Wipeout: Wipeout Book 1

by Richards, ES

  KW closed her eyes and inhaled slowly. Finally. After years of dedication, hard work and perseverance, it was done. Trident was no more and at last, KW could smile. But the best part of it all: they weren’t even finished yet.

  Chapter 2

  Slamming the door of his office behind him, Samuel leant back against the wooden frame and panted. Sweat clung to his forehead and his back, making his white shirt stick to his skin. He had never even walked up all fourteen flights of stairs before, let alone run. But today he didn’t feel like he’d had much of a choice.

  Trident was compromised. Forcing himself across his office to the large floor to ceiling window that occupied one side of it, Samuel glanced down and saw hundreds of people pushing their way into the building. The glass at the front must have shattered to some extent, meaning there was less of a bottleneck entrance and more of a way into the bank. Staggering back from the window before his dizziness kicked in, Samuel knew that he wouldn’t have been the only staff member among the crowd. People were going to get beyond the lower levels eventually and then the building would really be in danger.

  As with any building of its calibre and in its location, Trident was relatively well protected. Employees needed a personal code to get from each floor to the next, and several hallways were off-limits depending on your access level. Samuel had one of the higher-ranking levels of access and so he knew he was relatively safe in his office for the time being. But as with everything, it would only be a matter of hours before even that safety crumbled from beneath him. Samuel needed to do what he came there to do and then get out while he still could.

  Moving with determination, he landed in his desk chair and quickly logged onto the Trident computer system. Unlike the banking app, this was thankfully still working. The first thing Samuel did was check his emails. It was routine. He’d been doing the same thing for over twenty years and it was second nature for his cursor to move over to his email system the second the screen came to life. Disappointingly though, there was nothing of importance waiting for him. Samuel wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting really: an internal company wide email telling staff not to panic and that it was all a big mistake. There was nothing of the sort.

  Slumping back in his chair, Samuel tried to figure out what to do next. Theoretically he should have the answers at his fingertips based on his position, but even sitting in his office he had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for. This wasn’t exactly a routine case of cyber security. The entire digital vault had been wiped clean. There was nothing left. No breadcrumbs, nothing. A part of him wondered that even if there were clues, would he be able to figure them out and decipher the hidden message.

  He wasn’t a technical genius. He worked in marketing. Samuel liked pen and paper and drawing big ideas on whiteboards. In fact, if he could help it, he avoided using the computer system altogether. This was practically hopeless, but it was the best shot he had. Everyone else who was left in the building was running around just as lost in their own worlds as he was. There wasn’t an opportunity to ask for help, Samuel needed to try and figure this out himself.

  With a sigh, Samuel rested his head back against his leather chair and closed his eyes. He could hear the screams and the chaos raging outside – both below his window and on the floors below. He wondered how far into the building the rioters had gotten so far. Were they hours away, or just mere minutes?

  Slowing down his train of thought for a moment, Samuel did the one thing he could think to do and opened up his digital employee pay portal. It contained all the records of his payslips, remuneration packages, expenses claimed and owed; everything. At least this was still working. Samuel knew how much money he had accrued over the years working at Trident, he knew how much he should have – the only question now was where that money had gone?

  He was frantically trying to figure out an answer to that question when a loud bang and bloodcurdling scream that seemed to come from above him caught his attention. It was like someone had slammed into the window above his, the noise so desperate and strange that it was powerful enough to distract Samuel from his thoughts for a minute or two. Walking cautiously over to the window he forced himself to look down, his eyes immediately noticing a small clearance that had formed in the crowd below. In the middle of it stood one woman, her arms wrapped around herself as she stared upwards, almost directly at Samuel himself.

  Taking a step back, Samuel shivered as he locked eyes with the woman. He doubted whether she could make out his figure from so far down, but he could certainly see her, and it was like she was staring right at him. He watched as her body shook with sobs, wailing and crying out, begging someone to stop and yet apparently not talking to anyone.

  Then it clicked. The shiver that ran down his spine intensified as Samuel realized who the woman was looking at. Not him, but someone else in a window nearby. A jumper. Everyone who worked on Wall Street was aware of the stories of the jumpers from the 1920s market crash. The tops of buildings were lined with brokers threatening to jump; the sidewalks below stained a dirty red color as a result. He shuddered. That couldn’t happen again. There had to be something he could do.

  Wrestling with the window lock, his fingers suddenly sweaty, Samuel freed the latch and shoved open his office window, sticking his head out and immediately looking down. Mistake. Samuel was no good with heights and his vertigo quickly kicked in, causing him to feel dizzy and lightheaded, his vision blurring. Squeezing his eyes closed, Samuel brought his head back inside and took several deep breaths.

  “Come on,” he whispered to himself, “not now. You can do this. You can do this.”

  Samuel slowly forced himself to open his eyes again. The room seemed to sway slightly, but he fought through the sickening sensation and shuffled forward. Placing his hands on the window frame, he cautiously leant forward and looked down, his eyes finding the woman easily as she continued to scream and wail.

