Derek Walsh leaned forward in the awkward rolling chair he had plopped into ten minutes earlier. He was still in his supervisor’s office, which Cheryl kept immaculate. There were books on marketing and management lining the top row of the shelf behind her wide modern desk. A copy of Jack Welch’s Winning lay on her desk like a Bible. This was the first time he had thought Cheryl might have delusions of grandeur, thinking that she could move from supervisor at a financial house to head of a major corporation through her management skills, which mainly came down to her making fun of people until they did their job.
Now all of his attention turned to Tonya Stratford. Her dark complexion framed very sharp brown eyes that felt like lasers. He realized she was studying him as much as he was studying her. The woman knew finance, and he could tell she was not used to people evading her questions.
Walsh didn’t want to seem like an idiot. He recognized he was sitting silently with his mouth open. Finally he was able to say, “You think I did what?” He didn’t have to fake any outrage. It was all boiling up. He was still scared, but now he was pissed off as well.
Stratford’s partner, whose name was Frank Martin, sat like a pudgy, middle-aged pet, watching everything unfold but not appearing to understand what was being said.
Tonya Stratford repeated her first statement. “According to your company’s records, six nights ago at 7:50 P.M. Eastern Standard Time several transfers were made on your ID from your computer. I’m asking if you have any explanation for why you made the trades at almost eight o’clock at night.”
Walsh tried to keep his voice from cracking. “For how much?”
“The total is a little more than a hundred and eighty million.”
Walsh raised a hand and started to wave it in front of him. “I’ve never made a trade that big. I’d remember. There must be a mistake.” The panic started to creep up from his stomach into his chest. How often did someone tell these guys they were having a heart attack?
Tonya Stratford just gave him a look.
Then Walsh started thinking clearly. He snapped his fingers and said, “That was last Tuesday night, right? I wasn’t even here. I was on a date. I left at quarter after six.”
The FBI agent casually looked over to Walsh’s supervisor.
She just raised her hands and said, “I can’t swear to that. They all slip out every chance they get. No one wants to be noticed leaving. Probably worse than government work. Am I right?”
Tonya Stratford’s look shut her up, too. Then she focused on Walsh again. “According to the logs from your security key, which was in your computer at the time, someone using your password and your computer made the four transfers. A hundred million went to an account in Switzerland, and the rest went to accounts in Asia and one in the Cayman Islands, all owned by the Swiss bank. All the money has been withdrawn. You are now a target of an FBI investigation. Is there anything you don’t understand about that, Mr. Walsh?”
Walsh stammered, “What would be the charges?”
“For starters, wire fraud. There’s a grand theft in there somewhere, and we’ll see what else we might be looking at. I’m not charging you at this minute. It’s an investigation. What I’m doing is giving you a fair chance to help yourself.”
Cheryl said, “Derek, I think you should probably keep quiet. You need an attorney.”
Tonya Stratford calmly turned her head and said to Cheryl, “You need to leave.”
“Derek needs representation.”
“Are you an attorney?”
“No.”
“Then get out.” She added a “Now” in a flat tone.
For some reason, Walsh felt the overwhelming need to speak to either Mike Rosenberg or Bill Shepherd. He felt like his friends would know what to say and make him feel better. If they had gotten him through the marines, they could certainly handle a couple of FBI types. But he didn’t have his friends. Walsh was alone with the two FBI agents. He knew they could hear his stomach rumble as he considered vomiting. He just didn’t think it would help.
* * *
Michael Rosenberg sat in the media room watching ten TVs at the same time. This section at the CIA headquarters in Langley monitored news reports and sifted them into usable intelligence. Their duty overlapped with the National Security Agency, but they rarely shared information. Watching the news was a good tactic and resource. Why not let guys like Anderson Cooper or Shepard Smith do the work for you? Each of the big networks had correspondents and news crews all across the world. The problem was that CNN tended to focus on the most video-friendly of issues and ignore any with real substance.
Two TVs in the corner, 55-inch Samsung high-definition units, played the political talk shows from MSNBC and some of the Fox panel shows. The analyst who tracked these shows did it to get a pulse of what the American people were worried about. Or at least what some of the commentators thought the American people should be worried about.
Rosenberg liked watching the shows when he had a chance and hearing everyone’s view. His time in the military had taught him the importance of seeing the big picture. He didn’t understand how the different networks decided to hire people. But today it didn’t matter because he was only watching a New York channel and CNN as they covered a rising tide of violence and unrest that had started in the financial district of Wall Street and spread across the entire city.
