Wall Street Noir

The enlightenment of Magnus McKay by John Burdett

Bangkok, Thailand

Wall Street, New York, Monday, February 28, 2005

Magnus McKay, alpha male, writes: Lalita, teelak — that does mean “darling” in Thai, right? — I miss you. I know this sounds ridiculous, but those two short moments we spent together have touched something inside of me. I’m going to bring you here as soon as possible, if I can’t find an excuse to visit Thailand next week (I’m working on it). Will you wait for me? Magnus.

He sits back in his executive chair to rub his jaw, then he stands up to look down on the ants bundled up against the cold on the Street.

He is not officially the senior partner of Weisman, Constant and Draper, so they had to give him the second corner office. Nevertheless, here we have power expressed through space: seven hundred square feet, two sets of windows. He’d chosen the crimson trimmings to go with his famous suspenders, the rest he’d left to the interior designer.

Musing: Does his draft e-mail hit the right tone or not? Hookers are no different to everyone else, right? You adapt human resources techniques to make them feel special, and if they’re good you give them a glittering prize to aim for. Not that Lalita’s performances in that seedy short-time hotel had been in any way deficient. To tell the truth, he hasn’t stopped thinking about her for the past three days.

Reminiscing with twinges: She was beautiful, far too beautiful for that cheap go-go dive where he found her, quite by accident. He had been with Samson Lee’s main man in Thailand, Tallboy Yip. Normally, McKay would never take his pleasure so down market, for, as a frequent traveler to Bangkok, he had joined the best, most discreet, and most expensive of the city’s brothels; but Yip, who these days was almost as wide as he was tall — with thick degenerate lips in a lived-in mug — owned low-life tastes.

McKay had been on the point of making excuses and going back to his hotel, when he’d seen her gyrating around that stainless steel pole on the revolving platform with all the other girls, her long black hair reaching to the small of her back. When she passed by the second time he deliberately smiled at her. On the third turn she deliberately smiled at him. Within the law of contract his offer had been accepted: They had a deal. He bought her a triple tequila because she asked him to.

His first thought had been to use her merely as an excuse to lose Tallboy, for he was not really in the mood, having sated his lust in a threesome the night before. He paid her bar fine after ten minutes of talking to her, then said goodnight to Yip with a lecherous smirk which Yip appreciated: Uncontrollable lust was always an acceptable reason for cutting a drinking bout short. Magnus had let her lead him up a set of squalid stairs to the room, following her perfect body from behind. He watched her undress automatically in front of him; long hair covering dark-brown nipples when she stood up straight to face him; he noted that she was smiling with just the right amount of shyness. Should he have her after all, or should he merely pay her modest fee and leave without taking his pleasure? She saw his hesitation and went to work on him. Magnus McKay, veteran womanizer and whoremonger, had never known anything like it. He gave her a hundred-dollar tip. She took it in the spirit it was meant: a symbol of his intent to return for more.

The next night had been his last in Bangkok and he really didn’t have time for her; but he made time for her anyway, between checkout and airport. It was uncanny, she seemed to know more about his libido than he did. It was magic, no other word for it. This time he gave her five hundred dollars: serious money. They talked briefly, like business people, about the possibility of her making regular visits to New York at his expense: say once a month, business class. She immediately undertook to get a passport, as if she had been expecting such an offer. They exchanged e-mail addresses. That was only three days ago.

He checks himself in a crimson-framed mirror behind his chair. He knows how Thai girls like her think: a farang a foreigner, a lawyer who works on Wall Street, a forty-one-year-old bachelor in perfect shape who could solve her financial problems and those of her family with one flash of his platinum credit card.

A fool would succumb to narcissism, remind himself what an incredible catch he must be for a Third World hooker (tall, slim, handsome, rich, charm-enhanced American); but Magnus knows better than that. Hunting is what makes him run. In work he hunts for money, in women he hunts for that extreme performance which you only extract from a girl who believes she has found the answer to her prayers and a meal ticket for life. Magnus would play that white knight role perfectly, and, if she played her cards right, he would certainly give her the golden handshake when he grew bored. Hell, he probably would solve most of her financial problems, how much could it cost? Twenty grand, fifty at most? In the old days he’d spent that on crack in a week, and she was better than crack. Another twinge forces him to wrench consciousness out of his groin chakra.

Back facing his computer, he clicks on send, logs off of his personal account with Yahoo Mail, and, switching with ruthless discipline to his work mindset, returns to his business e-mail.

His sorting technique is primitive but appropriate for his practice: Anything not concerning the Thai-Chinese businessman Samson Lee, no matter how grave and weighty, he forwards to his numerous assistants; anything touching on his master, no matter how trivial, he works on himself. He knows he is Lee’s slave, but so what? It is symbiotic. Lee simply could not survive in the U.S. without a lawyer of McKay’s cunning and ruthlessness, for he is perpetually hounded by all the usual suspects: FBI, CIA, DEA, Inland Revenue. Samson Lee thinks McKay some kind of blue-eyed magus, for Magnus always finds a way out of the apparently watertight traps these agencies lay for his client. Magnus has lost count of the jams he’s gotten Lee and his five sons out of, frequently risking his career. But that is the deal. Roughly thirty percent of the firm’s income comes from the Lee family and nobody, absolutely nobody in the firm, so much as speaks to Lee’s secretary without McKay’s prior knowledge and approval. Samson Lee is the reason McKay got the second corner office.

Checking his solid gold Longines watch: 7:35 in the morning, which is the time Samson Lee likes him to start. In Bangkok it is twelve hours later, she’s probably started dancing already in that seedy bar, nearly naked in a G-string and flimsy bra — though sometimes she starts late. It is just possible she is sitting in an Internet café hoping to hear from him. In response to more prodding from his loins, he logs on again to Yahoo Mail. Yep, there it is, a message from Naronsip Wiwatanasan, a.k.a., Lalita:

A cool positive? McKay smiles. That’s exactly how he would have replied if he had been in her position. Clearly, she is a master of the game, like him. The secret to McKay’s success: He never fools himself; lawyers are whores too.

As it happens, his laptop includes a digital camera. He takes a snap of his face turned slightly to highlight the manly strength of his jaw, and zings it off to her.