  “Help him!” It sounds like she called out, clearly noticing Samuel and his position so near to the jumper he was yet to spot. The rest of her sentence was impossible to make out with the ambient surrounding noise, but the woman continued to shout upwards, pointing into the sky as she wailed.

  With Samuel’s appearance, more people looked up, surprised to see someone else in the high-up windows of the Trident building. For a moment, Samuel wondered whether he had made a grave mistake revealing his location to the angry crowd below. Now that they knew people were definitely in the building, they would be even more determined for get some answers on the whereabouts of their money. It would take some convincing to let them know that he was in exactly the same boat.

  But that was something to worry about at a later date. As the woman on the ground continued to scream, Samuel dragged his gaze away from her and scanned the building below him. Nothing. Other than the shimmering glass from the windows, there wasn’t anything to break up the scene below him. Swallowing, Samuel realized that meant the jumper was above him. Once he’d turned his head upwards, it didn’t take much to find the man. Balanced precariously on a ledge just a couple of floors above him, Samuel locked eyes on the man and exhaled deeply. This was it. He needed to do something. He needed to act.

  Tugging off his suit jacket and tie, Samuel tossed them both onto his desk chair and charged across his office to the door. In his head he calculated where he had seen the man. Two floors up, just across to his right… which would be the left once he was upstairs. Darting out into the hallway, the noises from inside the Trident building suddenly came back to him as a stark reminder that he was not alone inside and he was not safe.

  The sound intensified as he rushed toward the stairwell. It almost made him want to go back to his office and hide away, but the thought of the man on the ledge upstairs pushed him forward. If he had the chance to save a life, he had to try.

  Pressing the door release, Samuel pushed it open as softly yet quickly as he could manage. He’d never even thought about how much sound the big metal
doors made before, but now it was all he could think about. The few seconds it took him to slide through and close the door behind him felt like long minutes, dragging out that at any point could result in someone finding him and putting his life in danger.

  Two floors up, two or three over to the left.

  The words repeated in Samuel's head as he sprinted up the stairs, refusing to glance down to see if anyone else joined him on the stairwell. He was using the back stairs, but it made little difference. He could hear people struggling to break through doors not that far away, the crowd of people turning into an angry mob the longer they were left without an explanation.

  By the time he reached the sixteenth floor, Samuel was sweating again. He had moved as quickly as he dared, hugging the wall to avoid being spotted by anyone looking up. Thankfully as he keyed in his code, the door light flashed green and allowed him entry. He’d never been up beyond the fourteenth before, uncertain what department even operated from this floor until he saw the frightening sign that welcomed him inside: Finance and Operations.

  “Of course,” Samuel mumbled to himself, now he was really in the lion’s den. If he was going to find answers to what had happened to his money, this was the place to be. Immediately it made sense why the jumper was here: these were the people who would know everything, these were the people who had been directly involved.

  A gust of wind coming from down the hall snapped Samuel back to reality and the reason he was there. Money could wait, someone’s life was on the line and that needed his attention. The breeze was a good enough indicator of where the jumper was and as Samuel hurried toward the open door, he prayed he wasn’t too late. Walking through, he heaved a sigh of relief. It was strange to be so happy to see someone threatening to jump from a sixteenth-floor window, but the fact the man was still there meant that there was still hope. There was a chance that Samuel could talk him down from the ledge, now he just had to figure out how to do it.

  “Err, you okay pal?”

  Shaking his head at his own words, Samuel couldn’t believe what he’d just asked someone threatening to jump from a window. The man twitched as he heard another voice in the room but didn’t turn around or look in Samuel's direction.

  “Don’t come any closer!” He shouted back, his knees wobbling as he stood in the window. “I’m going to jump!”

  “I know, I know,” Samuel replied, silently moving closer to the man, nonetheless. While the jumper couldn’t see him, Samuel wanted to get as close as possible. “It’s just – I’d rather you didn’t. Jumping won’t solve anything. Why don’t you step down and we can talk about what’s happened?”

  The jumper scoffed. “Talking won’t solve anything either. The money’s gone, pal. All of it. And we’re not going to be getting it back.”

  As the words processed in Samuel’s head, he tried not to let them get to him. He had to push his emotions and fears to one side while he was with this man, but he couldn’t help shuddering. They were in the finance department; based on his current position, Samuel was willing to bet that if anyone in the Trident building knew what had really happened and the consequences of it, it was the man standing in front of him. That wasn’t good news, but it spurred Samuel on to get the man to safety so he could uncover more of the truth.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Samuel replied, choosing his words carefully as he tried to figure out what he could say to appease the man and get him to change his mind about his negative situation. “There’s always a way to sort these things out. Everything can’t just be gone. The government will help, or Canada, or, someone… But jumping isn’t going to help anything. That woman down there – she needs you. You’ve seen her, right? You can’t leave her to deal with this on her own.”

  “You don’t get it, pal,” the jumper shook his head, finally turning around and looking at Samuel. “Your job and your life are over.”

