“Morning,” said Beck. “I’m going downstairs.”
Without saying any more, Beck went through a door near the front of the bar and walked down a flight of wooden steps to the basement under his building. He turned on overhead bare lightbulbs as he walked through the musty space, making his way past the detritus that had accumulated over the decades: old radiators, shelving, boxes of junk, half-filled cans of old paint, rotting documents that nobody would ever bother to look at, old restaurant dishes and cookware. He went past the boiler room and continued on to almost the back wall.
On his left, a nine-foot set of metal shelves was set against the north wall. The shelves were crammed with more junk.
Beck braced himself and carefully pivoted the shelves away from the wall. A close look at the wall showed that part of it wasn’t completely solid. Beck worked his fingers into two small indentations, and gently but firmly pulled back a four-foot-square slab of plywood, plastered over so it looked like the rest of the wall. He slid the plywood to his right, just enough so that he could step into the opening and enter a passageway about five feet long connecting Beck’s building with the building next door. Bending low, Beck made his way into another basement, much newer and about four times the size of his. The area was clean and empty except for machinery in the far-west corner, and a free-standing one-man prison cell in the east corner.
The machinery consisted of a long steel table under a rotary saw. The powerful saw had been mounted on an aluminum frame so it could slide back and forth over the table. Just past the table sat a large industrial-strength meat grinder. The machine could grind a hundred pounds of meat and bone into paste in about five minutes.
All the equipment could be seen by whoever occupied the prison cell. The entire basement was dimly lit by sparsely spaced fluorescent lights that stayed on 24/7.
Upstairs was a warehouse, empty except for the first floor where a garden equipment business stored mostly stone and gravel. Beck had a twenty-year net lease on the building.
Ahmet Sukol sat on an iron bench that was chained to the bars of the cell. The temperature in the basement hovered around a perpetual fifty-five degrees. Not cold enough to freeze somebody, but cold enough to make any extended stay nearly unbearable. Over the course of days or weeks, without winter clothing and enough food needed to maintain a body temperature of 98.6 degrees, a person would gradually die of hypothermia.
Sukol wore his winter coat, a knit cap, and gloves.
Beck’s men had given him only water and one cold cheese sandwich.
Beck checked his watch. The man had only been in the cell about nine hours, but Beck knew that it probably felt more like fifteen or twenty.
He approached the cell, stopping about five feet from the iron bars. He looked at what he assumed was another Bosnian Serb. The man stared back at him.
Beck didn’t utter a word. Neither did the Bosnian. That told Beck this wasn’t the first time the man had been imprisoned. Beck preferred that the man had done time. Especially if he had ever been placed in solitary confinement. It didn’t much matter where or what type of cell. The horror of solitary derived from two things: no contact with the outside world, and no way to tell time.
If his prisoner had been in solitary before, the prospect of suffering it again would terrify him. Solitary confinement was one of the worst tortures ever conceived.
But that required this Bosnian tough guy to truly believe that it was happening to him. Suddenly. Out of nowhere.
Beck waited a few more moments to see if the man would ask him a question, curse him, yell at him, plead with him. Nothing.
Shit, thought Beck. He doesn’t believe it.
Beck put it aside. He concentrated on looking at the man in the cell as someone who had been part of a force gathered to kill, or maim him. Or do that to his friends. Beck pictured the man attacking him. Shooting him. Or striking with a knife or bat. He worked at connecting the man in the cage with pain that could have ended his life. Or the lives of the others.
Beck stared at Sukol and imagined the Bosnian kicking him in the face. Breaking his teeth. Maybe stomping out an eye. He thought about fists and feet slamming into his back, ribs, head. Beck thought about the pain. About the number of agonizing days he might have suffered. About the certainty of permanent damage.
The hate welled up. The mercy leached out. And the Bosnian saw it happen right before him. He saw Beck’s face. He was ready to believe it now.
It seemed that the man was about to say something, but right at that moment Beck turned and walked back toward the opening in the far wall, his footsteps echoing off the concrete floor, filling the cold, forlorn, unidentifiable space behind him with the sound of his retreating steps. Empty save for the dim lights and the meat-grinding equipment.
When Beck reached the opening in the wall, he stopped to place four fingers over four light switches. With one move, he flipped all of them down.
The fluorescent ceiling fixtures all went off, plunging the entire space into darkness so deep and profound that he knew Gregor’s man would not be able to see his hand in front of his face.
As he ducked into the opening Beck heard the man cry out, “Wait. Stop.”
Beck grimaced. Nope. No stopping now.
49
By the time Beck had made his way back to the bar, Manny, Ciro, and Demarco had assembled around the big petrified wood coffee table on the second floor. Joey B remained downstairs watching the street.
Manny and Demarco had their shotguns within reach. Ciro had a semiautomatic version of the M-16 assault rifle, a weapon designed to fire bullets at very high velocity.
Alex Liebowitz sat at the other end of the loft, eyes glued to his computer monitors. Apparently Alan Crane was back at work.
Beck asked. “Where’s Olivia?”
