Graveland

The photo dates from sometime in the summer of 1972 and shows Richard Nixon, Bebe Rebozo, Adnan Khashoggi, and a 43-year-old James Vaughan on a yacht in Key Biscayne, Florida. Jacqueline Prescott, who later went on to work for Vaughan, can be seen in the background holding a cocktail shaker.

– House of Vaughan (p. 59)

4

MOST MORNINGS, by the time he gets to the office, Craig Howley has already done about two hours’ work. On Mondays, it’s more likely to be three. This is because James Vaughan insists on kickstarting the week with an 8 A.M. meeting of senior investment and consulting staff to review all Oberon deals either in play or on the table. Howley will get up at five, therefore, and pore over any relevant files or documentation, and continue doing so through breakfast and in the back of the car on the way to the office. He believes it’s essential to get ahead of any perceived curve. Vaughan himself seems able to pull this off instinctively, without any apparent effort-certainly without having to get up at 5:00 A.M. and probably without even having to look at a single quarterly report. Which is kind of annoying. But it’s part of his thing, of what makes him the great Jimmy Vaughan.

On his way up in the elevator, Howley anticipates the usual sniping and goading that goes on at these meetings, as different people seek to impress Vaughan by championing or attacking this or that deal. He also anticipates a lot of speculation, some of it informed, most of it hopelessly uninformed, about what happened over the weekend. At first, the general perception-the story, if you will-was that the Jeff Gale killing in Central Park on Saturday morning was an isolated incident. It was a random shooting, and as such, for the victim’s family, a terrible tragedy.

But the killing of Bob Holland twelve hours later on Columbus Avenue changed all of that.

Now, it seemed, the two incidents were linked.

Now, as a result, this possible link had become the story.

As Howley emerges from the elevator car and into Oberon’s steel and glass reception area, he is joined by Angela, his PA. Efficient and fiercely loyal, Angela is a brunette in her late forties who has worked for Howley since his early days at the Pentagon.

“Morning, Ange.”

“Mr. Howley.”

They proceed toward the central conference room, and as Angela takes his coat and briefcase, she discreetly informs him that Mr. Vaughan has just called in sick.

“What?”

“Just now. It was actually Ms. Prescott I spoke to. She passed on the message.”

Jacqueline Prescott is Vaughan’s PA, and has been since Angela herself was probably in kindergarten.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“She didn’t say exactly. Under the weather, something along those lines.”

In the twelve months he’s been at Oberon, Howley doesn’t think he’s seen Vaughan miss a single one of these Monday morning sit-downs.

“Well, well.”

“Ms. Prescott also said that Mrs. Vaughan would like you to call her after the meeting.”

Howley nods.

Hhmm.

What’s that about?

A moment later, arriving at the door of the conference room, he feels a twinge of apprehension. It’s strange. He’s chaired a thousand meetings in his day. What’s different about this one?

No point being coy. He knows what it is. He’ll be the most senior guy in the room. Which also means that for the next sixty minutes or so he’ll effectively be the Oberon Capital Group. And that’s bound to ignite more succession talk, fuel the chatter he knows has been going on for some time.

Without Vaughan in the room, too, the dynamic will be different, it’ll shift, and that’s always unpredictable.

“Ange, get me a green tea, will you? Decaf.”

He’s already had coffee and doesn’t want to overdo it.

He steps inside. Everything in Oberon’s main conference room-recently renovated according to specs laid down by Vaughan-is white, or on a spectrum, snow, ivory, alabaster, vanilla. The room’s only saving grace, for Howley, and no doubt for the rest of them, is its spectacular view over Central Park.

“Morning, gentlemen.”

Clearly, word has spread that Vaughan won’t be making it in today, and there’s already a certain tension in the air. Seated around the table are the heads of the various industry-specific investment groups, as well as the CEO of Lyndon Consulting, a firm that works exclusively with Oberon to assess performance levels and devise rationalization plans.

Howley gets straight into it, deciding to make no reference to Vaughan’s absence. This sets a tone, and within a matter of minutes-and somewhat to his surprise-he feels a growing confidence. They discuss proposals to buy a Phoenix-based electric utility operator, a chain of British health-food stores, and an equity fund that manages $35.6 billion on behalf of two Swedish pension schemes. Views are expressed, relevant data is presented, figures are pored over. And Howley listens. He defers, solicits further information, and then outlines a provisional strategy for each of the deals. The whole thing goes very smoothly. Afterward, as Howley is chatting with the CEO of Lyndon Consulting about “poor old” Bob Holland, one of the group heads comes up to him and shakes his hand, doesn’t say anything, just gives him a very firm handshake that seems to speak volumes. A few minutes later, two other group heads approach and ask him straight out what his position is on the IPO question.

This is a tricky one.

Filing for a public ticker is not necessarily the panacea that some people think it is. High-profile private equity firms have offered in the past, started well, and then seen their share prices plummet. It’d also involve opening the company’s books to public scrutiny, and as a Pentagon man that’s something Howley would find particularly distasteful. In fact, he’s pretty much ad idem with Vaughan on this, but at the same time he’s aware that that’s not what these guys want to hear.

“Look,” he says to them, just above a whisper, “we’re in a volatile phase here, so let’s take it one step at a time, okay?”

This is sufficiently cryptic and conspiratorial to mean anything and everything-and, crucially, nothing. It seems to satisfy them.

When he gets to his office, Angela already has the call in to Meredith Vaughan. Personally, he’d have waited a bit, but he’s not going to argue. Angela only ever acts in his best interests.

It’s Meredith that’s the problem.

He can’t take her seriously. She’s forty-six years younger than Vaughan-a man who’s already been married five times-and yet she acts, and expects to be treated, like she’s the First Lady. She’s very attractive, he supposes, but that’s hardly relevant.

“Meredith, hi.”

“Thanks for getting back to me, Craig.”

And then there’s that awful come-hither pussycat voice of hers.

“No problem. How’s Jimmy?”

“He’s not too bad, a little tired. I think he’s got a mild chest infection or something.” She pauses. “I wasn’t going to let him go in today.”

“Of course not.” Howley is about to say something here about calling a doctor when he remembers that Vaughan sees a doctor every single day-his own personal physician, no less, a man employed to monitor a serious blood condition Vaughan has, along with anything else that might come up.

Such as a mild chest infection.

“But listen, Craig,” Meredith says. “Jimmy wants you to come for dinner tonight. Is that okay?”

This is not a question. Or an invitation.

“Sure.”

“He just wants a quiet chat.”

Code for don’t bring Jessica.

“Of course.” Howley knows the routine here. Vaughan needs to eat early. “Seven good?”

“Perfect. We’ll see you then.”

We?

After he puts the phone down, Howley looks at his desk, at a big report on it that he has to read for an upcoming symposium he’s addressing on opportunities in the clean energy sector.

Wind turbines, solar power, shale gas.

He reaches for the report and skims through a few pages. He’s distracted, though, and his eyes glaze over. He glances out the window and replays the meeting in his head.

It was subtle, not much you could put your finger on, but he was right-the dynamic here at Oberon HQ has indeed shifted.

Ellen Dorsey wakes up tired. Technically, she got plenty of sleep, but it wasn’t the restorative kind, not by a long shot. It was more like eight hours of enhanced interrogation, but without any actual questions or clear notion of what her interrogators might have wanted her to reveal. It felt like one continuous garbled dream based on what she’d been doing over the previous sixteen hours-online research mainly, plus one or two brief phone calls (no more, solely because it was a Sunday) and a quick trip down to Bra on Columbus Avenue, with assiduous note taking throughout, countless pages of them scrawled on loose sheets of graph paper.

She hadn’t slept well on Saturday night, either, partly due to this heightened sense she’d had of what she might wake up to. And when she did wake up to something, to the Bob Holland killing-the Sunday morning newsfeed already engorged with it-she felt there was no route back.

She felt this was her story.

However irrational that may have seemed. And impractical.

And now, on Monday morning, mainly impractical.

Because as a news item it’s covered, everyone’s on it-it’s not like she’s got a jump on the story. In addition to which the new issue of Parallax will be out on Thursday, so anything she might come up with in the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours would be too late anyway. And next month’s issue, in news-cycle terms, may as well be a century away. There’s always the online edition, but it’s not exactly a premium site for breaking news.

Even if she had any to break.

Despite all of this, Ellen feels energized.

She e-mails in her copy for the Ratt Atkinson piece and then heads out for some breakfast. Over coffee she goes through the papers, where it’s wall-to-wall Jeff and Bob. The pattern of coverage is pretty much the same everywhere, as it has been since yesterday morning-an outline of what happened, a profile of each victim, and some editorializing. The outlines are sketchy, because not much seems to be known, the level of detail in the profiles depends on which paper it is, and the editorializing is remarkably consistent-all of them reaching more or less the same, and perhaps obvious, conclusion, i.e., that Wall Street bankers are being targeted by a group of highly organized domestic terrorists. A single reference is made to a months-old report detailing intelligence-community concerns that al Qaeda operatives in Yemen may have been planning attacks against certain leading Wall Street institutions.

And beyond that, just yet, no one seems willing to go.

No mention is made of any possible connection with the Occupy movement, and very little is said about what-or who-might be next. In the blogosphere, predictably, things are a little different. Convenient lists are drawn up, after-the-fact manifestos are posted, and each-way conspiracy theories are formulated.

When she leaves the coffee shop, Ellen takes the subway to midtown, walks around for a bit with her earphones in, listening, thinking, and then stops by the Parallax offices to see Max Daitch. With the new issue almost-but not quite-put to bed, the place is fairly hectic.

“Hi, Ellen,” Ricky, the features editor, says as he passes her in the hallway. “Got the Ratt piece, thanks. Cutting it a bit fine, though, no?”

Ellen shrugs.

A deadline’s a deadline.

In Daitch’s office, there’s a meeting in progress, some minor crisis. She stands in the doorway, and waits.

Sitting at his desk, partly hidden behind piles of books and papers, Daitch looks tired, under siege. Standing in front of the desk, in a semicircle, are three young tech guys.