  Opening his mouth to argue with the jumper, Samuel tried to find something to say, but the man in the window silenced him first.

  “I’m telling ya, there’s no coming back from this. I’ve never seen work like this before, how they managed to get in and get out of our systems undetected is,” the jumper paused, “it’s incredible. They’ve wiped everything, and I mean everything. It isn’t just Trident that’s going to suffer. The whole country is ruined. The government can’t help us. No one can. We’re done for pal, there isn’t any point anymore.”

  Before Samuel could react, the man was facing outwards again, looking down to the crowd sixteen stories below. Everything started to move in slow motion, Samuel realizing that this was the moment. He lurched forward, his arms outstretched toward the jumper, desperate to grab him and stop what was about to happen. But he was too late. Too slow. The man stepped forward and disappeared in front of Samuel’s eyes. Mere seconds passed before he heard a thud from the ground, followed by a chorus of screams. He hadn’t been quick enough. He couldn’t save him. Without moving an inch closer to the window, Samuel turned on his heel and left the room. He didn’t need to look down to know what had happened. The man was dead now and Samuel still didn’t even know his name.

  Chapter 3

  Looking out over the city, Jameson Kildare stuffed his hands into his pockets and hummed. It was something he did when he was thinking and as the Head of Finance for Trident Banking Corporation, he had never had more to think about than in that very moment. In truth, he had no idea what to do, but he had a conference call with the President, Claire Manning – the Trident CEO – and a number of other important people in under an hour, and he needed to have something to tell them at least.

  News about the collapse of the Trident Banking Corporation had spread fast, reporting crews scattered throughout the city documenting the terror as it leaked down every street and into every apartment building. There were reports coming in around the world too, Trident’s reach affecting billions of people across the globe. No one was safe from it and Jameson knew things were going to get a great deal worse before they got any better.

  New York was not prepared to be at the epicenter of a disaster like this. Jameson had already worked out in his head how much the backlash of this would ruin the immediate environment, everything ten times worse around HQ simply because they were the people who were supposed to be able to stop these things from happening. And that was where he was based. He couldn’t control what happened in California or in Canada or Europe. New York was on his doorstep and while he might be absent from the Trident building itself, he still needed to do everything he possibly could for the company.

  Considering the reach of it all made Jameson feel nauseous. Trident was responsible for trillions of dollars, potentially even hundreds of trillions. It was a figure so large that even he, as the Head of Finance, didn’t know for certain. It was a figure that wouldn’t fit on a calculator, that wasn’t printed in the dictionary. It was – as he would’ve said as a young child – infinity plus one.

  “Sir?”

  Turning away from the window, Jameson looked over to the entrance of his office where a young intern stood nervously. He was keeping the specifics of how bad this crash was entirely top secret, but everyone obviously knew something had happened. There were a number of staff members who had left their posts upon hearing the news, believing their lives over and no longer seeing the point in remaining in work. That meant the offices where Jameson was were incredibly understaffed, hence the fresh-faced intern who was now stuttering in Jameson’s doorway. Typical that this was the day of the week he had chosen to be out of HQ.

  “Yes?” Jameson answered, his mind racing as he glanced at the clock on the wall. It couldn’t be time for the conference already. Surely not. “What is it?”

  “I’ve err, I’ve got your mother on the phone. I told her you were busy, but she insisted. Shall I put her through?”

  Raising his eyebrows in surprise, Jameson let out a half laugh. That was the last thing he had been expecting. With another glance at the clock he d
ecided that he didn’t really have time to speak to his mother, but with everything going on he knew he couldn’t let the opportunity pass him by. He should at least make sure she was safe.

  “Right okay,” he replied, “yes, put her through.”

  With a nod the intern disappeared from view. Seconds later, the phone rang on Jameson’s desk. Walking over to the doorway first, he pushed it closed before breathing in a deep breath and picking up the receiver, waiting to hear his mother’s voice at the other end of the line.

  “Mom? Are you okay?”

  “Jamie,” his mother gushed into her cell, the reception somewhat fuzzy but her familiar voice still able to make out. “What’s going on? Is all of this true? I think I’ve lost everything.”

  “Calm down mom,” Jameson sat up straighter in his chair; quickly realizing this was not going to be an easy conversation with his mother. “Where are you? Are you safe?”

  “Yes, I’m at home. Do you think I’m in danger? I’ve seen on the news people rioting and looting in the streets. Things are already completely out of control. Are you going to be able to put a stop to this, Jamie? When is the government going to step in?”

  “Mom, listen,” Jameson paused for a moment, trying to decide what to do. On the one hand, he had a duty to his job and the secrecy he was sworn to. On the other, his mom was just a regular woman who still didn’t truly know what was going on and if he could give her a bit of information about what was happening in order to make her life that tiny bit easier, he wasn’t going to miss out on that opportunity. “Things are bad mom, worse than they’re making out on the news. I’ve got a call with the President soon but –”