The Last Trade

by James Conway

  The Lord of the Western Approaches, Approaches.

  Which translates, in no less than four languages, for people in no less than seven countries, to It’s go time.

  9

  New York City, 9:50 A.M.

  They burst into the lobby, and Sobieski hustles across the marble floor, beneath the million-dollar murals and through the clustered billionaire conference-goers, toward the security desk. Two men are on top of her before she reaches the desk. “I’m a federal agent,” she tells them as they close ranks upon her. “You’ve got to clear the building.”

  They grab her by the elbows and begin to steer her away from the others. “I’m agent Cara Sobieski of TSI, and you have got to believe me, there’s a bomb in this building.”

  “Right,” says one of the guards, pushing a button under his desk, motioning with a hand to another guard, “but you’re gonna have to show us some kind of ID. . . .”

  Seeing that time is wasting, Havens looks around the lobby, walks to a far wall near the banks of elevators, and pulls a fire alarm. As the alarm pierces the air, two businessmen who saw him yank the switch ask what’s going on and he tells them, “There’s a bomb in the building.”

  One of the men steps back and yells over his shoulder, just as Havens had hoped, “Says there’s a bomb in the building.”

  Havens takes two steps back and watches. People heading inside turn around and head back out. Another alarm, set to a different pitch and rhythm, begins to sound. The two guards with Sobieski briefly let go of her arms and turn to look down the desk for information from their boss. At that instant, Sobieski slips away and runs toward the security turnstiles. Through the sea of conference-goers who have turned to leave she swims in, toward the theater.

  Steps behind her once again, Havens follows.

  10

  New York City, 9:48 A.M.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Deborah Salvado whispers to her.

  “You said . . .”

  “It’s only a matter of minutes before he kills us anyway, so I’m going to do something.”

  Miranda looks at her. She agrees.

  “I’m going to try to get out first.”

  “He’s in between us and the door. There’s no—”

  “The other way,” Deborah whispers. “At the other end of the room, I’m not sure if there’s a door, but next time he gets up, I’m going to try. When he follows . . . I want you to run out the other door through the hall as fast as you can.”

  “But . . .”

  Deborah Salvado shakes her head. “This is the way it’s supposed to happen. You didn’t deserve this. And this . . . this is what I get. Plus, I feel lucky.”

  A few minutes later the bearded man’s phone rings again.

  11

  New York City, 9:50 A.M.

  The theater is filled with agitated rich people, the old and new financial and corporate elite and their broad-shouldered security guards. The blare of the alarms exponentially compounds their market-related anxiety.

  Ten years and a month since 9/11, and the fear rises back in an instant.

  Benjamin Krupp stands in the center of the stage, holding a PowerPoint clicker he’ll never click, wondering how the day can possibly get any worse. Over the PA system they are already playing the opening bars to Rick Salvado’s song, “The Rising,” of course, by Bruce Springsteen. Or, the “other Boss,” as Salvado likes to call him.

  Sobieski crashes through the swinging doors at the rear of the theater.

  Havens is close behind. “Everyone out!” she screams. “There is a bomb threat in this room.” New York City PD foot patrol are first on the scene, running onto both ends of the stage and directing the crowd toward the exits. FDNY first responders, in full bunko gear, begin entering from the rear. Sobieski continues to shout, “Everyone out!” but she’s not sure what to do next. She’s scanning the crowd for Salvado, whom she’s never seen in person, and for anything that looks like it might be a bomb, but what does that look like, exactly? Right now, everything looks like a bomb.

  Havens jumps onto a table in the back of the room, in part to get away from the stampede and in part to get a better view of the theater. He sees Laslow before Laslow sees him. The bald man is cursing at an uncooperative cell phone in his right hand and wearing a backpack. He looks even bulkier than usual and he’s heading directly toward Havens.

  Havens looks down at the tabletop and notices that it is covered with closed cardboard boxes stamped SALVADO MEMOIR. If anyone would know the status of Salvado’s memoir, it’s Havens. The guy never stopped talking about it, and its June publication date. He also knows that he’s far from finished writing it. Terrorist or not, the egotistical son of a bitch couldn’t keep his mouth shut over something like that. You’re standing, Havens tells himself, on the fucking bomb. And Laslow, whose faulty phone was probably detonator number one, is detonator number two.

