by David Meyer
“Good,” I replied. “Find something sharp and get back here.”
While he sorted through tools, I grabbed a long pipe off the floor. Long ago, drywall had replaced lath and plaster as the most popular form of interior walling. Although solid to the touch, it was really nothing more than gypsum plaster sandwiched between thick sheets of paper.
In other words, easy prey.
I felt around the wall, locating lots of little screws. Steering away from them, I slammed the pipe into the drywall. It punched through the material with ease, leaving a hole in its wake.
Graham joined me, hammer in hand, and together we attacked the drywall. Then I dropped the pipe and reached my fingers into one of the many jagged holes. A couple of tugs and the drywall began to break off into my hands.
After clearing away a four-foot square hole, I aimed my beam into the space. “You know what’s more annoying than a layer of drywall?”
“What?” Graham asked.
“Two layers.”
He groaned.
Peering into the space, I studied the second layer. It sat about three feet beyond the first one. It was heavily stained and stank of mold, thanks to a significant amount of untreated water damage.
“That looks like black mold,” Graham said.
“The one and only,” I replied.
“I’d rather walk back into that riot with a Kick Me sign on my back than go through there.”
“Look on the bright side,” I said. “At least you’re not part of The Falcon’s investor flock.”
For the next three minutes, we attacked the outer layer of drywall, eventually clearing away two whole panels. Then we gathered our tools and hiked to the second wall. I studied the moldy material for a moment. Then I prodded it with my pipe. The drywall cracked and crumbled in numerous places.
We checked for studs and screws. Then we attacked the second wall. It fell easier than the first one and in a matter of minutes, we found ourselves facing a dark void.
“If there’s more drywall back there, I’ll …” Graham grumbled something unintelligible as he aimed his beam into the void. “Want the good news or the bad news?”
“Good news,” I replied.
“There’s no more drywall.”
“Nice. Then let’s—”
“Instead, there’s an old masonry wall.”
A masonry wall? That was about a billion times more challenging than drywall. “You realize this isn’t good news and bad news, right? It’s just bad news.”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “I just always liked that whole good news, bad news shtick.”
I checked my satphone. 9:42 p.m. Twelve minutes down, forty-eight to go.
Stepping past Graham, I moved to the masonry wall. The individual bricks looked old and many showed signs of significant crumbling. Mortar joints were cracked in multiple places and some of the bricks had shifted a bit.
“How do you want to do this?” Graham asked. “From the top down?”
I touched the bricks. They felt gritty and a bit moist. I scratched one and its edges crumbled beneath my fingernails.
Taking a step backward, I aimed my beam at the top of the wall. The bricks and mortar didn’t quite reach the ceiling, which meant it wasn’t a load-bearing wall.
“I’ve got another idea,” I said. “Get back.”
Arching an eyebrow, Graham backed up a few feet.
I shoved my satphone into my pocket. Took a deep breath. Steeled myself.
And charged the wall.
My left shoulder slammed into ancient brick with jarring force. It stopped me cold, but I felt a little give.
Beverly.
My adrenaline raced. Sweat poured down my neck, soaking my left shoulder. Mashing my teeth together, I kept pushing, pushing, pushing. Pushing with all my strength. Pushing with strength I didn’t even know I possessed.
The wall creaked. Bricks began to vibrate, to quake. Mortar dissolved into dust and debris. It shot up my nostrils and I tasted it on my tongue.
Abruptly, the wall exploded into dust and smithereens. I pitched forward and rolled. Bricks slammed into bricks. Dust wafted into the air and shot down my lungs. Coughing and choking, I struggled to my feet.
The falling debris slowed, then stopped altogether. I coughed a few more times, hacking up about a pound of ancient brick dust while accidentally swallowing another pound at the same time. It tasted terrible, an unholy mixture of mold and stale grit.
As my coughs subsided, I glanced back. The brick structure now had a gaping hole in it, three-feet wide and stretching all the way to the ceiling. The rest of the wall, as far as I could tell, was still intact.
“The good news?” Waving dust away, Graham clambered over the pile of bricks. “Or the bad news?”
“The bad,” I said.
“You look like a building just fell on you.”
“And the good?”
“You were right.” He smiled and his good eye looked past me. “There’s definitely a vault here.”
CHAPTER 19
I spun around and my eyes grew wide as tumblers. A giant door stood before me, bathed in the beam of Graham’s satphone flashlight. It was rectangular in shape and rounded on the edges. Beneath the grime and dust, I saw hints of silvery metal, all well-tarnished.
“What’s the time?” I asked.
“9:49 p.m. Looks like we beat the clock.”
I took out my satphone. Switching on the flashlight function, I approached the door. It was partially ajar and connected to a metal wall with enormous hinges. Elegant marble surrounded the metal wall and door. Clearly, the basement had once been an area of great pride, built to showcase the bank’s wealth along with its impressive and secure vault. And despite everything—the grime, the tarnished metal, the mold, the general abandonment—the area still retained a regal air about it.
This was old-school New York. A New York of jazz pianos, straw boater hats, and Art Deco skyscrapers. Not much of that New York remained, having been swallowed up and spat out by the avant-garde movement. To stand before a small piece of it felt oddly enriching.
