Flash Crash

by Denison Hatch

  “Things?”

  “The shipping containers—the company in the Seychelles—whatever. You’re going to have to work with those morons. I can’t stand ’em. Get all their paperwork and get into it.”

  Tony nodded and scurried back into the security office.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  VLAD STOOD COURT IN front of David and the rest of his crew inside an old cherry-manufacturing plant a few blocks from the gym.

  “David wasn’t wrong,” Vlad announced. “The Montgomery commodity vault is impossible to break into. To access the building conventionally, there’s a security booth in the front. An RFID card is required for that.”

  “Which I could probably fake,” said David.

  “Right,” replied Vlad.

  “But never the visual. That’s the second line of defense. They know who each person is, and all guests are escorted.”

  “In the back,” Vlad continued, “we have a few loading bays. There’s also RFID access as well as sign-in access. Now, once you’ve gotten through the elevator or down the stairs, both also only scannable or through escort by a security guard, then we arrive at the vault entrance. It’s protected by multiple armed security guards. Outside of the personnel, this vault is not human accessible. There’s the usual—redundant electricity, off-site surveillance, passcard access, eighteen inches of steel, pressure-sensitive glass—and the unusual. There are vibration sensors built into all sides of the vault. You simply cannot drill or blow your way into this place.” Vlad glanced around to make sure they were still with him. “Now how do I know all of this?” Vlad asked rhetorically. “Because David has seen it himself. And Baranowski works for the Sandhog’s union. Which means that we have blueprints.”

  David grinned. Vlad truly did have his fingers everywhere. Sandhog was the moniker of the group of construction workers that toiled in the tunnels and cisterns underneath New York City, specializing in building drainage pipes and drilling huge tunnels for future public-transportation projects. Vlad unrolled a massive schematic of the bank’s vault, basement, and the underlying subway and sewer. He turned to David. “Will you do the honors?”

  “These plans might look like chaos to you,” David said as he traced his finger along the plumbing systems, “but what I see is a complex industrial system just begging and pleading to be hacked.” David continued to pitch the assembled crew.

  What David did not present to the group was his inner turmoil. He had spent the morning conferring with Vlad. The two of them were a potent combination. David provided the significant technical factor, but Vlad was downright ingenious. Vlad had figured out the one, and perhaps only, possible way to break into Montgomery’s vault. It was a solution so far out of the box that David wouldn’t have contemplated the scenario in his wildest fantasies. That said, the approach only had a small chance of succeeding. But if anyone could accomplish this heist of heists, it would be Vlad. David also knew that he didn’t have a choice. His options had dwindled down to nothing. If luck is the residue of design, then David had done a fairly poor job of constructing his life.

  David had spent the previous night expecting a police spotlight to suddenly appear outside his window, followed by a battering ram and the sly face of Detective Rivett whispering snide obscenities. It might have been a relief. When it didn’t happen, he had dreamt about it instead. Except in David’s dreams—the faces of authority were those of his own family. His wife was the judge. Mikey and Veronika were in the jury. The court case went on forever, as dreams often do, ebbing and flowing through conversation and dramatic action but never getting anywhere. It was the trial of the day, the week, the century. When he was finally sentenced to the jail of infinity, the cell blocks repeated themselves ad infinitum. He could walk between the cells, but always found himself in a new one. And although each cell was made of concrete and iron, they looked like the rooms and offices and corridors of Montgomery Noyes.

  He’d woken up in a cold sweat, as though an ice pack had been wrapped around the back of his neck. Then he’d remembered that he was still David. Even though he could be naive at times, and his shrimp-like physicality notwithstanding, David was a winner. He solved his own problems with the power of his brain. He reached his goals, even when they seemed impossible. Those successes had defined his life. The triumph was not dead. It would return. He just had to trust himself. What happened from then on out would define his place in the world once and for all. Driven by his own sense of self-preservation, he’d make sure that he came out ahead in the end. He was sure of it.

