After the board meeting, Treadwell went down the hall to his glass-enclosed office, his mind going in a dozen different directions, most of them good. In less than twenty-four hours, he thought, Abacus will have taken effect, the markets here in the States will have crashed, and the domino effect will have spread around the world nearly at the speed of light.
The computer scientist downstairs who somehow had gotten onto the virus would no longer be a problem by the end of the day, according to Dammerman. Treadwell wanted to believe it, but it was one of the worries nagging at him.
What they had put in place was about as foolproof as any complicated scheme could be, and he had a great deal of confidence in his people that by tomorrow he would be a rich man—even richer than he was at this moment—plus, he would come out smelling like a rose. The hero of the crisis. The man who’d saved not only Burnham Pike but also the investors savvy enough to have listened to him.
His secretary, Ashley Coburn, looked up with a broad smile when he walked in. “How’d it go, boss?”
“Like taking candy from a baby,” he said. At thirty-one she was beyond cute, with a great ass, and more than once he’d thought about fucking her. But mixing pleasure with business at home plate was just a bad idea in any book, including his.
“They know a good bet when they see one.”
“Clyde should be showing up soon.”
“I’ll buzz you and send him right in.”
“Why don’t we say the hell with it, and take my plane down to Acapulco for a long weekend?” It was a running joke between them.
“Say the word,” Ashley said.
He laughed and went into his sanctum.
Glass-walled offices and open spaces where everyone could see just about everyone else all the time—total transparency for a new age, the architects were calling it—was the new thing in just about every financial institution in New York City. Except his office was soundproof. Anything said inside could not be heard beyond the confines of the glass walls.
Treadwell’s office was laid out like a miniature trading floor. A flat-screen television was usually tuned to CNBC, but with the sound off. The chyron display crawling along the bottom of the picture showed breaking market news. Next to his white enamel desk was a Bloomberg terminal that accessed market data in real time, and unlike Dammerman’s desk, Treadwell’s held only a laptop, a telephone, an appointments calendar, and a few papers neatly arranged.
“An uncluttered workspace for an uncluttered mind,” he’d told a visitor once.
His cell phone pinged. He took it out of his jacket pocket and brought up the text icon. Heather had sent him a message.