The First Billion

by Christopher Reich

  Luca nodded. “And, Jett? Order yourself a drink beforehand. Something strong. You’re going to need it.”

  Leaving the building, Gavallan turned left and headed down the sidewalk to his car. He didn’t see the slender young man in the baseball cap enter the building less than a minute after he left.

  28

  Luca hardly heard the first shot.

  A door slamming, he thought, keeping his eyes on the screens, but then came the moaning, the fevered imprecations not to shoot, followed by another bang. This time the noise was unmistakable. Achingly loud. Frightening. His ears rang, and then he caught a whiff of smoke and his nose began to burn. Cordite, he thought. Yet for all the sensory data, it came to him slowly. A gun. A very, very big gun.

  At first, he thought it had to be Mazursky, some kind of joke he was playing, but a glance down the aisle told him he was wrong on that score. The Wizard of Warsaw lay twenty feet away, his jaw opening and closing like that of a fish out of water, eyes wide open, a pitch-black crater on his forehead starting to leak blood.

  And for a split second, Luca thought, Jesus, it took a bullet to shut that loudmouth up.

  But by then Krumins was yelling and running toward the front door. Halfway there he seemed to leap out of his shoes and slam against the wall, and when he slid to the ground there was a wide, bloody red swath tracing his path.

  Gregorio stood up in his cubicle, and his blond head seemed all at once to vaporize in a cloud of red mist. Nevins crawled past Luca down the aisle. The gun roared, and he went flat and stopped moving, without even a grunt.

  “Ray?”

  Four feet away stood the shooter. The voice gave her away as a woman and foreign, though it was hard to tell by how she was dressed.

  “Ray Luca?” she asked again.

  “Yes?” he said, frozen, confused, very, very scared. Kirov, he thought. Kirov sent you. “What do you want?”

  But she didn’t answer. Striking with the speed of a cobra, she wrapped an arm around his neck, brought him to her chest, and laid the pistol against his temple. Paralyzed, he tried to scream, but the words lodged in his throat.

  No, no, it can’t be. We’re going to Disney World. My wife and daughters, we’re going to—

  29

  Along Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, traffic slowed to a crawl. Jett Gavallan braked, trying to see ahead and determine what might have caused a traffic jam at eleven-fifteen in the morning. He caught a slew of flashing lights, bright metal, and the rush of uniformed men and women to and fro. A pair of police cruisers, strobes spinning, barred the street a block ahead. An auto accident, he surmised. And a bad one at that.

  “Tony, Bruce, I want you both to listen to me,” Gavallan was saying into his cell phone. “No more calls to farm out the bridge loan. It’s time we show some confidence in the client. If Lehman wants out, fine. Ditto for Merrill. We’ll keep all fifty on our books. End of story. I don’t want the market to see us sweat.”

  “It’s not a question of seeing us sweat,” replied Llewellyn-Davies. “Just simple financial prudence. If I can unload twenty million of our exposure to Kirov, I’m damned well going to.”

  “No, you’re damn well not,” barked Gavallan right back.

  “He’s right, Jett,” chimed in Tustin. “Deal goes south, you’ll be thanking us, kid.”

  “And when it goes through you going to fund me the eight hundred grand we passed up?”

  “Youfugginkidddinme?” bawled Tustin. “I’m just an employee, bwana.”

  “Reconsider, Jett,” said Llewellyn-Davies. “That’s a right decent chunk of risk you’re willing to shoulder for eight hundred thousand dollars.”

  Gavallan shook his head at their tenacity. Not now, fellas; this is not the time. It was imperative everything continue as before, that he not give the slightest hint he was going to scupper the deal before it hit the street, or that he had an inkling that Grafton Byrnes was in a world of trouble.

  “The decision has been made,” he declared. “No more calls.”

  He hung up.

  It was a picture-postcard day, lacy clouds scudding across a pale blue sky, trade winds blowing up from the Caribbean, tangy with sea salt and suntan oil. Close your eyes and you might hear some marimbas and steel drums, catch a scent of jerk pork roasting on the spit. A day to relax, he decided. Play a little golf, take the boat out for a sail, drink a six-pack on the back stoop. A cynical voice laughed at his middle-class musings. In nine years, he’d never taken a day off except when sick. His longest vacation had lasted all of four days, cut short by the minicrash of ‘98 and the demise of Long Term Capital.

