Wipeout: Wipeout Book 1 Read online

  WIPEOUT

  Wipeout Series

  Book 1

  By

  E.S. Richards

  Mike Kraus

  © 2020 Muonic Press Inc

  www.muonic.com

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  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, without the permission in writing from the author.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

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  Special Thanks

  Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great.

  Thank you!

  Wipeout Book 2

  Available Here

  Preface

  Throwing the paper from his falafel wrap into the trash, Samuel Westchester wiped his mouth with his handkerchief and smiled. Checking his watch, he saw he still had about ten minutes before he needed to be back in his Wall Street office. It was just long enough for a leisurely stroll along Exchange Place, a nice change from the manic rush he was normally in.

  Today was turning out to be a very good day. The new receptionist in his building had definitely smiled at him that morning and the line for his guilty pleasure lunch cart had been non-existent. Everything seemed to be working out and it made Samuel feel optimistic about the promotion he was up for at the end of the month. If he could keep up his work, there was a very high chance he would make partner by the end of the year. That would certainly give him something to smile about.

  Samuel fought the urge to whistle a merry tune as he strolled back to his office. A huge grin was plastered across his face as he nodded at tourists and locals alike, trying to spread his cheerful mood throughout New York City. Everyone was always in such a rush around where he worked, their faces glued to their phones or their eyes glazed over as voices blared through tiny, almost invisible headphones.

  Samuel had always been much too polite to navigate the sidewalks in such a manner, unlike most New Yorkers. He was an advocate for human conversation and rarely passed up an opportunity to share a smile or a nod of the head where possible. But not everyone was like him. As usual, he refused to let himself get worked up by mentally chastising the way people were. Life was too short to be affected by actions you couldn’t change. With the mood that he was in, Samuel just wanted to get back to work and enjoy his day.

  “Hey mister! Watch where you’re going will ya!”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Samuel was quick to apologize and move to one side, though he knew the woman he had just walked into was really the one at fault. Unlike most people in the city, he was always polite and respectful of others. It made him different, but that was the way he liked it. His parents had taught him that manners were the most important thing a gentleman could carry, a lesson he had never forgotten.

  Someone ran past him, smashed into his shoulder and sent him toppling over onto the sidewalk. “Hey!” Samuel shouted at the runner, but the man didn’t even look back over his shoulder. He ran into someone else as Samuel watched, unable to do anything except huff and shake his head.

  Climbing to his feet, Samuel noticed how strangely people were acting. Frozen in place, staring at their cellphones with shocked expressions. Shaking their heads and glancing around with worried looks. One woman nearby muttered under her breath as she did so.

  Furrowing his brow, Samuel tried to figure out what was happening. Panic seemed to be rising in the streets around him, people sprinting off in one direction or another. Samuel reached for his own cell when a piercing scream cut through the air and once again, he was knocked to the ground.

  Dazed and confused, he put a hand to the back of his head and groaned. His hair was wet, his ears rang, and his head pounded. Looking at his hand, Samuel could see the red stain even with his blurred vision. Blood. His whole body had been thrown backwards and his head smashed into a parking meter. He didn’t even know what had caused it until he looked up, but then it was unmistakable. The blood on his hand wasn’t the only blood now leaking onto the street.

  Samuel gagged and wretched. His stomach lurched, he fell to his hands and knees, and vomited into the gutter. The sight ahead of him was horrific. A car had veered off the road, the driver’s body hung half out of the front window, limp and lifeless from where they’d smashed through the glass. They had no hope; neither did the woman crushed underneath the hood. She was screaming. Struggling. Trying to free her lower body from the car that was crushing her. But there was no hope for her either. Between screams she coughed and spluttered, blood gurgled out of her mouth and sprayed up onto the sidewalk and over her clothes. The life was fading from her fast. In a matter of minutes, she too would be dead.

  “Hey!” Samuel shouted as loudly as he could manage, the effort causing him to wince from the pounding in his head. “Hey! We need some help over here!” But no one came. “What in God’s name is going on,” he muttered a moment later, his cries completely ignored.

  No one was coming to the aid of this woman and if things didn’t change quickly it would be too late for her. Reaching into his pocket, Samuel pulled out his cellphone and dialed 911, watching the woman carefully as he put his phone to his ear. She was choking, gasping desperately for air as blood filled her lungs. Just as a voice sounded out at the other end of the line, her body lurched somewhat and finally stilled for good. With his phone still pressed against his ear, Samuel stared at the now dead woman, knowing it had been too late.

