Black Market

by James Patterson

  The sergeant driving the police car was as good-looking as any young actor in a Hollywood cop show. He had long blue-black hair curling over his uniform collar. His name was Signarelli. Caitlin figured he definitely watched “Hill Street Blues.”

  “Never seen anything this bad.” The police sergeant revealed a nasal Brooklyn accent when he spoke. His eyes kept darting in and out of the rearview mirror.

  “Can't even call in to your normal communications desk. Nerve center they set up is always busy, too. Nobody knows what the army's doing. What the FBI guys are doing, either. It's completely nuts!”

  “How would you handle it?” There was nothing patronizing in the question. Caitlin was always curious about the rank and file. That was one reason she made a good boss at the SEC. A second reason was that she was smart, so knowledgeable about Wall Street and the workings of business that most of her associates legitimately held her in awe. “If this was your show, what would you do now, Sergeant?”

  “Well… I'd hit every terrorist hangout we know about in the city. We know about a hell of a lot of them, too. I'd blow into their little maggot nests. Arrest everybody in sight. That way we'd sure as hell get some information.”

  “Sergeant, I believe that's what teams of detectives have been doing all night. Over sixty separate squads of NYPD detectives. But the maggots are just not cooperating on this one.”

  Caitlin arched her eyebrow, then smiled gently at the cop. Predictably, he asked her for a date, and just as predictably, Caitlin turned him down.

  With police and army helicopters constantly whirring overhead, Caitlin Dillon stood still and numb on the northwest corner of Broadway and Wall. She allowed her eyes to roam across the most chilling, surreal scene she ever hoped to view in her lifetime.

  What appeared to be billions of tons of granite block, shattered glass, and concrete and mortar had crashed down onto Wall Street and Broad Street and Pine and all the narrow, interconnecting alleyways. According to the latest army intelligence estimate, as many as sixty separate plastique bombs had detonated at 6:34 Friday evening. The police theory was that the bombs had been exploded by sophisticated radio signals. The signals could have been transmitted from as far away as ten or twelve miles.

  Caitlin craned her neck to gaze up at nearby 6 Wall Street. She winced as she observed the sheared, swinging clumps of wiring: thick elevator cables dangling between the highest floors of the office building. Here and there patches of sky shone through great yawning holes in the building's walls. The overall effect reminded her of a doll house utterly destroyed by a child's temper tantrum.

  She stood all alone, shivering and cold, on the stone portal of the New York Stock Exchange. She couldn't stop herself from staring at the abysmal destruction, the incomprehensible damage, on Wall Street. More than anything, she wanted to be sick.

  She saw an oil painting, a Yankee sailing clipper, hanging in a distant office with two of the room's walls blown away. It looked absurd. In the foyer of an adjacent building, an overturned copier had collapsed through several floors before striking the unyielding marble in the lobby. She could see the shattered screens of computer terminals and the melted remains of keyboards that reminded her of some nightmare art form. All over the littered, desolate street, police and hospital emergency vehicles were flashing bright red-and-blue distress signals.

  Caitlin Dillon could feel a cold dead weight pushing down on her. Her body was numb. Her ears buzzed softly, as if there were a sudden drop in air pressure. She couldn't stop a feeling of nausea, of sudden weakness in her legs. She understood what many of the others still didn't-that an entire way of life had quite possibly been destroyed here on Friday night.

  Inside number 13, Caitlin was confronted immediately by noisy squads of secretaries typing frantically in the marble-and-stone entryway corridors. Stock exchange clerks milled around with a kind of busy uselessness, carrying clipboards with a hollow show of self-importance, carting files from one office to another.

  Caitlin took in the command post scene and then, as she stepped nimbly around the broken glass and debris that had been shaken loose from the ceiling, she was surrounded by heavily armed policemen who demanded to see her identification.

  She smiled to herself as she showed her ID. No one knew who she was; no one recognized her here in the stock exchange foyer.

  How very typical that was. Damn it, how typical.

  For the past three years the SEC's director of enforcement had been a most unlikely Wall Street figure: Caitlin Dillon was clearly a major force yet a person of supreme mystery to almost everybody around her.

