The Blueprint (The Upgrade Book 1) (12 page)

“I’m sorry, pal,” the bartender said, smiling at him, “but I think you’ve had enough.”

“I wish.” Jason stared back at him, annoyed, but didn’t argue. He paid the tab and went outside. After the darkness of the drinking den the sun was unbearably bright. Jason leaned on the wall for support and closed his eyes for a few seconds, letting the sun hit his face, breathing in the crisp winter air.

“Spare change?” he heard someone say. He opened his eyes and saw a thin, bent, homeless man in his late sixties expectantly looking at him.

“Sure.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out a bunch of twenty dollar bills. He looked at them for a couple of seconds trying to see if there were any singles, then just handed over the whole pile to the homeless person.

“It’s too much, brother,” said the old man, picking out a five dollar banknote from the pile and stuffing the rest back into Jason’s pocket. “God bless.” The man started walking away and waved goodbye as he did.

Jason watched the man slowly hobble away, peeled himself off the wall, and started walking. Max’s place was just a few blocks away. As he walked he saw a few teenagers turn a corner in front of him. Jason moved to the side of the street letting them pass, but just as he did, one of them, a short stocky kid with a pimply face, gave him a hard shove with his shoulder.

“Whoa,” the kid said, as Jason tumbled back and landed awkwardly on his ass. “This guy just tried to jump me.”

“What the hell,” was all Jason had time to say as the rest of the youths descended upon him. He was immediately overwhelmed by the flurry of punches and kicks, then something hard and sandy smashed into his face. He fell back, his head painfully striking the cold concrete of the sidewalk, and grunted as another kick landed on his groin. The beating finally stopped, and Jason felt rough hands searched his pockets, taking out his cash and the wallet.

After a few seconds, it was quiet again, and he slowly sat up and looked around. The assailants were gone, and the street was just as empty as it had been a few minutes ago, a bleak empty stretch of road, with cars parked on either side of it buried in the banks of dirty snow. He sat there for a while, the cold seeping from the rough surface of the sidewalk numbing his bruised body. His face stung, and when Jason cautiously touched it with his fingertips, the hand came away bloody. He picked himself up and started slowly walking again.

•     •     •

The screen was a flickering sea of red and green, stock symbols blinking in and out of existence. Making fortunes for some, ruining others. This morning, however, Max was interested only in one ticker; ASCP. It wasn’t a particularly volatile stock. For the last year it traded between $9.50 and $10.17. Today it was hovering just under ten dollars, which meant that if he wanted to buy the entire fifty million float of Asclepius Inc. shares, he would have to come up with half a billion dollars.

Max had always found the false simplicity of this math amusing. Take the share price of any company, multiply it by the number of issued shares, and there it was. The exact real time value of a giant company. All those inventories of raw materials, warehouses, assembly line robots, trucks, boxes, clipboards, and paperclips, neatly represented by one number, accurate to a penny. At least in theory, of course. Today this was the theory he was most interested in. If at ten dollars per share Asclepius was worth half a billion, then at twenty it would be worth a full billion. Or, and here Max found himself grinning, if the price of the stock dropped to as little as ten cents a share, one could buy the entire company for just five million dollars.

Max took a last look at the market screen and shut it down. Just staring at the stock price wasn’t going to change it. He picked up his rugged Nikon with telescopic lens and headed to the door. Some spying was in order.

•     •     •

The headquarters of Blackwater Research Group was located in the heart of the financial district, right across the street from Trinity Church. It was a busy spot all year, tourists flocking in from across the globe. They would come here to gaze at the New York Stock Exchange, to touch the bronze balls of the famous Charging Bull, and roam the streets around Wall Street. Most would hope to catch a glimpse of the famous inhabitants of Wall Street, the handsome men and women in ultra-expensive business suits. Of course, what’d they find was quite different from their expectations. They’d find the bull cordoned off by the police to keep graffiti artists at bay, the Exchange barricaded against possible terrorist threats, and instead of handsome faces in expensive suits fit for a TV show, they’d see the tired faces of the Wall Street hopefuls in cheap business attire standing in long lines for halal food trucks and hot dog stands during their non-existent lunch breaks.