Just then the laptop telephone beeps. This is McKay’s secret number which he gives out to no one except Samson Lee. Lee has an Asian addiction to video conferencing.

McKay’s only important client appears on the monitor, looking a lot more Chinese than Thai, with eyes so slit McKay wonders how any light ever gets in there: a vast moon face with near-circular wrinkles, small flat nose, cheap off-the-peg sweater.

“I can’t see you,” Lee snaps. McKay switches the movie camera function on. “That’s better.”

“Good morning, Mr. Lee,” McKay says with a big, bright, yes-I-do-love-to-suck-your-bum smile. He tried using “Samson” once at the beginning of the relationship, but it didn’t work for either of them. Lee is very conservative in the Confucian tradition. His sons are his slaves and his daughters marry whoever he tells them to marry. The Lees are certainly a centralized family, if not a close one.

“You’re going back to Bangkok on the next plane,” Lee says.

McKay maintains self-control, at the same time congratulating himself on his usual good luck. He is simply one of those hyper-neat guys who kind of constellate everything around them so that, even without his thinking about it, events conspire to conform to his will. The journey is twenty hours plus, and he can probably get on a flight that morning if he kicks ass. In other words, Lalita — naked — will be servicing him again in less than a day.

Keeping a straight face: “Certainly, Mr. Lee. What’s the problem?”

Lee looks directly into his digital camera. By making certain adjustments on his laptop McKay can enlarge those heavily lidded eyes until they almost fill the screen. He’s done this many times, out of curiosity. It never makes any difference. Even magnified as much as ten times, Lee’s eyes still have no life in them.

“It’s wet,” Lee says.

McKay pales somewhat and experiences a hundred-and-eighty degree mood swing. Maybe his luck isn’t so good today, after all. Wet?

“Well, now, Mr. Lee...” McKay begins.

“I already know what you don’t do,” Lee says.

This is a reference to something McKay witnessed at the beginning of their relationship. Shaken, he found a way to explain that it was very counter-productive for Lee to implicate his main and most trusted lawyer-fixer in that kind of thing. Lee had agreed, to his relief.

McKay doesn’t mind bending the rules for a benevolent billionaire, but he is not a sadist. Like every successful man and woman on the Street, he believes in dictatorship by the filthy rich, but as a civilized American he sees himself as a benign despot.

Question: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?

Answer: I have not the faintest idea, my culture forgot to tell me.

Yes, he has a sensitive side. Both parents were pious English Literature teachers martyred by the functional barbarism of these times. Without respect, money, power, or direction, they both hit the bottle. When they started having fist fights, they all knew the barbarism had won. His father jumped from a high window and his mother, unable to live without him, took an overdose.

In a nutshell, whatever kind of crook he was at heart, he was totally white collar. Whatever kind of crook Lee was, it was not white collar. That was why Lee was so rich: He took the barbarism all the way, sucked it all up. Even Magnus didn’t know how much dough Lee had. Officially, only thirty percent of the trillions of trillions of dollars washing around the international banking system every minute was illegal drug money, but that was certainly disinformation designed to keep the sober majority from panicking. The true figure was probably more than fifty percent, perhaps as much as seventy. Maybe everyone worked for Samson Lee without knowing it? Maybe that was why they would never legalize recreational drugs? Nobody loves Prohibition more than Al Capone. If not for criminalization, Lee would be selling secondhand automobiles.

“I still don’t do wet,” McKay says.

“The Spics have grabbed my son Hercules,” Lee says, as if relating an irritating but predictable occurrence.

McKay’s heart sinks: war. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr. Lee, but I don’t see—”

“Emerald Buddha Corporation,” Lee says. “Forty-nine percent. Sign before you get on the plane, or I’ll FedEx the docs to you in Bangkok if you prefer.”

McKay knows Lee is watching his face closely on the giant monitor hanging on a wall in his Long Island mansion. McKay knows Lee saw him swallow immediately on hearing the name. The EBC is Lee’s respectable front. Well, it is only semi-respectable since it smuggles illegal Buddha heads and other priceless icons stolen from Ankor Wat, but Lee keeps it scrupulously apart from his other businesses. It is his “face” for official America, and as such he’s been obliged to spend quite a few tens of millions on stock, which is not exclusively Khmer, but includes some museum-quality jade pieces; they look identical to world-famous missing items, once the property of the last emperor of China. McKay has hinted more than once that a good way for Lee to reward his extra, secret, and professionally life-threatening efforts on behalf of his master would be for Lee to simply hand over a chunk of EBC stock. McKay knows Lee has been keeping EBC for a rainy day, when he will ask McKay to go even deeper into hell as his legal representative. Well, today it’s raining.

McKay doesn’t know he’s been holding his breath until he breathes out: Did the man say forty-nine percent? That is worth about twenty-five million, but the best of it is: The little firm actually makes a very healthy profit, averaging more than sixteen percent net per year of stock value. Sixteen percent of twenty-five million is four million. That would almost exactly triple his average yearly income. He supposes he will get drunk or something to see him through Tallboy’s elaborate vengeance strategy, whatever it is. He sure will need a night with Lalita afterwards, though.

“Okay,” McKay says, “but why?”

“Because I can’t go myself and Tallboy is losing it. He has tactics but no strategy. He spends his time drinking whiskey and screwing whores. He doesn’t have your discipline. You don’t have to do anything — he’ll take care of the wet side — you just have to tell him when to start, when to pause...” Lee himself pauses at this point to lick his lips “... and when to stop.”

“I see.”

“I want Hercules back alive, not sliced up like a lump of salami. If he’s dead or crippled his mother will never stop bitching.”

“I understand that,” says McKay. Then, as an after-thought: “Which Colombian did you grab after you heard they’d grabbed Hercules?”

“The kid brother,” Lee says, and logs off. Secretaries will take care of the rest.

Off Soi 4, Sukhumvit, Bangkok, Monday, February 28, 2005

Lalita has the Internet café print a copy of McKay’s picture to take to the clairvoyant monk at Wat Tanorn, then logs off. A little overwhelmed by the events of the past few days, she slumps in her chair to think for a moment.

