The Prince of Risk (36 page)

T
wo more bad guys were identified approaching up New Street from the south.

And another two after that, coming down Liberty.

One on Broadway.

Alex’s earpiece bristled with reports from her agents. A template of the suspected bad guys quickly emerged. Baggy shirts. Baseball caps. Sunglasses. A few carrying athletic bags. She passed the description along and told everyone to be ready to take down their man on her order.

Ten had been spotted. Then twelve. But time was running out. The mercenaries were getting too close to the Exchange. At any moment they could open fire.

Alex walked outside. Well over two hundred people crowded the streets bordering the Exchange and sat on the stairs of Federal Hall. It would take only one machine gun to wreak havoc. She spotted Deadeye Mintz, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, sitting behind the statue of George Washington at the entry to Federal Hall.

A voice in her earpiece. Another sighting took the number to fourteen. Alex made her decision. “Move in,” she said. “Take ’em down.”

All around the Exchange, undercover FBI agents and policemen converged on their targets. Groups of three, four, and five officers swarmed each assailant. Alex was watching a violent flash mob in reverse. Instead of standing apart from the crowd, the bad guys disappeared from it, thrown to the pavement, hands pulled behind their backs and cuffed. Those law enforcement agents not tracking a suspect rushed among the bewildered pedestrians, seeking out the nine remaining assailants.

Alex ran to the security checkpoint at the corner of Broad and Wall. She eyed a woman looking much too calm in the melee erupting all around her.

Baggy shirt.
Check
.

Cap.
Check.

Sunglasses.
Check
.

Athletic bag.
Check.

The woman’s hands delved into the bag.

Alex leaped the barricade and drew her Glock, advancing on the woman. “Freeze. Let me see your hands.”

In an instant three other agents surrounded the suspect. The woman raised her hands high. Alex ripped the bag off her shoulder. Inside was a submachine gun. The other agents pushed the woman to the ground and cuffed her.

The first gunshot sounded.

Alex turned to see where it had come from and saw a man running toward Broadway. He carried a submachine gun in one hand. And then he was down, shot by one of three policemen almost before the welter of gunshots exploded.

“I’m hit,” a man shouted.

Alex saw one of her agents clutching his leg. A policeman ran to his side and administered aid.

“Give me a count,” she said.

“Ten down.”

Alex returned to Exchange Place. She turned the corner to the main entrance as a woman screamed. A blond man held the woman to his chest and pointed a pistol at her head. A dozen officers surrounded him in seconds. Alex approached him, her pistol at her side.

“Your move,” she said.

The blond mercenary looked around him. He was young and handsome, by all accounts someone who had the world before him. He smiled sadly, realizing that he was hopelessly outnumbered. He put the pistol beneath his chin. “Ah, fuck it.”

It wasn’t the Exchange.

Astor stood at the window of his office looking down toward the Stock Exchange. From his aerie sixty stories above the ground, all looked calm, peaceful, and orderly. It didn’t make sense. Magnus Lee’s and Septimus Reventlow’s strategy was to buy a controlling interest in a company, place a man inside, and use the Empire Platform to see into and, when needed, control its operations. An outright Mumbai-style attack on the Stock Exchange might shut down trading for a few days, even sow doubt in investors’ minds about the invincibility of the United States, but it would do nothing to enable Lee and his brother to gain control over the entire trading system. And yet Palantir and Astor’s father had been sure that their target was the Exchange. This belief was reinforced by the CIC’s last investment, in Matronix, the company that manufactured the servers and hardware recently installed to run the New York Stock Exchange’s trading platform.

A line from Palantir’s report was stuck in his mind: “…and though there is no question about the depth and extent of the penetration of critical national systems, the aggressor cannot use TEP to trigger a modal system-wide default until a source code is introduced.”

TEP, for The Empire Platform.

But an outright physical assault wasn’t enough.

Astor looked at his television. It was 9:30 a.m., and he watched as the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange was rung by United States Navy Master Chief Ron Blackburn, a member of SEAL Team Six and the nation’s most recent recipient of the Medal of Honor. Accompanying him on the dais were his wife and child, as well as the man who had replaced Edward Astor as CEO of the NYSE. After an initial surge of energy, the floor grew quiet. Each year fewer and fewer men and women were required to supervise the trades. More and more of the work was done by computers.

