Graveland

It was while working in 1878 as an ill-paid scrivener at a dingy law office on Wall Street that Charles A. Vaughan first encountered the fabulously successful financier and speculator Gilbert Morley.

– House of Vaughan (p. 212)

13

THE REFERENCE TO PALOMA ELECTRONICS IS WHAT GETS HER.

It’s weird, she thinks, how all of this stuff seems connected. The only reason she’s watching an overcaffeinated cable news channel like Bloomberg in the first place is because she received an e-mail out of the blue yesterday from Jimmy Gilroy in which he mentioned that Craig Howley was taking over as the new CEO of the Oberon Capital Group.

Not really out of the blue, then.

Which is her point.

Jimmy Gilroy has been researching James Vaughan and Oberon for the last eighteen months, ever since he and Ellen covered the Rundle brothers story together. That was big enough in itself-one of the most spectacular cases of a presidential candidate falling from grace in U.S. history-but Jimmy Gilroy knew that Rundle’s withdrawal from the race was only the outermost ripple of a much darker and more complex set of circumstances. The Rundles’ business in the Congo, for instance, involved the setting up of an illegal supply chain of thanaxite that led all the way to a robotics plant in Connecticut. But when it became apparent to Jimmy that behind that story was a large and very active private equity firm, the Oberon Capital Group, the focus of his interest shifted. It shifted again when he became aware of Oberon’s founder, James Vaughan-of his wide-ranging influence in Washington and of his long, serpentine family history.

So what started out as a proposed series of background articles for Parallax has gradually morphed into a book-length project with the provisional title House of Vaughan-a book that will apparently cover a period stretching back over nearly a century and a half. The only problem is that the project seems to have turned into something of a black hole, and one that Gilroy himself has more or less disappeared headlong into.

Ellen occasionally gets e-mails from him-yesterday’s was the first in several months-but she’s heard other stuff, stories from people in the business, rumors that Gilroy doesn’t have a publisher or any kind of a contract, that he has encountered all sorts of obstacles in getting research done, that he’s been subjected to subtle forms of intimidation and even manipulation, that he’s had to sell his apartment in Dublin to keep going, that he’s had a nervous breakdown, that he hasn’t actually written a single word.

Ellen liked Jimmy Gilroy, and she got on well with him over the few weeks that they ended up working together. But he was young and relatively inexperienced, even a little callow, and when he took off on his initial research jag to the Democratic Republic of Congo she wondered if he’d ever be heard from again.

The occasional e-mails she got from him were reassuring, but they didn’t reveal much.

Yesterday’s revealed a bit more than usual.

It turns out that he’s been living in Brooklyn for the last three months working in a bar and trying to patch his manuscript together.

But go figure is what he seemed to be saying in the e-mail yesterday.

Just as I’m getting somewhere with this book, James Vaughan retires? What, is he going to die on me next? Rendering the book even less relevant than it apparently already is? And his replacement is this boring-as-shit Craig Howley guy? Seriously? Watch him on Bloomberg tomorrow and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

So here she is, watching, and what is it that catches her attention? Craig Howley’s mention of Paloma Electronics is what. This is the company that uses thanaxite to manufacture its military robots in Connecticut. But it’s also the company that Frank Bishop had a retail McJob with until very recently-before he shot his mouth off and got fired, and was then catapulted to national attention when his daughter…

Ellen shakes her head.

She doesn’t know. You see weird connections all the time. They don’t have to mean anything, and they usually don’t. But the result of this particular connection is that she is now thinking about both Jimmy Gilroy and Frank Bishop, and it’s giving her the strangest, weirdest feeling. She doesn’t believe in intuition, not really, except when it shows results, and even then it’s more often than not because you worked pretty hard to achieve those results anyway.

But sometimes…

She hasn’t answered Jimmy Gilroy’s e-mail yet. She gets up from the couch, goes over to her desk, opens up a reply, and starts typing. She says it’s great to hear from him and that they should meet up soon for a drink-that she has some stuff she wants to talk to him about.

What that stuff might be specifically, what form it might take, she’s not quite sure herself yet. But she’s not worried about it.

She presses SEND.

Then she picks up her phone.

She called Frank Bishop earlier in the day and left a message. He never got back to her.

When she saw him on Monday evening he was in pretty bad shape, but there wasn’t much she could do about it, apart from answer his questions. She hadn’t met him to get a story or anything. He’d called her. Besides, as far as she was concerned the story had played itself out-and as for a human interest angle, the grieving father in the aftermath of a tragedy? That held no interest for her whatsoever.

So why did she call him today?

And why is she about to call him again now?

She doesn’t know.

Intuition?

She waits.

“Yeah?”

“Frank? Hi, it’s Ellen.”

“Ellen.” Pause. “Hi.”

He doesn’t sound any better. Though why would he, she supposes. After all, he is a grieving father in the aftermath of a tragedy. A few days isn’t going to make any real difference.

“How are you, Frank?”

“I’m okay. I was pretty drunk a little while ago. Then I got sick. Not drunk anymore.”

“Oh…”

“Yeah, I was watching TV. A thing with, an interview with… what was his name again?”

Still sounds a little drunk.

“I don’t know, Frank.”

“Craig Howley. That’s it. One of these big, fucking… private equity guys.”

Ellen’s heart stops. “What?”

Frank Bishop takes a deep loud breath. “Private equity guy. Even turns out I used to work for him. What do you think of that?”

“But… how did…?” She knows how she came to be watching the interview with Howley on Bloomberg. But Frank?

“Huh?”

“How come you were watching that?”

“I’ve been watching all the business channels, Ellen, reading business magazines, business books. I’m an expert now. On the financial crisis. I couldn’t explain any of it to you, but-”

He stops. There is silence for a moment, and then he starts coughing.

Definitely still drunk.

Ellen stares at the floor, waiting.

This is her fault. He was trying to make sense of what had been going on in Lizzie’s head, and she more or less told him that to have any chance of succeeding he’d have to… do what he was apparently doing. It was outside the diner on Ninth Avenue. They were standing on the sidewalk. She doesn’t remember her exact words, but-

“-it’d make no difference anyway,” Frank says, recovering. “These people are just carrying on regardless. I mean, you ought to hear what this guy was saying, he-”

“I know, Frank,” she cuts in. “I saw him, I was watching it, too.”

“Sorry… what?” He seems confused. “You were watching it?” He takes a moment to fold this information into his argument. “Well, then, you know what I’m talking about, right? Because… this motherfucker, he’s like the one that got away. In fact, he’s worse.”

Ellen feels something creeping up on her here, a chill. That phrase he’s just used, the one that got away-that was also from their conversation the other night. She just can’t remember the exact context, and which of them used it first.

She looks up and across the room.

It’s more likely to have been her, though.

“What do you mean, Frank?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I don’t know. It just struck me that-”

He’s trying to be cagey now.

“What?”

“That… that I wish I was still drunk.”

She has a knot in her stomach.

“Where are you, Frank?”

“I’m in this shitty hotel, the Bromley. Deb says the FBI is being difficult. They told her we’re not going to see the body… see Lizzie… until at least…”

There’s a long pause here. She stares at the back of her couch.

“Frank?”

“Until-”

He makes a loud gulping sound. It’s followed by another one, even louder, and some heavy sniffling.

Then the line goes dead.

“Frank?”

She tries the number again immediately, and a couple more times after that. It goes to message each time.

She puts her phone down.

Poor bastard.

She sits there swiveling from side to side.

She shouldn’t have called him. Why did she call him?

After a moment she hears the ping of an incoming e-mail. She turns to the keyboard. It’s from Jimmy Gilroy. He says yes, let’s meet up, he has tomorrow night off, how about then? She writes back, okay, and suggests a time and a place.

She hits SEND.

Connections.

Then she sits there, still swiveling in the chair, staring out across the room. At nothing in particular. But this strange, weird feeling she’s got? This chill?

She can’t shake it.

He sees the absurdity of the situation, the irony, he gets it-he’s an old man and he’s acting like he’s some young kid trying to score a dime bag, if that’s what they still call them. And not just any old man either, an old man who used to own the very pharmaceutical company that’s developing the drug he’s so desperate to get his hands on.

It’s ridiculous.

At least he can do it over the phone. He doesn’t have to hang around on a street corner, waiting.

“You going to bed, sweetheart?”

“In a minute. I have a call I need to make.”

He heads for the study.

Though it’s barely ten o’clock, he and Meredith are just back from dinner at Dick and Maria Wolper’s. This was a big deal for the Wolpers, apparently-to have him there. And they’d obviously been briefed about timing and procedures. The old man has his medication regimen. Needs his sleep. No dairy or gluten. As for wine, French only, and don’t stray too far from Bordeaux. Whatever. But the thing was, Vaughan felt he could have outpaced anyone there. He was seated next to Felipe Keizer, the architect who designed 220 Hanson Street, and they were having this great conversation, Keizer talking about the litigation he’s currently involved in, Vaughan reminiscing about his dealings with Mies van der Rohe in the early sixties and the construction of the Snyder Building. It was a process, he told Keizer, that he found awe-inspiring in its speed and complexity. It was like time-lapse photography-the derricks and cranes appearing, the steel skeleton climbing up into the midtown skyline, the pipes and ducts sliding into place, followed by the partitions and suspended ceilings. It was pure magic. Keizer agreed, and then quizzed him about Mies. What was he like to work with? Was he difficult, approachable? Vaughan was happy to answer these questions, but before you knew it the whole table was listening in.

Not an experience Vaughan has had for a while-being at the center of attention, and firing on all cylinders-but he liked it. And he wasn’t too happy when a clearly terrified Maria Wolper started shunting them out the door at nine thirty.

Anyway.

He’s only got a few of these pills left, and he’s having a hard time getting in touch with his contact at Eiben. This guy, Arnie Tisch, who’s now an executive vice president in charge of worldwide business development, used to run R &D projects under Jerry Hale in the Oberon days. He was an easy enough mark-but now, what, he won’t take Vaughan’s calls?

He’s left three messages already.

Sitting at his desk, he tries him again.

“Hello?”

“Arnie?” A miracle. “Jimmy Vaughan.”

“Oh, Mr. Vaughan, good evening. I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, I-”

“You didn’t get back to me, Arnie. That’s the whole point. It’s what, ten o’clock on a Friday night, and I’m getting back to you?”

“Oh? Oh yes, of course. Sorry.”

“And you know why I’m calling, don’t you. I need you to get me some more of those pills.”

When he says it like that it sounds sort of pathetic. Not so much a kid looking to score a dime bag as a degenerate lowlife junkie pleading for his next fix.

Like his degenerate lowlife junkie son.

When was that? Jesus, 1981? Feels like a century ago. Feels like yesterday.

“The problem, Mr. Vaughan, is that-”

“No, no. There is no problem. This is a repeat prescription, my friend.” If this bastard wants to be difficult, Vaughan will instigate proceedings to buy Eiben-Chemcorp back. Which he could do. In a heartbeat. “Just see to it that what we did last time happens again, okay? You know the terms. They’re very generous. So I’ll expect to hear-”

“But, Mr. Vaughan-”

“I’ll expect to hear from you on Monday or Tuesday. Thank you.”

He hangs up.

That has agitated him a little, and he doesn’t like it.

This drug works, it’s as simple as that, and he wants more of it. He heard all the scare stories ten years ago about MDT-48, and he wouldn’t have gone near the stuff with a ten-foot pole. But now? Now he’s old and he doesn’t give a damn. Besides, this is clearly MDT-lite.

Very lite.

His doctors are amazed-and baffled-at his improved condition, so why would he back away from this? Why would he not take advantage of it? He’s been involved with companies developing innovative products and services all his life, in pharmaceuticals, electronics, communications, the agri and energy sectors, you name it, and when has he once benefited personally or exploited his position in any way?

He gets up from his desk and leaves the study.

He should go to bed.

Instead he goes in search of Meredith. He finds her down the hall, in the main living room, splayed out on a couch with a soda in one hand and the TV remote in the other.

He steps into the room and stands there, looking at her.

The way she’s positioned, all languorous… her skirt pulled up a bit, lots of stocking showing, one shoulder strap slipped off and-

He feels-

“What are you watching?” he says.

He’s got a hard-on.

She looks up, distracted, and presses PAUSE on the remote. He turns and glances at the screen.

Connie Carillo, frozen in sober gray, staring out over the courtroom.

“I DVR’d it,” she says. “It’s so depressing.”

“Then why are you watching it?”

She takes a sip from her drink. “I don’t know. It’s Connie.” She pauses. “I still can’t believe it. I mean, she stabbed him in the chest with a carving knife.”

Hard-on’s gone.

“If she did it,” he says, only for something to say. He’s grown bored with the trial and hasn’t followed it for days.

“Of course she did it.”

Attempting to sit up now, Meredith gets a splash of soda on her dress.

“Jesus.” She reaches down and puts the can on the floor. Then she inspects the stain. “Shit. They’ll never get this out.”

“Well,” Vaughan says, “I’ll leave you to it. Good night.”

He goes to bed and falls asleep pretty quickly, but after maybe an hour something wakes him, a passing siren maybe. He stares into the darkness. He was in the middle of a dream… Ray Whitestone cross-examining Connie Carillo in the kitchen of their house in Palm Beach, asking her how many ladles and soup spoons and pepper pots she had, and if she could describe them.

It was extremely vivid.

But also stupid and meaningless.

He turns over and tries to go back to sleep.

When he’s leaving the room, Frank puts the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle. There’s a big fat crack on the plasma TV screen from the Stoli bottle, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with that today. He may be coming back here, he may not be, he doesn’t know. He’s paid through till Wednesday. It was the easiest thing to do.

He gets a cab outside the hotel and tells the driver to head downtown.

This is something he really doesn’t want to do, but what choice has he got?