  “When you work, work. When you play, play,” Graf Byrnes was fond of saying. “But goddamn it, don’t think the world is going to stop if you don’t show up for work one day. The graveyard is filled with indispensable managers.”

  Gavallan took the words to heart, deciding that when this thing was over, when he had Graf Byrnes safe and sound back in his office in San Francisco, he’d do some serious playing. A month in Maui. The safari in Kenya he’d promised himself. Maybe he’d charter a yacht, do a little island-hopping near the Bahamas.

  “Alone?” a cynical voice asked, and the glow of his dream vacation lost its luster.

  “Come on, come on. I’m in a hurry here.”

  Rapping his palm against the steering wheel, Gavallan urged the column of cars to advance. Yard by yard, the cars edged forward, past the color-coordinated strip malls painted the same gay shade of coral, the casual cafes, the brokerage offices, and the cruise ships offering two-day jaunts to the Bahamas for $99. Delray Beach had the look of a theme park for seniors, with cappuccino and conch fritters replacing cotton candy and corn dogs.

  The car in front of him turned onto a side street, offering Gavallan full view of the street ahead. Four patrol cars sat behind the cruisers blocking the road. Parked at odd angles to one another, they looked as if they’d hit a patch of ice and spun to a stop. Two had their noses half to the curb, a third his rear tires on the sidewalk. The last was frozen in the center of his lane, a track of spent rubber thirty feet long attesting to the urgency of his arrival. He sniffed the air. Burnt rubber mixed uneasily with the bloom of summer gardenias and the scent of freshly cut grass.

  In the blink of an eye, his curiosity turned to apprehension.

  Sliding a knee onto the seat, he lifted himself up and peered over the convertible’s windshield. Emergency vehicles jammed the street: three ambulances, rear doors flung open, gurneys absent; a fire truck; a trio of identical navy Crown Vics that screamed federal law enforcement; and bringing up the rear, a TV van, horn blaring, advancing foot by foot. For all the activity, Gavallan had no way of figuring out what exactly had happened. He knew only one thing: This was no auto accident.

  A swarm of uniformed men and women buzzed back and forth across the street, running into and out of a building in the center of the block. Two cops carrying spools of yellow and black tape began to walk toward the building, and the words “crime scene” flashed through his head. A gurney emerged from the building and rattled along the sidewalk, shepherded toward an ambulance by three determined paramedics. Their sober pace didn’t give Gavallan much hope for the patient. Neither did the woman following them, a middle-aged peroxide blond, hands to her face, sobbing. Another gurney rolled out, this one in a hurry. Above the din, he heard a voice. Strident. Losing its calm. “Move it. We got one alive. I need four units of . . .”

  The words were drowned out by a chopper flying in low overhead, a Bell Ranger hovering a hundred feet in the air. Police? No. More TV.

  It was then he recognized the building: the mint green plantation shutters, the barrel tile roof, the Mediterranean arches. Cornerstone Trading.

  “All right, sir, let’s get a move on,” said a tan young traffic cop, patting a hand on the hood of Gavallan’s rental car. “Nothing here for you to see. Detour to your right and be on your way.”

  “Any idea what happened, officer?”
Beneath the tourist’s smile, Gavallan was aware of his breath coming fast and shallow. He had to fight not to wipe the sweat from his lip.

  “Nothing to concern you,” answered the policeman. “Just move along. I’m sure you’ll be able to read about it tomorrow.”

  “Looks bad,” Gavallan persisted. “Anyone hurt?”

  “Move along, buddy. Now!”

  Giving a curt wave, Gavallan activated his turn signal and drove the Mustang rental up the block. After finding a place to park two blocks up, Gavallan ran back to the crime scene. By now a sizable crowd had gathered. He threaded his way through the onlookers, stopping on the sidewalk opposite the entry to Cornerstone Trading. He’d hardly had time to gather his breath before a young man standing next to him began to fill him in.

