Full Black - Brad Thor [144]
“Cheating,” mumbled Harvath.
“Yes.”
“So what did you find?”
“I looked at all the color-coded dots on our map again, but this time from a financial perspective. I asked myself how I would try to make money out of these attacks, and that’s when it hit.
“I don’t think the failed bomber in Chicago was targeting 100 North Riverside Plaza because it was built above the train tracks. That might have been part of it, but if so, it was secondary.”
“What was the primary reason, then?”
“It was home to Boeing’s corporate headquarters,” said Nicholas.
“You think the bomber wanted to bring down the entire building just to get to Boeing?”
“I do,” replied the little man, “and it’s not just Boeing. I think this is what the orange dots are all about. The one thing they have in common is that they’re in cities from Fairfield, Connecticut, to Palo Alto, California, that are home to the corporate headquarters of all the companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Can you imagine taking out all thirty headquarters at once? Do you have any idea the economic chaos that would cause, especially if you timed it so that most, if not all, of the senior management was present when the buildings came down?”
Harvath’s eyes were wide open now and he propped himself up in bed. “That would be huge.”
“It wouldn’t just be huge, it would be game over. Let’s set aside for a moment that the Dow is basically a BS indicator—”
“What do you mean? The Dow is the financial indicator everyone looks at.”
“No,” Nicholas clarified, “it’s the indicator that retail investors look at. Since 1910 it has been on an upward trajectory. The funny thing is that only one of the thirty companies that make up the Dow has been there over the last hundred years and that’s GE. It’s a massive psychological operation. If a company does poorly, it gets yanked, so the Dow can keep climbing.”
“So if it’s all BS, what difference does it make if it takes a hit?”
“Regardless of what you think of the index, the companies on it are currently some of the best-performing in the United States. A massive, coordinated terrorist attack, wiping out just the top twenty-five people in each company, in effect their intellectual horsepower, could absolutely devastate their stock and, in turn, the financial markets.”
“If your goal was to collapse the United States,” said Harvath, “why not go right for the Dow attack then?”
“To soften the battlefield. I’d want to sow as much chaos and panic as possible. I think it’s brilliant. Make people across the country feel that they aren’t physically safe anywhere and then take all their money away in a financial crisis, and they’ll beg for a return to normalcy. Start throwing in more attacks after that, and they’ll give up anything and stand behind anyone who promises to return things to the way they were. At that point, America, as its citizens know it, is over and is never coming back.”
Having studied history, Harvath knew that once people gave up their freedom in order to restore order, that freedom was never returned. He didn’t even want to consider that this was possible, but he knew that it was and he knew that they had to figure out a way to prevent it from happening. “You’re sure that’s what the orange dots represent?”
“As sure as I can be,” he replied. “But it’s not just because of the locations. I found something else, and it’s exactly what I would do if I were James Standing and thought I was smarter than everyone else and wouldn’t get caught.”
“What is it?”
“Beginning six weeks ago, significant bets were placed that all thirty companies making up the Dow were going to drastically lose value over the subsequent three months.”
“You mean someone is shorting them?”
“That’s the way it looks,” said Nicholas. “Very much in the same way options were purchased against United and American Airlines stocks right before 9/11.”
“Is it Standing?” Harvath asked.
“I said people like Standing were aggressive,