CHAPTER 21

Basel, Switzerland

March

COLONEL ANDRENOV REVIEWED THE spreadsheets on his screens and offered a rare smile. The string of terrorist attacks and his investment strategies in advance of them had been far more successful than even he could have imagined. He knew, of course, that the retail markets would decline sharply out of consumers’ fear of terrorism, timed perfectly with the holiday shopping season. His problem was spreading that fear and panic to the United States, where no kinetic attacks had taken place.

His solution came thanks to a group that called itself the “Syrian Electronic Army. ” This group of pro-Assad hackers took over the Associated Press’s Twitter account in June 2013 and posted an erroneous “Breaking News” headline about an explosion at the White House that had wounded the president. Despite the lack of an explosion, the U. S. stock market lost $136 billion in equity value in just five minutes.

As a Russian national with plenty of capital, Andrenov had access to his choice of hackers and “bot” accounts. For a few thousand euros’ worth of cryptocurrency, his hackers had been carefully coordinating false reports of terrorist attacks at shopping malls and other retail locations across North America and Europe, keeping the Western world constantly on edge.

As shoppers stayed home, brick-and-mortar stores had lost out on the holiday income that usually put them in the black for the year. The ordinarily chaotic shopping scenes on the Friday after Thanksgiving had been replaced by empty retailers whose shelves stood piled with unsold merchandise. Instead of flocking to movie theaters and restaurants over the holidays, consumers sat at home and fed on the fear stoked by the twenty-four-hour news media. The ripple effect was felt across nearly all sectors of the economy as demand fell.

This was all a predictable result of Andrenov’s carefully planned operations, but the second element was pure luck. Over the past two decades, investors had exponentially increased their use of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). These securities offer investors a vehicle by which to profit from commodities, currencies, futures, and other “goods” without actually owning or taking possession of those items. For example, a gold ETF allows an investor to profit from an increase in the price of gold without buying actual gold.

When the stock markets in New York, London, and across the globe declined sharply after the Kingston Market attack, it set off a demand for cash. The problem was that many of the ETFs that had become so popular lacked any true liquidity. They were built on investor confidence rather than actual value. As that confidence shattered, so did the value of the funds. A gold ETF that owned very little actual gold bullion became a nearly worthless investment as institutions and individuals scrambled to cash out. The “ETF bubble” took the market by surprise, just as the housing bubble had done a decade earlier. The entire system collapsed like a trillion-dollar house of cards, catalyzing what would have been a small recession into an event that surpassed the 2008 financial crisis in terms of lost wealth.

Hardworking people saw their 401(k)s evaporate and their pension plans become nearly insolvent. Retailers, who were already teetering on bankruptcy thanks to online sales, shut their doors and laid off tens of thousands of workers. There was a worldwide contraction of credit that stifled growth to a standstill.

Everyone, wealthy and poor, suffered. Everyone, that is, but Vasili Andrenov. He had shorted the equity markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across the European Union months before the attacks. That news alone had caused some uncertainty in the market since he was viewed as such a savvy, if shadowy, investor. Instead of looking to the world like the profiteering terrorist mastermind that he was, he came out looking like an oracle, the kind of mind that could lead a nation out of decline.

Andrenov pulled a tattered volume from the vast collection of first editions in his opulent library. Published in Russian, it was known to most of the world as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was the only relic of the life of his maternal grandfather, a man he’d never met. His mother spoke of her father with awe, influencing young Vasili deeply with the political beliefs of a generation past. Unlike Andrenov’s father and grandfather, who were devout communists, his mother’s father had been an outspoken supporter of imperial Russia. He was a member of the Black Hundreds, an ultranationalist society that espoused a motto of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. ” The Black Hundreds despised anything and anyone who would challenge the House of Romanov: communists, Jews, and Ukrainian nationalists. The Black Hundreds had fought to suppress Ukrainian language and culture in Odessa, of all places, a feat that Andrenov planned to repeat. Capitalism had defeated the communists, Andrenov’s attack on the world economies had punished the international bankers, and the next phase of his plan would finish the Ukrainians for good. A century after the fall of the empire, Andrenov would rebuild what his grandfather fought so hard to protect.

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