The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  Over the course of months, Markov had helped Thomason develop a plan. Markov coached him on wooing allies to the cause, helped him set up offshore bank accounts, and even taught him rudimentary social-engineering tricks: how to steal personal data, how to guess account names and numbers, and, most important, how to appear innocent when you were in truth horrifically guilty.

  There was more to Thomason’s plans than just simple revenge. He felt that he was saving the world. He’d come to realize that trading houses were mirror images of Mafia families. They had godfathers (or CEOs), lieutenants (or traders); they both moved commodities (drugs or stocks), both extorted money (from strip-club owners or Fortune 500 companies); they were rapacious and paranoid and convinced that the government was out to get them, which in both cases was actually true.

  But the real parallel was that both mob families and trading houses were parasites latched onto the flesh of the public. They fed on the trust and integrity of honest, hardworking Americans, and they never looked back. No one at Vanderbilt Frink had a conscience, and Thomason could only guess that the same held true in the Gambino or Trafficante families. Both entities needed to be destroyed, for the good of the nation and humanity, of this Jeffrey Thomason was absolutely certain. Thomason could do little about the mob, so he went after Vandy.

  He was not without resources. Like-minded assistants worked throughout the building—a surprising number of them. They had kowtowed to traders and analysts and vice presidents, fetched coffee and dry cleaning, worked until midnight and over the holidays, provided sexual favors if they were women or if their bosses were gay—their bosses were all men—and basically rolled over and played dead whenever told that it was important to do so. For all of this, they did not receive praise or more money or career advancement.

  Thomason’s main allies were Benny Barnett, the assistant to Aldous Mackenzie, the chief investment officer, on the thirty-first floor, and Matt Raillot, the assistant to the biggest derivatives broker in the building, Otto Beardsley, one floor below. Together, the three assistants worked in three of the four most powerful offices at Vandy. Only the compliance desk was left out, and that was fine, because compliance could bring the whole scheme crashing down in an instant.

  What they had was access. Access to trading platforms, to accounts, to monitoring software. They had links, passwords, account names and numbers. Some they came by honestly, but most they just pilfered. With them, Thomason and his cohort could see exactly what their bosses could see. And more important, once they had those passwords and account numbers, they could move money just as quickly, just as invisibly, as their bosses could. Thomason himself couldn’t trade—the CEO of a place such as Vandy did little buying and selling—but he could tell other divisions how to behave, nudge them away from watching the things that were going on right under their noses.

  And so he did.

  Raillot, the assistant to the chief derivatives trader, had slowly, methodically built up positions on wildly risky loan derivatives over the last two months. The algorithms that ran those derivatives were so dense, and the positions so complicated, that only a few people in the company could have figured out what the liabilities were. But Thomason had made sure no one had the chance. He’d sent a quiet e-mail to the techs at the real-time risk-analytics desk six weeks ago asking them to focus exclusively on the company’s stock positions; the derivatives traders, Thomason had written—from Wells’s account—were switching over to cash and standing down for a while.

  Barnett, the assistant to the CIO, had then shorted a basket of smaller stocks. The trigger to cover on those stock shorts was a jump in their share price. Their share prices would move up if the derivatives Raillot had placed on those very same stocks unwound. The whole thing was a financial Rube Goldberg machine—you drop a ball down a chute over here, and it flips a switch over there, which drops a cage on a rat down below. Bing, bang, kaboom.

  Or maybe, Thomason thought as he watched the Bloomberg terminal at his desk outside of Wells’s mammoth corner office, this was more of a time bomb than a jerry-rigged contraption. He had sent an e-mail to his allies five minutes ago. That had lit the fuse. The first explosion would hit in another five minutes, when the clock hit 9:31 a.m., one minute after the market opened, the execute time on the first set of derivatives coming due. Money would be owed. Not a lot of money, at least not in Vandy terms, but enough—$42 million.

