For the next hour Tom focused on nothing but the preparation for bringing the house down on the anti-climate change meeting. He spoke to his men on the scene to make sure they had taken care of Ike Silverman and planted the suicide note on him. The explosives were set and Tom had accepted remote control of the detonators, which he would access via another secret bookmark. He set the first detonation to go off at four o’clock exactly and selected the option to manually detonate the second, more powerful explosion. The Emergency Response truck was ready, waiting for people to run away from the building so his men could bundle everyone in the back and take them to Camp Alpha.
If Gabe made it out of the Silverman building alive, there was no way Tom could let him get away—not with all that he had seen and done today. A trip to Camp Alpha for a vaccination and ‘memory rinse’ was the order of the day for Gabe.
Room service order number two arrived and Tom wolfed it down with gusto. It was getting late in the day but he still had a couple of hours to wait until the President’s clone took to the stage in the TV studio. If only everything had been scheduled earlier, or he hadn’t been in another time zone, and Tom could have enjoyed a nice frosty beer with his meal. As it stood, he had to keep his wits about him.
He’d seen a steady stream of transactions tick through on the investment status page and decided to give Gabe a call five minutes before the first bomb was due to go off. Gabe had made Tom and his boss—mainly his boss—a lot of money and deserved at least a chance of getting out of the building before it blew. Tom looked at the video feed. Gabe wasn’t in his chair. Tom picked up the phone and watched Gabe run across the office to answer it.
‘Where do you think you’re going, Gabe?’
‘My boss is in trouble. I need to go and help him.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got someone on the way to help him now,’ Tom lied. The pause on the end of the phone was far too long for Tom’s liking. He could almost hear the gears in Gabe’s brain cranking round. ‘How’s it going?’ he demanded.
‘I put as much in as I could.’
‘Good work. I don’t need you to put any more trades through for me today. I suppose you want to know what happened today, don’t you?’
‘Insider trading, isn’t it?’
‘Not exactly. More like market manipulation.’ Tom chuckled.
‘You’re going to knock this building down, aren’t you?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Based on what’s happened today, I’d say that’s a pretty good hunch.’
‘Good luck getting out of the building. You’ve got three minutes.’ Tom watched the animated hands of the clock on his laptop screen tick round to three minutes to the hour, then shouted, ‘Go!’
‘Good luck at the soup kitchen.’
Tom was lost for words at that remark. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I didn’t short Mark Duncan Properties, I bought them. If you blow this building up, you’ll lose millions. I thought that might buy me some more time to get out of here.’
As Gabe hung up, Tom brought up the investment status page. Gabe wasn’t bluffing. He’d invested seventeen million dollars in Mark Duncan stock. Even worse: he hadn’t set a stop-loss on the holding, which meant there was no auto-sell when the price dropped below a pre-defined level.
Tom came out in a cold sweat and checked his watch. Two minutes until the bomb was set to go off. There was nowhere near enough time to transfer the holdings to another institution and find a different broker to sell the stock. He would have to wait until the morning to sell his boss’s holdings and, if the Silverman building fell, the market would open with Mark Duncan stock at a much lower price than it was about to close at.
I don’t have any other option, Tom thought as he disabled the manual detonation for the second set of explosives, all the while fearing the reaction of his boss when he found out what had happened.
For full details on how to get your hands on a copy of One Day in Gitmo Nation, visit www.noagendanovels.com
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