Storm Front

CHAPTER 4

NEW YORK, New York

Soaring high above lower Manhattan, Marlowe Tower was a ninety-two-story monument to American economic might, a glistening glass menagerie that housed some of the country’s fiercest financial animals. In New York’s hypercompetitive commercial real estate market, merely the name — Marlowe Tower — had come to represent status, to the point where neighboring properties bolstered their reputations by describing themselves as “Near Marlowe.”

Marlowe Tower was a place where wealthy capitalists went to grow their already large stake in the world. After parking their expensive imported cars at nearby garages, they entered at street level through the air lock created by the polished brass revolving doors, wearing their hand-crafted leather shoes and custom-tailored silk suits, each determined to make his fortune, whether it was his first, his second, or some subsequent iteration thereof.

G. Whitely Cracker V joined them in their battle each day. But to say he was merely one of them did not do him justice. The fact was, he was the best of them. His Maserati (or Lexus, or Jaguar, or whatever he chose to drive that day) was just a little faster. His shoes were just a little finer. His suits fit just a little better.

And his executive suite on the eighty-seventh floor made him the envy of all who entered. It was six thousand square feet — an absurd bounty in a building where office space went for $125 a square foot — and it included such necessities as a coffee bar, a workout area, and a multimedia center, along with luxuries like a full-time massage therapist, a vintage video game arcade, and a feng shui–themed “decompression center” with a floor-to-ceiling waterfall.

As the CEO and chief proprietor of Prime Resource Investment Group LLC, Whitely Cracker had won this palace of prestige the new old-fashioned way. He’d earned it — by taking an already huge pile of family money, then leveraging it to make even more.

Whitely Cracker was the scion of one of New York’s wealthiest families — the Westchester Crackers, not the Suffolk Crackers — and could trace the origin of his name to 1857, with the birth of his great-great-grandfather.

The first in the line had actually gone by his given name, Graham. This, naturally, was before the National Biscuit Company came on the scene and popularized the slightly sweetened rectangular whole wheat food product. Graham W. Cracker had been a visionary who had made a fortune by luring Chinese workers across the Pacific to build railroads for substandard wages. That Graham Cracker gave his son, Graham W. Cracker Jr., seed money that he used to create a textiles conglomerate.

This set the pattern honored by all the Graham Crackers who followed: Each made his riches in his own area, then helped set up his son to make money in an industry befitting his generation.

Graham W. Cracker III struck it rich with oil refineries. G. W. Cracker IV — the popularity of the aforementioned Nabisco product had necessitated the use of initials — had been in plastics. And in keeping with the modern times, G. Whitely Cracker V, who used his middle name so no one confused him with his father, had become a hedge fund manager.

Yet while all this wealth and success might make them seem detestable, the fact was people couldn’t help but like a guy named Graham Cracker. And G. Whitely Cracker was no exception. At forty, he was still trim and boyishly handsome, with but a few wisps of gray hair beginning to blend in with his ash-blond coiffure. He smiled easily, laughed appropriately at every joke, and shook hands like he meant it.

He coupled this effortless charm with a gift for remembering names and a warmth in his relations, whether personal or professional. He was self-deprecating, openly admitting that his wife, Melissa — who was adored in social circles — was much smarter than him. And in a world full of philanderers, he was unerringly faithful to her.

He was also endlessly generous to his employees, whom he treated like family. He was a friend to nearly every major charity in New York, lavishing each with a six-figure check annually and seven-figure gifts when any of them found themselves in a pinch. And if ever he was panhandled by an indigent, he kept a ready supply of sandwich shop coupons — nonrefundable and nontransferrable, so they couldn’t swap the handout for booze.

It was this last trait that led to one glossy magazine deeming him the “Nicest Guy in New York.”

Everyone, it seemed, liked Whitely Cracker.

Which made it all the more confounding that he was being stalked by a trained killer.

Whitely Cracker was, naturally, unaware of this as he drove in from Chappaqua. He had kissed Melissa at 5:25 A.M. that Monday, put on his favorite driving cap and driving gloves, the ones that made him feel like a badass, climbed into his vintage V12 Jaguar XJS, because he was in a Jaguar kind of mood that day, and made the drive to Marlowe Tower, tailed several car-lengths back by an unassuming white panel van.

That Whitely was a creature of habit made him surpassingly easy to stalk. He liked to be at his office by 6:30 A.M. at the latest, to get a good head start on his day. This was not unusual among the kind of people who populated Marlowe Tower, some of whom passive-aggressively competed with one another to see who could be the first to push through the brass doors each day. The current winner clocked in shortly after four each morning. Whitely Cracker had no patience for such foolishness. What was the point of being absurdly wealthy if you couldn’t set your own schedule?

By 7 A.M., he had dispatched a few small items that had built up overnight from markets in Asia and Europe, beaten back his accountant, the always-nervous Theodore Sniff, and retreated to his in-office arcade. Every super-rich guy needed some eccentricities, and classic video games were Whitely’s. They soothed him, he said, but also focused his brain. He claimed to have invented one of his most lucrative derivatives while battering Don Flamenco in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.

On this morning, he made sure Ms. Pac-Man was well fed. He burnished Zelda’s legend for a little while. Then he switched to Pitfall!, where he amassed a small pretend fortune by swinging on ropes and avoiding ravenous alligators — oblivious that he had a real predator’s eyes on him, albeit electronically, the whole time.

