Sunfail (7 page)

He was young. He was strong. Military training. There was stuff he could do here before panic genuinely took hold. The longer the blackout, the worse it was going to get. He knew that much.

In the perpetual quest for status, the brightest, the shiniest, and the newest, New Yorkers had bought themselves into helplessness.

Jake was still thinking about the irony of it all as he reached a break in the buildings to his left. He glanced around, surprised to discover an entire block that was nothing but steps and benches and a few scattered trees. He recognized it, but didn’t understand how he’d wound up all the way down by Zuccotti Park. The natives still crowded the benches, but there were other groups in the park this afternoon, just as there had been for weeks now, people gathered together for comfort and support.

He spotted one cluster with their heads bowed and hands linked. The sight both warmed and disgusted him. A prayer group? Now? What the fuck did they think was going to happen? Maybe their god would give them a holy miracle to make everything all right? Well, God had given them light once before, Jake figured bleakly, so maybe he’d turn the lights back on.

As he stood in judgment over them, Jake noticed a man walking down the opposite side of Trinity Place, moving parallel to him. On a normal day he wouldn’t have paid him the slightest attention, even though the guy moved with real purpose. But all New Yorkers moved with real purpose; it was only the tourists who walked with their heads up, looking around, trying to take it all in before someone lifted their money roll in a big old fuck you from the Big Apple.

The walker took long, solid strides, eyes focused straight ahead. He didn’t deviate from his path once in the minute that Jake watched him, causing people to get out of his way. That single-mindedness was quintessentially New York. But today he was the only person Jake had seen who looked like he knew where he was going, and that included the cops he’d come across trying to keep order.

That made the guy interesting.

Jake wanted to know what the guy was up to. He followed him, keeping his distance as the walker headed down Trinity Place. He stayed on the opposite side of the street.

The guy was shorter than Jake, but a bull of a man, dressed in faded black jeans and a black leather jacket. Jake checked out his shoes. They were Timberlands or a generic copy, solid and practical, common enough not to draw attention but comfortable enough for real use.

They passed under the footbridge to Trinity Church. Then the guy changed tack, crossing the street toward Jake.

He thought about slowing his pace, but that would only make it obvious he was tailing the guy, so instead he stretched his stride. It was just as easy to follow someone from the front if you knew what you were doing. It was a basic maneuver, but surprisingly effective because most people don’t pick up on it.

The entrance to the Rector Street R stop was right in front of him. Jake darted down the steps, disappearing into the subway.

Like most stations, Rector Street had two separate entrances, both on the same side of the street, a few dozen feet apart and facing in opposite directions. Jake didn’t venture down into the station proper—he crossed the landing and emerged from the other side, on the corner of Trinity Place and Rector Street.

He unclipped his radio from his safety vest, pulled the orange top over his head, rolled it up, and shoved it in a trash can along with his tool belt. It was a small change, but a very visual one, hopefully enough to throw him off if the guy hadn’t gotten a close look at his face.

Jake emerged as the man cut left on Rector.

Rector dead-ended at Broadway, offering a fork in the road. He chose left. At the next corner, he turned right onto Wall Street. Cement pylons meant the street was closed to cars. Not that there were any trying to get in.

The man headed straight down the center of the street, walking along the white line.

Jake stayed off to one side, hugging the Bank of New York’s towering walls, and turned again, this time going left.

The walker slowed as he rounded the corner, then stopped.

Jake lingered half a block back. He could observe the man freely now.

The Federal Hall building was across the street, but the guy was looking down Broad Street at a massive white stone building. The structure had enormous columns running from the middle of the third floor up to an impressive cornice. Stone rails ringed the building in place of gutters. Below the columns was a row of balconies brooding over wide double doors. To the side of them, a single set of glass double doors with golden latticework above them and a black band that would normally scroll company abbreviations and stock prices over and over until they made no sense to the common man.

The New York Stock Exchange.

It was one of the many iconic buildings in Manhattan, and in the age of the psychopath, the very heart of the city. Even one of the most powerful financial centers in the world wasn’t immune to the blackout. Though of course it had generators and contingencies, it couldn’t be allowed to go offline.

A group of men filed in through that solitary set of glass doors. They weren’t dressed like stockbrokers.

Their faces were covered and they moved with the grim efficiency of military men, at pace, in tight formation.

The fuck?

One guy held the door. He was the lookout, scanning the street for signs of trouble. Trouble walked toward him in the form of the stranger Jake had been tailing.

The guy stepped back into the shadows and watched.

Jake tried to process what he was seeing. The walker hadn’t come down to rendezvous with the crew, but he clearly knew they would be there. That posed its own set of questions, not least of which was still his identity: Who was he? FBI? Homeland Security? If he was either, he was here without backup. He was armed, though. Jake could make out the telltale bulge of a holstered gun at the small of his back. The leather jacket did a good job concealing it if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Jake did; his training ran deep.

He heard the gunshots before the last member of the group stepped inside, letting the door swing shut after him.

The walker rushed out of the shadows, catching the door before it fully closed.

Jake was already moving. He wasn’t thinking, it was all instinct. Once a warrior . . .

He stepped through into total darkness, with no idea what he was getting himself into.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A FEW HOURS AGO THE NYSE’S LABYRINTHINE CORRIDORS were bright, garishly lit by the sleek fluorescent panels running along the wall’s length.

Now everything beyond the door was pitch black.

One wall was tiled while the other was mirrored. He only knew that because he’d seen through the open door. With the outside world locked away, he might as well have stepped through into
nothing
.

Supposedly the loss of one sense would heighten the remaining ones, but that was bullshit. The darkness just meant he heard the blood of his pulse in his ears louder, not that he was more attuned to the sounds of the dark.

