6:30 A.M.
RIVERSIDE DRIVE AND 108TH STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Adam Jaklitsch was up by 5 A.M., as usual. Nevertheless, he had a few hours until he needed to be at the office. He sat in front of a computer, studying what was happening in Asia and Europe. Jaklitsch was not looking at publicly available information. In fact, few human beings on earth would be able to comprehend what he was looking at. It was a black screen with four quadrants, and in each one a series of numbers and letters moved slowly up the screen. This wasn’t information about some company’s stock price, nor even the current price of a country’s currency. Jaklitsch was watching, in real time, the digital flow of funds from the largest banks, companies, and governments in the world in interaction with the United States Federal Reserve, moving along patterns he himself had executed. He was looking at the movement of money in its basest and most elemental format. He wasn’t trying to make money. Jaklitsch was one of four people making sure money was even there in the first place.
Liquidity was a measure of readily accessible wealth. It could be in the form of cash, or savings, or assets that could be sold within a few hours.
For an individual, liquidity would include savings and checking accounts, stocks that could be easily sold, but it would not include other assets, such as a home or an IRA.
Liquidity was not a measure of overall wealth; in fact it was somewhat unrelated. An individual might have $50,000 in cash in a suitcase, but owe $200,000. This individual’s liquidity would be $50,000, but net worth would be negative $150,000. Liquidity was important, however; oftentimes more important than net worth. Cash was king, and Jaklitsch and his three coworkers managed the actual financial transactions—mostly loans—that fueled the world economy.
America’s liquidity was estimated to be—at any one time—$4.5 to $5 trillion. Of that amount, less than 5 percent existed in physical cash and gold. Almost all of it—more than $4 trillion—was kept in a foundational, highly complex infrastructure built upon a massively secure, single-purpose digital framework, which enabled the transmission and protection of America’s sovereign wealth itself, in its basic form. A system of credits written in a computer language that was agnostic. This was the digital bank account by which America served as the foundation of the international economy. It was called Fedwire.
Immediately, Jaklitsch saw that there was a need for an injection of $10 billion to Bank of America, and he also saw that it would be repaid in less than an hour. This was one of but fifty such interactions the Fed would take this coming day, in essence allowing Bank of America to borrow from the digital foundation of America’s currency and pay it back, all without the need for cash and other physical representations of such, such as gold.
Jaklitsch shut down the computer and looked around his apartment. He lived on Riverside Drive and 108th Street, in a two-bedroom apartment on the eighth floor of a beautiful old limestone building just down the street from Columbia University. He had a view of the Hudson River. He watched early-morning joggers moving in both directions through Riverside Park.
He walked to the door, shutting it, locking it, and went right, to the elevator, but as he turned the corner, he encountered a man—and the spheroid cap of an alloy noise suppressor, at the muzzle of a weapon. Jaklitsch’s mind registered a black turtleneck and ski mask, then he felt the bullet as he was about to say something, to protest, but it was too late, and he felt it in the same moment he heard the spit of the gun. The bullet hit his chest but he didn’t feel it other than a dull thud, like getting a tooth drilled under Novocaine.
The killer felt in Jaklitsch’s pocket for his keys and dragged him back to the apartment, unlocking the door. He pulled him inside and shut the door. He removed a plastic bag, cut off Jaklitsch’s thumb, then jammed the blade into the side of his eyeball and ripped it quickly out. He stuffed both in the plastic bag and left the apartment, then took the elevator to the ground floor. The stranger exited the building and disappeared into the crowd on its way to the subway station, most on their way to work.