  A handful of other derivatives had been linked to that first one, each with a payout ratio of one hundred to one. Each of those other derivatives was valued in the $100 million range, and each was signed with counterparties at other large trading firms. Firms that were blood enemies of Vanderbilt Frink, that had signed on to those deals without a second’s hesitation. At a hundred to one, each derivative was a liability in the $10 billion range. And there were a dozen of them.

  And that was just the beginning.

  The fallout from all the trades would put Vandy in a hole so deep, and put it in that hole so fast, that by 10:30 a.m. the bank would be unable to meet its obligations. Vandy would seize up. News of the potential collapse would hit the nation’s TVs, and every single depositor across the country would race to withdraw their money from Vanderbilt Frink. Given how skittish Americans had become about their financial system in the last twenty-four hours, this bank run would be unlike any ever seen before.

  It would be Armageddon by sunset.

  Thomason closed his eyes to relish the moment, listening to the buzz of phones and the low chatter of people coming in and out of the secured hallways. He checked his watch: 9:28 a.m. Two minutes until the markets opened. All the bank’s senior management were on the tenth floor, meeting with Wells in the conference room. That was good; they were out of the way. Now Thomason needed to grab all his papers, erase everything on his computer, then head to the airport and grab the flight that Ilya Markov had set up for him. Thomason, like Edward Snowden before him, was going to flee the country before the shit hit the fan. Markov had secured a place for him and his coconspirators in Caracas, with visas in place and temporary apartments in their names.

  Did Thomason really want to spend the rest of his days in Venezuela? No, he did not. But a considerable amount of money would be waiting for him when he got there, and once the heat died down, he figured he could go to any number of exotic countries and lead the kind of leisurely existence that he’d been preparing for all his life. Yes, this path was a shortcut to riches and fame, but it was a path nonetheless.

  He checked his terminal again, to see if anything big had hit the news wires, then started to send a final e-mail to Raillot at the derivatives desk, to make sure that all the other triggers were about to go off as well. Markov had told him that there would be a spectacular bit of business first thing this morning, something that would send a shock wave through a particular stock, but Thomason didn’t know what that bit of business—or that stock—was. He didn’t really care—he just wanted enough time to catch a cab to JFK.

  And then, like a light going out, his computer froze. Just stopped dead. No e-mails going out, no new screens coming up if he clicked them. He checked his Bloomberg terminal, and it too had stopped. The scroll was dead, his news RSS had locked up, and the tiny video feed in the corner was stalled on a frame of Maria Bartiromo’s open mouth.

  Thomason stood up, surprised, and walked quickly to Jessica Bortles’s desk a few feet away. Bortles was prim and upright and still very much on board with the Vandy lifestyle, but she was a tech geek through and through, and if anyone had an explanation for what was going on, it would be her.

  “Hey, your computer working?” he asked, trying to sound casual. The minutes were now ticking down to his flight and escape from the country.

  Bortles looked up at Thomason, and he immediately sensed hostility. There was a coldness, a distance, in her eyes, and the way she pressed her lips together had a sealed, grim quality. She forced a smile, but it
was tepid at best. “You didn’t get the e-mail?” She adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose.

  “No. What e-mail?”

  Bortles stood up, gathering her purse from the back of her chair. “I think there’s a bit of a problem.” She blocked the door from the office suite to the hallway with her tiny body. “And you’re apparently part of it.”

  • • •

  They stopped first at the IT desk. Wells led the way, cursing as he went, and Garrett followed, with Chaudry at his side. The geeks in IT had never before been blessed with the physical presence of the company’s CEO in their offices. A few of them had never actually seen Wells in the flesh; one didn’t even know that he was the head of the company.

  “Shut down the entire system,” Wells said, marching past the cubicles of computer screens to the IT director’s cluttered office. “Do it now.”

  Gutierrez, the head of IT, a dowdy woman of maybe thirty-five, couldn’t wrap her head around shutting down information systems to the entire building, but when Wells leaned over her desk and barked six inches from her glasses, his white, bubbled spit spotting her lenses, she squeaked that she would do her best.