He left his office and hurried across the floor. By the time he reached Ivan Davidoff’s office, he was running. “Ivan, you free?”

“Sure, boss,” said the bespectacled IT professional.

“You familiar with a company called Matronix?”

“Of course. Their machines run the most sophisticated trading systems in the world.”

“And we just bought a bunch of them—I mean, my father did.”

“Yes, they’re housed in New Jersey.”

“No,” said Astor. “I mean here in Manhattan. The ones housed at the Exchange.”

“There are only a few there. Traders on the floor use remote terminals to input orders. The heart of the machinery is at the trading center in Mahwah.”

“Where?”

“Mahwah, New Jersey. All trading moved there two years ago.”

“So you couldn’t screw with the trading platform from the floor?”

“The only place you can tinker with the system is in Mahwah.”

“And you could introduce a source code there?”

“That’s correct.” Ivan Davidoff eyed Astor strangely. “What do you know about source codes?”

Sandy Beaufoy watched helplessly as the police took down three of his men. He glanced to his left. At the corner of Wall and Broadway, police tackled another one. Down the street, a female plainclothes officer held a pistol to the head of one of the Swedish girls. The entire area was swarming with undercover policemen.

The operation had been compromised.

“Freeze!”

Beaufoy spun and shot the policeman standing behind him in the head. Thirty feet away, another plainclothes cop charged his way, firing his gun. Beaufoy shot him, too.

Beaufoy ran into the building behind him. It was a bank. The lobby was crowded, but all activity had frozen at the sound of the first gunshot. As one, customers and employees stared at him. A security guard drew a gun. Beaufoy fired into the ceiling and the lobby devolved into chaos, every man, woman, and child for himself. Beaufoy ran through them, dodging and elbowing his way to the rear of the building. A narrow lane separated him from the Exchange. He freed his H&K, broke from the door, and charged toward the building’s New Street entrance. The police saw him coming, but he opened fire first. Glass shattered. Men fell. He threw open the door and shot a man in front of him.

Beaufoy ran along the corridor. The exfil plan was as important as the attack itself. He did not want to give his life to cause a blip in trading volume. He ran down one corridor, then another. He heard voices behind him. A woman shouting for him to freeze. A bullet struck the wall above his head. Too close. He slid on his knees, turning and spraying the corridor behind him. The woman was nowhere in sight. Beaufoy stood. The hall ended dead ahead, with offshoots to the right and left.

Which way?

He started right, then remembered it was left, then down a flight of stairs to the passageway that led out from under the Exchange a full city block south, to Beaver Street. The passage had been built when gold had been stored on the premises and bank officials did not want to bring it in under full public view. Beaver Street was the exfil point. From there, the teams would divide up and lose themselves in the warren of streets and alleys that made up the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

To the left, then.

The first bullet hit him before he could cover a step. A gut shot stopped by his vest. He hardly felt it. Beaufoy lifted the H&K and swiveled to get off a shot. The second bullet struck his neck and severed his spinal cord. He dropped to the ground as if he’d been unplugged.

A woman who was much too pretty to be a cop stood above him. She had lovely brown hair and eyes the color of good whiskey. He noticed that someone had given her a nice little shiner.

“Hello, Skinner,” she said.

“Like a labyrinth in here,” he muttered.

Beaufoy died.

S
ix buttonwood trees lined the pathway to the entrance of the New York Stock Exchange’s data center in Mahwah, New Jersey. The trees commemorated the storied buttonwood tree on Wall Street, where the first brokers of the infant United States had gathered in the late 1700s to trade shares. Septimus Reventlow thought it was a quaint touch. Ahead, a single set of doors provided entry to the building. No other doors led inside. There were no windows, either. The imposing stone structure looked more like a fortress or a monument to a modern-day pharaoh than the home of the world’s most sophisticated stock trading platform.

Reventlow walked easily toward the building. He had already cleared the security checkpoints without a hitch. First there had been the tall earthen berm and ironwork fence that surrounded the complex. Then there had been the three Delta barriers, each lowered only after he’d passed over the one before. None posed any problem. Reventlow’s name was on the visitors list. He was the day’s guest of honor.

An official waited at the door. Reventlow gave an alias, along with a matching identification, in this case a New York driver’s license. The alias matched the name of the vice president of a small investment bank that his brother had recently purchased. Like any similar institution, the bank desired to rent some space in the facility to house its own computers so they would be in close physical proximity to the computers that ran the Exchange. The proper term was
colocation.