I stopped just outside the vault. The door was about three to four feet thick and made of solid metal. Probably steel with some kind of embedded copper alloy.
The history of bank security was a sort of tit for tat between brilliant inventors and relentless criminals. By the 1920s, giant vaults with thick steel doors and steel-reinforced concrete walls had largely replaced the traditional bank safe. Steel was a strong material and well-equipped to deter angry mobs as well as withstand explosives. But it was particularly susceptible to cutting torches. That led to the addition of copper alloys. Copper’s high thermal conductivity helped to dissipate heat and ended a short, but significant run of cutting torch thefts.
I slid past the door and entered the vault. It was gigantic. There were multiple internal walls, all filled with neat rows and columns of safe deposit boxes along with rectangular holes where boxes had once rested. More rectangular holes filled the reachable portion of the vault walls. Steel plating covered the higher portion along with the ceiling.
As for the safe deposit boxes, they were everywhere. The vast majority were heaped upon the floor, their metallic surfaces marred by scratches and dents. The rest were positioned in the various walls, partially pulled out of their individual holes. Keys stuck out of some of the boxes. Other keys lay scattered about the floor.
“Wow.” Graham whistled through his teeth as he slid through the doorway and entered the vault. “There must be hundreds of boxes here.”
“Try thousands.” I rotated my head, my gaze passing over the vault’s interior. “We might as well be picking a needle out of a haystack.”
CHAPTER 20
Ben Marvin knew the call was coming. It was just a matter of time. And so he sat in his favorite easy chair, clothed in a luxurious robe and sipping some brandy. The finer things weren’t all life had to offer.
But they sure were nice.
He lifte
d his gaze to the painting above his fireplace. It was an old family portrait, painted with oil on canvas. It depicted him as a young boy, cradled in his sitting mother’s arms. His father, Roy Marvin, stood to the side and about a foot behind them. The portrait was vibrant and full of beautiful color. And yet, it was also undeniably cold. His mother’s smile seemed forced and his father stood a little too far away. Like he didn’t really belong in the picture.
It had held a place of honor in the family home until his mother’s stroke and subsequent death. Afterward, Roy had packed it away in a trunk. It gathered dust for years until Ben found it after his father’s death.
This was the Roy he remembered. The cold, bitter man with mussed hair, hooded eyes and shallow cheeks. The man who largely ignored his family, preferring instead to lock himself away in his study during almost every non-sleeping hour.
Although Roy wasn’t much of a father, Ben had never felt hatred or even indifference for the man. Rather, blazing curiosity consumed him. What had happened to Roy? Why did the man seem so beaten down by life?
Occasionally, Roy would come out of seclusion. He’d throw angry tirades about nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the military-industrial complex, socialism, and more. In a weird sort of way, Ben looked forward to those rants and what they revealed about his father.
After Roy’s death, Ben had scoured the man’s papers and belongings. And gradually, a very strange story had unfolded before his eyes. A story about the post-war American government and a mysterious project known as Capitalist Curtain. A story about triumph destroyed in an instant and all the indignities and problems Roy had been forced to endure in the aftermath.
Indignities and problems. Those were constant staples of his father’s brilliant, but marred career. Still, his father might’ve survived them in a better state of mind if he hadn’t already been destroyed by the ultra-strange events of December 14, 1949. Or, as Roy had referred to it in his notes, the Shrieker Tower Incident.
So far, Ben had managed to avoid the sort of career-killing, life-sucking moment that had ruined his father. In fact, Secretary Horst’s change-of-mind was the first real crisis he’d faced since joining forces with the other members of the Working Group on Capital Markets. Thankfully, he’d survived the crisis intact, thanks in no small part to her.
Ahh, the charmingly-named Willow Marvin. His beloved daughter, closest confidante, and the brilliant hacker known worldwide as Malware. It was hard to believe he’d only known of her existence for the last three years.
A long time ago, he’d met the love of his life, the sculptor Sally Keller. Sally was headstrong and spirited and most importantly, the complete opposite of the proper, well-mannered ladies he normally dated. She preferred art to science, the outdoors to television, and bare feet to shoes. Her heart was big and she regularly adopted elderly dogs in order to give them as much love as possible before they passed on to doggie heaven. And of course, she was an emotional basket case, capable of laughing like a lunatic one moment and crying like a mourner the next.
Back in those days, Ben had been more than a little intrigued by this crazed, lively woman. But he was also taken aback and often embarrassed by her antics. Even worse, he was changing in ways that disturbed him. For example, he began to lose focus at work. He started to read fiction instead of research papers. He laughed more and cried more too. And so he did what any young, clueless guy would do … he began to to distance himself from his one great love.
Sally fought for him. Oh, she fought like crazy. But while she was his one and only, it simply wasn’t the right time. He just wasn’t ready to fully accept the whirlwind known as Sally Keller into his life. Thus, he’d continued to distance himself until she felt compelled to give him an ultimatum and he felt compelled to ignore it.