Two beardies, one baldy.

Lots of jargon.

Daitch doesn’t stand a chance.

The magazine’s website is fairly primitive, barely on the grid, in fact-no Twitter feed, no YouTube channel, no mobile app, no Facebook page even-and that’s more than likely the source of the problem here. Max claims to be a technophobe and a Luddite, and he probably is, but he’ll also argue in private that no one has yet worked out a convincing business model for any of this stuff. If he was going to commit the magazine to a digital future, he’d like to feel that the range of possible outcomes wasn’t limited to either financial self-harm or institutional suicide.

“Well,” he says eventually, dragging the word out, and then exhaling loudly, “I don’t know, do I?” He gets up. “You fucking figure it out.”

End of meeting.

Ellen steps back to let the boys pass.

Max remains standing and then waves Ellen in. “What’s the matter with me?” he says. “I’m not even forty, and I can’t get a handle on this shit.”

“You were born forty, Max. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I have to worry about it. These pricks are at the gate. It’s all very well me taking a stand, old man shakes his fist at Twitter, but how long is that tenable? Sooner or later-”

“Get a handle on it, Max. It’s not hard.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He sits down again. “So what’s up?”

“Jeff Gale. Bob Holland.”

“What about them?”

“In case you didn’t know, Max, someone shot them both dead over the weekend. I’m interested in who and why.”

“No shit.” He leans back in his chair and swivels from side to side. “What about Jane Glasser?”

This was to be Ellen’s next subject in the presidential hopefuls series, the congresswoman from West Virginia whose own staff members were recently caught on a YouTube video calling her “the she-devil.”

“Yeah, I’m on that, but… this is news.”

Max groans. And she knows why. It’s the same argument as before, the same argument as always. Parallax calls itself a news magazine, but what does that mean anymore? The phrase is almost archaic, like “fax machine” or “long-distance telephone call.” The issue that’s coming out on Thursday, for instance, has some good stuff in it-a piece on China’s new mega-cities, and an interview with Alexandre Desplat-but for the next four weeks the magazine will sit on newsstands and coffee tables across the country blithely unaffected by anything new that actually happens.

“I know,” Max says, “I know. We have to ramp up the online side of things. I know. In fact, I should call those three guys back in here right now, shouldn’t I? Give them the green light, give them the keys.” He pauses. “But you know what? It wouldn’t make any difference.”

Standing there in front of him, listening, Ellen is torn between going, Yeah, yeah, Max, whatever, and leaning across the desk to slap him in the face.

He winces. “Don’t look at me like that, Ellen. Not you.”

Then she feels bad. They go back a long way and have never fallen out, which for her has to be some kind of a record. “What is it, Max?”

He turns away for a moment and gazes out the window. Then he says, “Do you know who owns Parallax these days, Ellen?”

She’s about to answer, but hesitates. Does she know? Maybe not. As a contributing editor, she should know, and certainly did know at one stage-it was Wolper & Stone, and was for decades. But then Wolper was bought out by MCL Media. Wasn’t that it?

And now?

“Isn’t it MCL?”

“Sure, yeah, but who owns them?”

Penny dropping, she clicks her tongue. “Oh.”

Max leans forward. “Last year MCL was bought out by the Mercury Publishing Group, who is owned by Offtech… who, in turn”-he squeezes his eyes shut for a second, as though in pain-“has just been bought out by Tiberius Capital Partners.”

“Fuck.”

“Exactly.” He leans back in his swivel chair. “Let the asset stripping begin.”

“Oh, Max.” She feels even worse now. And stupid. For not having known. Parallax survives almost forty years as an independent organ, a supposedly fearless voice in print journalism, and then in the space of two or three years it disappears into a Russian nesting doll of corporate ownership.

“They could switch us out like a light, Ellen, any time, and they’re going to, it’s simply a matter of when.” He taps out a drumroll on the edge of his desk. “So listen to me, start asking around for work, okay?”

“Jesus.”

“I mean it.”

“Max.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Anywhere you go will be lucky to get you.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. But I’m just being realistic. You said it yourself, what’s happening out there is news. Once opened it has to be consumed immediately. Or it goes bad. Or needs to be refrigerated.” He looks up at her. “Something like that.”

When she gives it a little thought, Ellen isn’t surprised by any of this. It’s a combination of things-the current climate principally, but also the curious, gradual fact of Max’s diminished fearlessness. The Luddite thing, she believes, is part affectation and part defense mechanism. But what she really believes, and can’t satisfactorily explain, and definitely isn’t ready to articulate just yet, is that since she and Jimmy Gilroy wrote that piece on Senator John Rundle eighteen months ago, this magazine has been more or less doomed, with Max’s own doom-professionally speaking, at any rate-an unfortunate and inevitable piece of collateral damage.

She holds his gaze for what feels like a long time.

But there’s only one way forward here, and it applies to both of them.

“So,” she says eventually, “you want to hear what I’ve got?”

“Yeah. Okay.” He draws a hand across his thinning hair. “Shoot.”

Ellen pulls a chair over, sits down, and starts telling him about how she spent the weekend-about her quick visits to the two crime scenes, the first in Central Park, the second on the sidewalk outside Bra on Columbus Avenue. She describes how she met and spoke with various people at these locations, and then got follow-up texts or phone messages. She lists the different subjects she spent most of yesterday researching online, anything from algorithmic trading to real estate litigation to forensic ballistics. “And from all of which,” she says, summing up, “I did manage to extract at least one interesting and possibly relevant observation. It’s something I haven’t seen a single reference to yet, not anywhere, though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before there’ll be one.” She pauses. “Or maybe not. You never know. But it is weird.”

“What is? What’s weird?”

“Okay, look, everyone’s saying that this is the work of terrorists, right? And maybe it is, but an assumption is also being made, and it’s based on nothing as far as I can see-”

“What assumption?”

“That these terrorists are highly organized, and professional, and that therefore the two shootings were carried out by the same people. Now maybe there’s an official narrative being put out for some reason, that’s always possible, I don’t know…”

“But?”

“Well… from talking to different people, and putting it all together, my understanding of it is that Jeff Gale took a clean shot to the forehead, and no one saw the perps, whereas Bob Holland had half his face and head blown off on a busy sidewalk with literally dozens of people watching.”

Max nods slowly. “Different MO.”

“Completely. The weapons were different, that’s clear from the ballistics, even to me… and the psychology of it was different. I mean, look at the whole approach.” She hunches forward a little more and lowers her voice. “So that can only mean one of two things-different perps, with no connection, or the same perps, but they’re a bunch of clowns and are making this up as they go along. Either way, what we’re being fed at the moment is clearly a line of bullshit, and this story isn’t even two days old.”

By the time Frank Bishop gets to work on Monday morning the feeling he’s had since he woke up-a low-lying sense of dread-has intensified considerably. It’s not a full-blown panic attack, not yet, but he suspects he’s getting there. And he tries to pin it down, to locate the starting point, the catalyst-because there usually is one, a specific moment when you see or hear or even just remember something, and it’s like a change in wind direction or a sudden shift in temperature. Was it a dream he had? He can’t remember. When you wake up feeling this shitty it usually is a dream, an insidious wormhole into some forgotten corner of your unconscious.

Though now that he thinks about it he actually went to bed feeling shitty, so…

What did he do yesterday? Nothing. It was a Sunday. He slept half the day and flicked through the pages of the New York Times and watched TV.

Oh… that was it. He remembers now.

He watched part of a documentary on some cable channel about the architect Frank Gehry, and it reminded him of how his own career as an architect has turned to dust. What bothers him is not the alternative life he has ended up leading, here in Mahopac, and at Winterbrook Mall, so much as the stuff he never got around to doing in his original life, professionally speaking, at any rate-the civic buildings, the bank offices, the bridges… the grand unrealized projects. That’s what bugs the crap out of him whenever he thinks about it. Which, to be fair, isn’t that often. But when he does, like last night, and now this morning, the feeling tends to linger, and thicken.

He waits until Lance has arrived before calling the regional manager. The place is quiet, and they’ll be lucky if three or four people wander in all morning. Though given the state he’s in today, Frank doesn’t want to take any chances. He talks to this guy at the same time every Monday, to go over numbers and staffing issues, and while it’s a perfectly routine call, it’s never that easy. Only in his late twenties, the regional manager is a bit of a jerk and clearly perceives himself to be on some “upward trajectory” within the Paloma management constellation. Frank gets all of this and plays along. He’s not an idiot. It’s part of what he has to do if he wants to keep getting a paycheck every month. But he doesn’t have to like it.

“Frank, my man,” the regional manager says when the call is put through, “talk to me.”

“Saturday,” Frank says at once, emphatically, and as if that’s all that needs to be said-one word, nothing else, not even the guy’s name.

Which is Mike.

“Saturday? What do you mean, Saturday? I don’t understand, Frank.”

“I mean, Saturday, Mike. Fifty units of the LudeX.” Then, instead of a judicious edit, he lets the tape roll. “Jesus, what was that meant to be, some kind of a fucking joke?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Hesitating, Frank looks out over the stockroom from his little office in the corner. No contingency plan here, it would seem. Though whatever this is, it didn’t just happen. Something is spurring him on. It feels like anger, but if so, what’s he angry about? Not the LudeX situation, that’s for sure. He couldn’t give a shit about the LudeX situation. Is it his increasing dread, then, his anxiety, but redirected somehow, transmuted into this belligerent little snit he seems to be having? Maybe, but he’s confused and doesn’t feel entirely in control.

“It was insane,” he says. “We were turning customers away all day.”

“We allocated-”

“Oh come on, allocated. That’s ridiculous.” He leans back in his chair. “I don’t know, do you people sit around all day thinking this shit up? Allocated.”

There is a short silence. Then, “Frank, have you been drinking?”

Frank laughs at this. “No, Mike, I haven’t. It’s a little early in the day, don’t you think? But is that all you can come up with? I’ve been drinking?”

“What the-”

“Because I question your fucking judgment?”

“Jesus, Frank.”