  Women in general had only been permitted on the floor of the stock exchange since 1967. Nevertheless the idea hadn't particularly caught on. In fact, in the visitors' gallery of the exchange one infamous sign still retained a position of prominence:

  WOMEN MAKE POOR SPECULATORS.

  WHEN THROWN UPON THEIR OWN

  RESOURCES, THEY ARE COMPARATIVELY

  HELPLESS. EXCELLING IN CERTAIN LINES,

  THEY ARE FORCED TO TAKE BACKSEATS

  IN SPECULATION. WITHOUT THE

  ASSISTANCE OF A MAN, A WOMAN ON

  WALL STREET IS LIKE A SHIP WITHOUT A

  RUDDER.

  Caitlin Dillon had actually inherited her job because of her predecessor's bad luck in the shape of a sudden fatal coronary. Caitlin knew that insiders had predicted she wouldn't last two months. They compared the fateful situation with that of a politician's wife taking over for an unexpectedly invalid husband. Caitlin was called by some “the interim enforcer.”

  For that reason, and some strong personal ones from her past, she had decided that-for however long she might last in the job-she was going to become the sternest, hardest SEC enforcement officer since Professor James Landis had been doing the hiring himself. What did she possibly have to lose?

  She was, therefore, stubbornly serious. Some said Caitlin Dillon was unnecessarily obsessed with white-collar criminal investigations, with skillfully prosecuting malfeasance by senior officers of major American corporations.

  “I'll tell you something off the record,” Caitlin had once said to a dear friend, Meg O'Brian, the financial editor of Newsweek. “The Ten Most Wanted men in America are all working on Wall Street.”

  As the “interim” enforcement officer at the SEC, Caitlin Dillon made a lot of news very fast. The mystery of Caitlin Dillon-how she had surfaced virtually from nowhere-grew each week she held on to the important job. The power brokers on the Street still wanted to replace her, but suddenly they found they couldn't do so very easily. Caitlin was simply too good at what she did. She'd become too visible. She was almost instantly a strong symbol for the disenfranchised in America 's financial system.

  At seven forty-five that morning, Caitlin finally reached her office inside 13 Wall. It was respectably large, even elegant. She removed her coat and took a deep breath as she sat down. On her desk lay a damage report prepared for her the previous night. As her eyes scanned the page, she felt a deepening despair at the sheer amount of destruction done:

  The Federal Reserve Bank

  Salomon Brothers

  Bankers Trust

  Affiliated Fund

  Merrill Lynch

  U.S. Trust Corporation

  The Depository Trust Company

  The list went on to detail fourteen downtown New York buildings that had been partially or completely destroyed.

  She closed her eyes and placed her hands on the report. If only it could give her a hint, a clue. Fourteen different buildings in the Wall Street financial district-the whole thing was beyond her, out of control by any measure.

  She opened her eyes.

  It was the start of the second day of her formal investigation of Green Band, and she knew no more than she'd known before. It was going to be a long, long Sunday.

  Arch Carroll strode briskly from a comfortable State Department limousine toward the ominous gray stone entranceway to 13 Wall Street. At least
Green Band had left this building mostly intact-a fact that caused him to wonder. If a terrorist cell was going to strike out hard at U.S. capitalism, why wouldn't they destroy the New York Stock Exchange?

  Carroll had on a knee-length, black leather topcoat that Nora had given him the Christmas before her death. At the time she'd joked that it made him look like a tough-guy hero in an action movie. The coat was now one of his few personal treasures; that it was a little too tight under the arms didn't matter. There was no way he'd have it altered. He wanted it exactly as it was when Nora had given it to him.

  Carroll was smoking a crumpled cigarette. Sometimes on the weekends he wore the coat and smoked crumpled cigarettes when he took Mickey Kevin and Clancy to the New York Knicks or Rangers games. It made both kids laugh hysterically. They told him he was trying to look like Clint Eastwood in the movies. He wasn't, he knew. Clint Eastwood was trying to look like him-like some nihilistic, tough-guy city cop.

