by Drew Chapman
When Alexis finished, the room settled back into silence. Kline nodded ever so slightly, as if to acknowledge the truth of what she had said without lending that truth too much weight. Then he reached across his desk and slid a piece of white printer paper toward Alexis. She glanced down at it.
“A transcript of an NSA recording of a call made from a phone booth on the corner of Alabama and Fifteenth, forty-five minutes ago. Ten blocks from here. My source at NSA just sent it to me.”
Alexis took in a sharp breath of air.
“Interfering with an FBI investigation is a federal offense, punishable by severe jail time. If the voice on that conversation is yours”—Kline’s tone was quiet, almost a whisper—“there is nothing I can do to help you.”
VALLETTA, MALTA, JUNE 14, 4:43 P.M. (GMT +1)
The rumors had been circulating through the First European Bank of Malta for a week.
Matthew Leone knew them well enough, even if he wasn’t involved in the banking or securities side of the business, but was just an assistant VP of human resources. They were everywhere, the rumors, discussed at the coffee machine and in the men’s room, then later at bars on the waterfront that the bank employees frequented after work, and they went something like this: The bank had too many bad loans outstanding, spread throughout Europe. The bank had also put a lot of cash into risky investments, and bank insiders knew it. Some of those insiders had told Russian mobsters, who had started to pull their cash out first, before the news broke and all the regular, Maltese depositors wanted their money as well. If the other shoe dropped—if a new shock hit the bank’s balance sheets—it would collapse.
Leone didn’t believe the rumors, even if he had some reason to think they might be true. The bank president, a Swiss named Clement, had brought all the bank’s employees together yesterday morning in the lobby of the main branch to calm their nerves. “We are solvent,” Clement had said. “There is nothing to worry about. The rumors are false. They are being spread by speculators looking to short our stock. When you interact with the public, reassure them. Tell them everything is fine. And go about your business.”
Rather a short meeting, Leone had thought at the time, for such an important topic. He and Abela, his Italian friend from legal, had stood in back. Both of them wanted to ask about the darkest of the rumors, that some kind of economic hit man, a destroyer of companies, had his sights on the bank and was looking to take it down, but both Leone and Abela were junior employees, and nothing was more suicidal, careerwise, than confronting the boss at a staff meeting with less than upbeat questions.
Anyway, it was a crazy rumor. There was no such thing as an economic assassin, and both Leone and Abela knew it. And even if there were, why would such a person target a small, unimportant bank in Malta? But strange times made for outrageous rumors, and the entire company was on edge. Ten minutes ago the latest gossip had trickled in from accounting: bank regulators had landed on the island that very morning to give the firm a financial stress test.
“We fail the stress test, we’re bloody screwed,” Leone said in his thick Liverpool accent, as he poured himself his fourth coffee of the morning. “They’ll shut us down.”
Juliette, from the comptroller’s office, shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. The bank is fine. Just rumors. Because of the 2008 meltdown. Because of Greece. People get nervous. But it will be fine.”
Juliette was pretty, and French, and both Leone and Abela had asked her out. Both had been rebuffed. Leone didn’t mind so much because she was a brunette, and Leone had a thing for redheads. He’d met one the night before at a bar on the water, a startlingly pretty young woman, and things had gone quite well. He hadn’t slept with her, but they had flirted until two in the morning, and they’d exchanged numbers and e-mail addresses, and Leone had secured a date for this very evening. So even if the bank did go under, Leone had a chance at sex, which, while secondary, wasn’t so terrible. Part of why he’d moved from England to Malta was because the girls were prettier here. That, and the weather.
Leone watched Juliette strut off in that particular French way she had—a straight, arched back, a slight shimmy of the hips. “The French,” he sighed.
Abela laughed. “Are you seeing the redhead tonight?” He had been at the bar with Leone and had appreciated that woman’s feline, almost predatory beauty.
“I think so.” Leone and Abela spoke in English. Everyone in Malta, especially at the bank, spoke English, which was why Leone had never bothered to learn Maltese. “She’s supposed to text me a meeting place. She said she might even stop by the office.”
“Okay, we like her already,” Abela said with a leering smile.
Leone had been checking his phone all day, but no word had come in from the redhead, Dorina. At the bar, she had told Leone where she was from—Hungary or Romania or some place East European like that—but Leone couldn’t quite remember through the fog of gin and beer. He still had a hangover.
“We’ll talk later,” Abela said. “If there is a later.”
Leone grunted a half laugh, then shuffled off to his desk in the corner of the open bull pen of cubicles. He passed a swath of windows that looked out onto the sparkling blue waters of Valletta harbor and the Mediterranean. Leone waved to a few coworkers, some of whom waved back. Most everyone else was glued to phones or computer terminals. Leone guessed that they were checking the bank’s stock price, or scouring the wire services for the latest bit of news. He thought he’d overheard someone say that a banker in New York City had been gunned down a few hours ago. An important banker—a Federal Reserve president. What the hell was going on in the world?
Strange times. Very, very strange.