  “We could shut down electricity to the building, I guess. Maybe,” Gutierrez said.

  Garrett felt bad for her. “You’ve got to have a main Internet trunk line coming in, right?”

  “We do,” Gutierrez said. Garrett thought she might burst into tears.

  “Pull the plug on that. Just cut it off.”

  “I’m not sure we can.”

  Garrett turned his palms upward with a grin. “Come on, be creative. It’s fun.” He looked out her door to the IT geeks beginning to cluster around a single desk. “Tell your team to shut down the e-mail system first. Then cut off the Bloomberg feed. I know that can be done, because it goes down in my office once a week. Then go floor by floor. Isolate all the trading desks one by one.”

  They marched out of her office before she could reply, with Wells again taking the lead and charging to the elevators. He had called up to Bortles on the thirty-first floor five minutes earlier—he said he trusted her with his life—and told her to keep everyone at his or her seat. No one leaves.

  Garrett said he thought that was a bad idea, but Wells, once he’d decided to go through with Garrett’s plan, had taken over and would not be dissuaded from leading.

  “It’s what I do,” he yelled at Garrett. “My company.”

  When they arrived on the thirty-first floor, a half dozen employees were huddled around a woman lying on the floor, her nose bloodied and her glasses smashed.

  “What happened?” Wells asked as he knelt beside Jessica Bortles, propping up her head.

  “I tried to stop him,” she said between tears. “But he twisted my arm and then punched me in the face.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Wells said.

  Garrett looked around the office. A hallway led to a bank of elevators, and beyond that another set of executive-office suites. Garrett pointed. “What’s down there?”

  “CFO offices. VPs and public relations,” Wells said.

  Garrett shook his head. Thomason wouldn’t have gone that way. But where would he go? Down, to the lobby? Garrett dialed Mitty. She answered immediately.

  “Anyone left the building?”

  “Nobody. And some of these bitches are pissed about it.”

  “Keep holding them.” Garrett hung up.

  Chaudry moved to his shoulder. “The side exits?”

  “Alexis and Patmore would have called. And nobody’s getting past them.”

  Chaudry and Garrett stood there, trying to puzzle out Thomason’s whereabouts. Chaudry frowned and looked at Garrett, and Garrett suspected she had come to the same conclusion as he had. “The roof?” she asked.

  As they ran up the stairs to the thirty-fourth floor, they could hear an alarm blaring, and two flights later, they found the door to the roof banging in the breeze, open, the warning Klaxon screaming. Garrett charged out first. Thirty-five stories above the city, the wind and the sound of the Klaxon blended into a low rumble. Garrett’s eyes swept across the cluttered rooftop. A pair of steel huts, cooling fans, and vents that blew air into the sky all surrounded a raised helipad in the center of the roof. Garrett clattered up a flight of stairs to the top of the helipad.

  Jeffrey Thomason stood at the far end of the platform, staring off at the distant horizon. The rooftop offered an unobstructed view over the East River and into Queens. The building wasn’t high enough to allow a view past the boroughs, but a large swath of low-slung apartments, factories, and elevated highways was visible leading off into the distance. An intricate dance of jets and helicopters angled across the sky, and Thomason seemed to be staring at them.

  Garrett slowed as he crossed the landing area. “Hey,” he shouted, as Chaudry ran up behind him. “You Jeffrey?”

  Thomason turned. His face was drained of life, pale and white. His eyes looked watery, as if he’d been crying. “Who are you?”

  “FBI, Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry,” Chaudry yelled. “You’ll need to put your hands above your head.” She flashed her badge—it seemed to Garrett that she did that a lot—then pulled her gun from her shoulder holster.

  “No,” Thomason said without further explanation. He stepped backward toward the edge of the landing pad. “No, I don’t.”

  “Where’s Ilya Markov?” Garrett asked.

  “No idea.” Thomason took another step back.

