The Downside

by Mike Cooper

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Emily had been watching rhodium for fifty minutes.

  She had a trading window open on her home computer. Nothing fancy, not the high-powered ultrafast workstations the guys used at the office. None of that was necessary, and she didn’t care about a fifteen- or twenty-second delay.

  The markets felt a little off. Prices rose and fell without apparent reason. Someone would ask something ridiculous—6, 7 percent over the last cleared trade—and it would sit there, blinking, for a full minute before disappearing. Or there’d be an intense flurry of activity, volumes spiking so fast the chart couldn’t refresh its axes, but everything clearing within a basis point or two.

  Maybe it was the algobots, automatic trading systems making thousands of offers every second. They were always around, 95 percent of the market on slower days. Human day traders swam on the surface of a very deep, very murky ocean, with all the leviathans and turbulence far below. Faint ripples surfaced, sometimes long rolling waves, but always eons past the point that a slow-moving primate brain could profit.

  On the other hand, New Year’s Eve, it was probably drunk guys. Maybe showing off to girls they’d just picked up at the parties. Maybe alone in their trading dens, bottles of Macallan and no one to share. Maybe some significant fraction of the bots were off-line, given a rare vacation when their overseers wanted to go have fun.

  Whatever, volatility was all over the place.

  Emily stretched, looked away from the monitors, and closed her eyes for a minute. Resting.

  Trying not to worry about Finn.

  A soft ping from a preprogrammed alert. Emily opened her eyes. Rhodium twitched up, then down, then down again. Interesting … but not an opportunity. Not yet.

  This was just killing time, anyway. She was waiting for something else.

  For the phone call.

  “Ten feet past the edge of the fucking wall.” Asher stood before the control panel, arms crossed. “Still grinding away at concrete.”

  “I don’t know, man,” Jake said. “I don’t know.”

  Finn looked at the jacking frame in the bottom of the shaft as if it could tell him something. “Maybe one of us can crawl up the tunnel …”

  “There’s nothing to see. That’s the problem.”

  Kayo stood in the cold, shivering though he tried to keep it to himself, more and more pissed about the entire experience. He looked at Millz.

  “What are these assholes doing?”

  “Dunno.” The first TV news truck had shown up thirty minutes after the car fire, but by then, it had burned down to an unimpressive pile of blackened metal. Apparently disappointed in those visuals, the Channel Three team had parked their van near the demonstrators at the entrance. Now it was closed up tight, engine running, no one visible.

  “All I know is, they’re inside all warm and dry and probably drinking hot rum from a thermos, and we’re out here with the fucking kermits.”

  They were standing closer to the demonstrators than to the row of riot police, but almost as wary of both. The rail yard parking lot was dusted with snow, more falling, lights farther away blurred by the precipitation. Trains rumbled past in the yard, usually invisible behind the closer rows of cars but occasionally appearing on the mainline. Up in the dispatch tower, faces were looking down at them.

  After the explosion, the police had gotten serious, setting their shields in a row, no more smoking or standing idly around. A few weapons appeared: tasers, shotguns, and, in the rear, some assault rifles. When he saw that, Millz was ready to turn and leave immediately, but Kayo had talked him down.

  “Who they gonna arrest first, they see us running off? All we’re doing, we’re lawfully assembling and peaceably expressing our First Amendment rights.” Kayo looked at the scraggly protesters, mostly young people with irregular haircuts and North Face jackets. “Don’t know what they’re afraid of, anyway. Couple of bicycle cops could keep those fuckwads in line.”

  “All I’m saying—”

  “The man paid us. When’s the last time somebody paid you without you having to fuck them up first, huh? Plain cash and more to come, and all we got to do is stand here.”

  “That ain’t all we got to do.”

  Kayo ignored that, though there was still a smell of gasoline on his gloves. “Anyway, who knows what might fall out of a boxcar, huh? We could go home with a carton of iPhones.”

  “iPhones?” Millz laughed, all phlegmy, and spat. “Bag of coal, maybe. Bucket of oil if we bust open a tanker. These are fucking trains, not FedEx vans.”

  The TV truck’s door opened and a guy in a nylon jacket over a hoodie stepped out. The protesters looked over like cattle hopeful for feed, and one of the leaders tried to get a chant going. But no one had much energy for it, and the camera operator—certainly not the reporter, not in those clothes—walked about twenty feet from the van and opened his fly.

  At least he had the grace to put his back to the crowd.

  Kayo’s feet went numb. He stamped them up and down, which didn’t help much.

  “Gotta walk around,” he said.

  Millz followed. They ended up by the school bus that had brought in a few dozen demonstrators. The driver was standing in its entry, arms crossed, sheltered from the snow.

  “Hey,” said Kayo.

  “’Sup.”

  “Cold, huh?”

  “Naw, don’t mind it much.”

  “Guess not. Was me I’d be inside, running the heater.”

  Kayo pulled out a smoke, offered one, lit both. Millz wandered away.

  “You with them?” said the driver.

  “The Million Man March over there?” Kayo shrugged. “Kinda.”

  “Well, you don’t look like the stormtroopers.”