Leone sat at his desk and waited. There wasn’t much to do—no point in looking over the CVs of job applicants if the bank was going to go under. He checked his Facebook account, as well as his Tumblr and Instagram. He lingered on the Tumblr page. He’d posted a number of pictures of other redheads there, and he liked to gaze at them. He wasn’t sure why he was so obsessed with girls with red hair, but he was. There was something about their eyes, blue usually, or sometimes green, and the fair skin, so often smattered with charmingly light freckles. The entire package drove him into paroxysms of ecstasy, and he didn’t mind if anyone else knew it. He had five hundred followers for his Tumblr page, and almost all of them loved to wax rhapsodic on the virtues of gingers the world over.
And speaking of which, where was Dorina from Romania? Or Hungary, or wherever the hell she came from. He peered into the next cubicle. Edgar from operations was picking at a salad and waiting for his array of phones to ring. Edgar oversaw the bank’s two hundred ATMs scattered across Malta and neighboring Sicily. Everyone inside the bank saw his department—and his phones in particular—as a canary in a coal mine: if the public got wind of the rumors, they would start withdrawing money from the bank’s ATMs. If they withdrew enough money, the ATMs would run out of cash. If the ATMs ran out of cash, Edgar’s phones would ring. That would be the starting bell of a bank run, and everyone was afraid of a bank run. It was the scariest of all outcomes—when banks failed, economies went under. That’s when the rioting would start. That’s when the rocks would come through the windows.
Edgar waved at Leone, as if to say, So far, so good, then continued nibbling at his salad as a text came through on Leone’s phone. Before he had a chance to check it, Maria from the front desk arrived at his cubicle with a package. He signed for the package, then checked his phone. The number came up as Dorina’s, and Leone’s heart quickened.
Did u get it? the message read.
Get what? he wrote back almost instantaneously.
Package.
Leone glanced at the envelope from the front desk: a DHL package, addressed to him. He had assumed it was another résumé; he got a dozen a day, easily, from all over Europe, sometimes twice that number. The return address was from a hotel on the
island, and the sender’s name was D. Gabris.
Was that Dorina’s last name? Gabris?
He tore open the envelope. Inside was a smaller, letter-size white envelope, which he quickly opened. No letter was inside, only a small, green thumb drive. Leone held it up to the light: a four-gig USB external memory stick with a smiley face drawn on the green plastic.
He texted Dorina, A thumb drive? You sent?
Guess what is on it? The reply was immediate.
Leone held his breath. He texted back slowly, fingers trembling, Pictures?
Look and find out.
Leone licked his lips and started to guide the thumb drive into the USB slot on his work computer. He stopped as the drive was halfway in. The bank had a rule: absolutely no external memory devices were to ever—ever—be plugged into the bank’s internal network. The IT people had sent endless memos on the subject and had gathered all the departments in the cafeteria earlier in the month to lecture employees on the dangers of network penetration. “Think of the bank as a fortress,” the bearded troll from IT had said. “The fortress must never be breached. If it is breached, it will crumble.” The IT department was so serious about the issue that they had software set up to block any foreign devices that might download program’s onto the banks computers. But Leone had been given a two day administrator’s permission to install an approved piece of human resourcs software on the network, and he still had a few hours left on his access.
The IT people had also warned everyone on the evils of browsing the Web from work, and downloading pictures and playing games, as well as going on Facebook. But everyone else did these things, so why couldn’t Leone investigate a harmless thumb drive? Abela had a whole file full of pregnant-women porn mixed in with his legal briefs. He’d shown it to Leone just last week, even though Leone had asked him not to. Leone knew he was in no position to cast stones at people’s fetishes, but looking at pictures of naked pregnant women was just a touch too deviant, even for him.
His phone chimed. Dorina again. Well?
Rule against outside devices, he wrote quickly. Can’t do it.
2 bad they are good.
Leone grimaced. He rubbed his thumb against the ridged plastic of the drive and breathed deep. He texted her, Clothes?
Why bother sending pictures with clothes?
He hesitated.
She sent another text: May not make date tonight.
His thumbs clicked out an immediate reply: Why not?
Disappointed.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” Leone muttered. She had gone to the trouble of sending him nude selfies, and he couldn’t even do her the honor of looking at them. Now she was pissed, and he had lost any chance of seeing whether she was a true redhead, or just faking it.
“Bollocks.” With one quick jab of his right hand, he slotted her thumb drive into the USB port of his work computer. In a breathless rush, he clicked on the drive’s tab. A folder opened, but it was empty. He clicked it again, surprised, then closed it and looked for other folders on the thumb drive.
There were none.
He texted Dorina again: Drive is empty. No pictures.
He waited for a reply.
Hello? Dorina? A mistake? Sent me wrong drive?
Still, no reply came.
Dorina? Hello?
He waited another five minutes, hopeful that Dorina would check her phone and write back, that she would realize her mistake and send a new thumb drive. Her hair was so spectacularly red, and her face so pale and lovely.
Suddenly, it occurred to him that there might never have been any pictures on the drive.