There is another silence. Frank presses the back of his head against the wall. He’s being reckless here, and he isn’t sure why-why now, why like this. But what does strike him is that in terms of tone, whatever about content, there’s no reason why any conversation between himself and Mike shouldn’t unfold in precisely the way this one has. It’s what should be normal. His being deferential to Mike, on the other hand… that’s what’s absurd. At the same time, if he doesn’t climb back through the looking-glass, and pretty quickly, he’s going to be in serious trouble.

“Listen to me, Mike,” he says. “What I-”

But he freezes. He can’t do it. Not at the moment.

“Frank?”

“Let me call you back later, okay?”

He puts the phone down.

After a couple of seconds, he gets up out of the chair and starts walking across the stockroom, expecting the phone behind him to ring at any second. He hopes it doesn’t, and actually suspects-on the basis that Mike must have been as relieved to end the conversation as he was-that it won’t.

He goes outside to the loading area and takes a few deep breaths.

Anyway, this probably isn’t a situation Mike would be all that well equipped to deal with-disaffected staff member getting confrontational, using abusive language. He might be trained for it, in theory, but given his age it’s unlikely he’s had any direct or relevant experience. With jobs so hard to come by these days, people tend to be more careful in their behavior.

Frank stares out over the vast, largely empty parking lot to the rear of the mall.

So… what was he thinking? What was on his mind?

With jobs so hard to come by and all.

He doesn’t know. Could this be a turning point, though? A tipping point?

Maybe.

But to what?

In the absence of a cigarette to smoke, or a soda to drink, he takes out his cell phone and scrolls down through his list of contacts.

He stops at Lizzie’s number.

He didn’t want to call her yesterday, because that would have been too soon after their conversation of the night before. No doubt today is still too soon.

But he’s worried about her.

He makes the call. No answer.

Leave a message.

He doesn’t.

What would it be? I’m worried about you? I love you? It makes my heart ache just to say your name?

With his stomach jumping, he puts his phone away, turns around and goes back inside.

On his way up in the elevator, Craig Howley straightens his tie. He’d have liked a little time to freshen up before coming here, but it was a busy day. Hectic actually. The worst part was the two hours he spent on a conference call with three executives from a struggling Asian hotel chain, Best Pacific-a company whose senior and subordinated debt Oberon recently acquired, an act that then necessitated Oberon’s shedding the chain’s pension fund along with seventeen hundred of its employees.

Tough, yes, certainly, but what planet were these people living on? Barking at him over the phone wasn’t going to change the basic facts of the situation.

Vaughan’s absence didn’t help much either, it has to be said.

The elevator door slides open.

At which point Howley remembers just where he is, and what he’s in for here. The foyer to James Vaughan’s Park Avenue apartment is a palace of onyx and alabaster, a trompe l’oeil cathedral. Howley has lived on Park himself-though a good bit farther up, and it was at least fifteen years ago, different job, different marriage, different life. He currently lives in a handsome townhouse on Sixty-eighth, but this place is simply of a different order.

“Meredith!”

And there she is-sculpted purple sheath dress, crimson lips, coruscating eyes, raven black hair. Gatekeeper, keeper of the flame. Howley more or less hates this woman, but he has to admit that he has a weird, tingly kind of crush on her at the same time. He couldn’t imagine having sex with her, wouldn’t want to in a million years, nor could he imagine even having a meaningful conversation with her, but there’s something there, something that renders-not her, actually, but him incomprehensible.

“Craig, how are you?”

And the pussycat voice. Over the phone, it’s like a joke. In person, it’s more like an intimidating sex toy, black, solid, shiny.

Unknowable, but in your face.

A lot of people, Howley included, have expended a good deal of time and energy speculating about the nature of Vaughan’s relationship with this woman. Of course, the knowledge that five fairly formidable wives preceded her only complicates matters. Howley himself knew Ruth, who stretched back into the early nineties, and who at the time seemed like a perfect lady, smart as a whip and rake thin-a victim of cancer, sadly, but also, in many people’s eyes, the calculating bitch who took over from Megan, his eighties wife. To those in the know, however, Vaughan’s real wife-the way people have a real president, the one they grew up with, and that in a strange way defines them (LBJ in Howley’s case)-was Kitty. She stretched from the early eighties right back to the mid-fifties. She was the sweetheart, the mother of his children, the woman behind the man. The first two wives, the early ones, Howley knows nothing of. He assumes they were probably a bit like this one, sexy, distracting, ill-advised.

“I’m good,” he says, mwah-mwahing her. “Kept on my toes, you know, with the boss out sick and all.”

“The boss,” she says, mock dismissively, and leads him along the main hallway. To Howley’s surprise, they head for the kitchen. He’s been to the apartment many times before and is usually led into the library or straight into the dining room. This is his first visit to the kitchen, which is huge, brightly lit, and fitted out with cabinets and surfaces of brushed steel, black chrome, and polished marble.

Vaughan is seated on a high stool at a long counter. He looks small and frail. There’s a bowl of something in front of him. He glances up.

“Craig.”

Howley approaches and nods at the bowl, which contains some kind of soup or chowder. “Getting a head start there, Jimmy, are you?”

Vaughan shrugs. He’s wearing a bathrobe and hasn’t shaved. Howley has never seen him like this before, never seen him out of a suit before.

“Yeah,” he says. “What are you gonna do? Sue me? Mrs. R there will fix you something if you’re hungry.”

Howley looks at him. If he’s hungry? Of course he’s fucking hungry. He’s been working all day and was expecting dinner. He glances to his left. Mrs. Richardson, Vaughan’s longtime cook, is busy over at the sink scrubbing something, a baking tray or a pot. Howley looks back, hesitates, and then says, “You know what, I’m good, thanks. I’ll eat later.”

“Suit yourself.” Vaughan indicates a stool on the other side of the counter. “But sit with me, will you?”

Howley pulls out the nearest stool and sits down. A little farther along the counter, an open copy of the New York Post is lying next to a can of Dr. Thurston’s Diet Cherry Cola. Meredith slides onto the stool in front of the paper, hunches forward, and starts reading.

“So, Jimmy, how are you feeling?”

Vaughan makes a face. “Lousy. I’ve got ten different things wrong with me.” He takes a slurp from the bowl, then looks up at Howley. “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”

And he’s right. Howley doesn’t.

But at the same time it’d be useful to know what they’re dealing with here. Vaughan looks pretty awful, it has to be said-pathetic, really… stooped, unshaven, pale, dribbling chowder. It’s hard to imagine a route back from this, and to something like a vigorous investment committee meeting or a tricky client lunch at the Four Seasons. It’s shocking how rapid the deterioration has been. The old man seemed fine on Friday.

“Are we going to be seeing you back at the office anytime soon?”

The moment Howley says this, he regrets it.

“Jesus, Craig.”

Because it’s not as if Vaughan has been out sick for weeks. He’s missed a single day. It just felt like a very long day.

“No, I meant…”

“Ha,” Vaughan says, his spoon suspended over the bowl, “either you can’t handle the pressure or you’re itching to rearrange the furniture in my office. Which is it?”

Howley tenses. He isn’t comfortable having a conversation like this in the kitchen, with Meredith there, and the cook listening in. “Jimmy-”

“Just tell me, should I be worried?”

“Look, I, er-”

Vaughan cracks a smile, a sour one. “Oh, relax, Craig, would you?” He shifts his focus back to the spoon. “I was just kidding.”

“Right.”

The next mouthful of chowder Vaughan takes has a chunky piece in it that requires chewing. The chewing goes on for quite a while, and Howley becomes exasperated. He’s just about to ask why he was summoned up here in the first place when Meredith slaps her hand down loudly on the countertop.

They both turn to look at her.

“These people.”

Howley tilts his head to get a glimpse of what she’s reading. It’s a two-page spread covering the Connie Carillo trial. In between blocks of text, he can make out pictures of Judge Roberts, of Ray Whitestone, and of Connie herself.

Vaughan puts his spoon down. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

She flicks the back of her hand against the spread.

“This. I’ve had enough of it. They’re like vultures.” She shakes her head. “Poor Connie.”

Vaughan shrugs. “What do you want? It’s a murder trial.” He turns back to Howley. “You been following this, Craig?”

“As much as anyone, I guess. It’s hard to avoid.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. Meredith here was at Brearley with Connie. Isn’t that right, Mer?”

She tenses. There is silence for a moment. “Just because I was at school with her doesn’t mean-” She stops and slides off the stool. “Oh, what would you know? Finish that slop there and take your medication, would you?”

She grabs her soda roughly, spilling some on the countertop, and storms out of the kitchen.

“My word,” Vaughan says, picking up his spoon again. “What’s eating her?” He takes another sip of chowder. “So, Craig. What do you think? Is Senator Pendleton going to take the stand?”

Howley can’t quite believe the way this is shaping up. It’s certainly not what he had in mind. Nevertheless, he looks around, thinking… Connie Carillo, Pendleton. He heard something about the trial this morning. People were discussing it in the elevator.

“I doubt it,” he says eventually. “Too much exposure. It’s the name. If she was still a Pendleton, then maybe, but I figure the old man’s going to let her fry.”

“Yeah,” Vaughan says, “but if she fries, he’s finished anyway. In fact, he’s already finished. Connie screwed her old man over years ago by marrying Ricky. I mean, what, we’re going to elect a governor who’s got an ex-son-in-law with ‘Icepick’ for a middle name? Please.”

“I don’t see why not,” Howley says. “These days? It’d take a lot more than that to crush Gene Pendleton.”

“Maybe, but it’s not over yet. I think there’s still a bunch of stuff to come out. That campaign funds thing, for instance, with Meeker… the missing checkbook.” He pauses, then coughs. “There’s also this guy at the moment, the doorman, what’s his name?”

Howley hasn’t seen enough of the coverage and is out of his depth here. A missing checkbook? The doorman? He has no idea what Vaughan is talking about.

He shakes his head.

“Mrs. R?” Vaughan then says, turning awkwardly. “The doorman, the guy on at the moment, what’s his name?”