  “No shit.” The police had pulled down their visors and unlimbered batons and tear-gas guns. Black armor gleamed. Kayo shivered. “Those motherfuckers, best stay real clear.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What you doing here anyway? Waiting to take them all back?”

  “They paid for eight hours, they get eight hours. Charter.”

  “Uh-huh.” Kayo took a drag and discovered that snow had put it out. He frowned, tossed away the butt. “Seems like they might be going back in a different bus, you know? The kind with bars on the windows.”

  The driver laughed. “Least they could warm up inside.”

  “Except those ain’t got heaters.”

  “Or windows, now you saying. Sounds like maybe you know.”

  “Could be.” Kayo grinned. “Sometimes they let you go, sometimes they haul your ass to Tombs.”

  They stood companionably for another few minutes. A few unmarked cars drove in and out of the yard, the police shifting each time to make room, then closing ranks again.

  “Maybe it’s time to leave,” Kayo said. “Worst party in the world still be more fun than this.”

  “Oh, yeah.” The driver pulled out his phone to check the time. “Happy New Year.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “You idiots!” Nicola’s voice burst over the circuit. “I figured it out!”

  “What?”

  “You drilled into the corner of the vault, right?”

  “That was the plan.” Finn straightened from where he’d been, kneeling at the shaft’s edge. “It seemed like the clearest area, and right next to where we want to—”

  “It’s the corner.” She paused. “Don’t you get it?”

  Finn, Jake, and Asher all looked at one another. Asher made a face, like, What the fuck’s she on about?

  “What the fuck are you on about?” he said.

  “Did you take into account the width of the wall?”

  “Yeah, I know, three feet—”

  But Finn broke in. “The other wall.”

  “
What?”

  “Son of a gun.” Finn was shaking his head.

  “Right,” Nicola said. “You hit the corner dead square. I can see the coordinates here, plain as day. But then you drilled straight into the perpendicular wall, right down its center.” She laughed. “The tunnel pipe is three feet wide. You should have been six feet from the corner—not eighteen inches.”

  “Oh shit.” Jake caught on. “We’re running parallel, aren’t we? Digging down the length of the side wall.”

  “Yes. Exactly. I mean, I think so.”

  It took Asher longer, but he was first to ask the obvious question.

  “Okay, fine. But now what?”

  “Huh?”

  “We can’t turn the auger. It doesn’t make right-angle bends. So how do we get in?”

  “The wall is three feet thick,” Finn said slowly, “and the pipe is three feet wide, right?” He paused. “Hey, Nicola?”

  “Yes?”

  “Scan the cameras back. Can you see anything from the inside? Like maybe just the edge of the pipe sticking through on its way past? Maybe gouging a rip along the wall?”

  A few moments of silence.

  “Yes,” she said. “Missed it the first time—these things are too low res. But there’s a long crack, and some dust in the air. That’s what happened, all right.”

  “Right.” Finn looked down at the pipe opening at the bottom of the pit. “We’re going to have to go in, all the way to the end, and bust our way out sideways.”

  “How?” said Jake.

  “Um …”

  “The pipe wall is just concrete, but it’s two inches thick. Can’t swing a pickax in there.”

  “I told you we needed semtex,” Asher said.

  “That’d be as likely to collapse the tunnel as open it. No.”

  “Tire jack,” Jake said. “One of those must have one.” He pointed at their row of vehicles: the Kei truck, the delivery truck, the tractor trailer. “Set it up crossways inside the tunnel, where we want to break out.”

  “Good idea.” Finn turned it over and around in his head. “Might work.”

  “Formed concrete is fucking strong,” said Asher.

  “True,” said Finn. “So we’ll have to weaken it first.”

  Emily had gone to get some dinner earlier—take-out Thai in a plastic sack. A hole-in-the-wall on Greenpoint, open like it was any other night. Maybe it was for them.

  Now she pulled out the aluminum flat of rad na tofu and a plastic container of soup. Someone had music on, bass thumping through the entire building. But almost no traffic noise. Either everyone was inside somewhere having fun or the snow was muffling all sound.

  Eating, wrapped in the wool blanket on the futon couch, she checked her laptop one-handed. A simple search got her video from Channel Three: a field reporter in falling snow, hatless, a crowd of demonstrators behind him. From a half hour earlier. The story title, above the news ticker at the bottom of the screen, was “Car Bomb at Anti-China Protest.”

  “Jesus, Finn,” she muttered.

  Searching Twitter brought up some near-real-time photos. One cell-phone shot, blurry and with bad contrast from the glare of security floods, nonetheless clearly showed a line of paramilitary police: balaclavas, armor, shields.

  He’d said there would be some kind of demonstration, nothing to do with them but a convenient distraction. This, however, looked like it had gone beyond that.

  She checked her phone again for messages.

  Nothing.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Finn was jammed into the tunnel, breathing his own carbon dioxide and thinking he really ought to have a respirator.

  The pipe’s inner diameter was only thirty-four inches. Corman couldn’t even have entered. Finn wasn’t huge, but the space was tight and claustrophobic. After crawling more than a hundred yards from the warehouse, his knees and elbows were sore, scraped right through his clothing.