They’re on Seventh Avenue, and when they get to Fourteenth Street, he tells the driver to go east. Then, when they get to Orchard, he gets him to crawl along, says they’re looking for a car-but that if they reach Delancey to turn left, and on no account to go straight on. It’s bad enough being down here, but he doesn’t think he could bear going right past the building. Looking around, what strikes him first is how ordinary everything is, how there’s no… there’s no trace of what happened. But why would there be? It was a week ago, which is the second thing that strikes him… the relentless, forward-moving, unidirectional, fuck-you nature of time itself. There was before, there was the event, and now there’s afterward. If you’ve got a problem with that, then… you’ve got a problem.

Car’s not here.

They turn left on Delancey.

“No car, sir?”

“No.”

Parking’s pretty crazy in New York, with times, alternate side regs, etc. Also, he can’t remember exactly where he parked, if it was at a hydrant or a loading zone.

“They boot your car, probably.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t see it. It’d still be there. Let’s spin around one more time.”

They loop back onto Grand and then onto Orchard again. It’s definitely not there.

“When you leave it, sir?”

Frank exhales. Yeah, it’s kind of obvious now, isn’t it?

“Week ago,” he says, knowing what’s next.

“Ah, even if they boot it, sir, after two days it gets towed. You want to go to the pound.”

Pier 76.

West Thirty-eighth and Twelfth.

“Okay.” He rolls his eyes. “Let’s go.”

On the way there he calls Deb. He doesn’t want any surprises at the pound, like alarm bells triggering when he hands over his credit card or anything. She’s left him multiple voice messages over the last few days, but he hasn’t actually spoken to her.

So this isn’t going to be easy.

“Jesus, Frank.”

He gets it out of her pretty quickly that he’s not being sought for further questioning, at least not yet. She says that Lloyd has been fielding all of that stuff, and that as she said in one of her messages the FBI is refusing to give them a release date.

Frank swallows.

He looks out at languid, sunny Twenty-third Street, quiet Saturday morning traffic cruising by.

A release date.

He asks how John is.

John went back to California two days ago. He has stuff to do at college. He’ll be back again, though.

He’ll be back when…

Yeah.

“But how are you, Frank? I’m worried about you.”

The reflex response here would be I’m fine, but he’s not fine, so he isn’t going to say it. He mumbles something and turns it around by asking her how she is.

“I guess I’m fine, but counseling helps. It really does, Frank. You should consider-”

“Are there still media people outside your building?”

“Erm… no. They’ve moved on. The damn world has moved on. I can’t even watch the news anymore.” She pauses. “Frank, where are you? Why don’t you come and see us? Let’s talk. Come for dinner. Come tonight.”

“I can’t.”

“Well then, how about-”

He makes a vague commitment for early next week sometime and gets off the phone.

Pier 76.

Oh God.

The waiting room is more than half full. It’s hot and stuffy, and peopled by the hungover and the dispirited. It doesn’t take too long, though. He gets called to the window after about twenty minutes. He’s allowed to go and get his registration and other documents from the car, and then after another maybe ten minutes he’s paying with his credit card and being handed a retrieval slip.

Another ten minutes again and he’s heading north on the West Side Highway.

The drive back to West Mahopac passes in a dream-like rush, and it’s only when he gets near his apartment building that he starts feeling weird, and actually a bit sick. That’s when he realizes he hasn’t eaten in… how long? He can’t remember. Eating seems like a sort of weakness, a betrayal, a surrender to the future.

Anyway, once inside the apartment, he makes straight for the bathroom and throws up, or spends a couple of minutes trying to, at least-retching and groaning.

There’s nothing he’d eat in his fridge or in any of the cupboards, and he doesn’t want to go out again, not just yet. Eventually, he finds a couple of granola bars, which he tears open and eats standing at the sink. Then he makes some coffee.

He gets his laptop out, sits on the couch with it, and for the next several hours reads anything and everything he can find on Craig Howley and the Oberon Capital Group.

When Ellen sees Jimmy Gilroy coming through the door, she gets quite a shock. He’s put on a little weight and has a beard. The callow look is gone. He surveys the room, and when he spots her sitting at the bar his face lights up.

They embrace, double-take, reembrace, and then get settled, Jimmy doing a quick survey of the taps and bottles before ordering a Theakston XB.

Ellen is fine with her Leffe.

It’s early Saturday evening, so the place isn’t too crowded. She’d been going to suggest Flannery’s, but she knows too many people there and they’d never be left alone. This place-the Black Lamps, on East Sixteenth-is small, dark, and rickety, with a tiled floor and worn oak fixtures. It’s perfect for a quiet reunion like this.

They spend a few minutes doing catch-up, during which Ellen reacquaints herself with Jimmy’s Irish accent. She also sees definite flickers of his earlier self, but her main impression is of someone who is tired and a bit desperate, someone who has been backed into a corner and can’t see any way out. His pursuit of James Vaughan seemed logical at the outset, given that Vaughan owned most of the companies, most of the players, involved in the original affair-Paloma Electronics, Gideon Global, the Rundles-and given that he’d been around for, if not directly complicit in, the very event that kickstarted this whole thing in the first place, a helicopter crash at a conference in Ireland that resulted in the deaths of six people. But the very idea of pursuing Vaughan for a specific crime, for any wrongdoing at all, in fact, soon began to seem ridiculous, quixotic even. The corporate and legal firewalls surrounding a man like him were impenetrable. So Gilroy decided to focus instead on Vaughan’s business empire, in a general sort of way, and then on his family.

Which was fine, but there were two slight problems here. Three, really.

One, the subject matter was vast, octopus-like, and it expanded exponentially the more he researched it. And two, who gave a fuck? No one.

Which is still the case. Because the simple fact is, no one outside of business or political circles has ever really heard of James Vaughan. So who’s going to want to buy, let alone read, a book about him?

Which leads neatly on to the third slight problem.

In a scenario like this one, how do you pay the rent?

Well, it turns out that Gilroy did indeed sell his apartment in Dublin. He also has that bar work he mentioned. But how does any of this promote… the career?

“It doesn’t,” he says. “The career is in a sort of holding pattern at the moment.”

Ellen looks at him, brow furrowed. Though she knows what he means, because really, her own career as a journalist is in a holding pattern, too. At least he’s got something to focus on, something to be passionate about.

“The thing is,” he continues, “as long as Vaughan is alive, he, or people in his organization, will block this any way they can, and they’ve made things very difficult already, believe me.” He pauses and reaches for his XB. “When Vaughan dies, though? That’s it. Window closed. I mean, all the work I’ve done? It’ll be of historical interest, sure, at some point… but that’s not what I signed up for.”

She nods. “What about the stuff that’s going on at the moment? These shootings. The kids down on Orchard Street. The protest movements, the marches, Occupy. Bain. Isn’t there a renewed interest in the whole private equity thing arising out of all that?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” he says, “but there’s a hell of a lot more to James Vaughan than just private equity. He’s managed to fly under the radar for years, but the fact is he’s involved in virtually everything-finance, domestic and foreign policy, intelligence, the military. My basic problem is I’ve written a biography of someone fascinating who no one has really heard of. Don’t get me wrong, they should have heard of him, but they haven’t, and there isn’t much I can do about that. No one’s interested. It’s too long for Parallax or any other magazine, and publishers just shrug and say who’s James Vaughan?” He pauses. “I suppose I could self-publish, do it as an e-book, but I can’t make the leap. Psychologically. I want someone to make me an offer for it. I want to bloody well get paid for my work.”

“I know,” Ellen says, “I know.” But she’s surprised. “You’ve actually finished it?”

“Pretty much. A full draft, give or take. It’s not Robert Caro or anything, it’s fairly succinct. But I knew if I didn’t nail it, and soon, the damn thing would kill me.”

“House of Vaughan?”

“Yeah.” He smiles, sheepish. “You want to read it?”

“Nah.” She shakes her head. “Of course I do, you moron.”

He reaches into his pocket and takes out a flash drive. He puts it on the bar and slides it across to her.

“I’m paranoid about sending this kind of thing by e-mail. My account has been hacked too many times.”

“Tell me about it.”

She takes the drive and slips it into her pocket. “Thanks. I look forward to reading it.”

And she genuinely does. Because she hopes it amounts to a lot more than what she’s done in the last year and a half, which is a dead-end series of articles about failed presidential candidates, followed by this recent, seemingly never-ending attempt to break into a story that has just persisted in eluding her.

She doesn’t relish the prospect of talking about it, though, of telling him about her various interactions with Frank Bishop over the last week or so-but she will, because there’s actually a small part of her that suspects this story can’t go on eluding her forever.

“So,” Jimmy says, shifting on his stool. “Ellen Dorsey. What have you been up to?”

14

AFTER CHAIRING HIS THIRD CONSECUTIVE MONDAY MORNING SIT-DOWN OF THE SENIOR INVESTMENT DIRECTORS, Craig Howley is beginning to feel that he has some sort of a grip on things. The Bloomberg interview was a triumph, and he’s been getting texts and messages of congratulation ever since-even more, weirdly enough, than when the actual takeover announcement was made. It’s the power of media exposure, he supposes, something that Vaughan himself would have done well to learn about and try to harness years ago. Howley plans on doing more interviews and has scheduled a meeting for later with Beth Overmyer, Oberon’s VP of communications, to sketch out a new media strategy. As a direct result of tonight’s Kurtzmann benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria, photos of him and Jess will be appearing in multiple platforms across the mediasphere, and it seems sort of crazy not to already have a strategy in place to take advantage of that.

It’s funny, but even a couple of weeks ago-at that cocktail party in the Hamptons, say-he couldn’t have foreseen how quickly, and how far, things would progress.

As he gazes out over the office now, mentally stripping away the mahogany panels and ripping up the pile carpets, Howley gets an alert from Angela that he has a call, and that it’s from Vaughan.

He reaches for the phone. What the fuck is this about? Vaughan is the last person he wants to talk to today.

“Jimmy?”

“Yeah. I was thinking.” Good morning to you, too. “A bidding war? Is that really what we want to get into with Tiberius? Because the numbers don’t make a lot of sense to me, Craig. We’re at $23.45 a share, they go $24.15, we counter with $25 something or $26 something, then it’s a war of attrition, no one’s happy, and six months down the road we’re not talking to each other, when we need to be, and all over some crappy retail chain that’s overpriced to begin with?”

Howley can’t believe this. And they were only discussing it earlier, at the meeting. As it happens, Vaughan’s analysis is probably correct, but what does he think he’s doing?

“Jesus, Jimmy, I… I don’t understand, what happened to I’m going to play some golf? I thought you were supposed to be taking it easy.”

“I am taking it easy. But the old batteries are recharged, you know, and I… I can’t help it. I see stuff like this in the papers, what do you want me to do, sit around and watch?”

Yes.

Howley leans far back in his chair and glares up at the ceiling. His batteries are recharged? Holy shit, two weeks ago, less, the man was practically an invalid.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Jimmy.”

“Tell me you agree. Then I’ll set up a lunch with Chris and get him to back off.”

Oh Jesus.

Chris Beaumont, chairman of Tiberius Capital Partners.

“That’s not a good idea, Jimmy. I mean, really.”

“Why not?”

He has to explain it?

“You know what, Jimmy,” he says, “let me think about it and I’ll get back to you, okay?” Then he blusters his way off the phone, saying he’s heading into a meeting.

Unbelievable.

It’s clearly this trial drug Vaughan is on, and something has to be done about it. So less than a minute later Howley is through to Paul Blanford and using some fairly explicit language. The CEO of Eiben-Chemcorp practically has a nervous breakdown on the other end of the line. Howley can hear him hyperventilating.

“I’m doing what I can, Craig, Jesus. What is this? Tell me what you know.”

Howley swivels in his chair. He’s not far from hyperventilating himself. “Whatever this new drug is,” he says, squeezing the receiver, “there’s someone very high profile who has access to it, okay? And they’re fairly, let’s say… volatile. So when this person eventually loses it, which they will, and it gets out that they were hopped up on your untested product, ten years ago will seem like a stroll in the fucking park, do you hear me?”

Blanford goes silent, and Howley can almost hear the cogs turning in his brain.

Who? Who?

It’s the obvious question, but Blanford won’t ask it, not here, not on the phone. It’s only a matter of time in any case. They’re talking about a drug for geriatrics, that much was established in their last conversation, so surely all it will take for Vaughan’s name to come up is one whisper from the rumor mill-one hint of erratic behavior on the old man’s part.

Howley breaks the silence. “You and Cassie are coming this evening, right? To the benefit?”

“Yeah,” Blanford says, though it’s more of a grunt.

“Okay. We’ll talk then.”

Howley hangs up. He gets out from behind his desk and walks over to the window.

He doesn’t feel like laughing exactly, but the idea that Vaughan could go to lunch with someone like Chris Beaumont and just get him to back off, and probably with nothing more than a few coded remarks-it’s really quite impressive. Like many of his contemporaries, Howley himself wields a certain degree of power and influence, but it is prosaic, featureless, a function of structure and hierarchy. This is something else entirely. This is something based on the force of personality that is almost occult and mystical. Okay, turning Chris Beaumont so easily would be a very minor manifestation of this power, but at the same time it would serve as an unwelcome reminder that it still existed.

After all these years.

Howley turns from the window and goes back to his desk.

Because his feeling is that Vaughan’s power belongs to a different era, and that these last twitches of its corpse cannot and should not be allowed to distract from Oberon business going forward.

Frank keeps the gun-along with an old pocket watch of his father’s, a couple of fountain pens, and a folder of documents and photos-in a large brown padded envelope. He keeps the envelope under his mattress. Not exactly a high-tech security system, but so what. He used to have a safe when he lived in the apartment in the city, and they had one in the Carroll Gardens house, too, one that was bolted to the floor.

And this is what he has now.

A fucking padded envelope.

He pulls it out from under the mattress and spills its contents onto the bed.