  He leaps off the table and stumbles momentarily. When he looks back up, he can no longer see Laslow.

  As he bounds through the side door near the stage, Salvado sees that he won’t be delivering a keynote this morning. He sees the pile of books in the back of the room and hears people shouting “bomb” as they rush past, toward the exit. Only now does he realize the full extent of the pact he made in 2002. “What have I done?” he asks himself as he continues toward the stack of boxes. After three steps he sees the bald man and calls his name. “Laslow!”

  Laslow turns and frowns. “What?”

  “No one said anything about a bomb.”

  Laslow shrugs, quickly turns, then hustles away toward the boxes.

  Havens is looking to his left as Laslow comes up on him from the right. Havens turns and reaches for Laslow, but the larger man recognizes him and punches him, glancing off his jaw, driving him back against the boxes. Havens straightens and surges forward, but Laslow steps back, pulls out a pistol, and points it at Havens. Havens stares at the gun, then directly at Laslow. “You don’t know when to quit, do you, you fucking egghead?” Havens looks over Laslow’s shoulder, where Salvado stands, panting and wild-eyed. Laslow glances back at Salvado, who nods, Do it. As Laslow turns, Havens braces himself for the shot, the close-range bullet to the head.

  But as Laslow fires, Salvado’s right fist slams down on his gun hand, knocking the pistol to the floor. Laslow turns and drives his left fist into Salvado’s nose and a right uppercut that drops him to his knees. He steps away from Salvado, eyes scanning the floor for the pistol. When he doesn’t see it, he removes his phone from his pocket and begins to rapidly redial the detonation code.

  Three numbers in, the bald man looks up and sees his gun in Havens’s hands, trained on his face. Havens squeezes the trigger and blood jets out the back of Laslow’s head and splashes on the stack of boxes. Before Laslow pitches face forward onto the theater floor, Havens grabs him and begins prying his dying hands away from anything that can set off the bomb that will take down the room, the building, and the economy.

  When he looks up, he sees the man who made him rich and changed his life several times over, bleeding from the nose, on his knees staring at him with a look of terror in his eyes. Havens raises the gun but knows he won’t fire it. He knows now that Salvado is an evil piece of trash, a criminal and a sociopath, but not a terrorist. Salvado takes a step back and slowly shakes his head while looking into Havens’s eyes. The billionaire raises his arms in half apology, half surrender. “This was never part of the plan,” he explains. Then, before Havens changes his mind, he turns and disappears into the crowd.

  12

  New York City, 9:59 A.M.

  She hears the gunshot but doesn’t bother to turn and see where it came from, or what it hit.

  Instead she continues toward the stage and the pale and dumbstruck man she saw stan
ding alongside Rick Salvado on TV this morning: the CEO of Transmediant!, Benjamin Krupp. She climbs the short flight of stairs two at a time and comes up on him from behind. He almost collapses under her touch.

  “I’m a federal agent,” she tells him. “Where’s Salvado?”

  Krupp stares at her, stunned, paralyzed with an array of fears. Personal. Professional. Universal. Plus, the realization, the confirmation of what he’s always known, that he’s a coward, not a leader. Sobieski almost smacks him, but she shakes him instead.

  “Where?”

  He turns to her. “Outside, in his limo, at the loading dock.” He points toward the left rear exit. “That way.”

  As she turns to leave, she notices the teleprompter screen raised up out of the floor. The text, which will never be spoken, reads, “On behalf of Transmediant!, welcome to this great day in the history and the future of the new global economy.”

  Outside, most of those who have already left the building linger on the sidewalks. A SWAT team scrambles out the back doors of a truck, and dozens of agents from seemingly every law enforcement organization operating in the city are massing around the building’s perimeter. Michaud got them to listen, she thinks, as she moves along the length of the concrete loading dock, looking for Salvado. She stops a building security guard. “You see a limo here?”

  “What car ain’t one this morning?”

