Graveland

When it became apparent in April 1913 that newly elected President Woodrow Wilson was ready to do the unthinkable and concede ground on union recognition, the industrialist, banker, and Vaughan family patriarch Charles A. Vaughan was quoted in the New York Journal as saying, “It would be nice if some day we could have a real businessman as president.”

– House of Vaughan (p. 164)

10

OUT ON MAIN STREET, in front of the Smokehouse Tavern, with Frank Bishop standing next to her, Ellen finds the number and calls her contact in the NYPD. She lays it out for this guy, a homicide detective, just as she did for Bishop inside at the bar, but this time she does it faster, and almost in a sort of code, or shorthand. The contact listens, interjecting only once with a low whistle of disbelief. This is when she mentions that the Feds might already be involved. He says he’ll run it up the line and get right back to her.

Then Ellen suggests to Bishop that they return to Manhattan without delay. The shootings took place there, and if there’s going to be another one, or any development at all, that’s more than likely where it’ll happen. Any Atherton-based information about the Coadys they can get by phone or online.

Bishop is still in a state of shock, and Ellen has to prod him into a response. They eventually come to an arrangement-Ellen will drop her rental off locally, and then they’ll head back together in Bishop’s car. Ellen offers to drive, but Bishop says he’s fine, that it’ll be a distraction.

Within half an hour they’re on I-87.

Ellen isn’t great at making small talk, so she just fires questions at him as though it’s an interview. She can’t take notes-or at least can’t be too blatant about it, not in these circumstances-but if something significant comes up she can always use the phone in her hands to record the conversation.

Bishop is forthcoming on most things and speaks, in fact, as though he were being interviewed. It’s something Ellen has noticed before-how without declaring your hand up front you can establish a sort of determining rhythm to a conversation. In any case, she finds out quite a lot about him, and also about his daughter, Lizzie-whom Ellen pegs at once as a likely piece of collateral damage in all of this.

After about an hour on the road, they pull in at a rest stop to get some coffee. Ellen stays in the car and takes the opportunity to call Max Daitch. She exchanged a few texts with him back at the Smokehouse Tavern, during which they agreed that Ellen should call her NYPD contact ASAP. But with Bishop now occupied she’s able to explain in more detail what’s been happening.

“Why didn’t you tell me all of this before?” he says.

“Because I’ve only just put it together myself. What I told you yesterday was guesswork. It’s taken me until now to flesh it out.”

“Okay, okay.” He sighs. “Look, I’m trying to get clearance from legal to see what we can post online right now, if anything. Because by tomorrow morning, maybe even by tonight, this’ll be everywhere.”

“I know. My NYPD contact said he’d get back to me. I’ll text you as soon as he does.” She checks the time. “We should be back in the city by about seven. This guy here, the girlfriend’s father, I’m talking to him all the time, so at least we’re ahead on that angle if we need it.” She looks up. “Okay, I’ve got to go.”

Bishop gets back in the car, and they sip their coffees in silence for a while. It’s gray and murky out, and the relentless whipsaw of the passing traffic out on 87 is giving Ellen a headache.

Did she really use the word angle to Max just now? We’re ahead on that angle?

She fucking did, didn’t she?

That is where this is going, though-she knows that, they’re not carpooling here for convenience. She’s going to have to broach it with him, and it’ll depend on how things play out, but exclusive access is the prize.

It’s what she’s after.

She looks at her half-reflection in the windshield and rolls her eyes.

Then Bishop says, “This is going to be rough, isn’t it? If it’s true, I mean. If these… brothers, these pricks, if they’re the ones, and Lizzie’s with them, it’s going to mean a lot of attention, media attention, isn’t it? A lot of intrusion?”

Ellen turns and looks at him. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Frank, but what the fuck do you think I’m doing here?”

“Yeah.” He exhales and half-smiles. “I know. It just… doesn’t feel like that. Not yet, anyway.” He pauses. “And I meant it more from Lizzie’s point of view.”

“Well, if it is true, and let’s face it, that’s the way it’s looking, yeah, it is going to be rough. On her, on you, on her mom.” Ellen shifts in the seat and leans forward a bit. “So look, this is where I make a reasonable pitch for you to give me exclusive access, and in return I do my best to minimize your exposure, minimize the bullshit you have to put up with. Protect you.” She pauses. “But the thing is, Frank, there is no protect. There’s only exposure. And that’s a beast no one controls.” She clears her throat. “If you want my honest pitch, here it is. One way or another, I’ll be writing about this. It’s what I do. But I have a pretty decent reputation, so I won’t write anything that’s a lie, I won’t exaggerate, and I won’t withhold anything from you.” She pauses again. “That’s it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay. Presumably you know people. Cops. You have contacts. You can find out stuff. You understand the system. I’m going to need that.” He looks at her and waves a hand between them. “You know, give and take.”

She nods. “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”

He puts his coffee down and starts the car.

After about ten minutes back on the road, Ellen’s phone rings.

It’s her NYPD guy.

She sits in silence and listens. He explains that the situation has moved on somewhat. Those guys at Atherton this morning were indeed Feds, and right now in fact, together with members of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, they’re involved in a siege situation in an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with three suspects, two male, one female. The situation is extremely volatile, and there’s even a possibility that explosives might be involved. This news, he says, is barely fifteen minutes old. It hasn’t gotten out yet, and he’s only telling her now because the info she provided earlier gave his guys a little leverage with the Feds and the JTTF.

Ellen swallows. She wants to ask questions, she wants clarification, but not with Frank Bishop sitting next to her driving the fucking car.

She gets off the phone and starts texting.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

Look at her, withholding already. Didn’t take long.

She sends a quick text to Max Daitch and another one to Val Brady. There’s not much she can do, stuck here for the next two hours. Val might as well get a jump on things. Maybe relay some details to her later.

Give and take.

She leans back, takes a deep breath. She glances over at the shoulder.

Then she turns to Frank.

So she can tell him to pull in and stop the car.

“That’s a relief.”

Craig Howley looks up from his laptop.

“What is?”

Jessica is standing in the middle of the room, hand on hip. She nods at the TV. “That is. They’ve caught those guys.”

From his position on the couch, Howley looks at the screen for a moment-a tenement building downtown somewhere, police cars, armed officers-and then he reads the crawl. “They haven’t exactly caught them, though, have they?” he says. “A siege? What I’d be asking is how they let that happen.” He turns back to his laptop. “I thought they had these things down to a fine art.”

On the screen of his laptop there’s a sequence of market data charts showing previous private equity IPO performance levels. He scrolls down through them, stopping occasionally to study this or that one more closely for a moment.

He’s looking for ammunition.

And the evidence here, as far as he’s concerned, is pretty encouraging. On an each-way bet it’s still a negative benefit outcome-because they either flatline or they tank. Which is just as well, because as Vaughan has so subtly illustrated with his “black file,” the idea of Oberon opening its books to public scrutiny is a non-runner anyway.

Howley closes the laptop and looks back at the TV screen.

There is a panel discussion going on, and it’s getting quite animated. “Look, it’s very clear,” someone is saying, “check it yourself, it’s Title Eighteen of the United States Code, section thirty-one oh nine…”

“What are they talking about?” Howley says.

Jessica turns around. She’s still standing there in the middle of the room with her hand on her hip. She does that sometimes. It’s her slightly haughty, noncommittal way of watching TV-watching, but ready to drop it and walk away at a moment’s notice. “Oh, they’re discussing the, what did you call it, the fine art of how to execute a search warrant.”

“Arrest or search?”

“Search. That’s what they said. Why?”

“Because they’re different. With a search you’re obliged to… knock and announce, I think they call it.”

“How do you know that?”

“The curse of a photographic memory. I read it somewhere. Who can say?”

“Well, one of these guys is arguing exactly that, he’s saying they followed procedure, and the other one is saying they’d have been within their rights to just barge in there unannounced.”

“Uh-uh.” Howley shakes his head. “Though it’s a pity they didn’t. Because look.” The street scene from earlier is on again. “The city doesn’t need this.”

Jessica turns back and looks at it.

“No, it certainly does not.” She shakes her head as well. “With the benefit coming up? Please.” She clicks her tongue. “They’d better resolve this fast, that’s all I can say.”

The benefit is a Kurtzmann Foundation fund-raiser, a gala event Jessica has been working on for months.

She turns around again. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready, darling? The Lowensteins will be here in an hour.”

He nods, yes, yes.

When she leaves the room he opens the laptop again. His statement for tomorrow is still a little rough around the edges, but he’ll keep chipping away at it. There are certain subtle points he needs to make, ideas he needs to implant. A lot of people will be paying attention.

Though on that, something occurs to him.

He glances up at the TV again.

If this siege thing has any legs at all, it’ll swamp the next couple of news cycles, at least, and there’s one person he knows who’ll be happy about that.

James Vaughan.

People know the Oberon name, the brand, but very few people have actually heard of Vaughan himself, and that’s how he’d like to keep it. Howley can well imagine how much Vaughan is dreading the public nature of this handover tomorrow-especially if it’s going to be presented in the context of his ailing health.

So any distraction will be welcome.

And this one certainly seems to be shaping up nicely.

Vaughan won’t be at the press conference himself, but he’ll be referenced endlessly, and his office will be inundated with media requests.

Howley closes the laptop again and puts it down beside him on the couch. He looks around for the remote but can’t find it.

He gets up and stands there, Jessica-style, staring at the screen.

This is crazy stuff.

But however it pans out over the next six, twelve, even twenty-four hours, he’s pretty sure that with words like “explosives” and “evacuation” now creeping into the narrative, Vaughan won’t have a whole lot to worry about in the morning.

When he looks up, and around, and sees that they’re at 110th Street already, Central Park just over to the right, Frank realizes, remembers, that he hasn’t been into the city for months, three or four at least. But gliding down Fifth now, he feels nauseous, dizzy, as though he’s being delivered to his own execution.

Ellen Dorsey is driving.

He turns to his left and looks at her. She’s staring straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, arms rigid.

Tense, silent.

The last two hours have been like this, neither of them wanting to speak-he, for obvious reasons, and she… well, who knows? Maybe she’s embarrassed. Maybe she’s out of her depth. Maybe she’s calculating how much money she can make out of this.

He doesn’t know.

He’s glad she’s driving his car, though.

Because he couldn’t.

He stares out the window now, the cross streets clocking down like a ticking bomb… Fifty-seventh, Forty-second, Thirty-fourth, Twenty-third.

She takes a left at Fourteenth and gets onto the FDR Drive.

The Lower East Side is a part of town that somehow seems abstract to Frank, as they approach it-doesn’t seem like a Lizzie sort of place at all. What comes to mind, if he does think about it, is the Tenement Museum… immigrant families, old photographs, vintage storefronts, fire escapes, raggedy kids playing around a water hydrant, that street panorama from Godfather II. He knows these are stereotypes, but it’s not as if he ever had occasion to come down here, when he was working in the city.

Which was midtown. Mostly.

Uptown, a bit.

Mostly where he lived was Brooklyn, and that, he thinks, definitely is a Lizzie sort of place, the house they had in Carroll Gardens, for instance… up the stoop, in the door, take the stairs two at a time and over to the right… her room…

So vivid.

What he hopes here, for this, the ideal outcome, is that he arrives on Orchard Street just as they’re parading the three of them out of the building, perp-walking them out the door, the two brothers first, whatever they look like-he doesn’t know, or care-and then the girl. He’s standing there, he looks up and it isn’t her…

It’s someone else, someone taller, skinnier, darker, it doesn’t matter, it isn’t Lizzie, and this is all a mistake, a misunderstanding.

Wires got crossed.

Ellen Dorsey here got her facts wrong.

Slumped in the car seat now, staring down, he replays this scene multiple times in his head.

“Are you ready, Frank?”

“What?”

He looks up, and around. They’re on Grand Street.

“We’re just coming to Orchard now,” she says.

Before he has properly refocused, they’re turning right and facing north again. He was certainly right about the fire escapes. And up ahead, two blocks, he sees it-the crowds, the police barriers, the blue lights rotating. He can’t see beyond that. Because this is just the periphery.

“There’s a space,” he says, pointing. “We’re not going to get much closer than this. We can walk.”

Ellen Dorsey nods and pulls in.

Quickly, they get out of the car and start moving.

Frank’s heart is pounding. Earlier he was concerned about media intrusion, journalists, photographers. He was also concerned for a while about seeing Deb. But now he feels he’ll be able to bypass all of that. Because the only thing he’s concerned about right now is Lizzie, and the idea that she’s somewhere in the middle of this circus.

They come to Delancey, and it starts there, on the far side-the barriers, the onlookers, the cops, the outside broadcast units, the camera operators, the booms, the cables and tripods and mikes, the reporters.

Frank turns to his left. Ellen Dorsey has her phone out.

“Wait,” she says to him. She then obviously sees the panic in his eyes and takes him by the arm. “Just wait a second, I’m going to call someone, okay?”

He waits, standing there, staring ahead.

“Val? Ellen. We’re here. Anyone there you can talk to?”

The next ten or fifteen minutes float by in a headachy haze, as they are met by men in dark suits and uniforms. They are then guided forward-cameras clicking and whirring behind them-through the barriers and on to a second set of barriers just before the next intersection. At one point it takes Frank a few seconds to realize that he is standing beside Deb. She looks just as shell-shocked as he feels, and it takes them another few seconds to acknowledge each other, to react, to embrace.

Interviews follow-interrogations, really-with representatives from different law enforcement agencies. These take place in the back of a large van, or maybe it’s a trailer, Frank isn’t sure of anything that’s happening. He answers whatever he’s asked, but doesn’t feel that any of the questions make sense. He asks several questions of his own-though they’re all the same question, really-but no one will give him a straight answer.

More time passes.

Then Frank finds himself back outside, standing next to Deb again, looking from behind a barrier at a long, deserted section of the street-no people, no cars, not even parked ones. It stretches all the way to a corresponding barrier just beyond Stanton Street. And there appears to be another one beyond that again, on East Houston.

What worries Frank is that no one here seems to know what’s going on, or is even prepared to say what they think is going on.

He looks around.

Almost without him noticing it, night has fallen. It’s dark now, city dark, an orange wash from the streetlights suffusing everything. There is an eerie silence, too, with a muffled backdrop of normal sounds-distant traffic, distant sirens.

Then something occurs to him. Where’s Ellen Dorsey? He hasn’t seen her for a while and doesn’t see her anywhere now.

He looks at Deb. They don’t know what to say to each other. But they’re here, and they’re together, and they’re waiting.

It’s not just them, though.

Everyone is waiting.

Lizzie is drowsy. She’s been drifting in and out of sleep for some time now, in and out of actual dreams, too… little narrative passages that for all their weirdness and anxiety-laden expansiveness have been a welcome respite from-she opens her eyes-from this, the silent, musty, horrible, box-like, coffin-like little apartment they are trapped inside of.

She is sitting on the floor in the kitchen, leaning back against the wall, under the window, in the tiny space between the table and the cupboards, and she’s been here… since this started.

Forever, it feels like.

Though still, it must be what, nearly five hours already?

What time is it?

She doesn’t have a watch, and her cell phone is out in the other room.

There’s no clock in here.

What gets her is the silence, the virtual silence anyway. She can hear traffic, and the occasional siren, but she can’t hear any of the regular building sounds, no flushing toilets, no muffled voices, or creaking floorboards from upstairs.

But she knows why. It’s because they’ve evacuated the building, isn’t it? Probably the whole street, and the buildings behind as well.

