Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt Read Online Free Page A

its tracks.
    There’d been challenges all along the route. After leaving Chicago they had tried and failed six times to tunnel 120 feet under the Calumet River. They were about to give up and find a slower way around when they stumbled upon a century-old tunnel that hadn’t been used in forty years. The first amp site after leaving Carteret was supposed to be near a mall in Alpha, New Jersey. The guy who owned the land said no. “He said he knew it was going to be some kind of terrorist target and he didn’t want it in the neighborhood,” said Spivey. “There’s always little gotchas out there that you have to be careful of.”
    Pennsylvania had proved even more difficult than Spivey had imagined. Coming from the east, the line ran to a small forest in Sunbury, just off the east bank of the Susquehanna River, where it stopped and waited for its western twin. The line coming from the west needed to cross the Susquehanna. That stretch of river was breathtakingly wide. There was one drill in the world—it would cost them $2 million to rent—capable of boring a tunnel under the river. In June 2010, the drill was in Brazil. “ We need a drill that is in Brazil ,” says Spivey. “That idea is quite alarming. Obviously someone is using the drill. When do we get to use it?” At the last minute they overcame some objections from Pennsylvania bridge authorities and were permitted to cross the river on the bridge—by boring holes through its concrete pylons and running the cable on the underside of the bridge.
    At which point the technical problems gave way to social problems. Leaving the bridge, the road split; one branch went north; the other, south. If you attempted to travel due east, you hit a dead end. The road just stopped, near a sign beside a levee that said, Welcome to Sunbury . Blocking the line’s path were two big parking lots. One belonged to a company that manufactured wire rope, the cable used on ski lifts; the other was owned by a century-old grocery store named Weis Markets. To reach its twin in the Sunbury forest, the line needed to pass through one of these parking lots or travel around the entire city. The owners of both Weis Markets and the Wirerope Works were hostile or suspicious, or both; they weren’t returning calls. “The whole state has been abused by coal companies,” Steve Williams explained. “When you say you want to dig, everyone gets suspicious.”
    Going around rather than through the town, Spivey calculated, would cost several months and a lot of money and would add four microseconds to his route. It would also prevent Spread Networks from delivering the cable on time to the Wall Street banks and traders ready to write checks for $10.6 million for it. But the guy who ran the wire rope factory was for some reason so angry with Spread’s local contractor that he wouldn’t speak to them. The guy who ran the Weis Markets was even harder to reach. His secretary told Spread that he was at a golf tournament, and unavailable. He’d already decided—without informing Spread Networks—to reject the somewhat strange offer of low six figures plus free high-speed Internet access they had offered him in exchange for a ten-foot easement under his parking lot. The line passed too close to his ice cream–making plant. The chairman had no interest in signing over a permanent easement that would make it difficult to expand the ice cream plant.
    In July 2010 the line dropped back underground beneath the bridge in Sunbury and just stopped. “We had all this fiber out there and we needed it to talk to each other and it couldn’t,” said Spivey. Then, for some reason he never fully understood, the wire rope people softened. They sold him the easement he needed. The day after Spread Networks acquired lifetime rights to a ten-foot-wide path under the wire rope factory’s parking lot, it sent out its first press release: “Round-trip travel time from Chicago to New Jersey has been cut to 13