  “When did the last one pull out?”

  “Oh, shit. A minute, two minutes ago.”

  “Which way?”

  He jerks his thumb to the east. “Only way a car’s allowed to go on this street.”

  She’s off the edge of the dock and running before he finishes. Eastbound toward Fifth, in and out of the pedestrian scrum, skirting the edge of slow-moving traffic. Just before the corner she sees a limo stopped at a light with its right blinker flashing. She bears down on it and jerks open the rear passenger side door as the car begins to roll. Jogging to keep up, she looks inside. Rick Salvado is not there. Two stunned Japanese businessmen are. Without a word she slams the door and looks to the east and south. One limo is moving toward Madison on the other side of the intersection, and another, heading downtown, is stopped at a light a block away. She’s about to head south, but one last glance at the eastbound vehicle reveals a vanity license plate that reads:

  THE RI$ING

  13

  New York City, 10:01 A.M.

  Deborah nudges Miranda with her foot and Miranda nods. Together they watch the bearded man passionately talking, gesturing with the phone. He’s taking short steps now, but not venturing into the hall and not beyond the edges of the doorjamb. Suddenly he kicks at the door, furious. When he momentarily disappears from view, Deborah rises and rushes toward the near exit.

  At the same moment Miranda and the bearded man hear the door swing open on the other side of the room. The bearded man bursts back into the room. His mobile drops to the floor as he reaches to steady the gun. He runs right past Miranda, brushing against her leg and briefly looking at her before continuing past and through the far door.

  As soon as he passes, Miranda is up and running out the near door toward an exit she’s never seen but prays is close at hand. She pauses when she hears the first short burst of gunfire, back in Deborah’s vicinity.

  14

  New York City, 10:03 A.M.

  With one hand on Laslow’s backpack, Havens looks up at the barrel of a policeman’s gun. He lowers Laslow’s gun and holds up his hands.

  “All yours,” he says, gesturing toward the gun. The cop bends and grabs it while keeping his gun fixed on Havens. Havens says, “Help me get this off him. It’s some kind of bomb.” When the cop, a tall, brawny redhead who looks about sixteen, hesitates, Havens unzips the top of the backpack, revealing a series of wires and the top of many blocks of C-4 explosive. The cop takes a step back as Havens peels off one shoulder strap, then swiftly but carefully shifts Laslow’s weight to unsnap the other. He stands, holding the pack.

  “What are you gonna do with it?” asks the cop.

  “Get it away from those,” Havens answers, pointing at the boxes.

  “Follow me.” The cop begins barreling through what’s left of the crowd, holding his gun in the air. Havens tails him like a running back behind a pulling guard, holding the bag at arm’s length, while the cop speaks into his radio, inquiring about the whereabouts of the bomb squad.

  They burst out onto the street through a revolving door on the north side of the building and are greeted by two figures in full protective bomb gear. When they see the backpack in Havens’s hand, they back off and point them toward the rear of an armored police vehicle parked half a block away. After Havens places the pack inside the truck, one of the bomb squad cops slams closed the hatch while another grabs him by the arm and rushes him out of range.

  “In the theater . . . ,” Havens explains as they near a makeshift NYPD command post, “there’s a shitload of boxes in the back that are supposed to be filled with books but are filled with explosives.”

  A lieutenant tells him to sit tight and then rushes down the block with the bomb squad guys. Havens bends at the waist and puts his hands on his knees. He’s wired and exhausted. His hands are shaking, and his entire body is spent. The past few days have been fueled by fear and adrenaline, and when the adrenaline ebbs it’s all he can do to stay on his feet. He wonders what Sobieski is up to, and where Salvado has gone, but mostly he thinks of Miranda.

  Hundreds of civilians from the upper floors continue to stream out of the building. The networks are setting up satellite trucks down the block, near Sixth, and he counts no fewer than four helicopters hovering over the tower. The redheaded cop stands ten feet away, talking to two members of a SWAT team. Havens reaches for his phone to try Miranda once again, but he’s distracted by a familiar face, not heading out of the Transmediant! Building, but jogging back in. It’s Tommy Rourke. Havens lowers the phone and watches. He’s tempted to call out to Rourke, but Rourke is talking on his phone and gesturing frantically with his right hand. Over his left shoulder is a backpack not unlike the bag that Havens just stripped off Laslow.