It was that one word Alex used, explosives. Otherwise, she’s sure they would have stormed in by now, with tear gas or stun grenades or whatever the hell it is they use in these situations.

But the thing is, Lizzie doesn’t know if Alex and Julian actually have any explosives. Alex grabbed that backpack from the table pretty fast. Was it just to get his gun? Or was there something else in it? Does Julian have anything stashed in his bedroom?

Lizzie didn’t make a decision to stay in the kitchen like this, on the floor-not consciously, anyway. It just came about. For the initial twenty minutes, or half an hour, she stood a couple of inches inside the kitchen door and didn’t move a muscle, barely even took a breath. Neither did Alex or Julian; they just stood where they were, frozen, waiting for something to happen, for someone to make a move.

Then the phone rang, the landline.

Julian and Alex flinched. Alex gestured for Lizzie to move, to get back, as though the phone itself were about to explode.

Lizzie did move back, into the position she’s in now.

She sat there, trembling, and listened, as first Julian, and then Alex, tried their hand at… negotiation? Is that what it was? She couldn’t make out everything they were saying, but she heard enough to know that either they didn’t know what they were doing or they didn’t care.

A few more quick phone calls followed, and then… nothing at all. Obviously some sort of a waiting game. For her part, Lizzie waited where she was, thinking Alex might come in and tell her something, try to comfort her-she wanted him to, and was prepared to wait for him-but it’s as if she wasn’t even there.

Through the kitchen door, over the next couple of hours, she could hear them whispering, conspiring, strategizing, or so she imagined. But there were also moments when the exchanges sounded harsh, as if Julian and Alex were bickering or snapping at each other. Occasionally, she could see shadows and some movement, but not a lot, and then for the longest time all she could make out was Julian’s boots, positioned horizontally-so she took it that he was sitting on the floor, too, legs outstretched, leaning against the section of wall next to the living room window.

No sign of Alex.

After that, time just passed. She considered crawling over to the door, or whispering something out, but the more the hours drifted by, the harder it became for her to imagine doing anything at all, even moving. It got dark as well, and no one turned on any lights, or tried to turn on the TV. Was this because the electricity supply into the apartment had been cut? Maybe. She didn’t know. Though if it was the case, it probably meant that cell phone and Internet connections had also been blocked.

Eventually, the drowsiness came, and Lizzie started letting her head slump.

Now she’s in a weird in-between state.

“Lizzie.”

She focuses. It’s Alex. He’s in front of her, crouched down, but with one hand holding on to the table, for balance. In the dim light, his face is only partially visible.

“Alex,” she whispers, leaning forward suddenly, reaching a hand out to touch him, as though they haven’t seen each other for months.

“Listen,” he says, leaning sideways, avoiding her hand. “We need coffee, if we’re going to stay awake. So make some, will you? But keep as quiet as you can.”

Lizzie stares at him. “Alex, what’s happening? Talk to me.” Her eyes fill up with tears. “What are we going to do?”

She puts so much effort into saying this last word that it’s like a release. And now that she’s finally asked the question, she can’t help feeling that an answer-full, satisfactory, game-changing-will come spilling out of him. But all he says is “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“You must know.”

“Look, this wasn’t part of the plan, okay?” He says the words slowly, his tone very deliberate. “Now. Will you please make the coffee.”

Lizzie feels sick all of a sudden. She doesn’t know what’s going on here. It seemed like they were almost in tune back there, before this started, in the other room, like they had a chance of connecting again-but only for all of, what was it, five or six seconds? And that was it? Now she’s supposed to just make coffee? In normal circumstances, Julian wouldn’t let her touch anything in his precious kitchen, now she’s the fucking maid?

Fully awake again, she starts thinking more clearly than she has done in a while.

“Okay,” she says, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater, “it wasn’t part of the plan, but that was then, what’s the plan now?”

Alex sighs, shudders almost. “There isn’t one. I mean… Julian… he can’t take this, he’s falling apart in there. I don’t know what to do.” Now his eyes fill up. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I shouldn’t have gotten you involved in this, in our family shit. I just… I wanted you around-”

“Oh, Alex,” she says, her heart swelling, “I love you.” She reaches out to touch his face again, and this time he lets her. After a moment, she whispers, “What did you tell them… when they called? What happened?”

He looks confused. “I… I don’t really remember. We just talked bullshit. Julian was incoherent. I told them to fuck off, and that if they didn’t, we’d… you know…” He stops, exhales, unable to finish putting the thought into words.

Lizzie uses her other sleeve to wipe his tears away.

“Listen to me,” she says, adrenaline starting to pump through her system now. “We really need to focus. This is not the time to be incoherent. You guys did what you did for a reason, okay? And you were very focused when you were doing it. So that’s what you’ve got to hold on to here. What we’ve got to hold on to. And when they call back, which they’re bound to do sooner or later, you articulate that reason, over and over, hammer it home, show them you’re not just a pair of crazy fucks, that there’s a way out, a route to the other side.” She pauses and swallows, unsure where any of this is coming from. “And then, when we get out of here,” she goes on, “that reason, that rationale, whatever it is, even if it’s fucked up or hopelessly deluded, it’ll be a platform, and a passport, to some kind of public sympathy. It won’t be much, but what else is there?”

Alex stares at her, then nods his head. “Yeah,” he says, in a loud whisper, “yeah, you’re right.”

“So go back in there. Talk to Julian. Work something out. The phone might ring in the next five minutes. It might not ring all night. But you have to be ready.”

She leans forward and kisses him on the forehead.

Moments later, he’s back in the other room, and she hears their voices again, Alex whispering to Julian, Julian whispering to Alex.

Then she looks up at the cupboard where the coffee is. She looks at the stovetop. It’s dark in here, but not completely. How hard can it be?

With her heart still racing, Lizzie breathes in, reaches for the edge of the table, and slowly pulls herself up.

It’s in a bar on Norfolk Street-at around 5 A.M., while having a quick drink with Val Brady-that Ellen Dorsey decides she’s had enough of this whole story and should really go home. It’s been a long night of huddled conversations with other journalists, of rushed phone calls and live tweeting, of trying to make contact with Frank Bishop again but being blocked at every turn (she’d given him her number but somehow, stupidly, in the confusion, hadn’t taken his), and ultimately of realizing she’s lost all control of the story, that it’s moved ahead without her, that she works for an outlet where breaking news just doesn’t figure into the mission.

Not that she didn’t know this already, but she’d certainly been trying to ignore it in recent days.

She looks across at Val Brady now.

There’s an early edition of the New York Times spread out on the table in front of him. This is his first-ever page-one byline, and he can’t stop staring at it. He also hasn’t been able to stop thanking Ellen for texting him the previous afternoon and giving him the jump on everyone else.

She knew there was no point in trying to get anything up on the Parallax site, or even on her own page-because, to be honest, who would see it in time? This needed to be addressed head-on, and within minutes, literally. So while she might have been trapped in a car on I-87, texting Val meant that he could be the first one on the scene.

And she has to admit that he did a great job, because not only was he the first one to publicly name the Coady brothers, he also managed to dig up some pretty electrifying background material on their father.

At one point during the evening he offered to share his byline with her, but for various reasons, political, logistical, whatever, that was never going to happen. She didn’t mind, though. He got to break the story, and that’s how it goes.

But man, thinking about it now, at 5:00 A.M. with a drink in her hand…

“So you don’t get to do this,” she says after a while, “but I think I’ll slink off to bed.”

“No fair.”

“Fuck you. Do your job. That means no sleep for the next twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six hours, whatever it takes.”

Val already looks shattered-bleary-eyed and coffee-jagged-but it’s what he signed up for.

“Come on,” he says, “why don’t you stick around?”

“Because I don’t have to, that’s why. I can read about it in the paper”-she flicks the Times with the back of her hand-“or online, or watch it on TV, with much better pictures and angles.” She picks up her drink, releasing a long sigh. “I’m done here. My last thread to this was the girlfriend’s old man, but they won’t let me near him, and besides, he’s probably signed a movie deal already.” She drains what’s in her glass. “Plus, there’s no point, I don’t work for a daily newspaper. What am I going to do? Fucking live tweet developments all day? I’m a journalist, not a civilian.”

“Right.”

“I just need to look for a new job, that’s all.” She puts her glass down. “But that’s not going to happen today. Plus, plus, I have this Ratt shit to deal with.”

Val laughs and is about to say something when his phone pings. He whips it up and reads the message, starting to slide out of his chair as he does so. “Er, I have to get back. There’s been a-”

Ellen holds up a hand. “No, don’t tell me. I’ll read about it. Just go.”

He hesitates, knows not to say thanks again, half-smiles, and leaves.

A few minutes later, she leaves herself, gets a cab on Delancey, and within half an hour is at home and in the shower.

She’s tired and tries to sleep, but isn’t able to. After a while she moves from the bed to the couch and considers turning on the TV. She decides not to and throws an eye instead over the Ratt Atkinson article with a view to arming herself for later. There won’t be as much interest in it as there was yesterday, but she likes to be prepared.

At what she considers a reasonable hour-reasonable, that is, for her sister, a mother with two school-age kids-Ellen calls Michelle and slips into their familiar routine… or at least tries to, because as it turns out all that Michelle wants to talk about is this horrible siege thing up in New York. When Ellen, with some reluctance, fills her in on a few of the background details, Michelle is transfixed. The point of the call, however, gets lost, and can’t be retrieved.

When she puts the phone down, Ellen is more tired than ever, but even less likely to be able to sleep. Stretched out on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, she pictures that deserted block on Orchard Street, pictures a small second-floor apartment. It’s been nearly fourteen hours now. What the fuck is going on in there?

In some ways it’s a classic siege situation. They’ve been through the initial phase and are now in the more fluid negotiation, or standoff, phase. Conventional wisdom says that the longer a siege situation of this type goes on, the more likely it is to end peacefully, so the negotiators are probably dragging it out deliberately, employing various well-worn tactics. But it’s unclear so far what demands, if any, the Coadys are making. None of that information had trickled down from police sources to any of the reporters Ellen spoke to.

There was plenty of speculation, though, as more information became available about who they were, about the older brother’s previous activism, and about the circumstances surrounding their father’s death.

There was also plenty of speculation about the explosives-about whether or not they really had any, and about what kind these were most likely to be if they did.

Ellen figures that this is the key point on which the whole thing will turn.

She also figures there’ll have to be a development soon. It’s gone on long enough, and with Friday morning kicking into gear a four-block-radius shutdown of any part of the city is pretty much unsustainable.

She could turn on the TV for an update, but again, she decides not to.

Why?

Because on reflection she doesn’t really want to know. It’s not her story anymore.

If she turned on the TV now, it’d be as a civilian.

It’d be prurience.

So she keeps staring up at the ceiling, unable to stop running stuff through her mind, though.

It’s weird, the one person she feels particularly bad for is Frank Bishop. He was a nice guy, strangely guarded, or repressed or something, she doesn’t know, but what he must be going through at the moment is unimaginable.

Ellen eventually starts getting drowsy, and by a little after 9 A.M. she has fallen asleep.

Thanks to an endless supply of bad coffee and high-grade adrenaline, Frank has managed to stay awake all night and well into the next morning.

There’s a strange feel to the new day. All the fire escapes and shop signs on Orchard are glistening and sun-dappled in the early light. But simultaneously, at street level, a deathly stillness radiates from the deserted, locked-up bodegas and nail salons, the leather goods stores and discount boutiques.

Frank finds it disturbing and weirdly calming at the same time.

But really, he’s been through so many phases of this thing already that it’s hard to tell, from one moment to the next, just what he’s feeling.

Once he got past his own initial phase late the previous evening-pure terror eventually yielding to a slightly less intense cocktail of anxiety and confusion-he found that talking to people, the police officers, the FBI guys, the negotiators, anyone who’d engage with him, was as good a way of steadying his nerves as any. And these people did allow a certain amount of information to filter out. Initial phone contact, for example, revealed an apparent degree of confusion on the part of the Coady brothers. Seasoned negotiators regarded this as a positive, because it indicated amateur status-it meant the brothers didn’t really know what they were doing and would therefore be easier to manipulate. A long-and no doubt calculated-stand-off phase ensued, and during this time detailed profiles of the Coadys were drawn up, not just by the various law enforcement agencies involved but also by the media, with the online edition of the New York Times first out of the gate. And by this stage, too, late into the night, Frank and Deb were both glued to their respective devices, monitoring news and Twitter feeds, text messages and e-mails.

As a result, it wasn’t long before there was something approaching full disclosure on Alex and Julian Coady. Frank found this extremely difficult, even humiliating-hearing in detail, along with everyone else, about a boyfriend of his daughter’s he hadn’t known existed until yesterday.

It appears that the Coadys, originally from Florida, are a wealthy, well-respected family-or at least were until six years ago when old man Jeremy L. Coady slit his own throat in a Manhattan hotel room after being indicted by a federal grand jury on twenty counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering stemming from his alleged role in a $4.7 billion Ponzi scheme. In the subsequent trial of his business partner, it emerged, or was claimed, that Coady had been unaware of what was going on in the company and was driven to suicide by the shame and ignominy heaped on him after the charges were made public. This was the narrative that his family-certainly his two sons, and especially the older one-chose to embrace. Julian was “radicalized” by what had happened and embarked on a so-called crusade against the bankers and financiers of Wall Street-individuals and institutions he saw as being responsible for the culture of greed and excess that had ultimately destroyed his father. Younger brother Alex, the quiet, impressionable one, was perceived to have been led astray by Julian.

References to Elizabeth Bishop, the “girlfriend”-incorrectly assigned to Julian in some reports-were cursory and light on detail, a fact that Frank found irksome, as if they were somehow giving her short shrift. But at the same time it was a relief, and it also meant that no reference was made at this stage (early morning, first editions) to either him or Deb. This was almost an even bigger relief, as far as Frank was concerned, though he didn’t expect it to last.

At around 5 A.M. there was a second flurry of activity.

A phone call was made into the apartment.

As one of the cops, a Detective Lenny Byron, explained to Frank later, this was strategic, a very deliberate move, the idea being to disorient the Coadys after hours of silence, to shake them up, maybe even to wake them up.

But what nobody expected was that the negotiator would be greeted with a coherent shopping list of demands.

And that these would be delivered by the girlfriend.

It took both Frank and Deb a good while to bounce back from this. Lizzie was the difficult one of their two kids, the one who required inordinate amounts of cunning and guile to deal with, and who gave it all back in spades-so on one level this didn’t really come as a surprise…

But-

It still did.

Plus, it also led to an unfortunate and inevitable shift in focus. Because for the next editions, for the online news updates, for the TV breakfast shows, and for fucking Twitter, it was no longer a question of who are these geeky boys, and more a question of who is this nineteen-year-old girl?

America going, “Hey Nineteen.”

Skate a little lower now.

Frank’s heart bursting and ripping itself into bloody shreds inside his chest.

Then, by eight o’clock, on discussion panels all across the networks, professors of behavioral psychology were name-checking Patty Hearst and wondering if this mightn’t be another classic case of Stockholm syndrome. Deb was distraught at the very idea, as it seemed to bring home to her just what a circus the whole thing had become. She’d been fairly composed for most of the night and had spent a lot of it on the phone to her second husband, Lloyd, either out at the barrier or sitting in one of the NYPD trailers. She and Frank had been civil at first, united in their horror at what was happening, but they’d pretty quickly run out of things to say to each other. By morning, a combination of sheer physical exhaustion and the weirdness of this enforced proximity had led to a palpable tension between them, with contact soon limited to the occasional wordless look or cryptic shrug.