And so, she left him. She moved out of New York City, out of New York State, even out of the United States altogether. She moved across the ocean to London and he never heard from her again.
His friends and colleagues had patted him on the back at the time. It’s for the best, they’d told him. Career-wise, they were right. But personally? Well, that was the day he stopped laughing, stopped crying. Stopped feeling.
Three years ago, Willow had showed up on his doorstep, claiming to be his and Sally’s offspring. One look in her bright eyes and he knew she was telling the truth. Of course, he’d still ordered genetic tests because that was the prudent thing to do. But afterward, she’d told him everything. Their life in London. Sally’s battles with manic depression and inability to achieve creative happiness. Willow’s love of art and science. Sally’s torrid affairs with a string of deadbeats and abusers. Willow’s interest in computers, her career as a coder, and her foray into hacking. And worst of all, Sally’s premature death due to complications brought about by breast cancer.
Oh, that had been a crushing day. For the first time in years, Ben had broken down in tears. Willow had comforted him and thus, they began the awkward transition from strangers to family members.
They’d spent lots of time together over the last three years. Ben had told her all about his side of the family. But most of all, he’d talking about his own father, the troubled Roy Marvin. After Roy’s death, he’d found the Capitalist Curtain files and learned how his hard, embittered father had sacrificed everything in an epic quest to achieve world peace. He’d shared his discovery with Willow and his newfound desire to achieve his father’s dream, just in a different way. Willow, in turn, had wanted to help him with this quest. And so, they’d begun to plan, to plot, to strategize. Together, they were going to remake this country, this world, this everything into something glorious.
A soft buzzing noise caught Ben’s attention. Glancing to his right, he saw his smartphone on a side table, vibrating with the expected call.
He took another sip of brandy, savoring the taste on his tongue. Then he picked up the phone, checked the Caller ID, and accepted the call. “Hello, sir. I was just about to call you.”
“So, you heard the news?” The president’s rich voice erupted out of the tiny speaker. He sounded hurried, yet in control.
“News?” Ben feigned confusion. “You mean about that riot in New York?”
Earlier in the evening, a massive riot had erupted in Manhattan’s ultra-wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood. While the location would undoubtedly bring it extra attention, it was just another in a growing list of civil disturbances that had rocked the nation to its very core. Of course, this particular riot was different than those other ones. Namely, because Willow—acting as Malware—had instigated it.
“No. I mean about Terry Horst.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“She’s dead, Ben. Terry’s dead.”
Ben remained quiet for several seconds.
“A pizza delivery guy lost control, crashed right into her car. I don’t know all the details, but paramedics announced her dead on arrival.”
Ben inhaled a sharp breath. A car crash? Caused by a separate driver? Willow had really outdone herself this time. “Jesus Christ.”
“This is a disaster, Ben. An unmitigated disaster. Between this and that mess in Manhattan, the stock market is going to get crushed all over again on Monday.”
Ahh, the political stripes of President Wade Walters were showing through. No thought for the family or friends of the newly deceased. Instead, his only thoughts were for the country as a whole. Or perhaps, for his legacy. Either way, Ben found it refreshing.
As for himself, he’d gone over all the scenarios and so he had a pretty good idea of how things would play out. And the president was right. The news would hit Wall Street hard. The media might even think Terry had been deliberately targeted for her role in the economic crisis. If so, all the better. The more pressure the president felt, the easier it would be to manipulate the man.
“So, what did you want?” the president asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You said you were j
ust about to call me.”
“Oh, yes.” Ben paused for effect. “We need to meet.”
“Aren’t we meeting tomorrow?”
“Well, yes. Terry and I had a nine o’clock appointment with you. But, well, this can’t wait, Mr. President.”
A short pause followed. When the president’s voice reappeared, it sounded confused and maybe a little guarded. “You mean … right now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s this about anyway?”
“I’d rather discuss it in person, Mr. President.”
A short pause. “When can you get here?”
While they discussed the details, Ben’s heart raced. This was it. Everything was in place. All he needed was to convince the president to follow his lead.
His eyes drifted back to the family portrait. His gaze settled in on a pair of cold, steely eyes. This is for you, Father, he thought. This is for you.
CHAPTER 21
We found the safe deposit boxes, I typed into my satphone.
It took a few seconds for Malware’s response to appear. I guess you really are as good as they say.
I’m better. Now, let her go.
But I don’t want boxes, she replied. Just one will do.
Which one?
If I told you, that would ruin all the fun.
This is fun?
It is for me. So, find my box. Oh, and Cy?
I didn’t bother responding. Seconds later, another message flashed across my screen. You have 37 minutes. And then she dies.
I exhaled. “Looks like we’re on our own.”
Graham picked up one of the boxes. Its burgundy-painted surface was dented and scratched. Its edges featured hand-painted pin-striping, done in a soft gold. More gold paint had been used to inscribe a number—165—just below a rung and next to a keyhole.
Graham flipped the lid open and checked the interior. “Empty.” He tossed the box over his shoulder and it clattered to the floor. “I bet they’re all empty.”
“Don’t be such a pessimist.”
“Okay, then I bet they’re all full.”