Graveland

It was at a reception in Cardinal Spellman’s residence prior to attending the Al Smith Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in October of 1948 that William J. Vaughan was introduced to the young congressman from Massachusetts. The two were spotted later that night by Walter Winchell at El Morocco “cupiding” a couple of girls from the chorus of Brigadoon.

– House of Vaughan (p. 103)

7

ON THE WAY BACK UPTOWN IN A CAB, Ellen replays what she has on her phone. It’s blurry and chaotic, but it’s all there-except for the first few seconds. It was only when she spotted Scott Lebrecht coming out of the revolving doors of the hotel that she lifted her phone, flicked it to camera mode, and started recording-by which point, of course, the action was already under way… young guy rushing forward, arm outstretched, bulky doorman mounting a counterattack. But from that point on she pretty much caught the whole thing.

As the city blocks flit past outside now, she makes a couple of calculations. One, this surely confirms her theory. Whoever those guys were, they weren’t professional, weren’t military trained, certainly weren’t any kind of “special ops.” And they weren’t jihadis, either. From what Ellen could make out they looked like… just two young white guys. One of them was wearing a gray zip-front hoodie and jeans, and the other one had on a heavier coat, jeans, and a woolly hat.

Her second calculation is that she won’t have been the only one back there quick on the draw with a camera phone. She might have been the first, but there’ll have been others-and there’ll have been CCTV footage as well, no doubt-which means… no way this doesn’t get out, no way this whole story doesn’t undergo a serious retrofit.

Which in turn, of course, leaves her high and dry.

Because what else has she got?

Given how these two guys have left themselves so exposed-dozens of witnesses, cameras, possible forensics-Ellen can’t imagine they’ll be remaining free for very long.

That’ll wrap the whole thing up. And with zero input from her.

She looks out the window.

At least she won’t have to deal with the guilt of having allowed, or enabled-or, at any rate, refused to prevent-the killing of Scott Lebrecht.

She’s assuming here that the limo driver makes it.

He was still on his feet. There was no blood.

Ellen decides to get out at Eighty-ninth Street and walk the remaining four blocks. As she’s turning onto Ninety-third Street her cell phone rings.

“Hi, Max.”

“Holy shit, Ellen.”

“What?”

“You were right.”

“That was fast.”

“It’s everywhere.”

“It only happened forty minutes ago.”

“They have footage of it, from someone’s phone. It’s on MSNBC.”

“I knew it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was there. I got it on my fucking phone.”

“What?”

Standing outside her building, glancing around, she explains.

“Jesus, Ellen.”

“What?” Feeling defensive all of a sudden. “You think I should have reported this? I was going to. I was on my way in to see you.”

“No, I mean you could have been hurt. Those guys had guns.” He exhales loudly. “It’s insane.”

She bites her lip. “Did they mention the limo driver?”

“Er… not specifically. What-”

“There was a single shot discharged. One of the limo drivers took the bullet.”

“All they’re saying is that one person was wounded, no details.”

“Wounded.” She pictures him standing there, the look on his face.

“You want to write this up, Ellen? We can put it on the website, upload your footage. Tweet the shit out of it. Maybe draw in a few hits.”

“Listen to you.”

Then she goes silent, thinking about it.

“Ellen?”

“How do I explain what I was doing there?”

“You were covering the equity conference.”

“I don’t know, Max. Let me look at it again and I’ll call you back.”

She heads inside.

The air is stuffy from last night. She opens all the windows and puts on some coffee. She transfers the footage from her phone to her iMac and watches it a couple of times. Then she turns on MSNBC to see what they’ve got. Alex Wagner and a panel of talking heads discussing payroll tax cuts. She goes to their website and sees the clip there.

Hers is better.

Longer, more detailed, clearer, less jumpy. But theirs is alright. It gets the point across. The report that goes with it is sketchy, but she can already see the shape of what’s emerging.

Her version, basically.

Or what her version would have been if she’d managed to get it out there. But it’s too late now. Because these guys will be in custody within hours. She’s convinced of that.

She skips the coffee and lies down for a while, exhaustion catching up with her.

When she opens her eyes again it’s after five.

Groggy and stiff, she rolls off the side of the bed and sits there with her head in her hands. What a weird, misshapen day it’s turned out to be.

She gets up and checks the usual news sources.

No developments, just a heightened realization that this is actually a huge story. The Yemen thing is mentioned again, and there are sidebars about corporate executives upping their security details. “Citizen” journalism is dissected, and the phone footage is shown endlessly.

She flicks around all the channels and websites, checks Facebook and Twitter, and aggregates the various reports in her head. The banner here is that Wall Street is under attack and no one seems to have the first clue who the attackers are.

Or no one is saying.

Because Ellen presumes the police are making headway with what they’ve got. It was Broadway, after all, and in broad daylight, so there’ll be CCTV footage from every angle. Witness statements, ballistics, prints, fibers, particles.

A DNA deposit, maybe. On the doorman.

Somehow.

Fuck.

How did she let it all slip away?

She gets up from the desk, but immediately feels a little dizzy and has to reach for the back of her chair to steady herself. If she’s going to stay on her feet, if she’s going to keep working, she needs to eat something.

But not here.

There’s something about this-being at home in the middle of the afternoon, on a weekday, when he’s not sick or on vacation-that Frank really doesn’t like.

It’s weird and unsettling.

On his way back from the mall, he stopped off and bought a six-pack, and has put it in the fridge, but that’s probably where it’s going to stay. The alternative was a bottle of Stoli. That would have been too extreme, too fast, too downward-trajectory.

The six-pack isn’t going to do it for him either, though. He can tell.

Too chill, too ball game.

What he needs is some serious anti-anxiety medication, a nice warm blanket of Don’t worry, that didn’t just happen, or of… Okay, even if it did, so fucking what?

But he ran out of those pills a long time ago. After the divorce.

Another thing Frank is finding weird at the moment-now that he thinks about it, now that he has the time-is the fact that he could even casually refer to this place he’s in as “home.” It bears so little resemblance to anywhere he has ever lived before.

Sitting on the couch now, he looks around.

Everything is stripped down, smaller, more compact.

Cheaper.

He hasn’t put any kind of a personal stamp on the place. There’s no art or interesting furniture, no design sense. There are no CDs or DVDs either. That stuff is all digital now anyway, invisible and hidden. He has a few books, but they torment him more than anything else. He started several in his first couple of months here, but lost his way with each one.

And it’s not just books. His sense these days is of everything being fragmented, digitized, atomized. He can’t stop at a channel on TV for more than a few seconds, can’t decide what music he wants to listen to anymore, can’t read a newspaper. He can’t pay attention to anything in front of him for long enough to even bring it into focus.

Sometimes he wonders how he ever managed to sit at a drawing board at Belmont, McCann and work, how he ever used modeling software, read contracts and building codes, how he ever steered a whole project through from initial concept to launch.

It’s only been a couple of hours since he left, but now he’s even beginning to wonder how he held down his job at the mall for so long.

How he spoke to people, interacted.

He reaches for the remote, hesitates, doesn’t touch it. He considers standing up.

Or maybe stretching out on the couch.

There’s really no move he can make here that’s going to be the right one, is there? This is paralysis of the will, good and proper.

He stares at the blank TV screen.

The thing is, without the job at the Paloma outlet, there’s no reason for him to be in this apartment, let alone in West Mahopac.

There’s no money for it now, either.

So what’s he going to do?

He’s already cut his expenses to the bone. The move from working as an architect in the city to selling electronics out here in the boonies was about as much of a downsize as he could have ever envisaged being necessary. He did the math and made all the adjustments. The one thing he didn’t factor in, he supposes now, was a sort of fatal, infantile compulsion on his part to eventually whine about it.

Deb would have factored that in.

Deb.

Deb-or-ah.

But then…

He stands up. Where’s his phone? He gets it from the kitchen table and checks for messages.

Nothing.

He scrolls for Deb and hits CALL. It’s been a while since he’s done this.

It rings. She’ll be at work. Plenty of that for lawyers.

“What is it, Frank?”

Her tone. Christ.

“Have you heard from Lizzie?”

Stony silence for a second, then a panicky “Why?”

“Have you?”

“No. Yes. Over the weekend. Saturday, I think. Why?”

He sighs. “Nothing, it’s just that I’ve left a couple of messages for her and she hasn’t gotten back to me.”

“Jesus, Frank, is that all? She’s got a life, she’s busy. She’s a student.”

“Yeah.” He stares out the window, at the car dealership across the street. “I know.”

Then, in one of those classic Deb changes of pace-he can picture it, the lip bite, the head shake-she says, “Frank, honey, are you alright?”

Honey?

There’s no question of his coming clean here, about the job, not now-she’d link the fact that he’s vulnerable with this sudden concern for Lizzie, and make a big deal out of it.

“I’m fine.”

And that’s it. Nowhere left for either of them to go.

Didn’t take very long, did it?

Afterward, he remains in the same position, looking down, the phone in his hand.

He’ll call Lizzie again, leave one more message.

He glances up.

And after that?

When they’ve all left, Craig Howley goes back to his office, sits at his desk, and gazes out the window.

There are a lot of things that he’s not.

He’s not a sentimentalist, he’s not a hedonist, he’s not a fool. But for a few moments now he thinks he can allow himself to feel just a little giddy. It’s quite a sensation…

And he wants to mark it.

When he walked past Angela’s desk on his way in here, he had an impulse to ruffle her hair, or to… to…

See?

He’s no good at this.

He hasn’t told Jessica yet. Should he call her now, or wait until later?

Chairman and CEO of the Oberon Capital Group.

Damn, that sounds good.

Ideas are already fighting for airtime in his head. There’s so much to do, so much restructuring and reorganizing that Oberon could benefit from.

He swivels in his chair.

And that’ll be the first hurdle, now that he thinks about it. He’s been the chief operating officer of the company for a year now, and in recent months something more than that, but the truth is there’s still a lot about the place he doesn’t know, information he’s not privy to. And the reason for this is quite simple. The company, in a hundred different ways, is the very embodiment of its founder-a fact that, in turn, might help explain the culture of secrecy around here… the general reluctance ever to do interviews, for example, or to attend conferences, or to nurture any kind of a profile outside of financial and Washington circles. If a corporation is indeed a person, then no one can seriously doubt that the Oberon Capital Group is James Vaughan.

But all of that’s going to have to change.

The old man may have spent decades preserving his anonymity, but Howley will have no problem going on Bloomberg or Fox and talking the company up, talking the industry up-because that’s what it needs right now, people like him to go out and tell it like it is.

He smiles, briefly amused by his own enthusiasm.

It’s true, though. Private equity has an image problem-the predatory thing, the bonuses, a couple of lavish and regrettably high-profile birthday parties held in the last year or two-but Howley doesn’t see why that trend can’t be reversed.

He swivels around to his desk, reaches for a pen and a legal pad, and starts writing.

Notes, headings, bullet points.

Not exactly a to-do list, not exactly a mission statement either-something in between maybe.

At the very least, he wants to have his thoughts clear for when he next speaks to Vaughan.

He wants to hit the ground running.

After a few minutes, he checks the time. He and Jessica have a dinner later on with some friends. He’ll tell her then, when he can see her reaction. It won’t be a real surprise-she’s been predicting this, or a version of it, for months-but she will be pleased.

When Howley looks up again, having jotted down another half page of notes, he is surprised to see that Jacqueline Prescott is outside his office. She’s standing at Angela’s desk. The two women talk for a bit. Then Jacqueline passes something-it looks like a file folder of some kind-to Angela.

Vaughan’s office is on the other side of the fifty-seventh floor, and it’s a fairly rare occurrence to see his PA over here. Despite her years, Jacqueline is still the old man’s Praetorian Guard, his firewall-everything that’s directed to him, or that comes from him, must go through her first.

