"That's putting it mildly, Dr. Ryan. We may be watching the beginning of a global panic," Winston began. "I'm not sure where the bottom is."
"So far Buzz is doing okay," Jack replied cautiously.
Winston looked up from his cup. "Ryan, if you're a bullshitter, I've come to the wrong place. I thought you knew the Street. The IPO you did with Silicon Alchemy was nicely crafted—now, was that you or did you take the credit for somebody else's work?"
"There's only two people who talk to me like that. One I'm married to. The other has an office about a hundred feet that way." Jack pointed. Then he grinned. "Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Winston. Silicon Alchemy was all my work. I have ten percent of the stock in my personal portfolio. That's how much I thought of the outfit. If you ask around about my rep, you'll find I'm not a bullshitter."
"Then you know it's today," Winston said, still taking the measure of his host.
Jack bit his lip for a moment and nodded. "Yeah, I told Buzz the same thing Sunday. I don't know how close the investigators are to reconstructing the records. I've been working on something else."
"Okay." Winston wondered what else Ryan might he working on but dismissed the irrelevancy. "I can't tell you how to fix it, hut I think I can show you how it got broke."
Ryan turned for a second to look at his TV. CNN Headline News had just started its thirty-minute cycle with a live shot from the floor of the NYSE. The sound was all the way down, but the commentator was speaking rapidly and her face was not smiling. When he turned back, Gant had his laptop flipped open and was calling up some files.
"How much time do we have for this?" Winston asked.
"Let me worry about that," Jack replied.
31—The How and the What
Treasury Secretary Bosley Fiedler had not allowed himself three consecutive hours of sleep since the return from Moscow, and his stride through the tunnel connecting the Treasury Building with the White House meandered sufficiently to make his bodyguards wonder if he might need a wheelchair soon. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve was hardly in better shape. The two had been conferring, again, in the Secretary's office when the call arrived—Drop everything and come here—peremptory even for somebody like Ryan, who frequently short-circuited the workings of the government. Fiedler started talking even before he walked through the open door. "Jack, in twenty minutes we have a conference call with the central banks of five Euro—who's this?" SecTreas asked, stopping three paces into the room.
"Mr. Secretary, I'm George Winston. I'm president and managing director of—"
"Not anymore. You sold out," Fiedler objected.
"I'm back as of the last rump-board meeting. This is Mark Gant, another of my directors."
"I think we need to listen to what they have to say," Ryan told his two new arrivals. "Mr. Gant, please restart your rain dance."
"Damn it, Jack, I have twenty minutes. Less now," the Secretary of the Treasury said, looking at his watch.
Winston almost snarled, but instead spoke as he would have to another senior trader: "Fiedler, the short version is this: the markets were deliberately taken down by a systematic and highly skillful attack, and I think I can prove that to your satisfaction. Interested?"
The SecTreas blinked very hard. "Why. yes."
"But how…?" the Fed Chairman asked.
"Sit down and we'll show you," Gant said. Ryan made way and the two senior officials took their places on either side of him and his computer, "It started in Hong Kong…"
Ryan walked to his desk, dialed the Secretary's office, and told his secretary to route the conference call to his room in the West Wing. A typical executive secretary, she handled the irregularity better than her boss could ever have done. Gant, Jack saw, was a superb technician, and his second stint at explaining matters was even more efficient than his first. The Secretary and the Chairman were also good listeners who knew the jargon. Questions were not necessary.
"I didn't think something like this was possible," the Chairman said eight minutes into the exposition. Winston handled the response.
"All the safeguards built into the system are designed to prevent accidents and catch crooks. It never occurred to anybody that somebody would pull something like this. Who would deliberately lose so much money?"
"Somebody with bigger fish to fry," Ryan told him.
"What's bigger than—"
Jack cut him off. "Lots of things, Mr. Winston. We'll get to that later."
Ryan turned his head. "Buzz?"
"I'll want to confirm this with my own data, but it looks pretty solid."
SecTreas looked over at the Chairman.
"You know, I'm not even sure it's a criminal violation."
"Forget that," Winston announced. "The real problem is still here. Crunch time is today. If Europe keeps going down, then we have a global panic. The dollar's in free-fall, the American markets can't operate, most of the world's liquidity is paralyzed, and all the little guys out there are going to catch on as soon as the media figure out what the hell is going down. The only thing that's prevented that to this point is that financial reporters don't know crap about what they cover."
"Otherwise they'd be working for us," Gant said, rejoining the conversation. "Thank God their sources are keeping it zipped for the time being, but I'm surprised it hasn't broken out all the way yet." Just maybe, he thought, the media didn't want to start a panic either.
Ryan's phone rang and he went to answer it. "Buzz, it's your conference call." The Secretary's physical state was apparent when he rose. The man wavered and grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself. The Chairman was only a touch more agile, and if anything both men were yet more shaken by what they had just learned. Fixing something that had broken was a sufficiently difficult task. Fixing something deliberately and maliciously destroyed could hardly be easier. And it had to be fixed, and soon, lest every nation in Europe and North America join the plunge into a deep, dark canyon. The climb out of it would require both years and pain, and that was under the best of political circumstances—the long-term political ramifications of such a vast economic dislocation could not possibly be grasped at this stage, though Ryan was already recoiling from that particular horror.
Winston looked at the National Security Advisor's face, and it wasn't hard to read his thoughts. His own elation at the discovery was gone now that he'd given the information over to others. There ought to have been something else for him to say: how to fix matters. But all of his intellectual energy had been expended in building his case for the prosecution, as it were. He hadn't had the chance yet to take his analysis any further.
Ryan saw that and nodded with a grim smile of respect. "Good job."
"It's my fault," Winston said, quietly so as not to disturb the conference call proceeding a few feet away. "I should have stayed in."
"I've bailed out once myself, remember?" Ryan got back into a chair.
"Hey, we all need a change from time to time. You didn't see this coming. It happens all the time. Especially here."
Winston gestured angrily. "I suppose. Now we can identify the rapist, but how the hell do you get unraped? Once it's happened, it's happened. But those were my investors he fucked. Those people came to me. Those people trusted me." Ryan admired the summation. That was how people in the business were supposed to think.
"In other words, now what?"
Gant and Winston traded a look. "We haven't figured that one out."
"Well, so far you've outperformed the FBI and SEC. You know, I haven't even bothered checking how my portfolio did."
"Your ten percent of Silicon Alchemy won't hurt you. Long term," Winston said, "new communications gadgets always make out, and they have a couple of honeys."