Escape (53 page)

"What happens if the computer crashes?" Giancarlo asked.

"Why, the end of the world as we know it, sport," Eric replied seriously, then leaned close to whisper again. "Now, this is top top secret; nobody's supposed to know this stuff—or at least they aren't very public with it—but there's a backup computer. It records everything this one does. Blow the shit out of this building and it ain't a good thing—don't get me wrong, there's a lot of money in these computers and the rest of the stuff—but all those transactions are still being recorded on the backup."

"Still, it seems like awfully important equipment to leave in a glass room," Marlene noted.

"Yeah, so it would seem," Eric replied. "But looks are deceiving. One of the security guys here told me that 'glass' is an inch thick, and made of multilayered polycarbonate laminate. It can take the best shot from a high-powered rifle without a dent. He told me that it would even take a pretty good bomb to get through that stuff. That's a special door, too. Titanium frame and lock. No one gets in without a special code—mostly only the techies who take care of the brains. The room is kept at a constant temperature and humidity, dust-free too. That computer's got a nicer apartment than I do."

Eric led the group past the cafeteria, to the twins' disappointment. "Don't worry, we'll come back for lunch," he said. "They make a mean Hero Sandwich, and the brownies are to die for."

Back upstairs, he led them around the hardwood floor of the main trading area. "When they decided to replace the old exchange in 1901 and build this one here, the board of directors held a competition between the eight best architects in the city to see who could come up with the best design. The rules were simple: The trading floor needed to have a lot of space, a lot of light—that's a thirty-square-foot skylight in the ceiling—and be convenient and comfortable for transacting business. A guy named George B. Post won, and this is the result."

He continued the tour with obvious pride. "This building opened in 1903 and right away was recognized as one of the most magnificent structures in the entire country. The main trading room where we're standing is 109 feet by 140 feet, and those marble walls are 72 feet tall up to the ceiling."

"Wow, you really know your stuff," Marlene said.

"I used to date one of the tour guides when they let the public in here. She used to recite that stuff when we were ..."

"Too much information," Marlene interjected.

Eric laughed and proceeded to lead them around the tall, vaguely figure-eight-shaped trading stations, talking and joking with many of the men and women who sat watching monitors as their fingers typed. "These guys are placing orders to buy and sell different stocks," he explained. "Some of them are general traders; they deal with whatever looks hot. Others specialize, like in oil futures or, say, airline stock. Most of them work for big banks and trading firms only doing really large transactions, like a million dollars or more. You used to have to buy a seat on the Exchange. Up to a few years ago, they were pretty pricey—the most expensive went for a little more than four million dollars."

Zak whistled. "Just to sit in front of those monitors?"

"Just to sit in front of those monitors and hopefully make a buttload of cash," Eric nodded.

"What's with all the people wearing the same color coats?" Zak asked. "I see blue, green, red."

"You mean like mine," Eric said, tugging on the blue jacket with Gotham City Bank stenciled on the back. "They identify who you work for and whether you belong here. They've been around since before 9/11, but now the security guys actually pay attention."

"What about the folks running around in the red hats?" Mariano asked.

"Those are people with companies that are being listed on the NYSE for the first time. They're here for a tour and the Opening Bell. It used to be a really big day for a company, and it still is to a degree, just not quite like it used to be."

Eric looked at his watch. "It's almost time for the Opening Bell now, and you guys will want to be there for that. Some bigshot Arab is ringing today."

In the gallery, Eric pointed to a small dais above the main trading floor. "Look, they're getting ready to ring the bell, which starts the trading day," he said. "The first bell was a Chinese gong; now they're brass bells."

The little group saw that a group of people had appeared on the dais. Several of them wore traditional Arab headdresses. There were also a few familiar faces in the crowd.

"Hey look, there's Lucy," Zak exclaimed.

"And V. T.," Giancarlo added.

Marlene frowned.
Where's Jaxon?