At first it appeared to be just the Stand Up to Wall Street group. An FBI report had indicated that this new group was largely leftovers from Occupy Wall Street. Neither seemed to have a cohesive message or any respected spokesman. As far as Rosenberg could tell they just wanted a reason not to work or pay their own way. He had seen them up close when he visited his friend “Tubby” Walsh in New York. They were a surly group who didn’t seem interested in civil interaction. They were clearly the ones who’d started this by trashing a couple of police cars and then spread general mayhem with rocks and bottles.
About an hour ago someone had dropped a hand grenade at the entrance to one of the subway stations and killed eleven people. A few minutes after that, on the other side of the city, gunmen fired fourteen shots into a bus, killing an elderly woman and wounding two children. Somehow it didn’t feel all that random to Rosenberg.
He was afraid this all fell in with the new tactic of lone assailant terrorists. They all seemed to be vaguely connected to the group ISIS; at least that’s how the media portrayed it. There had been three beheadings in the last two weeks. One in Chicago, one in Kansas City, and the last a schoolteacher in Denver.
In Los Angeles, a ritual severing of the hands of four men accused of being thieves had caused a huge reaction from the Latino population. The men all survived and told the tale of a Muslim shopkeeper who had branded them shoplifters. The next thing they knew, a van with three masked men had scooped them up, and a few minutes later they were left to bleed on the sidewalk.
The final piece of the puzzle, as far as Rosenberg was concerned, was the attacks on tourist attractions across the country. The Liberty Bell, the Atlanta Aquarium, and the Lincoln Memorial had all seen violence in the past week. It made him think of a couple of attacks his unit had suffered in Afghanistan. At least his friends were there to help. Now, even though he still worked for the U.S. government, Rosenberg felt all alone as he watched the world disintegrate.
Rosenberg recognized it was one thing to study trends in terrorism, or even watch it on newscasts, and it was another to experience it firsthand. He had seen the results in a couple of the cities in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the closest he ever came was in their forward operating base outside the village of Landigal in Afghanistan. The marines would venture out to strike at insurgents deep in the heart of the Korengal Valley and pull back to the base for resupply. The longer they were there, the more they worked with the local population. His unit even provided protection to the UN medical personnel who vaccinated everyone in the vicinity.
But one evening, in the middle of the base, during a lull in the fighting that had lasted more than two months, when no one was expecting it, trouble had started. Rosenberg was just coming out of the small mess tent with Bill Shepherd at his side and Ron Jackson telling them the story about his football prowess in college. No one bothered to remind Ron that he had told the story before, always with a different, more spectacular ending.
The first sound of gunfire was so close it shocked them all into statues. As always, it was Jackson’s measured response that got them moving. He immediately pushed the others to the side and started to look for a weapon.
Shepherd was ready to act that moment and pulled the sidearm he had in a flap holster on his right hip.
Rosenberg, as always, assessed the situation. There were two very young Afghans who had gotten hold of M-4 rifles. The fact that they weren’t using AK-47s meant that they had already been inside the compound and were probably trusted by someone. Rosenberg knew these attacks from supposed allies had happened at other bases, but it was still startling to be in the middle of one.
He saw his friend Derek Walsh coming from the side of the supply depot he was responsible for. He was running toward the sound of gunfire and had an M-4 in his hands. Rosenberg considered shouting a warning that he was about to run up on the two shooters, but just then a third man, dressed as a traditional Afghan, wearing a giant backpack, started running toward the command post from the other side of the supply tent. A suicide bomber would cause havoc.
Then Rosenberg was shocked when he saw the man run past Walsh just as they both reached the front of the supply tent. Walsh reached up without hesitation and grabbed hold of the pack. The rail-thin Afghan’s momentum and Walsh’s sheer size jerked the pack from the man’s back and sent Walsh tumbling to the ground.
Return fire from someone near the front of the command post cut all three intruders down instantly.
Walsh sat on the ground holding the pack in one hand and the M-4 raised up looking for more targets in the other. It was the most heroic thing Rosenberg had ever seen anyone do. And he was glad the man who did it was his friend.
At the CIA, on the TV farthest from him, Rosenberg could see that the violence was having a serious effect on the stock market. It had drifted lower over the past week and now, just after eleven o’clock in the morning, it was in absolute freefall. The word “crash” came to his mind.