  Swallowing and ending the call he forced himself to look away from her body. Samuel had never seen anyone die before and it made him feel hollow somewhat, like a part of him had disappeared even though he had never laid eyes on the woman before a few minutes earlier. Blinking a couple of times, he looked down at his cellphone again, clicking the button on the side to light up the screen. In an instant everything changed; all thoughts of the woman vanished from his head as he read the alert on his screen. Trident Banking Corporation collapsed. Billions of dollars lost.

  Samuel Westchester stared at his phone. That couldn’t be right. He clicked the button on the side again so the screen went black and then once more so it lit up again. But the message hadn’t changed. Trident had collapsed. One of the biggest banking corporations in the city – no, in the world – had gone down. Mi
llions of people had their money with Trident. Samuel had his money with Trident. He had his job with Trident. Surely that couldn’t all be lost. Surely there had to be some sort of explanation?

  Joining the throngs of people rushing through the street, he started pushing and shoving, trying to make his way to his office opposite the Trump Building. He had everything with Trident. He was just a few months away from making partner. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not to him.

  How much had he saved up over the years? He had thousands of dollars with Trident. Tens of thousands. Samuel had never been a greedy man, but he made a good living and he saved what he could. Each paycheck had added up and amassed to a quite substantial amount. That couldn’t now just be gone.

  Rushing toward the building, Samuel forced himself to switch off from the horrors that were happening around him. Two separate vehicles both veered off of the road and slammed into buildings due to the drivers staring at their phones. In both cases people were crushed between the cars and the brickwork. Screams echoed through the skies like birdsong, a river of red quickly streaming through the cracks in the sidewalk.

  It was impossible not to look. Samuel turned his head and saw the limp bodies of three figures who hadn’t managed to escape in time. Miraculously the driver had survived and was just stumbling from the door as Samuel moved past, the others not so lucky. One of them was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. Her eyes remained open as she lay still just to the side of the vehicle. The impact must have killed her instantly. At least that meant she didn’t have to suffer.

  As Samuel moved past the gruesome scene, the Trump Building came into view. But getting there would be another matter. The road and sidewalks were gridlocked ahead of him. Clearly everyone had had the same idea.

  “Sorry! Excuse me! Coming through!” He tried to start his journey through the sea of bodies with his signature politeness and decorum, but by the end of it, Samuel was pushing and shoving as much as everyone else. At one point he barged past a woman and her child so ferociously that the young boy was knocked to the ground.

  “Hey!” The mother spun round and shouted accusingly into the crowd, but Samuel was already on his way past the woman and away from the incident. Glancing back over his shoulder he saw another man bearing the brunt for what he had done, a shred of remorse catching Samuel off guard as he witnessed it. But by the time he had reached Trident’s building, any remorse or concern for anyone else had long faded.

  “Let me in,” he shouted in a security guard’s ear. “I work here. I’m personnel.”

  “No one in or out,” the guard yelled back, shoving Samuel into the crowd and standing firm in front of the double doors to the Trident building. “Everyone back off. Back off!”

  “Look,” Samuel reached into his pocket and pulled out an ID card. “See? Samuel Westchester. Marketing Director. You have to let me into this building.”

  “I don’t care what your card says, pal,” the guard sneered, taking Samuel’s ID and tossing it away into the crowd. “My orders come from the top and no one is getting inside. Not even you.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Samuel argued back. “You have to let me in. I have a right to know what’s going on!”

  “Yeah!” A loud voice echoed from the crowd behind Samuel, pushing him forward slightly and making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “We have a right to the truth! Let us in!”

  “Yeah! Open the doors!”

  “Let us in!”

  “Tell us what’s happened!”

  Before he knew it, Samuel was at the front of a riot, hundreds of people swelling up behind him and trying to break their way into the building. Trident was a secure place. There was a bank on the ground floor, vaults underneath it and offices above. The office where Samuel himself worked was on the fourteenth floor. But despite how well it was built, it wasn’t impenetrable. A large portion of the ground floor walls were in fact windows, the glass built thick, but not thick enough that it wouldn’t shatter.

  “Come on!” Samuel shouted at the same man, now feeling charged with adrenaline from the crowd. “Your money's in there too, isn’t it? Don’t you want to know what’s happened to it?”

  “We deserve to know the truth!”

  “We deserve our money!”

  “Let us in,” Samuel shouted again, keeping eye contact with the guard in front of him. “You can’t keep us out forever!”