Now, just before ten o’clock, that tension escalates in a way that catches Frank off guard. Deb emerges from one of the trailers and comes toward him with her BlackBerry held up.

She looks great, as usual, elegantly dressed and with that commanding, lawyerly presence. She walks right up to him and waves the BlackBerry in his face. “You weren’t going to tell me?”

“What?”

But he knows. Fuck. Winterbrook Mall. It seems like a thousand centuries ago.

“You lost your job? You got fired? From a Paloma store? Because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut?”

“But-”

“And now it’s all over the Internet?” She waves the BlackBerry in his face again. “On Gawker? ‘Like Father, Like Daughter? Does This Man Need Anger Management Classes?’ Jesus, Frank.”

He wilts.

Frank hadn’t mentioned anything because… why the fuck would he? The focus was on Lizzie, as it should have been. He and Deb were here for her, not to exchange pleasantries or career updates.

But this is being willfully naive, and he knows it. Exposure of some kind was inevitable. In fact, Deb is being naive if she thinks they won’t go after her, too. No one controls this stuff, isn’t that what Ellen Dorsey had said?

“It’s my business, Deb, mine only. I can’t help it if these bastards have no scruples.”

“Well, have you talked to anyone else?”

“What do you mean? I haven’t talked to anyone at all. Certainly not to anyone at Gawker. They’re the ones who probably talked to someone at Paloma, or at the mall. And don’t think they won’t be sniffing around up at Pierson Hackler either.”

Deb’s law firm.

She stares at him, and he sees a crack. “We’ve had a few calls,” she says, “from… the cable news shows, looking for an interview… just something short.” She pauses. “Lloyd thinks we should do it.”

Lloyd.

He’s a lawyer, too, of course.

Then Frank suddenly leans in toward her. “We? You mean us, right?”

Deb falters, and he sees it coming. “No, Frank,” she says, “I don’t. I mean me and Lloyd.”

Lizzie isn’t sure, but she thinks Julian might be dead. Either that or he’s slipped into a convenient coma. He’s over in the corner, on the floor, curled up in a fetal position, not moving or making any sound.

Alex is on the couch, staring blankly at the blank TV screen.

Lizzie is at the table, an open book in front of her that she’s no longer even pretending to read.

Between the three of them they’ve drunk all the coffee in the apartment. They’ve eaten a pack of rice cakes, a bag of sunflower seeds, some cold cuts, a chunk of Swiss cheese, a few apples, and two bananas.

They’ve each used the bathroom at least twice.

They’ve each come close to having full-blown psychotic episodes-though Lizzie sort of felt she was faking hers, that hers was more an attempt to make Alex feel better about his. Julian’s, on the other hand, was the real deal, hysteria uncoiling slowly down to virtual catatonia-and unless something happens soon, they may have to unload him.

On medical grounds.

Which would make things a little easier for her. Relatively speaking. But it’s been nearly eighteen hours already, so surely something will have to happen soon anyway?

The police, the FBI, whoever is in control of operations-they’re clearly playing a long game here. From what they said on the phone earlier, Lizzie understood that they’re waiting for an uncle of Alex and Julian’s to show up from Florida, that they think this guy’s presence will shift the dynamic sufficiently to break the impasse. Though she also got the impression that her taking the call was something of a surprise to them.

Maybe they’d been assuming she was a hostage.

Not anymore.

The thing is, when it came to it, Alex just froze. It was really early, just before five, dawn breaking. The phone rang, and he picked it up, but then he held it out in front of him, as though he didn’t know what it was for. After a few agonizing seconds, Lizzie grabbed it from his hand, simultaneously reaching over to the table to pick up the list of demands they’d compiled.

“Hello?”

There was a pause. Then, “Good morning. Who’s this? Lizzie? Is that Lizzie I’m talking to?”

“Yes.”

“Hi. I’m Special Agent Tom Bale. Listen, Lizzie, is everything alright in there? How are the guys doing? You got enough water? Have you had something to eat?”

Soothing, eminently reasonable, all-things-are-possible negotiator voice.

“We’re all doing fine,” Lizzie said. “Feeling a bit cut off maybe, communications-wise.”

It turned out that they did have electricity in the apartment, but the TV and Internet connections had been blocked.

“Well, you know how it is, Lizzie. These are standard procedures. But let me see what I can do, okay? It’s just that… I mean, the thing is… we’re all naturally a little concerned out here, considering what Alex said and all, at the outset of this thing. He was very clearly distressed, we understand that-but we’re not sure if… you know…”

Never having undergone this process before, Lizzie found it surprising how transparent and predictable it seemed. She knew exactly what Special Agent Bale was up to and didn’t even have to think about how to respond.

“Well,” she whispered, “you heard what he said, the word he used, right? It was pretty unambiguous.”

She left it at that.

It was then that Bale mentioned the uncle who was supposed to be on his way up from Florida. Lizzie didn’t react. Though she did wonder, and not for the first time, about her own folks. Were they here? Standing outside the building? Next to each other? She found that thought a little disquieting and decided to get on with the business at hand.

“We have a list,” she said. “These are the things that we want.”

“Lizzie, that’s great, it is, but I must-”

“Just shut up, okay? And listen.”

Micro beat.

“You got it.”

Then she started reeling them off. Nothing about food here, or tampons, or money, or safe passage out of the building-these were hard-core political demands.

“… end the carried-interest tax break for hedge fund managers… reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act… impose a zero-point-one percent tax on all trades of stocks, bonds, and derivatives…”

And as she read these out-her eyes darting from the page to Alex, then back to the page again-Lizzie felt the peculiar, transgressive thrill of knowing that while she sounded in control here, the truth was she barely understood a word of what she was saying. She had some knowledge of this stuff, from listening to Alex over the months, but she was extremely vague on the specifics.

“… mandate a new separation of the banks into investment and commercial by repealing Gramm-Leach-Bliley…”

So once she got off the phone-having lobbed the ball firmly into the FBI’s court-she decided it was time to get with the program and just bone up on the specifics. Energized, she gathered a few of the books and papers Julian had lying around the apartment, spread them out on the table, and started reading.

This was important.

That’s what she told herself.

There was a whole language here she needed to learn, a language that both she and Alex, when they found themselves caught up-as they soon would, make no mistake-in the flaming crucible of global media attention, could use to…

To what? To what?

Looking back now, a few hours later, she can see that that was the high point-before, during, and immediately after the phone conversation with the FBI guy. It was the high point in terms of energy levels and enthusiasm, the high point in terms of being in love with Alex, of being exquisitely deluded, of being in the throes of a mindless, giddy, tingly, bring-it-on, romantic death wish, whatever… that was the fucking crucible right there.

But it didn’t last, it couldn’t, and after half an hour or so of reading about fiat currencies and the gold standard, the air went out of it all.

Literal deflation.

She persevered, but there wasn’t much point, and the next few hours were like the comedown from an acid trip-or, at least, never having done acid, what she imagined that would be like.

The mention of a Coady uncle didn’t help matters. As far as Julian and Alex were concerned, the prospect of this man maybe standing down on Orchard Street with a bullhorn and saying things certainly seemed to put a dampener on the proceedings, and might have even been the catalyst for each of their subsequent “episodes.”

In any case, Friday morning lurching toward its midpoint, here they are, the three of them, one slumped in a chair, one on the couch, one on the floor.

All waiting.

But for what? The Internet connection to boot back up? Some cable news channel to come on the TV (with an update on the Carillo trial)? An amplified voice from outside to start pleading with them to surrender? The door to be kicked in, followed by the blinding, deafening flash of an M84 stun grenade?

This all feels a lot smaller than it did before-the possible outcomes more limited, the future more boxed in.

It’s the new torpor, and Lizzie doesn’t like it one little bit.

She looks at the guys and wants to scream at them.

But the thing is, what would she say?

The media conference is being held in the Amontillado Suite at the Wilson Hotel on Madison Avenue.

Announced at such short notice, and considering what else is going on in the city, it’ll be a low-key enough affair, but that’s fine. The event will be reported, recorded, live-streamed, and blogged. The message will get out, and there’ll be plenty of opportunity for follow-up. Howley will read his prepared statement, introduce his new COO/head of global infrastructure, and then answer a few questions.

And that’ll be that.

The takeaway here-he hopes-will be the phrase “effective immediately.”

Everything else will be noise and interference.

And heading up to the Wilson now for a midday kickoff, Howley pretty much knows what kind of noise and interference to expect. The more seasoned business hacks-the ones with a genuine sense of history-will want at least some return on the Vaughan angle. How is the old man? Where is he? What are his plans? Others will be focusing more on the succession process, and others again, predictably, will be fishing for any hint of an IPO announcement.

The succession narrative is fairly well established by this stage. For several years, whenever the subject came up, the names of a few high-profile contenders from within the company would be trotted out, but then Vaughan took the decisive step of bringing in an outsider as his new COO, a move widely seen as an unequivocal appoint-and-anoint. It was designed to end the speculation-that much is clear-but it also had the effect of emphasizing just what a one-man show the Oberon Capital Group really was.

Today’s announcement will bring an end to all of that.

As for an IPO, Howley intends to put that issue to bed next week, on Thursday or Friday, when he appears on Bloomberg to do an in-depth interview.

The final arrangements have yet to be made.

Approaching Seventy-first Street now, Howley leans back in his seat and takes a deep breath.

This is the big one, the pinnacle of his career.

Five or six years at the helm of Oberon and he can think about retiring. It’s incredible. Only seems like yesterday that he was moving to D.C. to work as a consultant at the Defense Department.

The car pulls up outside the hotel. Howley gets out, and as he’s standing there on the sidewalk he feels his phone vibrating in his pocket.

He pulls it out and looks at the display.

Vaughan.

He’s been expecting this. They went over the statement very briefly last night and everything was in order, but it was a business call and neither of them made any reference whatsoever to the significance of what was being set in train here. Howley is no sentimentalist, but he has a strong sense of occasion and would like to see this particular one marked in some way.

Or at the very least acknowledged.

He understands that Vaughan probably has mixed feelings, as well as a degree of trepidation about the publicity side of things-but on that score, just as Howley predicted, all eyes this morning are on Orchard Street.

On this Lizzie Bishop.

Whose fifteen-minute allotment of fame, as far as Vaughan is concerned, has come at just the right time.

Glancing around at sunny Madison Avenue, Howley raises the phone to his ear. “Jimmy?”

“Craig, how are you? Listen, meant to say last night, I’m thinking of heading out of town for a while, give you a little breathing space.”

“No, no, Jimmy, come on, that’s not necessary, you don’t have to-”

“No, I don’t. But I might anyway. Spend a little time at the house in Palm Beach. Relax, do a bit of sailing-”

Sailing?

“-play some golf. That’d be the real reason, if you want to know the truth.”

“Would you…” Howley doesn’t know how to phrase this. The Jimmy Vaughan he saw earlier in the week was a very sick man. “Would you…”

“Would I be able to, you mean? Well, listen, this new medication I’m on-the one I told you about, that the boys at Eiben are working on?-it’s amazing. It’s finally kicking in, and I actually feel pretty good for a change.”

“Holy shit, Jimmy.” Howley isn’t sure what to make of this. But one thing does occur to him. The boys at Eiben? Isn’t that a little weird? Given the history, given-

Then he sees Dave Fishman, Oberon’s director of corporate affairs, coming through the hotel’s revolving doors, and he gets distracted. “Er… that’s great, it really is…”

“Don’t worry, Craig,” Vaughan says. “I’m still going to die.”

“Jesus, Jimmy.”

“No, I just mean I mightn’t have such a miserable time doing it.”

As Fishman approaches, eyebrows raised, pointing at his watch, Howley feels a flicker of panic, of uncertainty. It’s as though he has lost his bearings all of a sudden. “Er, listen, Jimmy,” he says, “I have to-”

“Go, go, you’re fine.” That was whispered. But what Vaughan says next is much louder. “You know what, I might just stick around. This could be interesting.”

“Good… yeah, okay.”

“And Craig?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t fuck this up on me, you hear?”

It’s nearly one o’clock, and Frank has an uneasy sense that something is under way. But he has no idea what it is and no one will talk to him.

There’s a lot of coming and going, a lot of huddled, urgent-looking conversations taking place between busy, important-looking people.

He keeps glancing around to see if he can spot that detective he spoke to a few times during the night. What was his name? Lenny Byron. There was a man you could deal with-open, direct, reluctant to just peddle any old line from the department.

But Detective Byron doesn’t seem to be here anymore.

It’s not that no one will talk to Frank-there are liaison officers and trauma counselors and all kinds of spokespeople available and willing to talk to him, but what they really are is a sort of buffer zone.

Right now he wants to talk to the important-looking people.

Because he has his suspicions.

Gleaned from various conversations and from things he’s overheard.

For instance, it’s Frank’s understanding that there is considerable FBI skepticism about the explosives. Apparently, what led them to the apartment in the first place was a tip-off from an informant inside the protest movement regarding a firearms trail. All they had was a search warrant for this address. They had no idea what they were stumbling upon, and it was only the simultaneous tip-off from Ellen Dorsey that enabled them to get on top of things so fast.

But a subsequent trawl of their intelligence has turned up nothing that would indicate any explosives capability on the part of the Coady brothers.

What worries Frank is that if the FBI and JTTF think the explosives claim is a bluff, then they might do something reckless.

His second suspicion about what might be going on has to do with this much-rumored uncle who is supposed to be arriving from Florida. First, if it’s true, then where the fuck is he? It’s been over twenty hours already since this thing started, and last time Frank looked Florida was about a three-hour plane ride away, not nestled somewhere between Australia and New Zealand. And second, there seems to be a serious disagreement about the advisability of using this guy even if he does arrive-it has to do with some bullshit psych assessment of the family dynamics.

Frank’s third suspicion arises from that conversation he had this morning with Deb. She wouldn’t say anything more about it, wouldn’t elaborate or confirm, but the idea seemed to be that she and her husband-fucking Lloyd Hackler-would go on TV and talk about the situation.

Lloyd would talk about Lizzie.

His daughter.

Deb and Lloyd have been married for three years, and for two of those Lizzie has been away at college. So what’s he going to say about her?

It’s absurd.

And it’s not just the humiliation of being excluded. Frank feels that for sure. It’s also the question of motivation.

Why would Deb do this?

He doesn’t know.

She’s kept her distance all morning, spending most of it on the phone-but now, just in these last few minutes, Frank has noticed a slight increase in the levels of activity around her, and he can’t help thinking this is it.

She’s going to do it.

When Lloyd Hackler appears a short while later, it’s pretty much confirmed, and Frank’s stress levels skyrocket. Agitated, and only a few yards away, he looks on as a little group forms, Deb, Lloyd, a man he guesses to be some high-ranking TV executive, and Victoria Hannahoe, the preternaturally radiant anchor of a cable news show he can’t remember the name of. He watches as these people talk among themselves, smiling, throwing hand gestures around, and even, on occasion, laughing.

A few moments later, they begin to move away-where they’re going, Frank doesn’t know, but he starts to move as well, to follow them.

His heart pounding.

At which point an arm shoots across his chest and blocks his path.

“Frank, don’t.”

He turns to his left, and exhales in defeat. It’s Lenny Byron.

“Detective.”

“That look on your face, Frank. Bit of a giveaway. I’d stay here if I were you.”

“Yeah… okay.”

Byron lowers his arm.

Frank nods his head, indicating Deb and the others. “Where are they going exactly?”