  Hurrying down the long, echoing corridors, Carroll pulled his way out of the leather coat. For a few hefty strides he left it capelike over his shoulders. Then he folded it over one arm, in the hope that he'd look a little more civilized. There were lots of very straight business people in the hallowed halls of 13 Wall.

  Carroll pushed open leather-covered doors into a formal meeting room thick with perspiration and stale tobacco smoke. The room where the New York Stock Exchange professional staff usually met was the size of a large theater.

  The scheduled meeting was already in progress. He was late. He was also weary from his flight, and his nerves-kept moderately alert by an infusion of amphetamine-were beginning to complain. He glanced at his watch. There was another long day ahead of him.

  Carroll scanned the shadowy room. It was filled with New York City police and U.S. Army personnel, with corporate lawyers and investigators from the major banks and brokerage houses on Wall Street. The only seats left were' way in front.

  Carroll groaned and crouched low. He clumsily climbed over gray-and-blue pin-striped legs, and over someone's abundant lap, toward the front row. He thought everybody in the room must be staring at him.

  The speaker was saying, “Let me tell you how to make a hell of a lot of money on Wall Street. All you have to do is steal a little from the rich, steal a little from the middle rich, steal a lot from the lower rich…”

  Nervous laughter cascaded around the vast meeting room. It was a muted, mirthless outbreak that sounded more like a release of fear than anything else.

  The speaker went on: “The Wall Street security system simply doesn't work. As you all know, the computer setup here is one of the most antiquated in all of the business world. That's why this disaster could happen.”

  Carroll finally found a seat. He lowered himself onto it until only his head peeked above the theater's gray velvet seat back and pressed his knees against the wooden stage in front.

  “The computer system on Wall Street is a complete disgrace…”

  Carroll looked up and took in the meeting's speaker. Jesus. He was completely taken aback by the sight of Caitlin Dillon on the podium. Her hair, a sleek chestnut-brown color, was bobbed at the shoulders. Long legs, slender waist. Tall-maybe five feet eight. She looked, if anything, even more intriguing than she'd seemed that first night in Washington.

  She was staring down at him. Her brown eyes were very calm, measuring everything they saw. Yes, she was staring directly down at Carroll himself.

  “Are you expecting trouble during my briefing, Mr. Carroll?” Her eyes had fastened onto his Browning, his beat-up leather shoulder holster. He was suddenly embarrassed by her question and the way his name had sounded through her microphone. Those pale red lips seemed to be lightly mocking him.

  Carroll didn't know what to say. He shrugged and tried to sink a little deeper onto his seat. Why didn't he have one of his usual wisecracks to throw back at her?

  Caitlin Dillon smoothly switched her attention back to the audience of senior police officers and heavy-duty Wall Street businessmen. Without missing a beat, she resumed her briefing at exactly the point where she had interrupted herself.

  “In the past decade,” she said, and her next chart efficiently appeared on the screen at her back, “foreign investment in the United States has skyrocketed. Billions of francs, yen, pesos, and deutsche marks have flowed into our economy to the sum of eighty-five billion dollars. The Midland Bank of England, for instance, took full control of the Crocker National Bank of California. Nippon Kokan purchased half the National Steel Corporation. The list goes on and on.

  “At this rate, I'm sorry to say, the Japanese, the Arabs, and the Germans will very soon control our financial destiny.”

  As she recited exhaustive facts and numbers that defined the present situation in the financial community, Carroll listened attentively. He also watched attentively. Nothing could have drawn his eyes away from her, short of a second Wall Street bombing raid.

  There was a disarming twinkle in her eyes, an unexpected hint of sweetness in her smile. Was it really sweetness, though? Coyness? How could she hold down the job she had if she was shy and retiring and sweet? “Sweet” was not in the Wall Street lexicon.

  She was chic-even in a conservative, salt-and-pepper tweed business suit. She looked stylish and somehow just right.

  Most of all, though, she looked untouchable.

  That was the single word, the most precise idea floating through Carroll's head, that seemed to sum up Caitlin Dillon best.

