The Prince of Risk A Novel(128)

“Out! Out! Out!” he shouted. “The place is booby-trapped.”

He stood by the door, counting his men as they ran past. The last man brushed by.

Barnes turned to leave.

He never made it.



Twenty-nine seconds after he had entered the house, a 10-pound charge of C4 plastic explosive wrapped in a bed sheet filled with cutlery, candelabra, and cooking ware and hidden in the dresser 2 feet away detonated.

Supervisory Special Agent Bill Barnes was vaporized.

Miraculously, no other member of the SWAT team was seriously injured.





83




Michael Grillo took a long, satisfying draw from his cigar. Jeb Washburn sat next to him, enjoying one of his own. The men were talking to Paul Lawrence Tiernan about his Palantir software and how it had spotted the coming attack.

“I first noticed the pattern a year ago. I use the program to trend stock market activity. I noted that a lot of investments were being made in corporations with high national security quotients. Power plants, oil, satellites, microchips, Net hardware. Companies you’d never allow a foreigner to own, especially someone who wasn’t an ally. I ran a regression analysis to see if I could find a common thread. Bingo! There it was. All the purchases were run through private equity firms. But then I thought, no way. Each firm can’t be making its decision independently. It’s statistically impossible for that kind of activity to be random. There has to be some kind of correlation, something that ties them together. I dug deeper, and that’s when I hit on the CIC, the China Investment Corporation, which had made large investments in all the private equity firms. Still, I thought the connection might be benign. There are a lot of sovereign wealth funds and it’s their job to invest all around the world. I decided to do some dirty work. Those sly bastards in Shanghai aren’t the only ones who can hack at will.” Tiernan took a sip of Coke and grinned.

“You know the best way into a closed system? Photocopiers. They’re all linked to the Net and they have virtually no defense at all. I got into the CIC’s internal system and everything kept feeding up the ladder to Magnus Lee. He wasn’t just running the CIC. He also headed up a covert organization called i3, the Institute for Investment Initiative, which he created to steal every industrial secret in the United States, Japan, and Europe. The Chinese are not just making fake Rolexes anymore. We’re talking stealing the latest car designs from General Motors, microchip architecture from Intel, stealth technology from Northrop. I don’t know how, but they have eyes and ears everywhere. This is government-sanctioned piracy.” Tiernan looked from one man to the other. “That’s when things got scary and I reached out to Mr. Washburn here. I know when I’m out of my depth. When his supervisors didn’t want to remunerate me for my considerable investment in time and money, I thought about who else might be interested in getting their hands on this information. I saw that Edward Astor sat on the CIC’s international board of advisers. No way he knew about this. He’s a hard-ass. Boy, I thought, would he be pissed if he learned about all this.”



“You still haven’t said anything about the target,” said Grillo.

“In China, everything is about face. Dignity. Standing. How people regard you. Lee’s goal is to elevate the reputation of China as an international financial center. He’s up for a slot as vice premier of finance. No better way of getting it than bringing mighty America down a notch or two. Right now New York, London, and Tokyo are the world’s financial centers. Shanghai is way down on the list. He wants to change that.”

“How?” asked Washburn.

“Not sure. Edward Astor thought they had had a hand in the Flash Crash a few years back and in that Feudal Trading debacle, where that company lost a billion dollars of its own money in thirty minutes, supposedly by entering the wrong algorithm. I don’t know whether they did or they didn’t. What I do know is that Lee has everything he needs to bring our financial infrastructure to its knees. The last company Watersmark bought built the hardware that runs the New York Stock Exchange’s brand-new trading platform. That ought to tell you something.”

“So the Exchange is the target?” asked Washburn. “I’ve got to make a call.”

There was a knock on the door. “That’s Mr. Astor,” said Grillo.

Grillo rose and put his eye to the peephole. He saw the back of Astor’s head, a dark T-shirt.

“Come on in,” he said, opening the door.

A fist drove into his solar plexus. Another smashed his cheek. He collapsed on the floor as a slim Asian man stepped over him. A taller, imperious man followed, slamming the door behind him.