  Watching the security man, Samuel could almost see the moment his perspective changed and he succumbed to the will of the crowd. He stopped fighting against them and stepped to one side, allowing the surge of people to push forward, the link in the chain of resistance broken. Other members of the security team tried to fill his gap, but it was hopeless. The dam had broken and the crowd had won.

  Within seconds, Samuel was inside the building. A place he had been coming to for over twenty years, a place he thought he knew inside and out; a place he thought he could trust. But Trident was different now. The bank floor was deserted, no tellers behind their booths or welcome staff standing beside the door. The smiling new receptionist nowhere to be seen.

  As the mob from outside streamed in, Samuel knew he had to break away if he was going to find anything out for himself. He dove toward the staff staircase and out of the sea of people, keeping his head down as he keyed in his code and dashed up the stairs on the way to the fourteenth floor where he felt safe. Only then could he catch his breath. Only then could he try to figure out what had happened to his bank. To his money. To his life. To the world.

  Introduction

  The modern banking system is increasingly reliant upon technology to function. Electronic records are the standard for transferring, storing and accessing money, turning what we used to think of as a “hard” form of currency into a digital one, where the sum total of your wealth is expressed as a series of 0’s and 1’s in a computer database. We save our money – in some form or another – to buy homes, start families, go on vacations, protect ourselves against the worst possibilities in life and, ultimately, to have a future.

  In 1929, well before digital records were even conceived of, the great Wall Street crash preceding the Great Depression ruined millions of lives. Billions of dollars were lost in an instant thanks to plummeting stock values, soup kitchens became the go-to places to get a few bites of food, businesses ceased to exist overnight and an entire generation’s way of living was upturned in the blink of an eye. Looking back, the one positive we can draw upon from the crash is that it’s well understood what actually happened and, even more importantly, how it could be avoided again.

  Imagine, though, a scenario where such a crash was caused not by extensive loans, fraudulent banking or another similar situation, but instead by a rogue group whose only goal would be the complete destruction of the US – and by extension, much of the world’s – banking systems. As our monetary records become increasingly digitized and large banking corporations continue to control more and more of the banking sectors across the globe, if such a group were to find a way to destroy the records of even a single banking giant, the results would be unfathomably disastrous.

  Already, terrorism in the world today is more than just individuals or groups dressed in masks waving guns and setting off bombs. The value of computer hackers on the black market has risen over a hundred percent in the last ten years, and nations who don’t field their own array of computer geniuses have easy access to them through groups that hire themselves out. This has led to the startling fact that there is a new cyber-attack taking place roughly twice a minute, costing the United States alone over fifteen billion dollars a year in damage mitigation, damage response and increased cybersecurity bills.

  As terrorism goes digital, so comes the possibility that organized groups could find loopholes within the digital economic landscape, exploit them and wreak horrifying consequences upon millions – or billions – of innocent lives.

  Imagine, then, if you will, a pos
sible near-future world in which every single dollar in the United States banking system is stored electronically and someone finds a way to wipe all of those 0’s and 1’s clean. If even one of the major banking institutions in the world were to suffer such an attack, it would make the Great Depression look like a tiny blip on the world economy.

  Stock markets would crash overnight. Without a way to process paychecks, businesses would shut down within days. Individuals who hadn’t spent time preparing a stockpile of necessities would find themselves fighting with millions of others for scraps of food, water and medical supplies. Governments would be thrown into chaos as the value of the dollar was thrown into doubt, and even massive government interventions would have no guarantee of fixing the situation.

  Money is, quite literally, the thing that keeps the world turning. If it’s taken away, though, how long would it take before society would crumble and fall apart? Without a stable economic system, how will the unprepared have a hope of surviving?

  Chapter 1

  In a dark room in a quiet and unsuspecting neighborhood, KW spun around from her computer and smiled. The screens all around the room showed the same image. Trident had collapsed. They had done it. Looking at her accomplices, each of them wore the same expression on their face. DM was practically giddy, his pale hand gripping FM’s in victory.

  “How much is there? What’s the final figure?”

  Turning back to her computer, KW typed a further few lines of code out in a flash and then lifted her eyes to the small total box on her screen and her screen alone. She felt four bodies lean in behind her, each of them waiting for the number to appear. When it did there were no words. Nothing that any of them could say would bring this moment justice. Trident spanned across three continents and over fifteen countries. There were nearly a thousand different banks and buildings devoted to it. Hundreds of millions of people would be left penniless, bankrupted by the actions of five people in one room in an undisclosed location.