The Prince of Risk

6

Monday morning traffic was a bitch.

Bobby Astor surveyed the line in front of him and shook his head. The Hamptons were done. Ten years ago, he could zip out to the house on a Friday afternoon without breaking a sweat and leave early Monday morning to be back in the office by eight. No more. Fridays worked fine, but the return leg was a bear. This morning was a perfect example. After a straight shot out of Amagansett, past Southampton, and across Long Island, he’d been stuck on the far side of the East River, circling, for twenty minutes.

“How much longer they keeping us in the pattern?” he asked.

“We’re next in line. Just waiting for the pad to clear.”

Astor loosened his shoulder harness. It was a gorgeous day, with blue sky as far as the eye could see. Looking south, he enjoyed a clear view to Atlantic City. Through the Perspex canopy of the Aérospatiale AS350 “Squirrel,” he counted four helicopters circling the Downtown Manhattan Heliport.

Astor shot a glance at the tablet in his lap displaying a summary of world financial markets. Europe was off 2 percent on fears that the incident in Washington had been a terrorist attack. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng had dropped 4 percent before rebounding. China had its own problems, and the deaths of three American financial luminaries would have no effect, either positively or negatively, on them. Futures on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and the S &P 500 were sharply lower.

Astor brought up a list of his open positions. One column tallied his profits and losses, the sum total shown in bold numerals at the bottom. The figure was black, but not by much. His eye fixed on a single symbol. Next to it stood the nominal value of his investment: $2,000,000,000. It represented a bet on the value of a currency. All summer the number had not fluctuated more than half a percent up or down. The currency had steadfastly guarded its value against the dollar.

Sometime in the next few days, all that was going to change.

Astor slipped the tablet into the satchel at his side. Away to the west, he watched a chopper lift from the pad and head up the East River. He was thinking how his father had hated helicopters and how he had refused to join him for the flight into the city even when they had been getting along. It wasn’t the helicopter so much as that his son owned one, and that he’d defied Graham and Dodd’s every precept to earn it. There was no wrath like that of a value investor scorned.

Astor took out his phone and brought up the message from his father.

PALANTIR.

A search on the web had offered a definition meaning “illumination” and nothing more. If the news had accurately reported the time of his father’s death, the message counted as his father’s last words. Or at least his last message. Regardless, it was to be taken seriously.

The phone rang. Astor saw it was the office calling. “Yeah, Marv, be there in ten,” he said.

No one replied. The earpiece filled with white noise.

“Marv…you there? Marv?”

Astor checked the screen and saw that he had four bars of reception. Still, he could not hear his partner. He hung up and called back, but the call didn’t go through. Phone reception in Manhattan was a work in progress. He didn’t worry about it. Marv could wait.

Astor looked again at the text message. He’d spent the night glued to the wall of monitors, switching from program to program, hoping to glean some piece of information he might have missed, anything that might help him understand what had happened to his father, and, more important, why.

By dawn the analysts had broken down the incident into four questions: Why had Hughes, Gelman, and Astor’s father demanded to see the president so late on a Sunday night? And why had they been meeting in the first place? Why had the Secret Service agent, a twenty-five-year veteran with a family of four, left the paved road and driven across the South Lawn of the White House? And why had the agents on the grounds seen fit to blow to kingdom come the Chevrolet Suburban in which they all were traveling?

Answers to the first two boiled down to an unknown threat to the nation’s financial system. Most of the talking heads were in agreement that it was Edward Astor’s presence with the nation’s two highest-ranking economic officials that offered the most clues. Yet as to the nature of the threat, no one had an answer. The only other person who appeared to have known about the meeting was the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, who confirmed that the three men had convened at the Eccles Building at 9 p.m. As to who had asked for the meeting, he did not know if it was the treasury secretary or the chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange. It was not, however, the chairman of the Fed.

The third question involved more fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. Answers bandied about ran from the driver of the vehicle being a homegrown extremist to Hughes, Gelman, or Astor being a latter-day Manchurian candidate, a sleeper spy brainwashed by a foreign power to assassinate the president. No one could offer a credible response.

Only the fourth question merited a quick reply. The Secret Service agents charged with guarding the White House grounds had deemed that the vehicle carrying Hughes, Gelman, and Astor posed a clear and present danger to the president’s safety and the safety of others inside the White House and had acted accordingly.

“Q E friggin’ D,” said Astor. It was short for Quod erat demonstrandum, which was about the only Latin he remembered. Give or take, it meant “No shit, Sherlock.”

But not once had he heard the word Palantir.

Astor shifted in his seat. He was made uncomfortable by the notion that in his final moments, his father had reached out to him. Astor had no brothers or sisters. His mother had died of cancer when he was ten. There had been no valiant struggle. She did not “fight cancer.” She never had the chance to be a “survivor.” She was diagnosed. She went to the hospital. A few weeks after that, she died. It was over, beginning to end, in three months. It was summer, too, he remembered. A sweltering July spent inside Sloan-Kettering hospital waiting for his mother to die. It was the smell that stayed with him most. Ammonia, disinfectant, and a lemon cleaner used to polish the floors. Somehow it still hadn’t been enough to camouflage the odor of death. He had sworn never to go to a hospital to die.

After that, it was just father and son. Astor went off to prep school in seventh grade and never really returned home again. He saw his father on vacations, but briefly, in segmented, scheduled bursts, never more than three or four days at a time. These included a few days at the beginning and end of summer, wedged in between ten-week stays at sleep-away camp in Maine. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break involved travel to resorts in places such as Vail, St. Moritz, and Bermuda where outdoor activities served to maintain a respectful separation between the two.

It was better that way.

The trouble began at fourteen. Astor was expelled from his first school in ninth grade, his second in tenth, and his third in eleventh. It was never a question of intelligence. When he applied himself, he received top marks. And of course there was the question of the PSAT, on which he earned a perfect score, and the fact that he was named a National Merit Finalist. The problem, his teachers agreed, was motivation, or rather the lack of it.

Astor begged to differ, but he was in no mood to share his family secrets with strangers.

It required the intercession of his father and a considerable donation to the school fund to find him a place for senior year. He made it all of two weeks before being dismissed for “unbecoming conduct,” namely running a sports book out of his dorm room. Alcohol and marijuana were also found. The fact that ten teachers, including the school’s chaplain, were his largest clients was not brought up at his adjudication.

And so that was the end. At seventeen, Astor asked to be declared an emancipated minor. Broke and free of all family ties, he graduated from a public school in western New Hampshire, where he lived with the family of a close friend.

So why me? he wondered, staring at the message. If his father had no other immediate family, he had many close friends, most of whom held positions of considerable power. Surely they were better placed to find out what Palantir meant. Why reach out to a son he hadn’t spoken to in five years?

The question stayed with him as the helicopter banked and the sapphire surface of the Atlantic Ocean enveloped the windscreen. The radio squawked and the air traffic controller gave them clearance to land.

“I have the stick,” said Astor.

“The stick is yours,” said his pilot.

Astor lifted the collective and brought the chopper over the landing pad, nose up, and the wheels touched down firmly.