It was her sexual frigidity that was getting her the sack from the go-go bar, before McKay burst into her life. Customers had started to complain. Her technique, pre-McKay, had consisted of apologizing that she was menstruating, so would a hand job do for tonight? Usually she got away with it, counting on the customer’s guilt and pity, but some of the old hands had caught on to her and complained to the mamasan. The mamasan, a good Buddhist, had been kind in suggesting that Lalita was just not cut out for this type of work: Why not serve behind the bar? Lalita would have loved to work behind the bar, but there was the problem of her mother’s cataracts — she would be quite blind in three months if Lalita did not pay for the operation, not to mention her father’s heart condition and her younger brother’s boarding school fees. Girls who worked behind the bar made three hundred dollars a month, max. Girls who were good at selling their bodies made nearly a thousand dollars a month. Lalita wasn’t making anything like that, but not because she wasn’t attractive. She looked outstanding, everyone said so, and at the beginning men had almost lined up for her. Then word got around that she loathed sex, which was true. When she couldn’t avoid intercourse she would lay on the bed more or less inert and let him get on with it. Girls like her can make a man impotent, one of her customers had explained in exasperation.

“Listen,” the mamasan had said, “there’s one thing you can do. It only works for girls like you, because any man with sense can see you’re no natural to the Game, to say the least. So you find the best prospect you can, give him everything he wants from you, and allow yourself to fall in love with him so you don’t have to keep faking it. Nine times out of ten the faran will fall for you too and marry you or at least take care of you and your family for a few years, which is a lot better than selling your body in a bar.”

How to fall in love? She shared a room with three other girls, all from Lalita’s home village near Surin on the border with Cambodia. Together they spoke in a dialect of Khmer, which made things feel cozy and happy. The three others knew all about Lalita’s problem with sex, for they told each other everything. After her little chat with the mamasan, Lalita had gone home to her friends and burst into tears. It was so frustrating. If only she could open her legs and screw with exaggerated abandon like the others, she would be able to save her mother’s sight and her father’s life and her brother’s future in less than a year. Nong, her best friend, realized that a radical solution was called for.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Lalita replied. “You’re going to say that I should aim for one special guy and give him everything so he can’t live without me — but I don’t have a clue how to do that.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say at all,” Nong countered. She took a DVD out of her handbag and inserted it into the DVD machine they had all bought together. It was Japanese hard porn, very professionally produced with unusual camera angles. As Nong had guessed, Lalita had never seen hard porn before. Of course, Lalita knew what other women did for their clients from the general conversation, but she had never actually seen a woman in action like that, really working the john. It made her feel sick and she told Nong to turn it off. “No,” Nong said, “you’re going to watch it to the end.”

“Now what?” Lalita asked when the movie finally ended in an unconvincing crescendo of groans and moans, the girl’s face dripping with his goo.

“Now you’re gonna watch it and watch it and watch it, and you’re gonna make sure you get every move, and then you’re gonna figure out how to refine it because you’re much more sensitive than that whore in the movie and a lot smarter, so when you’ve got the idea you can easily do better than her, depending on the john’s personality. And then you’re gonna ask yourself how many tequilas you need to do that. And then, because no way you’re gonna be able to keep up that kind of performance night after night, you’re gonna—”

“Find the right john and lock him in,” Lalita supplied.

“Right,” said Nong.

So it all pointed to luck after all. For luck you need an expert. The monk at Wat Tanorn was from Surin; he spoke to her in her own Khmer dialect and liked to discuss the rice harvest and other agricultural matters.

“The sow under the house is pregnant,” she told him, “due in a week’s time.”

Phra Tanatika knew Lalita’s mother and father, both of whom were highly respected: poor but devout and dependable. Nobody wanted to see her mother go blind, or her father die, if it could be helped. In other words, he had to balance spiritual duty with community service. He tried to use his gift of clairvoyance wisely, in a way consistent with spiritual evolution. Lalita never told him she was a prostitute; she didn’t need to.

“I’m having trouble making ends meet but I do work in a field where I meet farang men quite a lot, and I’m wondering if astrologically this is a moment when I can expect to meet my Number One, or someone close to it,” Lalita explained.

“Tell me again your date and time of birth?”

In Thailand everyone uses the Chinese horoscope, with some Hindu flourishes. Lalita was born in the year of the metal rabbit. This meant that although sensitive, smart, and more than a little inclined to freak out when life got tough, she nevertheless had about her a persistence, even a stubbornness, which no one ever saw except in extremis Then there was the hour of her birth, which in the young was at least as important as the year. Phra Tanatika was impressed with her dragon rising. It was tremendously well aspected at this moment and he told her so. But when she looked up at him, there was something else in her eyes, something that made him very sad.

“This isn’t easy for you, is it?”

“No,” Lalita admitted.

“You have to be careful. You might not know it, but at this moment you wield extraordinary power, especially over men. And as we know, the world is balanced by duality. The other side of the coin is that you will have to give something from your heart.”

“Enthusiasm?”

“More than that,” the monk said, still feeling slightly depressed, for he was beginning to get serious signals concerning her future. “Look, I’ll give it to you straight. The man you are going to meet in the next few days is, well, someone who can help you much much more than you think, but the only way to really keep him is to give him something special.”

“What’s that?”

“You already know.”

The monk, divining with little effort that Lalita was one of those pure souls who tend to take sexual love far more seriously than is healthy, decided to tell her about an interesting recent event. Soon after his alms round a few mornings before, when he had been eating the food his flock had prepared for him, he saw the astral body of Old Tou, whom he knew to be on his deathbed. Old Tou had led an averagely debauched life — a great womanizer in his youth, an alcoholic as he grew older, just another lost, self-centered soul. Phra Tanatika had watched in fascination while Old Tou’s astral body entered the body of a puppy who had just been born to one of the temple dogs. The puppy didn’t have a name yet, so Phra Tanatika called him “Tou.”

“We copulate because karma forces us to,” the Phra explained with a smile. “Like Old Tou, everyone needs a body to inhabit — that’s all it amounts to. Humans make love for exactly the same reason dogs do.”

Lalita smiled at the story and felt a great fondness for Phra Tanatika, for she saw he was trying to take the edge off of her problem with sex. Surely he was right: It was just an agricultural function, why did she take it so seriously?

“What can I do to help my karma along in this regard and find the right man?”

“Imaging,” the monk promptly replied. “You make an image in your mind of the kind of man you could give everything to — then when you see him you will know him.”