Mrs. Richardson looks up from the sink and clicks her tongue. “Joey Gifford.”

“Thank you. Yes, of course.” He takes another old-man slurp of chowder and quickly wipes his chin with a napkin. “And let’s not forget the question of method, the carving knife.” He pauses, looking up. “Not exactly an icepick, but hey.”

Howley remains silent and gazes at the tiny splashes of cherry soda on the countertop. Sticky and crimson, they look like speckles of blood.

“Anyway,” Vaughan says, “Ray Whitestone is going to have a ball working the various angles.” He puts his spoon into the bowl and pushes it aside. “Case is made for him.” He reaches into the pocket of his robe and takes out a silver pillbox. “It’s got everything,” he goes on, more slowly now, concentrating, his mind fixed on getting the box open. “Politics, sex, the mob… Wall Street, grand opera. You couldn’t make it up. Right, Craig?”

Howley nods. What else is there to do?

The old man clears his throat. “Get me a glass of water, Mrs. R, would you?”

She does.

Over the next couple of minutes, and in silence, Vaughan takes his various tablets. When he’s done, he stands up, ties the sash of his robe, and nods at the door. “Come on, Craig, let me walk you out.”

Walk him out? He just got here.

Resigned, Howley nods at Mrs. Richardson, who’s standing at the counter now, scrubbing at the soda stains with a spiral wire brush.

On the way out, Vaughan starts coughing. It escalates, and to get it under control he has to pound his chest with the palm of his hand. Howley finds this alarming.

“You okay?”

“Do I sound it?”

After he’s regained his composure, and as they’re crossing the foyer, Vaughan turns and says, “So, Craig, tell me, what do you make of these shootings over the weekend?”

Howley exhales loudly. He doesn’t know, and at this point he doesn’t really care. He’s more concerned-or, at any rate, baffled-by Vaughan’s behavior. It’s clear that the old man is unwell, and very frail, but also that he’s as sharp as ever, and as calculating. The fact that they haven’t discussed either the succession question or the proposed IPO is no accident as far as Howley is concerned. This other stuff, the Carillo trial, the shootings… Howley sees it all as smoke and mirrors, a form of misdirection.

Sleight of hand.

Or is it?

In truth, he can’t be sure. Because the thing is… could Vaughan have actually forgotten what he’d called Howley up here to discuss?

It can’t be discounted as a possibility.

“I don’t know, Jimmy,” he says, eyeing the old man warily now. “I refuse to believe any of this conspiracy stuff in the papers. There’s no mystery about it, really.” He shrugs. “It’s simple. The murder rate goes up in a recession.”

Vaughan shakes his head. “I think you’ll find the most recent stats contradict you on that one, Craig.” He starts coughing again, but manages to contain it this time. “Big drop in violent crime, five, almost six percent last year alone.”

Okay, whatever, Jesus.

“Well, Jimmy, what do you think?”

This is what he wants, isn’t it?

Vaughan presses the button for the elevator and the door whispers open. “Whatever this is,” he says, “I think it goes pretty deep.” He holds his arm against the elevator door to keep it open. “It could be some form of, I don’t know… bloodletting.” He looks very weak all of a sudden, and a little spaced. “I don’t think we’ve seen an end to it.”

Howley nods and steps into the elevator cab.

It goes deep? Bloodletting? An end to it?

He’s not quite sure what the old man is talking about. But maybe-it occurs to him-just maybe, the old man isn’t sure either. In fact, maybe he’s losing his marbles. Maybe this is the end of an era, or the start of a new one. Howley has a quick vision of himself steering Oberon to a successful IPO, and then beyond, to his own rightful place at the table, CFR, Trilateral, Bilderberg, whatever-the old man, meanwhile, stuck here in the apartment coughing his lungs up, fumbling with tablets, sucking his food out of a straw, and watching endless coverage on TV of some tawdry celebrity murder trial…

Howley turns around.

Maybe he should think about rearranging the furniture in Vaughan’s office, because chances are this decrepit old bird in front of him now won’t be leaving home anytime soon.

Unless it’s in a box.

“Okay, Jimmy,” he says, looking out from the overly ornate interior of the elevator cab. “Good night.”

“Yeah, Craig, old sport,” Vaughan says, but quietly, a sudden and unexpected glint in his eye. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

5

AT THE COUNTER IN HER LOCAL DINER, sipping coffee, waiting on a bagel and cream cheese, Ellen flicks through her notebook, the most recent few pages of it. But there’s nothing there. It’s all doodles and arrows and mini-mindmaps and word lists-hieroglyphic shit in her own handwriting that soon even she’ll be unable to decipher. This is what happens when you lose the thread of a story, or can’t find the shape of one in the first place.

She puts the notebook down and stirs her coffee. There’s no reason to, it’s black and unsweetened, but she does it anyway.

One of the little diner-y things people do.

Like shaking the packet of sugar before you open it, or chewing on a toothpick.

She glances up and down the counter.

Skinny guy in a business suit perched on his stool at one end, burly construction worker spilling off his at the other.

Where’s Norman Rockwell when you need him?

The bagel arrives, and she starts into it, eyeing the notebook, unwilling to let this go. Since expounding her theory yesterday to Max Daitch, Ellen has made little or no progress. Probably because it wasn’t much of a theory to start with. What was it she said? Different perps, no connection, same perps, bunch of clowns?

Something like that?

Or that specifically.

The counter guy is passing, and she holds out her cup for a refill.

The official line hasn’t changed in the last twenty-four hours either. Maybe there’s hard evidence somewhere that she’s unaware of-or maybe it’s a carefully engineered consensus, or maybe it’s just intellectual laziness, she doesn’t know-but the continuing and remarkably consistent media assumption seems to be that a group of domestic terrorists, as yet unidentified, was responsible for the two killings. Within those parameters, there is a modicum of theorizing, and the usual lingo is deployed-jihad, radical, global… battlefield… threat level. Repeated reference is now also being made to that earlier report about intel analysts picking up noises in Yemen relating to possible targeting of Wall Street executives.

But what strikes Ellen most is that there hasn’t been a single mention anywhere, at least not that she can see, of the differing methods used in the two shootings, and of how weird that is, and of what it implies-

Quick sip of coffee.

– namely, that the shootings may well have been separate and unconnected, which would also mean they were random and coincidental, thus rendering all of that speculative Homeland Security-speak in the papers and online pretty much irrelevant. The alternative scenario is that the shootings were indeed connected, at least circumstantially. For the moment, the how and why remain unknown, but what the differing methods would seem to imply is that maybe there was no method, or very little method, and that the perps were simply amateurs.

As far as Ellen is concerned, if it’s the first, there’s no story here worth pursuing. It’d just be two routine homicides. But if it’s the second-

She takes her last mouthful of bagel.

– there is.

So she’s going with the second.

With the amateurs, the clowns.

The lone wolves, the stray dogs.

Because if that’s what these guys are, amateurs, and not a highly organized terrorist cell-not pre-installed units, not strings of code in some elaborate phase of video gameplay-then there’s no reason why she or any other moderately intelligent person shouldn’t be able to get inside their heads, work out what they’re up to, second-guess them even.

She twirls the coffee spoon between her fingers for a moment.

Is that being overly ambitious? Perhaps. Wouldn’t be the first time, though.

She looks around.

Regrouping.

Okay, most parties with an interest in this-Homeland Security, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, the NYPD, CNN, Fox, the WSJ, the Times, half the blogosphere-are just assuming that these perps are experienced professionals, possibly with a background in the military or in special ops. Little Ellen Dorsey, on the other hand, and based solely on a fucking hunch, has decided otherwise-that they’re newbies, isolated, and largely clueless.

It’s not much of a competitive edge, and maybe she’s deluding herself, but it’s all she’s got.

She pays and leaves.

And there isn’t much of a window here, because if she’s right about this, it’s bound to become apparent to everyone pretty quickly-one more development is all it’ll take, and that could happen at any time.

Walking back to her apartment, she decides that with the lack of any intel on the perps, the only other likely route into the story is through the vics. Why them? Who were they? What did they have in common? Did they ever meet, or cross paths professionally? And if so, does this tell us anything?

She gets home, clears some space on her desk, and settles down to work.

Over the course of the day she trawls through dozens of business websites, gathering and collating references to the two men. She reads profiles, magazine articles, blog posts, anything she can find. She prints out some of this stuff, pinning loose pages of it onto various corkboards around the apartment and laying others out on the floor. She moves quickly from one spot to another, highlighting passages with a red marker as she follows a line of thought, swirling and daubing red streaks on paper like a hopped-up Jackson Pollock. She spends a good deal of time on the phone and writing e-mails, putting out feelers, questions, requests for information.

She doesn’t eat anything. She drinks a lot of coffee.

But none of this really gets her anywhere. Because although it turns out that Jeff Gale and Bob Holland had quite a lot in common, there’s a predictability to it all, and a banality. They both served, for instance, on a couple of the same boards; they were both members of the same golf club for a while; and they both had former wives who went to the same high school. She finds gala charity events that they both attended and infers a certain degree of casual social contact between them, at lunches, openings, the occasional weekend in the Hamptons.

But what she doesn’t find, or stumble upon, is any kind of sinister nexus between Northwood Leffingwell and Chambers Capital Management. She finds a nexus, alright, but it’s the bigger one-the one that links them all together, the banks, the hedge funds, the private equity shops. She knew this-of course she did, it’s axiomatic now-but it still comes as a shock to see it laid out like that in such unequivocal terms.

And it’s no help really.

Because it doesn’t tell her anything.

By late evening she’s tired, addled from too much caffeine, her brain engorged with terabytes of useless information. In an attempt to reverse this, or at least to calm it-to calm what she considers her attention surplus disorder-she takes a long, hot, fragrant bath. Lying there, in the flickering candlelight, she listens for the weird sounds that her building occasionally tends to make, or that tend to ripple through it-bumps, thuds, muffled voices-and that for some reason she can only ever seem to hear at all clearly from here, from the bath.

Not that she wants to particularly.

