Betty Ladd was just getting ready to head down to the trading floor for the third time, to check what the mood was with less than a half hour to go in the session and the stock slide accelerating, when her cell phone rang.
The caller ID was for Denise Baker, a waitress at the Kittredge, who was one of Betty’s informants. She’d texted earlier about the meeting among Treadwell and a few of his executives and Spencer Nast, but hadn’t added much more except that they’d been deep in conversation.
The club was where a lot of Wall Street’s movers and shakers met to discuss just about everything that had happened, was happening, and was likely to happen on the Street, and the waitress was a good resource who was well worth the extra two hundred in her tip envelope each week.
Betty answered. “Hi, Denise, have something new for me?”
“I was too busy until now to give you everything about the meeting with Mr. Nast and the folks from BP.”
Betty couldn’t help but smile. “Tell me, dear.”
The day had been difficult starting just after lunch, when the market had lost 13 percent, tripping a circuit breaker that halted trading for fifteen minutes so that everyone could stop and take a deep breath. And at this moment stocks were approaching the 20 percent–loss threshold, which would shut the market down until opening bell tomorrow.
She was hoping that Denise would have something useful to tell her about Reid. Maybe even something that was relevant to what was happening to the market.
“Most of the time I wasn’t close enough to make out everything they were talking about, but I managed to get the gist of it.”
“Go ahead.”
“Anyway, Ms. O’Connell was talking about a virus, and Mr. Dammerman said that it could have an effect on just about every stock exchange in the world,” Denise said. “It sounded crazy to me, but they raised their coffee cups to toast someone or something in Amsterdam, I think.”
If Burnham Pike was afraid of a computer virus it would explain why Julia had been a part of their inner circle, which almost never included a woman. And Amsterdam, if that’s what they’d said, was a well-known home base for world-class hackers.
“You sure they used the word Amsterdam?”
“Pretty sure,” Denise said. “But the funny thing was, they seemed happy about it—about the virus.”
“Happy?”
“Yeah, and they even had a name for it. Called it Abacus.”
After Denise hung up, Betty sat back and tried to make some sense of what she’d just been told. Reid was up to something; she’d known that when she’d learned he’d been taking BP to all cash.
And she didn’t trust the bastard any farther than she could throw the building she was in. But a virus named Abacus from Amsterdam? And Julia’s meeting her in the park, and later Cassy’s frantic phone call that she was coming to the exchange with something, and then her disappearance.
None of it was adding up, on top of which was the nosedive the market had been taking since midmorning.
“I’ll be downstairs,” she told her secretary as she emerged from her office and headed to the elevator.