Black Market

by James Patterson

  For a long, pensive moment, he stared at Nora in her hospital-issue wheelchair. Anniversary of her death. Pain still sharp and fresh as yesterday, it seemed. He could remember exactly when the snapshot had been taken. After they'd operated. After the surgeons had failed to remove her malignant tumor.

  In the photo, Nora was wearing a simple yellow-flowered sundress, a knitted blue cardigan sweater. She had on a pair of crazy high-topped sneakers that became her trademark as an invalid.

  She was smiling radiantly in the picture. Not once to his knowledge had she completely broken down during the illness; not once had she felt sorry for herself. She'd been thirty-one years old when they'd found the tumor. She'd had to watch her blond hair fall out from the chemotherapy treatments. Then she'd had to adapt to life in the inflexible iron clutches of her wheelchair. Nora had somehow accepted that she wasn't going to see her children grow up or anything else the two of them had laughed and dreamed about and always taken for granted.

  Why couldn't he finally accept her death?

  Why couldn't he ever accept the way life was apparently supposed to be?

  Arch Carroll stopped and listened more closely to Barbra Streisand singing.

  The song “Promises” made him remember the stretch when he'd visited Nora every night, night after night, at New York Hospital. After the hospital visits, he would eat at Galahanty's Bar up the hill on First Avenue. A very tired burger, soggy home fries, draft beer that tasted the way swamp grass smelled. Probably the beginning of his drinking problems.

  The two Streisand songs had been local favorites on Galahanty's jukebox. They always made him think of Nora-all alone back at that scary, skyscraper hospital.

  Sitting in the bar, he'd always wanted to go back-at ten, eleven o'clock-to talk with her just a little bit more; to sleep with her; to hold her tight against the gathering night inside her hospital room. To squeeze every possible goddamn moment out of the time they had left together…

  The worst, the very truest line for him in “Promises” finally came…

  Tears rolled slowly down his cheeks. The pain inside was like a rock-solid column that extended from the center of his chest all the way up to his forehead. The sadness and inconsolable grief were for Nora, though, not for himself-the unfairness of what had happened to her.

  He began to hold himself fiercely tight, squeezing hard with both arms. He was remembering more than he wanted to about the time around Nora's death. He was going to blow apart one of these times. Real tough cop, right?

  When would this cold, hollow feeling please stop? The past three years had been unbearable. When would it please fucking stop?

  He always had this same insane urge-to break glass.

  Just to punch glass.

  Blindly, irrationally punch glass.

  Caitlin, meanwhile, stood immobile, perfectly silent, in the darkened hallway. She couldn't catch her breath, couldn't even swallow right then. She had wandered back from the bedroom when she'd heard noises. Faint strains of music…

  So sad to watch Carroll like this, with the old photographs.

  Finally she walked back to the bedroom and huddled deep down into the body-warm covers and sheets.

  Lying there alone, she bit down hard on her lip. She understood and felt so much more about Carroll now. Maybe she understood more than she wanted to.

  She stared at shadows walking the bedroom ceiling; she thought about her own life since she'd come to New York. Somehow she'd known she would never completely fit in Lima, Ohio. There were so many other experiences she needed to try. There was her long-standing need to involve herself in the financial arena. Maybe to vindicate her father, maybe just to make him proud again. She'd become a success; everybody acknowledged that.

  Only recently, for the first time in many years, she wasn't sure if success was what she wanted now, if she'd even done the right thing leaving the Midwest. Right at the moment, she was not completely sure about anything.

  Except maybe one thing: she was in love with Carroll. She was falling deeply in love.

  She wanted to hold him right now, only she was afraid. Caitlin closed her eyes and felt a great sense of solitude assail her. Would she always be a trespasser in Carroll's life?

  She didn't know exactly how long she'd been alone. The bed felt so empty without Carroll.

  The telephone on the nightstand began to ring.

  It was three-thirty in the morning.

  Carroll didn't pick up in the living room. Where was he?

