Black Market

“Arch Carroll, State Department Antiterrorist Division! You have no rights! You hear me?… How did you know about Green Band? Who talked to you? You look at me!”

Diego Alvarez said, “Fuck you!” and spat into Carroll's face.

Carroll shuffled a little to his left, then hit the drug dealer with a sharp right hand delivered to the mouth. Alvarez fell to the ground, already out cold.

“Yeah, fuck you, too!” said the former Bronx street kid still lurking somewhere inside Carroll. He wiped the dope dealer's saliva from his cheek.

Clark Sommers's mouth fell open, creating a surprised O at the center of his sunta

At the FBI office on Collins Avenue in Miami, Diego Alvarez was taken to a small interrogation room, where he told Carroll everything he knew.

“I don't know who they are, honest, man. Somebody jus' want you down here to Florida,” he said with almost believable sincerity. Because he had been busted with three hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of cocaine, and because his prospects of freedom looked grim, he didn't have much to gain by lying. Carroll studied the man as he spoke.

“I swear it. I don't know nothin' more, man. But I got a feelin' somebody playin' some kind of games wit' you. They set me up, my big mouth. But somebody playin' wit' you…

Somebody jus' want you come here 'stead of someplace else. They playin' wit' you, man. They playin' wit' you real good.”

Carroll wanted to put his head down on the interrogation table. He'd been used, and he had no idea why. All he knew was that whoever was doing it was extremely smart. They were sending a message: See, we can manipulate you-any which way we like.

Carroll eventually wandered outside the FBI building and leaned heavily against the warm white stucco wall.

He tried to let the Florida sun soothe his weary brain. He thought that Miami might be a better climate for playing Crusader Rabbit than New York.

He was relatively certain about a couple of disturbing things. The Green Band group, whoever they were, knew who he was and that he would be assigned to the investigation. How did they know? What should that tell him about who they might be?… They seemed to want him to know how superior, how well organized, they were. They wanted him to be a little in awe-and frankly, right now he was.

How did they know he'd be assigned to the investigation? Who was trying to send him a cryptic message? Why?

On the plane home, Eastern-the wings of man-Arch Carroll had two beers, then two Irish whiskeys. He could have gone for another two Irish, but he'd promised Walter Trentkamp-promised Uncle Walter something he couldn't quite remember. Finally he slept the rest of the way home to New York.

He had a real nice dream on the flight, too. Carroll dreamed that he quit his job with the DIA's Antiterrorist Division. He and the kids and Nora went to live on the nicest sugar white beach in Florida.

And they all lived happily ever after.

8

Manhattan

Before break of dawn on Sunday morning, Caitlin Dillon waded through a becalmed river of ice and slush that rose four inches above her ankles. Once she successfully emerged on half-deserted Fifth Avenue, the director of enforcement for the SEC's Division of Trading and Exchange hailed a yellow cab, which ferried her down to the Fourteenth Street Police and National Guard barricades. From there she was transferred by a snazzy police blue-and-white down into the smoldering chaos and confusion of the financial district itself.

The ride went by amazingly fast. There were no working traffic lights below Fourteenth and almost no other traffic on any of the downtown streets.

The sergeant driving the police car was as good-looking as any young actor in a Hollywood cop show. He had long blue-black hair curling over his uniform collar. His name was Signarelli. Caitlin figured he definitely watched “Hill Street Blues.”

“Never seen anything this bad.” The police sergeant revealed a nasal Brooklyn accent when he spoke. His eyes kept darting in and out of the rearview mirror.

“Can't even call in to your normal communications desk. Nerve center they set up is always busy, too. Nobody knows what the army's doing. What the FBI guys are doing, either. It's completely nuts!”

“How would you handle it?” There was nothing patronizing in the question. Caitlin was always curious about the rank and file. That was one reason she made a good boss at the SEC. A second reason was that she was smart, so knowledgeable about Wall Street and the workings of business that most of her associates legitimately held her in awe. “If this was your show, what would you do now, Sergeant?”

“Well… I'd hit every terrorist hangout we know about in the city. We know about a hell of a lot of them, too. I'd blow into their little maggot nests. Arrest everybody in sight. That way we'd sure as hell get some information.”

“Sergeant, I believe that's what teams of detectives have been doing all night. Over sixty separate squads of NYPD detectives. But the maggots are just not cooperating on this one.”

Caitlin arched her eyebrow, then smiled gently at the cop. Predictably, he asked her for a date, and just as predictably, Caitlin turned him down.

With police and army helicopters constantly whirring overhead, Caitlin Dillon stood still and numb on the northwest corner of Broadway and Wall. She allowed her eyes to roam across the most chilling, surreal scene she ever hoped to view in her lifetime.

What appeared to be billions of tons of granite block, shattered glass, and concrete and mortar had crashed down onto Wall Street and Broad Street and Pine and all the narrow, interco

Caitlin craned her neck to gaze up at nearby 6 Wall Street. She winced as she observed the sheared, swinging clumps of wiring: thick elevator cables dangling between the highest floors of the office building. Here and there patches of sky shone through great yawning holes in the building's walls. The overall effect reminded her of a doll house utterly destroyed by a child's temper tantrum.

She stood all alone, shivering and cold, on the stone portal of the New York Stock Exchange. She couldn't stop herself from staring at the abysmal destruction, the incomprehensible damage, on Wall Street. More than anything, she wanted to be sick.

She saw an oil painting, a Yankee sailing clipper, hanging in a distant office with two of the room's walls blown away. It looked absurd. In the foyer of an adjacent building, an overturned copier had collapsed through several floors before striking the unyielding marble in the lobby. She could see the shattered screens of computer terminals and the melted remains of keyboards that reminded her of some nightmare art form. All over the littered, desolate street, police and hospital emergency vehicles were flashing bright red-and-blue distress signals.

Caitlin Dillon could feel a cold dead weight pushing down on her. Her body was numb. Her ears buzzed softly, as if there were a sudden drop in air pressure. She couldn't stop a feeling of nausea, of sudden weakness in her legs. She understood what many of the others still didn't-that an entire way of life had quite possibly been destroyed here on Friday night.

Inside number 13, Caitlin was confronted immediately by noisy squads of secretaries typing frantically in the marble-and-stone entryway corridors. Stock exchange clerks milled around with a kind of busy uselessness, carrying clipboards with a hollow show of self-importance, carting files from one office to another.