Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [259]
It was an easy ride into Newark. The Gulfstream touched down smoothly and taxied off to the general-aviation terminal, where a car was waiting, and one of his senior former employees. He wasn't wearing a tie, which was unusual for the Wharton School graduate.
Mark Gant hadn't slept in fifty hours, and he leaned against the car for stability because the very earth seemed to move under him, to the accompaniment of a headache best measured on the Richter Scale. For all that, he was glad to be here. If anyone could figure this mess out, it was his former boss. As soon as the private jet stopped, he walked over to stand at the foot of the stairs.
"How bad?" was the first thing George Winston said. There was warmth between the two men, but business came first.
"We don't know yet," Gant replied, leading him to the car.
"Don't know?" The explanation had to wait until they got inside. Gant handed over the first section of the Times without comment.
"Is this for real?" A speed-reader, Winston scanned across the opening two columns, turning back to page 21 to finish a story framed by lingerie ads.
Gant's next revelation was that the manager Raizo Yamata had left behind was gone. "He flew back to Japan Friday night. He said to urge Yamata-san to come to New York to help stabilize the situation. Or maybe he wanted to gut himself open in front of his boss. Who the fuck knows?"
"So who the hell's in charge, Mark?"
"Nobody," Gant answered. "Just like everything else here."
"Goddamn it, Mark, somebody has to be giving the orders!"
"We don't have any instructions," the executive replied. "I've called the guy. He's not at the office-hey, I left messages, tried his house, Yamata's house, everybody's friggin' house, everybody's friggin' office. Zip-0, George. Everybody's running for cover. Hell, for all I know the dumb fuck took a header off the biggest building in town."
"Okay, I need an office and all the data you have," Winston said.
"What data?" Gant demanded. "We don't have shit. The whole system went down, remember?"
"You have the records of our trades, don't you?"
"Well, yeah, I have our tapes—a copy, anyway," Gant corrected himself. "The FBI took the originals."
A brilliant technician, Gant's first love had always been mathematics. Give Mark Gant the right instructions and he could work the market like a skilled cardsharp with a new deck of Bicycles. But like most of the people on the Street, he needed someone else to tell him what the job was. Well, every man had some limitations, and on the plus side of the ledger, Gant was smart, honest, and he knew what his limitations were. He knew when to ask for help. That last quality put him in the top 3 or 4 percent. So he must have gone to Yamata and his man for guidance…
"When all this was going down, what instructions did you have?"
"Instructions?" Gant rubbed his unshaven face and shook his head. "Hell, we busted our ass to stay ahead of it. If DTC gets its shit together, we'll come out with most of our ass intact. I laid a mega-put on GM and made a real killing on gold stocks, and—"
"That's not what I mean."
"He said to run with it. He got us out of the bank stocks in one big hurry, thank God. Damn if he didn't see that one coming first. We were pretty well placed before it all went down. If it hadn't been for all the panic calls—I mean, Jesus, George, it finally happened, y'know? One-eight-hundred-R-U-N. Jesus, if people had just kept their heads." A sigh. "But they didn't, and now, with the DTC fuckup…George, I don't know what's going to be opening up tomorrow, man. If this is true, if they can rebuild the house by tomorrow morning, hey, man, I don't know. I