Which is exactly what she did. Every night before she went to sleep, every morning when she woke up, she painstakingly built up an image of a farang man to whom she could happily give her heart and body and enthusiastically perform all those dreadful things that Japanese whore was doing in the porn video.

The image she built up in her mind was surprisingly detailed: tall, slim, handsome, probably American, wealthy, a strong jaw, beautifully dressed in expensive casual clothes, with a telltale look in his eyes that most men don’t have: the look of a conquering dragon, to go with her own inner drag which very few people ever saw. She even imaged his favorite color: crimson.

All that happened over the past week. Now she is taking Magnus’s photograph to Phra Tanatika at Wat Tanorn, using the sheet of paper as a makeshift fan in the hot, steamy bus that costs only two baht because there is no air-conditioning.

“Is this him?” she asks the monk. Phra Tanatika stares at Magnus’s picture, complete with crimson neck tie and suspenders. What he sees there he dares not tell her.

“What do you think?” he asks her. “Is it him or not?”

“I’m sure it is,” says Lalita.

“Then it is your karma, you cannot alter it.”

When she leaves, the monk looks after her with a worried expression. He knows that we humans are in reality a spaghetti junction of intertwined influences, called samscaras, from previous lifetimes. Some of the samscaras we bear date back to reptilian lifetimes and simply lie in wait indefinitely, like tics, for an opportunity to assert themselves, even in the most pure and gentle souls.

Bangkok, by the Chao Praya river, Tuesday, March 1, 2005

Magnus watches while Tallboy and a dozen Thai men set up the giant plasma TV monitor in the warehouse in Bangkok’s Chinatown, near the river. Every now and then Tallboy receives a call from Colombia on his cell phone. Sometimes he’s the one to make the call to Colombia.

“How’s your link?” Tallboy asks. “Everything in place?”

Tallboy is talking to his opposite number in the enemy camp, but practical issues force a polite, even genial tone. War will resume as soon as they have fixed the glitches.

“I know, the technology is never as advanced as they claim, there are always problems. How good is your satellite link? I mean, you’re on the top of some stone age hill in the Andes, right? I’m in the middle of a modern city, so most likely you would be the one with the problem, right? Okay, let’s do another trial run.”

The giant screen, hung on the back wall of the ware-house, is joined to a box of technological tricks from which a dozen cables emerge. A Sony digital movie camera points at an empty gurney. When a technician flicks a switch, the screen fills with a kind of energetic fuzz, billions of pixels in some chaotic state.

“Tell me something,” Tallboy says into his cell phone, “you got rain over there? Looks like rain on the screen. No, wait, okay, we’re receiving you. Shit, you weren’t supposed to start yet.”

Lacking Tallboy’s finesse, the Colombians have already pointed their camera at Hercules Lee, who is tied to a chair and gagged and looking very sick.

“Is Samson linked in to this?” Magnus asks Tallboy.

“Sure,” Tallboy says, looking worried.

“Better bring in the kid brother,” Magnus tells Tallboy.

“Right.”

Felipe Maria Jesus González Escaverada is swarthy, unshaven, in his late twenties, cuffed hand and foot. Maybe they tranquilized him, or simply beat the hell out of him already; he’s not fully conscious, anyway. But Magnus knows Tallboy has adrenalin and testosterone on hand: If necessary, the kid brother could be very alert in seconds. The boys dump the kid brother onto the gurney and strap him in with hospital-style restrainers. Now the screen splits: One half is Hercules Lee looking very sick on some hill in the Andes, the other half is Felipe Maria Jesus González also looking very sick strapped to the gurney in Bangkok. In Colombia they are watching the same split screen.

“Ready?” Tallboy asks.

Ready.” The thick Hispanic accent booms over the sound system.

Tallboy looks to Magnus for strategic advice: What do I do now?

“Ask if they’re ready to talk. Tell them what a childish waste of time this all is — waste of money too. It’s ridiculous in this day and age.”

Talking into a microphone, Tallboy repeats what Magnus has said, word for word.

It’s a matter of honor,” the Hispanic voice says from the speakers.

“It’s a matter of two little kilos of coke,” Tallboy corrects. “What’s to get macho about? Are you in business or do you spend all your time playing with yourself?”

Don’t get cheeky, flatnose.

“At least I don’t have a whole forest growing out of my nose. Do you grow coca in there?”

“You’re not a man. Men do not talk like that. Only boys, women, and Chinks.”

Tallboy, fuming now and picking up a pair of pliers: “Okay, I’m starting with the left ear.”

“Me too,” says the Hispanic voice.

Magnus cannot stand to watch. This is a preliminary skirmish; no new stage in the negotiations will be reached before both victims are properly softened up with a few minor body parts ripped to shreds, gags off, screaming the place down. McKay needs a drink, preferably where he will not hear the screams.

He leaves the warehouse and passes between ten of Tallboy’s men who are on guard outside. Magnus knows the area and heads toward the river. Small shops sell beer, basic provisions, and cigarettes. Magnus buys a pack of Marlboro Red and a can of Singha beer. He checks his watch. His experience with these kinds of negotiations suggests that a good ten minutes of terror on both sides is needed before anyone starts to see sense.

Halfway through his cigarette, he hears a sound both muffled and tremendous, then the sky above the river lights up for a moment, illuminating the water, the opposite shore, his hand holding the can of beer, and the face of the old lady who owns the shop. Little stars rise and dance amidst the acrid stench of plastic, the crude fragrance of petrol, the primeval aroma of burning wood. He stands and turns to watch the conflagration, less than a block away, quickly diminish to a massive blaze.

With the lightning reflex of a pro, Magnus realizes he misjudged the timing. Obviously the Colombians knew the location of the warehouse, and as soon as Pablo Escaverada, the godfather, decided the torture would have to be taken all the way, he preferred to kill his own kid brother along with Tallboy Yip and his men. He still held Hercules Lee, of course, and therefore had brilliantly gained the upper hand in the incomprehensible war.

Badly shaken: How the hell did a bunch of Colombian bums find out a secret address in Bangkok? Fighting an adrenalin rush: He needs to hide. If the Escaverada family know about the warehouse, they must know about him too. Maybe the bombers saw him leave the warehouse and know he’s still alive?

He calls Lalita on her cell phone. They’d had no time to make love, but he’d paid her bar fine, so she was in the hotel room waiting for him.