So what’s this? Those notes Vaughan mentioned?

Howley studies Jacqueline for a moment, fully aware that out of the corner of her eye she’s probably observing him, too. Quite the piece of work, she’s soon gliding off down the hallway, that finishing school deportment of hers, after nearly fifty years, still operating at full tilt.

Howley then makes a show of going back to his own notes. But he doesn’t have long to wait. Angela comes in almost immediately, holding the file folder in her hand.

“Mr. Howley,” she says, arriving at his desk and holding the folder out to him, “Ms. Prescott has asked me to give you this.”

“Thank you, Angela.”

He takes the folder and places it on his desk without looking at it. He’s aware-from her expression, from her body language, even from a slight residue of tension in the air arising from Jacqueline Prescott’s visit-that Angela knows something is afoot and wants to be briefed on it.

But he’s afraid she’s going to have to wait.

He freezes her out with a thin smile, and when he’s alone again he looks down at the folder, closely studying its blank and slightly faded cream-colored cover. This, if Howley is not mistaken, is one of James Vaughan’s legendary “black files.”

So called.

Vaughan is no slouch in the technology department, but when it comes to data storage-or the storage, at any rate, of certain data-he appears to have a preference for the non-digital, the legacy, which is to say, hard copies only, and kept in folders like this one.

For as long as anyone can remember-and generally that’s nowhere near as long as Vaughan himself can remember-these cream-colored folders have been a feature of life here at Oberon HQ. The old man often has one under his arm, he consults them at meetings, and there are always two or three on his desk.

Howley can’t be sure until he looks, of course, but he’s guessing that the folder he has in his hands right now contains some pretty interesting material. At the same time, it seems amazing to him that the old man would even let something like this out of his sight. Because for anyone wishing to arrive at a full understanding of the Oberon Capital Group, access to the contents of these files would surely have to be considered essential, the final piece of any puzzle.

Howley takes the folder in his hands and flicks through it. It’s only about fifty or sixty pages. Some contain graphics, others just solid blocks of text.

So what’s going on here? Is this some kind of a coded vote of confidence?

Howley has no other choice but to see it that way.

He smiles to himself and opens the folder at the first page.

It’s after seven when Ellen sits at the bar in Flannery’s on Amsterdam and orders an eight-ounce cheeseburger with smoked bacon, a Caesar salad, and a pint of Leffe.

A sip or two into the pint and someone appears at her side.

“Hey, Ellie, what’s up?”

“Charlie!”

Ellen comes to Flannery’s quite a bit and has gotten to know a few of the regulars. Charlie here is a retired… something, she’s never quite been able to establish what. But he knows what she does, and he enjoys analyzing the stories of the day with her. Ellen enjoys this, too, because Charlie’s taste in news, not unlike her own, runs to the conspiratorial, and it’s a useful exercise every now and again to have to pull stuff back from the edge of crazy.

Not that he’s crazy, but he’s freer in what he can say than she is. His newsroom is the barstool, and standards there tend to be a lot less stringent. Tonight, though, she’s surprised, and a little disappointed, to find that all Charlie wants to talk about is the Connie Carillo trial. For obvious reasons, she has missed the coverage today and isn’t up to speed on developments. He gives her a quick rundown (more stuff about the lobby, how it’s lit, traffic, etc.), which he then follows up with a pretty incisive analysis of the subtle effects Joey Gifford’s newfound celebrity seems to be having on both the content and the delivery of his ongoing testimony.

Interesting as Ellen finds this-and as she demolishes her eight-ounce cheeseburger-she does try to steer the conversation around to the shooting at the Rygate today. But to no avail. Charlie is dismissive of the whole affair, seeming to imply that it’s all somehow way too obvious and predictable. Ellen would like to tease this out but knows she’s not going to get the chance. In any case, they’re soon joined by a few other people, and the conversation opens up and at the same time, inevitably, dissipates.

Two pints and a shot of Jameson’s later, Ellen finds herself heading out to smoke a joint with Charlie and a guy from the kitchen called Nestor. There’s an alley two doors down from the bar, and that’s where they go. Nestor is probably twenty-two or twenty-three, a physics major apparently, and in his tight little cook’s shirt and check pants-at least as far as Ellen is concerned-distractingly ripped.

As they pass the joint around, the conversation flits from one thing to another-the kitchen politics at Flannery’s, the right ingredients for a Reuben sandwich, what the fuck a “babyccino” is, and the routine abuse these days of the word “quantum.” When they come out of the alleyway to head back to Flannery’s, Amsterdam Avenue has notched things up a couple of gears, in terms of sound levels, color display, pixilation, and Ellen herself now feels-the word bounces back into her head, on a curve, from earlier-ripped.

Distractedly ripped.

In the bar again, she starts into a pretty intense conversation with a friend of Charlie’s about the bizarre rules governing Super PACs, but from where she’s sitting the TV set at the end of the bar is in her direct line of vision, and she can’t take her eyes off it.

They’re showing the MSNBC clip from before, and it strikes her now that it’s actually little more than a blur. You can see there’s some kind of a tussle going on, just about. Then there’s one clear shot of Scott Lebrecht looking dazed, another of the doorman being helped back onto his feet, and a very shaky few seconds of someone running out into the traffic on Broadway.

But we see this hooded figure from behind.

And that’s it.

She visualizes her own clip and it seems-from memory, through the prism of being stoned-to be so much more substantial, riper, brimming with texture and detail. From that moment on she can’t get it out of her head. She needs to see it again, as soon as possible, and on a proper-sized screen. Within ten minutes, therefore, she has extricated herself from Flannery’s and is floating up Amsterdam Avenue toward Ninety-third Street.

At Ninety-first something occurs to her and she takes out her phone. She’s assuming Val Brady is on the story, so she calls him up.

“Ellen? What’s happening?”

Dispensing with any niceties, she gets straight into it. What’s he hearing? Basically. Is there much reliable CCTV footage? Do they have any kind of a fix on the perps yet? What are his sources in the NYPD saying? Are arrests imminent?

Val Brady laughs, at her refined social skills presumably. Then he sighs. “I wish I had something for you, Ellen, but the well is dry. As a fucking bone.” There are voices in the background. He’s in a bar, or a busy newsroom, she can’t tell which. “The thing is,” he goes on, “from what I’m hearing in the department? They’ve got nothing. And not publicly yet, but they’ve even stopped talking about it in terms of a regular terrorist threat. They’re thinking more Beltway sniper now, with some kind of a twist to it, political maybe or… who knows. It’s all just guesswork. The eyewitness accounts they have so far are pretty confused, and they’re not holding out much hope either for the surveillance material they’ve managed to gather.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty weird, alright. And because this was the third hit, or attempted hit anyway, the story is just going to mushroom, you know. With everyone waiting to see what happens next. I’m telling you, watch what it does overnight.” He pauses. “The cops are going apeshit, as well. I mean, this is really bad for the city.”

Ellen can’t believe it. “They’ve got nothing?”

“That’s my understanding.” He pauses. “I spoke to one senior detective on the case earlier this evening, and it was incredible, I’d never seen anything like it, he was putting his hands together, looking up, and saying, Just one lousy clue, Lord, that’s all I ask, just one lousy fucking clue.”

Ellen is stunned, but before Val Brady has a chance to ask her any questions, she mumbles something and gets off the phone.

She makes it back to the apartment in about two minutes flat.

She goes straight to her desk, calls up the file, and sits watching it with her jacket still on.

Adrenaline has cut a swathe through her buzz from the joint, and the clip isn’t quite the lost Kubrick masterpiece it seemed like it might be back in Flannery’s, but it nonetheless gives a much clearer idea of what happened outside the Rygate than the MSNBC version-the one that’s been running for most of the day, and that the cops and the Feds are now presumably going through with a fine-tooth comb.

This one shows faces.

It’s fleeting, but you can see them-two young guys, white, nondescript, sort of scruffy. They’re like members of some indie band you’ve never heard of.

But who are they?

She watches it again.

The first thing you see is Lebrecht emerging from the revolving doors and then the uniformed doorman suddenly lurching sideways. He collides with Gray Hoodie; they entangle and in turn collide with another man, who falls over them and rolls onto the sidewalk. In the background, there’s a melee as Woolly Hat struggles with a couple of suited limo drivers. There’s a lot of shouting, but no words can be made out, and then there’s a really loud bang, which everyone reacts to by pulling back-including Ellen, but only for a split second. In the confusion, Woolly Hat breaks free, Gray Hoodie struggles to his feet, and they both take off in different directions. Gray Hoodie heads straight out into the traffic. Someone then slides over the front of a car to follow him, but this person is immediately blocked by a bus. When the bus moves on, Gray Hoodie has disappeared. In the stunned aftermath, one of the limo drivers clutches his side, and another comes to his aid. The doorman pulls out his cell phone and barks into it as an ashen-faced Scott Lebrecht leans back against the wall, poking a finger-curiously-into his own chest.

Sirens are soon rising in the background, and as the first one closes in on the scene, Ellen withdraws.

The clip is jerky and blurry in parts, but enough of it is clear, in three- and four-second bursts, to make it feel like there’s something there, something in it to be seen.

If you look hard enough.

She takes off her jacket and sits at the desk, hunched forward, leaning in close to the screen.

And watches it again.

And again.

She pauses, fast-forwards, rewinds. Plays it with sound, plays it without.

Eventually-after maybe the ninth or tenth replay-she does spot something. It’s tiny, hardly a lead at all, and may well prove to be of no significance whatsoever, but at the same time it’s the kind of thing she could imagine Val Brady’s NYPD source zeroing in on.

She plays it over and over. Gray Hoodie is on the sidewalk, wrestling with the doorman, and at one point in the struggle-for less than a second-his zip-front jacket gets shoved up a bit, over his abdomen. Under the jacket he’s wearing a dark T-shirt, and on the T-shirt something is printed, some lettering, a word or words.

She freeze-frames it.

The only thing she can make out, the only thing that’s clearly visible, is a single letter, an uppercase A. It’s in some weird font. The succeeding couple of letters are a complete blur.

And that’s it.

She grabs the image, saves it, and prints off a copy.

She holds up the page to study it.

A.

Significance? There can’t possibly be any. It just seems like it might be significant because it’s the only concrete, extractable, quasi-evidentiary element from the whole clip. There’s no point at which the gun is visible, for instance. The two faces are visible, okay, but that’s of no use to Ellen. It’s not like she’s got any face-recognition software and a database she can run them through.

So… just a fragment of something printed on a T-shirt, then?

Yeah. She sighs, and places the sheet of paper next to the keyboard on her desk. She leans back in the chair.

Either she stops this right here, or she takes it forward in some way.

But how?

For a few minutes, in the still silence of the apartment, staring into space, she mulls it over.

A.

A.

A.

She glances at the sheet of paper again.

The font is weird. Half Gothic-y, half futuristic. What does she know about fonts? Not a lot.

She leans forward and reaches for the keyboard.

8

FRANK OPENS HIS EYES. It’s morning. He must have fallen asleep at some point, even though it felt like he was awake all night. He remembers lying there staring into the void, aware of each hour passing on the clock, his thoughts on a continuous loop but at the same time maddeningly, perpetually incomplete.

He tried to go over his finances, to calculate how long he might be able to string things out, but the figures kept dissolving and re-forming, refusing to compute into any comprehensible pattern.

He tries again now, sitting on the edge of the bed. Fully awake this time, he finds it just as hard, though for different reasons. He may have simplified everything-recalibrated his priorities, consolidated his accounts, cut down on his outgoings-but all of that was done in the context of paid employment. Now, with a negligible severance package and any prospects of new employment hopelessly compromised, the figures might compute, but not into any pattern he wants to comprehend.