Max hated the tourist crowds as much as any New Yorker but their presence made him and his telescopic lenses almost invisible.

He found a spot in front of Trinity Church between a picture dealer and a shoe shine guy and leaned against the black iron fence separating the church grounds from the sidewalk. It was almost noon, and Max expected someone from the “Blackwater” offices to come out for fresh air eventually.

The infamous research company and its flamboyant head trader Owen Perkins made hundreds of millions over the past ten years in a controversial but lucrative scheme. Their analysts looked for companies that traded in the open market and appeared to be legitimate on the surface. In reality they were scams and Ponzi schemes with overinflated balance sheets and non-existent revenues.

Once Blackwater identified a company they believed to be a fraud, they would issue a publicly available report while simultaneously shorting the company’s stock with the hope of buying it back at a significant discount once the public had a chance to digest Blackwater’s research report lambasting the company as a fraud. Out of the thirty-seven companies Blackwater Research targeted in the last ten years, only one was still around, a rare miss in the otherwise impeccable list of indictments, bankruptcies, and in some cases jail sentences.

People started getting out of the Blackwater office building, and Max perked up. From his position he could see the security gate in the building’s lobby with a magnetic reader. Security was tight. Every time somebody wanted to go in or out of the building he had to wave his access card in front of the reading device, then the guard would check the picture on the ID against the building’s database.

Max started taking pictures. The angle wasn’t ideal, but he didn’t need a perfect shot. With enough photographs he was confident he’d be able to create a composite later that looked good enough to pass the brief scrutiny by the guard. After snapping a couple of dozen pictures he felt that he had enough data.

Now for the fun part,
he mused to himself, putting the camera away. He watched one of the Blackwater employees, a man with a build similar to his own, put an ID in his left coat pocket and walk south on Broadway. Max crossed the street and started following the man weaving through the crowd of tourists. He caught up with him, pulled a small black device out of his pocket, and hid it in his right hand. As the employee stopped at an intersection checking for cars, Max clumsily bumped into him, placing his right hand with a little gadget in it against the man’s coat pocket as if for support.

“Pardon,” he said in French, then awkwardly smiled and corrected himself in English with a thick French accent. “Sorry. Not paying attention.”

“No worries,” the man said politely, and smiled back, then continued to walk.

Max crossed the street again and casually walked down to the subway station at the corner of Broadway and Rector Street. He took the stairs to the subway platform and only then allowed a quick glance at the little device in his right hand. The little LED light was emitting the steady green. Max smiled and put the device away, climbed the stairs to the street level, and walked across the street again. He went down to the northbound subway platform and sat on a bench to wait for the train. Now he could go home.

When he entered the apartment it was dark, the blinds shut on every window, a lonely light above the island in the kitchen throwing long shadows onto the floor. Max squinted trying to get his eyes adjusted after the bright afternoon sun.

“Jason?” he called out, but heard no answer. He looked around and grabbed a shoehorn off the hook on a wall, a long heavy piece of steel with a lion head on its handle. Kicking off his shoes, he started to slowly walk toward the kitchen, gripping the shoehorn like a hammer. As he got closer, narrowing his eyes against a bright spotlight, he saw something on the floor, sticking out from behind the kitchen island. Max rushed in, shoehorn raised and ready to strike, and froze in his tracks, staring in disbelief at the streaks of blood on his expensive white Italian marble floor. There in the middle of his posh kitchen Jason Hunt was lying in the heap of dirty clothes, his swollen face covered in blood.