Manny answered. “She’s keepin’ to her room. When are we going to move, James? Sitting here waiting for the shit to fall on us is a bad idea.”
“The list of shit about to fall is going to take me some time to explain. Let me talk to Alex, first.”
Beck headed to the other end of the loft. Liebowitz leaned back in his desk chair, arms crossed over his chest, eyes half closed staring at the computer monitors in front of him. Each monitor was divided into four segments, so Alex was watching eight different images simultaneously.
“Your hack is working?”
“Not exactly a hack. I’m not controlling anything. Yet. But the malware I implanted is humming along nicely.”
“So I was only half-listening to you last night, what exactly did you end up doing with Crane’s setup?”
“I spent a chunk of time in the cellar tracing his phone wires. His Internet connections, luckily, ran through the basement, too, instead of just along outside walls. They wired the whole building when they renovated it. But his wiring is special. He’s got a full 4nx T-1 line in there. No fractional. Plus, four different phone lines. Plus…”
Beck interrupted, “So did you get everything done you wanted?”
“Close enough. Hard to tell when you don’t know everything he has in that apartment.”
“What happened with his computer?”
“After I disabled and rerouted all his alarm shit with some routing boxes Ricky lent me, which are tricky because you have to get all the interfaces wired in before you reroute…”
“Uh-huh.”
Alex could tell Beck was being patient, so he tipped forward in the chair and tried to be more specific, but he just couldn’t avoid talking about relays, codes, information packets, Internet protocol, radio frequencies, access controls, identity management, and alarm systems.
Beck gave it a minute, then carefully interrupted and said, “So, Alex, did you get what we needed to find out about what Crane is doing and where he has the hedge fund money?”
“Yeah. As far as it goes.”
“What do you mean, as far as it goes?”
Liebowitz talked to Beck while glancing intermittently at the
images on the computer screen.
“Like I said, after I overrode all the alarms and security, I went up into the apartment. His computer was on, but of course access had shut down and I didn’t have time to get through his pass code. I suspect he has at least two layers. Long story short, I just bypassed everything and copied the entire hard drive.”
“And?”
“And I’ve been spending the last six hours unbundling everything, while I’m key-tracking everything he’s doing when he’s online. I’ve got just about everything opened. But, it’s only current from the time he shut down last night. He started up again about a half-hour ago. I’m still catching up.”
“And you can do that how? The short version, Alex.”
“Short version, I loaded a sniffer program into his computer. Routed it through his T-1 line to a VPN connection that is hooked into this computer which is maybe an hour from being a full twin of the one in his apartment. Mostly. Whatever he does on that computer, he does it on this computer.”
“Okay.”
“Thing is, I can see what he’s doing, but that doesn’t mean I completely understand what I see. He places his trades through a very high-end platform. It’s been customized a hell of a lot.
“From what I’ve tracked so far, he has four or five different accounts in his fund that he trades through leased servers. Those servers connect to six or seven electronic exchanges. He routes every trade into the exchange that gives him the best price, so it’s a lot to keep track of.”
Beck nodded. Alex had spoken rapidly, but he still thought he had absorbed the gist of it. “Okay, so how long before you see everything?”
“About an hour to get one hundred percent tracking. But it’s like he’s fluent in a language that I only know the basics of. I guess I can just follow along with his trades until the money starts getting assembled. But I’d like to know exactly what he’s doing, you know, what trading strategy he’s executing so I can get out far enough ahead of him to set up a snatch.”
Beck nodded. “You really think you’re going to figure out his strategy?”
“Not completely. Unless we can get somebody who knows how he operates. At the very least I’d like to be able to predict a little bit when he’s ready to finish up.”
“Okay, I’m figuring Olivia should get on this with you. She’ll know more about his trading methods than any of us. And what he has to do to get Markov’s positions closed out.”
“That would definitely help.”
“I’ll get her down here, but where is he right now in the process? As much as you can tell.”
Alex leaned forward and grabbed his wireless mouse. After some sliding and clicking and typing, screens of financial data bloomed on yet a third monitor. A desktop trading platform filled the central twenty-seven-inch monitor with a set of preconfigured screens.
Beck leaned forward to watch the blur of action in cyberspace that moved tens of millions of dollars. He saw columns of numbers and currency amounts and symbols. The numbers changed continuously in color-coded columns. It all seemed totally disconnected to the world around him.
Alex answered Beck as he squinted through his black-framed glasses at the screens. He pointed to images on his monitors.
“Okay, Summit Investing runs the fund. Or Crane does. The fund has several brokerage accounts for Markov. All the investment vehicles are in these accounts. As Crane closes out trades the cash goes into various sweep accounts.”
Alex pointed to different segments on the third monitor, pointing out the separate trading accounts.
“But there are also bank accounts, aside from the brokerage accounts. Summit isn’t a chartered bank so there’s tons of money in accounts scattered around in different banks. Some U.S. banks: JPMorgan, Wells, B of A. Also, a handful of offshore accounts. Four of them in Nevis. Two in Isle of Man. Two in Geneva, Switzerland. And four in Grand Cayman. There are probably more. But I only see these accounts when Crane transfers cash into them.”
