Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [30]
She smiled to herself as she showed her ID. No one knew who she was; not a single one of them recognized her here in the Stock Exchange foyer.
How very typical that was. Damn it, how typical.
For the past three years, the SEC’s Director of Enforcement had been a most unlikely Wall Street figure: Caitlin Dillon was clearly a force, yet a person of mystery to almost everybody around her.
Women in general had only been permitted on the floor of the Stock Exchange since 1967. Nevertheless, the idea hadn’t particularly caught on. A prominent sign in the visitor’s gallery of the Exchange still read:
WOMEN MAKE POOR SPECULATORS. WHEN THROWN UPON THEIR OWN RESOURCES, THEY ARE COMPARATIVELY HELPLESS. EXCELLING IN CERTAIN LINES, THEY ARE FORCED TO TAKE BACKSEATS IN SPECULATION. WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE OF A MAN, A WOMAN ON WALL STREET IS LIKE A SHIP WITHOUT A RUDDER.
Caitlin Dillon had actually inherited her job because of her predecessor’s bad luck in the shape of a fatal coronary. Caitlin knew that insiders had predicted she wouldn’t last two months. They compared the fateful situation with a politician’s wife taking over for an unexpectedly invalid husband. Caitlin was called by some “the interim enforcer.”
For that reason, and some strong personal ones from her past, she had decided that—for however long she might last in the job—she was going to become the sternest, hardest SEC Enforcement Officer since Professor James Landis had been doing the hiring himself. What did she have to lose?
She was, therefore, stubbornly serious. Some said Caitlin Dillon was unnecessarily obsessed with white-collar criminal investigations, with skillfully prosecuting malfeasance by senior officers of major American Corporations.
“I’ll tell you something off the record,” Caitlin had once said to a dear friend, Meg O’Brian, the financial editor of Newsweek. “The ten most wanted men in America are all working on Wall Street.”
As the “interim” Enforcement Officer at the SEC, Caitlin Dillon made a lot of news very fast. The mystery of Caitlin Dillon—how she had surfaced virtually from nowhere—grew each week she held on to the job. The powerbrokers on the Street still wanted to replace her, but suddenly they found they couldn’t do so very easily. Caitlin was too good at what she did. She’d become too visible. She was almost instantly a symbol for the disenfranchised in America’s financial system.
At 7:45 that morning, Caitlin finally reached her office inside No. 13 Wall. It was respectably large.
She removed her coat and, as she started to sit down, took a deep breath.
On her desk lay a damage report prepared for her the previous night. As her eyes quickly scanned the page, she felt a deepening despair at the sheer amount of destruction done.
The Federal Reserve Bank.Salomon BrothersBankers Trust.Affiliated Fund.Merrill-Lynch.U.S. Trust Corporation.The Depository Trust Company.
The list went on to detail fourteen downtown New York buildings that had been partially or completely destroyed.
She closed her eyes, placing the palm of her hand flat against the surface of the report. Fourteen different buildings in the Wall Street financial district—the whole thing was beyond her, out of control by any measure.
She opened her eyes.
It was the start of the second day of the formal investigation of Green Band, and she knew no more than she’d known before. This disturbing state of ignorance settled inside her head like a spreading black cloud.
It was going to be a long, long Sunday.
Chapter 22
CARROLL STRODE BRISKLY from a State Department limousine toward the ominous gray stone entrance-way to No. 13 Wall.
At least Green Band had left this building mostly intact—a fact that caused him to wonder. If a terrorist cell was going to strike out at U.S. capitalism, why wouldn’t they destroy the Stock Exchange?
Carroll had on a knee-length, black leather topcoat which Nora had given him the Christmas before her death. At the time she