Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [84]
It was here, on the ground floor and mezzanine, that the fiduciary nerve center of the banks and trust companies had been established after the bombings on Wall Street.
The escalator stairs to the mezzanine were frozen to a stop. An impromptu sign over a red arrow said FINANCIAL SECTION, and pointed straight up.
Carroll and Caitlin started to jog up the oddly motionless metal stairs. It was just past 4:00 A.M.
“This looks a little more organized than Number thirteen. Not much though,” Carroll observed.
Red and blue intercom wires were strung up everywhere, hung like Christmas decorations over the escalators and fire exit stairways. Open radio channels connecting uptown offices with the Financial Center squawked and chattered endlessly.
Even at that time in the morning, the hum and buzz of electronic noise was unrelenting.
Out a row of high, vaulted windows, Carroll and Caitlin could see a black Bell Army helicopter landing. Limos and other official cars were discharging somber-looking men carrying business briefcases.
A crash coming this morning?
Another Black Friday?
“What happened? What’s causing the worldwide panic?” Carroll wanted to know as he and Caitlin entered a cavernous marble hallway with no visible way out.
Caitlin rubbed her arms warm as she walked. The glass doors to the outside were constantly opening, and the building was cold as a meat freezer.
“None of the usual safeguards in the systems are working. Not enough fail-safe devices were ever built in for a situation like this. Academic economists have been warning the New York Stock Exchange for years. Every MBA candidate in the country knows that something like this could happen.”
Carroll finally pushed open heavy pine doors into a huge, disturbingly frantic business conference room: a miniature Stock Exchange almost. Brokers on complex NYTECH telephone consoles, analysts with IBM desktop computers, were talking all at once.
The room was absolutely jammed with frenetic, shadowy figures, many of whom were shouting into phone receivers which they managed to cradle, in a practiced defiance of gravity, between jaw and shoulder.
Carroll had the impression of madness, a bedlam: what this place reminded him of, give or take some modern ac-couterments, was a print he’d once seen of a Massachusetts insane asylum in the late 1800s.
Unconditional orders were being issued to sell, at the very best price possible. Jobs and business relationships were being routinely threatened over the long distance telephones.
Jay Fairchild, tall, jowly, bald as an infant, lumbered forward out of a clique of gray suits to meet Caitlin and Carroll. Fairchild was an Undersecretary of the Treasury, a man who’d come to rely regularly on Caitlin’s judgments, her usually astute, almost uncanny hunches about the market.
“Jay, what the hell has happened tonight? Who started it? Where did it start?” It was Caitlin’s turn to appear confused for a change.
The Undersecretary of the Treasury’s eyes had the animation of glass beads.
“Just about every nightmare scenario you or I have ever imagined has come true tonight,” Fairchild finally said.
“At the end of the day yesterday, out in Chicago, metal skyrocketed way up. A ton of futures, coffee, sugar, flopped badly. Bank of America and First National began calling in their loans.”
Caitlin couldn’t hold back her anger at that news. “Those unbelievable shits! Morons. The commodity people out of Chicago won’t listen to anybody, Arch. There have been all sorts of speculative excesses on the options market long before this.”
“None of that is the real problem right now, though,” Jay Fairchild said. “The crash is being precipitated by the goddamn banks! … The banks are almost completely responsible. Let’s wander back to the lobby. You’ll see what I mean. It’s worse than it looks up here. It’s quite sad, really.”
Chapter 62
FBI AGENTS AND hardnosed-looking New York City police officers were screening the credentials of everyone trying to get into the conference room on the ground floor