Mr Gary R Walston

Default to Zero Mr Gary R Walston

Publisher Marketing: Morty Garcia, investment advisor to a South Texas organized crime don, concludes he needs a change in profession. This blinding insight occurs while hanging by his ankles two floors above the San Antonio Riverwalk. Holding him there is the Don's enforcer looking for payback for losses in the subprime mortgage market. Morty concludes that he somehow needs to get the investment back, a decision that propels him into the dangerous, high stakes world of a Wall Street wunderkind who is expertly riding the tsunami of the government bailout. With one week to deliver the money or suffer the Don's wrath, Morty rushes to New York and is thrust into a shadowy and dangerous contest to steal back the money while trying to stay alive. Along the way he pulls together an unlikely but intriguing team of co-conspirators all working to keep Morty and the money from defaulting to zero. Everyone seems to want of piece of Morty's action as he pulls together a plan to steal back the millions that Brandon Taggart, a key player in the housing bubble driven collapse, managed to siphon off as a golden parachute when his banking firm made the most of the government's bail out of Wall Street. Morty finds that the complex world of digital banking, offshore accounts, and day trading on steroids offers a fertile ground for his team of a Dominican hacker, a Texas enforcer and a beautiful Cuban art salesgirl. Together they face federal investigators, Albanian mobsters and an angry, well connected Irish mob attorney whose daughter is about to lose her share of Taggart's millions. Against a background of a financial meltdown and intricate computer hacking schemes, Default to Zero sprints to a stormy conclusion.