This was his job: he agreed that the public needed to know the truth and if he could be instrumental in getting the right message to them, he was more than up for it. If working in marketing had taught him one thing, it was how important the delivery of a campaign was. People could be shown the same message twice and react in entirely different ways based on how it was shown to them. With this being the biggest piece of news the majority of people would ever receive, Samuel knew he had the opportunity to either make it seem like the end of the world, or to give the public hope that there was a way past this. It would require a lot of research in a very short amount of time, but he felt confident it was possible. Looking up at Graham, he finally gave his answer.
“Okay,” he repeated. “Get me Caitlin and a couple others. How long do we have?”
Graham smiled, knowing he had made the right decision in waiting for Samuel to arrive. But they had to act fast now; precious time had been burned in the interim. “One hour.”
“It’ll have to be enough,” Samuel pursed his lips. “Stranger things have happened.”
With a nod, Graham finally left Samuel to his work, heading back out onto the floor to try and find some people to assist him. As the door closed behind him, Samuel cracked his neck from side to side and started thinking about how he was going to tackle this problem. Grabbing a pen and paper he started to scribble down the facts he was aware of: Trident was finished, the bank had no money and no way of getting it back.
The more worrying element was how that was going to ripple out not only through New York City, but across the country and around the world. Trident was a multi-national enterprise, they had banks in almost all the major capital cities of the world, in four of the seven continents. This wasn’t just going to cause chaos on his doorstep, across the world there would be no money to maintain even the simplest human necessities like food and running water. Things wouldn’t all just collapse at once, the demise would surely be gradual, but piece by piece people’s lives as they had become accustomed to them would start to fall apart and change dramatically.
“Hello again, Sam,” Caitlin’s voice rang out behind him, Samuel turning to see the woman and two others walking into the meeting room to join him. “I hear we’ve got quite a job on our hands.”
Samuel was pleased to have Caitlin’s can-do attitude alongside him. “You could say that. How would you go about breaking the news to everyone that the country is broke and life as we know it is going to end?”
Caitlin and the others looked at Samuel in astonishment for a few second, before he ushered them further into the room and filled them in with more information.
***
Meanwhile, out on the floor, Austin Taylor watched on, confused about what was happening in front of his very eyes. He had been inside Trident throughout the entire disaster, barely moving from his desk from the moment the funds disappeared until now. He was still working tirelessly to protect the company; despite how little other people seemed to care about it.
Everyone seemed to have forgotten how much danger they were all in. They had been forced to shut down the building for a reason: they were on lock down because of how much of a threat the general public had become. People had been running around with crowbars, breaking into secure parts of the building searching for their missing money. It was ridiculous, almost like they expected to find billions of dollars locked behind a door or stuffed inside a mattress. Thankfully with the power to the building not yet affected, Austin had been able to work with a handful of others to rush people out of the building and flood them out of the area. But that was only temporary. The sun was rising and he knew that with it would come the seas of people searching for the truth.
Sure enough, just as he was about to dial up the head of their private security firm – this one recommended from the very top – he heard the faint sound of something hitting the windows in the distance. Looking up, the receiver in his hand, Austin paused and cocked his head to one side, almost like how an animal would listen for something. No one else seemed to have noticed it, but his partner had always told him he had superhuman hearing compared to everyone else. Curious, he put his phone back down for the first time in several hours and walked towards where he could hear the noise.
It was staggering how high up they were in the Trident skyscraper, something that was very easy to forget until you were looking down. Thankfully Austin didn’t have any troubles with heights and so he walked right up to the window, peering down into the twilight gloom and trying to make out what was happening below. It took his eyes a couple of seconds to adjust, but when he did he saw the sight below clear as day. Just as he had predicted: people were gathering again and they were peppering the windows with whatever they could find, trying to break their way in.
It was just like what had happened straight after the news had broken. Austin had almost given up hope trying to find anyone to help defend the Trident Banking Corporation until aid came from the very top itself. Trident had reached out to the government for support, hoping naturally that they would be able to bail the company out
