The image jiggled as the elevator began moving, and after twenty seconds jiggled again as it came to a halt. Then the doors opened and Stack walked out.
The scene switched to a waist-level shot of Stack emerging from the elevator into a familiar Victorian room with impressionist paintings and a fire. Recognizing the setting, Jordan’s heart began to race. Had they taped him too? Had the whole Zhu fantasy thing been a setup? Stack approached the camera, reached out to shake the hand of a woman who appeared in the foreground. (Sarah? Jordan couldn’t tell.)
Next shot: an empty hallway. The woman appeared, walking past the camera — Jordan still couldn’t see her face — and Stack followed behind. At the end of the hall, they paused in front of a door. The woman inserted a key card and opened it. They both disappeared inside.
Jordan had a queasy notion of what was coming next: a video of his boss in action — a sight he wasn’t anxious to see. He’d also broken out in a sweat. What had he done last night? Was he sure it wasn’t something worth filming? Why had Sarah sent him this, anyway? Was it a warning?
The scene switched again, and for a moment Jordan was confused. Instead of the Zhu fantasy suite, the room looked like a classroom, with the camera looking out from what would have been the blackboard. The room was empty except for the teacher’s desk and a single pupil, a pretty girl of perhaps eleven or twelve, seated at a desk in the center of the frame. She was dressed in a black skirt and white shirt, the ubiquitous uniform of Japanese grade-school students. (First the banquet, and now this — did Stack have some sort of Japan fetish?) The girl appeared to be copying something from the blackboard: She would look up, look down to write in her notebook, and look up again.
The classroom door opened, and the “teacher” walked in — and Jordan’s fears were confirmed. The girl stood to bow low to Teacher Stack. Stack strode toward the front of the classroom and sat at the desk, his back to the camera.
Jordan felt sick. Was this a standard option in Zhu’s video catalog — or one of Stack’s “special needs”? Was this how his hyper-cool, hyper-professional boss spent his leisure hours — indulging in power-trip kiddie fantasies?
The girl stood beside her chair, head bowed. Teacher Stack rose, picked up a fistful of papers from the desk, and began shaking them at her. He was yelling now, his head and shoulders jerking as he barked. Jordan had never known Stack to so much as raise his voice, so this alone was startling. Stack moved toward the girl, who remained motionless with her head bowed. He stopped in front of her, still yelling. Then, of course, she dropped to her knees.
A moment later, Jordan was on his knees too, beside Zhu’s luxurious toilet. He gagged, his hands gripping the bowl, and a Scotch-flavored flame surged up his throat. He swallowed hard, closed his eyes, waited for the next heave. It came, and Jordan expelled it, spraying the porcelain brown. Head hanging, hand groping upwards, he found the handle and pulled. The toilet flushed white, splashing Jordan’s face with cool water. He stood, staggered to the sink, and turned on the tap. He plunged his hands into the stream and doused water on his burning cheeks. Then he leaned on the counter and let water drip from his chalky face into the sink.
Images rushed through his head, one after the other — power fantasies that even Stack himself might have warmed to: Jordan as ninja, Jordan as heavyweight champion, Jordan as axe murderer, Jordan as righteous gunslinger. Had he been sober and rested, he might have realized that it was more than just the video fueling his fantasies, that his resentment toward Stack had been building for years. And it might have occurred to him that he hadn’t been fired yet, that he could have misread Stack the night before, that twelve hours — twelve drunken hours — of reeling year-end emotions weren’t worth betting a career on. He might have realized that pictures were worth a thousand words, but others weren’t worth the hard drives they were stored on. But Jordan wasn’t sober, and he wasn’t rested, and he wasn’t thinking any of that. Instead, as the water dripped away, his churning emotions condensed into a single, simple concept: payback.
Turning from the sink, Jordan strode back into the bedroom and picked up the BlackBerry. Several years earlier, when e-mail scandals had temporarily terrorized Wall Street, a techie friend had taught him how to send e-mails with untraceable return-path information. Thumbs clicking frantically, Jordan logged off the network, logged in again as an administrator, and returned to the e-mail. He copied the video file into a new e-mail. In the “Subject” field, he typed A Message From Alan Stack, and then skipped to the “BCC” field. From a pull-down menu, he selected Global Sales and Trading, a distribution list that included some 11,000 Whitney Gilman professionals worldwide. Then he pressed send.
What does it feel like to walk into your own execution? Jordan was sure he was about to find out. Seven hours earlier, after escaping from Zhu’s lair and returning to his own Hive pad, he had sent Fishman an e-mail implying a hang-over and asking him to take over for the morning. Then he had unplugged every communication device he owned and crawled into bed. When he awoke, just after noon, he had remembered the Stack e-mail and been hit with a bolt of terror and regret: What had he done?
He had considered camping in his apartment, but figured that, in the event they hadn’t yet traced the e-mail, this would be a dead giveaway. So, he had showered, dressed, and headed for the trading floor. Now, as Jordan approached the desk, he was glad to see that little had changed. Fishman leaned toward him.
“You’re not going to believe what you missed.”
“Do tell,” Jordan said, steeling himself.
As Fishman told it, the e-mail had hit Whitney’s trading floors like a bomb, blowing an otherwise ordinary morning to smithereens. No one knew where it had come from, but the Australia guys had opened it first: A bizarre pederastic-sado-fantasy in which Stack fucked a schoolgirl on a teacher’s desk. Within an hour, the video had bloomed on a thousand desktops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Moscow, Paris, London. The administrators had caught up with it, finally, ripped it off every server in the firm, but not before some bastard had posted it on the Internet. The networks had it now, and had been showing clips all morning, along with profiles of Whitney Gilman and headshots of Stack. The Shanghai government had demanded an apology, as had the Japanese government, and everyone was expecting a similar demand from Beijing. The firm’s Executive Committee had called an emergency meeting in New York in the middle of the night. And Stack! Poor Stack. He’d been picked up by the police at his apartment that morning and taken in for questioning. No one had seen him since.
As Fishman’s story unfolded, Jordan felt like a kid who had tossed a cigarette in a garbage can and burned down a city. The knot tightened in his chest again, and his hands dampened with sweat.
“You’ve got to see the video,” Fishman concluded. “It’s some sick shit. I’ll send you the link. Oh, and Reingold’s been calling you.”
“Reingold?”
“He’s holed up in Stack’s office, doing damage control. One of Stack’s secretaries keeps calling.”
“What does Reingold want with me?” Jordan asked, his heart pounding like a kettle drum, sure that this was it.
“Got me,” Fishman said. “Give her a call.”
Hand shaking, Jordan dialed Stack’s number. Lauren answered, confirmed that Reingold wanted to see him immediately. Now getting fired seemed like a dream scenario — he’d be lucky if he didn’t get jailed. Jordan stood up and set off across the trading floor, a dead man walking.