He takes a shower and gets dressed.

His phone is on the kitchen table. He passes it on his way to the fridge.

OJ first.

But holding the fridge door open, about to reach in for the Tropicana carton, he hesitates. Then he turns quickly and picks the phone up from the table. Like an idiot, he’s been putting this off, as though the delay were some form of Zen discipline.

He turns the phone on and waits.

Keys in his PIN.

Waits.

Fridge door still open.

No messages, no voicemail.

Fuck.

He goes back and rereads the various texts he has sent to Lizzie since Saturday. There are four of them, all short and to the point. Call me, basically. Plus, he’s left her about three voicemail messages.

Again, call me.

Now. Here’s a simple question. Is his daughter-as her mother seems to think-just a selfish, thoughtless little bitch… or is there something wrong?

He doesn’t know, but neither does Deb-which is surely the salient point here. Because okay, maybe Deb would be right to see a link between Frank’s current vulnerable state and his sudden concern for Lizzie… but if it turns out that something actually is wrong, how would that even matter?

In what universe?

He closes the fridge door.

Then he opens it again and takes out the OJ. He drinks directly from the carton, empties it, tosses it in the trash.

Coffee next.

This he drinks standing at the window, gazing out, distracted, but also thinking, making another calculation.

He could be up there in two hours.

What else has he got on today? He’s unemployed.

After he finishes the coffee and rinses the cup, he heads into the bedroom and gets a small carryall down from the top of the wardrobe. In reality, he could be up there in two hours, stay for another two, and be back in time for a late lunch.

But what if he needs to stay?

What if-

He packs the bag. A change of clothes. Some stuff from the bathroom.

You can’t argue with being prepared.

On his way down to the car, Frank is aware of a faint thrum of excitement running alongside the more regular and familiar rhythm of his anxiety.

He knows what it is.

He’s been stuck in a deadening routine here-in this apartment, in this town-for many months, and despite the distressing nature of the immediate circumstances, despite the fact that he may well be back here in a matter of hours, it feels like he’s escaping.

From the backseat of the car, cell phone in hand, Craig Howley gazes out at the Sixth Avenue traffic. After a good deal of hesitation, he calls Angela and tells her to cancel his appointments for the morning-two meetings, one at nine, the other at ten thirty, and a conference call at twelve. It’s probably because he doesn’t usually do this-has he ever?-that Angela asks him if he’s alright, but he reacts to her perfectly reasonable question by snapping. “I’m fine. Jesus. Just reschedule those, would you?”

Angela then reminds him, frostily, that he has a lunch appointment at one. It’s at Soleil on Madison Avenue, with Gary Wolinsky, and he can’t possibly skip it.

“Okay, okay.” He sighs loudly. “I’ll be there.”

When they’ve finished, he powers off his phone and slips it into his jacket pocket. As he does so, he looks down at the cream-colored folder on the seat next to him, the faded, almost grubby appearance of the cover contrasting sharply with the shiny red leather of the upholstery.

He still can’t believe what a high-risk strategy this seems to be on Vaughan’s part. On the one hand, yes, it’s a vote of confidence in Howley, but on the other… isn’t Vaughan very deliberately goading him? It’s like an act of loyalty and an act of betrayal.

Simultaneously.

The two things, inextricable, but mutually exclusive.

And Howley can’t even talk to him about it, because there’s nothing to say, nothing to negotiate. He just has to make a simple decision-whether or not he’s going to accept the job on these terms.

Howley looks up.

He certainly didn’t see this coming-though he can hardly claim he didn’t see the old man coming, can he? The old man’s been there all along.

The old man’s always been there.

Howley looks out the window. The traffic has been moving at a crawl up to this point, but suddenly there’s a break, and a spurt, and in no time they’re at the Fifty-seventh Street lights. Howley tells his driver not to turn here, as he normally would, but to go straight on. When the lights change they surge forward, and two blocks later they’re turning left onto Central Park South.

Howley then tells the driver to pull over, that he needs to get out of the car and walk around for a bit. The driver pulls over, but can’t stop for long, can’t park. He looks into his rearview mirror, awaiting instructions.

Howley grabs the folder, and a bottle of water from the bar, and as he’s reaching for the door he tells the driver to head on to the Oberon Building, that he’s fine, that when he’s ready he’ll… get a cab.

Or something.

Once out of the car, Howley takes off into the park at a brisk pace and makes his way over to the Mall. Near the end of this tree-lined thoroughfare he stops and picks out a bench on the east side that is dry and relatively clean. He sits down and glances around. He doesn’t know why, but he feels somewhat out of place here, in this little patch of virtual countryside. What is it? The smoothness of his silk suit? His pristine leather shoes? The scent of his cologne? Do any of these really sit well in the context, in this fresh, chilly environment he has so unexpectedly found himself in?

It’s also been a while since Howley was actually in Central Park, and he can’t believe how many people are out-strolling, jogging, walking dogs-and at nine fifteen on a weekday morning. Who are these people anyway, he thinks, and why aren’t they at work? His weekdays are spent in offices and conference rooms, in elevators and hallways, in traffic, with all of the people around him busy too, engaged in similar work-related activities. These people, on the other hand… what, are they retired, independently wealthy, on vacation?

He opens the bottle of water and takes a few gulps from it. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and throws the half-empty bottle into a trash can next to the bench.

He picks up the folder and flicks through it, recognizing certain pages-pages he has already read up to half a dozen times-and then he closes it again.

Holding the folder out in front of him, he stares at its cream-colored cover, still surprised that Vaughan has entrusted him with this, because… it’s just that the damn thing is so dangerous. It’s like a live grenade in his hands, and if he were so inclined he could fling it out there, and do some serious damage with it…

Reputations, careers, lives.

But-

Even by the way he’s holding it, the care, the hesitancy, it quickly becomes apparent to him that that’s not what he’s going to do.

Or anything like it.

Essentially, this is a cache of incriminating evidence-details, going back years, of Byzantine deals that could, at best, be described as unorthodox.

And at worst? Well, no point dwelling on it.

The takeaway message here is that the Oberon Capital Group is, and must remain, a private company. The disclosures that a public offering would entail, in relation to financial structuring, tax arrangements, salaries, options, profitability, and so on, are quite simply unthinkable.

Howley draws the folder in again and puts it under his arm. He stands up and looks around. What the hell is he doing in Central Park anyway? He needs to get back to the office. He needs to get this thing under lock and key-or, better still, back into the hands of Jacqueline Prescott.

Walking fast, he heads south. Before long, and as he glides under the shadowline of the skyscrapers on Fifty-ninth Street, Howley comes to the (perhaps now obvious) realization that he was never really going to be in control of this process.

How would he have been?

Across from the Plaza, he stands at the lights, waiting. He could hail a cab from here, but the Oberon Building is only a few blocks away. He’ll enjoy walking toward it, approaching and falling under its shadowline.

The lights change, and he moves.

Vaughan wanted to get this handover out of the way fast, so that’s what they’ll do. Tomorrow’s Friday. They’ll hold a press conference in the morning, get it done before the weekend.

Ba da bing.

As it were.

He should text Angela.

He takes out his phone and turns it on. He looks at his watch. He might even make it back in time for that ten-thirty meeting.

Watch what it does overnight.

Val Brady was certainly right about that. Thursday morning and it’s everywhere, hysterical banner headlines screaming LOOK OUT WALL STREET! and MANHUNT! and WHO’S NEXT? It’s the lead story in most major newspapers across the world. And why wouldn’t it be? Investment bankers being targeted for assassination? Summary executions on the sidewalks of Manhattan?

Ellen puts on a pot of coffee. She then turns on her phone and checks for messages. There are four, and all of them, to her surprise, are about the Ratt Atkinson piece she did for Parallax. She’d forgotten, the magazine is out today, and already, apparently, her piece is causing something of a stir.

Just as the coffee is ready, another call chimes in. She lets it go to message.

“Ellen, hi, Liz Zambelli, great piece today, I think there’s going to be quite a buzz around this, give me a call.”

Liz Zambelli is a booking agent for a couple of the talk shows. One of the earlier voicemail messages was from someone on The Rachel Maddow Show.

But Ellen’s puzzled. What is it? She’s been so preoccupied with this other story for the last few days that she barely remembers what she wrote in the Atkinson piece. She’s about to check online to see what people are saying when her phone rings again. This time she picks it up.

“Max.”

“Hi, Ellen.”

She waits. When he doesn’t say anything immediately, she sighs. “What is it, Max? I haven’t looked yet, but there’s obviously something there, something significant.”

“Well, that’s debatable.”

Ellen rolls her eyes. “Oh, just tell me.”

It turns out that what has caught people’s attention is a passing claim in the article that Ratt Atkinson has been exaggerating his popularity on Twitter in order to make himself look good in the eyes of a potential electorate. She quotes one source inside Atkinson’s own campaign as saying that 89 percent of the former governor’s followers on the site are fake, and that up to half a million either inactive or dummy accounts have been set up, and maybe even paid for, in a spectacular act of what has now come to be known as “astrotweeting.”

“That’s the takeaway? Nothing about…” She pauses, thinking. “Nothing about his… tax arrangements? The state contracts thing? No mention of that stuff about his wife and the soccer coach even?”

“Nope.”

“Jesus, that’s depressing. Twitter trumps sex as material for a scandal? I wasn’t even going to include that bit. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry I would have cut it.”

“But it’s kosher?”

“Oh yeah. It’s all been fact-checked. Talk to Ricky. And I’ve got tons more about it, too, quotes from the search agency that crunched the numbers, there’s a whole breakdown of his follower stats, but I dropped most of it, because… I just didn’t think anyone would give a fuck at this point.”

“Well, a fuck they most certainly do give. I’ve had a dozen calls so far today. Listen, this may not be the Pentagon Papers, but it’s exposure for us, okay, and we could use it.”

“I don’t know, Max.” She looks over at her desk. It’s strewn with loose pages, printouts of different typefaces, hundreds of them. She was up late again last night, chasing this… she hesitates to even call it a lead-especially since it led nowhere-but at least it felt like she was doing something serious. She did suspect she’d be giving up on it this morning, but if the alternative is appearing on cable news shows to talk about Twitter accounts with odd usernames and no profile photos, she’s not so sure. “I’m working on something.”

“What? Not Lebrecht? Not the shootings?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you have something, Ellen?” Pause, no answer. “Because it looks like you were right about it not being a professional setup, but we all know that now. So what else do you have?”

“Nothing, not really, but-”

“Well, then.”

“Not exactly nothing. I need some time, Max. And I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to get distracted by this Twitter shit.”

He groans.

“Trust me, Max. If I get anywhere with this, anywhere at all, it’ll be a whole lot better for the magazine than some pointless story about an ex-governor who’s got no chance in hell of securing the nomination in any case.”

“That’s a big if, Ellen. Have you seen how the story has scaled up? Every news organization in the world is on this now. How do you compete with that?”

“I don’t. I only compete with myself, Max.”

“Well, I hope one of you comes out on top, because-”

“Look, give me a couple of days, okay? The Twitter story can wait, it isn’t going away. If I haven’t made a breakthrough on this other thing by the weekend, I’ll go on goddamn Bill O’Reilly for you.”

Max exhales loudly. “Fine.” He’d clearly like to know more about where she is on the main story, but he knows not to push it.

They’ll talk tomorrow.

Sipping coffee, standing at her desk, Ellen then glances over the stuff she printed out last night.

Hundreds of uppercase A’s.

Which was only a small sample of the literally tens of thousands she could have printed out if she’d wanted to. She’d still be doing it, of course, and that was the main reason she stopped.

Because what was the point?

The first half hour or so she spent researching the difference between a typeface and a font, then between serif and sans-serif, then the general history and development of typefaces, after which she just started banging them out, in different point sizes, five or ten to a page, all uppercase.

