At exactly thirty seconds, the silence of the luncheon was shattered by a sharp, aggressive electronic trill.
It was Richard Sterling’s personal cell phone inside his tailored jacket pocket.
Richard frowned. He pulled the sleek device out, intending to silence it, but when he saw the caller ID, his breath hitched audibly. He held up a finger to the crowd and turned his back, pressing the phone to his ear. “Marcus, I’m in the middle of a board presentation, this better be—”
Richard stopped speaking.
The color vanished from his face with horrifying speed. From where I stood, I could see his knuckles turning stark white as he gripped the phone. His shoulders, perfectly square moments ago, suddenly slumped as if a two-ton weight had been dropped directly onto his spine.
“What do you mean?” Richard’s voice was no longer smooth; it was thin, high-pitched, and trembling with genuine panic. “That’s impossible. We have a fifty-month term on that umbrella line. They can’t call the margin, we haven’t violated the covenants!”
Whatever the voice on the other end said caused Richard to physically stumble backward. He caught himself on the edge of the wooden podium, his eyes wide, completely unblinking.
“All of it?” Richard choked out, a bead of sweat tracing down his temple. “How much are we down… Marcus, tell me how much! What do you mean eighty percent? That’s eight billion dollars! Stop the trading! Freeze the accounts!”
The wealthy board members stared in shocked horror. Jason, sensing the catastrophic shift in the atmosphere, stepped forward, his arrogant smirk entirely gone. “Dad? What’s going on?”
Richard slowly lowered the phone from his ear. His hand was shaking so violently the device slipped from his fingers, bouncing off the wooden dais and landing on the grass with a dull thud.
He slowly turned his head. His terrified, bloodshot eyes moved past the crowd, past his son, and locked directly onto me.
For the first time, Richard Sterling really looked at my face. He looked past the dirty beard and the stained clothes. He looked into my eyes, and I let him see the monster I used to be. The apex predator of Wall Street.
“Oh my god,” Richard whispered, the breath tearing out of his throat in a ragged gasp. He fell heavily to his knees on the wooden dais, ignoring the horrified gasps of the board members. He stared at me in absolute, soul-crushing terror. “You… you’re Arthur Vance. You’re the White Shark.”
CHAPTER 4
The name echoed through the canvas tent like a gunshot.
The older board members, the men who had spent their entire lives studying the mythology of high finance, physically stepped back from me. The disgust on their faces was instantly replaced by a deep, primal fear. Arthur Vance wasn’t just a wealthy man; I was a living force of nature that had devoured institutional banks and shattered national economies before disappearing completely a decade ago.
“Dad, what are you doing?” Jason demanded, his voice cracking with panic. He looked frantically from his kneeling father to me. “Why are you on your knees for a groundskeeper? Get up!”
“Shut up, Jason!” Richard screamed, the raw panic in his voice terrifying his son into silence. Richard scrambled forward, crawling to the very edge of the wooden dais, his expensive trousers soaking up the dampness of the grass. He looked at me, his chest heaving, his eyes pleading. “Mr. Vance. Arthur. I… I had no idea. The Avalon Trust… that’s your holding?”
“You owe my trust eight billion dollars, Richard,” I said, my voice cutting through the ambient murmur like a steel blade. “You leveraged the homes and pensions of thousands of middle-class families to fuel your expansion. Your firm was legally bound by an instant-liquidation clause in the event of extreme moral hazard. I just invoked it.”
“You can’t do this!” Richard cried out, tears of genuine despair welling in his eyes. “We will be bankrupt by the end of the hour! The central bank will freeze my personal accounts! Everything I have… it’s gone. Arthur, please. It was a misunderstanding with the boy. I’ll make Jason apologize. I’ll make him clean your greenhouse! I’ll donate the entire botanical garden to the school!”
I slowly walked closer to the stage, stopping just inches from Richard’s face. “The boy didn’t destroy your empire, Richard. The boy is simply a symptom of the disease you bred into your family. You build wealth by hurting people who can’t fight back. You thought I was helpless this morning, so you ordered your son to walk on me. Now, you realize I hold the leash, and you’re begging like a dog. You sicken me.”
Jason’s cell phone suddenly erupted into a shrill ringing sound from his blazer pocket.