Byron turns and watches as the group recedes down the street. “One of the trailers back there on Delancey. They’ve set up a temporary little, I don’t know, it’s like a little… studio or something. But-”

He pauses and makes a pained face. Byron is in his late thirties. He’s dark and handsome, but he looks overworked. He could also do with a shave and a haircut and a new suit.

“Yeah?”

“There’s something you should know. It’s not just going to be an interview with Victoria Hannahoe, they’re going to do it like a… sort of on-air appeal, and they’re going to run it directly into the apartment.”

“What?”

Frank feels weak, faint, as if his body is suddenly remembering it hasn’t slept in over thirty hours.

“It’s another… strategy,” Byron says, speaking almost under his breath now, and glancing around, “not necessarily what I’d do, but the Bureau’s running the show here.”

Frank tries to steady himself. “But what about me?” he says, with great effort. “I’m her father.”

“I know, Frank, I know.” Byron looks at him directly and maintains eye contact. “It’s a calculation on their part. They feel… they feel Lizzie is somehow in control in there now. That’s not based solely on the phone call, they have partial sightlines in through the various windows as well, and that’s just how they’re reading it. Julian has more or less folded. Apparently. And Alex is next.” He pauses. “So they think a direct appeal to Lizzie might work.”

“Appeal? Coming from Deb, maybe. But from Lloyd? You’ve got to be kidding me. She hates that prick. It’ll… it’ll backfire, if anything.” He breathes in hard, suddenly fighting back tears. “I should be doing this with Deb.” Then he says it again. “I’m her father.”

Byron nods, doesn’t look away. “Listen, Frank, I don’t know how up to speed you are on what’s been happening over the last few hours… out there.” He waves an arm in the air, indicating… what? The city? The world? “I’m talking about the Internet, Frank. You’ve been pretty much crucified. This guy you worked for, this Paloma guy, the area manager or something? Man, you must have really pissed him off, because he’s been bad-mouthing you a lot, and it’s caught on. Now you’re like some kind of fucking Bruce Banner character, I don’t know, some kind of ticking time bomb, and that’s not who they want in that trailer doing their little live broadcast.”

“But-”

Frank stops. What’s the point? This is a nightmare.

“Look, man,” Byron says, “I don’t know you from Adam, okay, but I know people, and this is clearly bullshit. You still have to be careful, though. So let me give you a piece of advice.”

Frank looks at him. He’s bewildered.

Advice?

“There’s going to be more of this,” Byron says. “One way or the other. And if you want to come through it, you’ll have to get some help. To mount a counterattack.”

“I don’t-”

“A press agent, someone in PR, a journalist who’s got your back, I don’t know. But right now, Frank, you’re a sitting duck for these people.”

A few minutes later, standing at the barrier, still numb from this latest shock, Frank starts patting down his pockets, then searching them one by one.

Ellen Dorsey gave him her card, and he took it. He didn’t throw it away. He put it somewhere.

He eventually finds it in his left back pocket.

He holds the card up to read the number on it. He takes out his phone and calls her.

The phone vibrating on the glass coffee table is what wakes her. She turns her head, looks at it, and lets it go to message. The phone is on silent, but it makes this low buzzy sound on a hard surface when it vibrates. She reaches out for it, groaning from the effort, and then sits upright on the couch. She looks at the display, doesn’t recognize the number.

She checks to see if there’s a message. There is. It’s from Frank Bishop.

There are messages from other people, too, five in total-that one just now from Frank, one an hour ago from Val Brady, one just before that from Liz Zambelli, and two much earlier from Max Daitch.

Everyone agitated.

But Frank the most, naturally.

All he said, in his shaky, tired voice, was Ellen, this is Frank Bishop. Please call me.

It occurs to her that she has no idea what’s going on. The last she knew of anything was sometime after 5 A.M. when she was in that bar on Norfolk Street with Val Brady.

She checks the time on her phone.

1:25.

That’s more than eight hours.

Is it over? What happened? She slides off the couch, picks up the TV remote, points it, and flicks. Then she goes over to her desk and taps a key on the keyboard.

Before she calls him back she’d better get some kind of an update.

Stiff from sleeping on the couch, she hobbles into the kitchen and puts on some coffee.

Over the next ten minutes, sipping espresso, and dividing her attention between the TV and the computer, she updates herself comprehensively.

The first shock is that it’s still going on. The second is that Lizzie Bishop has supplanted the Coady brothers as the focus of everyone’s attention. And in what seems to be something of an unfortunate sideshow, Frank Bishop himself has come in for a bit of a hammering.

Does that have anything to do with why he called?

She needs more coffee. She goes and makes some. Then she has a pee. Then she takes a quick shower.

Putting it off.

Because what’s she supposed to tell him? What can she do for him? She’s not in a position to do anything.

When she finally calls him, she does it standing at the window, looking out onto Ninety-third Street.

“Frank? It’s Ellen.”

“Hi. Er… just a second.” She hears some sounds in the background, muffled voices, shuffling. Then he’s on again. “Sorry. Thanks for getting back to me.” He pauses. “I… I didn’t see you anywhere last night, after we got here, I-”

“They wouldn’t let me through,” she says. “I guess you got swept up into it all, but I was held back at the first barrier. And I didn’t have your number. I tried to get a message to you, but… the general atmosphere was pretty crazy. I stayed most of the night, but eventually I just came home.”

“Right.” There’s a pause here as he considers this. “Okay.”

With that settled, sort of, he goes on to tell her about the upcoming Victoria Hannahoe interview and Lloyd Hackler’s involvement and how fucked up it all is. There’s an occasional crack in his voice as he speaks, but there’s a steely quality to it as well.

“So look,” he says in conclusion, “I could use some help. In return, you get exclusive access. Your phrase.”

This time it’s Ellen’s turn to pause and consider.

She’d given up on the story, and with good reason, but it’s funny how things can change in the space of a few hours. Because this is no longer news. That part of the process is over, almost. Now it’s morphing into something different, something that needs to be colored in and dissected and explained before it’s filed away in the public consciousness, archived as the Story of the Wall Street Killers, or the Siege of Orchard Street. With exclusive access to Frank Bishop-and, all going well, to Lizzie-there could be a substantial long-form piece in this.

Pretty much Ellen’s métier.

And it’d be perfect for the next issue of Parallax.

“Yes,” she says, “of course. Give and take. Your phrase.”

The second she’s off with Frank here, she’ll call Max.

“Good. Thanks.” He pauses. “Where are you now?”

She tells him and says that she can be down there in twenty minutes, half an hour.

He tells her that he’ll arrange for an NYPD detective named Lenny Byron to let her through the security barriers. That she should ask for him.

Ten minutes later, chewing on a last bite of stale bagel, she’s out on Columbus Avenue hailing a cab.

When the phone rings, Lizzie’s heart lurches sideways and she stands up at once from the table. Julian shifts slightly on the floor in the corner and groans, as if the sound of the phone is disturbing his sleep, but not enough to wake him up. On the couch, Alex turns his head. That’s all. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say, “You getting that?”

Doesn’t need to.

Because she’s getting it.

Picking it up, clearing her throat.

Loudly.

She has no script this time, no list, and a lot less adrenaline than she had the last time. The truth is, the waiting has been awful and has effectively drained the life out of her. She knows it’s probably been a deliberate strategy to undermine morale in here, and boy has it worked, but little do they know how fragile morale was to begin with.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Lizzie. It’s Tom.”

Tom.

This pretense of friendship is annoying. It’s patronizing. Standing at the table, next to the chair she’s been sitting in for hours, she sways from side to side.

She actually has nothing to say.

“Lizzie?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Have you reinstated Glass-Steagall yet?”

“Er…”

She closes her eyes. Shit, that was stupid. It was flippant. She wasn’t going for flippant. She’s tired. Tired isn’t even the word for it. She opens her eyes. Alex is looking up at her. She shrugs and turns away.

“Well?”

She’s not backtracking now.

“Lizzie, let’s take it one step at a time, okay? But I do have movement on something you asked about earlier, the communications situation?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, we’d like to get your TV back on. There’s something we’d like you to watch.”

Oh fuck.

“What?”

“You’ll find out in a-”

“Jesus, Tom-”

“Look, bear with me, Lizzie, okay?”

He pauses.

She can picture him, Special Agent Tom, huddled over his equipment. What she imagines his equipment to be. She doesn’t know, headphones, recording panels, displays with dials and gauges. He’d love to move in for the kill here. She can hear it in his voice. She’s not stupid. A little bit of veiled flirting, some white empathetic noise, and then bam-

Lizzie, we know we can count on you, and we know you’re under pressure in there, we do, so tell us, quick, the explosives…

She exhales loudly down the phone.

“It’s an interview,” he says, almost whispering. “I think you’ll respond to it. You will.” Before she can say anything, he adds, “Turn the TV on in about two minutes, okay? Fox News.”

And then he hangs up.

There is silence, and stillness, for probably most of the two minutes. Then Lizzie puts the phone down on the table. She walks around to the front of the couch and looks for the TV remote.

“What?” Alex says, looking up, as though he’s stoned, but making an effort.

And then, shit… holy shit-it occurs to her-these motherfuckers are stoned, on pills, sedatives, diaza-, diazap-, benzoap…

Whatever the fuck those things are called.

She’s seen them in Julian’s medicine cabinet.

What else would explain-

“What?” Alex repeats, shifting a little on the couch.

Lizzie rolls her eyes. This has been going on for nearly a whole day, a whole twenty-four hours, but she feels like she has aged ten years in that time, more-aged and changed and moved on, shed personas, past lives, complete versions of herself… grown, expanded, aged, calcified, atrophied.

In a quiet voice, she says, “They want us to turn on the TV. There’s something they want us to watch.”

Alex shifts again on the couch, wriggles for a moment, and reveals that he has been sitting on the remote.

There is another lurching movement from the corner, as Julian rolls over to face the room for the first time in many hours.

Oh, what? The promise of a little TV is enough to cut through the chemical molasses here? To raise these bozos from their self-administered inertia?

“Turn it on,” she says.

Alex picks up the remote and flicks it.

“What channel?”

Lizzie looks at him. “Fox.”

“Of course.”

The screen pops into life with a commercial for some anti-aging cream. Alex flicks forward through basketball, a sitcom, and a couple of soaps before getting to the cable news channels. He stops at Fox.

It’s America Unbound with Victoria Hannahoe.

“What is this shit?” Julian says.

Lizzie watches as he drags himself over to the couch, crawls onto it, and sits beside his brother.

There’s an item about Iran on at the moment, a filmed report. It seems to be coming to an end.

“Why are we watching this?” Alex says.

“I don’t know. Just… wait.”

They wait.

Then it cuts back to the studio. It takes Lizzie a moment to focus and to realize that the background graphic, which has the word siege emblazoned across it in jagged red letters, is a treated, filtered image of Orchard Street.

In the foreground sits glamorous Victoria Hannahoe, with her extravagant red hair and striking blue eyes.

“We return now to our top story,” she says, “the ongoing siege of a downtown New York City apartment in which three radical students believed to be in possession of bomb-making equipment and a quantity of explosives are caught up in a now nearly twenty-four-hour standoff with the New York City Police Department, the FBI, and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

Lizzie can barely process this. It seems unreal.

“The three radicals-students of Atherton College in upstate New York-have issued a wide-ranging series of demands, which, if carried out, would amount to an effective restructuring of our entire financial system.”

“Yesss.”

“Two of the three-brothers Julian and Alex Coady-are also believed to be responsible for the recent murders of two Wall Street bankers, Jeff Gale and Bob Holland, and for the attempted murder of another, Scott Lebrecht. However, it is now emerging that the leader of the group, and the ideological driving force behind it, may well be the third student holed up in the Orchard Street apartment, one Elizabeth Bishop.”

“What the fuck-”

Julian struggles to turn around on the couch.

Alex remains completely still.

Lizzie stares at the TV screen in disbelief.

“Elizabeth-or Lizzie-Bishop is the one who issued the demands and is also, according to police sources, understood to be the most in-control and proactive member of the group.”

Julian throws his arms up. “This is… this is BULLSHIT!”

“In an attempt to further our understanding of these events-events that are unfolding before the eyes of the world-we are now going to speak exclusively to the mother and stepfather of Lizzie Bishop, Deborah Bishop-Hackler and Lloyd Hackler-”

“Oh Jesus, oh no.”

Lizzie staggers back toward the wall as the camera pans right to reveal… her mother? And Lloyd fucking Hackler? Sitting together like teenagers, looking all attentive and concerned? This is horrendous, and where’s… where’s Frank?

Lloyd isn’t her fucking father…

“… and let me ask you as well…”

Wh-what was that? Lizzie didn’t hear the first part of the question. She’s finding it impossible to concentrate.

“… as a child, growing up…”

“Fuck this,” Julian says, and starts getting up off the couch. Alex turns and looks at Lizzie, the weirdest expression on his face-this pale, sickly, confused stare-and then he lurches to the side and throws up, a liquid hurl of vomit landing in a splat on the floorboards next to the couch.

“You bitch,” Julian says, one eye on Alex as he comes around the end of the couch, and then directly toward her, “I should have fucking-”

“… what you might call emotional intelligence…”

But he stops… just as-or just after-Lizzie hears a dry phwutt sound. Julian’s eyes roll upward, he stumbles to the left, and the red mark on the side of his head bubbles and spurts into a sudden and rapid trickle down his cheek.

Lizzie tries to scream, but nothing happens. Her throat is dry, and her chest seizes up in pain. When Julian falls to the floor, she notices a tiny cracked hole in the window behind him. In the next moment she hears a second phwutt sound, and an identical hole appears beside the first one. By the time she turns and looks down at Alex, whose head is now resting on the edge of the couch, the trickle of blood on his cheek has already started mingling with the vomity mucus around his mouth.

Directly ahead of Lizzie, her mother is on the screen, leaning toward the camera, words coming from her mouth, only some of them getting through, only some of them comprehensible.

“… a mother’s perspective… here now to implore my little…”

Lizzie leans against the wall behind her, stretching her arms out, pushing back hard, tears in her eyes. She looks to the right, at the window, at the two holes, waiting…

But it doesn’t come.

Then she slides quickly to the floor, out of the sightline of the window, facing the table and the back of the couch.

She feels like throwing up herself now, but manages to hold it in.

She’s no longer able to see the TV, but her mother’s voice continues to fill the room.

“… and for that reason, and that reason only, I know that Lloyd and I-”

Then it stops abruptly and is replaced by a low hum.

The connection cut.

The sudden stillness is terrifying. A few feet to her right is Julian’s crumpled body. To her left, on the floor next to the couch, she can see the glistening, lumpy peninsula stain of vomit-Alex himself unseen, but so close, slumped on the couch in front of her.

Dead.

Poor, sweet Alex.

In her worst imaginings this ended with handcuffs and a televised perp walk and orange jumpsuits and a vague, inexact, drawn-out process, including lots of photographers and clips gone viral and trendings and…

She’s ashamed now to think how little she thought it all through, and angry at how stupid she’s been-or was. Because she could have done something. She could have gone along with the guy on the phone, for instance. She could have found some way to neutralize the situation, to wind it down peacefully.

She wipes her eyes and nose with her sleeve.

So now what?

Is the phone going to ring? Will there be a gentle rap on the door?

Seconds pass, each one unbearable, each one hijacked by images and thoughts and emotions she has no way of resisting or fighting off. She thinks of her mom on the TV, a tracker scout calling back at her from the hostile, oxygen-thin media landscape. She thinks of her dad; she’d earlier imagined seeing him through the more intimate medium of the apartment-door peephole. When she got back from her long walk yesterday afternoon and plugged in her phone to charge it, she saw that he’d left voice messages and texts, so many of them-which had made her smile. She should have called him then.