Soft footsteps echoed up ahead. Jake could just make out the slumped shadows of dead guards. He knelt to check for a pulse: nothing. Same at the second and the third. No survivors. He picked a path through the dead.

Jake closed his eyes, counting through eleven Mississippis, then blinked and started after the footfalls. It wasn’t foolproof, but the short count had given his eyes a few more precious seconds to adjust to the dark. Not that he wanted to see more than he already could. There was a faint light at his back that added definition to it now.

He kept one hand on the wall and moved forward until he reached a glass door. It opened with the slightest touch, which felt inherently wrong. Security should have been airtight. Without power, though, and without the computer systems online, nothing was working. And that meant there was nothing to stop him from walking right down to the trading floor. Not that anyone was trading.

The place was a mausoleum to money. Jake crept forward until he reached a pair of steps. Beyond them, the hallway split, running left and right to ring the floor.

He peered down the left-side passage. He saw nothing as it disappeared into absolute darkness. To the right, though, he caught the tiniest glint of something shifting through the blackness of the corridor. He tried to focus on the shape as it resolved into the shadow of a man. Ahead of both of them came the sudden, shocking detonation of concussion grenades. There was no alarm—which meant they had to be inside the system as well as the building. This was rapidly escalating from really bad to a whole new plane of existential torment.

Jake didn’t move. Fumbling in the dark was going to make noise, and even after the concussion grenades, noise was going to bring trouble. The
only
smart thing to do was turn around and get the fuck out of there. But the smart choice was a coward’s choice. He wasn’t a coward. He could handle himself, even if the only thing he had in common with any of the action heroes of the world was that he was expendable. He wasn’t walking away, not now. Not ever. The fact that he was a black man breaking into the still heart of capitalism didn’t pass him by either. His would be an easy death to explain on the evening news if things went south.

His one advantage was that no one was expecting him to crash the party. His only tool, the mini-Maglite, wasn’t the kind of thing he could use to break a few skulls, and lighting up the trading floor wasn’t an option. This was an advance recon. Simple as that. Do not engage the enemy, soldier.

The corridors crossed and crossed again, offering what felt like hundreds of choices. He moved slowly, trailing his fingers against the wall. It would be easy to get lost in here with no recognizable landmarks. Every shadow and dark shape looked exactly the same, save for the structure damage caused by the explosives.

He reached a stairwell whose door was closing as he approached. Jake slipped his hand into the crack and caught it, listening for the soft footfalls ascending. He counted them before he pushed the door slowly open, wincing as it sighed on the hydraulic arm.

Time was the one commodity not being traded here.

Jake started climbing as quickly and quietly as he could. The sounds of the other man’s careful footsteps stopped. A door opened then closed, the rasp of it settling back into the frame echoing in the silence. Then the clatter of running feet filled the stairwell. The guy had thrown caution to the wind and was moving fast. That meant Jake needed to move faster. He could only hope the din would swallow the sound of his own ascent.

He charged up the stairs, taking them three at a time, hand on the rail for balance in the darkness, breathing hard before he was around the fourth landing.

More gunshots came as the last defenders of this financial Camelot fell.

He saw a chink of light up above him, on the next landing. A door opening.

It wasn’t natural light. A flashlight?

Jake slowed down. He didn’t want his own steps emerging as the other man’s faded. A bead of sweat broke and ran from his temple, trailing slowly down his cheek before it was absorbed into his neck. Nostrils flared, he fought to regulate his breathing. Everything was suddenly quiet. He didn’t like that.

Who the fuck brought a flashlight to a gunfight?

He rose up a single step, listening for the telltale signs of trouble. He clenched and unclenched his fist at his side. He banged it against his thigh, using the impact to mark time: another eleven count. Jake always added one for luck. That’s just the way he was.

On the count of eleven he moved, reaching for the door. He found the handle. What it opened onto was breathtaking.

Jake had never set foot inside the New York Stock Exchange before, never mind the trading floor; even so, he knew he was looking into the very heart of the building. It was an iconic sight, like the Empire State Building or the rectangle of Central Park seen from above. You didn’t need to have been inside to have seen it; the trading floor was on the news every day.

The room was
enormous
.

The ceilings were easily sixty feet high, with an array of overhead beams supporting lights and wires and cameras as if it were a concert stage, which, given the kinds of performance art that played out here, wasn’t a completely inappropriate analogy.

One wall was almost entirely green glass. Despite the fact that they were nearly opaque, the windows let in enough light for him to see the trading floor. There were nine dead men sprawled out in the center of it. Several large clusters of computers, workstations, and screens, built in a circle facing inward, dominated it. The walls were lined with more workstations with stools and chairs spaced haphazardly along them. Several massive screens hung from the ceiling at various points around the room, all dark now.

An enormous American flag dominated one wall. NYSE banners hung on either side of the flag.

It was an amazing place.

Jake could only imagine what it looked like normally, full of life, hundreds of people running, shouting buy and sell orders, waving frantically to relay information. There were no day traders barking orders. There was no stock ticker counting down the fiscal apocalypse. Suit jackets had been tossed carelessly over the backs of chairs, papers still piled on desks. He saw several Coke and Mountain Dew cans and takeout containers beside silent computers.

The corpses weren’t the only people on the trading floor. He saw the man he’d been following, and beyond him, the team he’d come here to intercept. The soft buzz of voices came from the room’s far side, directly beneath one of the big scrolling boards. They moved with grim efficiency. There were more computers there, hulking units that kept the back end of the system up and running so the traders could do their work up front.

The crew, some sort of paramilitary unit, gathered around the banks of machines as a computer screen lit up. What the hell? There was no juice in the place and it seemed pretty obvious an EMP or something equally toxic to electronics had wiped out every system in the city, but these guys just happened to have found the one working network in New York?