  She waited, four, five rings, and he still didn't pick up. Finally she grabbed the receiver.

  A high-pitched and very excited voice was on the line. A man was talking before she had a chance to say a word.

  “Arch, sorry to wake you. This is Walter Trentkamp. I'm down at number Thirteen right now. The stock exchange in Sydney just opened. There's a massive panic! You'd better come now. It's all going to crash!”

  27

  Manhattan

  At 3:40 A.M., while Caitlin and Carroll were hurrying downtown, a restless David Hudson was riding aboard the strangely crowded Eighth Avenue subway.

  The rattling, gray metal cars were filled with staggering, vacant-eyed drunks. There were clusters of Forty-second Street prostitutes. Here and there a late night Irish bartender or transit worker sat in wary silence.

  In order to avoid the unpleasant sweet-sour liquor smells, Hudson had stationed himself in the open bridge between two of the jouncing cars. Sometimes when he couldn't sleep, he would ride the mesmerizing subways for hours like this-nothing on his mind but the passing stations and the speed. It was a little like walking a night patrol in Vietnam.

  He'd worked late at the Vets garage. It was down to the agonizing final details now, always the last details to get exactly right.

  It all happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, on the train…

  As the subway relentlessly raced north, the heavy metal door between the cars suddenly opened. Two black men in their middle twenties squeezed into the swaying space between the cars.

  “Mind movin' on, my man!” One of the two sniffled and showed a row of dull gold caps.

  Hudson said nothing. The train was just braking into the Fifty-ninth Street station, a maze of connecting, blue-tinted platforms that were flashing by.

  “I said-move on, my man!”

  Colonel David Hudson's feet shifted slightly on the throbbing steel plates. He automatically slipped into the combatstance. The train bucked and squealed loudly to a stop, and the one with the gold caps started to move.

  The rest was like a familiar dream for Hudson. His clenched fist shot forward, followed immediately by a martial-arts kick.

  The lightning blows were lethal. One accurately smashed into the group leader's temple; the second crunched his jaw. He reeled backward and fell from the train.

  The second man pulled a knife. Hudson struck before the man could use it. Blood exploded over the attacker's right eyebrow.

  “You! Hey, you! Stop right there!”

  David Hudson heard shouts as the subway doors slid open. Two transit authority police in black leather jackets, a man and a woman, were running his way. They were coming fast, a dark blur hurtling down the crowded platform.

  The police officers had their nightsticks out. The heavy wooden Billy clubs were flying, pumping up and down as they ran.

  Colonel David Hudson burst from the gaping train doors before they could reach him.

  “You! Stop! Stop!” The transit cops screamed their sharp commands from the rear.

  David Hudson felt incomprehensible terror as he pushed and stumbled along the jammed subway platform. The Lizard Man was flashing back. The lessons of the Lizard Man…

  For it to all end like this was so absurd. So impossible to foresee. He had a “sample” bond inside his jacket, and they'd search him for certain.

  How could Green Band end here? In a mundane New York City subway station?

  David Hudson could see the careful planning, the deta
iled pieces of Green Band, swept into disarray by nothing more significant than a stroke of bad luck. He ran alongside colorful advertising billboards. Long-running plays, Perdue chickens, current movie hits, went swirling past in a Technicolor blur.

  The stone floor was slick with rainwater that had drained down from the street. The smell of urine was overpowering in the endless, fetid tunnel.

  For it all to end like this was unthinkable.

  “Stop! Stop, you!”

  Not a single person dared to help the trailing police team. Hudson looked too determined, too potentially dangerous, to grapple with. He was a flying, one-armed madman!

  His legs were pumping furiously high, and his face was fearsome in its intense concentration. He sideswiped a weaving drunk and didn't feel the insubstantial body bounce off.

  It was too absurd for the mission to end here! Wasn't it too absurd?

  An explosion suddenly echoed through the long stone tunnel behind him. People all over the station began to scream. A teenaged Puerto Rican girl crouched low, her palms flat against the wet concrete. An elderly man held down his feathered fedora with both hands.