“Get the hell out of there right now,” Magnus says. “Just get out right now.”

They meet at On Nut Sky train station. He tells her things have gone terribly for him. He doesn’t go into detail and she is too smart to ask. He tells her she is not to worry, he still has plenty of money and will look after her, but she must help him. He will pay whatever she wants for a week or so totally out of sight, out of play.

Lalita does not seem overly put out. Sure, she knows a place: her home in the country, near Surin, right on the Cambodian border.

He waits while Lalita calls her parents, tells them she is coming to see them with her fiancé. After all, these are respectable, pious country people, no way she can turn up with a man unless she is at least engaged to him. Magnus doesn’t mind. He guesses enough dough will settle ruffled feathers at the end of the day. Things are difficult, but not so difficult he would consider marrying a Third World whore.

Or would he?

The farm, Friday, March 4, 2005

It is interesting, Magnus muses after a couple of days, how an environment can change one. Lalita’s parents’ house is quite big, a wood structure on concrete stilts on a couple acres of land in a flat hot dry region that owns a peculiar beauty. Tall trees break up the landscape; to McKay’s astonishment, elephants graze in fields. Wild-looking young day workers with cloths tied around their heads, bundled up against the sun, race by in the backs of pickup trucks from time to time. Monks from the local wat make alms rounds at dawn. Lalita, her near-blind mother, and her seriously ill father take food out to the road every morning to offer to the monks. Lalita has explained that sex is out of the question. McKay has already gathered this from the fact that there are no rooms in the house, only one vast space upstairs where all domestic business is conducted, save cooking which takes place under the house where the sow lives. Yet surely they could find a way? Only by going through a Buddhist ceremony, Lalita tells him firmly. Lawyer McKay notes that she is not talking about anything legally binding.

In the meantime, he gets in touch with Samson Lee via a cheap cell phone, using one of a dozen SIM cards that Lalita has purchased for him. McKay will use each SIM card only once. A second cell phone fitted with the twelfth simcard he puts aside exclusively for Lee to use to call him.

Better stay where you are for the moment, till I sort this out,” was all Samson Lee would say on the first call. “It may take awhile. Don’t tell me where you are, just tell me if it’s secure for a month or two.”

“Month or two?”

“This will take some time.”

“Did they kill Hercules?”

“Of course they killed Hercules, what was left of him. His mother’s seriously pissed.”

McKay absorbs this information while, from an upstairs window, he watches Lalita’s mother pick rice. It doesn’t look so hard. You simply pull up a clump of the plant from the wet earth, bash it against the side of your foot, and chuck it in the basket. It’s hot though: The landscape turns into a mirage soon after sunup. And it cannot help to be almost blind. The old lady works mostly by feel.

On the second call on the second cell phone the next day, Lee tells him there is a whole gang of Colombians still in Thailand. They bribed the cops in advance, so no one is looking for them except Lee’s people. Lee’s people, though, have connections with senior police that go very deep. As a matter of fact, Lee is connected to almost everyone important in Thailand. The Colombians, who only had the know-how to bribe minor cops, are still at large, but they will find it difficult to leave the country. Magnus is probably not in imminent danger, he just needs to keep his head down until the Thai side of the war is won.

Magnus has to rethink his situation. A week in the country might be quaint, in a pinch, but a month or more is a different ballgame. Especially without sex. With the increased emotional need which is a function of insecurity, McKay finds it difficult to keep his hands off Lalita. Images from those two incandescent times he slept with her provoke almost continuous arousal. What to do? Furtive fumbling at night, or during the day when her parents are working the fields, is out of the question — Lalita has made that clear. On the other hand, he dares not take her to a hotel in Surin, not so much because the Colombians might be looking for him (though they might be), but mostly because Samson Lee would surely find out and Magnus is supposed to be incognito McKay doesn’t want to enrage Samson Lee at a time like this.

So what about a quaint Buddhist ceremony, as Lalita more or less suggested? Probably Lalita, considering her profession, will understand his pragmatism: get married Buddhist-style in order to make his sojourn in the country that much easier. Using his lawyerly knack of expressing himself in positive terms whilst playing down the counter arguments, he subtly lets Lalita understand that he will accept a Buddhist marriage with her, on certain terms which could be summarized as voluntary sex slavery on her part. He is not sure they are quite reading from the same hymn sheet, but does it really matter? He’ll take care of her and her parents, he really will solve all their money problems with a wave of his platinum Visa card. He knows you don’t get nothin’ for nothin’ in this world, and he is genuinely grateful to her. The way he puts it, the whole deal sounds eminently reasonable, although he’s not sure she’s fully understood his complicated logic in English.

He’s no sooner given this heavily nuanced “yes,” than her father appears as if from nowhere to discuss Lalita’s sale price. Her father is only a couple of years older than McKay, but to McKay he looks about eighty.

McKay has very little cash with him, but in Surin he can use his credit card to get money from an ATM. Except that he cannot go to Surin. To his astonishment, he realizes he can probably trust his fiancée. In these circumstances, the old man’s fee of fifteen thousand dollars for his beautiful daughter’s body for life does not seem unreasonable. (Maybe he’ll keep her indefinitely, a twenty-two-year-old sensual feast waiting for him in a sarong in the country — why not?)

Lalita rides to Surin in back of a pickup truck, and by using a number of ATMs manages to extract fifteen thousand dollars. Out of curiosity, McKay calls his bank to check: Yep, she took out exactly the agreed sum, not a penny more.

Next day, nine monks appear in their saffron robes, form a semicircle, join themselves together with a length of white string, and start chanting in Pali, while Magnus and his bride kneel with their palms held together near their chests for what seems to McKay like an inordinate period of time. Indeed, he is so tired from keeping his hands up after the first hour, and so bored with listening to the incomprehensible Pali, and at the same time so determined to show he has the stamina of any Thai man, that he is not paying very much attention to Lalita.

Like most Thais, Lalita understands quite a lot of Pali, thanks to the cultural influence of Buddhism. She knows that Pali is a dialect of Sanskrit, which is perhaps the only language on earth wholly dedicated to the sacred. Like most people in the world outside of the West, Lalita assumes that everyone, even McKay, has a God-shaped hole in his head, otherwise he could not be human at all, could he? She also assumes that the monks’ words are having the same effect on him as they are on her.