Butch had called and told her about Jaxon's message that Lucy couldn't visit the loft for security reasons, so she hadn't expected her to show up in Queens. When the twins and her dad were otherwise occupied, they'd had a long talk about what she was doing, especially the meeting at the Bowery Mission and the Brooklyn dockyard.

"Just you and the twins stay out of the subway on Tuesday, and definitely don't go near Grand Central Terminal," Lucy had concluded. "I know it's selfish because I can't tell everybody, but I don't want to lose my family."

Lucy hadn't said anything about visiting the stock exchange, so this was a surprise. Especially because Jaxon was nowhere in sight. Maybe in another part of the building?... Or
where the danger is.

"Can we go see Lucy?" Zak asked.

"No, she's working as a translator for some Saudi prince."

"That's some Saudi prince, all right," Eric said. "He's one of the richest men in the world. Just look at everybody pissing on themselves to get his attention."

Prince Esra bin Afraan al-Saud waved to a small crowd of photographers and reporters gathered on the floor below with an adoring crowd of stockbrokers. Next to him stood the president of the Exchange, who was beaming and waving as well. Some of the traders on the floor started applauding, and a few actually cheered.

"I take it this is a big deal," Marlene said.

"Yeah, if you're a whore," Eric scowled. "The guy has one of the biggest hedge-fund companies in the world, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, make that billions—he certainly controls that much anyway. It's a big deal when his people place an order. We're talking about millions of dollars' worth of stock in a single transaction, which means a hefty commission for the trader who places the order and for his bank. Ever since the prince got to New York, a lot of those guys down there have been bending over and taking it up the..."

"Uh, children present," Marlene interrupted, nodding at the twins.

"Oh, like we haven't heard that word before," Giancarlo laughed.

"Or what it means for someone to take it up the old ..."

"ZAK! That's enough," Marlene exclaimed, shooting her cousin a dirty look. "Thank you very much for that imagery, Eric, but I believe we get your point. Prince Esra is worth a lot of money to a lot of people. So how come you're not down there groveling with the others?"

"I have my pride. Believe me, my bank has been brown-nosing with the best of them, though we're not one of the big players. But I'd rather deal with clients I know and trust, and who trust me. This business, as long as human beings are involved in the trades, is still based on that trust, and it's how I prefer to do business. Most of the people who work here at the Exchange, I'd trust with my life, or at least the car keys to my BMW. We get the occasional joker who will stab you in the back—sell something out from under you after you've made a deal—some of them even make a good living. But nobody trusts them, and sooner or later they burn enough bridges and can't do any deals. By the same token, I don't trust these oil Arabs. They don't love us none, even the ones who pretend they do. Their granddaddies found black gold, and now they've got all this money and power, but they'd still like to stick it to us."

"You know the same sort of things have been said about Italians," Marlene pointed out. "We're all a bunch of gangsters and thieves. Dirty, illiterate WOPs ... without papers. Can't trust us."

"Hey, don't I know it. We both have parents who came over on a boat and put up with that shit. But their whole goal was to assimilate as quickly as possible ... to become Americans. Your dad and my dad, their first allegiance was to this country, not the Catholic Church. They dealt with a lot of prejudice, and some of them did become gangsters, but you didn't have homegrown Italian terrorists trying to take down the country on behalf of the Holy Ghost."

"That's a small percentage of them, Eric," Marlene said.

"Yeah, I know. But it's not just the Islamic terrorism thing. I'll admit that 9/11 created a lot of hard feelings toward anybody whose first allegiance is to Allah. But more than that...I think this guy, and other guys like him who run hedge funds, which are unregulated and unsupervised, are a real danger to the economy. And I'm talking the world economy. I don't like the idea of any one person, or company, having that much control over billions of dollars of stock. If something happened—say he got overextended or something bad happened to the company—it could cause a worldwide catastrophe."

"Like when the market crashed in 1929? I think it was called Black Friday," Giancarlo said.

"Yeah, you know about that, huh?" Eric replied.

"A little."