He wondered how his friend Derek Walsh was handling it.
* * *
Major Bill Shepherd was watching the international news as he pulled out a few reports and got a handle on who was on leave and who was at the base. The marine detachment there was used for several tasks. Mainly the Special Forces unit trained with the smaller NATO countries like Estonia and Hungary. They taught the local soldiers how to use certain portable weapons and gauged what kind of use they would be in a real conflict. Aside from Germany, France, and England, no one would be a great help in a large-scale conflict, but on a limited basis, the smaller countries had some decent fighters.
Even with Russian military exercises occurring near Estonia, no order to go on alert had come down. He agreed that keeping troops on alert caused stress and reduced their battle readiness if it went on too long, but this was a cost analysis. It was too expensive to keep them on alert. It went all the way back to leadership in the U.S., which was lacking by any standard. Shepherd read as much history as anyone on the planet. He recognized that a military was meant to scare, as well as fight. Russia had been held in check for decades by the idea of what the U.S. and NATO might do. Now, after the debacle in Crimea, it was obvious that NATO was simply a hollow threat. Their big move was to station twelve F-16s in Estonia, along with some older armor. That was it. With no hint of repercussions, there was no telling how far Russia might go.
Shepherd had stepped back but had not stood down. It was a slight and technical distinction. He was giving his companies two days off on a rotating basis. The time also allowed him to decompress, recognizing that a leader must rest and take care of himself if he’s going to act properly on the battlefield. He’d called the woman he met last week, Fannie. He thought he could work her into his dating rotation. His quick check on the Internet showed she had worked in finance and was from France. There weren’t any new posts from businesses in the past two years, so he figured she had a steady job and had not switched around at all. Maybe that meant he could finally go out with a woman who might pay for dinner. She answered her cell phone last night but was on a business trip somewhere in Switzerland. So far he’d only had one quick dinner with her, but she seemed like a winner. Beautiful, charming, and smart. Just the thought of her pretty face put him in a good mood.
A news story on CNN caught his attention, and he glanced up at the TV set in the corner of his office. Everyone seemed to be disturbed about a new financial issue back in the States. One of the big houses was accused of sending hundreds of millions of dollars to bank accounts used by terrorists. That’s all they needed: another financial crisis and terrorists with money to spend on operations. The name of the company, Thomas Brothers Financial, rang a bell. He thought that was where Derek Walsh was working. Maybe if he had time later on today he’d call Walsh and Mike Rosenberg. It was one way to keep his mind off the loss of his friend Ron Jackson.
* * *
Fannie Legat had not slept in two days. Once the money had come in from New York, she had disbursed it quickly. The U.S. government was able to freeze accounts far too swiftly. The other members of her network needed money to carry out operations and to survive. It was nice to show them how thoroughly she could deliver. She wanted to teach some of these fundamentalists that women were just as valuable as men in most situations. She followed the teachings of Mohammed as closely as her comrades and realized women had played a strong role in the Prophet’s life, as well as in the advancement of Islam ever since.
She had spent almost two days making all of the transfers out of the account. It was a long and complicated assignment, and she had to prioritize where the money went.
The backwoods group Boko Haram received over $800,000. They did little to help Islam and were no threat to most governments, but they tended to grab headlines and keep the world’s attention focused away from more productive groups who were preparing for major attacks. The path to a new world order. An Islamic order. What the African group lacked in education they made up for in creativity. Kidnapping schoolgirls and threatening religious orders always got the attention of the Western press, no matter how much it actually affected world politics. They had also publicly pledged their loyalty to the Islamic State.
More than $20 million had gone right back into New York City, where it would be disbursed among a number of cells. Most of these were one- or two-man operations, who were directed to start causing as much havoc as possible, building to a crescendo over the next three days. Fannie vaguely recognized that they were trying to harness the power of the mobs that had been protesting financial institutions in New York.
She had sent nearly $40 million to a number of different accounts to pay greedy bankers and European officials who turned a blind eye to her activities. She thought it was ironic that their effort to keep a distance from the transactions would ultimately be their downfall.
Now all the money was moved and she had proven her value. No one questioned the wisdom of having a woman in such an important role anymore. She wanted to take another step up the ladder and prayed that Allah would forgive her ambition. Looking at the Swiss bank building out her hotel window and knowing what would happen as soon as she got the signal made her smile in anticipation.