He checked his watch—6:17. He felt a brief surge of panic and pictured Alena being hit on by some lawyer, or worse, some photographer who wanted her to be a model in his creepy midtown studio. He shuddered at the thought. The Columbia international affairs grad student from Greece was too sweet to recognize a come-on like that. Life in Larissa or Athens was a little simpler than in New York.
Just as he glanced in the tiny mirror on his desk to flatten out the cowlick in his short brown hair and make sure he didn’t have any food crusted around his mouth, Ted Marshall stopped at his desk and said, “You’re moving a lot of transactions lately, Derek. Glad we took advantage of that program to grab guys like you coming out of the service. I always pictured marines climbing up hills and shooting little Asian dudes. It never occurred to me the Corps needed financial managers, too. Keep up the good work.”
Walsh just gave him a quick nod and mumbled, “Thanks, Ted.” It’d taken him a while to get away from adding a “sir” or “ma’am” to virtually every remark. He’d called Ted “Mr. Marshall” for the first week he was here until the portly manager told him to knock it off. He tried to keep his manners intact no matter how difficult it was in this odd social maze of money wonks, computer nerds, and financial sharks. Each of them needed the others to survive, but no one wanted to mix with the others.
He screwed up the courage to casually stand and slowly walk toward the men’s room. No one seemed to notice as they each focused on their own work and the room buzzed with a certain energy he’d never felt anywhere else. Once he was past the men’s room, it was an easy few steps to the stairwell. He went down two floors by foot, then imagined the bloom of perspiration building under his arms and slipped off at the twenty-ninth floor just in time to catch an express elevator to the lobby. God was with him.
He couldn’t help but look at his watch as the elevator door opened in the lobby and saw that he somehow had to make it seven blocks in about four minutes to be on time. He carried a simple zippered notebook instead of a briefcase, and his security plug was secure at the bottom of his inside coat pocket. The marines had taught him the importance of habit and keeping your uniform, no matter what it happened to be, clean and neat at all times.
He slipped out the glass door to cut across the courtyard and onto Nassau Street. He still wasn’t certain which would be faster, a cab or an all-out sprint. At the bottom of the stairs two figures stepped in front of him and blocked his way. Walsh mumbled, “Excuse me,” and started to spin to his left, but one of the men held out his arm to stop him.
All it took was one good breath to know exactly who these two were. They were part of the new Stand Up to Wall Street movement. Some of his coworkers called them the “aggravate movement,” since they were a little more on the aggressive side than the Occupy people from a few years earlier.
One of the men, in his midtwenties and a little shorter than Walsh’s six feet one, said, “What’s the hurry, big guy? You need to rush home to your Park Avenue penthouse?”
The other man, a few years older, got right in his face and said, “How do you sleep at night doing the things you do?”
Walsh ignored them and tried to step past. One of the men grabbed him by the arm, and Walsh realized this was about to turn ugly.
Major Anton Severov used his Zeiss-Jena knock-off Russian binoculars to scan the low rise of the hills surrounding the town of Kingisepp, about eight miles from the border of Estonia and the city of Narva. His units were slowly maneuvering into place, with the main objective of not being noticed. For the past year they had been conducting war games in the area in and around Estonia, Latvia, and Belarus. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what the Kremlin had planned, but so far no one seemed to really care. Severov had been a tanker his entire career, but he fought against the stereotype of the slow-witted brute. Sure, the MiG pilots and the intelligence people had time to dress in the most stylish of uniforms and were the envy of every man at a party, but in every war the Soviet Union and then Russia had been involved in, it was tankers who really led the way. His command vehicle was a T-90 tank with a 125 mm smoothbore main gun. Aside from a brief skirmish in Georgia, he hadn’t had the chance to see what the tank could do. Afghanistan was long over by the time he joined the service. Now it was the Americans’ problem.
There was renewed optimism as Vladimir Putin had proven to the world Russia was not a dying superpower. Ukraine had found that out the hard way. Now they were poised to make a bold move into Estonia. A NATO partner. That might not have been the exact orders, but Severov was no idiot. He spoke English almost as well as Russian and subscribed online to The New York Times. He’d visited the U.S. three separate times, all of them on official passports back when relations between the two countries were much warmer. He knew their soldiers were tough and well trained, but he also knew there weren’t enough of them in Eastern Europe. There had barely been enough in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, but now, being preoccupied in the Middle East trying to act as a policeman, the U.S. had virtually forgotten about commitments to the countries of Europe.
The plans for a rapid deployment force had foundered, and the best the U.S. could do was base a dozen F-16s in Estonia, as a warning not to cross the border, and park a few outdated tanks on bases scattered across the country. Severov doubted that would be enough to influence Russian policy. The Russian hierarchy had calculated that no one would go to war over Estonia. Just like Crimea. There would be an outcry and a few useless sanctions, but the U.S. president did not have the spine to stand up to Vladimir Putin and everyone knew it. Especially Putin.
A smile spread across Severov’s face as he saw that all the tanks had settled in under trees and spread camouflage netting so that satellites would have a difficult time picking up the movement. He wasn’t even worried about flights overhead. No one from NATO had bothered to fly a jet through Estonia or Latvia in the past three weeks. They were still bitching about Ukraine.
He knew the orders would come soon. He’d been told to settle down and keep his men fed, rested, and engaged. If that wasn’t a precursor to war, nothing was.
Walsh felt the man’s hand on his bicep and resisted the urge to turn toward him; instead he locked his arm to his body and turned away quickly, tossing the man into his partner. Now they turned on him with fire in their eyes. These didn’t seem like the peaceful Stand Up to Wall Street people he’d gotten used to seeing urinating in the flowerpots and dozing under the trees and in the green spaces. He didn’t want to crouch and give away his intentions, as he kept his eyes on both men, who were now separating slowly, making it difficult for him to face both of them at once.
He felt a third hand on his right shoulder. This one was gentle and barely startled him. Then the soft voice acted like a tranquilizer as he heard his girlfriend, Alena, say, “Let these men go. They’re just confused.”
That seemed to catch the younger man’s attention. He looked at her and said, “Why are we confused?”
“Because you don’t even know what you’re protesting. Everyone is against unlawful financial transactions, but none of you are qualified to know who’s an honest banker and who is not. None of you even have jobs.” Her light accent added flair to the comment.
The other man leveled his gaze at her and said, “How do you know we don’t have jobs?”
Now Walsh ended the conversation and stepped toward the man, saying, “Because you guys hang out here all day.” He let the frustration bleed into his voice. Even if it was a reasonable cause, who could take it seriously? These guys weren’t even homeless. They just chose to not work and live off their parents.