At 10:35 on the morning of December 4, more than seven thousand dedicated capitalists-DOT system clerks, youthful pages with their jaunty epaulets and floppy Connecticut Yankee haircuts, grimly determined stockbrokers, bond analysts, and supervisors with bright-green jackets were busily, if somewhat nonchalantly, promenading through the three jam-packed main rooms of the New York Stock Exchange.
The twelve elevated ticker-tape TV monitors in the busy room were spewing stock symbols and trades comprehensible only to the trained eyes of exchange professionals. The day's volume, if it was only an average Friday, would easily exceed a hundred fifty million shares.
No doubt the original forebears, the first bulls and bears, had been ferocious negotiators and boardroom masters. Their descendants, however, their mostly thin- blooded heirs, were not particularly adroit at money changing.
The heirs were a strikingly homogenous group, for the most part smug and vainglorious bean counters; they all looked blood-related and tended toward red-faced baby fat or an almost tubercular gauntness. Their pale blue eyes looked like marbles, round and bulging, with a distant vagueness in them.
Moreover, the heirs were standing by helplessly while American business was losing “World War III,” as the most recent fight over the world's economy had sometimes been called. They were quietly, though quite rapidly, surrendering world economic leadership to the Japanese, the Germans, and the Arab world.
At 10:57 on Friday morning, the bell-which had once actually been a brass fire bell struck by a rubber mallet and still signaled the official beginning of trading at 10:00 A.M. sharp and end of trading at 4:00 P.M.-went off inside the New York Stock Exchange. The bell sounded with all the shock value of a firework popping in a cathedral.
Absolute silence followed. Shocked silence.
Then came uncontrollable buzzing, frantic rumor-trading. Almost three minutes of unprecedented confusion and chaos on the exchange floor.
Finally, there was the deep and resonant voice of the stock exchange manager blaring over the antiquated PA system.
“Gentlemen… ladies… the New York Stock Exchange is officially closed… Please leave the floor. Please leave the trading floor immediately. This is not a bomb scare. This is an actual emergency! This is a serious police emergency!”
Outside the heavy stone-and-steel entranceway to the Mobil Building on East Forty-second Street, a series of personal stretch limousines-Mercedeses, Lincolns, Rolls-Royces-were arriving and departing with dramatic haste.
Important-looking men, most of them in dark overcoats, and a few women hurriedly got out of their limousines and entered the building's familiar deco lobby. Upstairs on the forty-second floor, other CEOs and presidents of the major Wall Street banks and brokerage houses were already gathered inside the exclusive Pinnacle Club.
The luxurious main dining room of the private club, which was set up for lunch with crisp white linens and shining silver and crystal, had been commandeered for the emergency meeting. Several of the dark-suited executives stood before floor-to-ceiling nonglare windows, which faced downtown. They looked dazed and disoriented. None of them had ever experienced anything remotely like this, nor had they ever expected to.
The view was a spectacular and chilling one, down uneven canyons to lower Manhattan, all the way to the pencil pocket of skyscrapers that was the financial center itself. About halfway, at Fourteenth Street, there were massive police barricades. Police buses, EMS ambulances, and a paradelike crowd could be seen waiting, watching toward Wall Street as if they were studying some puzzling work of art in a midtown museum.
“They haven't even bothered to reestablish contact with us. Not since six this morning,” said Secretary of the Treasury Walter O'Brien. “What the hell are they up to?”
Standing stiffly among a small group of prominent Wall Street executives, George Firth, the attorney general of the United States, was quietly lighting his pipe. He appeared surprisingly casual and controlled, except that he'd given up smoking more than three years before.
“They certainly were damn clear when it came to stating their deadline. Five minutes past five. Five minutes past five or what? What do the bastards want from us?” The attorney general's pipe went out, and he relit it, looking exasperated. The closest observers noticed the nervous tremors in his fingers.
A somber-looking businessman from Lehman Brothers named Jerrold Gottlieb looked at his wristwatch. “Well, gentlemen, it's one minute past five…” He was about to add something but left it unsaid.
They were all in unfamiliar territory now, where things couldn't be properly articulated.
“They've been extremely punctual up to now. Obsessive about getting details and schedules perfect. They'll call. I wouldn't worry, they'll call.”
The speaker was the vice president of the United States, who'd been rushed from the United Nations to the nearby Mobil Building. Thomas More Elliot was a stern man with the look of an Ivy League scholar. His harshest critics carped that he was a Brahmin who was out of touch with the complexities of contemporary America. He'd spent the better part of his public career with the State Department, traveling extensively in Europe during the turbulent sixties, then in South America through the seventies. And now this.