“How much has he assembled?”
“In cash?”
“Yes.”
Alex leaned closer to the monitor. Moving his mouse. Clicking his keyboard.
“I count just over thirty million. But he’s only closed about twenty-five percent of his positions.”
Beck thought about the amount. Crane had been at this less than a day. If there was another hundred million or so, the pace would have to accelerate very soon.
“Okay, Alex, can you keep going for a couple more hours?”
Alex’s long arm reached amidst the clutter on his desk and rummaged around until he found a small energy drink bottle. Liebowitz gulped it down in one swallow.
“Of course.”
“Good. I’ll have Olivia walk you through all the separate accounts and look over the assets. I suspect she’ll know how he’ll sequence his trades to close things out. At least some of it.”
“Okay. But I’ll tell you, from the looks of it, a lot of his trades are automated. Running on bracketed conditional orders.”
Alex clicked through more screens and pulled up a tool that looked like a spreadsheet.
“His trading platform has a function that pulls in algorithms right off Excel. My hope is that even if he’s not running it himself, there’s a bunch of trades that will cycle through and he’ll just sit and oversee it so he can pull out the cash as it comes in. Or bust a trade if he doesn’t like it.”
Beck nodded. “He may have his conditional orders in, but if the numbers don’t hit fast enough, he’ll have to step in and override the orders. He’s got to. I don’t think Markov is going to wait around for his money.”
“Why doesn’t he just move the assets as is?”
“Because Markov can’t manage those investments. He has a very complicated, volatile portfolio.”
“Makes sense,” said Alex. “But remember, once Crane’s got everything assembled, there’s no guarantee I can hack into the bank accounts it ends up in, and take it out. That’s movie stuff. It doesn’t work that way in the real world. The banks will shut down access to accounts if anything starts tickling that money.”
“I know. We’ll do that another way.”
“Really? How?”
“Don’t worry about that now. You just let me know where it is as soon as you can.”
“When he starts to run out of time and starts pulling the plug, James, there’s going to be big tranches of cash flowing in. If I’m fast enough I can see where it goes. But I won’t know what happens to the cash after that. Once it’s all assembled, I won’t be able to track it unless Crane moves it.”
Beck stared at the screen and nodded. “Understood. Just try to get a sense from Olivia when he’s approaching the finish.”
Beck patted Alex on the shoulder and headed up to the third floor.
The knife wound in his left leg twinged with each step up. He emerged on the third floor and walked to the east end of the building. He found her room. The door stood open; she sat on the end of the bed combing her thick black hair. She looked like she had just showered.
“Good morning,” she said with a quick, half-smile.
Her diffident smile seemed out of character. Beck couldn’t interpret it, so he stood in the doorway and asked, “You sleep okay?”
“Not bad.”
“You feel all right?”
She stopped brushing her hair and looked up at Beck still standing in the doorway.
“I guess. I don’t know. I never experienced anything like last night. I don’t know how I feel.”
Beck nodded. “I understand. So, you still ready to help?”
“Of course.”
“We’re into Crane’s computers. Can you help Alex understand what he’s looking at?”
“I’ll try.”
She placed the hairbrush down on the bed, leaving it there as she stood up. She walked toward the doorway where Beck stood. He watched her. He decided that he could spend a lot of time watching this woman and never get tired of doi
ng it. He didn’t move. She stopped in front of him, so close to him that her breasts nearly touched his chest. She looked directly at him. Beck returned the look. Neither of them moved.
And then, suddenly, Olivia stepped into him, grabbed him by the head, and kissed him hard and fast on the lips. Just as quickly as she had done it, she released him and stepped back.
“Get out of my way,” she said, smiling at him as she walked past him.
50
Beck had left Olivia and Alex alone to work uninterrupted for an hour. It was now nearly noon. He couldn’t wait any longer. He stood up from the couch at the west end of the second floor and headed back to speak to them.
As he approached, Alex told him, “He’s moving a lot faster now. He’s liquidated more in the last couple of hours than since he started last night.”
Beck didn’t bother to sit. He asked, “How much?”
“Over fifty million.”
“How much more is left?”
“Depends on how the markets move. About seventy mil. Assuming all the accounts are appearing on this computer. If he hasn’t opened one or looked at one since I rigged his setup, I won’t know what the total is.”
“How much you think isn’t showing?”
Olivia answered. “Not much. Maybe ten million or so.”
“Okay, keep on it. Where is it looking like it’s going to end up?”
Alex answered, “Grand Cayman. He’s sweeping the cash into a Summit account in the Grand Cayman branch of HSBC. That account is actually five accounts, all in the bank, but it looks like one.”
“Why?”
Olivia spoke. “It makes it easier to see which accounts are up or down. At some point Crane will assemble everything in one account at HSBC. That way Markov can transfer it out faster and easier. How are you going to…?”
Beck interrupted her before she could finish the question. “Okay, I got it.”
Olivia dropped her question and said, “I suspect Crane is going to start slowing down a bit soon.”
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