The watch, pens, and other items he ignores. They each in their way have the power to lure him into what would become a vortex of memory and emotion, especially the photos, but he can’t let himself get near any of that stuff now. He picks up the gun, turning it in his hands as he walks away from the bed. It’s a.40 caliber semiautomatic pistol, a Glock 27, Gen 3. It’s got a standard nine-round magazine in it, with a small extension to improve grip.

He’s used it at a firing range, plenty of times, but not for a few years.

He slips it into his jacket pocket.

The concealed-carry handgun of choice.

Or so he was told when he bought it.

He takes it out again and puts it on the kitchen table beside his keys.

He didn’t sleep well last night, if at all, and now he feels really tired. His head was full of the stuff he’s been reading about since he got back here on Saturday-an indiscriminate, unfiltered feed of Wikipedia entries, blog posts, PDF files, and quarterly reports. Halfway through yesterday he lost all sense of what he was doing, but he couldn’t stop, and just continued reading. By the time he lay down he knew that he’d reached saturation point. He also knew that no amount of information was going to make any difference to what he thought or to what he was going to do.

He looks over at the laptop on the couch.

Is there any point in taking it with him?

Not really.

It’s too late for all that now… checking stuff, cross-referencing, verifying. None of it made sense to him at the time anyway. He was just stalling.

He goes into the bathroom and checks himself again in the mirror. He straightens his tie. He looks respectable, as if he’s about to attend a meeting or make a presentation.

He flicks his wrist up to check the time.

10:38 A.M.

He feels like screaming.

He turns away from the mirror, leaves the bathroom, and goes into the kitchen. He gathers up his keys, and the gun, from the table and puts them into his jacket pocket.

He looks around the apartment one more time, and leaves.

It’s early in the day, and he’s got plenty of time-too much time-but he can’t stay around here, in the apartment, in West Mahopac, any longer. So he gets in the car and hits the road.

If it comes to it, he can spend the afternoon staring up at the ceiling of his room at the Bromley.

After a shower and some breakfast, Ellen opens the House of Vaughan file and picks up where she left off. She started reading it late last night, having delayed for nearly twenty-four hours, and now she really wants to finish it. As Jimmy Gilroy said the other evening, the book is succinct-just over two hundred pages-but it covers a lot of ground. Not only the story of James Vaughan himself, it’s also about his father and grandfather, and consequently could be-and probably should be-four times as long. Someday it may well be, but the brevity of this current version gives it an urgency and punch that Ellen has rarely seen in a standard biography.

But she can see where the problem might lie. While House of Vaughan possesses the energy of really good investigative journalism, that’s not what it is. It actually is history, in that it doesn’t deal with any of the shit that’s happening right now, or tell us who the James Vaughan of today is. Another aspect of the book that’s challenging, and perhaps willfully so, is that it is written in reverse. It moves backward in time, taking us from the early 2000s right back to-she thinks, she hasn’t gotten that far yet-the late 1870s. It’s as though Gilroy were hacking and chopping his way through the decades, through dense fields of inexplicable effects, looking for some ultimate and explicable cause-some original sin that would explain all the others. He clearly subscribes, at the very least, to the notion that a good understanding of the present requires a forensic dissection of the past-which is fine, but at the end of the day, unless James Vaughan himself emerges from the gray shadows of his anonymity and agrees to become a judge on American Idol, then not that many people are going to be interested in reading a book about him.

Ellen is interested, but that’s because she’s both a news junkie and a history nerd. She sees the connections to her own work and the work she did with Gilroy. She’s also fascinated to learn about Vaughan’s personal tragedies, stuff she’d never heard before-how his third wife (of six), the mother of his two children, died in a car crash thirty years ago; how his only son, an aspiring musician, died of a heroin overdose a couple of years before that; how his older brother was killed in Korea.

What surprises her, though, and what seems to be emerging as the central theme of the book, is the number of key moments in recent history where one or another of the Vaughans seemed to play a role, either at the heart of things or on the periphery, but always there, always involved, and how this recurring role, this active participation, tells us something about the… the secretive, conspiratorial, and frankly compromised nature of our…

She looks away from the screen.

Of our what?

She was going to use the D word, wasn’t she? Weary now, and jaded-jaded because she’s back here again, back at this point, the point she inevitably reaches with so many of the stories she covers-Ellen gets up from her desk and walks over to the window. She stands there for a while looking out onto Ninety-third Street.

These last few days her thoughts have been yo-yoing between Jimmy Gilroy and Frank Bishop, and it’s happening again now-an easy, natural transition from one to the other, only this time the contrast is sharper, and more unsettling. Jimmy has had a tough time over the last year and a half researching and writing this book. He told her the other night about some of the obstacles Vaughan’s people had put in his way, how he’d been intimidated by lawyers, hounded by private investigators, had his accounts hacked, even been physically threatened. But the fact is, no one asked him to do it, to get involved. Frank, by contrast, has had an infinitely tougher time over the last week and a half, and none of it by choice. Yet there is common ground. The two men share something.

Ellen turns and goes back to her desk. She picks up her phone.

They share an obsession-a feverish need, albeit for different reasons, to understand what it is about money and power that gnaws away at the human soul. Jimmy’s obsession is borderline, on the cusp between professional and certifiable, whereas Frank’s is over the line, no question about it.

Jimmy’s is focused. Frank’s is shapeless, directionless, and dangerous.

She gets through to his voicemail, but doesn’t leave a message.

Where did he say he was staying again? The Bromley? That’s a huge pile down on Seventh Avenue, midtown somewhere. She looks up the number.

He’s still registered at the hotel, but there’s no answer from his room.

When she gets off the phone, Ellen paces back and forth for a while, going from the window to the desk, then from the desk back to the window.

But enough.

She grabs her jacket and keys, and heads out. She flags down a cab on Columbus Avenue and within fifteen minutes is walking into the lobby of the Bromley Hotel. There is a large group of tourists, along with all of their luggage, gathered in front of a fountain in the center of it. Two of their party are at the desk engaged in some sort of negotiation, or argument even, with an attractive young receptionist in uniform. Standing behind the receptionist, also in uniform, is a slightly older guy, late thirties maybe, who seems to be observing the scene, but not participating. Ellen catches this guy’s eye and indicates to him that she wants to talk. He silently leaves his colleague and moves along the desk, past a fake marble pillar, to a quieter section at the end.

“Good morning, ma’am. Welcome to the Bromley. How may I help you today?”

“Hi, I need to speak to a guest. A Mr. Frank Bishop. I don’t know his room number.”

The receptionist smiles, does a few strokes on his keyboard, and then reaches for a phone.

Ellen knows there probably won’t be an answer, but she waits anyway.

“Ma’am, I’m afraid that Mr. Bish-”

“Yeah, I figured,” she says, interrupting him. She glances left and right, then leans in slightly. “You see, I, er… I think there might be a problem here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Ellen lays it on fairly thick. She’s concerned about her ex-husband. Hasn’t been heard from in days. May have stopped taking his meds. The name Bishop has been hard to avoid recently, but she’s hoping, gambling on it, that the receptionist doesn’t make the connection.

He looks concerned, even slightly alarmed. He works his keyboard a little more, then makes another discreet call, turning away and speaking in a whisper. He looks back at Ellen. “Hhmm. Housekeeping hasn’t been into Mr. Bishop’s room since Friday.” He taps his fingers on the desk. “That’s not necessarily unusual, of course-”

“I know, but…” Before he starts talking about strict protocols and informing his superiors, Ellen decides to go for broke. She glances at his name tag. “Look, Luis, all I want to know is that poor Frank isn’t lying there in the bathtub with his wrists all slit open and blood everywhere, okay?”

Luis winces, and his eyes widen, but he’s still wavering.

Ellen shrugs. “How about this? I’ll give you fifty dollars. All you have to do is open the door and look in. I don’t even have to be there. I just want to know that he’s okay.”

Luis looks around. Then he looks back at Ellen and nods. Despite what she said about not having to be there, Ellen follows Luis, and he doesn’t seem to object. They take the elevator in silence. As they walk along the corridor to Frank’s room they pass an elderly Japanese couple.

At the door, which has a DO NOT DISTURB sign on it, Luis clears his throat. Then he raps on the door and says, “Management.” He does this twice more, and when there is no response he takes out a card key, and without looking back at Ellen or referring to her in any way he opens the door, steps in, and flicks on a light.

Ellen steps in behind him.

The room is a mess, but a weird mess. There are books and magazines strewn everywhere. The air is heavy, the bed is unmade, and there are some clothes lying around… but it’s mainly the books and magazines that catch the eye.

“Holy shit.”

Ellen looks up. Luis is staring at the wall-mounted plasma TV screen, which is blank but has a long crack, or gash, in it. On the floor in front of it, there is an empty vodka bottle, also cracked.

Suddenly remembering why he’s here, Luis rushes over to the bathroom, pushes the door open, and reaches for the light switch. Somehow, Ellen knows that Frank won’t be in there, and that the bathtub will be empty, so for the few seconds that she’s alone here in the main room, and not hearing any gasps of horror, she throws her eye over some of the book titles.

From what she can make out, they’re mostly what Frank said. Business books.

Money Down.

The Dominion of Debt.

Luis reappears. “Mr. Bishop isn’t here,” he says.

Ellen holds out her hand. There’s a fifty-dollar bill in it. “Thanks,” she says.

Luis swallows. “You know what?” He holds up his hands, palms outstretched. “I’m good.”

He looks pale, almost as if he has seen a bloody corpse in the bathtub.

“Take it, Luis.” She stuffs the bill into the breast pocket of his jacket. “I’m relieved he’s not in there, believe me.”

Back outside, as Luis is closing the door, Ellen hears the ping of the elevator down the hallway and turns to look.

A moment later, Frank Bishop appears.

Shit.

He walks for a few yards in their direction before he focuses and sees Ellen.

“What the-”

“Hi, Frank.”

Luis seems horrified, but also conflicted. That TV is going to have to be accounted for.

Frank shakes his head. “Were you in my fucking room just now?”

“Sir,” Luis says firmly, “please stay calm. I can explain.”

Ellen holds up a hand. “I was worried about you, Frank. You weren’t answering my calls. You haven’t been-”

“What are you, my wife?”

She avoids looking at Luis and studies Frank instead. He’s wearing a suit, and a tie. He’s clean-shaven. Has she missed something?

“Look, Frank…” she begins, but then stops. She turns to Luis. “I think we’re okay here, Luis. You know? Thank you.”

Luis hesitates. Then he addresses Frank. “There is the question of the TV, sir. I’ll have to-”

“You have my credit card number, right? Buy a new TV with it. Knock yourself out.” He pauses. “Okay?”

Luis nods. “Very well, sir. Ma’am.”

He takes off down the corridor.

Frank closes his eyes for a moment. “Ellen,” he then says, almost a tremor in his voice, “you had no right to come snooping around here. If you want-”

“I wasn’t snooping. I told you. I was worried about you.”

“Worried about me? You don’t even know me.”

“I know you a bit. Enough to be concerned.”

“Well, don’t be.”

She nods back toward the room. “That’s quite a collection of material you have in there.”

“I told you.” He shrugs. “I’m an expert now.”

“No one’s an expert, Frank. Isn’t that part of the problem?”

“Maybe, but I’m not interested in the problem anymore. Just the solution.”

She looks at him. “And what’s that?”

He holds her gaze for a moment. “Ask my daughter.”

Ellen swallows and looks away. She wonders again about his suit, his tie, this clean-cut appearance. Maybe that’s how he usually looks. Or maybe he looks this way because he’s just come back from seeing his daughter’s body? And this intrusion, this presumption on her part, is the last thing he needs? Is that it?

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

She starts to walk away.

“Don’t worry about it, Ellen. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, too.”

“For what?”

“I wasn’t of much use to you, was I? In the end?”

Ellen doesn’t know what he means by this-if he’s being honest, or deeply sarcastic, or if he’s just confused.

“I don’t look at it that way, Frank.” It’s the only answer she can think of.

“Well, who knows,” he says, “maybe we’ll get one last shot at it.”

He’s definitely confused.

“I wish you all the best, Frank.” She raises a hand and gives it a gentle wave. “Take care of yourself.”

On the way down in the elevator, she curses herself for getting up this morning.

Normally, Howley doesn’t mind this getting-ready period at home prior to going out. Jessica isn’t one of those obsessive, neurotic women-and Howley has known a few-who make a production number out of it, parading all their insecurities, fussing over clothes and hair, soliciting opinions and then dismissing them instantly. Jess is levelheaded, and rightly confident in her looks and how she dresses. But this evening is a little different. The Kurtzmann gala benefit is the culmination of several months’ work, and although she has an excellent staff and committee who appear to be on top of everything, Jess is understandably on edge.

Howley is, too, as it happens, though it’s got nothing to do with the benefit. He feels he’s under siege. Vaughan has called him twice this afternoon, and both times Howley refused to take the call. He’s never done that before, not even once, and he somehow doubts that anyone else has either. But he can’t go on doing it.

Nor does he want to have the conversation-the one where he tells Vaughan, in whatever ingenious formulation of words he can summon at the time, that he’s effectively being an interfering pain in the ass and must stop. Howley’s only hope here is that Paul Blanford will come up trumps by cutting off the supply of this new medication, and thereby, he doesn’t know, slow Vaughan down, return him to the seemly and steady decline to which they had all… happily… become accustomed?

Whatever.

But the problem now is that Paul Blanford won’t return his calls. They said at the end of their conversation this morning that they’d talk at the benefit, but soon after he put the phone down Howley remembered what a control freak Jessica can be at these events and that a discreet, private confab with a colleague might actually be hard to arrange.

So he called him back, after lunch.

Twice.