It took her another few hours to identify what specific typeface the A was.

Blackwood Old Style, apparently.

It was a meticulous examination and comparison process-tricky, hard on the eyes, exhausting-but she was pretty sure about it in the end. Reaching a conclusion felt good, too. But of course that was deceptive… because what did it mean? What did it tell her?

Absolutely nothing.

The typeface itself was designed in the 1920s by a former San Francisco newspaperman whom a local foundry had commissioned to come up with something they could sell to ad agencies. Not long after that, Blackwood Old Style made its first appearance-on a public billboard advertising the Culpepper Union Brewing Company-and over subsequent decades the typeface proved to be very popular.

But what was she supposed to do now? With drowsiness and near-paralysis taking hold, it occurred to her-as it should have done before she went off on this obsessive tangent-to make a list of categories where a typeface like Blackwood Old Style might be used in more recent times and then to search for examples. The most obvious one, given how young the two guys appeared to be, was colleges. Beers and breweries maybe? Rock bands. What else? Trucks? Automobiles?

But she was hanging on by her fingertips here, because even if she found something-a recent example of Blackwood Old Style-it would still most likely prove to be a dead end. The guy was just wearing a printed T-shirt, and the design on it was probably something totally random. It didn’t have to be significant. It didn’t have to be a coded message.

Conceding defeat, she went to bed.

But now this morning, feeling fresher, and spurred on by a desire to avoid getting caught up in this preposterous Twitter controversy, she reengages. She sits at her desk and reviews the categories she came up with for her search.

And then it all happens in what feels like a flash.

Because again, the category most likely to yield results, it seems to her, is colleges. So she generates an initial list, confining it to ten East Coast states and eliminating anywhere that doesn’t begin with the letter A.

Nineteen colleges.

She starts logging on to the Web sites for each of these, one after the other… and at number seventeen, she hits pay dirt.

Atherton College.

There it is, clear as day. Blackwood Old Style.

She stares at the screen for a few moments-at the typeface, at the initial letter-and it slowly dawns on her.

Fuck.

This is significant. It isn’t random. It’s a real lead. And why the hell didn’t she do this last night?

After a moment, she hears the ping of an incoming e-mail. The subject line is “Ratt/Twitter.” She ignores it.

The thing is, the guy was wearing a specific T-shirt. He was wearing a T-shirt with the name of a college on it.

Was it his college?

Before she starts shooting holes in this, which she could do pretty easily, something else occurs to her-or, to be more accurate, she remembers something.

ath900.

Holy shit.

The phone rings. She ignores it.

That was the name attached to the comment in that blog post she found, the one that talked about “popping the top guys.”

In shock, Ellen leans back in her chair.

Those two things combined… that’s more than a lead, that’s a…

Staring at the screen, she swallows.

That’s a…

She’s afraid to say it, or even think it, but that’s a grade-A, gilt-edged scoop right there.

Seriously.

She slides forward again and starts examining the college website, and as she’s doing this, over the next half hour or so, two things become clear to her. One, she’s going to keep getting phone calls and e-mails about this Ratt Atkinson situation, overtures that will only get harder and harder to fend off (especially if she remains here, in her apartment). And two, phone calls or e-mails to Atherton College simply aren’t going to be enough, not given the gravity-not given the delicacy-of the situation.

There is a logical conclusion to this, and she reaches it pretty fast. Atherton is in upstate New York, probably less than three hours away. She could get a train to Albany and rent a car from there.

She looks down.

She’ll probably need to get dressed first.

The phone rings again. As before, she ignores it.

Instead, she logs on to the Amtrak website.

9

LIZZIE BISHOP IS RELUCTANT TO ADMIT IT, but this shit is addictive.

Beforehand, she’d have assumed that watching live coverage of a murder trial on TV would be like watching paint dry. Okay, more than likely there’d be occasional ripples of drama, but the sheer tedium of it, day after day-the proceedings, the lingo, all that ipso facto shit, not to mention the endless analysis-just, No, I’m sorry… no way…

Who could possibly be into that?

Well, as it turns out, she could.

Because as it turns out, there’s something sort of creepy and hypnotic about it, and from her curled-up perspective here on the couch-remote in one hand, can of Red Bull in the other-she’s finding it hard to look away, to take her eyes off this prosecution guy, for instance, Ray Whitestone… who’s not cute, or anything, Jesus, he must have type 2 diabetes, at least, but he also has a commanding presence. And weirdly enough, too-it seems to Lizzie-the more banal the questions (and answers, of course), the more hypnotic the whole thing tends to become.

And it’s not just Ray Whitestone, either. The witness on the stand at the moment, this doorman guy, Joey Gifford-he’s something else. Curiously compelling is what one of the talking-head commentators has called him a few times, and that about sums him up. He’s like a person you’d see on some ultra-tacky, cringe-inducing reality show, only more so.

Because this actually is reality.

“The awning, the one outside that covers the sidewalk,” Ray Whitestone is saying, “the canopy, that’s… that’s supported by four brass poles, am I correct?”

“Yes, brass… brass poles. I’m assuming it’s brass, that’s what it looks like… brass. It’s the right color.” Joey Gifford clears his throat. “I mean, I’m no, what’s the word, metallurgist, but-”

“Indeed, Mr. Gifford, thank you.”

Not that Lizzie ever really watches reality shows, or daytime TV for that matter.

But-

A commercial break comes on and the spell is broken. She looks around, studying the apartment, these unfamiliar surroundings, for the hundredth time this week.

The place is small. In this room there’s the couch she’s sitting on, the TV, a shelving unit, a desk in the corner, and a longish rectangular table on which she has her study things laid out, textbooks, laptop, notebooks, pens. There’s a window that looks down over a concrete yard with some scrubby trees in it and a dilapidated wooden fence that backs onto the yard of another, similar building. There’s one bedroom, the door of which is always locked-during the day, at any rate. The kitchen and bathroom are tiny, really tiny, their poky windows giving onto the building’s cramped air shaft, where all you can see is other mostly shuttered windows and red brickwork, darkened now and flecked by a century’s deposit of bird shit and soot. There doesn’t seem to be much soundproofing between the apartments, either, because she can hear muffled voices, noises, random thuds, as well as the incessant clanking and hissing of the steam radiators.

Lizzie doesn’t like it here. She doesn’t feel comfortable on her own all day.

Not that it’s much better in the evenings.

But to be honest, what she’s really feeling right now is out of her depth.

And also a little stupid.

She takes a sip from her Red Bull.

The commercial break comes to an end, but instead of going back to the live feed from the courtroom, they start into a quick recap of the proceedings so far.

Most of which she has just watched.

She raises the remote control and flicks forward a few channels, stopping for a moment at a rerun of House.

“Sarcoidosis,” she shouts at the screen, then flicks forward again.

Nature documentary, insects.

She stares at it, not paying attention.

Out of her depth?

She takes another sip of Red Bull.

Stupid?

Why?

Because she doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, that’s why. And there’s only so much of this crap that she can put up with. It’s insane. No Internet access? No going out or talking to people? No using her cell phone? No TV?

It’s only supposed to be for a week-until tomorrow, in fact, and she did warn her friends about the impending radio silence.

But still.

Even the fact that she has slipped a bit-that wobbly call to her dad on the first night, putting the TV on this morning, and keeping it on-is surely telling her something.

That maybe she just doesn’t care as much anymore.

What she can’t believe is that she actually felt disloyal this morning turning on the fucking TV.

For almost a week now-in what has admittedly been the most productive period she’s ever spent as a student-Lizzie has been cooped up here in this apartment, reading, studying, but also assiduously abiding by these house rules, by this fucked-up paranoid off-the-grid communications blackout. And the thing is, she gets it, at least in regard to cell phones and social media. There’s a real danger there of personal data being monitored, sure. So don’t have them on.

Fine.

Being a fairly slack user of Facebook and Twitter herself, that aspect of it hasn’t actually been hard at all.

But Jesus H. Christ… the fucking TV?

This morning it just seemed too ridiculous. She’d finished a long paper and prepared a detailed set of notes for her next one, and…

Enough was enough.

She was only doing it, in any case, to keep her boyfriend’s asshole of a brother happy. So she turned on the goddamn TV, and started watching the first thing she came across, which happened to be live coverage of the Connie Carillo murder trial.

But now maybe she’s had her fill of that. For the moment, at least. Now maybe-and for the first time since last Saturday-she’s going to find a cable news channel and plug into what’s going on outside in the wider world, the one beyond this shithole of an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Frank Bishop arrives in the small town of Atherton just before noon. The college is situated about a mile north of the town, so he decides to stop first and find a cheap restaurant or diner where he can sit for a while over coffee and gather his thoughts.

Atherton itself is pretty short on charm, mainly consisting of car dealerships, strip malls, fast food joints, and sports bars. He parks on a side street off Main and wanders around in search of what he soon realizes is probably an elusive dream-the classic small-town diner with its chrome fittings, soda fountain, and tabletop jukeboxes.

The nearest thing he finds is either a Wendy’s or a Chicken Pit. Two years ago when he came here with Lizzie they had lunch at the Great Lakes Grill and Bistro, an indulgence he can no longer afford.

He chooses the Chicken Pit.

The coffee is undrinkable, the blueberry muffin he got to go with it inedible, but at least he can sit in his little booth, staring out the window, undisturbed.

And now that he’s here, of course, he feels like an idiot. Because how uncool is this going to be for Lizzie… her old man turning up unannounced, and even-if he’s not careful, if he can’t keep a lid on recent developments-presenting as borderline unhinged?

At the same time, though, when he looks down at his cell phone on the table between his keys and coffee cup, Frank is reminded of why he decided to come up here in the first place.

It’s perfectly simple.

Lizzie doesn’t go this long without returning a call. It might be a chore, and he might be a pain in the ass-but she doesn’t go five days, not when her old man is so clearly anxious to talk to her. And that’s what he should have pressed home to Deb yesterday when they spoke.

That this has never happened before.

Not like this.

Formulating the thought makes Frank’s insides turn.

He shuffles out of the booth and gathers up his keys and phone.

Out on Main Street, it occurs to him that he could have just called the college administration people and had them check up on her, but he’s also pretty sure that Lizzie would have regarded that as a serious breach of trust.

Considerably worse than what he is about to do.

Because just showing up won’t necessarily compromise or embarrass her. Anyway, he doesn’t care, he’s here now, and at this stage he actually needs to see her. It’s an imperative. It’s become that way.

He drives north out of Atherton and within a couple of minutes is approaching the sprawling campus. To the left there are residence halls, three of them, known locally as the Projects, and to the right there is the more severe, clean-lines administration block. Get past these and you enter a sort of sylvan grove, mostly single-story buildings arranged on scenic, grassy quads and tree-lined courtyards that house the various academic departments, dining halls, libraries, and student health and community centers.

He parks in a visitor’s space in front of the Administration Building and gets out of the car. But standing there, he realizes something. He feels weirdly self-conscious. It’s as though he’s guilty of something, or is about to be.

He looks around.

Where should he go first?

The easiest thing would be to wander the campus for a while and just randomly bump into Lizzie. Then he could be out of here in five minutes.

But that’s a pretty unlikely scenario.

He looks over toward the residence halls, focusing on the middle one.

Is she in her rooms?

Maybe, but he can’t just go in there, not without a security pass.

He needs to take this slowly. No one else is in a panic here. So he shouldn’t be. Besides, it’s lunchtime. Everywhere he looks, people are… having lunch.

On benches, on lawns.

He decides to wander around for a while anyway. He passes the Science Building and the main dining hall. He crosses the central quad, walks along by the Van Loon Auditorium, and then makes his way over toward the tennis and basketball courts. At this point he stops at a bench himself and sits down.