Of course, she knows he does not consciously understand anything, but this is a magical moment and these words are sacred. So sacred, indeed, that she finds she is undergoing that religious experience which she has always known would come to her sooner or later. Quite simply, this is the happiest day of her life and she has quickly forgotten the rather legalistic caveats that McKay tried to impose on their union. Indeed, as invariably happens when a soul begins to awaken, the spiritual experience is so powerful that she simply drops her former identity like a set of old clothes. Miraculously, but not unusually, she is able to forget she was ever on the Game. After all, as far as her community is concerned, in one smart move she has become a rich, respectable, powerful, married woman.

She enters a trance while the monks recite ancient texts concerning the sacredness of marriage, the intrinsic part it plays for lay people on the eight-fold path, the importance of the tiny beam of light at the center of every human soul that is like an authentic splinter of nirvana, and how much stronger we become when we are able to join with another in total commitment and faithfulness, and how we need this strength for that crucial and terrifying moment when at death we enter the transitional state called “The Other Side.” They end by reciting the duties each spouse owes the other, particularly emphasizing fidelity and honesty.

When the monks are gone, Lalita explains to her parents the strange farang inhibition about privacy: Basically, Magnus wants them to consummate their marriage alone in the house. After a short discussion, McKay forks out another three hundred dollars for her parents to go stay with her father’s brother, who lives up the road, for a week or so.

Now he can finally achieve what he has been planning since New York. A week is a long time for a millionaire to postpone gratification.

Afterwards, he tries to stifle his disappointment, tells himself it is early days and there has been a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line. She used none of her tantalizing tricks at all, employed none of those spectacular techniques which had been haunting his libido for so long. On the contrary, she made love to him with unstinting adoration in her eyes and the functionality of a country girl who wants to make a baby.

Laying on his back, controlling himself, not looking at her, smoking a Marlboro Red, McKay uses his softest, most charming tone. Smart attorney, he makes his pitch as a man with a problem: Due to an appalling childhood he is hopelessly promiscuous and favors threesomes. He would like for her to work on him with another woman, especially since he knows that Thai prostitutes often prefer threesomes and he has no doubt she has often done that sort of thing in the course of trade. There are plenty of whores for hire twenty miles away in Surin, right?

Somewhat preoccupied with his disappointment, he fails to notice a stiffening in her arm which lies across his chest. Staring at the ceiling, he does not notice a sudden contraction in her pupils or the tightening of the muscles around her eyes.

Changing the subject, Magnus asks her if she can get him some opium to help him pass the time (he does not say: in this godforsaken hellhole). He’s heard it is easily available in Cambodia, so logically there must be some importation, no?

Lalita nods: Yes, she can get him some.

“We can make out on it — wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Yes,” she says, looking away, “that could be fun.”

Of course, they do not make love on opium. She shows him how to prepare the pipe, as the old crone in the village where she bought it had shown her, and after a few puffs his mind takes a quite different direction. After five pipes he is in a trance which lasts eight hours. When he comes around he decides that opium is definitely his new recreational drug of choice. It is incredible: a lot more civilized than crack and therefore more suitable for one’s middle years. He has spent eight hours in a fascinating dream world where he lay on the king-size bed from his Manhattan apartment, except that the bed floated in a dynamic, light-filled space and Magnus was able to travel to different stars and back at will, on his magic bed.

While Magnus is in his opium trance the next day, Samson Lee calls on the special cell phone. Lalita tells Lee that McKay has gone out for the day. Lee speaks to her in Thai and tries to convey, in coded language McKay would understand, that the war is won on all fronts. The bodies of twenty-three horribly tortured and mutilated Colombians have been found by Thai police, following a tip-off, somewhere on the border with Mayanmar; at the same time, someone who shall be nameless informed the DEA of the exact location of the Escaverada family’s main jungle factory. He tells her to tell Magnus to watch the international news or buy a newspaper. In any event, McKay must get the next flight to New York, Lee has some urgent matters for him to attend to.

Lalita watches CNN at a shop in the village and sees how a massive haul of cocaine has been retrieved from a certain factory known to be the property of the Escaverada family, who have all been taken into custody except for those who died in the battle, which happens to be most of them: A combined Colombian government and U.S. operation had mobilized more than five hundred men. However, the godfather, Pablo Escaverada, is still at large; indeed, according to intelligence he has been traveling overseas for some time, running his operation by cell phone and e-mail.

Lalita is able to guess, from tone and manner, what kind of Thai-Chinese Samson Lee must be. She now has no doubt that Magnus is in reality Pablo Escaverada, a business partner of Lee, for sure, on the run from international law enforcement. Lalita doesn’t tell McKay about Lee’s call when he comes around.

For three and a half days Lalita keeps McKay opiated while she waits for the sow. Whenever he comes down from his opium trips, she has a fresh pipe prepared and ready for him, and off he goes again. She has no way of knowing that in his disembodied state he sloughs off all carnality. He wants to tell her he has discovered that he genuinely loves her, from the bottom of his heart, but he never gets the chance. Finally, she knows by the unusual grunts that the sow has started to give birth.

As soon as the first piglet pops out, she takes it tenderly in her arms and climbs the stairs to where Magnus lies on a futon on the floor. With grim stubbornness working her jaw, she takes a large roll of agricultural plastic to lay out next to him, then rolls him over onto it. She turns up all the corners and edges, so that it forms a kind of shallow pool. Then she removes the gold Longines watch from his left wrist and lays it next to the piglet, which she lays next to McKay; or rather, next to McKay’s body, for as we know, Magnus himself is off on some celestial frolic, where we must join him briefly to get his side of the story.

The other side, Tuesday March 8, 2005, Around noon

McKay, who after only three days has developed a measure of expertise in the manipulation of his opium dreams, has discovered that it is not only the bed which is under his control: On the contrary, the whole dream is at his command. This is the total-immersion virtual world that computer scientists hope to achieve in maybe fifty years time; opium smokers have been visiting it for thousands. His new and favorite trick is to expand until the bed is a structure of stardust and he is as big as the universe.