  “Guy just lost it, man. Went in and capped his crew, then did himself. Got every one of them. Ten dudes, all dead.” He was a handsome Hispanic kid, maybe fifteen, with spiked hair dyed henna, a golden nose stud, and cargo pants cut to the knee. “I heard it, man,” he went on. “I work at the Orange Julius next store. It was like this, check it out: bang, bang, bang, bang. Shit was loud, and quick, like maybe two seconds between shots.”

  “You think you ought to tell that to the police?” asked Gavallan.

  “The police? Heck, no. I don’t need that hassle.” Suddenly, the kid jumped back a step, his brown eyes skittish. “You ain’t the man, are you?”

  “No,” said Gavallan. “I ain’t the man.” He beckoned the boy closer. “You said, ‘The guy just lost it.’ You know who did it?”

  “Nah, man, no one knows. But I know one of the dudes was in there. My man, Ray. ‘Fact I made him a burger this morning—his favorite, a double chili cheese with jalapeños. Calls it his ‘victory burger.’ Dude came in real happy, see, smiling even, and that’s something. My man Ray is one serious dude.”

  A victory burger, Gavallan said to himself, remembering Luca’s cocky grin, the mention of having some dirt on Kirov.

  “When did it happen?” asked Gavallan.

  “When did what happen?”

  All at once, Gavallan’s patience left him, evaporated under the tropical heat, worn away by the endless string of setbacks, one more trading loss in Black Jet’s column, who knew? Grabbing the Hispanic youngster by the arm, he shook him once, hard enough to frighten him. “The shooting,” said Gavallan. “The murder. Whatever went on inside of that building.”

  “Yo, man, chill,” the kid said, eyes bugging. “Like an hour ago.” He flicked a wrist to check his watch. “Ten, ten-fifteen. Ten-twenty. Round there. We cool now?”

  “Yeah, we’re cool.” Gavallan patted the kid’s arm and moved off toward his car. A glance behind told him he’d already been forgotten. The Latino was busy offering his story to the next bystander who’d happened along.

  Gavallan wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  This was not how the day was supposed to have gone.

  The bodies lay where they had fallen. Some sat slumped at their computers, too surprised, too frightened, to have reacted. Others had run, though none had made it more than a few feet from his or her desk. The mess was terrible and overwhelming, gore spackled onto the walls and cubicles in chaotic, Technicolor blotches. Ponds of blood stained the carpet, clotted now, hard as ice. Black Ice.

  Dumdums, thought Howell Dodson as he walked slowly down the center aisle of the trading room at Cornerstone Trading. Bullets modified to flatten on impact. Small hole going in; big hole coming out. He passed a victim, his face missing below the hairline, a gaping mask of blood, bone, and gristle.

  Despite himself, he gasped. He’d seen men killed, women too. He’d witnessed death many times over in all its inglorious pageantry. He’d sat at a wooden table, arms and legs bound, and watched as the pinky and ring finger of his left hand were severed with a carpet layer’s dulled blade. The smell of blood and the scent of fear were familiar companions.

  But this was different, he thought, stepping carefully over another corpse. These were the innocent, the unknowing, the unsuspecting. Death didn’t belong in these stained, shabby, ordinary corridors.

  “Ten bullets, ten bodies,” explained Lieutenant Luis Amoro of the Delray Beach Police Department, a beefy Cubano of fifty who looked about two sizes too big for his khaki rayon uniform. “Guy started at the entrance, went seat by seat taking out each of his buddies, then ran upstairs, got the managers. We figure he came back down afterward, looked around, made sure no one was still alive, everything wrapped up nice and neat, then did himself.”

  “Some shooting.” It was the only thing Dodson’s normally glib tongue could manage. For all his time on the job, for all the wanton and terrible things he’d seen and experienced, he was having a tough go with this one. The question “Why?” kept jabbing away at his mind, and he had no answer.

  Since entering the building, he’d been overwhelmed by a desperate and irrational fear for his sons’ welfare. Though the infants were over a thousand miles away in McLean, Virginia, safe in their Talbots sweaters and Eddie Bauer strollers, he wanted nothing more than to hold them in his arms and guarantee their safety. “Christ our savior,” he whispered.

  Leading the way to the end of the aisle, Amoro knelt beside one of the bodies and pointed to a neat round hole inside the man’s hairline by the temple. “We figure he’s the doer. Everyone else got theirs from a foot or more, usually in the back of the head.”