He snatched the thumb drive from the USB slot and jammed the memory stick into his pocket. It had been sitting in his computer for ten minutes now. Leone didn’t understand much about technology, but he reckoned that ten minutes was more than enough time for something horrible to be downloaded onto the network. He figured half a second was probably more than enough time, but what the hell did he know?
Then Edgar’s phones began to ring.
First one. Then another. And another. Leone stood and watched as Edgar raced to answer each one, putting successive customers on hold as he grabbed the next receiver. “First European Bank of Malta, can you hold please?” Edgar said over and over.
Oh, God, Leone thought, horror-stricken. I have done something unspeakably stupid.
He started quickly across the bull pen toward the front door. He had to get the thumb drive into a trash bin as fast as possible, away from his cubicle and away from any trace of his involvement. Breaching the network was a termination offense. Why hadn’t he remembered that earlier? Because he was hungover and lonely, and he had a one-track mind. God, sometimes he hated himself.
Abela called out from his office as Leone strode past, but Leone made as if he didn’t hear his friend. Was it his imagination, or were all the phones in the central bank office suddenly ringing in a rising crescendo—at operations, trading, customer service. Employees answered in a cacophony of languages: Maltese, English, Italian. Out of the corner of his eye, Leone saw the older VP of banking come sprinting out of his office—running as if he’d just heard that the building was on fire—toward the IT offices.
Oh, shit, Leone thought. The building is on fire. I set it on fire.
When he turned left into reception, he was stopped dead in his tracks. Four Maltese policemen, dressed head to toe in their spotless royal-blue uniforms, were marching in the door. They were trailed by a half dozen stolid-looking men in dark suits. Their faces were grim and set, and their eyes flashed to Leone as he tried to hurry to the exit. Leone knew immediately that they were bank examiners, and they were not happy.
“I just have to use the WC.” He pointed desperately at the hallway.
“You cannot leave,” the first Maltese policeman said, thrusting out a beefy hand.
“But I have to go.” Leone clutched the thumb drive.
“This office is closed and quarantined,” one of the grim-faced men in suits said.
“But why?” Leone asked, even though he knew full well the answer.
“You’ve been breached.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Leone wailed, a pitiful look on his face.
The bank examiner stared at Leone, eyes full of indignant scorn. “Maybe, maybe not. But as of this moment, your bank has no assets. It has officially collapsed.”
QUEENS, NEW YORK, JUNE 14, 1:52 P.M.
Garrett walked north and east through lower Manhattan, keeping mostly to side streets and away from avenues. He walked fast, with his head down, only glancing up when he heard sirens. Police cars and fire trucks seemed to be racing through every intersection, and at Houston and Avenue A, a cop gave him the once-over from the driver’s seat of his cruiser. Garrett tried to ignore him and kept walking, but he felt as if his hair were standing on end, and that his face had reddened to the color of an overripe strawberry.
He walked to put distance between himself and the Jenkins & Altshuler offices, but also to try to collect his thoughts; to figure out what had just happened, and think his way out of it. But the meds had seeped into his bloodstream, and his mind felt fuzzy, his brain clouded. He hated himself for relying on the crutch that the pain drugs had become. He was half a person when he was medicated, and he was for certain medicated now. For a moment, on Allen Street, he thought he heard Avery Bernstein whispering something in his ear.
“Not now,” he grunted to Avery, and to the air, sounding like a ranting homeless person. “Not fucking now!”
He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. As much as he wanted to tell himself that it made no sense, that this was all some terrible misunderstanding, the truth was that it made perfect sense. And that was what was so terrifying.
Garrett had led the Ascendant program. He had guided it through a face-off with the Chinese government
—and US intelligence services as well—and he had won. He had spotted a threat that no one else had seen, then responded in kind. But Garrett had done it anonymously, invisibly. People around the world had spent the last year trying to track him down, to find out who, exactly, was the brains behind Ascendant, and Garrett had felt their probing, their intrusions into his life; the amateurish attempts to hack his bank account, to hijack his cell phone, or to simply taunt him into the open on darknet bulletin boards.
Now, if an attack was coming—and he had no idea what that attack might look like—then whoever was behind it would figure that Garrett and Ascendant might be poised to intercept it. It stood to reason that they would want him out of the way. They would want to frame him and put him on the run. And they had succeeded. He was scared. He was running.
He considered stopping at his apartment, but ruled that out almost immediately. That would be the first place the FBI would be waiting. He walked a wide circle away from his building on Twelfth and Avenue C and continued uptown. He called his best friend, Mitty Rodriguez, a like-minded freelance computer programmer and sometimes black-hat hacker, knowing he could ask her for anything, and that he could trust her. She’d heard about the shooting, but knew nothing else, and they set up a meeting for later in the day, at five o’clock.
“Meet me at that place,” she said, “where we ate last Saturday.”
Garrett appreciated her paranoia. At this point, anybody could be listening. He hung up, then took the battery out of his phone. That kept the police from tracking him, but it also took him off the grid—out of the information flow—and he felt the immediate loss of that in his bones. Garrett needed data the way he needed oxygen. Without a continuous stream of data to analyze, his mind went round and round in circles and eventually crashed.