It’s now nearly seven o’clock, they’re heading out in ten minutes, and Blanford hasn’t returned the call yet. Howley is irritated as a result, because this is really not the frame of mind he wants to be in this evening. The benefit, which is being held in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, will be his first major social engagement as the new head of the Oberon Capital Group, and he’s determined to make the most of it. It’s a culmination of months of work for Jessica, sure, but it’s more than that-it’s also a culmination for them, as a couple. This is a pinnacle, of sorts, an arrival.

Looking stunning, Jessica eventually emerges from her lair-leaving behind, he’s in no doubt, a deeply frazzled team of stylists and cosmeticians. She’s in a ravishing Tom Ford dress and nude leather Christian Louboutin pumps. Her strawberry blond mane is embellished with a beautiful floral headband. She’s clearly nervous, but not letting it get the better of her. Holding hands, they take the elevator down, then float-pumps notwithstanding-out through the marble echo chamber of their lobby to the waiting car on Sixty-eighth, assistants hovering, security on point, every detail in place.

It’s still earlyish, Manhattan’s electric background thrum carrying everything, carrying them all, into a warm, familiar, crepuscular embrace. They settle loose-limbed into the back of their spacious limo and then break out their devices.

The driver hums forward and quickly angles right onto Park.

They have eighteen or so blocks to go. The driver-his name is Pawel-knows what he’s doing, he’s wired in to the system, hyper-aware that the timing of arrivals is choreographed to within an inch of, if not his, then someone’s life, and consequently he’s working the traffic-the flow, the pacing, the lights-like a smacked-out bebopper on a serious roll.

Howley is sending a text to Angela when he gets a call alert. He answers it.

“Mr. Howley, it’s Vivienne Randle, from Mr. Blanford’s office.”

Howley sits forward. Jess looks up from her iPad, but only for a second.

“Put me through to Mr. Blanford.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Blanford is indisposed.”

“What?”

“He was taken ill this morning, at the office.”

Howley rolls his eyes and then turns to look out the window, all too aware that they’re probably gliding past Vaughan’s building right about now. “Is it serious? Is he in the hospital?”

“No, Mr. Blanford is at home. He’s receiving medical attention there.”

“What was it, his heart? No, not his heart, he wouldn’t be at home if it was his heart.”

“I believe it was some stomach problem, or intestinal issue.”

Yeah, right. A fucking ulcer. We all have those, sweetheart.

“Okay, thanks.”

Jess glances up at him again. “Who was that?”

“No one. Paul Blanford. Don’t worry about it. Just one name off the list.”

She returns to her screen.

They stop at lights.

Howley is seething now, furious. He feels like jumping out of the car, storming over to Vaughan’s building, grabbing the old bastard by the throat and throttling him to death.

That’d cure any stress-induced ulcer right there.

The lights change, and they whoosh forward.

As Frank walks east along Forty-ninth Street, he feels his heart thumping in his chest. He feels other things, too, elsewhere in his body-minor sensations, twinges, darts of pain or discomfort. These are mild and intermittent. But he does wonder if he’s having some form of coronary, or pre-coronary. He doesn’t eat well and doesn’t get enough exercise, and even though he’s lucky to have the kind of metabolism that means he generally doesn’t pack on the pounds (and looks fairly okay as a result), the reality is, he’s almost fifty years old and could well be in the grip of various conditions and diseases already.

Without knowing it.

He’s a prime candidate. Plus, the stress he’s under at the moment is of a level and intensity he has never experienced before-the kind he imagines you ignore at your peril.

Perfect storm, sounds like.

Nevertheless, he wonders if it’s possible, by sheer force of will, to delay something like this, a heart attack-if that’s what he’s actually having-to hold it off, to keep pushing, until you get over some… line.

Real or imaginary.

At Sixth, he waits for the lights to change.

In this case, the line is very real, and very close, three blocks away.

People gather on either side of him, in front, behind, waiting. The lights change. He pushes forward, across the avenue, and then on toward Fifth.

He catches his reflection in a store window.

Anonymous man in a suit.

Denizen of the city.

Architect.

For so much of his life that’s how Frank defined himself, which meant that he never had to struggle with his identity. It was simple-the world, and his place in it, consisted of angles and forms, of light and space. It was the ordering of the infinite into the quotidian, the perfect marriage of art and science. For a quarter of a century, as a student and then as a professional, but also as a husband and as a father, he needed no other terms or rules to live and breathe by-that is, until one Friday afternoon two years ago, in the Belmont, McCann conference room, when he got laid off and had to surrender his identity… simply give it back, then somehow carry on without it, making do with whatever ramshackle alternative he could piece together from the Help Wanted section in the paper and the weird looks he got from, among others, his precious daughter, Lizzie…

But-

But.

Crossing Fifth.

He was going to say.

It was always this part of town that made him feel most like an architect, midtown-with its soaring towers and vertiginous canyons, its expanses of glass and steel, its mullions and spandrels… the mongrel skyline rising from an ordered grid, this great aggregate of the revolutionary and the dandified, the conservative and the radical…

Skyscrapers.

Like that one up ahead there, with its granite base, its limestone facade, its bronze-clad cupolas. He comes to the foot of the squat Colgate-Palmolive Building on the corner of Park and Forty-ninth and stops. It’s just over there, on the other side of the avenue, the one with the anchored canopy, and the cars lining up outside, and the flashing lights, and the barriers, and the security, and the photographers, and the crowds…

He crosses to the grassy median and waits, gazing over at this iconic art deco masterpiece.

One of his favorites.

The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Something is bugging her, and by early evening Ellen needs to get out of the apartment, she needs a drink, or a couple of hits of a joint, anything that will lead to an altered state of consciousness. Because the one she’s currently in is tired, used up, polluted with the contorted syntax of all the e-mails she had to write this afternoon turning down offers to talk or blog about Ratt Atkinson and his bogus Twitter accounts.

She can’t believe that’s still going on.

A call to Michelle would normally be a reliable route out of the mental ash cloud, but recently Michelle has been too news-focused in her chat, too eager to engage with the stories Ellen needs a little respite from.

But still, that’s not what’s bugging her.

This thrum of anxiety has been with her since she left Frank Bishop earlier-left him standing outside his room in the Bromley Hotel on Seventh Avenue, left him in that wide, desolate corridor, on that ugly multicolored carpet, with its vertigo-inducing geometric patterns.

Frank Bishop is what’s bugging her.

His demeanor, his suit, the things he said, and maybe didn’t say… his hotel room, the books and magazines, the cracked TV screen and the empty vodka bottle.

How would she have reacted, and behaved, in his position? There’s no saying.

Not that it’s any of her concern anymore.

If it ever was.

She heads down to Flannery’s, which is pretty much empty. This is because it’s early, and it’s a Monday, which suits her just fine. She orders-and it’s almost perverse, because it’s not what she normally drinks, or ever drinks, in fact-a Stoli on the rocks. The barman gives her a look. She shrugs. What? She has to explain?

I’m looking to break a code, to enter someone’s mindset.

Right.

Not that it works, of course. The Stoli. As a drink it does, sure, but that’s all.

She’d probably be better off if she had someone to talk to. Charlie’s not here, which is a pity, because she watched some of the Carillo trial earlier and feels that she’s maybe ready to reengage. After more than a week, Mrs. Sanchez is still on the stand, and Ray Whitestone is getting her to deconstruct the household, its comings and goings, its rhythms and routines, and in quite staggering detail.

She’d like to get Charlie’s take on it.

But he’s not here.

The gorgeous Nestor is, though. She sees him emerge from the kitchen, obviously finished with his shift and heading off. He spots her at the bar, makes a discreet toking gesture, and flicks his head in the direction of the alleyway up the street.

She’s all over it.

A few minutes later they’re passing his joint back and forth and discussing why teleportation as seen in Star Trek is technically impossible.

Looking into Nestor’s eyes, and not entirely without irony, Ellen says, “Beam me aboard, Scotty.”

“Never going to happen, because… think about it-”

“Yeah, I am.”

“You’ve got to obliterate the human body, which is ten to the power of forty-five bits of information, and then reassemble all that shit somewhere else without so much as putting a single itty-bitty molecule out of place. I don’t think so.”

Ellen is wondering how Nestor would react to being hit on by a forty-one-year-old woman when something occurs to her.

Reassembled bits of data.

She passes the joint back, exhaling thick smoke, and looks away. Various corollaries of the thought that has just struck her seem to be forming now in clusters around her brain.

The bottle of Stoli and the cracked TV screen… when did he throw one against the other? And why? Isn’t it suddenly obvious? It was just before they spoke on Friday, when he was drunk and watching Craig Howley being interviewed on Bloomberg. And the solution? He said he was no longer interested in the problem, only in the solution, but when she asked him what that was, he told her to ask Lizzie.

Ask my daughter.

The last thing he said was that maybe he and Ellen had one more shot at this.

What did that mean?

She leans back against the alley wall.

Then there was the suit and tie, and the clean-shaven look, which she took to mean…

But-

Maybe she misread that one completely.

“You cool?”

Ellen turns back to Nestor. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.” She takes out her phone. “I’m sorry… to do this, but…”

Without finishing her sentence, she turns away again and wanders out of the alley.

Standing on Amsterdam, she stares down at her phone, trying to work out what to do.

A fire truck rushes past, siren screaming.

It’s Craig Howley, isn’t it? Private equity, Paloma…

But what?

She Googles him. Goes to News.

The first few stories are about him taking over the Oberon Capital Group, his appearance on Bloomberg, his press conference. Then there’s a story about something called the Kurtzmann Foundation. She clicks on it.

Ellen hates using her phone for looking stuff up on the Internet. The screen is too small, the keys too fiddly. But she enlarges the text and reads.

Gala benefit… Jessica Bowen-Howley… Monday evening… 7:30… the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel…

She looks up and gazes out at the passing traffic.

Stoned, but not stoned.

Unconvinced, disbelieving, tired of all this.

She looks back down at her phone. What time is it? Just after seven.

Shit.

She turns around. “Sorry, man.” This to Nestor. “I have to go.”

Nestor shrugs and rolls an index finger.

Next time.

Ellen walks to the corner and flags down a cab going east.

They cross Park at Fifty-seventh Street.

Still seething, Howley is hunched forward, neck and shoulders all tense, switching his phone from one hand to the other. He’s desperately anxious to move this situation forward.

Fifty-fifth.

In just a few blocks Pawel will be swinging to the left, around the median, and they’ll be pulling up at the Waldorf.

He can’t hit the red carpet like this, can he? Looking distracted, angry, a scowl on his face? It wouldn’t be fair to Jessica. There will be A-list celebrities here, Hollywood actors, sports stars, senators and congressmen, people who know how to smile in public, schmooze, work the big room.

Professionals.

He needs to get with the program.

He looks over at Jessica and smiles, or at least tries to.

She’s about to say something when her phone rings. She rolls her eyes and answers it.

As she’s talking, he decides to try Blanford’s cell one last time.

It goes to message.

Damn.

They’re at Fifty-second.

“Paul?” He looks over at Jessica. She’s still talking. He turns to the right, facing the window. “Paul, it’s Craig,” he whispers. “What the fuck is going on? Are you really sick or has he gotten to you? It’s Jimmy Vaughan I’m talking about. But you had to have known that, right? Well, let me tell you this.” Rapid flick of the head toward Jess, then back. “If Jimmy goes on being allowed to take this stuff, he will fucking eat you alive, do you hear me? He’ll end up destroying your company, or worse, buying it back. And believe me, Paul, you do not want Jimmy Vaughan in your life, running things. Find this leak, find it now, and plug it.”

He presses END CALL.

Shit.

He overplayed his hand there, didn’t he? But the pressure of all this is getting to him.

He puts his phone on silent and slips it into his jacket pocket. He reaches a foot over and nudges Jessica in the leg. She looks at him and nods.

“Gotta go, sweetie,” she says into the phone. “See you in a bit.” She puts the phone away and looks out the window.

They’re swinging around the median.

“That’s quite a crowd,” she says, beaming.

Howley looks out the window, too, at the flashing lights and the photographers, at the security guys and the onlookers.

“Damn right,” he says, the red carpet just sliding into view now.

He reaches a hand out to Jessica.

“You ready?”

On the periphery there is mild curiosity. A few people in a passing MTA bus crane to see. A man in a car, stopped at lights, beeps his horn. Pedestrians on Forty-ninth and Fiftieth glance, then glance away.

Closer in, under the canopy, it’s a different story. On either side of the red carpet, which leads from the curb through the central entrance and right up into the lobby, there are security barriers. These are draped in white. Thickset guys in black, with earpieces, parade up and down, scanning the area for trouble, never smiling, exuding a kind of dumb, steroidal menace. Behind the barriers, on either side, there are photographers and onlookers. The real action for the photographers-as far as Frank can make out-is probably inside, in the main lobby. That’s where the posing and the interviews will take place, the serious media work. The photographers out here, he’s guessing, are bottom-feeders, only a notch or two above the onlookers.

People like him.

As each car pulls up-all either SUVs, town cars, or limos-there is a directed flurry of attention. The assembled photographers and onlookers wait to see who gets out, then react accordingly. If it’s some middle-aged couple, tanned and moneyed-looking, as most of them have been so far, the reaction is muted. If it’s anyone with the remotest whiff of celebrity to them, the reaction tends to be pretty wild.

“This way! Over here!”

“Look at me!”

In the ten minutes he’s been standing at the barrier-having slowly wormed his way in, the nudge of an elbow here, an excuse me there-he has barely recognized anyone.

Which is a cause for concern.

He thinks he saw Ray Sullivan, secretary of the treasury, and he’s fairly sure he saw one of the lesser Bush brothers, Marvin or Neil. He saw the actress Brandi Klugman, who caused quite a stir, and a Fox News guy whose name he can’t remember. There were one or two others he half recognized, as well as several he didn’t.

And they keep coming…

But standing here now, Frank is feeling a little anxious.

A little anxious? A lot anxious.

What if he misses his opportunity? What if Craig Howley doesn’t show? What if he got here early and is already inside?