  ■

  That afternoon, Petrov took the train ten miles east of Bensonhurst until he didn’t recognize a soul, which wasn’t saying much, because he rarely traveled more than five miles from the hospital where he was born and had never been on a plane. Petrov exited the train, packed a huge dab of dip, and jammed it into his cheek. He crossed the street towards a blue van. He looked left and right before stabbing a thin metal slim jim lockout tool into the window well. He fiddled for just a moment before the door unlocked. Petrov glanced around. A few men sat on a stoop a block down the street. They were staring at him, but doing nothing—par for the course. Petrov jumped into the van and began to work on the steering wheel with a screwdriver. After a moment, he had successfully hot-wired the van. He drove away while the stoopsters finally rose. They applauded him.

  ■

  Still ensconced in the old cherry factory while Petrov and Roschin took care of necessities, David studied the vault’s underground systems from the schematics that Vlad had provided.

  Vlad stood on the other side of the warehouse, using a jigsaw to cut a long PVC pipe in half. He fit a joint onto the piping, attaching the new joint to a series of other custom-cut PVC structures. David glanced at the plans again, comparing them with the web of PVC in front of him.

  “Can you raise that one by two inches?” David asked.

  Vlad did as instructed. David double-checked the measurement again.

  “Perfect,” David concluded. “Now let’s keep going with the last set.”

  Vlad continued to attach pieces of PVC piping, creating a massive gridwork of hundreds of PVC pipes on the floor of the warehouse. David supervised.

  After another hour, David and Vlad stood back over their creation with grins on their faces. They’d managed to replicate a scaled model of the underground sewer system extending out from underneath Montgomery Noyes’ vault.

  “We ready to test her out?” Vlad asked.

  “That’s an affirmative,” David responded.

  Vlad connected a hose to a water valve he’d inserted in the piping. He turned the hand valve to the open position. Water began to surge through their rickety plumbing system. David held a ping-pong ball. He placed it inside a hole atop one of the central PVC pipes. The two men watched with anticipation as the ping-pong ball disappeared. David ran excitedly along the PVC piping, guessing the path of the ball with his finger. Water began to pour out from the various open ends of PVC pipe on all sides of the warehouse.

  “Round and round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows,” Vlad orated poetically as David sprinted towards one particular pipe opening. As if by command, the ping-pong ball popped out into David’s expecting hand. He raised the ball for Vlad to see. “But we do,” Vlad said, grinning.

  ■

  Roschin entered a convenience store in Brooklyn.

  “You’re two days early!” the shopkeeper exclaimed when he saw him.

  But Roschin wasn’t interested in the man behind the desk. Instead, he admired the soda machine set up against the wall of the store. He finally turned back to the shopkeeper.

  “I will take it,” Roschin said.

  “A Coke?” the shopkeeper asked.

  “No. The whole machine.” Roschin gazed through the back of the store to a parking lot filled with white rental vans—the proprietor’s other business. “And one of those vans. For a week. I’ll pay for that one,” Roschin said. He placed a credit card do
wn on the desk and stared directly at the shopkeeper. “You know my face?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know my name?”

  “Uh . . . No. I don’t think so. Vlad’s boy, right?”

  Roschin shook his head defiantly. “You do not know. You will not use Vlad’s name in anyone’s presence—ever. You do and this place burns to the ground, but not before your house on Hendrix Street. Understood?”

  “I . . . Yes. Of course. Sir . . . Then who are you?” the shopkeeper stammered nervously, not wanting to make any verbal missteps in front of Roschin’s stony face.

  Roschin tapped the credit card sitting on the counter between them. “This is who I am. This is the only name you know,” he commanded menacingly.

