Flash Crash Page 3

  The two vehicles traversed Pearl, a small street cutting towards the Brooklyn Bridge Promenade and FDR Drive. As they drove down the sleepy back street, they passed a nondescript white service van parallel parked next to the sidewalk. Once the two-vehicle convoy passed, the van’s engine ignited. The van slowly exited its parking spot and began to follow behind the group surreptitiously, as if by coincidence.

  Leo, the driver of the armored truck, and Stevie, his guard, listened to the radio. Stevie sat shotgun and carried one as well. Roger’s security team was speaking to them from the car behind, updating the crew on road conditions.

  “Okay. Good, good. We’ll use Cherry to the bridge ramp to . . .” The security staffer’s voice became garbled and unintelligible. Leo glanced at Stevie, who hit the radio with his palm. No sound emerged, except for the choking tinnitus of static. Stevie hit the radio again, a bit harder this time.

  “Repeat that? Say again?” Stevie asked.

  But radio fuzz was the only message that greeted the two of them back.

  “Shitty thing. Restart it,” Leo ordered his shotgun guard. Then Leo gazed out his side-view mirror. Immediately spotting the security car still following behind them, he wasn’t particularly concerned. “But we should be good, Stevie. They’re still behind us,” he said. After all, it was just a delivery. Happened once a week—week in, week out. Roger ran a tight ship, just as his ancestors had. No one outside the organization could possibly know that there was more gold sitting inside this truck than there ever had been, or likely ever would be again.

  ■

  The convoy slowly and carefully merged onto the FDR Drive and proceeded to rip north through the clear Manhattan night.

  Following behind them, but indistinguishable from the normal flow of light traffic, the white van also merged onto the highway and continued to follow the convoy from about five hundred yards back.

  In the follow car, Roger’s security man, Ted, played with his radio. It seemed to be malfunctioning from his side as well.

  “You have Leo’s number, right?” Ted asked.

  “No, just Stevie . . .”

  “Get him on his cell,” Ted commanded one of his passengers, who dug into his own pocket for a cell phone.

  “Zero bars. Weird,” the passenger said.

  The group of vehicles whipped along the highway past the hulking, illuminated city on the left. As they moved north, the white van slowly began to gain on the convoy, until it smoothly matched speed with the follow car and hid within Ted’s blind spot for a few seconds. Traffic was sparse in the middle of the night. After a moment of calibrated driving, the passenger-side window of the white van opened just an inch and a barely visible, silenced gun barrel emerged from the crack.

  Pop! Pop! Both of the follow car’s left tires exploded, seemingly simultaneously—two perfect shots. The three men inside the vehicle were thrown to the side as they began to skid across the highway pavement. They slid across two lanes of traffic with a ghastly shower of sparks and smashed into a side barrier, their vehicle rendered completely immobile. Within twenty seconds, Roger’s three staffers, led by Ted, had jumped out of the follow car and were attempting to wave down the armored truck.

  ■

  Leo and Stevie were already a third of a mile down the highway, past the horizon angle of a sloping turn, completely oblivious to their security’s predicament. And they lacked a working radio. Leo powered the truck north. They were only a few miles from the uptown exit of their first drop-off.

  Suddenly, two motorcycles flew up the FDR towards the truck. Each motorcycle had a well-built man on front and a female passenger holding on behind him. All four were clad in leather from head to toe, with full helmets covering their faces. The motorcycles crisscrossed behind the armored truck.

  Stevie noticed the motorcycles first. “Fucking gearheads,” he said. He held up the shotgun in his hands and grinned. “I’ll just flash this through the window. That’ll scare them off.”

  “Nah. It’s fine. Guys on rice rockets think they own the road. What they don’t realize is we just don’t want to kill them,” Leo responded, staying focused, keeping his eyes on the road.

  The motorcycles slowed down to exactly the speed of the truck. The woman on the back of one bike reached into her bag, and her hand emerged gripping what appeared to be a drill. Extending from the front of the drill was a titanium bracket with four industrial suction cups at each corner.

  Leo noticed the motorcycle moving even closer to his door. Not able to see what was in her hands, he smiled. “I see them now. Think she’ll show us her tits?” he asked Stevie humorously.

  It was at that exact moment that Leo abruptly noticed the bizarre drill contraption the woman was holding. She rammed it against the side of the truck—on Leo’s door. The suction pads, attached to each end of the bracket system, immediately stuck tight to the armored truck’s outer layer. She no longer had to hold the drill, because it had become secured to the side of the armored truck itself.

  “The hell is that?” Leo asked Stevie as he craned his neck to observe the device through his side-view mirror.

  “Huh?” Stevie didn’t have eyes on it.

  “I’m pulling over,” Leo said.

  “But we’re not supposed to stop the run,” replied Stevie seriously, “for anything.” He had learned over time that not obeying Roger’s instructions was never deft—always daft.

  Leo started to slow down anyway as the woman on the motorcycle initiated the drill with a press of a button on a small remote control in her pocket. Apparently controlled via a wireless connection, the drilling system was topped by a diamond bit with a lubricant pump attached to the side to mitigate friction. Within a matter of seconds, the drill slid into the reinforced-steel side of the armored truck like a knife through butter. The bit ground through the door, creating a small, precise hole in the flank of the truck.

