Jersey City
Tam Broderick and Billy Sievers found Stone just a few minutes later, in a small windowless room in a vacant office, directly below the server room of the evidently defunct offices of NFI Investment Management. He was staring at a computer monitor, his expression uncharacteristically anxious, but he looked up when they entered and gave Tam a grim smile.
“You just missed them,” he said.
“Missed who?” Tam holstered her pistol and instead reached for her phone. “Give me a name. I’ll call DHS. Lock this place down.”
Stone shook his head. “No. He’ll have anticipated that.”
“Who?” Tam repeated.
“The Immortal. Martiel. But that’s not important. We’ve got bigger problems.”
“Thom is working for the Immortal?” Siever said.
“He is the Immortal,” Stone shot back. “I’ll tell you the whole story later, but right now we need to find a way into the Mystic trading platform.”
Tam put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. I figured out what you were trying to tell me.”
Stone seemed not to have heard. “He’s attempting a coordinated attack on the financial system. I tried to disable the IRC chat feature on his account so he couldn’t send the ‘execute’ command, but I don’t think it worked. He must have realized what I did and fixed it. We’ve got to find a way to shut Mystic down.”
“Stone, I did.”
He shook his head again. “Not just here. In this building. The whole system.”
“Stone!” She gripped him with both hands and shook him to get his attention. “It’s already done. We figured it out. We put a kill switch on all of the suspect accounts. They’re shut down. Whatever the Immortal was trying to do, we stopped it.”
Stone blinked at her in astonishment. “You did?”
“You ain’t the only one who can solve a puzzle, you know,” Sievers said. “Though I’m still not sure what exactly it was we just stopped.”
Stone stared at him, mute with disbelief.
Tam shook him again. “Focus, Stone. What’s this about Martiel and the Immortal?”
“Thom Martiel is an anagram of the Immortal.” Stone blinked again and then seemed to return to himself. “He’s working with a man named Peter Furst to destabilize the world economy. Crash the monetary system. Only...”
“Only?”
Some of the anxiety was gone from Stone’s features, but what replaced it was no less out of character for him. Confusion. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” The admission was clearly onerous for him. He took a deep breath, let it out with a sigh. Then his head snapped up. “The Brazen Head.”
“We’ve got that, too.”
“No. I mean, he knows. He’s got someone following them. Avery and Greg and Kasey. You’ve got to warn them.”
Tam reacted without question or hesitation. She brought up the contact list on her phone, tapped Greg’s name, waited as the ringtone played.
Waited until the call went to voice mail.
Tam’s heart was pounding in her chest. She felt utterly helpless. Her team was in immediate danger, and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do to help them.
“Greg and Kasey can handle it,” she said, as much to convince herself as the others. “Tell me about the people who were holding you. Martiel. Furst. Who are they? Who are they working for? Dominion?”
“No. At least I don’t think so.” Stone’s forehead creased in a frown. “Furst runs Nutria Mills.”
“The cereal people?” asked Sievers.
“No, that’s General Mills. Nutria does candy... I guess they probably do cereal, too, and a bunch of other stuff. Furst has some kind of grudge against bankers. I think he’s also an anti-Semite; he probably conflates Jews and banks.”
“A lot of folks do that,” Tam said. “All that conspiracy crap about the New World Order is just a dog whistle.”
She hit the ‘home’ button on her phone, banishing the screen with the incomplete call to Greg Johns, and did a Google search using the terms “Furst” and “Nutria.”
“He’s a foreign national,” she said after skimming Peter Furst’s Wikipedia page. “That will help. I’ll alert DHS. What exactly are they trying to do?”
“Furst and Martiel...” Stone paused a beat. “I’m pretty sure that’s not his real name. Their plan was to use Mystic to create a cash surplus in the banks, drive the value of the dollar and other fiat currencies into the ground, and then replace it all with cryptocurrency.”
“Cryptocurrency?”
“Bitcoin.”
“So this is just about money?” Sievers said. “Just like the big crash in ’08. Bet on the economy to fail, make it happen, and then clean up when everybody else is drowning.”
“Maybe for Furst. The Immortal wants something else.”
“What?” Tam asked.
“To be the smartest guy in the room.”
Tam couldn’t tell if Stone was being serious.
“So who tried to kill him the other night?” Sievers asked.
“That was for show. He was trying to draw us out. Mostly just me, actually.”
“He took a hell of a chance.”
“I’m sure he was never in any real danger,” Stone said with a dismissive gesture.
Tam exchanged a dubious glance with Sievers who merely shrugged.
“He knew I was getting close,” Stone continued. “I was looking at the pattern, but he was the one creating it. He staged the attack to get inside our investigation. Find out what we knew. And he was hoping I’d take the bait and go find the Brazen Head for him.”
“You said that was just a red herring.”
“I was wrong.”
“You been wrong a lot when it comes to this guy,” Sievers remarked. “I reckon that’s kind of a new experience for you.”
Stone frowned at him. “Not so much. I knew he was playing us almost from the beginning.”
“What?” Sievers blinked. His face was impassive, but Tam could see an ember of ire growing red hot behind his eyes. “You knew he was one of the bad guys?”
“His name. The anagram. It was obvious. Plus, his name didn’t appear in the coded messages on the Immortal Mysteries Forum. He was never a real target.”
“You knew,” Sievers said again. “And you didn’t tell us?”
Stone looked back at him, uncomprehending. “I needed him to believe he had us fooled. It was the only way to figure out what he was really after.”
“I jumped off a goddamned building trying to save you!”
“Billy!” Tam put a restraining hand on his arm. She faced Stone again. “We’re gonna have a talk about this later, but right now, I need to know what our next move is.”
“He wants the Brazen Head. I need to figure out why. And you need to keep him from getting it. They’re in London, right?”
Tam shook her head. “They were, but last I heard, they were on their way to Provence.”
“France? Why?” Stone shook his head and didn’t wait for an answer. “Doesn’t matter. We need to get there, ASAP.” He started for the door.
Before Tam could follow, her phone started buzzing.
It was Greg Johns.
The Immortal knew something was wrong, even before he and Furst made it out of the tower. Five minutes in, there should have been some visible sign of the unfolding apocalypse; murmurs of fear and dismay as the markets began circling the drain, spiraling into oblivion, but as they exited the elevator and made their way through the lobby toward the exit, all he heard was the sounds of business as usual.
“Stone,” he muttered the name like a curse.
Furst glanced sidelong at him. “What’s wrong?”
“He stopped it. I’m not sure how, but he did.”
The old man stopped in his tracks. “What?”
The Immortal grabbed the other man by the elbow, got him moving again. “We need to keep moving. They’ll be looking for us now.”
“This is a disaster. You promised—”
“Keep moving,” he hissed, half-dragging the other man through the exit doors and toward a waiting limousine. Once they were inside and on the move, he snapped, “This is your fault. I told you that it would be futile to execute without the Brazen Head in our possession.”
“My fault?” Furst glowered at him. “You waited too long. Squandered our advantage.”
“This is a setback, not a defeat.”
“A setback?” Furst seemed ready to pop. “Your plan is in ruins. Two years of preparation. Wasted.”
With an effort, the Immortal brought his rage under control. “We can still win this. But I absolutely must have the Brazen Head.”
Furst seemed only slightly mollified by the assurance. “I think you overestimate the importance of that old relic.”
Despite everything that happened, the Immortal smiled. Furst had no idea how important the Brazen Head really was.
And neither did Gavin Stone.