Alexander Engel looked up from the morning paper and glanced out of the tinted window as the limousine slowed to a crawl in front of the iron gates. A few seconds later the gates smoothly swung open and the car drove onto the circular gravel road leading around a fountain, switched off at this time of the year, to the front of the estate. They parked just outside the front steps of the massive house and the chauffeur got out. He walked around the sleek car, opened the passenger door, and briskly walked back to the driver seat. Alexander remained seated, his eyes scanning the newspaper, ignoring the cold air flooding the car. A few seconds later a tall gray-haired man walked down the steps of the porch, got into the car, and closed the door behind him.

“Good morning, Alex,” he said in a deep baritone, his handsome face forming a well-rehearsed smile. “Dropping by on your way to work?“

“Good morning, Senator,” Engel said, putting the paper down. “How’s the campaign going?”

“It’s going quite well, thanks to some of my staunch supporters. But what happened to the Relentless? I’m rather surprised to see you out of your beloved chopper.”

“I’m glad you have such a loyal following,” said Alexander, pushing a small button on the divider between the front seats and the back. A thick one-way privacy guard slowly rose and slid in place with a quiet
click
, separating them from the driver.

“I like being driven once in a while. More time to think. Now, tell me about our progress.”

“Stage One is almost complete,” said the Senator, relaxing in his seat. “We replaced the key players already. We should be able to move to Stage Two not later than mid-March.”

“That’s too slow; we should have been in Stage Two already.”

“You worry too much, Alex. I’ve got everything—”

“I pay too fucking much, so don’t tell me not to worry. If you can’t get it done, I’ll get somebody else who can. You’re not irreplaceable, you know that, right?”

“I do know that,” said Senator fixing his eyes on Engel. “No one is irreplaceable.”

The two men stared at each other for a few seconds. Finally, Senator threw his hands into the air.

“Let’s not fight, Alex,” he said in conciliatory tone. “We’ve got way too much at stake to get into squabbles.

“Then fucking fix it,” said Engel, picking up his paper and turning away from the Senator. “We’re starting Stage Three by the end of March, and if you want it as much as you say you do, you’ll make it happen.”

Senator stared at Alexander for a few seconds, then climbed out of the limo.

“I’ll get it done, Alex,” he said before closing the door. “Just make sure you hold up your part of the bargain.”

Engel gave him a curt nod without looking up, and after the door closed knocked on the divider separating him from the driver. The car smoothly pulled out. They drove through a deceptively small gate onto Further Lane, a narrow two-way street in East Hampton running through one of the most expensive zip codes in the country.

Alex touched a biometric sensor on the communication console and waited a few seconds until a green light came on, signaling that the device was ready to establish a secure link. He then punched in a twelve digit code.

“Please state your name and your designation,” said a young female voice with a British accent.

“You know who I am,” he snapped at the device.

“I’m sorry, sir, please state your name and your designation” the voice said again, not fazed by his little outburst.

“Alexander Engel, Alpha Two,” he said impatiently.

“Thank you, sir. What is your destination number?”

“Alpha One.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The line went quiet for a few seconds, then there was a distinct
click
, then it went quiet again. Alexander waited a few moments, but no one was talking.

“Hello?” he said.

“I’m here, Alex,” said a genderless computerized voice, its identity protected by the scrambler.

“I’m concerned about some of the Betas. Beta Four in particular.”

He paused, waiting for some sort of reaction from the listener, but none came.

“I think we might be moving too slowly. The longer we wait, the greater the risk of getting exposed.”

He paused again, unnerved and irritated by the lack of any response.

“Hello?”

“I’m still here,” the voice said again, “but all you’ve done so far is express some concern. I’m not sure what do you expect me to say.”

“I think it might have been a mistake to put Betas forward. Pulling the strings from the shadows is ineffective.”

“That may be so, but this arrangement wasn’t created to make things efficient; it was created to protect us. Betas come and go, and if the plan fails, we can assemble a new team. We
will
be successful eventually.”

Alexander stayed quiet for some time, mulling things over.

“One more thing,” he said, tapping his finger on the communication device. “I need to know who I’m talking to. I’ve had enough of these games when we have so much at stake; I need to know who my partners are.”

“That’s not possible, Alex, and you know why.”