  Leo stared down in shock. “Oh my god,” he exclaimed slowly. Both Leo and Stevie watched as the tip of the bit stopped moving. Then it began to rip counterclockwise, turning in reverse. As quickly as it had entered, it was gone. Only the small hole remained.

  “Don’t slow down, man. Gun it. Fucking gun it!” Stevie exclaimed, his fingers gripping the shotgun tight, bracing for whatever was to come.

  “Hells yeah, I am.” Leo nodded his agreement and jammed his foot onto the accelerator.

  Behind the armored truck, the first motorcycle faded away and the second one took its place. A brunette was sitting on the back of the second motorcycle, her long hair streaming in the wind. Once she was within a few feet of the remote-controlled titanium rig suctioned to the side of the armored truck, she pressed another small remote button. On command, the entire drill unit dropped out of the brackets and onto the street below, leaving the open titanium bracket system still attached to the truck and nothing else. A path was now cleared to access the small hole the drill had bored. The brunette placed another device into the brackets. The new unit consisted of a grey cylinder about the size of a soda can, connected to a battery-charged, pressurized gas injector. The injector latched into place. The brunette flicked a switch. Then with a tap on her driving partner’s shoulder, the second motorcycle flew off into the night, following quickly behind the first.

  As the two bikes departed, Leo could hear the rumbling of another piece of machinery behind the armored truck. He glanced into his side-view mirror, but couldn’t quite make the shape out. All he could tell was that a hulking vehicle behind him was blotting out all of the streetlights and casting a shadow over his armored truck. But Leo and Stevie were afflicted by an even more pertinent and mission-critical issue. A light gassy substance had entered the truck, pumped in by the injector on the outside. Visible only around the drill hole, the gas quickly dissipated as it expanded into the space. Leo’s eyes started to dilate wildly. His hand slipped off the wheel, and Stevie noticed.

  “You okay, man?” Stevie asked. But he received no response. Stevie realized t
hat Leo had stopped moving. He flung his body over to the driver’s side, grabbed the wheel and attempted to guide the truck himself. But then he felt it too. The gas began to take him. Stevie barely heard the massive clunking noise on the roof of the truck. He tried in vain to handle the wheel, but while doing so, the truck started to swerve across lanes without his control. It was aimed directly at a concrete barrier adjacent to an exit on the highway ahead. Stevie could barely see. His eyelids felt as though they each had a thousand pounds of weight pulling them down. He was moments from succumbing to the gas’s power.

  Stevie used the last fleeting moments of his consciousness to brace himself for the certain collision ahead, when he started to feel a new sensation—weightlessness. The armored truck rose a few inches off the ground, then a few feet. Stevie realized that somehow the truck was floating into the sky. The last thought he processed before passing into another plane of existence was that of confusion. Was it just the gas, or was he really flying?

  Behind the armored truck, a massive industrial flatbed drove along the highway. An electromagnetic crane rig had been affixed to the flatbed, and had attached itself to the armored truck. The unyielding magnet held the armored truck suspended in the air as the flatbed and crane rig flew down the highway. Once the armored truck was high enough in the air to avoid any collisions, the crane slowly rotated and lowered it onto the flatbed.

  Then the flatbed, with its crane and illegally acquired armored truck worth over a hundred million dollars, flew north into the night and away from the bright spires of Manhattan and their phosphorous glow.

  FOUR

 

  EXACTLY TWENTY-FOUR HOURS before the gold crash, David wasn’t worried about a single problem in the world except for making pancakes. His eight-year-old son Mikey had demanded them and he was fulfilling said request. That’s how life should be on Sundays. He was dedicated to being the father he never had, and that wasn’t just a turn of phrase.

  ■

  David’s own father had died heroically in a gun battle when David was a small child. At least that’s what he distinctly remembered his mother, Veronika Belov, informing him at the time. As more time passed, David had realized that Papa’s death had been ignominious at best. Veronika had refused to speak about it for years. She was sixty-five years old, and he knew that she would never talk about it again. It was the past—water under the bridge. He still didn’t know exactly who was involved, nor even the circumstances that had led to his father’s death. Maybe it had been drugs. Or counterfeit cash. Or something worse. All his mother had told him throughout the years was that his father had been a “Russian bear,” a fierce man who had known both the limits of his own brain and the power of aggression. He had used the first to a lesser degree than the second. Veronika had always viewed life from the perspective of the various members of the animal kingdom. She felt that the wild kingdom provided a better understanding of humanity. This was presumably because it’s easier to objectively understand our motivation by watching creatures that have no subtlety and cannot control their urges.

  In the five brief years that he’d known his father, Papa hadn’t wanted much to do with David. That’s probably because David had been a very intelligent baby. From an early age, he had noticed when something was out of sync in the world. But he hadn’t had the vocabulary to fix it. So David would simply scream and carry on as if the world was ending. That was his preferred method of communication as a child—for hours. At age three, there is a fine line between an irrational temper tantrum and the first spark of bona-fide genius. And in general, bears don’t like screaming mice. His mother told him that Papa didn’t use his head nearly as much as David, and that was a fact David had always prided himself upon. He wished that his dad was still alive, but he wasn’t sure what they’d have in common. David wouldn’t have wanted to go down Papa’s footsteps as a thuggish foot soldier within Bensonhurst’s now-indigenous, primarily Eastern European and former Soviet-bloc mafia population.