Every muscle in Frank’s body, every atom, is tensed up and ready for this. It’s all that’s left of himself, he realizes, as he eddies ever farther out to sea, beyond reason or logic, any access to his emotions long since abandoned. But it’s okay, because when the broad-shouldered security guy who’s been standing directly in front of him for the last few seconds moves to the right, it’s like a curtain being drawn back.

And there he is…

The door of the limo opens, and out steps tall, balding, moneyed-looking Craig Howley, unmistakable from his TV interview and a hundred magazine and Google images. By his side is the elegant Jessica-the driving force, apparently, behind this whole event.

Some short, stocky guy in a tux is there to greet them. There’s a little banter, a little glancing around, and then the couple join hands and turn, with Howley on the right, to head inside.

As they move forward, each second shattering in his mind like a pane of glass, Frank reaches into his jacket pocket for the Glock. He draws it out, inserting his finger right in over the trigger to make sure that he’s ready-to make sure that the various safety mechanisms deactivate when he pulls it.

He looks up.

Howley is nearly level with him now.

Given the crowded, confined space he’s in, it’s sort of an awkward maneuver, but Frank brings his arm up to his chest and then quickly extends it, all the way out, aiming at Howley’s head.

He fires once, then a second time.

The loud cracks are followed almost instantaneously by a collective intake of breath, and in the nanosecond before he is mobbed to the ground, Frank sees a streak of something, it’s red and stringy, spurt from the side of Howley’s bare head, which itself jerks and twists awkwardly off to the left.

Pinned to the ground now, face down, Frank closes his eyes. With both arms yanked back almost to breaking point, with a knee lodged sharply between his shoulder blades, and with voices roaring in his ear, and everywhere, he offers no resistance.

There is a degree of pain in all of this. He surrenders to it.

Even from three or four blocks away, Ellen can see the revolving lights of the police cars.

And of an ambulance.

There’s one crossing Park now, arriving east on Forty-ninth.

She’s ready to throw up, but fights it really hard, taking deep breaths and rolling down the window.

After another block, with the traffic ahead starting to get backed up, she thinks… what’s the point?

“Pull over, please,” she tells the driver. “Now. Here’s good.”

She pays and gets out.

At Fifty-first Street, she crosses to the east side of the avenue. The tension in the air here is palpable, and as she moves closer to the scene, the hubbub of a few hundred animated conversations soon begins to overwhelm even the roar of the traffic. She gets to the edge of the crowd, which has extended back now to the corner of Fiftieth, and just stands there, trying to see what’s happening.

She pretty much knows what has happened, though, doesn’t she?

No need to be told.

She makes eye contact with someone, a woman in a business suit, and throws her an interrogative look.

Woman shrugs. “Don’t know. Some guy got shot?”

Without turning, someone else, a lanky kid in front of them with a huge pair of cans around his neck, says, “Yeah. One man down. They got the shooter.”

Ellen nods, still feeling the urge to throw up.

A few minutes later, the ambulance takes off, followed shortly thereafter by at least three police cars.

The crowd begins to disperse.

She spots one or two reporters she knows, already on the scene, notebooks and recorders out.

Big story.

She turns around, eye out for a cab.

If she’s going to throw up, she wants to do it in the comfort and privacy of her own bathroom.

15

IT SEEMS LIKE THE LOGICAL SOLUTION.

To reassume control of the company.

If he doesn’t step up to the plate, what are they going to do? Bring in an outsider? Pick someone from the Oberon gene pool who’ll cause all sorts of resentments and destabilize everything?

Nah.

This is the right thing to do.

Besides, he’s up for it, and has never felt more motivated or energized.

From the moment Vaughan enters the Oberon Building early Tuesday morning, he picks up on the reaction-heads turn, there are audible intakes of breath, he hears murmurs, people whispering. The elevator ride to the fifty-seventh floor is a solemn affair and passes in silence, but once he steps into reception-at least as far as he’s concerned-it’s business as usual.

Craig Howley’s death last night, at the hands of a madman, was an appalling tragedy, and tribute will be paid to him in due course, recognition for his contribution to the company, there’s no question about that-but Craig would be the first to acknowledge that you can’t let your guard down, that the show must go on, and must be seen to go on.

Back in his office, behind his desk, Vaughan firefights his way through a fairly cluttered agenda. It seems to be just one crisis after another. They’re relatively minor ones, but he works his magic on them nonetheless, mostly over the phone. One key meeting he sets up is with Beth Overmyer, Oberon’s VP of communications. She’s coming in at eleven to discuss how this whole thing should be dealt with from a media perspective.

On a more personal level, the situation with Arnie Tisch at Eiben-Chemcorp is a real worry for Vaughan. He needs to refresh his supply of this new medication, because he has only two pills left, but the trouble is… he’s been feeling so damn good that he hasn’t given any real thought to what might happen if, or when-and it’s now looking increasingly like when-he runs out.

So just before Beth Overmyer shows up, he spends a few minutes on the phone trying to reach Arnie Tisch.

But Arnie Tisch, it would appear, is unavailable.

Vaughan looks around the office, and over to the window. He hates being thwarted like this. He leaves a message-a message that is unequivocal in its grumpiness.

Moments later, Beth Overmyer is shown into the office. She approaches and takes a seat in front of Vaughan’s desk.

Initially, he’s distracted by how attractive she is, in her satin blouse and slim-fitting skirt, with her shapely legs and peep-toe shoes. Her sparkly eyes. Like a young Meredith.

Like a what?

Jesus Christ. Did he just think that? He did. Rather than feeling excited by her presence, though, or aroused, he feels irritated.

He nods at her to go on.

She starts by expressing her condolences, and shock, on the death of Mr. Howley. Vaughan nods at her again-yes, yes, now go on.

She outlines the media coverage of what happened last night. The main focus so far, without a doubt, is on the father-daughter angle, the high drama of all that. Howley is getting some attention, but it’s cursory. In a way, he’s little more than a piece of collateral damage.

“Which is good, isn’t it?” Vaughan says. “For us, I mean.”

“Sure.” She clears her throat. “But there could be some fallout from… well, from you being here. Today.” She pauses, indicating the desk. “Like this.”

“What? The man’s barely dead twelve hours and someone’s replaced him already? The unseemly haste of it, is that what you’re talking about?”

“Yes, but-”

“Yes, but it’s bullshit. Clearly. Because it’s me.” He pats his chest. “That’s the beauty of it. If it was anyone else, maybe, but-”

“The beauty, okay, but also, just maybe, the problem. It puts a spotlight on you, Mr. Vaughan.”

He freezes.

“And my understanding is that-”

“Yes, yes, okay.” He holds up a hand to silence her.

She’s right.

Goddammit.

The “understanding” she referred to there is an unspoken company policy of always striving to protect Vaughan’s privacy, and even, where possible, his anonymity. Coming in like this today was certainly a bold move on his part, but also one that was bound to attract attention. By any standard, therefore, it was a serious error of judgment.

However, it is perfectly clear to Vaughan, now that he thinks about it, that the real error of judgment here was Craig Howley’s. There’s already been speculation in the papers and online that Howley was targeted because he ran a private equity company, and that this deluded character, this Frank Bishop, was supposedly carrying out the wishes of his own deluded daughter. But if Howley hadn’t gone on television and done that interview, if he hadn’t been so stupid as to place a value on that kind of exposure, on having a so-called high profile, maybe Bishop would have ended up going after someone else.

Who knows?

But why take the risk?

Beth Overmyer drums her fingers on the side of her chair. “Mr. Vaughan, may I be frank?”

It’s barely perceptible, but he nods assent.

“I think you should go home. This… visit. We can describe it, if we have to, as a gesture of solidarity with the staff. By the company patriarch. At this terrible time. But any announcement we make about a successor to Mr. Howley, or about whatever temporary arrangements we’re putting in place… it really shouldn’t have your name on it anywhere. In fact, you shouldn’t be here a minute longer than is necessary.”

Vaughan makes a face, petulant now.

But she’s right. Again. Maintaining privacy has been a priority throughout his life, partly fueled by a distaste for his father’s flagrant disregard of it, and partly necessitated by certain commercial sensitivities. But it has now reached the stage where it’s probably close to a pathology. So this carelessness of his today, this recklessness…

It’s taken him somewhat by surprise.

Maybe it’s due to the medication, he doesn’t know, but-

“Mr. Vaughan,” Beth Overmyer says.

He needs to keep his eye on the ball a bit more.

“Er… yes?”

“There is one other thing. It has come to our attention that Jimmy Gilroy has resurfaced.”

Vaughan leans forward on the desk and buries his head in his hands. This is the little bastard who broke the J. J. Rundle story and then spent the next year or so nosing around for a follow-up story on Vaughan himself. He was discouraged gently, and then not so gently. Obstacles were put in his way, incentives, too. Vaughan thought he’d been taken care of.

He looks up at Beth Overmyer.

Now what?

“Well, he has apparently finished this book of his, and although no one seems to want to publish it, which is a good sign, he has just recently met up with Ellen Dorsey again.”

“Oh, please.” Vaughan slaps his hand on the desk.

“My concern, therefore,” Beth Overmyer goes on, “is that with this dreadful business of Mr. Howley’s death, there will inevitably be increased focus on Oberon, even on you… and that this might increase Gilroy’s chances of finding a publisher.”

Vaughan leans back in his chair. Initial intelligence reports on what Gilroy was putting together were pretty horrifying-a full family history, no less. But with confidentiality clauses, libel laws, insiders sworn to secrecy, and so on, he was never going to get very far.

That was the understanding, at any rate.

“No,” Vaughan then says, shaking his head. “This situation cannot be allowed to develop. It is not acceptable.”

Beth Overmyer nods in agreement. “Absolutely.” She pauses and straightens out a crease in her skirt. “What would you like me to do about it?”

Vaughan thinks about this for a while, swiveling in his chair. But there’s only one thing he can do, isn’t there?

“Don’t worry about it,” he says eventually, standing up from the desk. “I’ll take care of this.”

“O-kay.”

“But in the meantime can you get me a copy of the damn thing? Of this stupid book?”

“It should be possible, yeah. But Mr. Vaughan, is that really a good idea-”

“Yes. It is. I want to see what he’s written.”

“Very well. I’ll send it to you as soon as I get my hands on a copy.”

“Good.”

He remains there for a moment, distracted, gazing at her legs.

“Mr. Vaughan?”

“Er, yes.” He looks into her eyes. “Thank you. That’ll be all.”

She stands up, but seems reluctant to move.

“Okay, okay,” he says to her. “I get it, I get it. I just have one phone call to make and then I’m leaving.”

Ellen spends a lot of Tuesday on the couch in front of the TV, flicking between analysis of the Frank Bishop story and live coverage of the Connie Carillo murder trial. When the analysis becomes unbearable, either too convoluted or just too close to the bone, she switches to the murder trial. And when the trial becomes too much, with its longueurs and its overreliance on trivial detail-Ray Whitestone’s signature technique-she switches back.

She feels bad for Frank. She feels she should have seen this coming, and done something. She did see it coming, in fact, but not soon enough. And anyway, what could she have done?

This has all just compounded her general sense of uselessness. The thing is, instead of vegetating on the couch, she should probably be working on her next piece for Parallax, the one on West Virginia congresswoman Jane Glasser. But it’s not happening. There’s nothing in the tank to kickstart that story.

“Now, Mrs. Sanchez, could you kindly describe for the court the exact layout of the kitchen?”

Ray Whitestone is getting closer here, finally, to the heart of the matter. This is where the murder took place. Or at least it’s where Howard Meeker’s naked body was found.

In the kitchen, on the floor.

A lot of people will be relieved that the prosecution’s case seems to be entering its final phase-though no one is quite sure yet where this massive accumulation of detail Whitestone has built up is leading. So far no motive has been established, no tearing apart of Connie’s character has taken place-there’s been no real drama, in fact. The appeal of the trial, weirdly, appears to lie in its very banality, in this slow-burn, slightly soporific, almost tantric quality. It’s as if the promise of an explosive resolution is what has been carrying everyone forward.

Appropriately drowsy, Ellen stares at the screen.

There are only three fixed angles allowed in the courtroom. One takes in both the prosecution and defense teams, with Connie Carillo herself sometimes visible, sometimes obscured, at the far end. The second angle is of the witness box, which provides virtual close-up shots of those giving evidence, and the third angle is of the bench and of the fifty-eight-year-old presiding judge, ex-Olympic shot-put silver medalist J. Shelley Roberts.

“Well, first off, Mr. Whitestone, let me tell you, it’s a big kitchen, specially when you got to clean it…”

Ellen flicks over.

“… to be honest, what this sap did, what his daughter did-and I’m not condoning it, obviously, God forbid-but I don’t understand why there hasn’t actually been more of it, because when you look at the situation, when you consider the scale of what’s been perpetrated on the American people…”

And back.

“… the countertop, that part of the island, it’s of marble, I guess, I don’t know, a kind of dark, black marble, and it has these light fixtures hanging over it, they’re made with copper, I think…”

“… I mean really, were we all asleep at the wheel when these bozos passed the bill in 2000 exempting toxic assets like CDOs, repos, and swaps from regulation? Were we smoking crack when the ratings agencies declared that junk mortgages were as safe as Treasury bonds? I mean come on…”

After a few more rounds of this, Ellen has had enough and flicks the TV off. She goes over to her desk and calls up the House of Vaughan file.

She’s not sure if she’s ready for this either, but she wants to finish it. The last chapter she read was a vivid account of how James Vaughan’s grandfather, Charles A. Vaughan, was one of the seven men who met in secret at a remote hunting lodge on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia in 1910 to plot the creation of the Federal Reserve System. The book’s final chapter then takes the reader back to Vaughan’s youth decades earlier and describes how he effectively came out of nowhere and got started in business.