When he had finally satisfied his pixel-based urges, it was nine-fifteen, which meant it was time to turn his attention to his actual fortune. He left the arcade, smiling and waving at the employees he passed on the way, and returned to his office, where he settled in front of his MonEx 4000 terminal. He entered his password, the one that only he knew, and it came to life.

The MonEx 4000 had, in the last few years, become the preferred platform of the serious international trader, replacing a variety of lesser competitors. Faster and more versatile than its rivals, it provided access to all major markets, currencies, and commodities, seamlessly integrating them into one interface. Its operations were baffling to anyone unfamiliar with the bizarre language of the marketplace — its screen would appear to be something like hieroglyphics to a layman — but a seasoned trader could work it like a maestro.

Whitely Cracker made it sing better than most. He was legendary among fellow traders for his ability to keep up with a myriad of complex deals simultaneously. In the worldwide community of MonEx 4000 users, many of whom only knew each other virtually, Whitely’s virtuosity had earned him the nickname “the great white shark” — because he was always moving and always hungry.

This day was no different. Within a half hour of the opening of North American markets, he had already made twelve million dollars’ worth of transactions, and he was just getting warmed up. He had just pulled the trigger on a 1.1-million-dollar purchase of cattle futures — he would sell them long before they matured four months from now, because Lord knows there wasn’t space in the decompression center for that many cows — when the MonEx 4000’s instant messaging function flashed on the top of his screen.

It was from a trader in Berlin to whom Whitely had just made an offer.

Selling short again, White?

Whitely’s handsome face assumed a slight grin. His fingers flew.

Just hedging some bets elsewhere. Looking to shore up some significant gains. You know how it is.

The top of the screen stayed static for a moment, then a new message appeared.

Ah, the great white strikes again.

Whitely studied this for a moment, weighed the benefits of prodding the guy a little bit, and decided there could be no harm. He was offering the Berliner what would appear to be a solid deal. The guy would be a fool not to take it.

Don’t worry. You’re not my tuna today. Just a small mackerel. Maybe even a minnow.

Whitely enjoyed this, the jocularity of bantering traders. He liked the money, too. But the real benefit was, simply, the deal itself. He was an unabashed deal junkie. Buy low, sell high. Un-earth an undervalued asset, snap it up. Discover an overvalued asset, sell it short. Big margins. Small margins. Didn’t matter. The deal was his drug. Whether he made millions, thousands, or mere hundreds was immaterial. As long as it was a win. The high was incomparable. When he was trading, he was even more engrossed than he was when he played his video games. The hours just slipped by. The outside world barely mattered when he was trading.

He certainly didn’t notice that his every move — and every trade — was being captured by three tiny cameras that had been hidden behind his desk: one in the bookcase, one in a picture frame, one in the liquor cabinet.

Each had a perfect view of every trade he offered and accepted. Each relayed its crisp, high-definition video feed to an office on the eighty-third floor.

On the other side of his desk, and littered in numerous spots throughout those six thousand square feet, there were more cameras and bugs. It helped that Whitely preferred such lavish furnishings: It made for more hiding places. His home in Chappaqua, his various cars, anywhere he regularly went — even his health club — were festooned with them. There was nothing he did, no conversation he had, that wasn’t being monitored by a person well trained in the ways of killing.

Whitely was oblivious to it all, just as he was oblivious for the first three minutes Theodore Sniff spent lurking in his doorway midway through the morning. Sniff had been Prime Resource Investment Group’s accountant since its inception. He did not have his boss’s charm, and certainly lacked his good looks: Sniff was short, fat, and balding, the Holy Trinity of datelessness. His clothes, which seemed to wrinkle faster than ought to have been scientifically possible, never fit right. By the end of his long days at the office, his body odor tended to overpower whatever deodorant he chose. Even with a salary that should have made him plenty attractive to the opposite sex — or at least a certain opportunistic subset of it — Sniff hadn’t been laid in years.

His lone gift was for accounting. And there, he was genius, capable of keeping a veritable Domesday Book’s worth of accounts and ledgers at his command. Whitely leaned heavily on this ability because, in truth, he couldn’t really be bothered to oversee these things himself. Whitely took pride in his instincts as a trader, instincts that had built an empire. He could feel changes in the marketplace coming the way the Native Americans of yore could feel the ground trembling from buffalo. But keeping up with the books? Boring. Melissa told him he should make more of an effort. He told her that’s what Sniff was for.

Cracker was so loath to pay attention to the bottom line, he even tended to overlook when Sniff was in the room. For Whitely, a man ordinarily so attuned to his staff, ignoring Sniff was like a congenital condition. There was seemingly nothing he could do to stop it. The accountant was entering his fourth minute of standing in the doorway before he finally coughed softly into his hand. Whitely did not look up from his screen. Sniff rattled the change in his pocket. Nothing. Sniff cleared his throat, this time louder. Still nothing. Finally, he spoke.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Sniff said. “But it’s important.”

“Not now, Teddy,” Whitely said. Whitely always called him Teddy. Whitely used the name affectionately; he thought it brought the men closer. Sniff never had the courage to tell his boss he abhorred it.

“Sir, I…”

“Teddy,” Whitely said sharply, without taking his eyes off his screen. “I’m trading.”

Sniff turned his back and slinked off.

The camera in the far corner caught his dejected look as he departed.