  ■

  Petrov drove the stolen blue van through a roll-up door and into the cherry factory. He guided it onto a mechanic’s lift set up in a dusty side of the warehouse. Vlad quickly checked the van out and nodded his approval. Konstantin pulled a lever and lifted the van up. He and Petrov quickly began dismantling the main axle of the vehicle and then pulled away wiring and insulation from the bottom of the van. After they were finished, Baranowski held a steel-cutting circular saw to the floor of the van. Sparks flew as he cut a large square out of the van’s bottom, about four feet long by four feet wide. After a few more measurements, Konstantin welded two super-sized hinges to the new piece of metal. They screwed the hinges back into the bottom of the van, creating a trap door. The steel panel rotated perfectly down on the new hinges and dropped into place as the floor of the van, practically imperceptible from both inside and out of the vehicle.

  TWENTY-SIX

 

  JAKE SAT IN HIS rarely utilized office, inside the major crimes division on the second floor of the One Police Plaza building in the center of Manhattan. He stared at the wall. Even though the entire space was jam-packed with information, pinned photos, taped e-mails and marked maps, it felt blank. None of the leads were worth anything. They didn’t have legs. Close to two weeks after the gold had disappeared, it was safe to say that this was the most profitable and successful theft that had ever occurred in New York City.

  Jake had hunted down each piece of evidence like a hound after truffles in the forests of Lake Garda, but found himself smacking headfirst into stone walls with each attempted sprint. Everything that he’d turned up had suggested a diabolical set of thieves. It wasn’t just the gold—it was the operation. The sheer amount of heavy equipment involved stunned Jake. Either the criminals had been planning this heist for years, or they happened to possess a huge cache of identity-backstopped machinery available for use any time they wished. Neither option seemed very realistic.

  The flatbed truck had been easy to locate records for. When Jake had found the truck in New Rochelle, it still had Connecticut plates that hadn’t been registered for seven and a half years. Through the DMV, Jake had quickly discovered that the flatbed had gone missing eight years before. It had been stolen from an equipment yard in New Haven. Based on eyewitness testimony, a nineteen-year-old kid had been arrested, tried, and convicted for the theft. Apparently the thief told the police he’d sold the truck to an auto-body distributer in New Jersey and the Connecticut troopers were never actually able to locate the vehicle. There weren’t any other records available for Jake, and the perp had long served his time and was no longer in jail. Jake knew that even if he tracked that guy down, it was an extreme longshot that the effort would reveal anything of substance. The flatbed had obviously been processed through multiple links of the criminal ecosystem throughout the years.

  The magnetic crane that had been secured to the top of the flatbed was stolen more recently from a construction site in upstate New York. Jake had reviewed the security footage from the one camera at the location, and had been unable to catch more than a dark silhouette wearing a mask and rushing past the blurry lens.

  The torch that had been used to cut open the armored car had been sold as a cash transaction out of a hardware store in Wilmington, Delaware. That lead had excited Jake and Tony for about thirty-six hours, until they learned that the establishment didn’t possess security cameras or, apparently, memories. And of course Jake had still not been able to locate the source of the most unique tool they’d found lying inside the crime scene: the cell phone jammer. The evidence was scant, clean as a hospital ward, and none of that was the worst part.

  What was driving Jake batty was that David Belov was still out there. Jake was sure that if he could find David, the whole case would open up like an orchid from eve to sunrise. He knew that David was scared, afraid, and desperate. David needed him, and he, David. But for some reason the entire metropolitan police force couldn’t find one dorknut on the run. If anything, this conundrum fit part and parcel into Jake’s worldview that the nerds were taking over the Earth and there was nothing the strong could do about it. The thought actually made him happy, because it was a just progression—a moral evolution. And Jake was sort of a nerd himself. Eventually he had become tougher than everyone else around him because he didn’t want to feel any pain. But he knew how it felt. The anguish was still there. It was simply hidden behind the façade. Maybe it was impossible to avoid the pain of life, whether you were David or Goliath.

  Jake plugged in his earphones, swiped across his phone, and looked for some music to play. He found the comforting tunes of AFI and kicked his booted feet onto his desk. He stared out into the empty abyss of reason that was the world. He’d accepted that both the city and life itself were too big to make sense of for one man. All he could do was point his boat in the direction he wanted to go, paddle like hell, and hope for the best. And just moments after Jake had finally zoned out, Tony Villalon came pounding into his office.