If she had, all of this might be different.

She thinks of her brother, John. She should have-

Jesus.

What?

Is that all she’s got left? A fucking catalog of should haves…

Shoulda this, shoulda that, shoulda the other.

The phone rings.

She lets it go for a bit, but then leans forward. As she’s reaching up to get the phone, she notices Alex’s backpack under the table. She pulls it out, realizing that she has no idea what’s in it. It doesn’t feel heavy. It could be just a few books.

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t open it. She puts it on the table.

She picks up the phone. She doesn’t say anything.

“Lizzie?”

She avoids looking at Alex, but notices that on the couch next to him-and next to the remote control-is the gun he had yesterday.

“Lizzie? Lizzie? You there?”

“Yeah.”

She stretches across the table, over the back of the couch, and reaches down for the gun.

The window is to her right.

She must be plainly visible.

“Lizzie, listen to me very carefully, okay?”

“Have you done it yet?”

“What… sorry?”

“Glass-Steagall. Have you reinstated it yet?” She pauses. “You stupid motherfuckers.”

She drops the phone on the floor. She raises her other hand, points the gun at the window, and pulls the trigger. The sound is alarmingly sharp, and in the recoil her arm and shoulder yank back really hard. Unlike the earlier and more discreet incoming shots, this one shatters the windowpane completely.

Lizzie’s shoulder is sore, and she rubs it for a moment with her free hand.

When she’s done, she picks the bag up from the table. She walks over to the door and kicks it a couple of times, grunting loudly.

Then she opens it.

Holding the bag up and pointing the gun directly in front of her, she heads out into the narrow hallway and the oncoming steel-gray blur of Kevlar vests, ballistic helmets, and M4 assault rifles.

In the cab on the way down, Ellen tries to plot out the next three weeks in her head. The first one-assuming this siege thing doesn’t drag on too long-will be talking to Frank Bishop and, hopefully, to Lizzie. The second week will be back up at Atherton, excavating the Coady connections and gathering local detail, and then maybe, if it becomes necessary, a Coady-related schlep down to Florida for the rest. The third week will be at home on an intravenous coffee drip getting the story written for the next Parallax deadline.

Her agreement with Frank Bishop-informal, and yet to be tested-will be key here. To make it work she’ll have to help him first.

Devise some kind of a strategy.

As the cab turns onto Delancey Street, her phone pings. It’s a text from Max.

You watching Hannahoe?

She composes a reply-No. In a cab.-but then decides not to send it. She doesn’t want to be distracted by calls or texts. She’ll get back to Max after she’s met with Frank.

At the barrier on the corner of Orchard she asks a uniformed officer if she can speak to a Detective Lenny Byron. The officer turns away and relays the request into his radio. After a few moments he turns back and tells her that Detective Byron will be along to see her in a few minutes.

She thanks him, and looks around.

Traffic is passing normally on Delancey, but there are a lot of extra parked vehicles-squad cars, trucks, trailers. There are a lot of people gathered on the sidewalk, too, mostly civilian onlookers, locals, the evacuated. There’s a good deal of curiosity and neck-craning and disgruntlement. She can see up Orchard Street, and there’s another, smaller group of people at the next set of barriers, just before Rivington. These are mostly cops, Bureau and Homeland personnel, journalists, tech crews.

After a couple of minutes, a guy in a crumpled suit and an invisible cigarette sticking out of his mouth wanders down.

Ellen has met a lot of NYPD detectives in her day, and they tend to fall into fairly set categories, the assholes, the plodders, and the ones you can actually have a decent conversation with. Only problem is you can never tell beforehand. Unless you have an indication. The fact that Frank Bishop apparently has this guy on his side is indication enough for Ellen.

And that’s how it turns out.

A minute or so later, they’re both strolling back in the direction of Rivington and parsing recent testimony in the Connie Carillo murder trial. The sun is nudging its way out from behind a passing cloud bank, and Ellen has already spotted Frank Bishop.

It is a moment of virtual tranquility.

And then a shot rings out.

It’s somewhat muffled, but it’s unmistakable.

Byron runs on, everyone else moving at the same time, sucked forward.

But just as quickly, all movement ceases, and there is an eerie silence.

The scene suspended, everyone left hanging.

Frank Bishop leans over the barrier, his head in his hands, Byron at his side now.

Ellen stands watching.

Then the silence is broken, this time by a sustained burst of gunfire. It comes from the same direction, from inside, and is louder, fuller, more comprehensive.

Still only a couple of seconds.

But enough to change everything.

11

WALKING FROM THE DOOR OF THE BUILDING OVER TOWARD FRANK, Detective Lenny Byron gives a quick shake of his head. He’s pale, and his eyes look hollowed out.

He mouths, “I’m sorry.”

Frank stares at him in disbelief, barely able to breathe now, his chest like a brick, his gut twisting into knots. He holds on to the barrier with both hands, squeezing so hard it feels as if either the metal or his bones should crack.

There is a moment when his voice comes close to making a sound, to releasing something, a scream or a howl, but the moment passes. And then it’s too late. Frank knows what this is, even if he can’t control it-his systems are shutting down, his emotions seizing up, grief and despair retreating, burrowing into dark, silent recesses.

Almost immediately, too, stuff begins to happen around him, distracting stuff, like the Rivington and Stanton Street barriers being pushed aside to make way for the extra personnel that are now appearing-technical units, crime scene, bomb disposal, paramedics-a whole security apparatus whose function, it seems, is to disassemble, to debrief.

To obliterate.

Frank and an openly howling Deb soon get swept up into a separate debriefing process that involves being talked to, or talked at, in various locations, at various times-and, most disconcertingly, in various tones-by a parade of uniformed officers, special agents, and PTSD counselors. What the process does not involve, however, is any kind of response to their repeated requests for information.

For confirmation.

For a chance to see their daughter’s body.

That-it soon becomes apparent, as they are drawn ever farther away from the scene-is simply not going to happen. And despite whatever armory of legalistic-sounding bullshit Lloyd Hackler is able to draw on, the firewall phrase “national security concerns” proves to be impenetrable.

But what strikes Frank about this-about the notion of juxtaposing that phrase with his daughter’s name-is just how preposterous it seems.

A part of him wants to laugh.

Which actually feels like something he might be able to do, in the absence of other, more appropriate responses-crying, say, howling, trembling uncontrollably, lashing out.

He doesn’t laugh, though, or do any of these things. Instead, he moves through the hours like a zombie, dealing with the authorities, with Deb and Lloyd, talking on the phone to John (after Deb calls him), accepting Deb’s invitation to stay with them tonight (because where else is he going to stay), and ending up in their apartment on Eighty-sixth Street, with people dropping by all the time, people he knows vaguely, people he doesn’t know at all, then watching Deb break down, watching her recover, and watching her break down again.

Unable to sleep that night, he stares at the ceiling for six hours.

At around noon the next day, he and Lloyd drive out to JFK to pick up John. This forty-minute car journey should be awkward and emotionally charged, as it’s actually the first time the two men have ever been alone together, but instead it’s nothing. It’s preceded by a testy encounter between Lloyd and some of the photographers and reporters camped out on Eighty-sixth Street, and is followed by an interminable wait in the overcrowded arrivals area.

John is understandably distraught when he appears, but after a long silent hug, Frank leaves most of the talking, and explaining, such as it is, to Lloyd.

And in this way Saturday rolls on and folds into Sunday.

The media barrage in the morning is relentless, the papers, the talk shows, but Frank ends up being shielded from a lot of it-and again, here, thanks are due to Lloyd, whose crisis management skills are operating at full tilt.

But what Frank realizes after a while is that he doesn’t want to be shielded from it, because in the absence of being able to feel anything, he finds that all he can do is think, and to do that he needs input, he needs information.

In the apartment, there is a lot of walking on eggshells, and whispered conversations, and tea drinking, and Frank knows he won’t be able to bear this for much longer. On Sunday evening, therefore, he has a quiet word with Deb, an even quieter one with John, and then he takes his leave. He borrows a coat and hat of Lloyd’s, so that when he exits the building he’s able to slip by the photographers unnoticed.

He’s not sure what he’s going to do, though.

He doesn’t want to go downtown to retrieve his car-doesn’t want to go anywhere near there, not yet. Besides, he’ll have to stick around town for a few days, to find out what’s happening. To find out about the release of the body.

So he wanders aimlessly for an hour or two, and eventually checks into a cheap hotel, the Bromley, in midtown, near Seventh Avenue. For a cheap hotel, the Bromley is still fairly expensive, but Frank doesn’t care. He has a credit card, and some money in the bank.

Not that any of that matters anymore.

He settles into his room, which is musty and could do with a lick of paint and a change of carpets, and turns on the TV.

He flicks around the channels looking for any reference to, or analysis of, the events of Friday. Incredibly, it seems that the story has already receded somewhat, and other stuff has come to the fore. But he does find a bit of coverage, which he watches with mute incomprehension-and as soon as it’s done, he flicks on through the channels to look for more elsewhere.

He’s also very hungry, he realizes, but he does nothing about it.

Eventually, he falls asleep on the bed, in his clothes, the remote control in his hand.

“Well, I wasn’t paying attention. I was actually pretty busy on Friday.”

“Yeah. Guess I called that one wrong.”

It’s Sunday night, and Ellen is at the bar in Flannery’s having a drink with Charlie. She raises her glass and says, “You might not have been the only one.”

Charlie nods. “Quite the spectacular fuckup, wasn’t it?”

Ellen doesn’t say anything. She can still hear the gunfire in her head, and feel the resultant knot in her stomach. She’s had the weekend to get over it, to digest what happened, but it now appears that that’s not going to be enough.

“Three dead kids?” Charlie goes on. “That’s a bad day’s work, no matter what the circumstances. Okay, this wasn’t Kent State or anything. They shot those banker guys, I get that. But still.”

Ellen doesn’t know how old Charlie is exactly, but his casual reference to Kent State as a sort of touchstone for this says a lot.

“Anyway.” She doesn’t really want to talk about Orchard Street. It’s not that she doesn’t have anything to say on the matter. She does. That’s the trouble. She wouldn’t know where to start. “So, counselor,” she says, upbeat, “what’s going on? What’s the latest?”

Charlie’s obsessive interest in the Connie Carillo murder trial is almost as amusing as the trial itself. It’s like a soap opera for him, something to watch and then ironically tear apart and analyze in the bar with his co-retirees and anyone else, like Ellen, who’ll bother to listen.

“Okay,” he says, “on Friday morning Joey Gifford finished up, so after lunch they called the next witness.” He glides a hand through the air, as though conjuring up something magical. “Enter Mrs. Sanchez, the housekeeper.” He lets that sink in for a moment, but when it doesn’t get the reaction he was obviously expecting, he hammers the point home. “It means we get our first glimpse inside the apartment. And even if Mrs. Sanchez is no Joey Gifford, she’s going to have a lot more to dish up on the day-to-day stuff chez Carillo.”

Dutifully, Ellen raises her glass again. “What’s not to like?”

“Exactly.”

But as Charlie goes on with his account of Friday’s proceedings in the courtroom, Ellen finds her mind wandering back to Orchard Street, and to an image she has of Frank Bishop standing alone at the barrier, stooped, motionless, waiting for Lenny Byron to reappear.

She and others were shunted away at that point.

Near the outer barrier she had a quick word with Val Brady, and then stood around on Delancey for a while before wandering off and eventually-once again-heading home.

Here there were more voice messages and e-mails inviting her to address Twittergate-or, as it should perhaps more generously be called (it being the only -gate he’s ever likely to get), Rattgate-but she ignored them. She turned on the TV, went online, grabbed her phone, and started following the Orchard Street story across as many platforms as she could handle. Unlike earlier, she accepted now that she was a civilian where this was concerned. But she was a committed one and wanted answers.

She wanted to understand.

And over the course of Saturday and Sunday she has come to understand quite a bit, even managing to piece together for herself a plausible-ish picture of how and why the whole thing happened. Unsurprisingly, though, certain key questions remain unanswered-questions about the different guns the Coadys used in the shootings, about whether or not there actually were any explosives in the apartment, and about the exact sequence of events at the very end. She knows from experience that when these issues come up for official processing they’ll either be dealt with head-on and honestly, or they’ll be fudged, spun, and subjected to such extensive redaction as to be rendered meaningless.

But in the meantime there’s plenty of speculation and theorizing and opinion, endless rivers of the stuff, in fact-and of every color and shade. Today alone, for example, in the papers and online, the Coadys and Lizzie Bishop have been vilified, lionized, psychoanalyzed, diagnosed, caricatured, and satirized. Members of their respective families have been followed, hounded, and photographed. Ellen even found herself watching a brief YouTube clip of Frank Bishop standing outside an apartment building with a couple of other people on the Upper East Side somewhere.

What was the point of that?

Who knows? She doesn’t.

What she does know, however, is that she liked Frank Bishop, and she feels for him. On the drive down to the city from Atherton they talked a lot, at least for the first part of the journey, and she got a real sense of what makes him tick, of how he thinks, and especially of how important Lizzie was to him. Maybe that last part is to state the obvious, but it certainly puts things into perspective for Ellen.

As she listens to Charlie talk now about the Carillo trial, she feels no real connection to any of the key players in it. Sure, Connie is on trial for her life, and may well be innocent, but as a semi-public figure of some years’ standing-socialite, opera singer, mob wife, and politician’s daughter-she’s been so mediated and filtered already, before this, that she doesn’t come across as authentic or relatable in any way.

Frank Bishop, by contrast…

Who’d ever heard of him before last Friday?

No one.

This is an ordinary guy who’s suddenly living the unimaginable nightmare of having his personal life-family tragedy, professional failures, character flaws, the lot-projected onto the Jumbotron screen of public consciousness.

From total anonymity to full-spectrum media blitz in a matter of hours.

There’s no comparison.

She looks into her glass.

Not that it’s a competition or anything.

Later, walking back to her apartment along Amsterdam Avenue toward Ninety-third Street, Ellen wonders how Frank is doing. He still has a story to tell, that’s for sure-a unique perspective, at the very least, and to put it at its most neutral, on a significant public event.

She’s not going to call him, though.

She should.

If she was doing her job right.

But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe she doesn’t know what that is anymore.

For most of Monday morning Craig Howley avoids going anywhere near Vaughan’s office. He knows that it has already been vacated, divested of all traces, etc., and that he’s free to rearrange the furniture in any way he sees fit, but still, there’s something very final, very Rubicon-esque, about this, about stepping over the threshold.

It isn’t so much like taking over the Oval Office after a previous incumbent’s four- or even eight-year term-a better analogy, Howley thinks, would be how L. Patrick Gray must have felt in 1972 taking over as director of the FBI following J. Edgar Hoover’s nearly four decades in the job. Howley doesn’t know if Gray occupied the same physical space as Hoover, if he took over his actual office, but man, he must have been feeling the pressure.

Howley himself is certainly feeling it.

At least when a four- or eight-year term is up, it’s up.

At least Hoover was dead.

In any case, Howley chairs the usual 8:00 A.M. meeting of senior investment directors in the conference room. He then spends an hour or so floating around the hallways, popping into other people’s offices and engaging in a form of banter that ends up being slightly awkward and forced. He also stands around reception for a while making calls and sending texts.

Displacement activity.

At around midday, just before he’s due to go for lunch with Paul Blanford, the CEO of Eiben-Chemcorp, Howley makes his way over to what has traditionally been thought of as Vaughan’s personal corner of the fifty-seventh floor. He couldn’t count the number of times in the last year that he has sat outside this office, waiting for the nod from Jacqueline Prescott. But now, suddenly, here’s Angela, already in place at her new desk. He has a few words with her before making his way into the main office.