  “Can you hear me? Anyone?”

  Nothing but static, as Asher had predicted. Finn had the repeater with him, but it required line current, and they weren’t ready to unspool a power cable all the way up the tunnel.

  And the reason for that was the gallon jug of hydrochloric acid he’d brought along. Leftovers from the galvanizing tank. No matter what, things were going to get messy. He didn’t want to accidentally burn through a power cord, cause a short, and blow himself up.

  He stretched the goggle strap over his hat, readjusting the headlamp, then squirmed a little farther and twisted himself back around. The slope was modest but unmistakable, and he wanted to be uphill when he started pouring acid.

  Another minute to place and set the breaker. It was a cheap scissor jack, perpendicular in the tunnel, one end against each side of the pipe. The jack handle scraped the base of the pipe, but did turn all the way around. Barely. Finn tightened it, then pressed as hard as his posture’s poor leverage would permit. With luck, the concrete would break and he wouldn’t have to …

  No luck.

  Finn sighed. He recovered the jug from the other side of the jack, where he’d placed it out of the way, and studied the pipe wall.

  Nothing complicated here. He hesitated a few moments, then took and held a deep breath, opened the cap, and started pouring.

  Nicola peered through her spotter’s scope. She had the hotel’s room lights turned off, and her computer screens faced the other direction. There was no reflection, and her view through the window glass was clear.

  She’d been wearing latex gloves for ten hours now. Changing them now and then, sure, but still. She didn’t know how heart surgeons kept them on for similarly long shifts, day after day.

  Snow filled the air outside, dancing in the wind, glowing in the soft globes of light around the streetlamps fading into the murk down the avenue. The control tower was a faraway luminescent blob.

  She adjusted the reticle, trying to focus on the parking lot in front of the blob. Half the time, snow gusted across her field of vision, obscuring everything. But the other half, she could see the ranks of dark officers, the bright security lights glinting off their shields and helmets. The protesters were a vague mass of color and movement, shifting restlessly just inside the fence. Vehicles occasionally came and went.

  Halfway between her hotel and the dispatch center, the vault building sat dark and unnoticed at the edge of the property. From her distant vantage, it seemed even closer to the yard’s boundary, barely enough room for the single line of track separating it from the fence.

  She moved the scope slightly, sliding her focus across the street to the warehouse. It was dark, too, just another anonymous industrial building, one among many.

  Finn had gone into the tunnel fifteen minutes earlier. They’d heard nothing since.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  His voice startled them all. Nicola had turned the gain all the way up on her headset, and he came through at about ninety decibels, distorted and painfully loud.

  “Finn!” She hastily spun the dial back down. Obviously, he’d gotten the repeater running at some point.

  “Yeah—” but Asher and Jake were talking, too, everyone overriding one another.

  “What happened?”

  “Are you in?”

  He was coughing, almost retching. Nicola returned to her computers, found the mouse, and panned the internal camera toward the corner. Finn was crouched on the floor, hunched, pieces of rubble around him, a dark jagged hole in the wall above his head.

  “He’s all right,” she said to the other two. “I can see him. He’s inside the vault.”

  “I hate that fucking stuff,” Finn rasped.

  “Hydrochloric acid,” Jake said. “I told you: It’ll strip chrome.”

  “I think it might have stripped my lungs.”

  But after a minute, he was back on h
is feet, looking around. His coughing diminished. He found the camera and stared up at its lens.

  “Nicola, can you see me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is, ah, anyone else watching?”

  She checked the other screen, scanning through the surveillance she had running on Stormwall’s servers, operators, and remote monitoring staff. “All clear, so far as I can tell. There’s some extra attention on the Penn Southern account, but it’s focused on the demonstrators in the parking lot.”

  “Good.” He paused. “I can’t believe we’re here.”

  “Awesome.” Jake’s voice. “We ready to continue?”

  “Yeah.” On Nicola’s screen, Finn looked up at the hole he’d made. “I’ll expand the opening and clean it up. Jake, head up here with the winch. Asher, start getting the conveyor sections ready to go.”

  “Right.”

  “On it.” Even Asher sounded energized.

  They got to work. Nicola kept track, glancing occasionally at the interior feed to see what Finn was up to. He soon had a four-foot pair of hydraulic cutters in action, snipping through the cage barrier to the next unit. Jake appeared at the opening after five minutes and began setting up the winch. Asher, after feeding Jake the power cord while he was crawling up the tunnel, began stacking conveyor sections in the pit.

  Nicola thought of something and frowned. She checked the time on her phone.

  “Hey,” she said into the wireless. “Where’s Corman?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  David had to get out of the tower.

  Boggs’s usual posse of yes-men was larger than usual, many of them clearly unhappy to be taken away from their parties. At least when the CEO wasn’t looking at them. They milled around the control room, peering at the route screens, bothering the dispatchers, generally getting in the way. Boggs himself was stationed at the east bank of windows, glaring down at the protesters in the parking lot. A Newark station commander, the man supposed to be in charge of at least his officers, stood alongside. Boggs elbowed him.

  “Why don’t you just arrest all those pissants?”