But it has become a routine, a little ritual for unwinding, for emptying her brain after too many hours at the keyboard.

Delete, delete, delete.

Ten minutes in, however, and she’s thinking again, speculating, unable to help herself. If these guys aren’t jihadis-and she doesn’t for one second believe they are-then what are they? Who are they? The Tea Party? Occupy Wall Street?

She shakes her head.

The Tea Partiers want to be the bankers, not to kill them, and the Occupiers are too wooly and amorphous for anything as decisive and proactive as an assassination program.

So she keeps coming back to her first instinct on this.

They’re amateurs.

Stray dogs.

Doing their own thing.

And where do people like this find inspiration? Where do they get their ideas from? Where do they meet, and hang out, and exchange information, and chat? Her heart sinks.

The fucking Internet, of course.

She stares at the tiled wall in front of her.

What’s she going to do? Instigate a search?

Without the full resources of an Echelon-style intercept station or fusion center, Ellen knows very well how pointless this would be. She pulls the plug and gets out of the bathtub. She dries off and puts on sweats and a T-shirt. She orders up pizza.

Not having eaten all day.

She turns on the TV. Even there they’ve sort of given up and are discussing instead the witness currently on the stand in the Connie Carillo murder trial.

Joey Gifford.

The celebrity doorman.

Jesus wept.

The thing is, for all she’s got, for all she’s pulled out of the hat, she may as well give up too, and sit around like the rest of them, waiting for the next target, the next vic. She flicks through a few channels, but doesn’t want to watch anything. There’s no one she wants to talk to, either. She checks Twitter on her phone and glances at the time. Pizza won’t be here for another fifteen minutes. She looks over at her desk.

It couldn’t hurt.

Three hours, the pizza, a bottle of wine, and two bananas later she’s still at her desk, bleary eyed, near to tears, scrolling down through forums, discussion groups, and comment boxes. Each new post she reads, or thread she follows, seems to hold out the promise of something, an insight, an angle, a revelation even. In discussing stuff like fractional reserve banking, the creation of the Fed, the Glass-Steagall Act, Keynes, the Chicago School, subprime, securitization, the bailouts, there’ll be an initial hint of reasonableness, a striving for clarity-for the holy grail of a coherent point-but sooner or later, and without fail, each contribution will descend into ambiguity, internal contradiction, and ultimately gibberish.

On some sites things can get pretty heated, and shrill, especially when they focus on the bankers themselves, on the voracious, lying, bloodsucking zombie motherfuckers who’ve effectively been RUNNING THE COUNTRY FOR THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS…

But it’s at about 3:00 A.M. that she comes across something she thinks is significant. Though she can’t be sure, because by that stage she also suspects she might be hallucinating.

It’s deep, deep into the comment box of an archived blog post on a site called Smells Like Victory. She doesn’t remember how she got here-through what circuitous route, or when exactly she veered off topic-because the post itself, go figure, is a half-scholarly account of the effects railroad construction had on the economy of pre-Civil War America. The discussion in the comment box leads with a fairly polite disagreement about the relative importance of railroads over canals in the antebellum North, and this soon degenerates into a testy spat about how unsuited the “heavy” imported British locomotives were to the supposedly “lighter” American-engineered track systems. But after close to a hundred comments-and as is so often the case these days, online and off-the subject somehow ends up being about the current crisis. A comment is posted claiming that the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and John D. Rockefeller shaped modern America, and pretty soon a discussion is in full swing about the relative merits (or demerits) of the nineteenth-century robber barons over today’s one percenters.

After a few more posts, someone called Trustbot37 says, “People forget that back then these guys were hated every bit as much as the bankers are now. I mean, Gould was routinely referred to as the Mephistopheles of Wall Street.” Sans-serif says that Trustbot37 is missing the point here-that okay, sure, people resented these Gilded Age fucks for their money and their fifty-room summer “cottages” in Newport, but at the same time they admired them and essentially approved of what they were doing, which was building up huge new industries and transforming the country in a thousand different ways. Whereas today, Jesus… today people are incandescent with rage at what they see as the wanton bleeding dry and tearing down of this same great country. John Fuze says we should bring RICO charges against these bastards, that that’s what the damn thing was enacted for back in 1970, to combat organized crime, and what is the Great Global Debt Bubble if not the most highly organized crime in human fucking history…

It goes on and on like this, and with multiple references-of the kind you see pretty often now, even on mainstream sites-to pitchforks, tumbrils, and guillotines. Then someone called ath900 takes up the theme and runs with it, but without the grim jocularity, without the slightest hint of irony. “Look,” he says, “these people need to be eliminated for real, and it needs to be systematic. If it was up to me I’d start with someone from each of the three pillars of this rotten temple, i.e., from an investment bank, a hedge fund, and a private equity firm. I’d do it like that, make a statement-just pick three institutions and pop the top guys. Maybe do a test run, start with some of the second-tier outfits-say, Northwood Leffingwell, Chambers Capital Management, and Black Vine Partners…”

Ellen stares at this last sentence in disbelief.

Then she scans the screen, looking for a date.

The comment was posted over a year ago.

ath900?

She reads his last sentence again, then the whole comment. She goes over the five or six comments that precede it and skims through the five or six that immediately follow it. It seems to be his only contribution. And within three or four comments anyway the discussion has moved on to a fine-point dissection of a recent SEC fraud settlement.

She goes back.

Pop the top guys?

Holy shit.

She slumps in her chair, hand still on the mouse.

It’s the middle of the night, muffled Upper West Side traffic noise outside, muffled techno beats coming from the guy next door. In a state of shock and frost-brained exhaustion, Ellen lets her gaze slide from the screen to the debris around her on the desk-scribbled notes, empty wineglass, oil-stained pizza box, shards of crust, banana peels, crumpled napkin…

Then she shakes her head and shifts forward in the chair again.

It may well transpire that she’s wasting her time here, but she has to keep going. This is only the beginning. There’s so much more to find out.

Like who ath900 is.

She moves her hand from the mouse to the keyboard.

Like who the fuck-more crucially right now-the top guy at Black Vine Partners is.

6

“IT’S A HOTEL,” Scott Lebrecht says, glancing out of the car window, Harlem flickering past. “In Marrakech. I stayed there a couple of years ago.”

The assistant clacks on his laptop.

“The… Mamounia?”

“Maybe. Go on.”

“Er… traditional Moroccan riads, seven and a half thousand square feet, each with its own courtyard, terrace, and pool.” He pauses. “Ten grand a night? Just under.”

“Yep, that’s it.”

“You want six nights, early June?”

“Yep.”

“Got it.”

Clack, clack.

“So, this British journalist, she’s at what time?”

“Eleven,” the assistant says, “right after the event.”

“Tell me about her. Is she cute?”

“So so. Petite. Fortyish.”

“Hhmmm.”

“Not my type.”

“Who gives a fuck what your type is, Baxter? Jesus.” A pause. “I could do petite and forty, no problem. So long as she’s got a halfway presentable face.”

“Well… she’s got good bone structure.”

“Right.” Lebrecht rolls his eyes. “Who does she work for?”

“Sunday Times. Of London. Business section. She’s on the private equity beat.”

“They have a PE beat? How fucking sad is that?”

“She’s doing a piece on the increased pressure CEOs are under these days from their private equity bosses. You know, to perform, to succeed.”

Lebrecht laughs out loud at this. “To perform? Damn right. They be my bitches, nigga.”

“Maybe not the line she’ll be expecting, but-”

“Shut up.” He takes out his phone and starts fiddling with it. “What line should I give her? The unvarnished truth or some kind of scented bullshit?”

“I’d go with the scented bullshit. In a piece like this she’s bound to find someone who’ll break ranks, but there’s no reason for it to be us.”

“Right.”

“So…?”

“What? You want me to rehearse? Fuck. I don’t know, er… we manage companies efficiently and profitably, we deliver higher returns, not just for the wealthy but for pensioners as well.”

“Good.”

“And we create more jobs than the stock market. Sure, CEOs are under pressure, but when was that ever not the case?”

“Okay.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said that’s okay.”

“It’s okay?” Half turning. “It’s fucking okay? What’s that meant to be, Baxter, your seal of approval or something? I know you’re experienced, you’ve been around the block a few times, but I can do this shit on my own, you know. Jesus.” Turning back. “Could do it in my sleep.” Distracted now, composing a tweet.

I’m on a panel this morning at this year’s-

On a panel soon at this year’s…

He glances out the window.

Hundred and Tenth Street, at last. John the Divine. Central Park.

Global Equities Conference… in Manhattan’s…

At Manhattan’s… Herald Rygate.

At the Herald Rygate.

How many does that leave?

Sixty-one.

The things we do for love.

Thirty-four.

Tweet.

A moment or two later, Baxter puts a hand up to the side of his head. “Er… I’ve got Teddy Schmule for you.”

“Oh.” Lebrecht shifts in the seat and adjusts his earpiece. “Yo, the Schmulemeister.”

“Scottsdale. What’s up?”

“Nothing. I’m in New York, at a conference. I’m down for a nine-thirty slot, panel discussion. Couple of things after that, then I’m heading out to the coast. You get Shem Tyner? Are we good?”

“Meh. We’ll see. You’ve got to play a long game where Shem is concerned.” He pauses. “Shem is Shem, you know.”

“Yeah, but Teddy… tell me he’s at least read the script. That he’s psyched.”

Teddy Schmule snorts at this. “Oh, he’s psyched alright, and he loves the script. It’s just that by the time he gets through with it… well, you might have a hard time actually recognizing it.”

“Fuuuuuuck.”

“Shem always does this. It’s one of his things.”

“We don’t have the time.”

“The one thing you’ve always got in this business, Scott, believe me, is time.”

“No.” He clenches his fist and bangs it against the window. “No. Fuck him. We can scale it down, go with someone else, someone who’s hungry. This is my third time out, Teddy, and I feel it, it’s the big one. I’m not going to let a little shit like Shem Tyner take the reins.” Shaking his head. “No way. This is a Black Vine production.”

The pause that follows is long and weary.

