by Green, Carey
“I know,” Conroy said. “Tell me about it. But we did get a tip.”
“What, exactly, are we looking for?”
“McGarity.”
“Right,” Vanessa said, “Perhaps he’ll come up here and invite us out of as beer.”
“Yeah,” was all that Conroy said. “It does seem a little obvious.”
“Not to mention boring.” She returned to the window to survey the scene down on the street. Down below, they could see the foot traffic of the street beginning to pick up. The closing bell had rung roughly an hour ago, and various traders and trade support people were on their way home. For the investment bankers, and dealmakers, the night was still young. Vanessa remembered when she had walked down this very street. She was glad it only lasted one year.
Vanessa watched as Conroy seemed to shuffle around the office. He seemed to be beating around the preverbal bush. Finally, he got around to the painfully obvious.
“I got a call from the office. I need to talk to Dylan, but I wanted to speak to you first.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“No, that’s why I wanted to speak to you first.”
“You don’t want me to go with you?”
“Something like that.” He turned away from her and walked towards the window.
“I want to be respectful of your private life, but now, I feel like its mixing business and pleasure. I’d rather speak to him alone if you don’t mind.”
“I guess I do mind. But I don’t have a choice.”
Conroy had made little mention of her relationship with Dylan, though she knew that it made him uncomfortable. It was awkward for her also, but she tried to make light of it whenever she could. Though it bugged her that he was not inviting her, she understood his concerns.
“You’re sure you’re not ticked off?”
“I already forgot about it. But what came up?”
“I don’t have all the details myself. But some of the IP addresses that Dylan gave us generated pinged responses.”
“Meaning?”
“One of the websites Josh used to communicate with McGarity was alive.”
“Was?”
“Yes, the fake site was supposedly about hunting and fishing. It’s gone now. But we caught just enough of one to intercept some messages. We think something is definitely about to go down and we could use Dylan’s expertise.”
“Huh,” Vanessa said, as she pondered these facts. “Does he know this?”
“That’s where I’m going now.”
“Then tell him I said ‘hello’.”
“I will.”
Vanessa packed her bag and left the office.
She had parked her car several blocks away, near Stone Street. As she walked, she wondered what Conroy really thought of her relationship with Dylan. The whole complexion of the case had changed from when she had first met him, as Dylan was no longer a suspect. Yet it still felt as if she was mixing business with pleasure. She was neither a career fanatic, nor indifferent to her future. She liked the FBI. She would pursue the relationship, but do so in a low key fashion.
As she reached Stone Street, she marveled at the fact that Wall Street was now a real place, with condos and restaurants and shops. People actually lived there. Some of the streets were actually pretty; with cobblestones and old world charm. It was nothing like the Village, but not bad if you worked nearby. When she had worked downtown it had been all offices except for the occasional Irish bar. She could remember a night from her freshman year when a group had sauntered into the city for a night of wilding, and she had nearly passed out in the ladies room at the Kilarney Rose on Wall Street. Long Island Iced Teas. By the time she reached he car she realized that she had left her keys upstairs. When she returned to retrieve them, Conroy was gone.
Chapter 52
Dylan sat working alone in Ray Corbin’s old office. All of the remaining staff had been dismissed, and an army of temporary workers had been brought in. Martha had been the last person from the fund to leave, and Dylan had heard from Vanessa and Conroy that she cried on the day that she finally removed her belongings. Dylan sometimes wondered if he was in a state of shock, considering the events that had occurred around him. If someone had told him his story, he would not have believed them.
Dylan had been hired as consultant, a specialist to help understand what had happened to much of the Corbin Brothers’ assets. Though he imagined that it was against protocol to bring in outsiders in a situation like this, the sensitive nature of Jonathan Kay’s involvement probably necessitated that the circle be kept small. Dylan had quickly agreed to join the team, and he found that he enjoyed the work. It was like an extended, cryptic puzzle, built upon incomplete information. After the first week, he was enthralled, working deep into the night to uncover the maze of the Corbin Brothers’ financials.
A host of lawyers and accountants had been brought in to deal with the fallout from the firms’ implosion. Dylan wondered if they were all CIA, designed to keep secret the government’s involvement in the case. He had been given little knowledge of how or why Kay had invested with Corbin.
From what he had seen, Kay’s explanation of the events that had transpired seemed accurate, and that the credit crisis, not the CIA, had driven Ray Corbin to take his life. In the last year, the funds performance had been particularly poor. They had lost money every month. In fact, the losses became steeper with each passing day. Dylan imagined that the correlation of these losses to Ray’s mental state was indeed very strong. His fund and everything he worked for had been flushed down the toilet, and death had seemed to him the only way out. Dylan was contemplating these thoughts as Conroy walked through the door of what was once Ray Mallard’s office.
“How’s it going?” Conroy asked.
“It’s going.”
“Finding anything juicy?” Conroy asked.
“Not yet. Did the stuff I sent you help?”
“That’s actually why I’m here.” Dylan turned towards Conroy excitedly.
