The Last Hedge (32 page)

“Josh Corbin would have had access,” Dylan said. “When we got the margin call, Josh was able to authorize the money through Switzerland. I’m sure he was on some of the accounts.”

“I’ll be dammed,” Kay said. His minion looked up with a startled face.

“The money was transferred into Chaz’s account.”

“Chaz McGarity?”

“The one and only.”

“It makes no sense,” Kay’s minion said.

“Who is this man?” Dylan asked.

“It makes perfect sense. He was one of us, one of the best in fact. Then…he ran into some problems. Someone had to be sacrificed by those at the top. He and Ray were always close, but after what happened neither of us ever spoke his name.”

“Where is he now?”

“At a tea party somewhere. He lost his mind. Declared his universal hate for the U.S. of A. Who the hell knows. He said he was going to start a revolution.”

“Funded by Josh Corbin.”

“Why the hell would Josh do a thing like that? He’s not a radical.”

“No, he’s not, but you gentleman gave him the perfect motive.” All eyes in the room were on Dylan.

“He thinks you murdered his brother.”

Vanessa felt that the monitoring of the major banks and exchanges were a waste of time. She was perched in an empty office high above Wall Street, looking directly down on the Charging Bull, the huge metallic sculpture near Bowling Green. There was already enough security there to protect a small country. McGarity would have to be a madman to attempt a terrorist attack in the city. Since 9/11, the security force was already prevalent, and surveillance, both overt and covert, was everywhere. She was still looking out the window when Conroy entered.

“How goes it?”

“It ‘goeth’ very ‘boringith’ Why are we here? This feels like such a waste of time.”

“I know,” Conroy said. “Tell me about it. But we did get a tip.”

“What, exactly, are we looking for?”

“McGarity.”

“Right,” Vanessa said, “Perhaps he’ll come up here and invite us out of as beer.”

“Yeah,” was all that Conroy said. “It does seem a little obvious.”

“Not to mention boring.” She returned to the window to survey the scene down on the street. Down below, they could see the foot traffic of the street beginning to pick up. The closing bell had rung roughly an hour ago, and various traders and trade support people were on their way home. For the investment bankers, and dealmakers, the night was still young. Vanessa remembered when she had walked down this very street. She was glad it only lasted one year.

Vanessa watched as Conroy seemed to shuffle around the office. He seemed to be beating around the preverbal bush. Finally, he got around to the painfully obvious.

“I got a call from the office. I need to talk to Dylan, but I wanted to speak to you first.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“No, that’s why I wanted to speak to you first.”

“You don’t want me to go with you?”

“Something like that.” He turned away from her and walked towards the window.

“I want to be respectful of your private life, but now, I feel like its mixing business and pleasure. I’d rather speak to him alone if you don’t mind.”

“I guess I do mind. But I don’t have a choice.”

Conroy had made little mention of her relationship with Dylan, though she knew that it made him uncomfortable. It was awkward for her also, but she tried to make light of it whenever she could. Though it bugged her that he was not inviting her, she understood his concerns.

“You’re sure you’re not ticked off?”

“I already forgot about it. But what came up?”

“I don’t have all the details myself. But some of the IP addresses that Dylan gave us generated pinged responses.”

“Meaning?”

“One of the websites Josh used to communicate with McGarity was alive.”

“Was?”

“Yes, the fake site was supposedly about hunting and fishing. It’s gone now. But we caught just enough of one to intercept some messages. We think something is definitely about to go down and we could use Dylan’s expertise.”

“Huh,” Vanessa said, as she pondered these facts. “Does he know this?”

“That’s where I’m going now.”

“Then tell him I said ‘hello’.”

“I will.”

Vanessa packed her bag and left the office.

She had parked her car several blocks away, near Stone Street. As she walked, she wondered what Conroy really thought of her relationship with Dylan. The whole complexion of the case had changed from when she had first met him, as Dylan was no longer a suspect. Yet it still felt as if she was mixing business with pleasure. She was neither a career fanatic, nor indifferent to her future. She liked the FBI. She would pursue the relationship, but do so in a low key fashion.