He stands inside the door and closes it behind him. The layout and design of this huge space are pretty much old school, lots of mahogany paneling and red leather furniture; carpeting; blinds; a big, solid desk; anonymous artworks. Vaughan had the conference room renovated six months ago, but hadn’t gotten around to doing his own office yet, even though he’d apparently been talking about it for some time.

Howley will do it now, though-gut the place and start from scratch.

He has a few ideas.

Brushed steel and travertine, custom fabrics and smoked glass. A couple of really big fishtanks, a walk-in humidor, a bocce court. Indulgent, yes, to a certain degree. He figures he’s earned it, though. This may well be the last office he ever occupies, so he’s determined to put his personal stamp on it.

But the truth is that there’s a lot more to be rearranged around here than the furniture. It’s something that has become plain to him over the last few days.

What it is, essentially, is a matter of survival.

He walks across the room to the big desk and sits behind it. He looks out on all that James Vaughan-up until last week sometime-surveyed. He thinks of the decisions that have been made from behind this desk, the deals struck, the strategies devised, the vast web of Oberon-related business that has been conducted. Howley has even been involved in some of it himself-over the last year, obviously, but also before that, from the other side of the fence. He and Vaughan were instrumental in setting up a supply chain out of Afghanistan of the precious metal thanaxite, an essential manufacturing component used in advanced robotics. More specifically, it was needed for a program called the BellumBot-an autonomous battlefield management system-that was in development at Paloma Electronics.

All of which is perfectly fine, but if Howley is really to succeed here on his own terms, he’s going to have to be more assertive, more proactive.

He swivels from side to side in the chair.

He’s going to have to do something about James Vaughan.

Because despite all of Vaughan’s good wishes and declarations of support, and despite his various health problems, as long as the man has a breath left in his body he will continue to run things-at some level, consciously, unconsciously, whatever, it doesn’t matter.

He was at it the other day, making that call just before the press conference, blowing hot and cold, actually trying to undermine-or so it seemed-the whole event. And it was the same up in his apartment that time, the way Howley was ushered into the fucking kitchen and then more or less dismissed after twenty minutes.

Mind games.

The ultimate example of which, of course, is this business with the “black file.” Howley has wondered on more than one occasion recently if Vaughan wasn’t in the grip of some form of creeping dementia, but not after that.

It was too calculated, and controlling.

However, there was one thing about the other day that puzzled Howley and that he thought about a lot over the weekend. He even discussed it with Jessica.

The boys at Eiben?

This new medication Vaughan is on?

It was the second time the old man had mentioned it, and it seemed to be something he was genuinely excited about. It also seemed to be something that was outside his normal arena of calculation and control-this despite the glaring fact that Eiben-Chemcorp was actually one of the companies listed in the file.

It was almost as if mentioning this new medication he was on had been a slip of the tongue, and therefore, in Howley’s view of things, a demonstration of weakness. Possible demonstration, at any rate. It was certainly worth looking into, certainly worth rearranging his first official lunch for.

As he’s leaving the office to meet Paul Blanford at the Four Seasons, Angela tells Howley that a producer from Bloomberg has called to schedule a meeting for tomorrow morning. Howley is pleased about this. Putting down his marker as Oberon’s new leader in a TV interview-something Vaughan would never have done-seems to him the right way to go about things.

He sets a time for the meeting with Angela. Then, just as he’s turning to go, he asks her to draw up a list of interior designers who specialize in executive office suites.

It’s not the dingy rooms, or the long soulless dingy corridors, or the oppressive rattling dingy elevator cars, Frank doesn’t mind those, but he wishes he’d picked a different hotel, in a different neighborhood. The Bromley-midtown, near Seventh Avenue-is rube central, the obvious place you’d pick on the map if you were heading to that New York City for the first time and had tickets to see a show.

But he’s not going to change hotels now. It’d be too much hassle. Not that it actually would be any hassle. All he’s got by way of stuff is the few things he accumulated this morning on a quick trip to the nearest Duane Reade.

It’d be a hassle in the sense that breathing is a hassle.

But the relative anonymity is working.

Because who’d think to look for him here? And apparently people are looking for him. He’s had voice messages on his cell and on his phone in Mahopac, all from journalists and TV booking agents wanting to get him to open up and talk. He’s also spoken to Deb more than once today, and each time the subject was raised-Victoria Hannahoe wants to do a follow-up interview and thinks maybe this time Frank should come on.

Frank tries really hard to make his “no” not sound like a primal scream. Also, he doesn’t have any idea where to begin trying to understand what Deb is thinking.

So he doesn’t.

The only reason he’s keeping the channel open is because he needs the information-what’s going on, what is the FBI saying, when will the body be released.

Lloyd has been the point man in all of this, and Frank is grateful to him. He’s always hated Lloyd, resented him, been unable to bear the sight of him, and now he just thinks, thank fuck for Lloyd.

When he got up this morning, Frank quickly found himself entangled in the illusion of being “busy.” He took a shower and shaved. He went out to get something to eat. He bought that stuff at the Duane Reade. Every few minutes he stopped and checked his phone. At a newsstand he picked up a New York Times and a Post. He walked around looking for somewhere to go through them. He found a place, a bench in Bryant Park, and sat down. He scanned the papers and read anything in them that was relevant. And just beneath the surface of all this-in his mind, in the pit of his stomach-there was a faint, constant thrum of expectation.

But expectation of what?

It didn’t take him long to realize that nothing was going to happen, at least nothing that he might want to happen. And he was going to have to keep reminding himself of this. Because otherwise, he’d go insane.

By the middle of the afternoon, however, he feels that he already has. The shapelessness, the lack of purpose, is inescapable. On the way back to his room, going through the lobby of the Bromley, he passes a group of German tourists. They look like intrepid explorers, with their maps, windbreakers, mustaches, and accents-confident, curious, ready for whatever lies in the undiscovered country ahead.

And yet he feels like the visiting alien.

In the elevator, alone, he presses the button for ten. On the way up, he doesn’t know what it is, maybe it’s the motion, maybe it’s a combination of that and the disorientating effect of the infinity mirrors, but something seems to dislodge deep inside him and he lurches sideways, simultaneously whimpering and gulping, unsure if he’s going to fall over, cry, or puke. He does none of these, but when he gets out of the car, escaping the mirrors, and is hobbling down the corridor toward his room, doors flickering left and right, he feels sure there’ll be some toll to pay for this, and a physical one.

When he gets to his room he hesitates, standing just inside the door, but then rushes into the bathroom and throws up. He spends the next twenty minutes sitting on the toilet, eyes closed, head in his hands, squirming, grunting in pain, as his insides twist and coil.

He imagines, when he’s finished, that this was some kind of psychosomatic delaying mechanism.

Because it was either his tear ducts or his gut.

And, at some level, an executive decision was taken.

Avoidance, repression.

Misdirection.

Except that he knows what’s going on. He understands how it works. It’s just that he can’t control it.

He could stage an intervention. Raid the minibar, infuse some alcohol into the equation. That would loosen things up.

But is it what he wants?

Because he knows that if he goes from thinking to feeling, if he hits that switch, there’ll be no turning back, and no telling where he’ll end up.

Talk about an undiscovered country.

He comes out of the bathroom and lies on the bed. He stares up at the ceiling. What he thinks he wants, before he surrenders, is to properly understand. And right now he doesn’t. Right now, despite the blanket nature of the media coverage, everything he sees or reads seems hopelessly superficial, each fact and opinion recycled, mediated, meme’d, so that he never feels any of it is actually about his daughter…

He can’t relate to the person they’re describing.

And he needs to.

Because where’s Lizzie in all of this?

Probably what Frank needs to do is talk to the people who were close to her, the friends she hung out with, the ones who knew what she was like and what she was into-the ones who can tell him if she really was, if she’d really turned into, some kind of extreme… militant activist.

The only problem is, that will mean going back up to Atherton, and he isn’t ready to do that yet.

After a while, a thought strikes him.

Who did Ellen Dorsey meet when she was up there? What, if anything, did she find out? She told him some stuff in that bar, but he can’t remember any of the details. And in the car on the way down here, he did most of the talking.

He slides over and sits on the side of the bed.

What does she know? What can she tell him?

It’s early evening, neither of them particularly wants a drink, so they meet in a diner. It’s on Ninth Avenue between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth, a real dive, but Ellen knows the owner, the food is actually good, and they won’t be disturbed.

“What can I get you?”

Frank looks up at the waitress with something like mild panic in his eyes. It’s as if he’s never been in this situation before and he doesn’t know what to do.

“Er…”

He drums his fingers on the table.

Ellen studies him. He looks awful. Tired, pale, shaky. It occurs to her that he probably hasn’t slept or eaten much in the last couple of days.

“The grilled chicken sandwich is good,” she says, to move things along, and on the basis that a grilled chicken sandwich will more than likely fit the bill.

He nods.

“Two, please,” Ellen says to the waitress. “And an iced tea.” She looks at Frank again, and he nods again. “Two.”

They surrender their menus.

The place is nearly empty. They have a booth by the window, looking out onto Ninth.

“Thanks for agreeing to see me.”

“No problem.”

He explained to her on the phone that obviously things had changed since the previous time they’d spoken, that the help he’d needed then was not the help he needed now. That what he needed now was just to ask her a few questions.

Fine by her.

On the way down here she tried to anticipate what those questions might be, but she couldn’t really settle on anything. What did he expect from her? As soon as he starts, though, it all begins to make sense. He talks for five minutes straight, articulately, and through his obvious exhaustion, and pain, mapping out in detail what he refers to, with sphincter-grinding restraint, as his “dilemma.”

His need to understand before he can grieve.

Their food and iced teas arrive. The waitress distributes plates and glasses. They murmur their thanks.

Ellen welcomes the brief interval.

She’s curious. Frank hasn’t actually asked his questions yet, even though it’s clear to her now what they will be. But the thing she’s wondering is, doesn’t he have anyone else to talk to? She gets it about the ex-wife. But doesn’t he have any friends he can confide in, the way he’s just confided in her? She’s good at talking to people, at getting them to open up to her, she knows that, but this is hardcore.

Reaching for his iced tea, Frank looks at her, and it’s as if he can hear what she’s thinking.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

“This. The long preamble. I haven’t really been able to talk to anyone. Since the other day.” He sips the tea. “It’s funny, you know. When I was working-as an architect, I mean-all my friends were architects, or in that world, and when you lose that, the work, when you get kicked out on your ass, you lose the friends as well. No one wants to get infected. And hanging out with other people who got canned isn’t much of an option either.”

She nods along. “I know. It’s more or less the same with journalism. I’ve seen it happen.”

“Yeah. So. Anyway.” He puts the glass down. “Here’s the thing. That’s not my daughter I’ve been reading about for the last two days. Political activist? Militant?” He shakes his head. “Lizzie was a bright kid, but she… I never once…” He seems reluctant to pin it down. “She wasn’t interested in politics.”

“Maybe so,” Ellen says, “but this was a lot more than politics. Plus, she was at college. Shit happens at college. People change, they get into stuff.”

“I know. I know. But-” He looks out the window, and then back at Ellen. “That’s what I wanted to ask you. Who you spoke to up there, what you heard, if you met anyone or saw anything. I know you told me some of this stuff at that bar, but I wasn’t exactly at my most focused.”

She thinks about this for a moment. The thing is, Ellen’s understanding of what happened is that Lizzie became central to events only when she spoke to the negotiator. Up to then it was all about the Coadys. They were the ones who carried out the shootings, who had a backstory and a supposed motive. Lizzie was just the girlfriend. She barely figured. But then she spoke, she read out those demands-this girl, this kid-and suddenly the story lit up like a fucking pinball machine… out here, in the media, but maybe in there as well, in the apartment. Maybe Lizzie’s real involvement started right at that point, when she answered the phone, and once she got involved there was no route back. Once she voiced those demands, it was an easy next step to picking up the gun and pulling the trigger. Though why she was the one who answered the phone in the first place, and read out the demands, is-and probably forever will remain-a mystery.

But is that what Frank Bishop wants to hear?

Probably not.

In any case, it’s only a theory-pieced together from her conversations with Val Brady and others, from what she’s read and from her general feel for these things, her instincts as a journalist.

And she may be wrong about all of it.

Besides, he didn’t ask for her opinion.

“Well,” she says, deciding to simply lay out the facts for him, “I did speak to a few people at Atherton. But remember, when I went there I didn’t have any names, and Lizzie’s only came up at the very end, which is why I went chasing after you.” She stops and glances for a second down at her grilled chicken sandwich. “It was what I found in the library, and in the archives, that led me to Julian Coady’s name. And this was stuff that more or less underpinned what they were about, what they did. In an ideological sense.”

Frank looks at her. “Ideological? Really?”

“Well… yeah.” Ellen is aware that a lot of the big-name protest groups have been dissociating themselves from anything to do with the Coadys and Lizzie Bishop, almost as if the whole thing were an embarrassment to them. Much has been made-in certain quarters-of the list of demands and how naive, or generic, or even just derivative, it was. But actually, on reflection, there was nothing that Ellen came across in the Atherton Chronicle pieces, in the radio interviews, in the opinions expressed on the Stone Report or by Farley Kaplan, that was in any way inconsistent with mainstream activist thought. The only dividing line-apart maybe from tone, and register, and levels of paranoia-was the question of whether or not the use of violence could be justified, and that question was as old as the hills. She turns and looks out the window, at a passing limo, a black streak of light on the avenue. “I don’t know,” she then says. “They certainly put a lot of thought into what they were doing.”

“They?”

Ellen hesitates, then picks up her sandwich and takes a bite out of it.

“Yes,” she says, chewing and nodding. “Look, there were three of them. They were in that apartment together, and for a week. During which time two, nearly three, assassinations were carried out. That didn’t just happen. They talked about this stuff, they planned it. And probably for months.” She puts her sandwich back on the plate, realizing that she’s straying here from hard fact, drifting back to opinion. But it’s difficult not to do. “Alex and Lizzie were a couple, Frank. And Alex and Julian were brothers. In and out of each other’s lives. However misguided it was, what they did was planned. It also didn’t come out of thin air, it was based on… stuff they were exposed to. Ideological stuff. They weren’t just going around shooting people randomly. This was a program.”

“What do you mean?”

Ellen pauses, thinking. She picks up a french fry.

Dips it in ketchup.

He’s staring at her, waiting.

In all the coverage of the shootings she’s read, seen, or heard, the victims have been referred to simply as Wall Street bankers-they’ve been lumped together into one easily identifiable, monolithic group.

But-

Her coverage, if she’d gotten to do any, would have been more specific, more nuanced.

“What do I mean?” she says. “They had a program worked out. Of assassinations. They weren’t just randomly shooting bankers. They wanted one from each of the three pillars of the system… one guy from an investment bank, one guy from a hedge fund, and one guy from a private equity firm. They got two and narrowly missed the third, the private equity guy.”

She pops the french fry into her mouth.

Frank continues staring at her. She wants to nod at his chicken sandwich and say, Come on, eat up, but the moment isn’t right.

“How do you know this?” he says quietly. “Are you guessing?”

“No.”

She’s guessing to some degree-about the dynamics in the apartment, about what went on between Julian and Alex and Lizzie. But she’s not guessing about their overall plan. She explains to Frank about ath900 and Farley Kaplan’s interview on What Up?

He seems stunned. It’s a level of detail he hasn’t heard from anyone else.

