'See how it's moving,' Lambert said, as much to the rest of the room as to the figure in the wheelchair. Tokyo had closed well down, not disastrously so, but enough to give the Western markets, which had to follow the game, sufficient jitters for a few nervous stomachs. Sydney and Hong Kong had drifted to a close along much the same lines. There were minor markets in Western Europe that opened before London. But no one was in any doubt about where the big players lay. The way the world was structured, London had the job of defending this game, until New York chipped in halfway through, opening the day as the sun rose over Manhattan.
Charley Pascal sipped a camomile tea and watched the way thing were being sold, not heavily, just at a measured rate, just out of caution. Then, with no emotion in her voice, asked, 'Sam. Take a look at Zurich, will you? Tell me what you think.' And before he could answer, added, 'No. Before you reply, take a look at Amsterdam too.'
Lambert started hammering the keyboard, staring fixedly into the screen. 'Unbelievable,' he said.
The numbers on the screen were, literally, incredible. They represented the largest and fastest fall on the smaller exchanges he had ever seen. Not just Amsterdam and Zurich. In Paris and Frankfurt and Brussels the local index was tumbling through the floor. Across the world in Singapore, which thought it was heading for a quiet close with only a little backdraught from what had happened in Tokyo, the Straits index was now plummeting too. It was as if they had all walked to the edge of the cliff, then jumped. And any minute now they would take the Footsie with them.
'Look at the money markets,' Charley said. Lambert switched the table onto the screen. It was the same old story. People rushing to the dollar, the mark, and the yen, even gold, hunting for security and letting everything they perceived to be weak collapse behind them. The pound was in freefall, already pushing par with the dollar. The Euro followed suit, plummeting to new lows.
This was the biggest market in the history of the world. It spanned the globe and ran through fibre-optic cables and geostationary satellites, it pulsed twenty-four hours of the day. And it behaved with the same mute, unchanging instinct of a herd of beasts. There was a name for this, and it was one that Charley, as she had watched the markets these last few months, had come to understand. It was a depressive supercycle, of the kind that was around in all the great crashes, in '87 and 1929 too if someone had known how to recognize it. And all it needed to push the supercycle over the edge into complete economic collapse was a little help.
'What's the state of the storm, Louise?' Charley asked a blonde girl at the next terminal.
'Coming up good. As good as we've seen.'
'This is just nervousness, Sam,' Charley said. 'That's right, isn't it? Nothing we've done?'
'The nervousness is caused by our presence,' Lambert replied. 'But you're right, the systems are running pretty well in themselves. There's some disruption from the solar activity, but it's not a cause in its own right, we haven't fed any disruptive data into the Net.'
Charley Pascal leaned back in her wheelchair, closed her eyes, felt ecstatic. 'Open the gates, Louise,' she said quietly. 'Not all the way. Just enough to throw a wrench in the works. No fire. Not yet.'
'Done.' The girl was smiling. They were all smiling. Twenty or more people in the room, waiting, the keyboards silent for once.
Charley Pascal closed her eyes and tried to imagine what was happening in space at that moment, tried to feel the way this tiny slice of that gigantic sea of energy flowing through the universe was being channelled toward the earth.
'Well?' She lifted up her head and looked at Lambert. A small crowd was gathering around his terminal; she could hear the fast, hot chatter of their excitement. Sam Lambert's face was a picture: half-glee, half-horror. There was still the thrill of the trader there, even after all these years. It was Like jumping from a plane without checking if there was a parachute on your back, she guessed. Or Russian roulette.
The lights shifted and flickered on the monitor. It was Singapore that went first, taking down the overnight trading lines that still ran after the market close. One moment the figures were on the screen, with some frantic agency copy underneath them. The next they were gone. No 'network down' announcement. Nothing.
Moscow was the next to fall. In exactly the same way, twenty seconds later. Zurich followed and shortly afterwards Frankfurt. Then, so quickly it seemed to happen simultaneously, Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels. The panels on the monitor that should have carried a miniature stock chart were empty, just black voids, while the live part that remained, the London market, and the prospects for Wall Street, whose turn it was next in the game, just raced and ran and screamed at them.
The stock screens went blank. The Children watched, waiting breathlessly, to see if something would return. Finally, Charley spoke. 'What do they do now, Sam? What are their options?'
'I don't know. They must have contingency plans for this. They can keep the markets closed on a temporary basis.'
'Good. But what does that mean? For these people? For this old order of things?'
He tried to imagine. 'They can rebuild. They can suspend trading until they are happy they can control things.'
'But this is capitalism,' she said. 'This is global capitalism, without frontiers. It feeds upon the ability to move money instantly, digitally, anywhere, at any time. And we are removing that nourishment, we are destroying the cogs and wheels of this particular machine that entraps, enslaves us all.'
'I know,' he said.
'So what happens?'
'Collapse,' Sam Lambert said. 'Absolute, bloody chaos.'
'The mother of us all.' Charley Pascal grinned and threw her arms around him.
CHAPTER 32
Martin Chalk
It didn't take long at all for an ID to come through. Forty minutes after the Bureau put the picture of the dead man on the internal net, the phone rang in the Pentagon bunker and Dan Fogerty started to smile, furiously taking notes all the time. A hurried conference was put together in a quarter of an hour. Tim Clarke was back at the head of the table, and this time, Helen Wagner thought to herself, the military men were starting to look energized. Targets.
'We have a lead,' Fogerty said. 'The office in San Jose picked the guy up from missing persons. His name is Martin Chalk, age twenty-six. Used to be a postgrad student at Berkeley, something to do with quantum mechanics and fusion. Then a year ago he dropped out, joined the Children. His family complained to the local police station and then to us that he'd been kidnapped, brainwashed, the usual thing. He was living with the Children in some commune they had in San Francisco.'
'Did you check it out?' Clarke asked.
Fogerty looked uncomfortable. 'The local cops did that, sir. The guy was twenty-six. And very bright. He knew what he was doing. He was able to come and go as he wanted. There was no way they could intervene. This is a free country.'
Clarke sighed and shook his head. 'You're sure about the ID?'
'Oh yes, sir. Last year Chalk took part in some kind of ecoprotest on the Golden Gate Bridge. Climbing up the pillars and sitting there, holding up the traffic until the cops came and talked them down. He got fingerprinted after that. The records are still at the station. He was never charged, which is why we would have been a little slow to pick up on them through the main print database. But we double-checked. And we know that he moved on to San Diego, presumably to be near the Children, because there was still some correspondence after the arrest, when they were thinking about whether to prosecute. This is the man.'