  “The container—I got it,” Tony said.

  “Got . . . what?” Jake’s eyes creaked back open.

  “Figured out the registration.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Honestly? Doesn’t seem like a lot—sort of like the empty container itself,” Tony said.

  “Fine. Except, why would the quant go to the trouble? He gets all the way to his wife and that’s the one message he leaves?”

  “To push us off track,” Tony replied simply.

  “Sure. Where’s he pushing us from? Or to? It’s not like we can’t chase him and also send someone to examine the container.”

  “Curious to know what I’ve learned, at least?”

  “Hit me.”

  “The containers were registered to an LLC called Tsunami in the Seychelles, which we knew. A lawyer down there signed their documents, but it just so happens that one of our money-laundering guys has a friend in the registrar general’s office, who gave me the inside slip. Tsunami’s actual hundred-percent shareholder is the lawyer’s client—another LLC called Forest Park. They have U.S. bank accounts and were registered domestically by a turnkey solution-type place out of Nevada called Incorporation Services.”

  “Of course,” Jake said.

  “So I got the federal ADA to hit up Judge Arsht last night and force Incorporation Services to turn over their books related to the account. It pings right back here.”

  “Good stuff. To where?”

  “Queens. A man named Stefano Dubbiono. We’ve got his signature and his social on the Forest Park incorporation documents, and wire transfers in and out of Tsunami LLC’s bank account.”

  “And who’s Stefano?” Jake asked.

  “That’s where it gets a lil’ screwy. He’s a driver,” said Villalon.

  “Huh?”

  “A limo driver,” Villalon replied, “who checks out so far. Works for one of those black car services. Office says he’s never had any trouble. Hard worker. But they’ll yank him off duty and we can go chat anytime we want. What do you think?”

  Jake stared at his empty board and replied, “I’ll race you to Queens.”

  “You know we can just go together, right?”

  “To
ny, do I ever ask you why you have a wedding ring on, but no pictures of a spouse on your desk like the rest of the stiffs here, and never talk about her?”

  “No . . .”

  “Then don’t ask me about me and my bike. No one gets in the way of us. And by the way, I don’t care. But neither should you. Some things are personal.”

  ■

  Their interview with Dubbiono did not provide clarity, at least not right away. Jake and Tony met the driver in a small conference room at the dispatch headquarters of his employer, one of many luxury chauffeur and black car services that operated in the city. A hefty and broad-shouldered man whose black shirt exhibited permanent sweat stains underneath the arms, Dubbiono smoked ten cigarettes throughout their hour-long interview. He had slightly long, greasy hair, which he combed severely over his head, and he was always turning his left ear towards the detectives due to the unilateral deafness he’d picked up in a bar fight in his twenties. Dubbiono was nervous, but open and honest.

  The detectives began with his past. It was a good way to achieve an understanding of a man, and also to disarm any anxiety and gain the upper hand. Dubbiono had been a gambler when he was young. That’s why it had taken him so long to get a regular job. But he’d been driving for the same black car service for eight years. Before that, he’d driven a limo independently. His work phone kept track of his schedule, and he referenced it many times. Not only did Dubbiono claim to be working the night of the robbery, but at most other instances throughout the timeline of the gold carriage job, he was with his family. The dots of his alibi connected, and not in a way that helped Jake and Villalon. But something about Dubbiono’s messy demeanor, mixed with the exactitude of his records, still bothered Jake. It reminded him of the perfection of the rest of the heist. The only issue was that Jake was so far leveraged down the branch of logic that he wasn’t sure if he could even balance any longer. They were pursuing a lead given to them by their main target, after all. Maybe Jake was just batting at a red herring on a tee. But still, there was the matter of the signatures. Towards the end of the interview, Jake pushed a piece of paper across the table towards Dubbiono. “Can you write your signature, please? Right there,” he said.