But what is he doing?

Almost immediately he stands up again and walks back the way he came-quickly, straight toward the Administration Building.

He goes into the main office. There are two women working behind a high reception counter.

He feels he’s blurting it out, but the information seems to get across, and within a minute the woman he’s dealing with is on the phone. There’s a brief exchange, and then some waiting. Frank starts drumming his fingers on the counter, but stops himself almost immediately.

“There’s no response from her room. I’ll-”

The woman cuts herself short and hits another number. There’s a second brief exchange, which Frank finds it difficult to hear, because a separate conversation is now taking place next to them.

When the woman has finished, she looks back at Frank. “There’ll be someone over to see you in a moment.”

“Who?” Franks says, a little too quickly.

“It’s the house RA. She’ll be able to help you.” The woman pauses. “If you’d care to take a seat?”

Frank takes a few steps backward and sits down.

She’s not in her rooms.

That doesn’t have to mean anything. She could be anywhere. In the library. At a lecture. Having lunch, like everyone else.

After a short while, Frank looks up and sees a young woman approaching. She’s tall, thin, and pale, with long red hair. She’s dressed… half like a hippie and half like a corporate executive. This weird, mix-it-up dress code seems to be de rigueur on campus.

“Mr. Bishop?” she says, extending a hand.

“Yes.”

They shake.

“I’m Sally Peake, the resident assistant in Lizzie’s house.” She holds up her cell phone. “I’ve just spoken with Lizzie’s roommate, Rachel, and… she says Lizzie is away for the week.”

Frank looks at her. “Away? I don’t understand. Away where?”

“Er, I don’t know, Mr. Bishop. Just away. That’s all she said.”

“But-”

“Would you like to speak with Rachel yourself? I could take you over there right now.”

Frank pauses. “Yeah. Okay.” He nods. “Thanks.”

A few minutes later they enter the third-floor hallway of Lizzie’s residence. When they’re about halfway along, a door opens and Rachel Clissmann appears, a good-looking, sun-blushed, sporty type in a floral-print dress and thick black-rimmed glasses. Frank met her once before, in the city, at some celebration. She looked different then, and he barely recognizes her now.

“Mr. Bishop.”

“Rachel.”

She shows them in. Frank feels slightly out of place here, standing in this small room, with these two young women. But he glances around nevertheless, taking everything in-the bookshelves, the Shaker table and chairs, the candles and crystals and cushions, the implausible neatness, the scented atmosphere of wellness and moderation. He’s prepared to bet that not all of the rooms on the third or any other floor here are like this.

He’s prepared to bet that Lizzie’s bedroom is not like this. He looks over. The door is closed.

“Rachel,” he says, turning to her, taking a deep breath, “Sally here told me what you said. Lizzie is away, is that right?”

“Yes, I-”

“I’m not checking up on her or anything. I-”

“No, no, I-”

“I’ve just been worried, that’s all. She hasn’t been returning my calls. Or texts.” He swallows. “Or anything.”

“I understand, Mr. Bishop, of course. She and Alex took off last Friday. It had been planned for a while, or… so it seemed.”

Frank stands there, looking into this girl’s startling blue eyes, uncomfortable in his sudden awareness of her perfume, of the tone of her skin… and he feels a rising sense of how indefensibly ridiculous what he’s about to say will sound.

“Alex?”

“Oh, oh, er… he’s-”

“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. Please. Alex, Schmalex… whatever. But do you know where they went?”

Before she has a chance to answer he thinks, last Friday. That means that when he spoke to her on Saturday evening she wasn’t here, settling in to finish a paper. She was somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else.

She was lying.

But again, fuck it, that’s not the point. He sounds indefensibly ridiculous to himself now, when the only thing he’s interested in, the only thing he cares about is… is she okay?

Realizing then that Rachel has already answered his question, and that he wasn’t listening, he says, “Sorry?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Bishop,” she repeats, obviously bewildered at having to do so. “Lizzie wouldn’t tell me. I got the impression they just needed some time on their own.” She pauses. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

As Frank turns away, he catches a glimpse of Sally glaring at Rachel.

“Let me try her,” Rachel then offers, but not sounding too hopeful for some reason. As Frank stares at a framed She & Him album cover on the wall, he senses determined phone busyness behind him. After a moment, he hears, “Shit, voicemail,” a pause, and then, in a concerned monotone, “Liz, Rach, call me.”

Frank turns back around.

A century on from two minutes ago, he looks at them both in turn, and says, “Okay, what do we know about this Alex guy?”

On the train to Albany, Ellen does as much background research on Atherton as she can.

A liberal arts college founded in the late 1870s, it was originally built on a twenty-five-acre site in the Sasketchaw Valley a few miles east of Atherton. The college moved to its present, much larger site a mile north of the town when it acquired the former Van Loon family estate in 1953. Most of the buildings currently in use on the campus were constructed in the 1960s, giving the place a curious feel, simultaneously contemporary and dated.

Atherton first admitted women in 1936, and today has a total enrollment of just under two thousand. It offers twenty-five majors leading to arts or science degrees, as well as pre-professional programs in law, medicine, engineering, and IT.

This takes Ellen as far as Yonkers. She then switches her focus to more practical matters.

As a school, Atherton is primarily residential, and most students live on campus. All of its three residence halls have common study areas, pantries, phone and cable connections, and Internet access. Suites are generally single-sex, but gender-neutral accommodation is available in the upper two floors of the third building. As an ex-Cartwright girl, Ellen is familiar with this kind of stuff, most of it, anyway-though she is certainly surprised by one thing, the range of food options available. Atherton’s main dining hall has five different sections, the Globe Café (serving a selection of cuisines from around the world), the Cabbage Patch (salads and vegan), the Spoon (burgers, pizza), the Deli-Zone (sandwiches, wraps), and the Juice Depot.

She looks up from the screen for a moment, and out the window.

Croton-Harmon.

And then back.

Atherton has all the usual other stuff as well, a Student Government Association that liaises with the college administration. It has an official student-run newspaper, the Atherton Chronicle, and a closed-circuit TV station (AthTV) that covers events on campus and in the surrounding area, as well as a highly respected and long-established college radio station (WKNT-92 FM) that broadcasts a mix of musical programming and various innovative talk-show formats.

Poughkeepsie.

In terms of security, Atherton is staffed by twelve full-time and six part-time professionals who are all state-certified security guards. The security staff also receives specialist training in first aid, CPR, conflict resolution, sex-aggression defense techniques, cyber crime, and diversity awareness.

Rhinecliff.

Ellen then spends a bit of time digging into the college’s history, looking out for any tradition of student radicalism, or of anything politically sensitive at all, but there’s really very little there. The late sixties and early seventies saw the usual reactions to Chicago, Kent State, Cambodia, and so on, there were sit-ins and marches, but nothing exceptional. In 2007, a chapter of the recently re-formed SDS was opened at Atherton, but the main focus of activity here seemed to be either teaming up with wider antiwar protest networks or working to change the state education system.

Hudson.

In more recent years, there’s been nothing of any special interest or note-no links beyond the obvious ones to the Occupy movement, and no discernible drift the other way either.

Ellen’s impression is of a fairly insular place, self-satisfied and maybe even a little smug, probably not unlike hundreds of other colleges across the country.

So what the fuck is she doing up here?

As she gets off the train at Albany-Rensselaer, no new answer comes to mind-just the old one: It’s all she’s got.

She picks up the rental car she booked earlier and gets to Atherton in under an hour.

As she approaches the campus, she sees that it does indeed have a slight time-warp feel to it-angular gray concrete buildings, now partially streaked and stained but that must have once seemed futuristic and full of promise. Mitigating this somewhat is the landscaping, the well-kept lawns, flower beds, and trees.

Ellen parks in front of the Administration Building and then has a quick think about how to proceed. Does she announce herself and spin some story about researching a piece on New York colleges, or does she wander around and wait until she gets busted by security?

She decides to wander around.

It takes her about thirty-five minutes to do a complete tour of the campus, stopping occasionally to inspect a building or to check out a sign or notice board.

She doesn’t get busted, and nothing catches her attention.

Except some of the students.

She remembers being a student herself, and vividly-it wasn’t that long ago-but these people here are like a different species. There’s an air of confidence and self-assurance about the place that she’s finding unfamiliar, and not a little strange. The crowd she ran with at Cartwright were all cocky and opinionated, no question about that, but this is not the same thing. This is like a sense of entitlement, or of ownership-and not ownership of property or material things, not even of position or privilege, but just of… their own world.

And its ways, whatever they may be.

Not exactly a formula for political engagement, she thinks, but maybe not a fair assessment either. Because she hasn’t actually spoken to anyone yet.

It’s early afternoon, sunny and cool, and quite a few people are out, some sitting on benches and lawns, others strolling around the various quads-most, it appears, in small groups, self-contained, cocooned.

Striking up a casual conversation out here isn’t going to be easy, so she decides to head for the main dining hall. The logic isn’t exactly airtight, but she imagines that standing in line for food could well generate an opening gambit or two.

Besides, she’s hungry.

She heads for the Cabbage Patch. There actually isn’t much of a line here, but she starts eyeing the salads on offer anyway.

“Check out the Avocado Wasabi.”

That was quick.

Ellen turns to her left.

“Good?”

“Oh my.”

The girl is early twenties, younger even, and quite geeky. She’s in glasses, jeans, and a T-shirt that has a cartoony graphic of a computer keyboard on it… geeky, that is, except for the small tattoo on the side of her neck, which Ellen now sees-as the girl turns around slightly-may well be part of a much bigger one all down her shoulder, or even her back.

Ellen takes the salad from the display and looks at the girl. “Twenty years ago, when I was a student? Wasabi? I don’t fucking think so. You do pretty well here.”

The girl draws back a little. “Twenty years ago? You’re kidding, right?”

Shaking her head, but saying nothing, Ellen reaches for a bottle of water.

“Here?”

“No, at Cartwright.”

“Wow. I’m at the wrong school.”

Moving her tray along the counter, Ellen glances back. “What are you studying?”

The girl pauses, maintaining eye contact and pursing her lips. “You mean right now?”

Ellen feels like telling her there’s a speed limit in this state, but she plays along, and within five minutes they’ve been joined at a table by two of Geek Girl’s friends and Ellen is pumping them hard for information, so hard in fact that she eventually has no choice but to partially blow her cover and tell them she’s a journalist.

One of them has heard of her and is wildly impressed.

But not a lot comes of it. She explains that she’s researching student activism post-Occupy and would like to identify any sources of radicalism in the college. Not wanting to freak them out or scare them off, she quickly adds that she isn’t looking for names or anything, which is a lie, of course, but she also gets the impression that if they had any such names, giving them out wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for these girls, and not because of any latent McCarthyite tendencies they might have, but rather because it just wouldn’t occur to them that anyone could possibly object.

Going by their ages, which probably average out at about twenty, it’s a safe bet to assume that these girls have fully recorded and documented their lives online, at least from the start of adolescence, and that it’s all still out there-every last confession, playlist, and photo, and for anyone at all to see, at any time-on Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo. It’s the great fault line of the new generation gap, the end of privacy-and it’s what makes Max Daitch (for example) such a dinosaur. He thinks, why would you do such a thing? They think, why wouldn’t you?

It’s just that right now, for Ellen, none of this is of any use, because it turns out that Geek Girl here and her friends are about as politically aware as, she doesn’t know… the Smurfs. Or the Bratz.

One of them, however-the Smart One-does make a useful suggestion.

Ellen should check out a few past numbers of the Atherton Chronicle. She’ll find a pile of them in the main library. And she should probably also listen back to some of the talk stuff they do on the college radio station-some of that shit, apparently, can get very political. She’ll find it all archived online.