“You found them?”
“Not yet. They must be completely off the grid. Last trace of Josh Corbin was in Alabama where McGarity allegedly had a training site. The site seems to have been abandoned recently, within days in fact. Since then, silence.”
“So where could they be?”
“Hard to say,” Conroy countered, “Could be anywhere, especially considering the money that is missing.”
Dylan’s cell phone rang. “Hello,” Dylan answered. After a few muffled sentences, he muttered, “I’ll call you back.”
“I wouldn’t need five guesses to know who that was.”
“You were saying,” Dylan said with a smile. Conroy closed the door.
“Why you closing the door? No one is here.”
“That is beside the point. We need to talk.” Dylan reared back in his chair and laughed.
“You’re like a bad girlfriend. Wee talk all the time but you never say anything.”
“Is that what you say to Vanessa?”
“Sometimes.”
“There is something: the list of IP addresses you gave us. We got a hit.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, something tangible.”
An IP address was a physical location of a computer on the Internet. Binky had reversed engineered Josh’s network packet software. The program that he had written had been clever enough to transmit the files to a remote email address that Binky had set up “just in case”. He had been able to uncover most of Josh’s personal information such as credit card numbers and passwords, and also any remote computers that Josh may have accessed. So far it had been futile; there had been no activity on any of his credit cards or bank accounts. But Dylan had turned over a list of the network addresses to Conroy.
“We hit some chatter in the networks. We definitely think something is up.”
“Like?”
“I have a few ideas; I’d be curious to know what you think.”
“Could be an
ything,” Dylan said, “But I don’t think Josh is after money. He’s too cerebral for that.”
“But if McGarity is involved, they’re not going to a bridge convention. I don’t think it’s the obvious, like blowing up a federal building.”
“No, Josh is too clever for that. It must be something else.”
“I agree. That’s where you come in.”
“Me?”
“The subject of collateral damage seems to have come up. Our profiler thinks if something is going to happen, the target will be something financial.”
“I wouldn’t disagree.”
“And what better person to use than your friend Binky.”
“Come on, Tim, we don’t know that from Adam.”
“I know that. But if your friend is as smart as you say he is, and Josh is as pissed off as we believe he is, what better combination than the two.”
“I guess,” Dylan said, skeptically.
“Do you think it’s possible?”
“You mean, some type of cyber attack scenario? Sure, why not? You know, the banks pay millions of dollars each year to hackers and various shady individuals as bribes and fees to stave off this type of thing. Call it insurance.”
“They pay money to hackers to not attack them?”
“That’s my understanding of it, yeah. The hackers and shadow criminals are so powerful and could cause so many problems that companies find it more efficient to simply pay them each year. It’s like the old mafia protection money thing.”
“Who told you this?”
“Who else? Binky.”
Conroy said nothing. He turned and took a seat on the corner of the desk where Dylan had been sitting.
“All roads come back to Binky.”
“Yeah, they do.”
“I think he’s alive, Dylan, and I’m not the only one. I think that if he were working with Josh, that could be a dangerous.”
“Binky’s not a criminal or a thief. If he were working for Josh, it would be under duress.”
“I think you’re right. But, the two of them together, under whatever circumstances, could pull something off.”
“Sure, donkeys could fly, but …”
“Hey!” Conroy said, as he pounded his hand on the desk. “Take this fucking seriously! Don’t be so god-dammed flip all the time! If you want to find your friend, then help me!”
Dylan popped to his feet. “Then give me something real instead of your bullshit FBI movie-of-the-week scenarios!” They stood down; both men taking a moment to let their feelings cool. Dylan sat back in the chair and put his feet up on the desk.
“So what do you want me to do?”
“We want you to work out of our command center in Jersey. You’re an expert in the markets. We want you to watch for anything unusual.”
“Such as?”
“Suspicious activity.”
“Across the entire market?”
“Maybe.”
“And If I say no?”
“Based on what I was told, if you want to work in your industry again, you don’t really have a choice in the matter.”
“It’s like that.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it is like that.”
Dylan stood up. A picture of Ray and Josh Corbin still rested on a corner of Ray’s desk. Dylan picked it up and examined it.
“Youth: it really is wasted on the young.” He turned back towards Conroy. “So when do I start?”
“We were hoping you could start tomorrow.”
“Good. I’ll be there.”
Chapter 53
Dylan stood at the large glass window overlooking the New Jersey swampland. The office he had been confined to was on the twentieth floor, and the view before him stretched from the piers of Manhattan all the way to Newark airport. A light rain had fallen that morning, leaving a dew-like dampness across the window, the building and the flat swampland stretched across the horizon in front of him. The view of the Hudson River was almost as good as his own.
The view was enticing, but Dylan was bored. For fifteen days now he had wandered out to this office in the armpit of New Jersey where The FBI had set up a data-center complete with the latest tools and technologies. He was familiar with the location. After 9/11, many of the larger financial firms had set up their data centers and emergency sites just across the river from Manhattan. In case of fire, attack or natural emergency, the data was safe. It made good sense. It was another layer of abstraction outside the city walls.
