Chapter 6 #3
Mold’s office building was one of the top ones of the list. The instant his martyr brothers could fan out, this building was to be one of the first to be irradiated.
The brothers would be freshly barbered, dressed in the uniforms of Wall Street—suits by Armani, Boss, Jil Sanders.
They would have ID that would bear up to a security guard’s scrutiny.
Muhammed would give the order that one martyr stay in the lobby and another martyr brother come up here, to the fifty-fifth floor, and blow himself up right in front of the snotty secretary’s desk.
Mold would die instantly. His company, everything he stood for, would be gone in an instant, everything untouchable for decades.
It calmed Muhammed right down. Mold was giving off the waves of aggression typical of a Wall Street trader turned hedge fund manager. His temper tantrums were famous. He was used to screaming, intimidating underlings to get his way.
Muhammed looked at Mold calmly, at this dead man walking.
Only a few days to go.
He looked around, then chose a chair and sat down just as Mold said, “Have a seat.”
The chair was by a hot new designer and was made of paper. Muhammed had read that it sold for $10,000, enough to feed hundreds of people in the camps for a year.
Richard Mold deserved to burn. They all did.
Muhammed hitched his trousers so as not to ruin the excellent crease, and crossed his legs.
Silence.
It irritated Mold. His deeply tanned face turned tight, his eyes narrowed. “So, Preston, what’s this about?” he asked coldly.
Muhammed waited a beat, then spoke. “I have a piece of information you might find interesting, and in exchange, I want a name and a phone number.”
Mold’s thick gray eyebrows drew together. “What’s the info and what name?”
Muhammed plucked at the crease of his trousers, enjoying the feel of the fine linen. He let a minute go by, two. Oh, he’d learned the subtle ways of power of the West. Mold watched him, face growing even tighter.
Finally, Muhammed gave a small sigh. “A company you invest in, a very well known corporation, has just announced one of its best quarters ever. A double-digit increase in sales. Its stock has risen by almost fifteen percent on the strength of the report. But it’s false.
The CEO is hiding almost twenty billion dollars in losses and the FBI will arrest him in four days’ time.
If you short that stock, you can make millions. In four days.”
Mold’s face betrayed nothing but Muhammed knew the thoughts going through his mind.
Over the past week, several corporations had announced big gains after almost two years of recession.
Muhammed could be referring to any one of a number of companies.
Guess wrong and you lose a bundle. Guess right, ah.
Make millions in an instant. Add to your reputation as a miracle man.
To someone like Mold, it was irresistible.
He and his kind were born for this kind of challenge.
That tight slash of a mouth opened, cranked the words out. “And what would you want in return for that name?”
Yes! It was a done deal.
“Another name,” Muhammed murmured. “All we both want is a name.”
Mold wasn’t one to utter unnecessary words. He simply stared.
Muhammed leaned forward slightly, lowered his voice. “Some time ago, I heard that there is a man the financial community…uses. When there are problems you can’t buy your way out of. I want the name and contact details of the man who makes problems and people go away.”
Silence. Utter silence.
They were so high no sounds could penetrate and one of the things the woman outside was there for was to prevent noises or distractions. There was no sound at all. Even the air-conditioning was utterly quiet.
Mold watched his eyes for a long moment, then took out a sheet of thick stock, clicked his Cross pen and wrote. The sound of the pen moving across the thick paper was loud in the morning silence. Mold folded the sheet once, twice, then slid it across his desk.
Muhammed had taken his own pen and written out the name of a company on the top of a page torn from the Wall Street Journal.
The name was that of the second-largest corporation in the US. It had just announced record sales after the long slump. As far as Muhammed knew, the figures were correct. Mold would sell short and lose a lot of money.
It wouldn’t matter, because in four days, Mold, his company, the corporation and all of Wall Street would be gone.
Muhammed folded the newspaper page neatly in half and slid it across the half acre of Mold’s desk, pocketing the paper Mold had written on without looking at it.