Before Ellen leaves the Cabbage Patch to head for the library, she vacuums some personal details up from around the table-phone numbers, e-mail and Web addresses, usernames, handles, hash tags-info she may find useful later on, if it turns out she needs a quick route into the Atherton College social mediasphere.

The girls, of course, are only too willing to hand over anything she asks for.

“She did say one thing, now that I remember.”

Frank looks at Rachel. Whatever this is, she’s pretending she’s only just remembered it-Frank can see that clearly, and he’s annoyed-but at this stage the information is what counts, nothing else.

“What is it?”

“Before she left, she said there’d be radio silence for a while. That’s what she called it.”

“Radio silence.”

“Yeah.”

“Meaning?”

Rachel swallows, uncomfortable now. “I guess that, yeah, she wouldn’t be answering her phone, or tweeting, that kind of stuff.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Bishop. She didn’t elaborate. Lizzie isn’t that forthcoming.”

He also finds it annoying being told what his daughter is supposedly like. “You didn’t ask?”

Rachel shuffles for a bit-in her bare feet, which Frank has just noticed-and then adjusts her glasses. “No, I didn’t. She’s not big on social media, she’s not an obsessive like I am, or like most people these days, so it didn’t seem like such a big deal, you know? Things can get pretty intense around here, and I just figured she and Alex maybe needed to, I don’t know, zone out for a bit.”

Alex.

She didn’t have much to say about him either. Sally Peake is currently out in the hallway trying to see who she can scare up that might have a little more to say about him.

Frank feels he’s getting something of a mixed message from these two. On the one hand, it’s obvious they think he’s a nutjob, and that he didn’t get-or read-the memo about how his daughter going to college meant that SHE WAS LEAVING HOME. On the other hand, he senses a slight nervousness, especially on Sally’s part, a desire to wrap this up, to contain it before security has to be called in.

“Around here,” Frank then says to Rachel. “You said things can get pretty intense. You mean specifically at Atherton?”

“Yes. There’s a lot of academic pressure, a lot of competitiveness.”

Frank nods. Now that he thinks about it, Lizzie is actually a very good student. She’s always done well and gotten good grades. She’s focused and works hard. She got a part scholarship to this place.

So maybe she did just need a break.

And maybe her old man is a fucking nutjob, who could do with seeing a psychiatrist.

Sally Peake reappears in the doorway, again holding up her phone. “Friend of Alex, guy who knows him pretty well? He’s just coming out of the VLA, says he’ll meet us at the Spoon in ten.”

Frank nods at Rachel and says, “Thanks.”

She nods back.

As he’s walking out of the room, he sees her lifting up her phone and starting to text.

The Spoon is a section of the main dining hall, which itself is more like a food court in a suburban mall, not unlike the one in Winterbrook, in fact-though seeing it again now, Frank realizes that this one is a tad fancier.

They approach a table near the front, where Sally Peake introduces him to a young guy named Claudio Mazza. Frank tries to get an instant fix on him, but is thwarted from the get-go. Despite his Italian name, Claudio Mazza has blond hair and blue eyes. Frank is also finding it hard to categorize him as a typical college kid. Is he a nerd, a jock, a hipster, or a partier? None of these really seems to fit. He does have a book next to his coffee cup, but that hardly counts as a clue around this place. Probably nineteen or twenty years old, he’s dressed with a nod to punk-or maybe it’s punk-meets-goth-in dirty, wide-strapped, spiked boots and a pair of studded jeans that look like something from an art installation. But these are offset sharply by an almost foppish upper half-tweed jacket and a plain white T-shirt.

What’s that called?

Frank gives up.

With Sally Peake hovering in the background, he sits at the table and starts asking questions.

Claudio and Alex, it seems, are taking some of the same literature courses (Melville, Dos Passos, Coover) and that’s how they know each other. Claudio says Alex is a really nice guy who doesn’t drink or do drugs. He’s very smart, very shy, very independent minded, but he also has a naive streak in him a mile wide. Thinks he can change the world. He has an older brother he’s in thrall to, Julian, who was at Atherton a couple of years back and is a veteran anti-globalization protester. Julian is apparently a streets guy. With Alex, it tends to be more cerebral. On hearing all of this, Frank finds himself simultaneously relieved and a little concerned.

He then asks Claudio about Alex and Lizzie.

It turns out the pair have been an item for several months now, and are rarely seen apart.

Or in the company of others.

“It’s a very exclusive relationship,” Claudio says, “and not just romantically. They tend to rely on each other in all sorts of… function-specific situations.” He reaches for his coffee cup, lifts it, then puts it down again. “But it’s an arrangement that seems to work pretty well,” he adds, “given that neither of them has a lot going on in the old social skills department.”

Frank bristles at this, even though he knows it’s true, at least in relation to Lizzie.

He leans back in his chair, unsure of what to think.

This Claudio seems fairly smart himself, and confident-though maybe a little too eager to showcase the Psych 101 stuff. Still, there’s no reason not to believe what he’s saying about Alex.

But where does that leave matters?

Deflating slightly, Frank glances around.

The Globe Café? The Juice Depot? This is so not like the food court at Winterbrook Mall. There are no obese people here, for starters. Everyone he can see is young and healthy. Look at Sally Peake, for instance-over there, pacing up and down, on her phone-the very picture of long-limbed, pink-cheeked, genetically unmodified youth.

Frank bends his neck slightly to get a look at the spine of Claudio’s book.

And no one at the mall is reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, that’s for sure.

After a moment, he catches Claudio’s eye and says, “Do you have any idea where they are?”

“No, Mr. Bishop, I don’t. Alex wouldn’t tell me, but he did mention they’d be gone for a week, and that means-what day is this? Thursday?-they’ll probably be back tomorrow.” He shrugs his shoulders, as if to say, Hey, problem solved. Frank then half expects this nineteen-year-old to produce a small pad and a pen and to write him out a prescription for some Xanax.

But who’s to say, maybe the problem is solved.

He pictures his precious girl, his Lizzie-little bit mousy, little bit mouthy-off somewhere with her shy, brainy, idealistic boyfriend, the two of them, what… going at it like jackrabbits?

Is that it? Is that all?

Does Deb know, and didn’t want to tell him? Didn’t want to point out that it’s actually none of his business?

With what it’s costing him, Frank could get worked up about Lizzie cutting school for a week, but… that’s not going to happen.

Academically, she’s doing fine.

He wants her to be happy, too, though. And if she is, well and good, who’s he to interfere?

You’re only young once.

He stares into space for a while. When he refocuses, he realizes that both Sally Peake and Claudio Mazza are staring at him.

Walking along the High Line, toward the exit at Thirtieth Street, Lizzie feels sick to her stomach. She also feels sort of hollowed-out, and paralyzed.

Not to mention scared.

She wonders if, when she gets back to street level, she shouldn’t just keep heading toward midtown. Because then she could stop by the law firm where her mother works. She could submit herself to that, and all it would entail-the machinery of the law, the machinery of her mother’s disapproval.

She doesn’t know which machinery would be worse.

Although they’re both pretty much unthinkable, really.

Like every other option she’s come up with in the last three hours. Which is how long she has been out and about in the city, wandering aimlessly, having hot flashes, hallucinating (as good as), and dry crying.

When she saw it-the clip, the footage from outside the Herald Rygate-fuck, it was like getting whacked on the head with a baseball bat. Because at first she had to piece the story together, the references and images, which were all rapid-fire, all seemingly random and out of sequence, it wasn’t breaking news anymore, but an aggregate, a mosaic, an accumulated and already absorbed narrative.

Jesus, listen to her, she sounds like fucking Julian.

But now she understands. That’s the difference. Now she gets it. And she’s been going over it all, the past week, reassembling it in her head, reinterpreting every word spoken, every testy exchange, every weird glance and inexplicable mood swing. Now she understands why Julian was so unhappy about her tagging along-the politically illiterate pain-in-the-ass girlfriend that his brother couldn’t bear to be separated from even for a lousy few days.

How could she have been so stupid?

Actually, she knows how. Because go over the signs, go over the timeline, and it all fits… even if it doesn’t make any sense, even if it doesn’t connect on an emotional or a gut level, even if it’s literally unbelievable-the idea that Julian could plan and carry out an operation of this magnitude. But go over the footage, study those two familiar, spectral figures, the way they move, the body language, and suddenly it all makes perfect sense.

To her at least.

But don’t ask her to explain it.

She walks down the steps of the cutoff to Thirtieth Street and keeps going. She crosses Tenth Avenue and heads for Ninth.

She’s wearing jeans and a sweater, but there’s a chill in the air, and it’s probably going to get chillier. Also, her feet are sore. She left the apartment in a hurry, not giving any thought to what she was doing, certainly not to what shoes she should wear.

She brought her phone, but the damn thing needs to be charged.

She has maybe twelve dollars and some loose change in her pocket. She’s hungry, but won’t go in anywhere because the thought of having to deal with people makes her feel even more nauseous than she’s already feeling.

At Sixth Avenue, she turns left and heads uptown.

So far she has covered most of downtown, the East Village, SoHo, Tribeca, and the West Village. Then she made her way up to Gansevoort Street, where the High Line starts.

There’s a lot to process in what has happened, no question about that, and she’s in a daze, but there’s also something nagging at her, tugging at her, some other level of this that she’s resisting.

What is it?

Block after block passes, and her mind refuses to settle. When she gets to Forty-second Street, she wanders into Bryant Park, finds an unoccupied bench, and sits down.

There’s a simple, recurring question here: How could she not have seen what was going on? Was she blind? Lizzie’s understanding of the situation up to now has been that Julian is the radical in the Coady family. He’s involved with various protest groups and firmly believes in direct action-city marches, shutting down bridges and ports, so-called black bloc rampages, that kind of thing. He also believes, at some level, in the use of actual physical force. She hasn’t given much thought to this, but if she does, what comes to mind? Pushing, shoving, shouting stuff like “Fuck the cops.” Maybe throwing stones or broken bottles. All of which leads, of course-according to Alex-to police brutality, tear gas, pepper sprays, Tasers, stun grenades. And beyond that to mass arrests, trumped-up charges, surveillance, infiltration, raids. And then, inevitably, on to more cycles of resistance.

But if Julian is the radical activist in the family, then what is Alex? The armchair strategist? Lizzie isn’t sure, because Alex plays his cards very close to his chest, even with her.

Lizzie’s understanding of the situation this week in particular was that Julian had asked Alex to come down and help him organize some big street protest that was in the offing. She wasn’t surprised that Alex agreed, because she knew that Alex would do anything for Julian. But she also knew from experience not to ask too many questions, and was content instead to imagine the two of them-it’s preposterous now, she realizes-hand-cranking out leaflets on a small printing press, or unpacking bulk consignments of Anonymous masks.

But then Alex asked her to come as well. She was into it at first, a mix of flattered and intrigued, but that was when her exposure to Julian hadn’t extended beyond a single face-to-face meeting over a pizza, a few Skype calls she happened to be in the room for, and Alex’s many stories about him.

Five days of the real thing has pretty much taken the shine off those.

But Lizzie’s focus in all of this is not-and never has been-on Julian. In a way, he’s the mad, fucked-up older brother in the background, like a secondary character out of some sitcom that got canceled after its first season. No, the focus for Lizzie, obviously, has always been on Alex-innocent, whispery, logical, weirdly sexy, on-the-fucking-spectrum Alex.

And Alex doesn’t get canceled, not lightly.

Which is when it hits her. Like a second whack of the baseball bat.

That thing that’s been nagging at her.

Within a minute, Lizzie is on her feet, digging into the pocket of her jeans for the crumpled-up ten and two ones. Walking along Forty-second, she looks back over her shoulder. Sixth goes up, right? And Fifth down.