For the next few minutes everyone was quiet, tense.
This tingling silence in the club's dining room was all the more frightening because there were so many highly articulate men in the room-the senior American business executives, used to having their own way, used to being listened to and obeyed, almost without question. Now they were virtually powerless, not used to the frustration and tension that this terrifying mystery had thrust into their lives. And their awesome power had distilled itself into a sequence of small, distinct noises:
A throat being cleared.
Ice crackling in a glass.
Tapping of fingers.
Madness. The thought seemed to echo in the room.
The most fearsome urban terrorism had finally struck deep inside the United States, right at the heart of America 's economic power.
There were anxious, repeated glances at the glinting faces of Rolex, Cartier, and Piaget wristwatches.
What did Green Band want?
What was the outrageous ransom for Wall Street to be?
Edward Palin, the seventy-seven-year-old chief executive of one of the largest investment firms, slowly backed away from the darkly reflective picture windows. He sat down on a Harvard chair pulled up beside one of the dining tables and, in a poignant gesture, put his head between his gray pinstriped knees. He felt faint; it was too embarrassing to watch. Were they about to lose everything now?
Twenty seconds left.
“Please call. Call, you bastards,” the vice president muttered.
It seemed like thousands of emergency sirens were screaming, a peculiar high-low wail, all over New York City. It was the first time the emergency warning system had been seriously in use since 1963 and the nuclear war scares.
Finally it was five minutes past five.
The sudden, terrifying realization struck every person in the room-they weren't going to call again!
They weren't going to negotiate at all.
Without any further warning, Green Band was going to strike.
Washington, D.C.
“A fast recap for you,” said Lisa Pelham, the president's chief of staff, an efficient, well-organized woman who'd been trained at Harvard and spoke in the clipped manner of one whose mind was used to making succinct outlines from mountains of information.
“By noon, all trading was stopped on the New York and all regional exchanges in the U.S. There is no trading in London, Paris, Geneva, Bonn. The key New York businesspeople are meeting right now at the Pinnacle Club in the Mobil Building.
“All the important securities and commodities exchanges have ceased trading around the world. The unanswered question is the same everywhere. What's the nature of the demands we are secretly negotiating?” Lisa Pelham paused and stroked a strand of hair away from her oval face. “Everyone believes we're negotiating with somebody, sir.”
“And we are definitely not?” President Justin Kearney's expression was one of extreme doubt and suspicion. He had discovered the awkward fact during his term of office that one branch of government all too frequently didn't know what another was doing.
“Which we are not, Mr. President. Both the CIA and the FBI have assured us of that. Sir, Green Band has still made
President Kearney had been rushed, under intensified Secret Service guard, to a windowless, lead-shielded room buried deep inside the White House. There, in the White House Communications Center, several of the most important political leaders in the United States were standing around the president in a manner that suggested they intended to protect him from whatever forces were presently at work in the country.
From the White House Communications Center, the president had been put into audio and visual contact with the Pinnacle Club in New York City.
The FBI chief, Walter Trentkamp, stepped forward to appear on the monitor screen. Time and his job had given him a tough, weathered policeman's look and a harassed attitude to match.
“There's been no further contact from Green Band, other than the pier firebombing, which is the demonstration they promised us, Mr. President. It's the kind of guerrilla warfare we've seen in Belfast, Beirut, Tel Aviv. Never before in the United States…
“We're all waiting, Mr. President,” Trentkamp went on. “We're clearly past their stated deadline.”
“Have any of the terrorist groups come forward and claimed responsibility?”
“They have. We're checking into them. So far none has shown any knowledge of the content of the warning phone call this morning.”
Minutes had never seemed so long.
It was now 5:09… 5:10, and slowly, slowly counting.
The director of the CIA moved before the lights and cameras in the White House emergency room. Philip Berger was a small, irascible man, highly unpopular in Washington, chiefly skilled at keeping the major American intelligence agencies competitive among themselves. “Is there
“Nothing, Phil. Apart from the police and the fire department vehicles on the periphery of the area, it could be a peaceful Sunday morning.”
“They're goddamn bluffing,” someone said in Washington.
“Or,” President Kearney said, “they're playing an enormous game of fucking nerves.”
No one agreed, or disagreed, with the president.
Speech had been replaced by the terrifying anxiety and uncertainty of waiting.