He rose, briefcase in hand. He didn’t make the mistake of offering his hand.
They stared at each other for a moment. Muhammed bowed his head soberly and walked out, feeling Mold’s eyes boring into the back of his head and hearing the slight crinkle of the piece of paper in his pocket with the name of the man who would solve his problem and help him bring down the world.
Georgia
The name was Sean McInerney. He worked undercover often and had had numerous aliases, but Sean McInerney was the name he’d been born with.
It wouldn’t be the name he’d die with.
After the military, starting his new profession, Sean had thought long and hard about his cover name. He wanted it short and snappy. One word, memorable, like Cher or Madonna, only instead of thinking good-looking chick, you had to think lethal.
He’d been listening to Outlaw by Whitesnake, and it came to him. Of course.
He’d had a number of aliases in his time, but “Outlaw” worked real well in his new profession. The name was corny, but his new employers loved it. Made them feel sexy, made them feel tough.
Life after SpecOps was good. Real good.
He’d lucked into a little cohort of bankers, CEOs, hedge fund managers, financiers and money managers who spent their time hunched over computer monitors, thinking they were dangerous dudes.
Outlaw had heard all the macho phrases: Eat what you kill, Put wood behind the arrow, Drink the Kool-aid.
Men in finance liked to think of themselves as real tough dudes, but they were tough only because they had a wall of money behind them. When that wall threatened to fall, they crumbled and showed their true natures—that of pale clerks, not alpha males, as they so fondly imagined themselves.
The only attribute Outlaw recognized of himself in them was utter ruthlessness. Touch their money and they would hire the best to fight for them and give no quarter.
And so his post-military life began. The dishonorable discharge—thrown out of the Army for selling arms when there were fucking warehouses full of them rusting in the desert—stopped him from applying for a white-collar job, not that he had ever wanted one.
No, a freak connection between an old Army buddy and his brother in finance had set him up in his new profession.
The first job couldn’t have been easier.
A whistleblower, about ready to send a hot set of documents showing malfeasance to the SEC and blow a fifteen-million-dollar bonus out of the water.
The CEO met with Outlaw in a luxury room at the top of a business skyscraper about five blocks from where he worked.
The financier might have been a god in the world of finance but he was a fuckhead in real life.
The financier had given a false name and made sure that he employed euphemisms, but it was clear he wanted the whistleblower taken out. Outlaw had showed him the Barrett 95 in its carrying case and watched as the banker’s eyes widened.
It was bullshit, all of it.
Outlaw knew perfectly well who the banker was.
Lewis Munro, CEO of the tenth largest corporation in the US.
Outlaw had his name, home address and address of the hideaway apartment on Lexington where Munro’s mistress lived.
Outlaw knew how much cocaine Munro consumed in a week and how much he paid for it.
He knew what private schools the kids were in, how much Mrs. Munro dropped weekly at Hermés and even the amount of taxes Munro had evaded.
Even the Barrett was bullshit. A .50 cal bullet was guaranteed to rain down police attention like nothing else.
For the Barrett he used an armor-piercing bullet, the Raufoss Mk.
211, containing an incendiary, and very accurate in sniper rifles.
He’d lifted three thousand boxes of the stuff from the base warehouse.
It was a military bullet, totally wasted on a civilian target unless you had to snipe at two grand out. Like a big, red fucking sign hung around the dead guy’s neck that this was a hit. Sometimes that was necessary. Most of the time, it wasn’t.
When it went down, it was a perfect street mugging.
The whistleblower walking back home alone from a dinner date with friends, the mugger taking all his money, credit cards and even his wedding ring and wristwatch.
The police speculated that the whistleblower had resisted and got a knife in the ribs for his pains.
The homicide detective stood over the crumpled body in the alley and shook his head over the mugger’s luck in hitting the heart with one thrust.
It wasn’t luck. Outlaw had practiced that move thousands of times in training and hundreds of times on live bodies on missions.