“Okay. Let me get back to him.”

“You do that, Teddy Schmule.”

Outside, they’re canyoning into midtown. A few moments later, they pull up outside the Herald Rygate.

Reaching for the door, Lebrecht pauses and turns to Baxter. “Okay,” he says, “so I’ve got this thing now, right? Then Reet Petite. Then… where am I having lunch?”

Frank Bishop checks the time, drains his coffee and heads for the bathroom. Over the course of four or five minutes in there-quick dump, hands, teeth-he doesn’t look in the mirror.

Doesn’t look at himself.

Not even once.

Is that weird? Maybe, but it’s become a habit lately.

It seems easier.

Avoidance.

In the car on his way to work, however, there’s something he can’t avoid. It’s been bugging him for the last two days.

He stares at the road ahead.

After his little snit on Monday, he never got back to the regional manager, and the regional manager never got back to him. And that has to mean trouble. What kind of trouble exactly, Frank is unwilling to contemplate.

But it’s not just that.

It’s the humiliation.

A further run-in is inevitable-on the phone, face-to-face, whatever-and he’s dreading it. This is because he knows he cannot win, or come out ahead, without groveling, without begging to keep his job. And all for what? Because he didn’t feel like taking shit from some pimply-faced little motherfucker at the head office? Because he decided to speak his fucking mind?

So it would seem.

The other source of anxiety for Frank this morning is Lizzie. He hasn’t heard back from her yet, either. He called again yesterday afternoon and left a brief message. Then, a while later, he thought about sending her a text.

He’s thinking about sending her one now.

But he knows that in Lizzie’s book that would probably qualify as harassment.

He’s sure she’s fine. She wasn’t fine on Saturday evening when they spoke, he knows that, but Saturday evening is probably ancient history already as far as she’s concerned.

He takes the wide bend at Cedar Bay Drive, and the enormous, creaking mall heaves into view.

He gets to the parking lot, turns in, and crosses its vast, mostly empty expanse. He finds a space near the main entrance. On his way inside he takes a detour to the Walgreens on the lower level to get some Excedrin and maybe make eye contact with that gorgeous Asian woman who works there, maybe even get served by her.

Kickstart his day with a little squirt of serotonin.

But it’s not to be.

He doesn’t see the woman anywhere and gets served instead by a skinny black kid called Felix.

It’s just after nine thirty when Ellen Dorsey rolls over in the bed.

Shit.

She didn’t fall asleep until nearly five, her muscles knotty and aching, her head buzzing with facts-with the fact of these facts.

The weight of them.

And as her eyelids grind open now, these facts are first to greet the light. His name is Scott Lebrecht. He’s thirty-three. He’s from Philadelphia. He’s worth a billion dollars. He’s the CEO of Black Vine Partners.

He’s on a hit list.

He’s next.

She sits upright in the bed.

Or at least that’s how it all seemed last night.

She looks across the room, through the open door, her desk in the living room partially visible.

No matter how she spins it-that it was random, a coincidence, the kind of spooky but ultimately meaningless shit the Internet throws up all the time-there’s no escaping the key fact here: Two of the three people mentioned in that post are already dead.

Popped.

So it’s only logical to assume that before long number three will be, too.

She slides off the bed.

She puts on a pot of coffee, tidies up, takes a shower, and gets dressed.

Through all of which she grapples with the central dilemma here.

Shouldn’t she be passing this on to the police? Isn’t she required to by law? If she doesn’t, and something happens, wouldn’t she be an accessory?

It’s a tricky one.

Because it’s not as if she’s protecting a confidential source and could be subpoenaed for discovery.

Who was your source, Ms. Dorsey?

The Internet, Your Honor.

Sipping coffee, she reads the comment again, more than once. Foreknowledge of a crime. Is that what this is?

She vacillates.

It is, it isn’t. It might be, it might not. The notion is plausible, the notion is ridiculous.

She massages her temples, to ward off an incipient headache. Outside, it’s overcast, dull and gray. Is it going to rain?

She looks from the window to the floor.

Actually, she decides, the notion is ridiculous. Jeff Gale and Bob Holland were killed twelve hours apart. This is four days on from that and Scott Lebrecht is still alive. There’s no discernible pattern here. So, seriously… who would take her seriously?

No one.

She looks up.

The thing is, she can talk herself out of this, no problem-but deep down she wants it to be true.

Not even deep down.

She gets up from the desk, walks around, stretches.

But then… let’s say it is true, that there really is a story here, what happens then? First, she’d have to bring Max Daitch in on it, and he’d have to run it by legal. Chances are that a fear of civil or even criminal liability would stop the whole thing dead in its tracks right there, with the lawyers advising Max to pass the info up the corporate chain or possibly straight on to the police.

So… what? She just hands it over? Before she gets a chance to work it, even a little?

Raindrops start pelting against the window.

She sits down again and reaches for the coffee. She’ll give it some thought. Go over her notes.

Fifteen minutes.

Black Vine Partners.

Scott Lebrecht…

He founded the company six or seven years ago with the assistance of two guys from a New York-based hedge fund called Reilly Asset Management. They provided Lebrecht with a substantial chunk of capital and a revolving line of credit, which he then very successfully used to focus on investments in the power and energy sectors. More recently, he has set his sights on Hollywood by creating Black Vine Media and signing a five-year production deal with Sony Entertainment. So far, this has only led to his involvement in a couple of poorly received mid-budget thrillers, but Lebrecht is said to be very determined and is busy raising cash for a third, considerably more ambitious project.

He also has a reputation for hanging out with the talent-dates with actresses, courtside seats with the boys, who-knows-what in the private jet. In photos, he comes across as something of a jock, blond and burly, not exactly good-looking-at least not preternaturally so, not the way some of his new A-lister friends tend to be-but he does have an energy about him, and a certain charm.

That’s what it says here, anyway.

In her barely legible 4 A.M. scrawl.

She flicks forward to the next page.

Lebrecht has a ferocious temper, serious commitment issues, a severe nut allergy, and a “rad” collection of sports cars.

He has a two-year-old son in Florida he apparently refuses to acknowledge.

He has over ten thousand followers on Twitter.

Ellen stops.

She reads that last bit again. She swivels in her chair.

Hhmmm.

She reaches for the keyboard, logs on to Twitter, and finds him.

He appears to be an avid tweeter.

One thousand two hundred and fifty-seven so far. Been at it for about a year.

She scrolls down through some recent ones.

Awesome celebration last night with my Jenkintown brohims. #achingintheplaces

A leader leads for a reason. Try to jump ahead of him and all you’ll get for your trouble is lost.

Tough negotiations on the Salertech buyout, including that ninth inning zinger, but we prevailed. Kudos to all concerned.

She goes back to the top.

His last tweet. It was one hour ago.

On a panel soon at this year’s Global Equities Conference at the Herald Rygate. The things we do for love.

Craig Howley wonders if Vaughan is going to make it into the office again today. He looks at his watch.

Nearly ten.

Isn’t that pushing it? Even for the old man?

He showed up yesterday, having pretty much thrown down the gauntlet the previous evening, but if Howley thought Monday was long…

Jesus.

The old man came in looking his normal self-back in a suit, groomed, dapper-but everything was painfully slow, his movements, his speech.

His reaction times.

It was a good thing they had nothing on, no visitors or important meetings.

Howley catches Angela’s eye through the glass partition, but she shakes her head.

He swivels in his chair and gazes out the window at midtown, and at his allotted shard, here on this side of the fifty-seventh floor, of Central Park.

Should he call Meredith? Show his concern? Not that that’s really what it is. What it really is, he knows, is impatience. Because ever since Monday’s early meeting, and the way he was approached afterward by the various group heads and senior managing directors-not to mention Vaughan’s quip later on about rearranging the furniture in his office-Howley has been in a sort of waking fever dream of anticipation.

He doesn’t have any illusions, though. He fully understands who and what James Vaughan is, and that no one can replace him or occupy quite the same space he has occupied in Washington and elsewhere for the past sixty years-more, in fact, in a way… if you go back, if you include his old man, William J., and his old man.

Fuck.

But replace him as head of Oberon? Howley could do that, no problem.

The thing is, in a long and distinguished career, Vaughan has had many more strings to his bow than just the Oberon Capital Group. He worked under Jack Kennedy, fought with Johnson, switched to the Republicans, got into bed with Nixon, did a stint at the Agency under Bush. He was always there in the background during Reagan’s two terms, and it was the same again later, during Dubya’s two. Without once being elected or appointed to public office, the man has exerted enormous influence, and mainly by operating in the interstices between federal agencies, private contractors, consulting firms, lobbyists, think tanks, and policy institutes.

Not that the private equity side of things has been too shabby. After more than forty years in the business, Vaughan can boast that Oberon has achieved compound annual returns for its equity investors of something in the region of 57 or 58 percent.

Which is staggering.

Howley gets up from his desk and goes over to the window.

So keeping a show like that on the road would certainly be enough for him. It’s what he wants and knows he’ll be good at. He spent long enough at the Pentagon shaping the acquisitions program and influencing which weapons systems were bought, not to mention being one of the instigators of the great outsourcing land grab that saw contractors move in on logistics and support services. And now, on this side of the so-called revolving door, he has proved equally adept at wooing and acquiring these same companies.

But not just them, as it turns out. He has been phenomenally successful at parlaying his considerable political clout into hard equity across a whole range of sectors-pharmaceutical, energy, telecoms, real estate. Plus, Oberon has expanded, they’re everywhere now, in Africa, Asia, China, and with the company sitting on stockpiles of cash the prospects for deal-making have never been better.

It’s what Vaughan hired him for. The two men go back, they get along. It was a clear succession strategy.

But these things rarely go smoothly. Of the major buyout firms that are still run by their founders, most of them have no strategies in place at all for handing on the reins-which is fine, or will be for a while, because the CEOs in these places tend to be in their mid- to late sixties. But in Vaughan’s case, strategy notwithstanding, the situation has become critical.

