The threat of a knife in the dark was a novel sensation, and Jason found it surprisingly clarifying.
He had faced financial ruin, the annihilation of his past life, and the dizzying shock of waking up in a dead man's body. A ruined man screaming threats in a restaurant was, by comparison, almost refreshingly direct.
When he returned to the Fifth Avenue mansion, the gaslights were burning low. Alta was waiting for him in the study. She was seated in one of the high-backed leather chairs, a glass of sherry untouched on the table beside her.
She wasn't concerned for his safety. Her eyes were like chips of ice, focused entirely on the game.
"An enemy who announces his intentions is a fool," she said, her voice a low murmur in the quiet room. "But a desperate fool is still dangerous."
"Heinze is finished," Jason said, loosening his tie. "He's just a ghost, screaming at his own gravestone."
"He is a symptom," Alta corrected, her gaze sharp. "The disease is the institution that financed his delusions: The Knickerbocker Trust."
She stood and walked to the desk where Jason's map of the financial district lay under the lamplight. Her mother's faded leather journal was beside it. She opened the book, her movements precise and certain.
"Heinze is a wounded animal. He will lash out. But he has no real power left." Her slender, pale finger traced a line of elegant script and tapped a single name.
Charles T. Barney.
"He is the power," she said.
Jason leaned over, reading the entry. It was a clinical, brutal assessment of the Knickerbocker's president. It detailed a secret, unrecorded loan Barney had personally approved for Heinze, using massively overvalued copper shares as collateral. It was the last, desperate injection of cash that had fueled the final stage of the scheme.
The entry was a death warrant.
"He tied himself to a sinking ship," Alta said, her voice devoid of pity. "It's time to cut the rope."
Jason looked from the name in the journal to the Knickerbocker building he had circled in red ink on his map. A cold, predatory smile touched his lips. The pieces were all there. The motive, the means, the target.
"Barney is the key," he said, his voice a whisper. "Break him, and the bank breaks with him."
The next morning, Jason did not call his broker. He did not short a stock. He launched a silent, surgical strike.
Using a portion of the twenty million dollars Rockefeller Sr. had given him, he had five different proxies—anonymous men of business—walk into five different branches of the Knickerbocker Trust at precisely ten o'clock in the morning.
They made a series of large, coordinated, but seemingly unrelated withdrawals. The sums were just large enough to raise eyebrows, to force the branch managers to dip into their secondary reserves.
It was a quiet, invisible attack. A single stone tossed into a placid lake to create the first, widening ripple of fear.
Jason watched from a motorcar parked across the street from the bank's headquarters on Fifth Avenue. He was a general on a hill, observing the opening shots of a battle he had engineered.
By eleven, the ripples had become waves. Word had spread through messengers and telephone calls. The withdrawals had been noticed. A line began to form outside the bank's main entrance. It was a small line at first, just a dozen anxious-looking men in bowler hats, but their anxiety was a contagion.
The line grew. The murmuring started.
Another motorcar, a gleaming black Rolls-Royce, pulled up with a screech of its brakes. John D. Rockefeller Jr. emerged, his face set with the grim determination of a man on a holy mission.
He strode directly to the marble steps of the bank and raised his hands, addressing the growing, muttering crowd.
"Gentlemen! Have faith!" his voice rang out, filled with moral authority. "This is a house of rumor and fear! The bank is sound! I urge you, do not give in to this baseless panic!"
He made a great show of marching inside, his back ramrod straight. Minutes later, he emerged, holding a deposit slip high for all to see. "I have just entrusted a substantial sum to this institution! As should you!"
His words had an effect. A few men at the front of the line hesitated, their resolve wavering.
As Junior stood on the steps, a white knight trying to rally the wavering crowd, his eyes scanned the street. They swept past Jason's car, then snapped back, locking onto him.
Across the chaos of the street, across the growing fear of the crowd, the two brothers-in-law stared at each other. Junior's face was a mask of righteous fury and absolute condemnation. He knew. He knew this was Jason's work.
Jason's expression was one of cold, detached amusement. He gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod to his driver.
The car pulled away smoothly from the curb, leaving Junior alone on the steps, trying to fight a fire that Jason was happily feeding with gasoline. The message was clear: Your morality is a shield made of paper. My money is a sword made of steel.
By midday, Junior's intervention had created a stalemate. The line outside the Knickerbocker was long, but it had stopped growing. The bank was bleeding, but the wound might not be fatal. They might just survive the day, and if they did, they could rally their allies overnight.
Jason needed a final, decisive blow. He needed to turn nervous fear into blind, trampling panic.
He went to his club and secured a private telephone line. He summoned a hungry young reporter from the New York World, a man whose ambition Jason knew outweighed his scruples.
He didn't give his name. He presented himself as a "concerned insider" at a rival bank, a patriot worried about the stability of the entire financial system.
"You're doing a public service by listening to me," Jason said, his voice a grave, conspiratorial whisper over the crackling line.
The reporter's pencil was scratching furiously on the other end.
Jason fed him the story. He gave him the weapon Alta had provided. He told him about the secret loans, about Charles Barney's direct, personal financial ties to the disgraced Augustus Heinze. He explained the worthless, overvalued collateral.
He framed it as a story of corruption, of a powerful man betraying the sacred trust of his depositors.
"The man at the top has been gambling with the public's money," Jason said, letting a note of outrage enter his voice. "He has been reckless. And now that his schemes have failed, he expects the good people of New York to pay the price. The public has a right to know."
He could hear the reporter's sharp intake of breath. This was the kind of story that made a career.
He hung up the phone, the reporter's excited, breathless thank-yous still echoing in his ear.
The story would be on the front page of the morning edition, delivered to every doorstep in the city. It would be read over breakfast by every man and woman with a dollar saved in that bank.
Jason walked to the window of the club, looking down at the city streets below. The stalemate at the bank was about to be broken. He had just dropped a bomb into the heart of the enemy's camp.
"Checkmate," he whispered to the city below.