Black Fridays by Michael Sears

Author:Michael Sears [Sears, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Thriller
ISBN: 0399158669
Google: pDZnVACI_qIC
Amazon: 0399158669
Barnesnoble: 0399158669
Goodreads: 13593566
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

MONDAY MORNING. Spud and I were back in the conference room—rumors were rampant, stocks were crashing, and everyone on the trading floor had the hollow-eyed look of earthquake survivors. Spud didn’t look much better. After a few, stress-filled hours of sleep, I fit right in. Zombie central.

From the moment the Kid and I stepped out onto Seventy-fourth Street until I passed through the well-guarded front doors of Weld Securities, I was convinced that I was being tailed. The two guys from the night before seemed to materialize in my peripheral vision on street corners, in subway stations, ducking into doorways, only to transform into harmless-looking fellow New Yorkers when I looked directly at them.

The Kid had sensed my upset—a situation that had threatened to escalate into a disaster when I couldn’t find him a matching pair of blue socks. I had been pleasantly surprised to find that he didn’t mind mismatched socks on Monday morning, as long as they were both blue.

I needed a day off, a green tea, and a massage. I would have settled for eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

“How’d you get his laptop?” Spud asked, for what I realized was the second time.

I kept the unedited version to myself. “The roommate let me take it.”

After dropping the Kid at school, I had stopped at the post office and mailed a box filled with almost a quarter million dollars of chips to myself. It could stay in the Ansonia mailroom until I figured out how to cash them in—without going back to jail.

“Let’s get started,” I said.

Lowell Barrington hadn’t shown up. He looked like another runner. When I called over to his desk, the bright, bubbly voice of the Hello Kitty girl informed me that he wasn’t in yet. Maybe he had joined Sudhir in India. Maybe his father had grounded him.

And my lawyer had yet to return my call. Calls. So far, my day sucked.

Spud fired up the laptop.

Other than the breakup e-mails—and the music—the computer was oddly devoid of personal information. There were no drafts of letters to headhunters, no electronic checkbook, not even an address book outside of his Google account. Sanders had not been on Facebook or Myspace, he had no profile on LinkedIn, and he did not Twitter. Either he had been a unique twenty-first-century young man, or he was hiding something.

“I’ve got his calendar,” Spud said.

“How the hell did I miss that?”

“It was sitting in his ‘recycle’ bin.”

I burst out laughing. I had hid the chips in the garbage—the same place where Sanders kept his secrets.

But Sanders kept his secrets in code. Letters and numbers filled the squares for each date. AH2x/EH. 10K/TP. It was a meaningless jumble. I scanned for patterns. Most simple codes give up their secrets because of patterns. Short words, like articles, are used repetitively. S appears at the end of words more often than any other letter. E is next. And so on.

One pattern leaped out immediately. “Ten K? Two K? See this. They’ve all got to be numbers.

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