“Err, you okay pal?”
Shaking his head at his own words, Samuel couldn’t believe what he’d just asked someone threatening to jump from a window. The man twitched as he heard another voice in the room but didn’t turn around or look in Samuel's direction.
“Don’t come any closer!” He shouted back, his knees wobbling as he stood in the window. “I’m going to jump!”
“I know, I know,” Samuel replied, silently moving closer to the man, nonetheless. While the jumper couldn’t see him, Samuel wanted to get as close as possible. “It’s just – I’d rather you didn’t. Jumping won’t solve anything. Why don’t you step down and we can talk about what’s happened?”
The jumper scoffed. “Talking won’t solve anything either. The money’s gone, pal. All of it. And we’re not going to be getting it back.”
As the words processed in Samuel’s head, he tried not to let them get to him. He had to push his emotions and fears to one side while he was with this man, but he couldn’t help shuddering. They were in the finance department; based on his current position, Samuel was willing to bet that if anyone in the Trident building knew what had really happened and the consequences of it, it was the man standing in front of him. That wasn’t good news, but it spurred Samuel on to get the man to safety so he could uncover more of the truth.
“You don’t know that for sure,” Samuel replied, choosing his words carefully as he tried to figure out what he could say to appease the man and get him to change his mind about his negative situation. “There’s always a way to sort these things out. Everything can’t just be gone. The government will help, or Canada, or, someone… But jumping isn’t going to help anything. That woman down there – she needs you. You’ve seen her, right? You can’t leave her to deal with this on her own.”
“You don’t get it, pal,” the jumper shook his head, finally turning around and looking at Samuel. “Your job and your life are over.”
Opening his mouth to argue with the jumper, Samuel tried to find something to say, but the man in the window silenced him first.
“I’m telling ya, there’s no coming back from this. I’ve never seen work like this before, how they managed to get in and get out of our systems undetected is,” the jumper paused, “it’s incredible. They’ve wiped everything, and I mean everything. It isn’t just Trident that’s going to suffer. The whole country is ruined. The government can’t help us. No one can. We’re done for pal, there isn’t any point anymore.”
Before Samuel could react, the man was facing outwards again, looking down to the crowd sixteen stories below. Everything started to move in slow motion, Samuel realizing that this was the moment. He lurched forward, his arms outstretched toward the jumper, desperate to grab him and stop what was about to happen. But he was too late. Too slow. The man stepped forward and disappeared in front of Samuel’s eyes. Mere seconds passed before he heard a thud from the ground, followed by a chorus of screams. He hadn’t been quick enough. He couldn’t save him. Without moving an inch closer to the window, Samuel turned on his heel and left the room. He didn’t need to look down to know what had happened. The man was dead now and Samuel still didn’t even know his name.
Chapter 3
Looking out over the city, Jameson Kildare stuffed his hands into his pockets and hummed. It was something he did when he was thinking and as the Head of Finance for Trident Banking Corporation, he had never had more to think about than in that very moment. In truth, he had no idea what to do, but he had a conference call with the President, Claire Manning – the Trident CEO – and a number of other important people in under an hour, and he needed to have something to tell them at least.
News about the collapse of the Trident Banking Corporation had spread fast, reporting crews scattered throughout the city documenting the terror as it leaked down every street and into every apartment building. There were reports coming in around the world too, Trident’s reach affecting billions of people across the globe. No one was safe from it and Jameson knew things were going to get a great deal worse before they got any better.
New York was not prepared to be at the epicenter of a disaster like this. Jameson had already worked out in his head how much the backlash of this would ruin the immediate environment, everything ten times worse around HQ simply because they were the people who were supposed to be able to stop these things from happening. And that was where he was based. He couldn’t control what happened in California or in Canada or Europe. New York was on his doorstep and while he might be absent from the Trident building itself, he still needed to do everything he possibly could for the company.
Considering the reach of it all made Jameson feel nauseous. Trident was responsible for trillions of dollars, potentially even hundreds of trillions. It was a figure so large that even he, as the Head of Finance, didn’t know for certain. It was a figure that wouldn’t fit on a calculator, that wasn’t printed in the dictionary. It was – as he would’ve said