The really surprising thing, as far as Ellen is concerned, is the detailed account of an incident that Gilroy chooses to close the book with, an incident that seems to identify-and with pinpoint precision-the very beginnings of the Vaughan family fortune. As she’s reading it, fully awake now and engaged, two aspects of this strike her as significant. One, the story is nothing short of incendiary-but kind of deceptively so, as it describes something that happened way back in late August of 1878. And two, in the unlikely event of the book ever being published, and sparking controversy, debate, or even litigation, Gilroy has built a pretty solid and impressive firewall around it in the form of multiple primary and secondary source citations. These include newspaper reports and contemporary eyewitness accounts.

The incident in question, which was quick and brutal, involved Charles Vaughan himself and Gilbert Morley, a renowned Wall Street speculator, as well as, indirectly, Arabella Stringham, the daughter of dry-goods magnate “Colonel” Cyrus T. Stringham.

When Ellen has finished the book, she gets on the phone and calls Gilroy up.

“Hi, Ellen.”

“Jimmy.” She whistles. “I’ve just finished House of Vaughan.”

“Oh.” Flicker of insecurity, standard issue. “And?”

She gives it to him straight-largely positive, one or two things she’s not sold on, one or two editorial suggestions. But her most enthusiastic comments she saves for last. The closing section of the book, she tells him, is fantastic, an absolute bombshell of a thing. She quizzes him for a few minutes on his methods, how and where he managed to dig up this material and how confident he would be about defending it.

Completely, he says. The ironic thing is that Vaughan’s subtle and not-so-subtle attempts to sabotage the project effectively drove it underground, causing a shift in focus, and steering Jimmy’s gaze ever deeper into the past-so that instead of trying to research and interview contemporaries of Vaughan’s, he ended up bunkering down in various basement libraries and trawling through, for the most part, old newspaper archives.

They then discuss the killing of Craig Howley and all the publicity surrounding it, but Jimmy guesses that for most publishers the link with Vaughan and his family history would still be too tenuous to justify acquiring the book and putting it out there. Vaughan really needs to stick his head above the parapet, Jimmy says, and that’s pretty unlikely at this stage.

But he’s fine with it.

The relief of getting the book finished has been liberating, and he’s looking forward to moving on.

“Okay,” Ellen says, “but you’re not giving up, right?”

“No. Certainly not. The way I see it, you know… it’s a long game.”

Yeah, Ellen thinks, as she’s putting the phone down a few moments later, you can say that again.

“Can I make another call?”

His first one, last night, at Central Booking, was to Deb. Not to apologize exactly, or even to explain, it was just to connect. And he has to give Deb her due, she let him. After the initial shock, she didn’t launch into an attack or go off on a rant or anything. In fact, she spent most of the time trying to persuade him to let Lloyd bring in a partner from the law firm to represent him.

Seymour Collins. Here now in the cell.

“Yeah,” he says, “we can arrange that. Who to?”

Collins is businesslike, very direct, no bullshit. He’s mid-fifties, well fed, well dressed, well groomed, but he clearly knows what he’s doing, knows his way around the system, and talks everyone’s language. At the arraignment this morning, even though he must have known it wouldn’t be granted, he made very convincing arguments for bail. When the judge then ordered that Frank be transferred to Rikers Island for his pretrial detention period, Collins successfully argued that given the high-profile nature of the crime his client should at least be granted protective custody.

Which means that Frank is being kept in the West Facility and away from the prison’s general population.

So again, thank fuck for Lloyd.

But as for who Frank wants to call? Well, Collins has just spent the last hour telling him about what’s in the papers today and what’s being said about him on TV and online. Frank Bishop, domestic terrorist, sick ideologue… epic fuckup as a father, epic fail as a man. Can’t even hold down a shitty job in retail. If this guy doesn’t plead insanity, one blogger wrote, then he’s obviously insane. Now, while one part of Frank agrees with all of this, and wholeheartedly, another part doesn’t-the same part that insisted on entering a plea of not guilty at the arraignment. That’s the position he’s taking. He’s prepared to admit that he shot and killed Craig Howley, but not that he’s guilty. This is why he’s being kept on remand, and why there’s going to be a trial, and why-given the nature of the coverage-he’s going to need an ally, someone to tell his side of the story.

“Ellen Dorsey,” he says.

Collins does a double take. “The journalist?”

“Yes.”

Frank has no real reason to trust Ellen Dorsey. But he has no reason to distrust her either. All he has to go on is his instincts.

“You sure that’s a good idea, Frank? I think maybe you ought to let-”

“No. Believe me, it’s a good idea.”

Actually, what Frank isn’t sure of right now is how long Seymour Collins might want to stick around. Because who knows, for a firm like Pierson Hackler this whole thing could very easily turn into a PR nightmare. Deb’s initial impulse to help could become a liability. They could lose clients.

But something tells Frank that with Ellen Dorsey it’ll be different, that she’s just too fucking stubborn to turn her back on this, and that consequently any chance of a fair hearing in the media lies with her. And he means a fair hearing not just for himself-maybe not even for himself at all, in fact-but for Lizzie. Because really, that’s what he wants to see, something written about her that’s honest and that tries to make sense of what happened without resorting to lies and hysteria.

“How well do you know this person? Can you trust her?”

This person.

He and Ellen drove down from Atherton together. A week later they sat in a diner for about an hour. They’ve spoken briefly a couple of times since. It’s not much-but not much is all he’s got left.

“Yes, I can.”

Collins paces back and forth. The cell isn’t very big. “Okay, so what do you have in mind?”

Frank explains. He keeps it simple. The idea is to enlist the support of someone with a bit of integrity who can set the record straight.

Can’t hurt, can it?

“Very well,” Collins says. “Be careful what you say, though. The call will be recorded.”

A while later, as Frank is being escorted to where the phones are in the recreation area, he wonders what he really meant when he used the phrase set the record straight.

Because Lizzie was involved in two murders.

And he carried out a third.

What could be straighter than that? All the rest is noise, and will soon be forgotten.

Just like he’ll soon be forgotten.

And this is a thought that occurs to him now with clockwork regularity. It’s like a new heartbeat, dull, thudding, relentless. Prison is all he will know for the rest of his life-damp walls like these, and awful smells, and shitty food, and restricted access to everything, and constant, gnawing fear. He’ll never again make eye contact with that Asian woman who works at the Walgreens, never again experience that frisson of excitement as a possible future opens up before him.

Never be free of self-pity, either.

The guard escorting him indicates which phone Frank should use. He goes to it, picks it up, and huddles in.

This is potentially something, though, isn’t it? A chance to talk, to remember, to put it all down for posterity.

A link with the past, a link with the future.

He has Ellen’s number written on a piece of paper. He punches it out, and waits.

Thursday is Vaughan’s first day in a month without this new medication. He took the last pill yesterday, and spent a good part of the morning walking in Central Park and most of the afternoon sorting through some old archives. But his irritation at not being able to contact Arnie Tisch-who has apparently been transferred, or has had himself transferred, to Eiben’s main office in Beijing-is mitigated slightly by a determination not to let himself be ruled by this.

It’s only a stupid pill, after all.

He’s James Vaughan.

But he’s not giving up on it, either. If he has to, he’ll go straight to Paul Blanford, Eiben’s CEO, and find some way to scare the living daylights out of him. Because what’s the big deal? It’s not like they’re conducting illegal clinical trials in some third-world hellhole and are afraid of getting caught. He’s volunteering to take it. You’d think they’d be happy to get the feedback.

By ten o’clock, however, and despite his determination to brave it out, Vaughan has to admit that he’s feeling pretty lousy. Energy levels are noticeably down on recent days, and all of a sudden he’s aware, as he hasn’t been for ages, of various bodily aches and pains.

And he’s not doing anything, apart from shuffling aimlessly around the apartment. He doesn’t want to panic, though, so he makes a real effort to engage. He goes into his study and sits at his desk. He places a call to Paul Blanford. After a few moments, he’s informed that Mr. Blanford is unavailable. Wheezing a little now, suppressing a cough, he just about stops himself from barking Do you know who I am? into the phone. What he does say is that it’s imperative Mr. Blanford gets back to him.

Then, feeling a bit sick, he goes in search of Meredith.

He finds her, as he does most days now, sitting at the counter in the kitchen, drinking either coffee or a soda and staring up at live coverage of the Connie Carillo murder trial on the wall-mounted TV. Sometimes Mrs. R is around, sometimes not. Today she’s not, and Mer is alone, in jeans and a T-shirt, no makeup, hunched forward over the counter, can of soda next to the remote.

It all seems to have become a little obsessive of late.

Vaughan doesn’t say anything. He just stands in the doorway-watching her, then watching the TV for a bit, alternating between the two, in a sort of daze himself.

Mrs. Sanchez is still on the stand, and Ray Whitestone is continuing the very thorough and forensic dissection of the housekeeper’s cleaning regimen that he began yesterday. Vaughan read about it online earlier this morning, how jury members had been shown a selection of cleaning solvents taken from the kitchen of the Park Avenue apartment, and had then been treated to detailed readings from their labels. Whitestone argued that the presence of one product in particular, Erodon 10, a highly unusual and industrial-strength cleaning solvent, was inconsistent with the defense counsel’s claim that Mrs. Sanchez was scrupulous in regard to safety. No one seems to know where this is going, and Judge Roberts hasn’t shown any inclination to intervene.

Unbelievably, Whitestone is still chiseling away at the same point this morning.

“Mrs. Sanchez,” he’s saying, “is it not true that Erodon 10 is a singularly inappropriate substance to use in an everyday domestic setting?”

“Objection, leading.”

“Overruled.”

“Mrs. Sanchez?”

“Yes, normally. I suppose.”

“And yet you had it there, under the sink, in among the washing powders and grease-stain removers?”

“Yes, sir, but-”

“Mrs. Sanchez, are you aware that Erodon 10 is used in heavy industry, and that it is even used by the military?”

She pauses, obviously irritated by the line of questioning. “No, sir.”

Vaughan looks at Meredith. She is engrossed, mesmerized.

“So you are not aware that it is essentially a commercial by-product of a chemical weapons R &D program?”

“Objection.”

“Mr. Whitestone?”

“Bear with me, Your Honor.”

Judge Roberts exhales, waves him on.

“Mrs. Sanchez, did you never once read the safety warnings on the label?”

“Yes, I did, but if I could-”

“So despite the alarming nature of those warnings, as we saw here yesterday, you saw fit to keep a container of the stuff in the defendant’s kitchen?”

“I had-”

“Mrs. Sanchez, please, you must answer the question. Did you consider it appropriate to keep a container of Erodon 10 in an ordinary domestic setting? Yes or no?”

Mrs. Sanchez rolls her eyes. She hesitates, sighs, seems to be looking for a way out.

“Mrs. Sanchez, did you consider it appropriate?”

“Yes.”

“I see. May we ask why?”

“Why? You want to know why?”

“Yes, Mrs. Sanchez.”

She leans forward in the box, clearly agitated now. “Because of Mr. Meeker’s girlfriend, that’s why, she kept spilling her stupid cherry soda-”

The courtroom erupts.

“-it was that Dr. something, diet cherry, and I don’t know how many times she spilt it on the kitchen floor, on the tiles, and nothing gets that stuff out, nothing, believe me, I’ve tried-”

The defense counsel jumps to his feet. “Mrs. Sanchez!”

“-then someone told me about this Erodon 10,” she goes on, “that it was good for getting out tough stains, but without damaging the tiles, because you know with terra-cotta-”

“Mrs. Sanchez, please.”

Judge Roberts calls for order.

“-because you have to…” She is looking around now, obviously bewildered by the reaction. “… you have to be careful…”

With the commotion continuing in the courtroom, Vaughan turns, as though in a dream, and looks at Meredith. She is leaning back from the counter now, her mouth open in shock. She raises a hand to cover it. “Oh my God,” she whispers-it’s just about audible-and then turns in Vaughan’s direction.

Their eyes meet.

A wave of exhaustion washes over him. He’s confused, but also suddenly quite focused.

Meredith shakes her head, and then, slowly, they both look down at the counter, and at the can of soda in front of Meredith.

It’s the one she always drinks, the one that anyone who knows her knows she drinks.

It’s Dr. Thurston’s Diet Cherry Cola.

The word she’s seeing most is frenzy-as in “media frenzy” or “frenzy of speculation.” Because everyone is asking the same question. Who is she? Who is Howard Meeker’s quote unquote girlfriend?

“Please tell us,” one blogger writes, “because we gots to know…”

On the train back from Atherton, Ellen has just put away her notes and taken out her phone. And it’s all over Twitter-this first serving of real drama in the Carillo murder trial. Mrs. Sanchez is trending, Ray Whitestone is trending, #mysterygirlfriend is trending.

Ellen checks a couple of news sites to get the lowdown. It seems that Whitestone’s laborious and painstaking technique of intense engagement followed by sudden deflection has paid off, providing the trial with something it has conspicuously lacked up to now, a motive.

She watches a clip of a panel discussion on MSNBC. The studio backdrop is a graphic depicting the scales of justice superimposed on a photo-montage of Salome’s veils, the Dow Jones logo, and a dead fish wrapped in newspapers.

“Yes,” one of the panelists is saying, “we now have a motive, and it appears to be sexual jealousy.”

“Which, of course,” another panelist says, “is quite in keeping with the operatic dimensions of this whole case.”

“Indeed. But who is this other woman? The only thing we know about her is that she drinks some kind of… diet soda.”

“And appears to be a little clumsy.”

This prompts a laugh.

“We’re also getting reports in that Mildred Sanchez is now claiming she doesn’t know who the girlfriend is, or at least doesn’t know her by name, but that this person was a frequent visitor to the apartment, especially when Connie was away on tour.”

“And now the hunt is on to find her.”

“Extraordinary. An absolutely extraordinary development in court today.”

They then show the relevant exchange.

And it is extraordinary.

But how many times, Ellen wonders, will they be rerunning it in the coming days and weeks?

