Free Dead Cat Bounce by Nic Bennett Page B

tie that the Baron had worn that morning, but it would do.
    He carefully closed the drawer and headed back out to the landing where the silence enveloped him once more. This time though it didn’t worry him as he looked at the tie and felt the circular shape of the disk in his pants pocket. He was going to recreate the trading floor in his head using the Baron’s training tool!
    Energized once more, he bounded across the hall into his ownroom. There, he awoke his desktop computer from sleep mode and swept his whopping two track trophies out of the way as he sat down in his grey, fabric desk chair. He pulled the disk out of his pocket, placed it into the drive, and carefully tied the tie around his neck while he waited for the old computer to chug to life.
    It took him two attempts to knot the tie to his satisfaction, and as he finished a red triplane appeared on the computer screen. The plane swept upward to reveal the German Iron Cross on the underside of its wings before disappearing to be replaced by the words “LEVEL ONE—Ours is the invisible hand. Do you have what it takes to join us?” Jonah screwed up his face in puzzlement as three options popped up: “New recruit,” “English Dummkopf,” and “Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen.”
    He waved his fingers in a moment of indecision before hitting “New Recruit.” Text scrolled up the screen, telling him about the pilots of World War I and that the greatest of them all, with more than eighty kills, was the German pilot Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, more commonly known as the Red Baron. Jonah snickered, thinking that it was probably a good thing that he hadn’t selected what was obviously the Baron’s preferred character.
    As soon as the text finished scrolling, the red triplane reappeared along with a graphic of keyboard controls showing how to land and take off, to turn and climb, to navigate and shoot. At this point, Jonah’s puzzlement transformed into laughter that grew louder and louder until finally he had to hit “pause.” How had the Baron called this a training tool?
    This—Jonah was pleasantly shocked to discover—
was a video game.

CHAPTER 9
Wednesday, August 25
    “Scramble! Scramble!” shouted the Baron the next morning. “Let’s go! Let’s go! iPod, you’re going to need to be really sharp this time. There won’t be any tickets. We’ll all be hollering at you, not just me.”
    “Why? What’s happening?” Jonah asked, pulling at the tie he’d “borrowed” the previous afternoon.
    The Baron shifted back to his desk and settled into his seat triumphantly. “The news is out! River Deep Gold is going to buy Mountain High Minerals. Market’s moving. Probably shouldn’t have waited for you to come back to us, but hey, when I start something with someone, I like to finish it.”
    Jonah thought he could hear Dog whisper something nasty under his breath. A second later, he and Jeeves were cracking up.
    “Ignore them,” said the Baron, eyeing Jonah directly. “Nice tie by the way.” Jonah was about to say thank you when the Baron once again undercut his attempt at pleasantries. “No time for that. Getyourself set. We’re going to be clearing out any minute now.”
    Jonah couldn’t help but be struck by the similarity between this Baron and the image of the Red Baron he’d played against yesterday. This one was pressing buttons on the keyboard like a fighter pilot going through his preflight checks; the other had appeared on Jonah’s screen out of nowhere, shooting to victory before Jonah could even blink.
    Meanwhile, Jonah’s screen was going berserk. The numbers next to everything they had bought and sold yesterday morning were changing by the second. And in the profit column it was all blue and climbing. Jonah marveled at how much he’d missed the energy and excitement, even though he’d only been gone for half a day.
    Suddenly, the bellowing started. Jonah could hardly tell where it was all coming