That first week, the FBI had given him chauffeured transportation: A non-descript car had picked him up each morning and driven him through the Holland tunnel over to New Jersey. But that had ended. Now, each day, he left his apartment in Tribeca and took the subway up to Christopher Street, then crossed the street to take the Path Train into New Jersey. The total trip took less than an hour door to door. He finally discovered what it felt like to be a commuter. He bought a Kindle. Dylan turned from the window and returned to the cubicle.
Most of the desks on the floor were empty, creating a sterile vastness that could have been mistaken for a hospital. Dylan had not been told why. As he was taking his seat, Stewart Pak came and sat down next to him.
Pak was a programmer par excellence, much like Binky. The similarities ended there. Pak was Asian and in his late forties. Though he was tall and thin, his belly was gaining on him.
Dylan glanced at each of the three monitors in front of him. One was set to Bloomberg News, the trader’s best friend, the other to CNN, for a general news summary. The third was set to the reconstructed trading system that Dylan had used at Ray’s fund. Stewart turned to him with a weary grin.
“Anything happening in the market?”
“Nada,” Dylan said, as he clicked onto a different news site.
“I read in Barron’s that the DOW is going up to 12,000. You think so?”
“I wouldn’t trust everything I read in Barron’s, Stewart. Their job is to sell newspapers; not make money in the open market.”
“I bought some IBM yesterday. I think it’s a steal.”
“Did you?”
“Sure,” Stewart said. “I read that it was going up to 200”
Stewart liked to trade as a hobby, and he had seemed particularly enthusiastic to discuss this with Dylan. Of course, Dylan hated talking shop or giving advice to pure amateurs. It was like asking a lawyer for free legal advice, or asking a doctor for a diagnosis over dinner.
“Be careful. Always remember, any stock can go to zero.” Stewart laughed.
Pak’s family had emigrated from South Korea, and Pak had done a stint in the military to earn his U.S. citizenship. From what Dylan could tell, Pak had risen through the ranks quickly, and had moved into Navy intelligence, presumably working on secret technology. He had taken an early retirement and had joined the FBI. He was gregarious and liked to talk, though he and Dylan hand not yet found a rhythm to their conversation. Dylan preferred to listen to his iPod or to the financial news.
The markets were at a lull and had been a trading range for the past ten days, and neither the S&P nor the Dow had moved more than one percent in either direction for a week. The summer doldrums were beginning to kick in, and the markets would soon reach a complete standstill as August came to a close. Most traders took vacation this time of year, as Dylan had often done while he was still employed. Now that he was working for the FBI, he wondered when they took vacations.
Dylan had worked carefully with Stewart to debug and analyze Binky’s software. Stewart was clearly talented, as he had been able to figure out much of what Binky had done, even when having very little documentation. Dylan knew that Binky’s code was dense, and that he commented very little in the code as he wrote it. Binky was also prone to flights of fancy, and used Italian and Spanish words in his programming, to display a sense of whimsy and flair. None of this had distracted Stewart. He had a test version of their software up and running within days. After a week, it was fully functional. Stewart had also inserted co
de into the various modules that allowed him to stop the code and examine it at any point during its execution. Despite the fact that he missed his friend Binky, Dylan knew that Stewart was completely capable of doing the job..
At first, the FBI had given them no clear guidance as to what the plan was. In Dylan’s view, this was partly illogical. When Dylan had pressed to find out what the FBI wanted to do, he had been told repeatedly that his job was simply to monitor market conditions. As the days passed on, Dylan began to understand that the FBI was worried about the “Flash Crash” scenario, a brief and sudden market crash that could wreak havoc on the markets. Though it was never talked about overtly, it was somehow believed that this was Josh’s plan.
Dylan had no clear idea if it were possible to recreate a flash-crash type of event, using solely the software that he and Binky had built. It seemed illogical. Clearly, if the FBI and CIA thought it was logical, they had tools to counterattack such a thing. If the CIA was involved, they had access to the best computing minds in the world, NSA geniuses who could crank algorithms that would make a mere mortals heads spin. In the days after 9/11, a virus had been released on the word that it had taken out thousands of servers and websites around the world. Dylan had always believed that this was the work of the CIA, a little technological wizardry designed to bring the Internet to a crawl for several days. It had never been confirmed, nor was there any way to prove this. Only the technological gods could have confirmed this and identified who those people were, Stewart turned towards Dylan with an inquisitive look.
“You really think somebody could crash the market with a system this?”
Dylan stopped typing and thought for a moment.
“Sure. Why not? What do you think?” Stewart contemplated his answer thoroughly.
“Its’ never been done before.”
“How do you know? How do I know for that matter? Maybe 1929 was caused by a guy with an iPhone. We only know what we’ve been told. Who do you think caused the ‘Flash Crash’? It could have been the CIA, could have been a fat finger, it could have been Bin Laden. I have no idea.”