Client confidence is key here. It’s not something you can afford to mess around with. The Global Equities Conference starts today, for example, and there are a lot of people in town, some of whom will be dropping by the office later on for a cocktail reception. And the Jimmy Vaughan of legend is one thing, but the Jimmy Vaughan of yesterday? That’s another matter entirely.

So he really needs to know what’s going on.

Howley turns and catches Angela’s eye again. He brings a hand up to his ear and makes a phone gesture.

She nods.

He’ll have a word with Meredith, try to get the point across. She’s not the only one who can speak in code.

Leaving the Melmotte Room on the tenth floor of the Rygate Hotel, Scott Lebrecht turns to his assistant.

“This interview, Baxter? Where we doing it again?”

“The Wilson. It’s uptown a bit. On Madison.”

“I know where the Wilson is.”

Baxter shrugs. They arrive at the elevators.

“So that went well.”

“No it fucking didn’t.”

“What. You got a great reception.”

“Nah.” Lebrecht shakes his head. “You know what it is? Most of these big equity guys are twenty years older than I am, more in some cases, and it’s like they think of me as the kid or something. They talk down to me. And I hate that.” He pauses. “What I hate is these events. I mean, a panel discussion? Come on. People here don’t think I have better uses for my time than a fucking panel discussion? Please.”

The elevator doors open, and they get in.

A lot of the delegates at the conference are from out of town and are staying for the full three days that it’s on. In between sessions, and over dinners, they’ll be discussing everything from how the industry needs to embrace change to the vexed question of going public.

Lebrecht can think of nothing worse.

Cutting out early like this, not sticking around, gives him some satisfaction. But now he has to face an interview with a business journalist.

In another hotel.

More convoluted questions, more evasive answers.

It’ll be a welcome distraction if she’s cute, but really, he has better uses for his time than that, too. Black Vine Partners is currently circling distressed European retailer Ballantine Marche, which fell into administration last month. Plus, they’re trying to raise capital for a new mezzanine fund.

He has stuff to do.

The elevator door opens, and they head out across the lobby.

It’s probably fair to say that Black Vine Media takes up more of his time than it should, but he’s determined to make it work. If this movie comes together, Shem Tyner or no Shem Tyner, they could have a valuable franchise on their hands.

Young Adult Post-Apocalyptic meets High School Gross-out.

As they approach the exit, Baxter puts a hand up to his earpiece. “You want to talk to Paris?”

Lebrecht stops. “Yeah.”

This’ll be Dan Travers, about Ballantine Marche.

“Okay,” Baxter says, moving off. “I’ll be out at the car.”

“Dan the Man,” Lebrecht says, leaning back a little to look up at the lobby’s soaring stained-glass dome. “Comment ça va?”

Sitting opposite a line of nervous-looking Japanese tourists on the downtown A train, Ellen Dorsey-sleep deprived, but hopped up on java-is feeling pretty nervous herself.

It’s a different kind of nervous, though.

She’s decided to head down to the Herald Rygate hotel in midtown and then… assess the situation. She won’t get past the lobby, because she’s not registered, or accredited, to attend the conference.

So in all likelihood she won’t get to see Scott Lebrecht.

But even if she did, if she pulled some ballsy reporter moves and got five minutes with him, what would she say? I’m running a story about an Internet post that suggests you as a suitable candidate for assassination? I was wondering if you’d care to comment?

Yes, that probably is what she’d say. Except for one thing-she isn’t running the story anywhere. Because that’s all she’s got and it isn’t enough, and if she were to alert Lebrecht or the police, the story would get out at once and that’d be the end of any advantage she had.

Or might have had.

The train pulls into Seventy-second Street. The Japanese tourists get off and are replaced by three randoms-business guy in a suit, sultry teen boy, and a woman about Ellen’s own age but considerably better dressed.

And saner-looking.

The train rattles on.

Ellen doesn’t really have any option here, does she? There’s no obvious solution that presents itself. She’s going to have to give this up.

Sultry teen boy stifles a sneeze, which seems to hurt. He then looks around scowling, as if it was someone else’s fault.

She’ll go into the Parallax offices and lay it all out for Max. She has a contact in the NYPD, and if it comes to it, she can make the call from there.

She stares down at the floor.

But first she’ll swing by the Rygate.

Train pulls in at Fifty-ninth Street.

It can’t hurt. She’ll wander around for a while, see what’s going on, play it by ear. Maybe inveigle her way in to the conference.

She runs through a couple of scenarios in her head.

A short time later, as the train is pulling out of Forty-second Street, she looks up again, at the seats opposite. Only one of the original three randoms is left.

Her enhanced doppelgänger.

They both get out at Thirty-fourth Street, and as Ellen trails behind, along the platform, she fantasizes briefly about having this woman’s life-the confidence to wear those clothes, the because-she’s-worth-it hair, the Jell-O-on-springs gait. But as they approach the stairs weariness prevails, slowing Ellen down, and the fantasy fragments, disassembles.

The woman vanishes into the crowd.

Up at street level, heading east, Ellen regroups, sort of. Even if she were to change her mind about the Rygate, she could still pass close by it on her way to the Parallax offices. She wouldn’t have to turn north for at least another few blocks.

But she hasn’t changed her mind.

A little sunshine has broken through, and the city is wet and glistening from the earlier rain.

She walks on.

A few minutes later she turns a corner and there it is, on the other side of Broadway-the Herald Rygate, town cars and limos lining the curb in front of it, drivers and doormen gathered under its awning.

Pedestrians streaming by.

Ellen pulls out her phone, checks the time, looks around, and starts crossing the street.

“So, you’d say five, six feet?”

“Yeah, five, six.”

“Five or six feet at the widest point?”

“That’s correct, sir. The widest point.”

“Which is at the bottom.”

“Yeah.”

“The bottom of the staircase?”

“That’s correct, sir.”

Out on the floor, Frank Bishop has one eye on a row of flat-screen LCD units tuned to live coverage of the Connie Carillo murder trial and one eye on the door. Lance took the call about an hour ago. It was while Frank was dealing with a customer.

The regional manager, it seems, is going to be stopping by for a brief unscheduled visit.

“On a Wednesday morning?” Lance said after the call. “What’s that about?”

Frank shrugged, his insides turning, Monday’s conversation replaying one more time in his head. There’s no doubt about it, he had a legitimate grievance. Those fifty LudeX consoles? Any manager would have been up in arms about that.

But how many would have called it a fucking joke?

On top of various other insults.

Pretty tense now, Frank is grateful for the intermittent distraction of the Carillo stuff on the store’s multiple TV screens. In his second week on the stand, Joey Gifford, the so-called celebrity doorman, is being cross-examined by prosecution counsel Ray Whitestone. For reasons Frank is unclear about, questions are currently focusing on particular architectural features of the lobby in the Park Avenue apartment building where Gifford has worked for nearly forty years-and through which Connie Carillo herself is in the habit of passing every morning at seven with her two dogs.

“Now, Mr. Gifford,” Whitestone is saying, “would you please describe for the court the decorative brass radiator grille that is set in the wall of the lobby at the bottom of the staircase.”

As Gifford clears his throat to speak, Frank detects some movement from behind, and turns.

Walking across the floor, directly toward him, is Mike, the baby-faced regional manager, and another guy. Mike is in a suit, and the other guy, who looks even younger than Mike, is wearing a zipped-up leather jacket, but with a Paloma shirt on underneath it.

Frank can see the logo sewn into the collar.

“Hi, Mike,” he says, and then adds-as though responding to some Pavlovian trigger, unable not to-“who’s your little friend?”

Mike rolls his eyes. “Say hello to Josh, Frank. He’s the new manager here.”

“Here?”

Mike nods.

Of course. What was he expecting? Some kind of reasoned negotiation? A lively exchange of views? An apology? Letting it sink in, Frank just stands there and says nothing. Logically, this is where he should start groveling, begging to keep his job, but he knows now that he’s not going to do that.

After a moment, Mike says, “You have fifteen minutes to get your stuff and leave.”

Frank looks at him. “Or else?”

“No severance package. You’ll be deemed to have acted in contravention of the regulations as set down in the employee handbook.”

“I see.”

“And can basically go fuck yourself.”

Frank nods, fighting a strong impulse here to lash out, with his fists.

But he doesn’t.

“Good for you, Mike,” he says eventually, his stomach still churning. “I was worried there for a moment that you’d left your balls back at head office.” Smiling, he turns and moves off in the direction of the storeroom.

Ten minutes later, out in the parking lot, under a thin veil of rain, Frank calls Lizzie.

He needs to hear her voice now. It’s a matter of priorities, of perspective.

He waits.

She doesn’t answer.

He squeezes the phone in his hand and represses an urge to fling it to the ground.

“I appear to be busy.” Her outgoing message. “But say something if you want, after the beep.”

Languid and annoying maybe, but it’s all he’s getting, and as usual he’ll take it.

“Lizzie, it’s Dad. Call me when you get a chance, will you?”

It suddenly occurs to him that this is probably the fourth or fifth time since Saturday evening that he’s tried, without success, to contact his daughter. Which isn’t normal. So should he be panicking? He tries to keep any trace of this out of his voice.

“Any time, sweetheart, okay?” He pauses. “Okay?”

Not much success there either.

“Just call me.” He gazes around, at the desolate parking lot, at the overcast sky. “I love you, Lizzie.”

The driver is leaning back against the car door, arms folded.

Baxter catches his eye and holds up an outstretched hand.

Five minutes.

The driver nods an acknowledgment.

Then Baxter looks left and right.

Broadway.

Torrents of people and traffic.

Not exactly ideal working conditions, but he stands there anyway, under the Rygate awning next to a doorman and a couple of other drivers, and takes out his BlackBerry. He checks for e-mails. As expected there are dozens, so he tries to block out the noise and starts scrolling down through them. In a matter of minutes he manages to clear six or seven, sometimes using only a one- or two-word reply. He’s good at this kind of stuff, the guerrilla approach-not that Lebrecht would ever give him any credit for it, or thanks.

Baxter glances around.