  It was difficult to avoid one’s past, no matter how hard David tried. For example, Veronika still insisted on calling her son “Davyd,” and pronouncing it exactly as such. Although that was the name on his birth certificate, David hated it. His first form of identification from the DMV read “David,” per his choice. He’d never looked back. David knew that his family’s past was never fully escapable, because by definition it was the building blocks from which he existed. But at least he recognized the syndrome. When he was a teenager, he’d actually taken a few steps in his father’s direction. But he quickly snapped out of it. He had realized that his was a different destiny. The only two keepsakes that remained of Papa’s were a wedding photo that sat on Veronika’s television at home and an old suede leather jacket. Veronika had given it to him when his shoulders broadened, around age fourteen. And David still wore that jacket every once in awhile. But he never told anyone where it came from.

  ■

  All of this was why Sunday mornings were dedicated to his own son, whom he loved more than life itself. And it must be mentioned that David’s son’s name was spelled “Michael” on his birth certificate, when any number of other derivations would have pleased Veronika moreso. While Papa had not provided intellectual inspiration, or particularly positive genetics, David hoped that Mikey Belov would be set up in life to utilize both. He was confident that if he raised his son right, Mikey would accomplish more than anyone in the lineage prior.

  David flipped a pancake with one hand while tapping on a laptop with the other. He was browsing through children’s animation shows, looking for a particular cartoon.

  “There’s nothing else you can watch, in the entire span of the media universe, besides the Samurai Cat?” he asked as Mikey padded into the room with a bathing suit on and a towel wrapped around his body like an Egyptian mummy.

  “No way, Daddy. It has to be the Cat!” Mikey replied.

  David clicked on a link. The video was there, but it was located behind a login paywall.

  “That one’s not a free play, Mikey,” David said. He sighed, thought for a moment, and then muttered under his breath, “Guess that’s why I’m here.”

  ■

  When David was a child, Veronika would constantly remind him that in order to succeed in the world, he needed a skill. That was why Papa had failed. His skills were of a low-grade, bulk-price talent that didn’t depend one iota on the brain behind it. The key to the American dream was identifying and exploiting one’s own personal edge. No edge? No dream. Develop a skill to differentiate yourself from the masses ahead of you and you’d soon find them mostly behind you. It very quickly became evident to David that his skill was not going to involve physical dominance. There was no way he was going to beat his childhood best friends, Vlad and Baranowski, at tag on the school playground or in pickup basketball games in the park across the street. David would always come in last at anything that required muscle mass.

  David found his skill in eighth grade. He could solve math problems faster than anyone he knew. At first he had hidden from the talent because when a boy is fourteen years old, in the less-than-posh areas of Brooklyn, it was decidedly uncool to know how to calculate the area underneath a curve. But luckily David had just enough foresight at that age to not cripple himself. He was never going to be the guy to answer a question incorrectly when he knew the right one. Even in his highly impressionable years, Veronika’s voice tugged him back from the brink, saying, “What’s your skill going to be, Davyd? What’s going to get you out of here?” So even as he tried and largely failed to sharpen his elbows in the outside world, David found himself excelling in everything that involved math. That included physics, algebra, and computer science. When his school opened up its first computer lab in a remote corner off the science department’s hallway, David was the first to show up. He realized that math controlled computers and that computers would eventually control almost every element of life. This skill gave David his first sense of power, nascent a
s it was. More importantly, it gave him his edge.

  During the difficult years after high school, David used to jog through Bensonhurst, past Fort Hamilton, and into the Shore Road Park every morning. He’d run up the side of the park, against the water, staring out over the upper bay of the Hudson. After a few miles the city would finally shift into view from the right. The pile of capitalism was nothing less than glorious to David, rising above the water like Oz.

  At the time, David was running because he couldn’t stop himself from waking up before dawn. Every single morning, by five o’clock sharp, his entire body was strung out with the anxiety. Life was an immensely stressful puzzle. He’d spent a few years slowly pulling his way up by the bootstraps. While living in a tiny walkup apartment with his girlfriend Marina, he studied for his undergraduate math degree, followed by his masters in computer science at Stony Brook in Long Island. During that period, David found it hard to stop thinking about what would happen if he failed. The weight of said pressure would seize him each and every morning. It would fling him from his bed, into his shoes, and out the door. The run provided more comfort than sleep ever could have. He craved the consistency as he curved right along the park and was greeted by the looming skyscrapers of Gotham. The buildings were the most beautiful creatures he’d ever seen, and he could even make out the open oval at the top of Montgomery Noyes’ headquarters at the bottom of Wall Street. When the sun finally ascended midway through his run, David wouldn’t actually watch the sunrise itself. He would watch the sun’s reflection off the buildings in the city that he aspired to matter in, and he wouldn’t look away until his route forced him back home.