all wanted to know. That set them to looking at additional data on the wires,
trying to catch up with the information streaming from America. Eyes
squinted, heads shook, and these traders, lacking the time to review every-
thing, turned to their own expert systems to make the analyses, because the
reasons for the swift movements were simply not obvious enough to be real.
But it didn’t really matter why, did it? It had to be real. The Fed had just
gone up a full point on the discount rate, and that hadn’t happened by acci-
dent. For the moment, they decided, in the absence of guidance from their
governments and central banks, they would defer buying U.S. Treasuries.
They also began immediate examinations of their equity holdings, because
stocks looked as though they were going to drop, and drop rapidly.
“… between the people of Russia and the people of America,” President
Grushavoy concluded his toast, the host answering President Durling, the
guest, as the protocol for such things went. Glasses were raised and tipped.
Ryan allowed a drop or two of the vodka to pass his lips. Even with these
thimble glasses, you could get pretty wasted-waiters stood everywhere to
replenish them-and the toasting had just begun. He’d never been to a state
affair this … loose. The entire diplomatic community was here-or at least
the ambassadors from all the important countries were present. The Japanese
Ambassador in particular seemed jovial, darting from table to table for snip-
pets of conversation.
path was most often that closest to the curb, and that is what Hildebrand
took, moving as rapidly as the circumstances permitted, the faster to get to
his office. He didn’t note the presence of another man, just behind him, only
three feet, in fact, a well-dressed man with dark hair and an ordinary face. It
was just a matter of waiting for the right moment, and the nature of the traf-
fic here made it inevitable that the moment would come. That was a relief to
the dark-haired man, who didn’t want to use his pistol for the contract. He
didn’t like noise. Noise attracted looks. Looks could be remembered, and
though he planned to be on a plane to Europe in just over two hours, there
was no such thing as being too careful. So, his head swiveled, watching the
traffic ahead and behind, he chose the moment with care.
They were approaching the corner of Rector and Trinity. The traffic light
ahead turned green, allowing a two-hundred-foot volume of automobiles to
surge forward another two hundred feet. Then the light behind changed as
well, releasing the pent-up energy of a corresponding number of vehicles.
Some of them were cabs, which raced especially fast because cabs loved to
change lanes. One yellow cab jumped off the light and darted to its right. A
perfect situation. The dark-haired man increased his pace until he was right
behind Hildebrand, and all he had to do was push. The president of the New
York Fed tripped on the curb and fell into the street. The cabdriver saw it,
and turned the wheel even before he had a chance to swear, but not far
enough. For all that, the man in the camel-hair overcoat was lucky. The cab
stopped as fast as its newly refurbished brakes allowed, and the impact speed
was under twenty miles per hour, enough to catapult Walter Hildebrand
about thirty feet into a steel lightpole and break his back. A police officer on
the other side of the street responded at once, calling for an ambulance on his
portable radio.
The dark-haired man blended back into the crowd and headed for the
nearest subway station. He didn’t know if the man was dead or not. It wasn’t
really necessary to kill him, he’d been told, which had seemed odd at the
time. Hildebrand was the first banker he’d been told not to kill.
The cop hovering over the fallen businessman noted the beeper’s repeated
chirping. He’d call the displayed number as soon as the ambulance arrived.
His main concern right now was in listening to the cabdriver protest that it
wasn’t his fault.
The expert systems “knew” that when bank stocks dropped rapidly, confi-
dence in the banks themselves was invariably badly shaken, and that people
would think about moving their money out of the banks that appeared to be
threatened. That would force the banks in turn to pressure their lenders to
pay back loans, or, more importantly to the expert systems and their ability
to read the market a few minutes faster than everyone else, because banks
were turning into investment institutions themselves, to liquidate their own
financial holdings to meet the demands of depositors who wauled Ihcir
deposits back. Banks were typically cautious investors on the equity market,
sticking mainly to blue chips and other bank stocks, and so the next dip, the
computers thought, would be in the major issues, especially the thirty bench-
mark stocks that made up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. As always, the
imperative was to see the trend first and to move first, thus safeguarding the
funds that the big institutions had to protect. Of course, since all the institu-
tions used essentially the same expert systems, they all moved at virtually
the same time. With the sight of a single thunderbolt just a little too close to
the herd, all of the herd members started moving away from it, in the same
direction, slowly at first, but moving.
The men on the floor of the exchange knew it was coming. Mostly people
who received programmed-trade orders, they had learned from experience to
predict what the computers would do. Here it comes was the murmur heard
in all three trading rooms, and the very predictability of it should have been
an indicator of what was really happening, but it was hard for the cowboys
just to stay outside the herd try to find a way to direct it, turn it, pacify it-
and not be engulfed by it. If that happened, they stood to lose because a
serious downward turn could obliterate the thin margins on which their firms
depended.
The head of the NYSE was now on the balcony, looking down, wondering
where the hell Walt Hildebrand was. That’s all they needed, really. Every-
body listened to Walt. He lifted his cellular phone and called his office
again, only to hear from Walt’s secretary that he hadn’t returned to the office
from his speech yet. Yes, she had beeped him. She really had.
He could see it start. People moved more rapidly on the floor. Everyone
was there now, and the sheer volume of noise emanating from the floor was
reaching deafening levels. Always a bad sign when people started shouting.
The electronic ticker told its own tale. The blue chips, all three-letter
acronyms as .well known to him as the names of his children, were account-
ing for more than a third of the notations, and the numbers were trending
sharply down. It took a mere twenty minutes for the Dow to drop fifty
points, and as awful and precipitous as that was, it came as a relief. Automat-
ically, the computers at the New York Stock Exchange stopped accepting
computer-generated sell orders from their electronic brethren. The fifty-
point mark was called a “speed bump.” Set in place after the 1987 crash, its
purpose was to slow things down to a human pace. The simple fact that ev-
eryone overlooked was that people could take the instructions-they didn’t
even bother calling them recommendations anymore-from their computers
and forward the sell orders themselves by phone or telex or electronic mail,
and all the speed bump accomplished was to add another thirty seconds to
the transaction process. Thus, after a hiatus of no more than a minute, the
trading pace picked up yet again and the direction was down.
By this time, the panic within the entire financial community was quite
real, reflected in a tenseness and a low buzz of conversation in every trading
room of every one of the large institutions. Now CNN issued a live special
report from its own perch over the floor of the former NYSE garage. The
stock ticker on their “Headline News” service told the tale to investors who
also liked to keep track of more human events. For others, there was now a
real human being to say that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped
fifty points in the blink of an eye, and was now down twenty more points,
and the downward spiral was not reversing itself. There followed questions
from the anchorperson in Atlanta, and resulting speculation on the cause of
the event, and the reporter who hadn’t had time to check her sources for
information, winged it on her own, and said that there was a worldwide run
on the dollar that the Fed had failed to stop. She couldn’t have picked a
worse thing to say. Now everyone knew what was happening, after a fash-