  The cops had actually fired warning shots.

  They were shooting inside the late night subway station.

  Dark stone stairs were off to his right! Stairs to what though? Hudson could see the street looming above, a patch of purplish gray sky. He ran three steps at a time.

  Up, he screamed at himself. Outside! Out of this careless, stupid trap he'd stumbled into.

  Hudson sprinted blindly down West Sixtieth Street. He ran across the empty street against the red light, trailing rags of his own breath. He continued down Sixtieth Street, past Columbus, slipping into a maze of high-rise beige and gray apartment buildings. His heart pounding, he finally stopped in a darkened doorway.

  Seconds later the two cops spun around the same corner of the gray brick building. He hadn't lost them, after all.

  Hudson slid his gun from his coat and trained it on the male. His finger curled round the trigger… Heart shots would be necessary here. He watched as they searched among the buildings' shadows.

  “Where the hell did he go?” the cop asked, breathing hard. wheezing like a much older man.

  Colonel Hudson continued to watch from the building's doorway… They only had to start walking toward him, and they were dead. Both of them…

  “You wanna call this off?” the patrolman asked. “I don't see him.”

  The female cop shrugged as she pulled off her duty cap.

  David Hudson held his breath. Don't come any closer, he thought. Not another step closer.

  Please, don't.

  “Yeah. He's probably miles away. That creep could run.” the patrolwoman said in a shrill voice.

  Hudson listened to their footsteps slowly fading. Cruel pain exploded inside his chest. He finally had to sit down on the curb.

  If he'd had to shoot those two cops…

  He stuck the gun inside his jacket. No need for that now. He didn't need any kind of disaster.

  Everything was going to come soon. The high-and-mighty United States was going to come crashing down to reality Colonel David Hudson thought it was a fate well deserved.

  28

  “What's happening, Arch, I think, is a disorderly, almost a riotous market condition. Everybody desperately wants to sell. Except there's a corresponding lack of buyers,” Caitlin said.

  “What exactly does that mean?” Carroll asked. “What happens now?”

  “It means the bottom-line price of stocks and bonds has to plummet dramatically… The crash that's apparently coming could last a few hours, days, or drag on for years.”

  “Years?”

  “Back in sixty-three, on the day Kennedy was assassinated, the market collapsed and was shut down early. The next day it recovered. But it wasn't until after the Second World War that the market recovered from the crash of 1929. There's never been a situation to match this one against, though. This panic is happening all over the world. All at the same time.”

  Carroll and Caitlin Dillon were hurrying across the immense marble lobby of the World Trade Center. It was here, on the ground floor and mezzanine, that the fiduciary nerve center of the banks and trust companies had been established after the bombing on Wall Street.

  The escalator stairs to the mezzanine were frozen to a stop. An impromptu sign over a red arrow read FINANCIAL SECTION and pointed straight up.

  Carroll and Caitlin started to jog up the motionless metal stairs. It was just past 4:00 A.M.

  “This looks a little more organized than number Thirteen. Not much, though,” Carroll observed.

  Red and blue intercom wires were strung up everywhere, hanging like Christmas decorations over the escalators and fire exit stairways. Open radio channels connecting uptown offices with the financial center squawked and chattered endlessly. Even at that time in the morning, the hum and buzz of electronic noise was unrelenting.

  From a row of high-vaulted windows, Carroll and Caitlin could see a black Bell army helicopter landing. Limos and official cars were discharging somber-looking men carrying briefcases.

  “What's causing the worldwide panic?” Carroll wanted to know as he and Caitlin entered a cavernous marble hallway with no visible exit.

  Caitlin rubbed her arms warm as she walked. The glass doors to the outside were opening constantly, and the building was as cold as a meat freezer.

  “None of the usual safeguards in the systems are working Not enough fail-safe devices were ever built in for a situation like this. Academic economists have been warning the New York Stock Exchange for years. Every MBA candidate in the country knows that something like this could conceivably happen.”