“The cops,” he says, “the authorities, the FBI, they’ve all been really cagey about telling us anything.”

“That’s pretty normal, I’m afraid. But this is stuff I came across by myself.” She picks up her iced tea and takes a sip. “The FBI possibly doesn’t even know any of this yet. They came to the case by a different route. They had an informant, apparently. Inside the group Julian was associated with. We just happened to converge.”

There’s a lengthy silence here, during which Frank, head down, seems to be processing what Ellen has told him.

“Come on,” she says, taking her chances. “Eat up.”

He glances at the sandwich, and shrugs.

“You look like shit, Frank. If you don’t take care of yourself you’re going to get sick.”

He raises his head. “The private equity guy?”

“Yeah?” She gives a quick, puzzled shake of her head. “What about him? Scott Lebrecht. Black Vine Partners. The one that got away.”

“Black Vine Partners. What do they do?”

Ellen is the one who shrugs this time.

“I don’t know. Private equity. LBOs. Asset stripping. They buy companies with debt, fire the employees, dump their pension funds, suck all the cash out, and then… skedaddle. It’s not how they’d portray it, but…”

There is another silence. She studies his face, his eyes. He’s lost in thought.

She nudges his plate across the table, just an inch or so.

“Don’t want to sound like your mother, Frank, but Jesus, eat something, will you?”

He looks at her, then nods. “Yeah, okay.” He lifts the sandwich up off the plate and takes a bite.

She does the same.

They eat in silence for a while, chewing solemnly, gazing out at the passing traffic on Ninth Avenue.

The next morning, Howley has his meeting with the producer from Bloomberg, and they set things up for late on Friday afternoon. It’ll be a wide-ranging interview with, by agreement, no holds barred, but no real surprises either. He intends to mount a general and fairly robust defense of private equity, he’ll talk up some deals that are in the pipeline, and he’ll lay out his position vis-à-vis any prospect there might be of an IPO. He’s done TV before and knows what they want, knows what tone to adopt. He’s not one of the flamboyant guys, he’s not charismatic, so it’ll be a question of slipping his message in under a cloak of unprepossessing middle-aged baldness and cautious, dense, meandering syntax.

It’s a reflex thing, but Howley feels he should be running all of this by Vaughan. He’s not going to, of course. They’ve moved beyond that-or, at any rate, are in the process of doing so.

Apropos of which, lunch with Paul Blanford yesterday proved to be very interesting. Howley knew Paul years ago through a Pentagon connection, and although they hadn’t been friends exactly or done any formal business together, enough of a mutual impression remained for Howley to be able to get Blanford’s attention and then bear down fairly heavily on him. The fact that Oberon once owned Eiben-Chemcorp certainly made things easier-but without the personal link Howley wouldn’t have been able to cut quite as straight to the chase with Blanford as he did. He circled the issue for a while and then dived in by expressing “deep concern” about a possible breach of protocols at Eiben that had just been brought to his attention. It was in relation to a particular set of clinical trials, he said, and this was especially worrying in the light of a recent DOJ investigation into how pharmaceutical companies were carrying out these very sorts of trials.

Blanford was dumbfounded and wanted to know more. He wanted to know exactly what Howley was talking about.

Howley wasn’t about to oblige at this point, but what he did was remind Blanford that Eiben-Chemcorp was no stranger to this kind of thing. There were various instances he could have cited here, most of them taking place long before Blanford’s time. In the early days of Triburbazine, for example, there was a damaging product liability trial involving a Massachusetts teenager who murdered her best friend and then killed herself; there was the botched takeover of Mediflux amid allegations of research results being suppressed; and there was the more recent scandal of widespread résumé fraud by a CRO hired by Eiben. But what Howley chose to cite instead was something he himself had read about just days earlier in Vaughan’s “black file”-those disturbing rumors from about ten years ago of a so-called smart drug called MDT-48 being leaked onto the streets with rather alarming consequences. The reason Vaughan had brought this story, among others, to Howley’s attention was to illustrate what a bad idea going public would be. Back then the Oberon Capital Group had sold Eiben-Chemcorp in the full knowledge that these rumors were about to break, and had then brazenly shorted the buyer’s stock-hardly the kind of trading practices that would bear much public scrutiny.

The reason that Howley was now bringing the story to Blanford’s attention, however, was quite different. In the current climate, any hint of another such scandal could easily destroy a company like Eiben, and at the very least they’d be stung for a couple of billion in fines.

So what he wanted to do was scare the shit out of him.

Phase one.

And it worked.

As far as Blanford was concerned the whole thing had come out of the blue, leaving him not only scared but also confused and compliant, which was just what Howley wanted, because without having to offer an explanation, or mention Vaughan by name, he was then able to suggest that Blanford take a close look at any clinical trials Eiben might be conducting on new drugs for geriatrics.

And to get back to him on it ASAP.

Simple as that.

Howley isn’t even sure where this might lead, but he feels he’s being proactive. He doesn’t want any surprises.

He doesn’t like surprises.

The Bloomberg guy leaves, and Howley calls Angela in. He has a few minutes before his next meeting, and he wants to see how far along she is with her list of office designers.

12

BY TUESDAY EVENING FRANK HAS SKIMMED THROUGH MOST OF THE BOOKS HE BOUGHT. They’re lying on the bed or in small piles on the floor, probably about fifteen in all. He acquired them in three separate spurts of enthusiasm (or delusion?)-each trip out from the hotel to the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue a desperate attempt to shore up his developing but still fragile understanding of the financial crisis, each new title he came across a hit from the crack pipe, an opening up of possibilities, a tingling promise of illumination. On his last trip out he also stopped off at a liquor store and got himself a bottle of Stoli.

Promises, promises.

The one book he keeps coming back to-although there’s no real prospect that he’ll get to grips with it right now, or possibly ever, because the damn thing is over eight hundred and fifty pages long-is Murray Rheingarten’s The Dominion of Debt: Financial Disambiguation in an Age of Crisis. Over and over he reads the blurb and the press reviews and the introduction and the chapter headings, he flicks through its capacious, deckled pages, its dense, labyrinthine prose, catching random names and phrases, picking up the sense each time, tantalizingly-like having a word on the tip of your tongue-that deep inside here somewhere, if only he could find and unravel it, is the key to the whole thing, the answer. He feels if he could only persevere, and concentrate, and focus, he could extract from these endless blocks of print an explanation of what happened to everyone that will explain what happened to Lizzie.

Some of the other books are easier, or seem so at first-Wall Street Crash (And Burn), Money Down, Goldman Sachs and the End of the World-but with most of them it doesn’t take Frank long to see that they’re too specialized, too technical, too detailed in an area he doesn’t quite need to go to. These books vie with one another for the accolade “clearest account so far of the crisis,” but twenty pages into each one and you’re predictably neck-deep in jargon and graphs, in credit default swaps and bogus triple-A-rated securities.

What got him started on this was something Ellen Dorsey said the other night. They were standing outside that diner on Ninth Avenue, about to go their separate ways, when he remarked one more time that he just didn’t understand what Lizzie had been thinking.

“Maybe it wasn’t such a mystery,” Ellen said. “I mean, look at that list of demands they made. They were pissed off at the bankers and the money guys. Like a lot of people. And once you follow that stuff, or try to understand it, which Lizzie and the others had obviously been doing, it’s hard not to… respond. I guess it’s just a question of how you choose to do it.”

Walking back to the hotel, Frank turned this over in his mind. Is that really what Lizzie had been thinking? She was angry? She was indignant? It was hard for Frank to see his daughter in this way-as someone who was independent, informed, and politically aware. Possibly because of the divorce and the years of minimal contact, his image of her was stuck back in the early teen years.

She was his little girl.

Sweet, smart, spiky… vulnerable, but also belligerent-a dangerous combination, but what Frank had to face now was that these were characteristics Lizzie had obviously carried with her into adulthood, and that if he wanted to understand her, it would have to be on her terms.

The other thing he realized walking along Fifty-fourth Street was that he himself wasn’t really angry or indignant. This was probably because he knew next to nothing about the financial crisis. Sure, he’d read the papers and watched the news and shared a certain amount of received indignation, he’d rolled his eyes and passed remarks like everyone else, he’d been appalled at the numbers, he’d seen the ripple effect in the economy, he’d lost his motherfucking job, for Christ’s sake-but he hadn’t ever focused on what had actually been happening, he hadn’t tried to figure any of it out. When he was at Belmont, McCann he’d been too busy working, trying to hold on to his job, and after he got laid off he’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself and scrambling around to find a new source of income. In other words, like a lot of people, he’d been too inward-looking and self-absorbed to pay attention.

So when he got near the hotel he went into what was now his local Duane Reade and bought a few magazines, business titles-Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist-with the vague intention of boning up on the crisis. But it didn’t take him long-back in his hotel room, flicking through these glossy, ad-heavy mags-to understand that there was a closed lingo here, that a lot was taken for granted, and that he’d have to dig a little deeper. His laptop was in the apartment in Mahopac. There were one or two Internet cafés near the hotel, but they seemed really busy and touristy, and he couldn’t see himself sitting in one of those for too long-or in the business center here in the hotel lobby. What he did was go out and head for the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue, where he stood for a while in front of what turned out to be a dedicated section, a display actually called “Understanding the Crisis.”

The weightiest and most hyped book here seemed to be The Dominion of Debt, so he picked that one up first, along with Money Down and a copy of Galbraith’s The Great Crash, 1929. Back in his room, he started reading, but was soon switching from one book to another, growing ever more impatient, constantly suspecting that he was reading the wrong one, that the books he’d bought were the wrong ones, that all the learning and illumination were happening somewhere else.

The next morning he went back to the Barnes & Noble, to the now altar-like “Understanding the Crisis” display, and loaded up on more tomes with urgent-sounding titles such as Financial Catastrophe 101 and Buddy, Can You Spare a Trillion Dollars? The same thing happened, and he made a third trip in the afternoon-stopping at that liquor store on his way back.

Now, as evening settles in, he feels simultaneously gorged and empty. He admits he’s learned some stuff, but really, more questions are raised by what he’s been reading here than answers. He detects in himself a growing resentment, too, an anger even, about what he’s discovering. But there’s a muffled quality to it, a reticence. What’s driving him first and foremost is this obsessive curiosity, this burning need to know what Lizzie knew.

To see what Lizzie saw.

He hasn’t opened the Stoli yet, and he mightn’t.

He looks around the room.

These books and magazines are all very well, but what he could really use here is Internet access, high-octane hyperlinks to take him where he needs to go. Someone mentions Bretton Woods? Glass-Steagall? Jekyll Island? Fine, he can go there, follow the thread, not be confined to the impenetrable thickets of some forty-page chapter on collateralized mortgage obligations. Because it seems to Frank that the financial crisis of 2008-its origins stretching back over decades, its aftermath unfolding into the foreseeable future-is a huge, unwieldy subject, a web of interconnecting narratives that cannot be contained in a single text or contemplated at a single glance.

He thinks about this for a while and then just heads straight out. There’s a place he’s passed on Forty-eighth Street called Café Zero, and that’s where he goes. With so many free Wi-Fi hotspots around now, these dedicated Internet cafés are becoming a thing of the past-but this one is still pretty busy, and although he’s not comfortable here, he settles in at a table and starts surfing.

He goes to Google and types in “Glass-Steagall Act.”

In less than a tenth of a second more than two million results come up.

It’s a foggy night in the early spring of 1865 and he’s crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot-vaguely aware somehow that construction of the bridge will not in fact be commencing for another five years-when he bumps into a tall, gaunt man in a frock coat and a shiny top hat. Then, curiously, and without any warning at all, it’s 1915 and the two men are in an IRT train, rattle-tattling, lights flickering, hurtling over the bridge, the president fumbling in his pocket for a greenback-

Vaughan says, “Sir, I-I-”

“Sshhh… listen to me now, don’t… don’t tell anyone about…”

Hhhnnn.

“Don’t-”

Hhhnnnn.

He opens his eyes. Looks around. Shit. That was intense.

He shakes his head.

Vivid, lucid, almost hyper-real.

It was like…

He glances around the room, at the red leather armchairs, and the bookshelves, at the Persian rug and the Matisse. He holds up his old, soft, mottled hand and stares at it.

Like this… like reality itself.

But it’s not only his dreams-ones he might have dozing off for ten minutes in the library, say, as he’s just done now, or denser, longer ones fresh in his head after waking in the morning-it’s his memories, too. These are more directed, and rational, which is hardly surprising, but they’re just as vivid and cinematic. He can glide back over past times and recall details he would never normally have access to. In the last couple of days, for instance, he’s had a flood of memories from the late 1950s-that office he had in the Century Building, with its art deco fittings, walnut and ebony throughout, and those baggy, double-breasted suits he used to wear. And that sterling silver cigarette case he had, that Kitty gave him… with the ribbed pattern on the outside and the gilt yellow swirled finish on the inside…

Shit.

When was the last time he thought about that?

In a reverie now, he stares into space.

Transported back.

Of course, in those days he was constantly at war with the old man.

He can just see him, striding into the office in his vicuña overcoat, declaiming, waving his cigar around.

The generally held view back then was that William J. Vaughan was a great man, a business titan of the old school who’d be a hard act for his son to follow. But really, what was so great about him? Apart from his one big coup in 1929, what did he ever achieve? The fact is that all through the thirties, forties, and fifties William J. oversaw the steady decline of the family business, undoing through recklessness and negligence everything his own father had ever done to build it up (before dropping dead during a recital in Carnegie Hall in 1938). And yet because he was this big personality who played golf with cardinals and fucked movie stars he was perceived by everyone to be a great success.

Vaughan sighs.

Enough.

He stands up out of the chair and straightens his jacket.

The ironic thing is that this… this clarity has only kicked in over the last few days, a week at most. It’s ironic because that’s more or less when he decided to call it a day. He’d been so tired, and sick most of the time, that it seemed pointless to continue. Everything was in place, and all he had to do was set things in train.

Which he did.

But then, as arrangements for the press conference were being finalized, this new medication he’s been on suddenly started to work-the dreams, the vivid memories, but also renewed energy and a general feeling of well-being. He wasn’t really going to go sailing in Palm Beach, that was just to yank Craig Howley’s chain, nor was he serious last night when he hinted to Meredith that he wouldn’t say no to a blowjob-but… these ideas didn’t come out of thin air either.

He is feeling better and stronger.

And he doesn’t care one whit that the medication is untested, and possibly dangerous.

It’s worth it.

Because we’re all going to die, so what difference does it make? When he first got sick in his mid-seventies he figured, not unreasonably, that his days were numbered, that death was probably just around the corner. But it proved to be a long, wide corner, a half-moon crescent of a thing that just wouldn’t quit-and now, nearly ten years later, here he is, still alive, still breathing, still on various medications. The thing is, most of his friends and contemporaries are dead, he’s attended a lot of funerals, looked into a lot of graves, but if anything, his sense of his own mortality has blurred somewhat, and dimmed. It’s like, alright, already, he’s gone through the scary phase, worrying about it day and night, shitting himself over it-and now he’s come out the other side. If he’s still here, then he’s still here. He doesn’t want to have to waste any more time thinking about it.

So, about a month ago, when he had a chance conversation with Jerome Hale, former head of research at Eiben-Chemcorp, Vaughan decided he was going to take some positive action. Hale was talking about what he believed Eiben currently had in the pipeline, a suite of in-development products that were offshoots of MDT-48, a designer smart drug that had nearly destroyed the company about a decade earlier when a batch was siphoned out of the lab and found its way onto the streets. MDT was way too powerful and dangerous a drug ever to find a place in the mainstream commercial market, but researchers at Eiben had been trying ever since to develop second-generation and much-toned-down versions-one of which, apparently, according to Hale, was targeted at geriatrics and was reputed to combat a range of conditions, including extreme fatigue and dementia. He added that this was still years away from even going to first-phase clinical trials, but wasn’t it interesting?