Today, unaware of Lalita’s strange arrangements, McKay has once again expanded his astral body until he is almost perfectly absorbed by the great, luminous Inner Kingdom. Then something odd starts to happen. A door stretching from Saturn to Andromeda appears in the sky with the words Other Side hanging on a sign above it. McKay notices millions upon millions of people entering this doorway and cannot resist following them.

On the other side of the door, things are not so idyllic. The great football crowds of bewildered souls are engulfed by terrible whirlwinds consisting of samsaras from all the lifetimes those souls have lived through. A large number of the newly dead are overcome by powerful currents, which lead them into the bodies of animals and insects. To his surprise, he watches a highly respected Supreme Court judge, who must have died that very hour, turn into a scorpion. The more developed reincarnate as humans, usually in some situation of tedious drudgery and/or reckless debauchery. Only one or two escape the spiritual tsunami to rise to the challenge of an intense beam of white light shining above the appalling chaos. McKay is not one of these. Although his commendable clarity of mind enables him to see without self-deception, his lifelong commitment to undiluted self-indulgence makes it impossible for him to resist the turgid currents. Then, all of a sudden and with an overwhelming relief that makes him cry, he sees his gold Longines watch, which appears magically before him in gigantic form. He flies toward it as if toward salvation. Too late, he sees the trap. Struggle though he might, he is sucked into a warm, smelly, squealing body.

Meanwhile, back on the farm

Lalita has opened all the major veins and arteries that she can penetrate with a kitchen knife, and while her husband bleeds to death, she caresses the piglet whose name hence-forth will be Magnus McKay and presses his Longines gold watch against the wriggling creature until she is quite sure McKay’s soul has found its new lodging. She ties a crimson ribbon around each of the piglet’s legs, so that she will not get him mixed up with the others, then gives him back to his mother to feed.

She has been terribly torn, right to the core, but she is finally at peace. Her torment consisted of the conflict between her undeniable need to possess him forever and the equally pressing need to kill him because he was a depraved monster who deceived and abused both her and the Buddha’s holy monks. This is resolved now. Pigs live at least ten years and she will have him with her constantly for that time. Using McKay’s platinum Visa card and the ATM code he gave her, she takes out as much as the account will allow on a daily basis, until she is rich enough to pay for her mother’s cataract operation and her father’s quadruple heart bypass. She also makes sure she can pay for her young brother’s school fees all the way to post-graduate level, and for herself to retire from the Game and live contentedly in her native land for the rest of her life. Her first and most pressing expense, though, is to bribe the local cops. Fortunately, she has known them since childhood, so once a sum has been agreed upon, they conclude that the faran died of bird flu.

When Magnus McKay the Pig finally dies, she will have had enough time to arrange for his transmigration to a more long-lived creature: perhaps an elephant? Marriage is forever, right?

Bonus season by Henry Blodget

Shanghai, China

When you were right, all was well in the world. The air seemed clearer, the future brighter, and the forest of roof-top construction cranes stretching west over the Huangpu a symbol of limitless opportunity. When you were wrong, however, as Emerson Jordan was now, a knot tightened in your chest, the Shanghai skyline just looked polluted, and your dubious future condensed to a red number at the bottom of your screen.

“It’ll come back,” a voice on Jordan’s left said.

Jordan prayed that, for once, Fishman would be right.

They had $400 million in a yuan-baht derivative, a bet that this afternoon’s Ministry of Finance meeting would send the yuan to the stars. Two hours earlier, when the markets had briefly lurched their way, Jordan had fantasized about ending his year with a ninth-inning grand slam. Up $80 million, he had rehearsed the final pitch he would make to Stack that night, after Stack had been softened by hours of hosannas from Reingold and other visiting New York brass. He had also considered taking the easy money, quitting while he was ahead. But he hadn’t, and now this was no longer an option.

As the red number blipped lower, the tightness in Jordan’s chest crept outward, and the scroll-wheel of his mouse grew damp with sweat. He had worked hard on hiding the stress — the lip-pinching and fetal slouching of the early years were long gone — but he couldn’t do anything about his palms. Wiping his hands on his pants, he glanced out the windows, where the smog had thickened to an ugly brown soup in the afternoon sun.

Should he cut and run? Even down $120 million — the latest bulletin — he was still up on the year (barely). Yes, the timing was terrible — mere hours before Stack finished the numbers and made the final decisions — but as of now, he could still make a case for a solid number. If he hung on, though? In the space of an hour, the trade had wiped out most of that year’s gains.

“You think they know something we don’t?” the ever-helpful Fishman asked. “Maybe some bastard in New York has a direct line into the meeting?”

Jordan suppressed an urge to smash Fishman’s face into his keyboard. But it was possible — especially here, where the same bigwigs who plotted policy placed trades on their BlackBerries. But that was what Stack was for — Stack, Mr. China, Mr. Guanxi. Stack had made his calls. Stack had signed off on the trade.

Two minutes later, after a tantalizing uptick had falsely raised his hopes, Jordan was down another $20 million. The knot in his chest now extended into his arms, stomach, and legs. All traces of the morning’s optimism were gone, replaced with the conviction that this new frontier was a land of pirates and thieves, that he’d lost his touch, that he was about to lose his job. A trader’s primary task is to manage emotions, and — irony of ironies! — he was actually thought to be good at it. An entire year’s work draining away, Jordan pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.

“Where are you going?” Fishman asked.

Jordan ignored him.

Stack’s office was off the far end of the floor, a glass box that jutted from the building like an observation platform. To get to it, Jordan had to walk past no fewer than fourteen trading desks. In the middle of a trading day, there were only two reasons to see Stack: you were making a killing, or you were getting killed. As he walked, Jordan tried to maintain his poker face — his Stack face — but he knew he wasn’t fooling anyone. On the contrary, on this day of all days, he imagined his fellow traders quietly celebrating, thinking that Stack’s erstwhile boy wonder had finally blown himself up, leaving more for everyone else.

The entrance to Stack’s imperial suite was guarded by two secretaries: Clara from Hong Kong and Lauren from New York. Neither seemed surprised to see him. Jordan nodded to both, then walked past into a dim, windowless corridor. As always, the door to Stack’s office was closed, leaving Jordan with nothing to do but stand helplessly in the gloom. Sometimes Stack made you wait seconds. Sometimes minutes. Sometimes, rumor had it, an hour or more. Today, thirty seconds after Jordan arrived, the door clicked softly and swung open.