  Carroll pushed open heavy pine doors into a huge, frantic conference room, almost a miniature stock exchange. Brokers on complex NYNEX telephone consoles, analysts with IBM desktop computers, were talking all at once.

  The room was jammed with frenetic shadowy figures many of whom were shouting into phone receivers they managed to cradle, in a practiced defiance of gravity, between jaw and shoulder. It was bedlam. It reminded Carroll of, give or take some modern accoutrements, a print he'd once seen of a Massachusetts insane asylum in the late 1800s.

  Unconditional orders were being issued to sell, at the very best price possible. Jobs and business relationships were being routinely threatened over the long-distance telephones.

  Jay Fairchild, tall, jowly, bald as an infant, lumbered out of a clique of gray suits to meet Caitlin and Carroll. Fairchild was the undersecretary of the Treasury, a man who'd come to rely regularly on Caitlin's judgments, her usually astute, almost uncanny hunches about the market.

  “Jay, what the hell has happened tonight?”

  Fairchild's eyes had all the animation of glass beads. There was a standing joke that all undersecretaries were illegitimate children of past congressmen and presidents. They definitely had a rare, collective ability to look completely out of place.

  “Just about every nightmare scenario you or I could ever have imagined has come true tonight,” Fairchild said. His voice held a tiny, whistling sibilance. “At the end of the day yesterday, out in Chicago, metal skyrocketed. A ton of futures, coffee, and sugar flopped badly. Bank of America and First National began calling in their loans.”

  Caitlin couldn't hold back her anger at that news. “Those unbelievable shits! Morons! The commodity people out of Chicago won't listen to anybody, Arch. There have been all sorts of speculative excesses on the options market long before this. For years and years. That's one more reason we were ripe for this panic.”

  “None of that is the real problem right now, though,” Jay Fairchild said. “The crash is being precipitated by the goddamn banks!… The banks are almost completely responsible. Let's wander back to the lobby. You'll see what I mean. It's worse than it looks up here.”

  FBI agents and hard-nosed-looking New York City police officers were conscientiously screening the credentials of ev
eryone trying to get into the conference room on the ground floor. Carroll knew the FBI men. They had no problem getting in.

  Once inside, the thundering noise and activity were easily double what Carroll and Caitlin had witnessed and heard upstairs. It was still only 4:30 A.M., but a nightmarish fear had taken firm hold-you could see it on every face inside the overcrowded room.

  The business investigators who squeezed into the conference room included some of the more sophisticated new breed of bankers. In the not-so-distant past, most banks had wanted to be viewed as impregnable places for their depositors' money, secure fortresses of capital. So bankers tended to be characterized by physical and emotional restraint, by almost compulsive neatness, by conservatism in their behavior and their thinking.

  That was hardly the case with the men and women packed into this room. These were glossy, well-tailored globe-trotters, most of them as comfortable in Geneva, in Paris, or in Beirut as they were in New York. The spiritual leader of this cosmopolitan group was Walter Wriston, the now retired head of Citicorp. In Caitlin's opinion, Wriston had been little more than a glorified traveling salesman, but some thought him a genius.

  “There's another factor contributing to the current disaster,” Jay Fairchild said. “The very real possibility of a worldwide crash, rather than an isolated one in the United States. This time, the whole bloody world really could go down. It's been that volatile a situation, potentially, for at least the last four years.”

  Everyone they passed in the formal conference room appeared hopelessly grave and, once again, battle weary to Carroll. The scene was something like a general alarm on a warship.

  Caitlin said, “Seven days of brokerage transactions are now unresolved. The bankers are competing, they're actually competing to see who can take the most clear-cut, amoral advantage of the chaos!” Her face was flushed, and there was an anger in her voice that Carroll hadn't heard before.

  Carroll didn't technically understand some of what was being said, but he grasped enough. When you misappropriate people's money, a lot of small investors' money given to you on trust, he figured you were a common criminal.