Click touched a button. Storm kept his eyes on the numbers.
“But nothing changed,” he said.
“Exactly. Nor would we expect it to. With ten trillion in circulation, shifting a billion one direction or another is like trying to move a hurricane with a ceiling fan. Now, here’s two yards.”
Storm watched as the last number on the screen, the one five spaces over from the decimal point, changed from 7 to 6. “Okay, I see it,” Storm said.
“Right. Now here’s five yards.”
This time, both the last digit and the second-to-last digit moved.
“Got that? Good. Now, here’s five yards, executed as a double-back trade,” Click said. The third-to-last digit changed, as did the two next to it. “I just affected the value of the U.S. dollar by a tenth of a cent. Still not that big a deal, right? I mean, the value of the dollar can fluctuate more than that on a daily basis and life as we know it goes on just fine.”
“Yeah, this doesn’t exactly look like financial Armageddon,” Storm confirmed.
“Trust me, we’re getting closer to Armageddon. Okay. Watch this. Here’s ten yards double-backed.”
The dollar in Click’s model was suddenly worth two cents less. “Still not much, right? But that’s because the negative feedback loops haven’t swung into action. It takes a little to make that happen. But, in the case of the Korean in 2008, we were talking about a one-hundred-fifty-yard trade — a historically large trade, all in one direction. Nothing like that had ever happened before. And, voilà.”
Click pressed a button. The dollar immediately lost seven cents against the British pound. “Now, wait for it…” Click said. And, sure enough, Storm and Xi Bang watched a simulated economic disaster unfold: The drop surged to ten cents. Then fourteen cents. Twenty-two cents. Thirty-eight cents.
Click pressed another button and the free fall halted.
“I just hit pause. Bear in mind, because this server is so powerful, I’m able to speed up the action so it’s happening faster than it would in real life. You just watched about fifteen minutes of simulated action. Now watch what happens when I have my simulated Fed step in to regulate the monetary supply by selling its bonds like it did in 2008.”
Click tapped a button, typed a few commands, then stepped back. Sure enough, the dollar quickly regained its lost ground and was soon trading at what appeared to be the same level as before.
“So, basically, no harm, no foul, right?” Click said. “As long as we’ve got Papa Fed watching our backs, we’ll be fine. But watch this. I’m going to execute six trades similar to the Korean trade of 2008, and — this is vital — they’re going to happen simultaneously, in six different currencies, all double-backed.”
Click’s fingers danced across the keyboard for about thirty seconds. Then he said, “Ling, would you like to do the honors? Press this button right here.”
Xi Bang slid to the computer keyboard, brushing Storm as she did. He was so engrossed in the demonstration that he nearly — nearly — forgot just how interested he was in seeing to it that their own foreign exchange program continued.
“This one?” she said.
“Yep. Go ahead.”
Xi Bang depressed the button and the numbers on the screen jumped at once. The numbers in the column on the left side, representing the U.S. dollar, ticked steadily downward. The column on the right, representing the other currencies, climbed accordingly.
“Now, I’m going to have the Fed intervene, in the same way it did before,” Click said.
The numbers on the left side continued their slide. It had no effect. By the time the numbers on the screen finally begin to stabilize, the dollar was a quarter of what it had been.
“What you’ve just seen would take place in about two hours of real time,” Click said. “So we’d be talking about the U.S. dollar losing three quarters of its value in two hours. The instability created in U.S. markets would be almost impossible to fathom. And that’s not even counting the ripple effects it would have across the globe. It more than likely would throw the world into a kind of financial Dark Ages that would last… well, who knows? Luckily we’ve never had the chance to find out. Suffice it to say, it would be bad.”
“And six traders, spread out across the globe, making large enough trades, could make this happen?” Storm asked.
“Yes,” Xi Bang said. “That’s a very basic summation of the Click Theory.”
“What would happen if it was just four traders?” Storm said.
“It would be enough to trigger the slide, but the Fed could still save it.”
“So six is the magic number.”
“That’s right.”
“Is there any way to stop it?” Storm asked.
“Yes, in theory,” Click said. “If the Fed sold everything it has — I’m talking everything, including the kitchen sink — it might have an effect. It would be an extraordinary measure on the Fed’s part. You literally have to max out the size of the Fed’s intervention, and even the model says we’d be looking at a forty-seven percent chance of a correction. Basically, it would be a coin flip as to whether it would work.”
“And without the Fed?”
“Armageddon guaranteed,” Click said. “Mind you, it’s a theoretical model. But the math, once you understand it, is really quite simple.”
“Like three plus three equals six?”
“More like any number times zero equals zero.” Storm nodded, then pulled out his phone.
“What are you doing?” Xi Bang asked.
“Following my intuition,” Storm said.
Storm stepped out of the server room, climbed back up the steps, then walked outside into the mid-afternoon Iowa sunshine, the kind that made crops grow and Storm squint.
No one would go to all the trouble to engineer a catastrophe unless they had neutralized the Fed’s ability to avert it. If Storm was able to find someone who had been tinkering with the Fed — either its personnel or its policy — he would be a lot closer to finding whoever hired Volkov.
And, much as Storm dreaded doing it, he knew he was one phone call away from a man who could probably find out what was happening, a man with his fingers stuck in pies all over Washington. Storm pulled out his satellite phone and pressed each button firmly, deliberately. He had learned this was not the kind of phone call you made lightly.
“What is it, Storm?” Jedediah Jones said, his voice sounding extra gritty, like he had just gulped an additional helping of sand.
Storm inhaled, to give himself one more second to think things through. This was a game he had played with Jones many times, the one where each man decided how much he could afford to show the other — and, more to the point, how much he could get away with holding back. For a man like Jones, information was like an Allen wrench — the more he got, the harder he would turn the screws later. And yet, in this case, there was no avoiding it: Storm would have to give some to get some. Given what he had just heard, there was too much at stake not to engage Jones and his considerable resources.
“I need some of your moles on Capitol Hill to do a little fishing,” Storm said.
“Yeah? What kind of fish are they trying to catch?”
“I’m curious if anyone is tinkering with the ability of the Federal Reserve to sell government bonds.”
“Really?” Jones said, almost sounding amused, because he knew, too — knew the game had already begun. “And why do you want to know that, Agent Storm? You wondering if now is the right time to invest?”
“Like I said, just curiosity.”
“Where are you right now?”
Jones had ways of finding out if he really wanted to know, so Storm didn’t bother lying: “Ames, Iowa.”
“Ames, Iowa? What’s in Ames, Iowa?”