“All the Exchange’s proprietary computers are housed in a single twenty-thousand-square-foot room, or pod,” explained the official as they walked into the heavily air-conditioned building. “These machines match all buy and sell orders in the most efficient manner. We call them ‘matching engines.’”

“And these matching engines run the entire Exchange?”

“Eighty percent of it, and more each day. Of course, there are specialists on the floor who handle large block trades for their clients. But we’re able to assume more of that business, too. We also handle trades for the American Stock Exchange. All told, over three billion shares a day.”

“Impressive,” offered Reventlow.

“We’d like to put your hardware in a pod just down the hall. You’ll be sharing the space with a few other banks, but rest assured that you’ll be equidistant from our servers.”

“I wouldn’t want anything less,” said Reventlow. In the day of high-frequency trading, when millions of shares changed hands in seconds, the smallest difference in the time it took for a trade to be executed was crucial. Every thousand feet away from one of the Exchange’s matching engines meant an additional millionth of a second in transit time. While differences of a foot or 10 feet or even 1,000 feet conveyed no competitive disadvantage, differences of 10 miles or 100 or 1,000 miles did. Hence the need to allow banks to position their mainframes as close to the Exchange’s as possible.

“Do you think I might see the matching engines?”

“I’m sorry, that’s out of the question,” said the official. “I hope you understand.”

Reventlow reluctantly nodded. “Before I went into banking, I worked in systems design. I’ve heard this is a beauty.”

“If I do say so myself, it is. Tell you what, I can let you see our Risk Management Gateway. It’s the hardware we put in place to guarantee against any errors on your end.”

“So all trades pass through it?”

“Of course,” said the official, offended. “We consider it our prime competitive advantage.”

The official led the way down a hallway and into a large, brightly lit room housing six mainframe computers. Reventlow smiled in appreciation even as his heart beat faster. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a slim envelope, concealed it in his palm, and with his thumb opened the flap.

“According to parameters you set, these machines will filter every trade to make sure it complies with SEC requirements,” the official continued.

Reventlow leaned closer to a machine, raising a hand to touch the control panel.

“Please,” said the official testily, gently removing his visitor’s hand.

It was then that Reventlow raised the concealed envelope to his mouth and blew. A fine spray of cyanide powder flew into the official’s face. He breathed in once, gasped, then collapsed. Reventlow caught him and laid him on the floor. He stepped over the writhing man and walked to the last computer in line.

From his other pocket he withdrew a small flash drive. He looked at the slim black device and a boost of adrenaline warmed his chest and shot to his fingertips. In his hand he held the end result of years of planning, of countless sums of money spent, of his family’s boundless ambition and his country’s most daring scheme.

It had all come down to this moment. It had come down to him.

Inside the flash drive was the source code that would give China control over every machine in the data center, and by extension every machine connected to them. These included matching engines in London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Paris, Tokyo, and, as important, the backup data centers in Basildon, England, and Cincinnati, Ohio. The code would also infect every piece of hardware that did business with the exchanges. Every bank, insurance company, and brokerage. And from there, every client who did business with them.

In short order, China would have control over every stock exchange in the world and every financial institution that did business with them.

Reventlow found the control unit. He moved his hand over the main panel, neatly flipping it open. He saw the USB slot immediately. All he needed to do was insert the flash drive and the source code would transfer immediately, and untraceably, to the mainframe and enter the Exchange’s proprietary trading software. He breathed easier, knowing his job was done. No one would have the slightest idea that his family—his country—was clandestinely controlling the most powerful market in the world. The faintest of smiles pressed at his lips. It was so simple, really.

A footstep sounded nearby. Then another.

“Stop.”

Reventlow spun and looked down the row at Bobby Astor. “You’re too late,” he said, turning his attention back to the server. Desperately he tried to insert the flash drive.

“That means now.”

It was a woman’s voice. Reventlow looked in the opposite direction. A woman stood 10 feet away, her pistol aimed at his face. He made his decision. His fingers flew again to the computer. The flash drive pressed against the USB slot. Metal met metal.

The pistol fired.

Reventlow fell.

He was dead before the flash drive hit the floor.

“No,” said Alex. “We’re not.”