"Well, let me fill you in some more. In 1929, the U.S. economy was going gangbusters. World War I was over, the United States had emerged as a world power, and the stock market was through the roof. Everybody was investing in stocks. Banks were putting their entire portfolios into stocks, not hedging by keeping some assets spread around. Even regular folks were taking their entire retirement nesteggs and savings and putting them into stocks. A few economists kept warning that the market was going to correct itself, and it could be bad, but nobody wanted to listen. It was going to last forever."

Eric looked over at the dais where the prince was getting ready to ring the Opening Bell. He shook his head. "Then in late October 1929, some big companies started selling off their stock, taking their profit out of the market. Stock prices started to fall. Other people saw that and figured somethin' was up—they remembered what them economists were saying—and they started selling off, too. Suddenly, we got a panic on our hands. Everybody's selling and the market is crashing. All that stock was now worth pennies on the dollar; all those cash assets were gone like somebody put a torch to 'em. In one day, the United States lost more capital than it spent in all of World War I. Then banks collapsed; everything they had—all their customers' money—was gone. Ma and Pa Kettle ran down to their bank and demanded their money, even if it was run by smarter people who had diversified and weren't in serious trouble. So even the smart banks were wiped out. All those people—from bank presidents in New York to wheat farmers in Kansas—were left with nothin'. People was destitute. They lost their homes and businesses. Companies that had invested in the market closed; same with companies whose stock was now worthless. People were thrown out of work and couldn't pay their bills, closing more stores and companies. Guys was throwing themselves out of buildings, or shooting themselves."

"Wow, that really happened?" Zak asked.

"Damn straight it did. The problem is that nobody thinks something like that could happen again. They think they got all these protections and that people are smarter about putting all their eggs in one basket. But it could happen. This time, however, the danger is with these huge hedge funds that control so much of the capital invested in the market. In fact, there's already been one case where one went under and the U.S. government had to ask the World Bank to bail out the market, or there would have been a huge disaster. And that wasn't as bad as it could have been, or as bad as it would be now. We're talking about a lot more money, and a much bigger ripple effect on the world economy than happened on Black Friday."

"How serious could it be?" Giancarlo asked.

"Well, the market is all about consumer confidence. A stock has value only if people believe it does. If the market goes down, especially if it goes down suddenly and a lot of people start to panic, it's October 1929 all over again, times a million. And you know what? What happens to the U.S. economy affects the economies of countries all over the world. There'd be global panic—I'm talkin' riots in the streets, famine, unemployment, and even war."

"And the prince could cause all that?" Marlene asked.

Eric shrugged. "What if he dies and the company gets tom apart by infighting or is mismanaged? Or the market takes a sudden downturn, devaluing a lot of the stock he has in the hedge fund, and he doesn't have the money to cover his transactions? Or maybe, something happens and he decides to sell what he has as fast as he can, and because he controls so much, it causes that panic we're all worried about?"

"Aren't there any safeguards?" Marlene asked.

"Sort of," Eric acknowledged. "Partly as a result of that other hedge fund running into trouble, and then 9/11, they put a supposedly fail-safe plan in place. It's called 'circuit breakers,' which operate like when an electronic device overloads and shuts down to prevent a fire. In the event of a sudden, drastic market decline, these circuit breakers shut down trading for certain periods of time."

"How do they know when to shut down?" Giancarlo asked.

"It's measured as a sudden decrease in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. There are three circuit-breaker thresholds—10 percent, 20 percent, and 30 percent. At 10 percent, the computer shuts the market down for an hour to see if that stabilizes things, and gives people a chance to stop panicking. But if necessary, they can shut it down for a day or more."

"Whew," Marlene said. "The way you were talking there for a moment I thought we were talking about the end of the world. Isn't that how you put it? Glad to know about those circuit breakers."

"Yeah? You really trust technology that much?" Eric gestured at the trading floor. "Just remember what I said about the loss of the human touch. It's a house of cards down there, Marlene."