She puts her phone away, leans back, and gazes out the window, pondering the extraordinary development there has been in her own circumstances.

The call on Tuesday from Frank Bishop came as a real surprise, but when he made his proposal she didn’t hesitate for a second. Because it all seemed to make sense now. She was no longer racing against the clock to crack a story that kept getting ahead of her. The story was already there, and she was being given the chance to tell it, comprehensively and more or less from the inside. When she got off the phone with Frank, she called Max, and they worked out a strategy right there and then-three parts over three months, once the trial was out of the way.

Ellen got on the case without delay by going through all of her notes. She then took the train up to Atherton College to reestablish some of the contacts she’d made first time around, and to make a few new ones. She stayed until this morning so she could interview as many people as possible.

Traveling back this afternoon, she feels energized, her head brimming with ideas on how to approach this. From Penn Station she takes an A train uptown, but instead of going straight home she decides to stop off at Flannery’s first for a quiet drink.

Settled at the bar, one beer in, she looks up and sees Charlie approaching.

“Hey, Ellen.” He takes the stool next to her. “You been following it, right? Please tell me you’ve been following it.”

“Carillo? Not exactly.” She plays with her phone, twirling it slowly on the bar. “I’ve been working. I heard, though.”

“Something else, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, the mystery girlfriend. You couldn’t make it up.”

Charlie rears back. “What? You’re behind the curve, sweetheart. Mystery’s been solved.”

“What?”

“Yeah, things are moving pretty fast. Someone squealed, apparently, about an hour ago. On Twitter. Of course. And now it’s everywhere.”

“Oh.” She takes a sip from her glass. “So who’s the little charmer?”

Charlie catches the barman’s eye and orders a drink. He turns back. “Who is it? Well, her name is Meredith Vaughan. Seems she’s married to some much older-”

Ellen’s jaw drops.

Charlie looks at her. “What?”

“Meredith Vaughan?”

“Yeah.”

“Holy shit.”

She slides off the stool, simultaneously grabbing her phone from the bar.

“What? Ellen. Jesus.”

“Give me two minutes, Charlie.”

She heads for the door, moving quickly, phone held up in front of her, looking for Jimmy Gilroy’s number.

Outside, there is a warmth in the late-afternoon air, a sort of thickening.

“Hi, Ellen.”

She feels excited.

“Have you heard?”

“Meredith? Yeah. It’s just unbelievable. The whole thing has ignited. I’m online right now, and one of the questions people are asking is, who is James Vaughan? It’s like… it’s…”

“Like Christmas has come early.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got to resubmit the book to publishers, Jimmy.” She watches an MTA bus glide by. “Do you still have an agent?”

“No, but-”

“I’ll talk to mine.”

“Thanks. I just want to do some edits, a few days, and then-”

“Yeah, let the momentum build. This story isn’t going away anytime soon.”

Jimmy laughs. “You know what, Ellen, I’m supposed to be heading out to work in a few minutes, but how am I going to get through this shift without cracking something open, and preferably a bottle of champagne?”

“Uh-uh, you save that for when I’m there.”

She tells him about the Frank Bishop development. They discuss the overlap, and how it might mean they could end up working on the same story again.

“For our sins,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah.”

“Fine by me, though.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Ellen looks around. “Okay, Irish, you get your edits done, I’ll talk to my agent tomorrow, and we’ll meet up early next week.”

She puts her phone away, breathes in a lungful of Amsterdam, and heads back inside.

It’s four thirty when he wakes definitively. Doesn’t mean he’s going to get up, but he certainly won’t be going back to sleep. That last little passage of dreamtime was enough to seal that deal-him and LBJ in a corridor somewhere, Johnson blocking the way, won’t let him get by, exhorting, cajoling, breathing in his face. “I’m tellin’ ya, son…”

The reality was quite different, though, because Vaughan famously clashed with LBJ-had the temerity to defy the man-and then went to work for Barry Goldwater.

It was in the summer of ’64.

Famously?

If that isn’t a relative term.

Now that he’s sufficiently awake, yesterday comes flooding back to him in all its horror. First, the screaming, mostly from Meredith, who was all defensive and passive-aggressive, trying to say it didn’t mean anything, which if he hadn’t been in such physical pain by that point he would have laughed at. And then the dramatics, the bag packing and the flight from the apartment, ostensibly to save his “feelings,” but in reality because she knew damn well that if she stayed here, she’d end up-once the cat was out of the bag-becoming a virtual prisoner in the building. And it wasn’t long before said cat was out of the bag and roaming free, claws out. It was a few hours at most.

Sometime late in the afternoon his phone started ringing, and it didn’t stop.

He refused to take any calls.

He also resisted turning on the TV for a while, but he eventually gave in. What he saw unfolding before him on the screen, and later on his computer in the study, was deeply traumatizing. He had never experienced anything like it before.

It was his ultimate nightmare.

Exposure.

Every mention of the word Vaughan felt like a stab wound. Every photo they showed-and they were mostly from the archives-felt like a laceration. As the evening progressed, he also felt sicker and weaker. This was, presumably, the effect of his withdrawal from the medication, which in turn, presumably, was responsible for the gradual unmasking of his various underlying conditions. After a while, it became hard to tell them apart, these two forms of pain-one imposed from outside, one pulsating from within.

Painkillers helped.

But painkillers only help in the short term. In Vaughan’s experience, they usually ended up killing a lot more than just the pain. He tried Paul Blanford again, without success, so he now pretty much accepts that with all this media stuff going on he hasn’t a hope in hell anymore of continuing with the medication.

He gets up at seven, and slowly makes his way to the bathroom.

It hurts to piss now.

He has a quick, awkward shower, using the handheld unit. He dries himself off and puts his robe back on.

As he’s coming out of the bedroom, he realizes that he’s alone in the apartment.

Mrs. R will be here shortly, as will his doctor. He dismissed his full-time nurse a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t see the point of having her. In the old days he used to employ a permanent domestic staff, but Meredith changed all of that.

Clutching his side, which is really sore now for some reason, he walks along the hallway toward the kitchen.

A few minutes later, as he’s preparing to make coffee, or trying to, he spots the remote control on the counter, and curses it.

He holds out for about thirty seconds.

When he flicks the TV on, the first image he sees, if only for a brief moment, is the exterior of his own apartment building. There are clearly reporters and photographers down there, but Billy the doorman is under strict instructions not to interact with them.

It then cuts back to a studio and another panel of primped and preening morons. Mostly what they seem to be talking about is Meredith and that whole social scene she’s involved in. Despite his vested interest in this, Vaughan quickly grows restive and changes the channel.

But it’s more of the same.

On yet another channel, they’re showing a photo of Vaughan in a white linen suit and a Panama hat, standing next to poor Hank Rundle. They’re in front of an enormous construction site-it must be in the Middle East somewhere, one of their great engineering projects from the early seventies. It’s followed by an even older black-and-white shot of Vaughan’s father, William J., taken at the Stork Club with Lana Turner. After that-Jesus wept-there’s one of his grandfather’s funeral procession on Fifth Avenue from, what, 1938?

Where’d they get their hands on that?

Vaughan’s sense of invasion, of violation almost, is acute. How can this be relevant in any way? How can these people possibly justify this stuff?

That’s why he had to take the steps he did with that young journalist. This thing with Meredith is temporary, and with any luck it’ll blow over and be forgotten, but not a book… not a book with goddamn chapter headings and footnotes…

“Mr. Vaughan.”

He turns around.

It’s Mrs. R. He didn’t hear her coming in.

“Good morning.”

“Good… Mr. Vaughan, what… what are you doing?”

“Nothing… I…”

He looks at the counter, at the mess he’s made, spilled coffee beans, the grinder on its side.

He got distracted by the TV.

But that doesn’t explain the look on her face. He glances down and sees that his robe is open, and that he forgot to put his boxers back on after the shower.

Damn.

He then sees his reflection in one of the glass cabinets, tousled wisps of gray hair, two-day stubble.

Pale as death.

He stands there, not entirely unaware that several seconds have already passed and he hasn’t closed his robe yet.

What is wrong with him?

“I’m sorry,” he says, closing the robe, the room starting to spin slightly-a glimpse of Meredith up on the TV screen, eyes shining, lips ruby red.

A kaleidoscope.

He reaches out for the counter to steady himself, and starts coughing.

“Mr. Vaughan?”

It takes him a few moments to get it under control, but he does eventually, and when he looks down at the marble countertop, he sees that it is speckled with blood.

The call comes on Monday morning. Ellen is at her desk, keying in notes from her Atherton interviews.

She reaches for the phone, her hello as distracted as they come.

“Is this Ellen Dorsey?”

“Yeah.”

“My name is Detective Oscar Rayburn from the Seventy-seventh Precinct in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Are you acquainted with a James Gilroy?”

“Yes.” She sits up. “Is he okay?”

“No, ma’am, I’m afraid he isn’t.” She tenses. “Mr. Gilroy was found dead in his apartment yesterday afternoon. We believe he took his own life.”

“What? But that’s-” Her incredulity, instant and all-encompassing, prevents her from going on.

“Ms. Dorsey?”

“That’s… not possible. He was-” She wants to mention the champagne, how he talked about cracking open a bottle of champagne, the word exploding like a supernova in her brain-champagne, champagne-but she doesn’t, she can’t, and resorts instead to a dense, slow, loaded “Oh… my… God.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Dorsey.” He pauses. “How well did you know Mr. Gilroy?”

“Not that well. We worked together. I’m a journalist, and so was he. We were colleagues, and friends, but…”

She’s babbling.

“The reason I called you, Ms. Dorsey, is because it appears the last person he spoke to on his cell phone was you.”

“Yeah, on Thursday. Thursday evening.”

“Can I ask what you guys talked about?”

“Er…” Ellen pauses and swallows. She stares at a page of scribbled notes on the desk, her mind beginning to glaze over. Then something kicks in, some kind of professional survival mechanism, where gears shift and extra adrenaline is pumped into the system. She leans forward on the desk. “I’m sorry, Detective, did you say the Seventy-seventh Precinct? In Crown Heights?”

“Yes, I-”

“Are you there for the next while, the next hour or two? Because frankly I’d prefer to do this face-to-face.” She swallows again, and winces, as though there’s suddenly something toxic in the air. “I think I’m probably going to have as many questions as you have, if not more.”

“That won’t be nec-”

“Yes, it will.”

They tussle over it for a bit, but Ellen’s determination wins out. She gets the impression that this case is only one of many on Oscar Rayburn’s roster, that he hadn’t figured on it needing anything more than a phone call, and that she has blindsided him, maybe even inconvenienced him.

But what, she’s supposed to give a fuck?

It’s his job.

She puts the phone down, and the next short while, the time between ending the conversation with Rayburn and getting into the back of a cab on Columbus Avenue, goes by in a blur-no coherent thoughts, just bathroom, jacket, notebook, phone, keys, stairs, street. Sitting in the cab, though, city flickering past, is a different story. Here the thoughts are all too coherent, and they revolve around a single, awful word, suicide-in most cases awful for the obvious reason, in a certain few cases awful for a less obvious one. In these few cases, the victim is usually a journalist, or a whistleblower, or a troublemaker of one kind or another. In these few cases, it’s suicide as a weapon.

But, of course, in these few cases it’s not suicide at all.

And that’s her most coherent thought, the one that’s keeping others at bay, the one that’s keeping emotion at bay.

Or not.

She tightens her fist into a ball, squeezes it hard. It doesn’t work. She starts crying.

The little bastard. He stormed into her life one afternoon, out of the blue, walked into her apartment, sat down, and started talking, unspooling this incredible web of intrigue and malfeasance, of corruption and venality. He was almost ten years younger than she was, but he had none of the arrogance or sense of entitlement you often get with guys that age, journalists that age, who think the world owes them an era-defining scoop, and are themselves defined, chiefly, by impatience. He wanted her help, and he was respectful, because all he really wanted was to make sense of what he had in front of him and to write it up.

They were thrown together by necessity-she had the experience and connections, and he had the story-but people she knew, people in the business, were shocked to find that the notoriously uncooperative and prickly Ellen Dorsey was actually collaborating with someone.

It was easy, though.

Because the guy was basically a sweetheart. He was good-looking, and kind of cute, but there was never anything between them. He felt like a really smart kid brother that she could boss around and-

She was going to say protect.

But that could never be part of the equation, not in this job. She’s not so sentimental as to think that that’s why she’s crying.

She’s crying because she liked him and respected him, and now he’s dead.

She sniffles and gets out a tissue. Blows her nose, sighs, says fuck a few times under her breath.

Looks around.

Driver taking in the show, surreptitiously, through the rearview.

She goes back to her most coherent thought.

Why would Jimmy Gilroy want to kill himself? No discernible reason. Plus, he was talking about cracking open a bottle of champagne and celebrating. Why would someone else want to kill Jimmy Gilroy? For a very discernible reason. Plus, he’d already been threatened.

There’s a depressing, all too familiar pattern here. She could list off other cases, Danny Casolaro, Steve Kangas, Gary Webb, half a dozen more. She doesn’t know if these people were murdered or not, but the official line on each of them is the same-they were depressed, they drank too much, life closed in on them… nothing to see here, please move along. Meanwhile, relatives are baffled, and files go missing, and legitimate lines of journalistic inquiry dry up.

Thing is, it’s an airtight method, it’s foolproof, because anyone who cries foul can easily be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist… and a fool.

And Ellen doesn’t know. She’s ambivalent. Believing isn’t enough, and people do commit suicide.

She looks out the window, the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge rippling past in the sunlight.

She knows where Barstool Charlie would stand, and that always gives her pause. But at the same time she has to steel herself here, because even from this distance, she can feel it coming, feel it in her bones…

The dreaded official line.

It comes sooner than expected, and not from Detective Oscar Rayburn, either.

