9:34 A.M.
DEWITT CLINTON PARK
WEST FIFTY-FOURTH STREET
UPPER WEST SIDE
NEW YORK CITY
Singerman sped the Suburban down Twelfth Avenue. Polk had ordered him to divert to the Federal Reserve, as fast as possible.
The area looked like a wasteland, streets clogged with cars that had either been abandoned or contained people who’d already been shot and killed. At the sight of a park at Fifty-fourth Street, Singerman decided to abandon the Suburban. He ducked onto Fifty-fourth, where there was another standstill wall of cars. He drove to the sidewalk and stopped, preparing to climb out. Then he heard automatic gunfire, a staccato rat-a-tat-tat from nearby. He remained still inside the vehicle, slowly raising the MP7A2. He scanned and found a gunman walking alone in the park. He was short and wore jeans and a dark hoodie. He had a short tan submachine gun Singerman recognized immediately: Uzi Flattop X95-S with a built-in suppressor. He pumped slugs when he saw someone hiding in the park, or running. He came to Fifty-fourth Street just a hundred feet away, pumping bullets into car windows, then aiming up at buildings, randomly selecting a building and firing, then turning in an unpredictable arc and shooting something again, then changing out mags.
Singerman climbed out of the Suburban, ducking prone to the pavement, invisible to the dark-haired gunman. Singerman squared the butt of the MP7 on the bumper, aimed, and pumped the trigger. The bullet missed and the gunman turned, looking for the source of the gunfire. Singerman flipped the fire selector to full auto and fired again. Bullets ripped into the shooter’s shoulder, dropping him.
Singerman moved in the direction of the man he’d just shot, knowing he wasn’t dead yet. He came upon him as the gunman sat up, blood coursing from his shoulder. As the killer reached for his Uzi, Singerman fired again. A handful of bullets hit the gunman’s forehead, splattering his skull and everything above his neck across the sidewalk.
Singerman went to the dead Iranian and lifted his Uzi, and then looked at the dead man. Singerman knelt and put the Uzi down next to the killer’s head. He unbuckled an ammo belt from the terrorist, stacked with spare magazines, and wrapped it around his own waist, tightening it. He lifted the Uzi and moved, hiding in an alcove in the lee of an office building. Beneath the alcove, he strapped the MP7A2 across his back and inspected the Uzi.
He heard gunfire coming closer and two men came into view. Both men were clutching rifles and—as with the last man—shooting anything that moved, and a lot of stuff that didn’t. The sidewalk was still, littered already with bodies of the ones who hadn’t managed to get away. Singerman acquired a firing line and clutched back on the Uzi trigger. A metallic fusillade rang out above the din. He hit both men in a line of slugs across the midsection of their bodies. Blood sprayed behind them onto vehicles and the street. Singerman watched them drop awkwardly to the pavement.
Now on foot, he moved in the direction of the skyscraper that housed the governors’ room. It wasn’t a sexy building or even that remarkable. They’d created a corporation called Interchem to house the system, buying the building, renting out unused floors so as to create the illusion that nothing important occurred there. Singerman had spent so much time there he knew every inch.
The economies of the world lived and grew upon a digital framework, a series of debits and credits, protected by technological encryption, redundancy, an agreed-upon set of rules that the world’s treasuries adhered to, or else faced a blighted existence outside the financial and economic mainframe. The mainframe was the U.S. Federal Reserve. It was the bulwark of the world economy.
Singerman, as a doctoral student at Wharton, had designed it all. Though his professor had helped him, the technological framework for the Federal Reserve had been his idea. It was his Ph.D. dissertation. He’d come up with an architectural construct designed to achieve certain ends based on an algorithm that, if harnessed properly, offered galactic scalability and numerical outcome perfection. His professor had seen the implications immediately. It was a way to harness energy based on an inherently large path of defined numerical outcomes. But to run it required a massive amount of energy in a highly defined, extensible, and scalable footprint. In other words, actually using the algorithm to, for example, guide a set of financial transactions, required massive amounts of energy confined within a finite space. Thus, as part of the algorithm Singerman designed, a heuristic link was made to a wall of pure energy they called an iodine sheet field. Because it was fueled with the radioactive output of the algorithm itself, it created, in essence, a self-fueled machine faster and more powerful, per square inch, than any computer in the world, by a factor of one trillion times. There were more powerful computers, but powering them required massive server farms spanning football fields and caverns in Iceland.
When he was recruited to implement the design for the Fed, Singerman had designed entry protocols and basic functionality dependent on human interaction. Singerman, even then, feared that removing the human in the day-to-day management of the Fed grid, while theoretically possible, would lead to unforeseen consequences.
His design: a parabolic DNA-based security corridor—in essence a room—whose door could open only if four individuals pressed a thumb on a reader and looked into an ocular scanner at the same time. While it sounded simple, Singerman had calculated the odds and it was basically impossible to hack into because of the human layer. It was game theory, extrapolated into a physical design so as to prevent penetration. Singerman hadn’t been worried about someone breaking in. The design was based on his fear of AI. He inserted a human alloy between the hacker and the Risch algorithm.
Blocks from the Federal Reserve, he heard a beep in his ear. Singerman tapped it.
“Aaron, it’s Igor. Are you close?”