She’s not a native here, not anymore.

She approaches the front of the New York Public Library, the steps, the stone lions. She’ll get a cab downtown, as far as the meter will take her, and walk the rest.

She has no choice now. She has to go back. It would be an act of disloyalty not to, and as the cab whittles down through the midtown cross streets, below Fourteenth, down to Washington Square Park, and over to Broadway, she realizes she doesn’t feel sick anymore. She’s not anxious, or scared, either.

She doesn’t know what she is.

But one thing she does know-as she gets out of the cab, surrendering her twelve bucks, with fifteen or so blocks outstanding, and as she replays that clip in her head-one thing she alone knows, and knows for sure.

It wasn’t Julian, it was never him.

The shooter? Okay, outside the Rygate, the potential shooter-but the shooter on Columbus Avenue? The shooter in Central Park? She’s prepared to lay even money now, not that she has to, because it’s just come to her, in a flash, from the clip, the woolly hat, the gray hoodie, which was which.

Who was who.

The shooter wasn’t Julian.

The shooter was Alex.

Ellen comes out of the library with a name.

Julian Robert Coady.

It was actually pretty easy. Five minutes of sweet-talking her way into a temporary reader’s pass, forty minutes of flicking through a pile of Atherton Chronicle back issues, and then another twenty, twenty-five minutes online, cross-referencing names that appeared in the paper with names from the college radio station’s website-specifically from the page for its headline talk show, What Up?

The paper is a weekly and doesn’t have an online edition, but it didn’t take Ellen long to familiarize herself with the layout and to identify likely page locations where strong political views might be expressed. She also started from a year ago, more or less around the time of that blog post with the comment thread that threw up the “ath900” handle. She got through over fifty issues-a quick riffle, literally, for each one-before coming across anything of interest. This turned out to be a semi-regular column called “The Eyeball” that railed pretty consistently against the bankers and their gigantic criminal conspiracy. Nothing unusual in that, of course, it’s practically a new art form-indignation porn, you find it everywhere-but the tone here was quite peculiar.

The byline on the articles was Caligula.

In one of them, reference was made to an academic called Farley Kaplan, who had apparently given an interview the previous week on a small local cable news show, the Stone Report, in which he stated that “leading bankers should face a firing squad.”

When Ellen went online and did a trawl of names on the WKNT website-guest lists, program hosts, production assistants-she quickly came across the name Farley Kaplan again. He appeared on an edition of What Up? a couple of months after the Eyeball piece and did a ten-minute interview in which he expanded on his firing squad comment.

What Up? is a half-hour show that goes out on Saturday afternoons and covers political and environmental stories mainly culled from alternative media sources. Ellen pulled the Kaplan interview from the archive and listened to it. It was standard stuff, with the firing squad remark definitely coming off as facetious rather than sinister, but toward the end of the ten-minute slot he did repeat it, adding that there should be enough bullets to go around “for a representative from each of the three Wall Street crime syndicates, investment banking, hedge funds, and private equity.”

Ellen was still trying to process this when the presenter signed off by thanking Kaplan for coming on the show, and also “our sound engineer, the Chronicle’s legendary Caligula, for enticing him to come on.”

It didn’t take Ellen more than a couple of keystrokes to establish that the What Up? sound engineer around that time was one Julian Robert Coady.

Was Coady the guy? Was he ath900? Was he one of the shooters?

Maybe, maybe not, but as she emerges from the library, Ellen has a keen sense that she’s on to something, certainly that she has something to work with-names (Coady, Kaplan) and possible places to check out (the WKNT office, the residence halls here at Atherton, wherever the Stone Report operates from).

She decides her next stop should probably be the Administration Building, but as she’s crossing the main quad in front of the library, she spots Geek Girl and her posse occupying a bench on the east side, under a maple tree, all of them looking in her direction.

“Hey there,” Geek Girl says, and waves.

Ellen stops, shakes her head, and walks over.

“What, you guys have nothing better to do,” she says, “no classes to go to?”

The Smart One holds her hand out, indicating the now-sundrenched quad. “What could be better than this?”

“Besides,” Geek Girl says, “we’re intrigued.”

Ellen looks at her, holding her gaze, saying nothing.

“You know.”

“Do I?”

“A reporter on campus, a real reporter. There must be something… afoot.”

“Afoot?”

“Yeah, you like that?” She pauses. “Newspaper girl.”

This chick is something else. Ellen has been hit on by women before, but not-as far as she can remember-by a twenty-year-old, and not outside the dim and noisy confines of a bar.

“I don’t work for a newspaper.”

“Oh, that’s right,” the Smart One says, holding up her phone. “Parallax magazine. I Googled you.”

“Yeah, well,” Ellen says, deciding she might as well get started here. “Whatever. But listen. Speaking of newspapers, do any of you guys actually read the Chronicle?”

This is greeted with a collective hoot of derision. Bulldozing through it, Ellen adds, “‘The Eyeball’? Caligula? Ever hear of those? It’s a… column.”

But from two years ago, she suddenly remembers.

So pretty unlikely.

This is confirmed by a few head shakes and some murmuring.

“Julian Robert Coady?” she tries, throwing it out there.

A silence follows, and then, “That’s weird.”

This from a girl standing at the back. She’s short and pale, gothy, impossibly young-looking.

“Why so?”

“Well,” the girl says, not making eye contact with Ellen, “I just got this text from a friend of mine, Alicia? It seems you’re not the only one around here asking questions today.”

Everyone turns and looks at her, waiting for more.

“Well?” Geek Girl says. “Spill it, Morticia.”

Morticia flips her one and then says, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Lizzie Bishop’s old man is here. He’s looking for her, and… no one can find her.”

“What?”

“Everyone’s talking about it. Texting, tweeting.”

There’s a collective grab for phones.

Ellen stands there, watching them all juice in. She gives it a few moments. After the first couple of message tones, she says, “So, what has this Lizzie what’s-it got to do with… Julian Robert Coady?”

The Smart One looks up from her phone. “Lizzie’s going out with Coady’s brother, a guy called Alex.” She pauses, consulting her device again. “And no one can find him either.”

Ellen’s heart skips a beat.

Alex… and Julian. Two brothers? One of them a radical-minded student at Atherton from a couple of years back, the other one still at Atherton, but currently missing?

Caligula and ath900?

The Atherton T-shirt?

She stands back now, swaying slightly from side to side, looking on as the girls work their phones, foreheads all screwed up in concentration, fingers hopping and dancing like they’re in some demented jazz ensemble.

So this story, the shooting of Wall Street bankers? Has she just fucking cracked it? That’s the way it seems, but she has to keep her nerve here. Because what she’s got is still based on speculation. She needs to go one more round and come up with some concrete evidence.

There is a fresh wave of message tones.

“My friend Trish?” Geek Girl says, looking up from her phone. “She spoke with Sally Peake. That’s the RA in Lizzie’s house. She says they’ve been gone since last Friday.”

Ellen nods along. Each new thing.

“But apparently,” the Smart One says, “Lizzie did tell her roommate she was going, and that’s why no red flag was raised.”

“So… do we know where they went?”

A pause, and then a ripple of shaking heads.

Ellen considers this for a moment. “The girl, Lizzie,” she says. “Her dad. Is he still here?”

Morticia gets on the case, clickety-click.

“So,” Geek Girl says, “you going to put us on the payroll?”

Ellen smiles. “I just might. You guys have been a real help.”

“Wow.”

“What?”

“She smiles.”

A moment later, Morticia’s phone makes its pinging sound. As she’s reading the message, she raises her arm and points. “He’s over that way,” she says. “Other side of the VLA. In front of the Admin Building. Talking to someone. They’ve been there for over half an hour.”

Ellen leans forward. “And under surveillance the whole time? Jesus, have you guys thought of applying for jobs with the NSA?”

“Not too much happens around here,” the Smart One says. “This is an event.”

A couple of minutes later, Geek Girl and Morticia accompany Ellen as far as the front of the Science Building, where they meet another girl, a Morticia clone, who points out Lizzie Bishop’s father.

He’s about fifty yards away, on a tree-lined pathway between the Admin Building and the parking lot. From here he looks mid-forties or so. He’s slim, medium height, and casually dressed. He’s talking to an older man. The older man is holding a leather satchel and has an academic look to him.

“Anyone know his name?”

“I think it’s Frank,” the new girl says.

“And the guy he’s talking to?”

“Don’t know,” Geek Girl says. “I’ve seen him around. He’s an associate professor of… something.”

“Something? Nice. Is that what you’re studying?”

“I’ve taken courses in it.”

The Morticias trade eye rolls.

A little more time passes, and they just stand there, the four of them-in silence now-watching the two men.

“Okay,” Ellen eventually says, glancing around. “You know what? Why don’t I take it from here?”

Geek Girl pouts. “We’re being dismissed?”

“The next phase of the operation might be a little delicate. I don’t want to scare him off.”

But as she’s saying this, Frank Bishop and the associate professor of something shake hands and separate. Bishop heads for the parking lot.

By the time Ellen gets halfway there, he’s already in his car and driving away.

Ellen then veers left and heads for her own car.

As she’s reaching for the door, she looks back over at the Science Building. Geek Girl is still standing there.

They exchange nods.

Ellen then gets into the car and follows Frank Bishop out onto the main road that leads back into the town of Atherton.

Frank orders a Stoli on the rocks. He’s driving, but he really needs a drink.

Just the one should do it.

As with the search for a diner earlier, he’s ended up having to settle for considerably less than he hoped for. This place, the Smokehouse Tavern, is the only bar he could find on Main Street. He knows from his previous trips to Atherton that there are a couple of big sports bars over on Railroad Avenue, but he’d never be seen dead in either of those, and besides, he figured there might be a more mood-appropriate dive bar here on Main, an old-school joint with sawdust on the floor and a faint smell of puke in the air.

Turns out there isn’t.

Instead, it’s the bland, musty Smokehouse, a place that makes Dave’s Bar & Grill back at the mall look like the Stork Club.

It’ll do, though. It’s almost empty, and the barman isn’t a talker.

Actually, middle of the afternoon now and Frank doesn’t feel too bad. At least he’s coming away with something, a plausible scenario, Lizzie and Alex on the road, off the grid, Bonnie and Clyde-ing it around for a few days-but without the bank robberies, or the erectile dysfunction.

He tried Lizzie’s phone again, and of course there was no answer, so he’s decided he’s going to find a motel room and stick around until tomorrow, wait for her to show up. He’s not going to be pissed off or anything. He just wants to look at her and make sure she’s okay. Tell her he loves her. Tell her to answer her fucking phone once in a while.

Then he’ll be out of here.

There’s another reason he doesn’t feel too bad. That encounter he had just now with Leland Bryce. Frank found it pretty refreshing, because what they talked about, and almost exclusively, was architecture. Now an associate professor at Atherton, Bryce used to teach at Columbia, and Frank took some of his courses. It was weird bumping into him again after all these years, and in these circumstances, but apart from mentioning he has a daughter at Atherton, Frank didn’t say anything at all about what was going on. Instead, they reminisced about Columbia for a bit and then got into a thing about the latest addition to the lower Manhattan skyline, F. T. Keizer’s controversial new residential tower, 220 Hanson Street. Not yet complete, and already the subject of extensive litigation, 220 Hanson has notoriously divided architectural opinion in the city. It’s been in the news a lot, and Frank has read about it, extensively, but he was still sort of surprised to find that he had an actual opinion on the matter-as if he’d somehow forfeited the right to have one of those by losing his job.

Nevertheless, this felt like the first grown-up interaction he’d engaged in for quite a while, and as a result he left the campus feeling a good deal less anxious.

But he still needs this drink. And might actually need a second. It’s not as if one adult conversation is going to solve all, or indeed any, of his problems.