When she gets to the Seventy-seventh Precinct, she announces herself, and is asked to sit in the waiting area. She takes her phone out and does a quick Internet trawl. To her surprise, there are already several reports of Gilroy’s death. Unsurprisingly, there’s a uniform, sort of planted feel to them. James Gilroy, the journalist who broke the Senator John Rundle story a couple of years back, has been found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, a bullet to the head, suspected suicide… sources say he’d been depressed, and drinking, that his career had gone off the rails…

Sources?

She deflates in her hard plastic chair.

Poor Jimmy.

Ellen’s interview with Rayburn doesn’t help.

He’s distracted and uninterested. Mid-forties, heavyset, sad and unhealthy-looking. Probably underpaid and overworked. When he asks his question again and she gives him an edited version of what they spoke about, adding that Jimmy was happy and untroubled and looking to the future with real enthusiasm… he barely reacts.

Ellen asks him about the weapon used, about ballistics and positioning. He answers each question, without looking at her, by consulting pages and folders on his desk.

She asks him about the state of Jimmy’s apartment, about his computer or laptop.

Rayburn looks up at her, and then back at his pages. He flicks through them, reads something. Checks another page. Then he looks at her again, and shakes his head. “He didn’t have a computer.”

“What the-” Ellen stops and composes herself. “He didn’t have one, or you didn’t find one in the apartment, because you people-”

Rayburn raises an index finger. “Steady, ma’am.”

“Detective, he was a single male, thirty years old, he was a journalist. Are you seriously telling me he didn’t have a computer? How did he send e-mails?”

Rayburn shrugs.

“And I’ll tell you something else, Detective. It’s a hell of a lot less likely that he owned a gun.”

Rayburn shuffles through a few papers and then holds something up. “State of New York,” he says wearily. “License to own a handgun, premises only.”

Ellen nods, her weariness matching his.

She asks about who found him, and about next of kin.

Seems he has a cousin who lives in Queens. And yes, there’ll be an autopsy. Funeral arrangements aren’t yet known.

Ellen gets the cousin’s number.

Rayburn then indicates that time’s up, that he’s really swamped here.

He stands up. She stands up, too.

They shake hands, and she leaves.

In bed, propped up with pillows, Vaughan clicks his way through the pages of the document. He catches words, phrases, names especially, but he can’t focus enough to read anymore, not properly. A sentence or two at a time is about all he can manage.

Nevertheless, it’s infuriating-the idea of some little shit snooping around his affairs like that, talking to people, asking elaborate questions, looking up archives, scrolling down through endless sheets of microfiche in some musty old library basement.

Like a rat.

On a treadmill.

And of course he’s Irish.

Vaughan doesn’t have a great history with the Irish. Got held at gunpoint once in Dublin, on a construction site, on the forty-eighth floor of a new build, albeit by an extremely attractive young woman.

The file arrived this morning as an e-mail attachment, sent by Beth Overmyer.

House of Vaughan.

He nearly got sick.

Sicker than he already is.

He’s been in bed since Friday, hooked up to drips and machinery. He refused to go to the hospital. His doctor argued for it, harangued him about it, but Vaughan resisted. What’s the point of having fifteen billion dollars if you can’t tell your doctor to go fuck himself?

He’s also refusing to see visitors, even though they’re apparently lining up outside.

Who are these people, anyway, but ghosts? Some of them, most of them, not even born when he was in his prime.

He looks out over the room, the machines beeping, the BP values fluctuating.

That doesn’t make them ghosts, though, does it? Isn’t he the ghost?

Whatever.

He’s made sure-as much as these things are possible-that this outrage, this so-called book, will never see the light of day.

Containment.

He’s set it in train. It’s a respectable policy and has a long and fairly rich tradition behind it. It’s been shown to work in the past, it’ll work again.

He comes to the last few pages of the file and tries really hard to focus.

… but instead, Charles Vaughan’s decision to short-sell his Union Pacific stocks only served to further provoke Gilbert Morley…

A pain throbs behind his eyes, and he has to look away from the screen for a moment. There’s a Pissarro out there, on the wall opposite, it’s usually a soothing presence, comforting, but he can’t see it right now. Everything’s a bit of a blur.

He reads on.

… in addition to which Vaughan’s attentions to Arabella Stringham, Morley’s fiancée, were to prove intolerable to the fusty and straitlaced Wall Street speculator. Undeterred, Vaughan pressed his advantage with the beautiful young dry-goods heiress…

This is the one and only Charles A. Vaughan he’s reading about, his grandfather, whom he vaguely remembers from when he was a kid-the mid-1930s it would have been, all those visits to the cottage in Newport, the stiff formality of the man, his gray beard, his tortoiseshell cane with the carved ivory handle.

He was the architect, the great begetter, the patriarch.

But this version of him? The brash young nobody on the make… the schemer, the conniver, the hustler?

It’s a travesty.

Vaughan clicks on to the last page.

… and then early one Thursday afternoon in August of 1878, as he made his way along Broad Street, Vaughan spotted Morley emerging from a tavern…

And farther down.

… but witnesses then report the conversation taking a somewhat violent turn, with Vaughan grabbing the other man by his lapels and shoving him backward…

Vaughan simply cannot believe what he is reading, but he pushes on, increasingly horrified, knowing that if this material ever were to be made public, the humiliation, the exposure, would kill him, and outright-much faster, in fact, than the multiple, advanced, late-stage cancers riddling his body that he has been reliably informed over the last two days are killing him now.

On Utica Avenue, outside the Seventy-seventh Precinct, Ellen wants to scream. Is this how Jimmy ends up? Is this what he’s reduced to? A half hour of inconvenient paperwork on the desk of some stressed-out, overworked cop?

That’s how it seems.

But contrasted with this is an image in her head now that she can’t shake. Jimmy slumped on his couch, gun in one hand, arm twisted back, brains daubed on the wall behind him.

Alone.

But not alone.

A spectral figure, maybe two, gliding around his apartment, placing items, removing items, subtly determining in advance the shape and direction of what will appear in Detective Rayburn’s paperwork.

What makes her sick, and a little dizzy, is the apparent ease with which this can be done. So it’s not something she can let lie. She’s going to have to pursue it, extract more information from Rayburn, dig deeper-maybe get Val Brady to look into it.

But then something occurs to Ellen, a thought that grows-mushrooms, in fact-as she walks the six blocks to the Crown Heights-Utica Avenue subway stop.

If she is right, and this has happened because of Jimmy’s book, it would be logical to assume that Jimmy was under surveillance. Wouldn’t it also then be logical to assume that she is too, given her history with Jimmy, and their recent meeting at the Black Lamps?

Is that a stretch?

To remove any trace of Jimmy’s work, they took his computer. Presumably, they’ve also hacked into his accounts to delete whatever material he might have had stored remotely on iCloud or on Dropbox.

But do they know that she has a copy?

They must realize that publishers have seen it, that a digital file, pretty hard to eliminate completely, is out there. But they would also know, or suspect, that Ellen is the one person most likely to want to use it.

Or would they? And, for that matter, who are they?

Standing on the platform now, waiting for a 4 train, she looks around, a little uneasily.

Who are they?

The Oberon Capital Group owns Gideon Global, a private security and intelligence company with massive resources. What more do you need to know? This isn’t a stretch at all.

The train arrives, and she takes it to Fulton Street, where she gets a 2 train uptown.

All the way home, Ellen feels nervous, and increasingly so as she approaches her building. She’s been the subject of surveillance in the past, while working on stories. She’s been hacked, and she’s been subtly intimidated. But she’s never feared for her actual safety before. She’s never felt that she had to scan the other passengers on a subway car, or look over her shoulder walking down the street.

She looks over her shoulder now.

But there’s no one there.

Weirdly, that makes her feel more nervous.

As she walks up the stoop to her building and goes inside, she thinks she might throw up. She also becomes convinced that she’s going to find something unpleasant when she gets into her apartment.

But what?

She gets to the fourth floor and stands there, with her key in her hand, not quite hyperventilating.

Fuck this.

She unlocks the door, pushes it open, and looks inside.

Nothing. It’s just as she left it.

She goes in and locks the door behind her. She goes over to the window and looks down onto Ninety-third Street.

After a while her breathing returns to normal. But she also realizes something. This isn’t just paranoia on her part. It’s real. And it isn’t going away, either.

Standing there, she takes out her phone.

“Yep?”

“Max, are you at the office?”

“Hi, Ellen, yeah. Where else would I be?”

“Stay there.”

She gets ready, gathers a few things, and goes. Approaching Columbus Avenue, she finds herself almost breaking into a run.

She flags down a cab.

Fifty blocks south, then a few more east.

When she walks through the door of the Parallax offices, she feels a distinct release-it’s physical, and could be expressed as a scream or a manic laugh or even fifteen minutes of uncontrollable sobbing. But she holds it in check, and walks the long hallway that leads to Max’s office.

Sitting behind his desk, hair unkempt, eyes out on sticks, Max looks like he’s inches from a caffeine heart attack.

“Hey, Jimmy Dorsey, what’s up?”

It’s a formula he’s used before. She doesn’t know how to tell him that it’s not funny, not anymore. But neither does she want to.

Not now.

And yet. She’s a reporter. She has to report.

She stands in front of his desk. “Those IT geeks you had in here once,” she says, “are they still around?”

“And good morning to you, too. Yeah, of course.” He looks at her, picking up on the tone. He adjusts his position in the chair. “Ellen. You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”

She takes Jimmy Gilroy’s USB flash drive from her pocket and places it gently on the desk.

Max leans forward and studies it. “So. What have we got here?”

She keeps it brief.

Jimmy’s dead. She explains how-or, at least, how it seems. Then there’s his book here, the one about James Vaughan and his family. She explains more or less what’s in it, and how it finishes with a charming tale of Vaughan’s grandfather, who one afternoon as a very young man was witnessed, near the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, getting into an altercation with another man, one Gilbert Morley, pushing this man into an adjacent construction pit, and then bashing his brains in with a lead pipe. Evading prosecution, Charles Vaughan subsequently married his victim’s fiancée, and not long after that effectively inherited his new father-in-law’s substantial fortune, which in turn became the financial basis for his own railroad, steel, and mining empire.

Max listens, first with shock on his face, then alarm.

“So what I think we should do,” Ellen goes on, pointing at the flash drive, “is upload that onto the Parallax website.” She pauses. “Today.”

Max exhales, shaking his head, trying to process what she’s told him. “Jesus, Ellen. This is a lot to take in.”

She remains standing there, impassive, waiting.

Max thinks about it for a minute.

“I don’t…” He’s struggling. He looks at her directly. “I don’t get the point of putting it on the website today. What’s the hurry?”

“Okay,” Ellen says, “let me tell you. One, you want to save this magazine, right? Best way to do that, as we both know, is by ramping up your Web presence. How do you achieve that? Do something spectacular, get everyone’s attention. With James Vaughan not just in the news right now, but halfway to being a fucking celebrity, this book is a heat-seeking missile. Two, Jimmy deserves it. He did the work, so this means he won’t be forgotten. And you don’t have to worry about making any allegations that won’t stand up, because the context will do it for you. Some straight reporting on how Jimmy died-I’m going to get Val Brady working on it-and this, his book, which is fully sourced and referenced, will speak for itself. And three…” She stops and sits down, pulling herself in closer to the desk. She puts her hand over the flash drive. “And three. Once this is out there, clocking up hits, I’m safe again.”

“You’re not safe now?”

“Look what happened to Jimmy. These people have to know I was in touch with him.” She leans in even closer. “So let me tell you something for free, Max. I’m not leaving the building until you upload this thing onto the website.”

Max sits back in his chair and swivels. “Okay, let me read it first. Then we’ll get the tech guys in, and legal, too.” He swivels some more. “If we go ahead with this, you’ll have to write something, an introduction.”

“Of course,” Ellen says. “Absolutely. I’d want to.”

Max sighs. He picks up the flash drive and studies it. “It’s going to be a long day.”

Ellen shrugs. “There’s plenty of coffee, isn’t there?”

“Sure.” Max looks at her for a while. “Are you okay, Ellen?”

She gets up from the chair. “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

She takes out her phone and walks over to the window.

Standing there, she makes a few calls, the first one to Val Brady, the second to Jimmy’s cousin in Queens, and a third to her sister, Michelle.

When she can’t talk anymore she finds a free desk and gets down to work. It takes her a couple of hours to write the introduction. After that she goes over her Atherton notes. Then she spends another couple of hours preparing questions for the interview she’s doing later in the week with Frank Bishop.

During all of this, in the background, people come and go, suits, guys in beards, phone calls are made, facts checked, opinions sought.

Ellen even manages to fall asleep for a while.

Sometime late in the afternoon, Val Brady shows up.

He has a piece on Gilroy ready to go. He’s been out to the Seventy-seventh, and has met the cousin. He says that if Parallax goes ahead and posts House of Vaughan on their website this evening, his piece will make page one of the Times tomorrow, which in turn will send a lot of traffic back the magazine’s way.

This revives Max, who’s been flagging somewhat. He then heads off for another round of consultations. Twenty-five minutes later, he reappears and says, “Okay, looks like we’re good to go.”

Ellen isn’t sure she’s heard him right.

“Yeah.” He sinks into his chair. “It’s all been cleared. The guys have set it up. They’ve previewed it. They’re using, I don’t know, WordPress or something. Anyway, one click and we’re done.”

A weary Ellen turns to Val. “I haven’t eaten all day. Are you hungry?”

Val’s eyes widen. He nods and says, “Yeah, sure, but I’m buying.”

Ellen then gets up and walks over to Max’s desk. She goes in behind it, stands next to him, and looks at the screen.

Max drags the cursor over to the PUBLISH icon. He withdraws his hand from the mouse, and glances up at her.

“You want to do it?”

Ellen takes a deep breath. She reaches down, clicks on the icon, and waits. “That’s it,” she says, after a couple of moments. “We’re live.”