CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Emily had been watching rhodium for fifty minutes.

She had a trading window open on her home computer. Nothing fancy, not the high-powered ultrafast workstations the guys used at the office. None of that was necessary, and she didn’t care about a fifteen- or twenty-second delay.

The markets felt a little off. Prices rose and fell without apparent reason. Someone would ask something ridiculous—6, 7 percent over the last cleared trade—and it would sit there, blinking, for a full minute before disappearing. Or there’d be an intense flurry of activity, volumes spiking so fast the chart couldn’t refresh its axes, but everything clearing within a basis point or two.

Maybe it was the algobots, automatic trading systems making thousands of offers every second. They were always around, 95 percent of the market on slower days. Human day traders swam on the surface of a very deep, very murky ocean, with all the leviathans and turbulence far below. Faint ripples surfaced, sometimes long rolling waves, but always eons past the point that a slow-moving primate brain could profit.

On the other hand, New Year’s Eve, it was probably drunk guys. Maybe showing off to girls they’d just picked up at the parties. Maybe alone in their trading dens, bottles of Macallan and no one to share. Maybe some significant fraction of the bots were off-line, given a rare vacation when their overseers wanted to go have fun.

Whatever, volatility was all over the place.

Emily stretched, looked away from the monitors, and closed her eyes for a minute. Resting.

Trying not to worry about Finn.

A soft ping from a preprogrammed alert. Emily opened her eyes. Rhodium twitched up, then down, then down again. Interesting … but not an opportunity. Not yet.

This was just killing time, anyway. She was waiting for something else.

For the phone call.

“Ten feet past the edge of the fucking wall.” Asher stood before the control panel, arms crossed. “Still grinding away at concrete.”

“I don’t know, man,” Jake said. “I don’t know.”

Finn looked at the jacking frame in the bottom of the shaft as if it could tell him something. “Maybe one of us can crawl up the tunnel …”

“There’s nothing to see. That’s the problem.”

Kayo stood in the cold, shivering though he tried to keep it to himself, more and more pissed about the entire experience. He looked at Millz.

“What are these assholes doing?”

“Dunno.” The first TV news truck had shown up thirty minutes after the car fire, but by then, it had burned down to an unimpressive pile of blackened metal. Apparently disappointed in those visuals, the Channel Three team had parked their van near the demonstrators at the entrance. Now it was closed up tight, engine running, no one visible.

“All I know is, they’re inside all warm and dry and probably drinking hot rum from a thermos, and we’re out here with the fucking kermits.”

They were standing closer to the demonstrators than to the row of riot police, but almost as wary of both. The rail yard parking lot was dusted with snow, more falling, lights farther away blurred by the precipitation. Trains rumbled past in the yard, usually invisible behind the closer rows of cars but occasionally appearing on the mainline. Up in the dispatch tower, faces were looking down at them.

After the explosion, the police had gotten serious, setting their shields in a row, no more smoking or standing idly around. A few weapons appeared: tasers, shotguns, and, in the rear, some assault rifles. When he saw that, Millz was ready to turn and leave immediately, but Kayo had talked him down.

“Who they gonna arrest first, they see us running off? All we’re doing, we’re lawfully assembling and peaceably expressing our First Amendment rights.” Kayo looked at the scraggly protesters, mostly young people with irregular haircuts and North Face jackets. “Don’t know what they’re afraid of, anyway. Couple of bicycle cops could keep those fuckwads in line.”

“All I’m saying—”

“The man paid us. When’s the last time somebody paid you without you having to fuck them up first, huh? Plain cash and more to come, and all we got to do is stand here.”

“That ain’t all we got to do.”

Kayo ignored that, though there was still a smell of gasoline on his gloves. “Anyway, who knows what might fall out of a boxcar, huh? We could go home with a carton of iPhones.”

“iPhones?” Millz laughed, all phlegmy, and spat. “Bag of coal, maybe. Bucket of oil if we bust open a tanker. These are fucking trains, not FedEx vans.”

The TV truck’s door opened and a guy in a nylon jacket over a hoodie stepped out. The protesters looked over like cattle hopeful for feed, and one of the leaders tried to get a chant going. But no one had much energy for it, and the camera operator—certainly not the reporter, not in those clothes—walked about twenty feet from the van and opened his fly.

At least he had the grace to put his back to the crowd.

Kayo’s feet went numb. He stamped them up and down, which didn’t help much.

“Gotta walk around,” he said.

Millz followed. They ended up by the school bus that had brought in a few dozen demonstrators. The driver was standing in its entry, arms crossed, sheltered from the snow.

“Hey,” said Kayo.

“’Sup.”

“Cold, huh?”

“Naw, don’t mind it much.”

“Guess not. Was me I’d be inside, running the heater.”

Kayo pulled out a smoke, offered one, lit both. Millz wandered away.

“You with them?” said the driver.

“The Million Man March over there?” Kayo shrugged. “Kinda.”

“Well, you don’t look like the stormtroopers.”

“No shit.” The police had pulled down their visors and unlimbered batons and tear-gas guns. Black armor gleamed. Kayo shivered. “Those motherfuckers, best stay real clear.”

“Yeah.”

“What you doing here anyway? Waiting to take them all back?”

“They paid for eight hours, they get eight hours. Charter.”

“Uh-huh.” Kayo took a drag and discovered that snow had put it out. He frowned, tossed away the butt. “Seems like they might be going back in a different bus, you know? The kind with bars on the windows.”

The driver laughed. “Least they could warm up inside.”

“Except those ain’t got heaters.”

“Or windows, now you saying. Sounds like maybe you know.”

“Could be.” Kayo grinned. “Sometimes they let you go, sometimes they haul your ass to Tombs.”

They stood companionably for another few minutes. A few unmarked cars drove in and out of the yard, the police shifting each time to make room, then closing ranks again.

“Maybe it’s time to leave,” Kayo said. “Worst party in the world still be more fun than this.”

“Oh, yeah.” The driver pulled out his phone to check the time. “Happy New Year.”