He takes a sip of Stoli. As he’s putting the glass down, he looks into the mirror behind the bar and sees movement-someone emerging from the shadows of the Smokehouse Tavern’s dimly lit vestibule area.

It’s a woman. She’s fortyish, small and slim, with short, dark hair. She’s dressed all in black-in jeans, a T-shirt, and a jacket.

She approaches the bar and pulls out a stool three along from where Frank is sitting. She lays car keys and a phone down in front of her.

The barman comes up from the far end where he was stacking some glasses and looks at her, eyebrows raised interrogatively.

“Club soda, please.”

She sits down, picks the phone up, and starts… whatever, texting, tweeting.

He takes another sip from his drink.

The barman places a glass of club soda with ice and lemon in front of the woman and wanders off.

There is silence for a while, the thick silence of a slow-moving, aimless afternoon.

Then, “Frank… isn’t it?”

He turns. “Sorry?”

“Frank Bishop, right?”

The woman is looking directly at him. He’s puzzled. Does he know her? Is he supposed to recognize her?

“I’m sorry… have we met?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “Someone pointed you out to me. Back there… on the campus. One of the students.”

Frank shifts on his stool and turns, studying the woman’s face for a moment. She has smooth, pale skin and dark, penetrating green eyes.

Then something occurs to him.

“Did you follow me here?”

She nods. “Yes, I’m sorry. But I needed to talk to you. My name is Ellen Dorsey. I’m a journalist.”

Frank swallows, a hundred things racing through his head at once, but principally, What the fuck… a journalist?

This is also-he’s now aware-what the look on his face is saying, and it seems to make her uncomfortable, maybe even a little uncertain. As the seconds pass, he keeps staring at her. It’s as though she’s weighing something and needs more time. But he doesn’t feel like giving her any.

“Come on,” he says, “you’ve got something to tell me? What is it?”

She wipes away an invisible speck of dust from the bar before looking at him. “I’m not sure how to say this, Frank, but I think your daughter might be in serious trouble.”

Not exactly how she planned it.

But in the few moments she was sitting there, the reality of the situation, the complexity of it, overwhelmed her. If she thinks about it now, even for a second, one thing is clear. This man in front of her isn’t just a source, a provider of the next link in a chain of information.

He’s involved.

She remembers talking about this to Jimmy Gilroy, about how you get involved-when a story goes a certain way, when you get out of the house and meet people, look them in the eye. It can all get a bit knotty. Ambivalence creeps in.

She looks him in the eye now.

He says, “I beg your pardon?”

Ellen adjusts herself on the stool. “I’m still working on it, okay, but I’ve been investigating something, a story, and a certain name has come up, Julian Robert Coady. The thing is, I think the guy your daughter is involved with, Alex, might be this guy’s brother.”

Bishop’s eyes screw up as he tries to process this. In his obvious bewilderment and desperation he does his best to formulate another question, but all he can manage is “Story? What story?”

Ellen takes a breath and pauses. She can’t get straight into it, can she? Not without some prepping. And besides, it’s beginning to feel a little flimsy to her-a T-shirt, a comment made on a radio show?

What is she doing?

“I’ll get to that,” she says, “but… do you have any idea where they are now? Lizzie and Alex?”

“No.” This isn’t quite shouted, but it’s close. “That’s why I came up here. I can’t reach her. She’s not answering her phone.” He raises his left hand, holds it up for a moment, almost threateningly, and then, in frustration, slaps his thigh with it, and really hard. “It’s been almost a week.”

“Right.”

It’s sudden, but the sense hits her now-ineluctable, inarguable-that this is over. The situation has reached critical mass. There’s simply no way she can contain it, or hold out for more. “Look,” she says, “I may have it wrong, I may be putting two and two together here and getting five, but…” She exhales and looks down at the bar, at her keys, at her phone.

How to say this.

“What?”

She looks up at him again. “These recent shootings in Manhattan? The Wall Street guys? It’s my belief that Julian Robert Coady is… involved. Actually maybe both him and his brother.”

“What the fuck?”

This he does shout. The barman turns, looks over, but Ellen raises a hand to keep him at bay.

“Look,” she says, half in a whisper now, “I’ve only literally just put this together myself. It’s still circumstantial, but…”

A pale Frank Bishop stares at her for a second. Then, as though he’s forgotten something, he turns to the bar, picks up his glass, drains it, and puts it down again.

He turns back to face her.

“What did you say your name was?”

A tremor in his voice.

“Ellen Dorsey.”

“Well, Ellen, you’re going to have to explain all of this to me, and you’d better make it fast, because my head is just about ready to explode.”

So she does. She explains it to him, quickly and efficiently. No point doing it any other way. But passing the story on like this also means it’ll very soon be out of her hands. Because really, in the circumstances, what does she think Frank Bishop is going to do with it?

“Jesus Christ.”

His voice is calm now, quiet. He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out his cell phone. He holds it up.

“I-I have to call… Lizzie’s mother.”

He gets off the stool and takes a few steps away from the bar. There is a slowness to his movements, an exaggerated steadiness, a concentration, as though he is drunk and trying not to show it. He’s actually in good shape, and handsome, sort of, with tight-cropped, graying hair. But he has a weary look to him as well, tired eyes, tired posture.

When he is far enough away, Ellen turns to her own phone and checks for messages, e-mails, tweets. Then she uses some of the coordinates she gathered back at that table in the Cabbage Patch for a quick data sweep through the Atherton social mediasphere.

With one eye on Bishop, who’s managing to keep his voice under control-though not his body language, that’s becoming increasingly agitated-she worms her way through half a dozen Twitter accounts.

It’s all anyone is talking about. A localized micro trend. Lizzie Bishop, her old man, that journalist.

Alex Coady.

Those two guys this morning.

Ellen stops, rereads that one.

This is getting a little creepy now. And those two guys asking questions this morning? Feds #noquestionaboutit

Ellen feels a weird sensation shooting down her spine.

Feds?

She quickly finds Geek Girl’s number and sends her a text.

There were two guys asking questions this morning?

It’s a long shot. Or maybe it isn’t. She’ll find out soon enough.

Frank Bishop turns around and looks at her, real fear in his eyes now. He walks the few steps back to the bar and reaches out to his stool for support. “My wife, ex-wife, is freaking out. Of course.” He swallows loudly. “She wants to know who you are.”

Ellen nods.

“Because she-Deb’s a lawyer-she says the cops’ll have been getting hundreds of crank calls on this since it started and we’ll need something to get their attention. To break through the firewall. And that’s you.”

Ellen nods again. “I know. And I know who to call.” She pauses. “I was going to do it anyway, but I wanted to talk to you first.”

The message alert on her cell phone pings.

She puts a hand out to pick it up, but then pauses. “I’m going to look at this,” she says. “Okay? It might be relevant.”

He nods.

She reads the message quickly.

Just heard about this from someone else. Two suits, this morning, but asking about Alex Coady not Lizzie Bishop xxx.

Ellen looks back up.

“Seems the cops are already on it,” she says.

Twenty minutes after Lizzie gets back to the apartment, she hears the key in the door. She’s sitting at the table, textbook open in front of her.

Trying to appear normal.

Heart racing.

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, or say-she just has this overwhelming sense of needing to see Alex, to envelop him, to let him know that she knows, and that it’s okay. All week there has been this poisonous tension between them that she’s hated, silences, sighs, deflected looks, things half spoken. She didn’t understand what it was, and attributed it to Julian’s influence over him, to the force of Julian’s toxic personality. She feels awful now, realizing that it was more than likely the unimaginable pressure that Alex had put himself under, and that she certainly wasn’t helping by being needy.

Also, she’s not allowing herself, at least for the moment, to dwell too much on what Alex has done, and what it might mean-other than what it says about his relationship with Julian.

Because-to her mind-it reverses things.

It puts Alex in charge, which is where she’s always thought he belongs. Julian is noisy and pushy, but Alex is the quiet stillness at the center of things. When Julian launches into a rant about the bankers or whatever, all she wants to do is scream or run away. When Alex talks about the same thing, in his subtler, more measured tones, she listens, and is soothed, seduced, won over.

The door opens now, and when she looks up, she sees it immediately-it’s in their faces, in their body language. No doubt it was there all along, but for her this is a realignment, a correction, and she wants to make amends.

Julian comes in first, lumbering to the table and heaving his backpack onto it. He grunts something at her, sits down, and starts stroking that ridiculous, barely noticeable goatee of his.

Alex glides in behind him.

Lizzie catches his eye and smiles. He doesn’t smile back, but that’s okay. He sits on the arm of the couch, leans forward, and starts massaging his temples.

On the other days when they’ve come in like this, exhausted, hardly able to speak, Lizzie has remained quiet herself and stayed out of their way.

Not this evening. She wants to know where they’ve been all day, and what they’re planning next. She wants to open this up, and let them know whose side she’s on-let Alex know it’s alright, let him know that more than anything else they’re alright. But just as she’s about to speak, Julian looks over at her, brow furrowing, and says, “There’s something different about her.”

Alex raises his head. “What?”

Lizzie feels the air thicken around her.

“She knows,” Julian says. “Look at her.” He stands up slowly, and points. “She’s been out. She knows.”

Alex stands up as well, rising from the edge of the couch, and glares at her.

Lizzie pushes the chair she’s sitting in back a little. What is it? Are her cheeks flushed from all the walking? Is she still perspiring?

“Yes,” she says, a crack in her voice, “I went out, so what. I know what you’ve been doing.” She gets up from the chair. “I watched some TV earlier, they showed that clip on the news, but listen-”

Julian bangs his fist on the table. “Jesus Christ.”

“Lizzie,” Alex says, his tone calm, but also direct and clinical, “have you spoken to anyone? Have you told anyone?”

She looks into his eyes. “Oh, Alex…” She pauses, lips parted. If only they could stay like this forever, and let everything outside their line of vision, everything else in the room, in the world-that table, Julian’s backpack, Julian himself, New York, the news-dissolve to nothing. “No,” she says at last, but softly, in a whisper, still maintaining eye contact.

Julian shakes his head. “Dumb-assed bitch.” He turns and scowls at Alex. “I told you a hundred times this was a bad idea.”

There is a pause. Then Alex says, calmly, without redirecting his gaze, “Shut the fuck up, Julian.”

“What?”

Lizzie swallows, and once again the room begins to spin.

But then it stops.

Because there’s… a creaking sound.

They all turn toward the door, then freeze.

“What was that?” Julian says, in a loud whisper.

Alex looks at him. “Someone’s there.” He reaches for the backpack on the table. Then he turns to Lizzie, eyes widening, and nods at the door.

She moves swiftly toward it, and senses equally swift movement behind her. At the door, she narrows her right eye in on the peephole-imagining for a second, she doesn’t know why, that it’s her father she’ll see, a dreamlike Frank in fish-eye, standing there, shuffling anxiously, waiting. What she sees instead-as a rap, tap sounds on the door, followed immediately, almost stopping her heart, by a shouted “POLICE, SEARCH WARRANT, OPEN THE DOOR”-is a retreating mass of black that quickly forms into the shape of a man, revealing behind him a hallway lined with other men, all in black, all heavily armed.

Lizzie spins around.

Julian has his back against the wall and is straining to see out of the window. Alex is standing in the middle of the room with a gun in his hand.

“Jesus,” Lizzie whispers, all her limbs starting to tremble, “there’s a fucking SWAT team out there.”

Alex nods his head again, to the side this time, indicating for her to move.

She hesitates, but then slides over toward the kitchen.

“We’re armed in here,” he shouts. “We’ve got explosives. Back off. Back off now.”

From this angle just inside the kitchen door, Lizzie stares at Alex, and the only thing in her head, the only thought she can process, is that she’s never heard him shout before.