  In an instant it all becomes clear. The human narrative, the financial models, and the previously hidden truth. Rourke, who had been there since The Rising began, who delivered clients when no one wanted to touch Rick Salvado. Rourke, the Harvard Crimson grad and self-proclaimed humble classical literature major. The blog that’s publishing the quotes that link back to Berlin, Hong Kong, Dubai, Rio, Dublin, Toronto, and the whiteboard in Danny Weiss’s apartment. The blog that runs the passages that activate it all:

  Crimson Classics: A Harvard Dude’s Take on Greek Lit

  Rick Salvado may be a greedy, deceitful thief, but Tommy Rourke is a bona fide terrorist.

  15

  New York City, 10:08 A.M.

  After the second burst of automatic gunfire, silence.

  Miranda bounds up a flight of fire stairs but can’t gain access to the lobby. As she starts up the next flight, she hears the door to the room below slam open, then the footsteps of the bearded man. The door to the next floor opens not on the lobby or office space she’s hoping for, but another subterranean storage room. She steps inside, closes the door, and looks for a lock, but there is none. The room is filled with massive computer servers and HVAC apparatus. She runs along a row of servers, zigzagging in and out between gaps in the racks, looking for another exit, or anyplace to hide.

  She drops to her knees when the stair door crashes open. Then she holds her breath and waits for the footsteps.

  16

  New York City, 10:14 A.M.

  Salvado, it turns out, isn’t in this limo, either.

  “Where’d he go?” Sobieski asks the driver through the open rear door.

  “Too much traffic. He got out and he
aded east. Asked for my MetroCard.”

  She straightens, looks over the hood of the car, then leans back in. “Where’s the nearest subway?”

  “Probably . . . Lex. Lex and 53rd, near Citicorp Center.”

  She runs. Across Madison. Through four lanes of moving traffic on both sides of Park. Scanning the sidewalks as she moves, but she doesn’t see him. At 53rd and Lex, on a hunch, assuming he’s headed toward lower Manhattan or toward a connection out to the airport, she goes down the downtown stairs. She skips through the turnstile and bounds out onto the almost empty mid-morning platform. A quick walk up and down. No Salvado. Then she looks across the tracks, at the uptown side. It’s him.

  Since Salvado has no idea who she is, she figures she’ll be able to surprise him. But she realizes that by the time she goes back upstairs and then down, he’ll likely be gone. She stares at him for a moment, coolly checking his BlackBerry while, for all he knows, thousands may be dying at this second, at his hand. She thinks of Patrick Lau and Sawa Luhabe and Heinrich and all of the others. And as she wells up with rage, she thinks of her father. The life he lived and the lie she can’t live down.

  She jumps.

  Cara Sobieski’s first journey on a New York City Subway track is across it. There’s a collective gasp, first from the small group of travelers on her side, then from the group on the other, as she lands flat-footed on the gravel. She steps over the inside rail, the outside rail and then, carefully, over the third rail, before crossing over to the uptown track. She’s watching the tracks, the tunnel, and Salvado at the same time. He notices her as the ground begins to shake and the glow of an approaching train’s headlamp appears in the distance.

  Perhaps he doesn’t comprehend that she’s following him, that she’s after him, or perhaps he feels that she isn’t going to make it. But he pauses for a moment and simply watches her as her eyes widen with urgency. She bounds over the uptown third rail and hoists her elbows onto the platform’s edge. A young woman screams. A man in a suit, too far away to make a difference, starts to jog her way. She begins to muscle herself up as the train roars and takes shape at the end of the platform. But now Salvado steps forward, leans down as if to help her, then kicks at her face. She sees it coming and snaps her head back, rolls to the left with the force of the kick. Her left hand slips off the edge, and her right foot drops back onto the ground. As he rears back to kick her again, she pushes off the right leg and springs up with both hands, both arms.