  Dodson eyed the inert form. “Mr. Luca leave any note? Any message for his loved ones?”

  “Not a word. Looks like he came in, worked for a little while. Around ten, something must have gotten him pissed. He got up, took out his haymaker, and went about his business.” Amoro did a double take. “Hey, how’d you know his name?”

  Dodson ignored the question. His eyes were glued to the banks of monitors, the blinking screens of blue and yellow and green. “Wouldn’t figure a man to be so upset on such a good day,” he said, pointing at the ticker for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. “Market’s up three hundred points. I’d say that’s cause for celebration. Guess there’s just no pleasing some people.”

  A large, dull gray pistol lay near Luca’s outstretched hand.

  “A Glock,” said Amoro, kneeling down, pointing at the weapon with a pencil. He spoke with a docent’s tone, as if the men were touring a museum, not a charnel house. “Serial numbers are filed off, but if you use an acetate wash you can usually bring them back up.”

  Dodson stooped to get a better look at the weapon. “Where do you suppose Mr. Luca got himself a toy like that?”

  “I imagine the same place he got his bullets. We took one out of the wall. He wasn’t messing around. These things can penetrate a Kevlar vest. Cop killers, we call ’em. Not a good policy to be on the receiving end of one of these.”

  Dodson nodded amiably. “I’ll take that under advisement, Lieutenant Amoro. Thank you.”

  “Our boys are checking for prints. We’ll do a residue analysis on Luca’s hands once we get him to the morgue, just to tie everything up.”

  “Good idea. Never can be too thorough.” Dodson’s eyes flitted across the crime scene. While murder was a matter handled by local or state police, the day trading angle and the use of the Internet raised questions of interstate commerce and securities fraud, both crimes squarely in the federal purview. Amoro might know a thing or two about dragging up filed-off serial numbers, but he was far too lax in securing a crime scene.

  Laying a hand on the officer’s shoulder, Dodson guided him to a quiet corner. “It may interest you to know that Mr. Luca here was the subject of a Daisy tap and a participant in an international investigation involving the Russian mafiya. I’m afraid that I’ll have to declare this crime scene under federal jurisdiction. I’d like you and your men’s fullest cooperation.”

  Amoro answered with surprising civility. “You want it, it’s yours. Worst crime we’ve had this year is grand theft auto and a rape up on the county line. Between you and me, it’s wh
y I transferred out of Miami. It’s nice to be able to say that murder’s beyond your reach.” He added skeptically, “The Russian mafia in Delray Beach? Come on.”

  “World’s a small place,” said Dodson. “Now if you’d be so kind, tell your men not to touch a thing. I’ve called in some of my colleagues from the Miami Dade office. They should be getting here any minute.”

  He meant the members of the violent crimes unit, sixteen strong. DiGenovese had wanted to alert them yesterday and ask that they put a twenty-four hour watch on Ray Luca. Dodson had said no. The decision would haunt him the rest of his life.

  Feeling a tug at his elbow, he turned to see Roy DiGenovese sliding several 8-by-12 photographs from a manila envelope. “Crowd pics from the crime scene an hour after the murders took place,” he explained. “Take a look. Second row. Good-looking guy, sunglasses, blond hair.”

  Dodson slipped his bifocals out of his jacket pocket and looked hard at the face. “Couldn’t be,” he said. “Must be a resemblance.”

  “Who else stayed in room 420 of the Ritz-Carlton in Palm Beach last night?”

  Dodson was impressed. “My, my, Roy, well done. Seems I taught you well. Anything else up your sleeve?”

  “Gavallan got in yesterday night at eleven. He’s booked back today at three. American out of Miami. He’s driving a Mustang convertible, gold.”

  “All well and good, Roy. I am a tad curious, however, how Mr. Gavallan slipped past your boys in San Francisco?”

  “We were soft,” replied DiGenovese unapologetically. “And we were strung too thin. We’d grown used to following him in his car. With two men on duty, it was tough to cover him on foot. Like you said, he must have slipped by.”

  “Must have. Now let me take another look at these pictures.” Dodson brought a photo close to his eyes, shaking his head incredulously. “Come now, Roy, cooking the books with Mr. Kirov is one thing; this is major wetwork. You think he has the cojones for this kind of thing?”