By which he meant, given their own involvement in these events all those years ago-his as head of research and Vaughan’s as proprietor of the parent company.

Vaughan nodded in agreement, yes, for sure-but he actually found it much more interesting than that. Without telling Jerry Hale what he was doing, he proceeded to track down an old contact who still worked at Eiben, and then, using a combination of arm-twisting, outright intimidation, and eye-watering amounts of money, he managed to coax a sample out of the Eiben lab.

First he was warned about possible side effects. Then he was told that the formula required a buildup in the system and not to expect any results for at least a week. But when nothing had happened after two, and with his general condition deteriorating rapidly, Vaughan sort of resigned himself to the inevitable and triggered the succession process with Howley.

And then, go figure, the medication kicked in.

Originally given enough for a month, he now has less than a week’s supply left.

Which is an issue he’ll have to address very soon.

Vaughan wanders out of the library. He went in there to take a quick nap. Normally at this time of the day, after lunch, he’ll go to bed for at least an hour and sleep soundly. He’ll then spend another hour fighting grogginess and trying to reconstitute himself so he can function for the remainder of the day. Recently, though, he’s finding that ten minutes in an armchair is all he needs, and that no recovery time is required either.

The only problem now-given that he’s officially, ironic air quotes, retired-is that he doesn’t have anything to do.

As he moves along the floor of the hallway, with its mother-of-pearl-encrusted black marble tiles, he taps out a quick, slightly giddy soft-shoe shuffle.

He’ll have to see about that, though, won’t he?

On his way to the Bloomberg studios on Friday afternoon, Craig Howley flicks through his notes. He likes to be prepared, to have a sprinkling of figures and statistics at the ready. It won’t be a hard interview, in the sense that he won’t be asked any particularly hard questions, but he does want to get certain points across, and that can sometimes be hard to do without coming off like a used-car salesman.

He also flicks through his datebook. Normally at this time of year he and Jessica go to the country on weekends, but with the Kurtzmann Foundation benefit happening on Monday night, Jess is up to her eyes in last-minute arrangements, so she’s staying put. He will, too.

Maybe catch up on some reading.

He glances out the window. They’re on Lexington, the Tower just a couple of blocks away.

As he’s gathering up his notes and papers, his phone rings.

It’s Paul Blanford.

Howley’s done a little extra homework since their lunch earlier in the week-on Eiben-Chemcorp, on its board, on the sector in general-and he’s fairly sure now that he’s got Blanford by the balls. As CEO, Blanford has been perfectly adequate, but with the company’s $47 billion in annual sales built on blockbuster drugs such as Narolet and Triburbazine-drugs whose patents are due to expire in the near future-the board is, well, pretty jumpy. What’s more, Howley knows of at least three members who are said to be unhappy with the CEO’s performance. Any public hint of another R &D leak, therefore, and it’d be curtains for Blanford.

“Paul?”

“Craig. How are you?”

“I’m good. Any luck with that thing?”

“Not yet, but I’m all over it, believe me. I just need another couple of days.”

The key thing here is, while Howley can ostensibly hold out knowledge of this leak as a threat, what he really wants is the same thing Blanford wants, for the leak to be plugged. But as long as Blanford has no idea what Howley’s interest is, and as long as he’s reluctant to ask about it, which he clearly is, Howley feels he has the advantage. Full disclosure-i.e., any mention of Vaughan’s involvement-would transfer some of that advantage back to Blanford, and while this is probably inevitable, it’s something Howley wants to put off until the last possible moment.

First, however, they need to find the leak.

“Why is it taking so long?” he asks.

“Well, R &D is our biggest division, Craig, and I can’t just charge around the place making accusations. You know that.” Blanford has a rep for being nonconfrontational, so this can’t be easy for him. “I mean, I have put out some feelers, but it’s a tricky one.”

This isn’t the way Howley would handle it, but he doesn’t have the time to argue his point now. “You know where to reach me, Paul.”

The car pulls into the public plaza of Bloomberg Tower, Howley is met by the producer and a couple of assistants, and they all head inside.

He is shepherded through makeup and then onto the set for a quick sound check. After a few minutes, the show’s host, Rob Melrose, appears, and they chat briefly. The atmosphere is relaxed, the studio bright and spacious, unlike pretty much every other studio Howley’s ever been in.

Someone adjusts his mike, and before he knows it the interview has started.

Rob Melrose’s style is direct and quite dynamic, but he’s also respectful-and, in Howley’s case, maybe even a little deferential.

The first few minutes they spend on private equity and its image problems.

“There’s no denying it, it’s a tough time for the industry,” Howley says in his now almost trademarked whisper. “Because the fact is, Rob, not all deals work out, and it’s pretty easy to highlight the ones that don’t, and make a song and dance about them, but really, the numbers should speak for themselves. I’m talking about the number of jobs created, proportion-wise compared to in the general economy, three-point-nine percent compared to one-point-two percent last year alone, I’m talking about returns for investors and pension funds, and about availability of growth capital for new companies, I mean it just goes on and on.”

“But the negativity is there,” Melrose says, swiveling on his stool and flicking the back of his hand at his silver laptop, as if to indicate all the hard data he has on his screen, “so what effect is that going to have on the Oberon Capital Group, what effect is it going to have on Craig Howley?”

“Well, you’re right, Rob, there is negativity, and unfortunately, for a time, that’s going to make it harder for companies like Oberon to raise funds, and to buy companies, and ultimately to create new jobs…”

And… yadda, yadda, yadda.

Okay, Howley can admit it to himself, he was slightly nervous coming on to do this interview, but sitting here now, under the lights, large bot-like cameras hovering on the periphery of his vision, he suddenly feels totally relaxed.

He knows this stuff.

There isn’t a single question Rob Melrose could put to him that he wouldn’t be able to answer-comprehensively, and with more wit and depth than they could ever have time for on a show like this. All he needs now is a nice little segue into his IPO spiel and his work here will be done.

“Let me throw something else at you,” Melrose then says. “This whole question of going public, it’s pretty much a hot button issue at the moment, to file or not to file, pitching to investors, how much stock to offer, how low or high to set the price, the whole crazy roller-coaster ride. Where does Craig Howley stand?”

“Well, Rob,” Howley says, looking directly at him now, and smiling, “I’m glad you asked me that…”

“… because it’s been on my mind a lot recently, but you know, having a stock ticker isn’t necessarily a panacea. Sure, it’s a good way to raise cash, but to be frank, that wouldn’t be one of our core concerns right now. And I like the idea of being able to stay agile, especially in the current climate-”

“Keeping it lean and mean.”

“Maybe not the term I’d use, Rob, but yes, and there’s a certain tyranny about the quarterly report, you know, about having to meet analysts’ expectations and forecasts, where you end up romancing the markets instead of looking after your LPs…”

“Romancing the markets? Fuck you, you prick.”

Frank takes another swig from the now half-empty bottle of Stoli and replaces it on the bedside unit.

The arrogance of this baldy fuck on the screen, with his barely audible, breathy delivery is something else.

Romancing the markets?

If it wasn’t so tragic, it’d be funny.

But a word like that certainly sticks out, because most of the time what you hear on these business cable shows-the language they use, the jargon-is impenetrable. It’s also mind-numbingly boring, and this is probably deliberate.

Because they…

They obfuscate.

That’s the word.

He burps, and pats his bare chest.

They operate in secrecy and darkness and hide behind arcane terminology.

“… more or less what you get when credit spreads blow out, when correlations go to one…”

Listen to him.

Laid out in front of Frank on the bed are a couple of books open at specific pages, some magazine pieces, and printouts from the various websites he’s been visiting. A part of him expects all of this material to pull into focus suddenly, to coalesce into a neat revelation, a mathematical formula almost. But another part of him knows it’s not going to happen, that this stuff is too diffuse, the connections too tenuous, the hunger for order and meaning-his hunger-too acute and voracious to possibly accommodate any degree of reasoned argument or criticism, any anomalies or pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit.

The truth is, over the last two days, much of it spent in Café Zero, Frank has been sliding into a quicksand of unverified and largely unverifiable… what? He hesitates to describe it as information.

White noise?

All he was looking for was an answer, an explanation, a grand unified field theory, something or someone to focus on and blame. What he got instead was an ever-widening gyre of speculation and paranoia-from Alan Greenspan to Ayn Rand, from the securitization of subprime mortgages to the payment of German war reparations, from LIBOR to Jekyll Island… from JFK’s infamous executive order skewering the Fed to Abraham Lincoln being assassinated by a cabal of international bankers because he insisted on printing his own debt-free legal tender to pay for the war.

From the New World Order to the Book of Revelation.

He didn’t know how or where to stop and ended up with a splitting headache, stomach cramps, and a sore back. Sometime late in the afternoon he gave up and came back to the hotel. He stripped and crawled into the shower.

When he got out after about twenty minutes he checked his phone, which he’d left in the room all day. He had half a dozen messages from Deb, a couple from Lenny Byron, and one from Ellen Dorsey. He didn’t reply to any of them.

He didn’t feel up to it.

Wearing only boxer shorts, he flopped back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling for a while.

Then he got off the bed, grabbed the unopened bottle of Stoli from the dresser, opened it, and took a slug.

Deciding that surrender wasn’t an option, he sorted once again through the books and magazines he’d bought, and the articles he’d had printed at Café Zero. He spread some of them out on the bed, trying to conjure up a pattern, a meaning.

He continued taking belts of vodka directly from the bottle.

At one point, in need of further sensory stimulation, he reached over for the remote and flicked the TV on. He whipped through a few channels, dismissing each one in turn. But then he found himself pausing and staring at this guy, Craig Howley. It wasn’t so much the Boring Middle-Aged White Guy in a Suit thing that caught his attention, or the awful financial jargon. It was more the words on the screen: DEFENDING PRIVATE EQUITY… which, after a couple of seconds, did actually coalesce into something of a revelation, and quite a neat one, too. Because for all of this time, since last weekend, Frank has been interested in only one thing: finding a wormhole into Lizzie’s mind, and what he suddenly suspected he had here was a wormhole out of it. It’s what Ellen Dorsey was talking about the other night in that diner. The three pillars of the system. One guy from an investment bank, one from a hedge fund, and one from a private equity firm.

They got two and narrowly missed the third.

But knowing how much thought and effort were involved here, knowing how much planning and commitment there was, knowing Lizzie… Frank can’t help thinking that this narrow miss must have preyed on her mind, and that as the siege progressed it must have assumed an ever greater significance for her. Because however she felt about their list of demands-which had surely been improvised, and could only ever have been aspirational anyway-their plan, their statement, their grand gesture… was incomplete.

Did that rankle with Lizzie?

He bets it did.

It’s funny, but when he thinks of her now, he sees a different person. It’s as if she has changed, morphed into someone else. It’s as if she has grown in stature.

He reaches for the bottle of Stoli on the bedside unit and takes another hit from it.

Then he looks at the screen again, at this Craig Howley guy, CEO and chairman of… what are they called? The Oberon Capital Group?

“… the spreads are pretty high and the base rates are low, so you’re picking up a lot of return, basically, for a lack of liquidity.”

It cuts to the host of the show, a handsome, chiseled little prick in his early thirties. “And how about real estate, Craig? Tell us about the opportunities you’re seeing in the sector right now.”

“Oh, this is just an incredible time to be in real estate, Rob.”

“Why?”

“Well, you’ve got all these CMOs that aren’t going to roll over, you’ve got overpriced properties and distressed sellers…”

Frank squeezes the neck of the bottle. He doesn’t understand what Craig Howley is talking about here, not exactly, but he’s picking up a tone, a hint of contained glee, of dog-eat-dog exuberance. Distressed sellers? Cool. Let’s kick these motherfuckers while they’re down.

“… and then you’re streaming into that attractive investment-grade credit market we mentioned earlier.”

“So share with us, Craig, how much has Oberon put into real estate so far this year?”

“I don’t have an exact figure, Rob, but it’s probably several billion, four perhaps, four-point-five.”

“Wow!”

Fuck.

Frank raises the bottle to his lips again.

“Look, it’s a large part of our business. We’re known as a private equity company, but really, we’re a bit more diversified than that.”

“Sure, private equity, real estate, debt and asset management, financial advisory, credit, it’s a long list.”

“It is, and people often think that investment by a company like Oberon means focusing only on short-term returns-”

“The classic strip and flip.”

“Yeah, well,” Howley laughs here, but there’s an edge to the laugh, “again I’d use different language, not that it’s even true anyway… but no, I mean, take an example…” He pauses. “Take any company in our portfolio.”

He stops to think for a moment.

Frank breathes in deeply, his head spinning ever so slightly. Half a bottle of Stoli? Straight up? If it weren’t for his accelerated adrenaline flow, his extra nervous energy, he’d be unconscious by this stage, or in a pool of his own vomit. He glances down at the bottle in his hand and feels his stomach lurch.

Oh, Jesus.

No self-fulfilling prophecies, please.

“Yes,” Howley says, nodding, ready to continue. “I mean, consider a company like Paloma Electronics, for instance-”

Frank looks up.

“Great company,” the host says, “consumer electronics, but a lot more besides, am I right? Military and defense contracting, IT, consulting, security.”

Frank is stunned.

“Absolutely, and don’t forget biotech, and robotics-”

“Of course.”

“So yeah, they’re just a super, super company, and we at Oberon are committed to helping them develop and grow, but here’s the thing, Rob, that’s over the long term.”

Frank leans forward on the bed and gulps, reflux vomit coming up into his mouth. He manages to swallow it back.

“Right. Though there have been job losses at Paloma recently, if I’m not mistaken, and a lot of cost cutting?”

“Oh sure, but with any effort to drive stronger performance you’re going to get some element of rationalization.”

It happens again, but this time Frank just lets it out, splats of clear liquid-he hasn’t eaten today-landing all over the bed, on the books and the magazines. In a sort of daze he lets go of the bottle, the remainder of its contents glugging out over his bare leg and making a deep stain on the polyester bedspread.

Fuuuck.

He wipes his mouth and looks back at the TV screen.

He’s focused now, though.

And the first thing he notices is that, okay, Howley’s suit is fine, expensive-looking and all, but at the same time… who chose that fucking shirt? And the tie? The second thing is that this is Ellen’s-Lizzie’s?-Ellen’s… this is the guy that got away.

This is the private equity guy.

The third pillar.

He’s not the guy, okay, he’s not Scott Lebrecht. But that doesn’t matter anymore. He’s actually a better pick-a point that Frank would like nothing better than to be able to hammer out with Lizzie…

He clears his throat and coughs up some grainy, charcoaly phlegm.

Spits it out.

“… in point of fact turmoil is good for private equity…”

And the supreme irony of the situation is that until a few days ago, until a week ago, maybe a bit more-he can’t remember exactly, until whenever-but it turns out that this bland, calculating, vicious, badly-dressed bastard on the screen was his boss…

“… but ultimately, I think, to solve the deficit problem, governments in Europe, and here, governments everywhere-”

All Frank wants to do now is tell Lizzie that, discuss it with her, dissect the irony.

That’s all he wants to do.

“-are going to have to move to the printing presses…”

But what he does instead is pick the empty Stoli bottle up, raise it high, and fling it hard at the flickering TV screen.