As she reached Stone Street, she marveled at the fact that Wall Street was now a real place, with condos and restaurants and shops. People actually lived there. Some of the streets were actually pretty; with cobblestones and old world charm. It was nothing like the Village, but not bad if you worked nearby. When she had worked downtown it had been all offices except for the occasional Irish bar. She could remember a night from her freshman year when a group had sauntered into the city for a night of wilding, and she had nearly passed out in the ladies room at the Kilarney Rose on Wall Street.
Long Island Iced Teas.
By the time she reached he car she realized that she had left her keys upstairs. When she returned to retrieve them, Conroy was gone.

Dylan sat working alone in Ray Corbin’s old office. All of the remaining staff had been dismissed, and an army of temporary workers had been brought in. Martha had been the last person from the fund to leave, and Dylan had heard from Vanessa and Conroy that she cried on the day that she finally removed her belongings. Dylan sometimes wondered if he was in a state of shock, considering the events that had occurred around him. If someone had told him his story, he would not have believed them.

Dylan had been hired as consultant, a specialist to help understand what had happened to much of the Corbin Brothers’ assets. Though he imagined that it was against protocol to bring in outsiders in a situation like this, the sensitive nature of Jonathan Kay’s involvement probably necessitated that the circle be kept small. Dylan had quickly agreed to join the team, and he found that he enjoyed the work. It was like an extended, cryptic puzzle, built upon incomplete information. After the first week, he was enthralled, working deep into the night to uncover the maze of the Corbin Brothers’ financials.

A host of lawyers and accountants had been brought in to deal with the fallout from the firms’ implosion. Dylan wondered if they were all CIA, designed to keep secret the government’s involvement in the case. He had been given little knowledge of how or why Kay had invested with Corbin.

From what he had seen, Kay’s explanation of the events that had transpired seemed accurate, and that the credit crisis, not the CIA, had driven Ray Corbin to take his life. In the last year, the funds performance had been particularly poor. They had lost money every month. In fact, the losses became steeper with each passing day. Dylan imagined that the correlation of these losses to Ray’s mental state was indeed very strong. His fund and everything he worked for had been flushed down the toilet, and death had seemed to him the only way out. Dylan was contemplating these thoughts as Conroy walked through the door of what was once Ray Mallard’s office.

“How’s it going?” Conroy asked.

“It’s going.”

“Finding anything juicy?” Conroy asked.

“Not yet. Did the stuff I sent you help?”

“That’s actually why I’m here.” Dylan turned towards Conroy excitedly.

“You found them?”

“Not yet. They must be completely off the grid. Last trace of Josh Corbin was in Alabama where McGarity allegedly had a training site. The site seems to have been abandoned recently, within days in fact. Since then, silence.”

“So where could they be?”

“Hard to say,” Conroy countered, “Could be anywhere, especially considering the money that is missing.”

Dylan’s cell phone rang. “Hello,” Dylan answered. After a few muffled sentences, he muttered, “I’ll call you back.”

“I wouldn’t need five guesses to know who that was.”

“You were saying,” Dylan said with a smile. Conroy closed the door.

“Why you closing the door? No one is here.”

“That is beside the point. We need to talk.” Dylan reared back in his chair and laughed.

“You’re like a bad girlfriend. Wee talk all the time but you never say anything.”

“Is that what you say to Vanessa?”

“Sometimes.”

“There is something: the list of IP addresses you gave us. We got a hit.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, something tangible.”

An IP address was a physical location of a computer on the Internet. Binky had reversed engineered Josh’s network packet software. The program that he had written had been clever enough to transmit the files to a remote email address that Binky had set up “just in case”. He had been able to uncover most of Josh’s personal information such as credit card numbers and passwords, and also any remote computers that Josh may have accessed. So far it had been futile; there had been no activity on any of his credit cards or bank accounts. But Dylan had turned over a list of the network addresses to Conroy.

“We hit some chatter in the networks. We definitely think something is up.”

“Like?”

