Now Putin said, “Will it? Would you? Is Estonia worth it?”
“I’m telling you NATO will have to respond.”
Putin stood and waved his finger like a professor addressing his class. “I think that’s where you’re wrong, Andre. They have to act. That’s different than responding. They could act by pushing resolutions through the UN. Maybe they even launch a few airstrikes. But if the past is our guide, NATO will follow the U.S. lead, and the U.S. has not taken action against us in years.”
“And the European Union,” Andre said, “cannot survive without our natural gas.”
Putin clapped his hands together and said, “Exactly my point. Now is the time to act. If we wait, we could end up with another Texan in the White House, or worse, a Floridian. Who knows what the next president will do, but I doubt we’ll ever be as lucky as we are right now.”
Putin liked the grin that was spreading across Andre’s face as he seemed to consider all the possible outcomes.
Derek Walsh sucked in a breath so he had an easier time sliding behind the computer monitor. He took a quick look around to make sure no one had noticed, but it was already too late. From three cubicles down he heard, “Hey, Derek, I thought once you were a marine you always stayed in shape.” He knew the jibe came from Cheryl Kravitz, the team leader of his group that specialized in currency transactions for Thomas Brothers Financial. Since the crash, Thomas Brothers had shot up to become one of the leading financial houses along with Morgan Stanley and Chase. The growth had been stunning even in the two years Walsh had been working there. Too bad it didn’t show in his pay. The company had hired him as part of a “hire a vet” campaign, but it was only lip service. He was still just a financial grunt.
He looked down at his belly and knew that he’d let his fitness slide since his discharge. But it wasn’t exactly like he was doing push-ups every day in the service, either. He’d been a captain in charge of logistics and finances, with his only real combat experience coming when he forced his way onto a Black Hawk for patrol in the Korengal Valley during the war in Afghanistan and a couple of attacks on the base. He counted the nine shots he got off in a brief firefight as combat experience, but he’d trade it now to lose thirty pounds.
Walsh just smiled and nodded at Cheryl. Slender and standing almost six feet tall in her heels, she rarely missed anything that went on in the office.
He’d thought about his overall physical shape more in the last three weeks since he’d attended the funeral of his friend and fellow marine Ron Jackson. The major had died in a terror attack in Berlin, of all places. But there had been more attacks on U.S. interests by jihadists, mainly from the Islamic State—or, as the marines called the movement, Daesh, which could be confused with an Arabic word for stepping on something and was considered by some as a slight. New York had seen two attacks: a bomb in the subway that killed a Dutch tourist and shut down the green line for two days, and a modified anthrax attack in the air-conditioning system of a sporting goods store. There were still three people in the hospital over that.
Walsh had seen his other two close friends in Arlington at the funeral. Bill Shepherd was tall and lanky and still in the Corps. Mike Rosenberg was working at the CIA but looked like he’d pass any fitness test for any branch of the service. It made Walsh resent his nickname, “Tubby,” for the first time since he’d earned it.
The fact that he had rented a tiny SoHo apartment and didn’t have far to walk most nights proved he made too little money and spent too little energy. It was a tiny hovel that he sublet from sublettors who had it under rent control. He didn’t even have his name on any official documents for the apartment and got all his mail at the office.
He missed his old team from the 2nd Marines. They were like brothers, and he had lost one to a conflict most Americans only knew from the nightly news. His new employment had teams as well, but they were nothing like a Marine unit. Thomas Brothers team members were a different breed. He was considered fit and tough on these teams. It was embarrassing. A twenty-three-year-old Princeton grad had yelled at him the other day.
Each of the six members of this team was involved in staggering transactions every day, but it never got to Cheryl. She stuck to a schedule of getting up at 5:00 A.M. and checking the exchanges, going to the gym, then staying in the office until after sunset every day except Friday. Then she did the unthinkable and sometimes left the office by six o’clock, whether it was summer or winter, sunny or gray.
All this occurred under the benevolent and watchful eye of Ted Marshall, the supervisor for his section and ultimate leader of three full teams. That made him similar to a major in the marines, but Ted worked hard to be liked. He was the guy who asked about your family. Cheryl was the one who told you that you didn’t have time to see them.
At his desk, Walsh inserted his plastic-encased USB security plug into a secure terminal on the side of the lightning-fast computer. The plug was slightly larger than a USB thumb drive and had three lights on the side that flashed when it completed different tasks. It was safer than just a password and allowed the company to see exactly who was involved in the transaction. He still needed to enter an eight-digit password, and if he lost the security plug, virtually no one would have any idea what the damn thing was; besides, it could only work on a Thomas Brothers network. He always needed it on overseas transfers but not on routine work within their own trading house. Sometimes he’d have to use the plug three times in a week, or he could go three weeks without using it. Such was the life of a scrub at Thomas Brothers Financial. Lots of paperwork and trading within the company for clients he never got to meet.
Today he was just checking an account, not making any trades or transactions. He glanced at his watch and realized it was approaching six o’clock, or after midnight in Sarajevo, where he was checking on $4 million in Canadian currency that was in escrow. Some poor schlub like him was working overnight to prepare the final transaction in Europe. He felt for the guy. He needed this to be done quickly because his girlfriend, Alena, expected to meet him before six thirty. There were a lot of things Walsh was willing to do, but disappointing his girlfriend of two years was not one of them. He had known her two years, anyway, and felt confident he could call her his girlfriend of eleven months. If he could only work up the nerve, he’d present her with the engagement ring he’d bought nearly three weeks earlier and had stashed in the top drawer of his desk. He’d used the last of his savings from the marines and now worried about paying his day-to-day bills. For now he was content to make Alena happy by being on time and buying her a nice sushi dinner. He was still a little sheepish from his experience in Germany when he was the paymaster at Camp Panzer Kaserne. His mixup with a local girl who stole his company credit cards and charged a fortune could’ve gotten him a few years in Leavenworth. She claimed Walsh was part of the scheme. Thank God for good JAG lawyers and a judge who recognized the truth. It was just a petty crime, but it had scarred him, or at least greatly embarrassed him.
As soon as he had checked the escrow, he scurried to his own cubicle and made sure nothing had come up in the last twenty minutes while he was away from his desk. This was the tricky part: sliding out of the office without anyone noticing. It was never good to be the first one done for the day. No one ever noticed if you arrived at seven o’clock every morning, but everyone picked up on someone creeping out of the office first. This was high finance. Medical emergencies were put on hold to transfer money. Children’s activities were the stuff of legend, and anniversaries past the third year were virtually unheard of.