It’s funny what Lebrecht said earlier, that some of the older guys up in the Melmotte Room think of him as the kid-because compared to them, that’s precisely what he is, a fucking kid. Baxter has worked for those guys, and they’re very serious, very focused, very conservative. Okay, Lebrecht is on a roll, making insane money, but none of it’s his, and it won’t last. He’s too volatile, too unstable, and too attached to this notion of taking Hollywood by storm.

Which is just a fantasy.

He thinks he can do it, but Hollywood will chew him up and spit out the seeds.

Baxter’s seen it before.

And he’s not sure he wants to be around when it happens this time. The abuse he can put up with, because at the moment, with things going well, it’s casual and flippant, almost unthinking. But when Lebrecht starts throwing real tantrums?

Forget about it.

Baxter clears two more e-mails and puts his BlackBerry away.

It might be time to move on, to look for something else.

But right now he could do with an espresso.

He steps forward a few paces and scopes out the immediate vicinity. Two blocks down there’s a Starbucks.

He catches the driver’s eye again. “I need some coffee,” he says, over the sound of the traffic. “You want something?”

The driver pushes himself forward from the car, clicks his tongue, and then says, “You want me to go? I’ll go.”

Baxter is about to take him up on the offer when the driver’s eyes widen slightly and he nods at something-indicating to Baxter that he should turn around.

Lebrecht.

Shit.

The driver straightens up. Baxter turns, thinking fuck it, he’ll get a coffee at the Wilson, and a proper one.

With real cream.

In that moment Lebrecht emerges from the revolving doors, and Baxter can tell he’s distracted, sulky-complications with Ballantine Marche, no doubt.

He has that look.

But in the next second, the look changes. Everything does, the air, the weight of things, the density, the speed at which they move.

Lebrecht’s arms go up, his whole body recoiling from… what?

Baxter turns to the right. There’s a guy rushing toward Lebrecht, his arm outstretched, something in his hand. The doorman of the Rygate, a bulky streak of gold and red in his overcoat, epaulettes, and Pershing hat, intervenes. He deflects the outstretched arm, but wrestles the guy as well, the two figures then careening toward Baxter himself, who steps back in horror, arms up and out, glaring down at his shoes. But the entangled figures keep coming, and a full-on collision is inevitable. It’s like a football tackle, with Baxter suddenly deciding he has to resist, arms bunched in tight now, upper body pushing forward and over them. But on contact he loses his balance and falls, rolling off the doorman’s back and onto the sidewalk.

There are voices, roars, shouts, but in all the confusion, as he clambers up, hand on the front of a town car next to Lebrecht’s limo, Baxter has no clear idea of what he’s hearing. Nor, when he turns around and manages to focus, does he have much idea of what he’s seeing, either.

Because there on the ground, still struggling, are the doorman and what Baxter can only assume is a gunman, while a few feet away there appears to be a separate struggle going on, as two of the limo drivers try to restrain a second man.

Behind them, a stunned Lebrecht staggers backward, stopping at the granite wall beside the revolving doors.

Baxter doesn’t see any blood or obvious wound.

But then, why would he?

And it’s only in that moment, as he hears the gunshot ring out, that he realizes why he wouldn’t-

Because there was no gunshot before.

There’s certainly one now, though, and it’s followed by a general recoil, a shocked pulling away, which loosens up the two nodal points of the skirmish. In the next couple of seconds the gunman on the ground, along with his accomplice, breaks free. They start running, but in different directions-one to the nearest corner, the other out into the traffic, where he proceeds to zigzag his way through the midmorning chaos of Broadway.

Lebrecht’s driver, standing next to Baxter, decides to give chase and slides over the front of the town car onto the street.

But he is immediately thwarted-blocked by a passing MTA bus.

Baxter turns around again. Like everyone else here, he’s in shock, and having a hard time processing what has happened-in particular the fact that when the gunman discharged his weapon a few moments ago someone apparently took the bullet…

It was-he sees now-one of the other drivers.

He’s alive, still standing, but clutching his side, a fellow driver giving him support. The doorman, back on his feet, is there as well, and on a cell phone, wild-eyed, waving his free hand around, calling 911.

In a sort of post-traumatic slo-mo, Baxter then does a general pan of the area. No one is walking by the front of the hotel, they’re going around it, actually stepping out onto the street to avoid the sidewalk. It’s like some collective but unspoken agreement to preserve the crime scene. There are onlookers, but they’ve formed a partial cordon to the left and right-a no-go area also loosely defined from above by the perimeter of the hotel’s awning.

Within this shaded rectangle of sidewalk, a handful of people stand, or move slowly, making eye contact with one another, shaking their heads in disbelief, waiting. Baxter glances over at Lebrecht, who’s still at the granite wall, looking pale and shaken.

Their eyes meet.

Lebrecht raises an index finger and points it inward, effectively poking himself in the chest, and mouthing, “Me? That was meant for me?”

Baxter shrugs and emits the requisite degree of incredulity, but he experiences something else here, too, a flicker of… what? Ambivalence? Disappointment? To deflect whatever it is he looks away, and that’s when he sees her.

She’s standing just inside the perimeter, to the left, staring at him, holding up her phone, a woman in her late thirties, early forties, dressed all in black.

Not just an onlooker, not just a bystander.

But what, then? Who?

With sirens filling the air, and getting louder, Baxter glances over at the wounded limo driver.

He’s clearly in agony. No blood is visible, though.

Is that good or bad?

Baxter doesn’t know.

As the first siren closes in, with multiple others coming up in the rear, he looks to his left again, still curious, but the woman with the camera phone is no longer there.

On the fifty-seventh floor, at the Oberon reception, no one will talk about anything else. There’s wall-to-wall media coverage, too. He can see it from here, through the glass, it’s on every screen and monitor-the Herald Rygate, Scott Lebrecht.

And the Twittersphere, apparently, is “on fire.”

Not that Craig Howley gives a shit about that.

He’s distracted enough as it is.

Without Vaughan here, it’s like the meeting he chaired on Monday morning, only multiplied by a hundred. That event was an exclusively in-house affair, with just the heads of the various investment groups, whereas this afternoon’s event is wide open, attended by some of the industry’s biggest players, and with pretty much everything, Oberon’s whole succession strategy (Vaughan conspicuous by his absence, Craig Howley clearly in charge) on display.

What he can’t figure out is if all the attention on this shooting at the Rygate is a help or a hindrance. It’ll be a help if it provides a little misdirection, takes some of the heat out of what’s going on here, but if no one even notices in the first place? What use is that?

He circulates, floating in and out of different conversations.

“Well, of course, once is happenstance-”

“Yeah, but Scott’s an arrogant little prick, I mean come on…”

“And how did this not get flagged?”

He actually wishes Vaughan were here.

“-twice is coincidence-”

“You’d imagine Homeland or the NSA’d be all over it like a rash, but Jesus H. Christ-”

“-thinks he’s David O. fucking Selznick-”

The old man is so much better at this than he is.

“-and three times is enemy action.”

A pause.

“Who said that? Henry Kissinger?”

“Auric Goldfinger.”

Everyone laughs.

What worries him most is that Meredith might have taken him the wrong way earlier on, when he called. She was very quiet, which was unusual, so now he has visions of her whispering into Vaughan’s ear like a Borgia, or some scheming harridan from Ancient Rome.

Don’t listen to that awful man.

Get rid of him.

He framed what he had to say as diplomatically as he could. But did he play his hand too soon? Did he make the classic mistake?

“… you create value, and at some point, it’s inevitable, you’re going to want to liquefy it.”

“-it’s a paradigm shift-”

“-but we’re dropping the mandatory arbitration requirement for shareholder disputes, right?”

It’s just as private equity issues are reentering the conversational orbit like this that Howley looks up and sees Angela approaching.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Howley,” she says, holding a phone out to him. “It’s Mr. Vaughan.”

Staged as he imagines this might seem to some of the guests here, Howley is genuinely surprised. As he takes the phone from Angela he hands her his glass.

“Jimmy,” he says, and in a louder voice than he intended. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices a sort of wave effect of turning heads. In the circumstances, should he have said Mr. Vaughan? He’s not sure.

“Craig, a word.”

“Of course, Jimmy.” He moves over toward the window, asking himself what this is about. The Rygate thing? The reception? What he said to Meredith?

He stands there, waiting, midtown nestled under a heavy blanket of gray cloud.

“I thought I’d be able to make it in today, but… I’m tired, Craig.”

Howley’s eyes widen. He doesn’t speak.

“I’m on these pills, it’s a new treatment, sort of a trial really, some guys over at Eiben are working on it, but I’ll be honest with you, Craig… I think it might be time to… you know.”

“Oh,” Howley says, his stomach jumping. Though he’ll have to do better than that. “Jimmy, I-”

“Look, we both knew this was coming. And you’re practically running the show as it is.”

What does he say to that? He can hardly agree. “Yes, but without you, without-”

“Yeah, yeah, stop it.” Vaughan pauses, then clears his throat. “So, is this what they’re all talking about there? Where’s the old man? What’s going on?”

“Actually, no, it’s not.” Howley glances over his shoulder. “This thing down at the Rygate has everyone pretty exercised at the moment.”

“Right. Well, sure, it’s a big story. Three strikes. There’ll be no getting away from it now.” A short silence follows. “Craig, we’ll make this quick. We’ll set it up, put out a statement.”

Howley nods. “Okay, Jimmy.”

“Call me in the morning.”

“Yeah.”

“And in the meantime, I might send some stuff over for you to look at, some notes.”

“Okay.” Howley furrows his brow.

Some notes.

When he turns around to face the room, he feels weirdly self-conscious, as though he has somehow pulled a fast one. But the feeling doesn’t last. He hands the phone back to Angela and takes his drink again.

He joins a small group and within less than a minute has subtly steered the conversation around to the subject of bringing private equity companies public.

“So,” someone eventually asks, “what about Oberon?”

“Well,” Howley says, as though the question had never occurred to him. “I’m of two minds, really.” He raises his glass and drains what’s in it. “But not for long. One way or the other, I’ll be making a decision about it very soon.”