“I have a few ideas; I’d be curious to know what you think.”

“Could be anything,” Dylan said, “But I don’t think Josh is after money. He’s too cerebral for that.”

“But if McGarity is involved, they’re not going to a bridge convention. I don’t think it’s the obvious, like blowing up a federal building.”

“No, Josh is too clever for that. It must be something else.”

“I agree. That’s where you come in.”

“Me?”

“The subject of collateral damage seems to have come up. Our profiler thinks if something is going to happen, the target will be something financial.”

“I wouldn’t disagree.”

“And what better person to use than your friend Binky.”

“Come on, Tim, we don’t know that from Adam.”

“I know that. But if your friend is as smart as you say he is, and Josh is as pissed off as we believe he is, what better combination than the two.”

“I guess,” Dylan said, skeptically.

“Do you think it’s possible?”

“You mean, some type of cyber attack scenario? Sure, why not? You know, the banks pay millions of dollars each year to hackers and various shady individuals as bribes and fees to stave off this type of thing. Call it insurance.”

“They pay money to hackers to not attack them?”

“That’s my understanding of it, yeah. The hackers and shadow criminals are so powerful and could cause so many problems that companies find it more efficient to simply pay them each year. It’s like the old mafia protection money thing.”

“Who told you this?”

“Who else? Binky.”

Conroy said nothing. He turned and took a seat on the corner of the desk where Dylan had been sitting.

“All roads come back to Binky.”

“Yeah, they do.”

“I think he’s alive, Dylan, and I’m not the only one. I think that if he were working with Josh, that could be a dangerous.”

“Binky’s not a criminal or a thief. If he were working for Josh, it would be under duress.”

“I think you’re right. But, the two of them together, under whatever circumstances, could pull something off.”

“Sure, donkeys could fly, but …”

“Hey!” Conroy said, as he pounded his hand on the desk. “Take this fucking seriously! Don’t be so god-dammed flip all the time! If you want to find your friend, then help me!”

Dylan popped to his feet. “Then give me something real instead of your bullshit FBI movie-of-the-week scenarios!” They stood down; both men taking a moment to let their feelings cool. Dylan sat back in the chair and put his feet up on the desk.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“We want you to work out of our command center in Jersey. You’re an expert in the markets. We want you to watch for anything unusual.”

“Such as?”

“Suspicious activity.”

“Across the entire market?”

“Maybe.”

“And If I say no?”

“Based on what I was told, if you want to work in your industry again, you don’t really have a choice in the matter.”

“It’s like that.”

“Yes, I’m afraid it is like that.”

Dylan stood up. A picture of Ray and Josh Corbin still rested on a corner of Ray’s desk. Dylan picked it up and examined it.

“Youth: it really is wasted on the young.” He turned back towards Conroy. “So when do I start?”

“We were hoping you could start tomorrow.”

“Good. I’ll be there.”

Dylan stood at the large glass window overlooking the New Jersey swampland. The office he had been confined to was on the twentieth floor, and the view before him stretched from the piers of Manhattan all the way to Newark airport. A light rain had fallen that morning, leaving a dew-like dampness across the window, the building and the flat swampland stretched across the horizon in front of him. The view of the Hudson River was almost as good as his own.

The view was enticing, but Dylan was bored. For fifteen days now he had wandered out to this office in the armpit of New Jersey where The FBI had set up a data-center complete with the latest tools and technologies. He was familiar with the location. After 9/11, many of the larger financial firms had set up their data centers and emergency sites just across the river from Manhattan. In case of fire, attack or natural emergency, the data was safe. It made good sense. It was another layer of abstraction outside the city walls.

That first week, the FBI had given him chauffeured transportation: A non-descript car had picked him up each morning and driven him through the Holland tunnel over to New Jersey. But that had ended. Now, each day, he left his apartment in Tribeca and took the subway up to Christopher Street, then crossed the street to take the Path Train into New Jersey. The total trip took less than an hour door to door. He finally discovered what it felt like to be a commuter. He bought a Kindle. Dylan turned from the window and returned to the cubicle.