  “Hands above your head,” Chaudry yelled, moving quickly across the tarmac. Without warning, Thomason stepped off the helipad, jumping to the roof below. Chaudry and Garrett ran to the edge of the pad and watched as Thomason, limping from the fall, stumbled to the edge of the rooftop. A steel-wire barrier, about five feet high and strung with lines of wrapped wire, guarded the edge of the roof. Without hesitation, Thomason slotted his shoes onto the wires and climbed the fence, stopping to balance on the second-to-highest wire. With one lean forward, he would go over the edge and tumble thirty-five floors down.

  Garrett leaped off the landing pad and ran toward Thomason. “Don’t,” he said, trying not to yell. “Don’t do this. Totally unnecessary.”

  Thomason turned his body slightly to see Garrett, then put up a single hand to signal that Garrett should stop where he was. “Why not? You have a better option?”

  Garrett started to say yes, that there was a better option, but he tripped on his own words. He couldn’t, at that moment, think of what to say. Was there a way forward for Thomason? Garrett didn’t suppose that there was. Thomason was looking at a long stint in jail, endless poverty, national disgrace.

  “I think”—Garrett tried to muster a coherent sentence—“I think there’s no need to throw everything—”

  Before Garrett could finish his sentence, Thomason leaned hard over the top wire, his upper body slipping over the edge. His shoes unhooked from the wires below his ankles, and he tumbled down, his head briefly banging on the top corner of the building. His feet flew out over his head, putting him into a somersault, and he dropped off into space without a sound.

  MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, JUNE 25, 9:49 A.M.

  The first thing Alexis heard was a shout—not a scream exactly, but more a strangled cry of horror. The sound came from a knot of people that had gathered on Forty-Sixth Street, on the south side of the Vandy building, not thirty yards from where she was standing. Alexis had been guarding the building’s two exit doors, making sure no one fled down the stairs and onto the street. There’d been no activity, nothing out of the ordinary, until that cry, and the small crowd of people huddled around the thing on the ground that Alexis could not yet see.

  She started toward them, abandoning her watch on the doors, a dread growing inside her with every step. A middle-aged man turned away, his hand to his mouth, gagging as he staggered down the street.

  Alex
is slowed. “What is it?” she called out.

  No one answered. Another woman turned away and retched.

  Alexis held her breath and pushed through the small crowd. Lying faceup on the pavement was a young man in a suit. His eyes were open, his mouth too, with a smattering of blood around his head. That was horrible enough, but the way in which his arms and legs were twisted in impossible angles made Alexis unsteady on her feet; his right arm was bent backward behind his torso, and his right leg was cocked back under his left, as if he were a rag doll lying discarded on a playroom floor. Looking at him, Alexis could almost feel the impact of his fall in her own bones; it was as if she herself had hit the pavement, body crushed in an instant. No human should ever look like that. She became light-headed.

  Alexis had seen death before, many times, in Iraq: bodies blown to pieces, servicemen shot by snipers, civilians burned in their homes. But she had steeled herself for those sights; she had known they were coming—had known it from the moment she set foot on the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport. This was different. This was not supposed to happen. This was a bolt from the blue.

  “He fell off that building,” a man said. “I saw him land.” Alexis thought she heard a hint of ghoulish pride in his voice.

  “He didn’t fall,” an older woman said. “He jumped. Nobody falls off a building. Not in a suit.”

  Alexis knelt beside the body. She took the young man’s broken arm in her hands and checked for a pulse at his wrist. She wasn’t sure why she was doing it—the man was obviously dead—but she’d been trained in the army to always check for signs of life, and so she did it by rote. She counted silently to ten, but there was nothing, and then his fingers flinched slightly, a postmortem nervous-system response, and Alexis’s stomach did a flip. She dropped his arm and stepped away from the crowd, moving quickly to the edge of the sidewalk, gasping for breath. She leaned against a car, afraid she might faint. Someone approached her from behind and asked if she was okay.