  Untouchable.

  In Carroll's experience, neither he nor anybody he knew ever actually got to meet the spectacular-looking women you all too frequently saw in midtown New York, in Washington, in Paris. Who the hell did get to know them?… Was there a matching species of untouchable men whom Carroll never bothered to notice?… What sort of man woke up with this Caitlin Dillon woman next to him? Some superwealthy Wall Street lion? One of those buccaneers of the stock arbitrage game? Yes, he'd bet anything that was the case.

  His attention drifted back to her speech, which was a succinct description of the Green Band emergency, of the current state of Wall Street's insufficient computer records, and of the stoppage of all international transfers of funds. She had some sobering and scary material up there on the podium.

  “Surprisingly, there's still been no further contact by the terrorist group, whatever kind of group they are. As you may know, no actual demands were made. No ultimatums. Absolutely no reason has been given so far for what happened on Friday.

  “There'll be another meeting after this, for my people and for the analysts. We have to get something going with the computers before the market opens on Monday. If not… I would expect major unpleasantness.”

  The meeting room became still. The scraping of feet, all paper shuffling, stopped.

  “Are we talking about a stock market panic? Some kind of crash? What sort of major unpleasantness?” someone called out.

  Caitlin paused before she spoke again. It was obvious to Carroll that she was choosing her next words with extreme care and diplomacy.

  “I think we all have to recognize… that there is a possibility, even a likelihood, of some form of market panic on Monday morning.”

  “What constitutes a panic in your mind? Give us a for instance,” said a senior Wall Street man.

  “The market could lose several hundred points very quickly. In a matter of hours. That's if they decide to open on Monday. In Tokyo, London, Geneva, the subject's still under discussion.”

  “Several hundred points!” Quite a few of the brokers groaned. Carroll watched them envision their comfortable lives eroding. The stretch Mercedeses, the Westchester estates, the fashionable clothes-everything gone. It's so fucking fragile, he thought.

  “Are we talking about a potential Black Friday situation?” asked someone from the back of the auditorium. “Are you saying there could actually be a stock market crash?”

  Caitlin frowned. She recognized the speaker, a stiff, stuffy bean coun
ter from one of the larger midtown New York banks. “I'm not saying anything like that yet. As I suggested before, if we had a more modern system of computers down here, if Wall Street had joined the rest of the twentieth century, we'd know a lot more. Tomorrow is Monday. We'll see what happens then. We should be prepared. That's what I'm suggesting-preparedness. For a change.”

  With that, Caitlin Dillon stepped down from the stage. As Carroll watched her leave the room, he became conscious of another figure approaching him: Captain Francis Nicolo from the New York City Bomb Squad, a cop who liked to think he was something of a dandy with his sleek, waxed mustache and his three-piece pin-striped suits.

  “A moment, Arch,” Nicolo said, and gestured rather mysteriously for Carroll to follow.

  They hurried out of the room and along various dimly lit stock exchange corridors, Carroll trailing behind. Nicolo opened the door to a small inner office tucked directly behind the trading floor. He closed it with a secretive gesture when Carroll was inside.

  “What's happening?” Carroll asked, both curious and slightly amused. “Talk to me, Francis.”

  “Check this,” Nicolo said. He pointed to a plain cardboard box propped on the desk. “Open it. Go ahead.”

  “What is it?” Carroll hesitantly stepped toward the desk. He laid the tips of his fingers lightly against the box lid.

  “Open it. Won't bite your widget off.”

  Carroll removed the lid. “Where the hell did this come from?” he asked. “Christ, Frank.”

  “Janitor found it behind a cistern in one of the men's rooms,” Nicolo answered. “Scared the living piss out of the poor guy.”

  Carroll stared at the device, at the length of shiny green ribbon that was wound elaborately around it. Green Band.

  “It's harmless,” Nicolo said. “It was never meant to go off.”

  Arch Carroll continued to stare at the makings of a professional terrorist's bomb. It was never meant to go off, he thought. Another warning? “They could have totaled this place,” he said with a sick feeling.