Stack’s office had been designed for maximum impact: a sensory deprivation trip through a dark tunnel followed by an assault of light and space — as though you had burrowed into a cave and emerged on the side of a cliff. The office was two stories high, walled by 270 degrees of floor-to-ceiling glass. Not content with the knee-weakening vertigo this instilled — and eager to fully embrace the over-the-top carnival spirit of the new Shanghai — the London-based architects had added another special feature: a translucent floor. It supposedly employed the same technology as photosensitive sunglasses, except in this case (and others), Stack retained control. On Stack’s desk was a box with the usual knobs — temperature, lights, AV, etc. — one of which allowed him to modify the clarity of the glass. If Stack wished, he could set the floor to “clear” and watch visitors discover what it felt like to negotiate while hovering 870 feet above the wide streets of Pudong.

Jordan, no fan of heights, had developed a method for dealing with the floor: From the moment the door swung open, he stared Stack straight in the eyes and never looked away. In the early days, Stack had observed this and, surprisingly, had responded by turning the floor as dark as onyx whenever Jordan arrived. It was a subject of debate on Jordan’s desk whether Stack had done this out of respect for Jordan’s trading prowess, or, as Jordan suspected, because Stack had liked him. In any case, in recent months, as Jordan’s market wizardry had faded, Stack had dispensed with this gesture and now left the floor as clear as glass.

“Sorry to bother you, Alan,” Jordan said. “We have a problem.”

Stack nodded. The back wall of the office, the one behind Jordan, held six enormous screens, allowing Stack to monitor every trading position in the firm.

“The rumors in New York are that the Ministry has voted to maintain its current stance,” Jordan continued. “But I think the rumors are wrong.”

“Any new information?” Stack asked.

“Just some b.s. fed to the wires,” Jordan said.

“Who’s on the other side?”

“Draco, I think,” Jordan answered, referring to a massive New York hedge fund. “Most of the wire quotes came from their shills.”

Stack nodded again, almost imperceptibly.

The meeting was over. A hundred and fifty million was real money, even for Stack. If Jordan took the loss, it would hit Stack too. And yet, as always, he had reacted as though receiving a weather report.

Back on the trading floor, Fishman stood up when Jordan approached, so agitated that he seemed about to shout across the floor.

“We’re down two hundred now,” Fishman hissed, as Jordan slid back his chair. “Two hundred fucking million.”

“You’d be a terrible poker player, Fishman,” Jordan said, trying to maintain a Stacklike demeanor. Despite his efforts, the number was a kick in the chest. They were now down for the year. He was going to get blown out the door.

Fishman shut up, thankfully, but the market didn’t stop falling. Ten minutes later, they were down $240 million. Then 280. Word spreads fast on a trading floor, and Jordan’s conviction that he was getting famous increased with every downtick. The glances, the murmurs... Finally, ten minutes after Jordan returned from Stack’s office, a light on his phone flashed: Stack. Jordan stabbed at the button.

“Double it,” Stack said. Then he was gone.

Double it? Jordan’s heart raced. The loss was huge now, even for Stack, but it wouldn’t kill him. Stack could take the hit, fire Jordan, cover his ass. Double it? No matter who Stack had called, no matter what he had learned, nothing was certain. It was no mystery why Stack sat in that translucent office and Jordan in a dime-a-dozen swivel chair.

Jordan turned to Fishman, who looked like the defendant in a murder trial.

“Double it,” Jordan said.

“Are you crazy? Stack said double it?”

“I said double it,” Jordan said. So Fishman did.

It wasn’t a baijiu headache, fortunately, but three hours of sake at the Japanese-themed year-end banquet had gone to work on Jordan’s head: a pinpoint throbbing pain, gradually increasing in intensity, just forward of his right ear. The waiters were pouring tea now, offering hope of a recharge, and Jordan knew he would need it to get in a final word. Fifty feet away, at the power table, Stack was still joined at the hip with Reingold and Zhu.

“Rumor has it Reingold’s mainly here to kiss Stack’s ass,” Fishman said, catching Jordan looking, referring to Steve Reingold, the head of Global Sales and Training. “Apparently he’s no longer the shoe-in for the CEO job.”

“Oh?” Jordan said. Fishman’s main attribute was that he was plugged in.

“Apparently, Beston seduced a couple of the board members over the past month,” Fishman continued. “He’s tight with Stack. The board is worried that if they pick Reingold, Stack will bolt, taking most of us with him. Reingold’s probably here to suck up to Stack, make sure he can keep him.”

“I thought Reingold had it sewn up,” Jordan said, feigning ignorance.

“So did everyone else,” Fishman replied. “But Beston crushed his numbers this year, and now he’s persuaded everyone he can hang onto Stack.”

“May the best man win,” Jordan said.

“And may we all get paid in the meantime,” Fishman added.

Fishman grabbed the sake bottle and, for the umpteenth time that evening, refilled everyone’s cup. Then he stood up and raised his own. “The night is as yet an embryo,” he proclaimed to the four junior members of the desk, trying to channel some frat lingo in a sad attempt to bond with them. “But before we move on, I would like once again to toast our fearless leader, Mr. Emerson Jordan, without whom we would all be living in hutongs.”

“To Emerson!” they shouted.

Jordan nodded his head in gratitude, embarrassed, hoping Fishman would leave it at that. But Fishman had been working up to this all evening.

“Those of you in fixed-income land,” he continued, louder, nodding toward six members of the emerging-market bond desk at the other end of the table, “may not be aware of the absolute killing that was made on the forex desk this afternoon. And to be sure that you show the proper deference to the god among men in our presence this evening, I would like to—”

“Thanks, Fishman,” Jordan interrupted, raising his own glass. “What Mr. Fishman means is that, once again, the Shanghai team at Whitney Gilman wiped the floor with every other division at the firm, and we should all drink to that.”

“To Shanghai!” ten of the twelve voices at the table concurred. They drained their glasses, set them back on the table. Then an eleventh voice, previously silent, chimed in.

“What I heard,” Joseph Wilson said, from the other end of the table, audible even over the cacophonous conversation of the banquet hall, “was that our resident ‘god among men’ got himself in a bit of a fix this afternoon.”

In the instant silence, Jordan looked down the table at Wilson, who was still holding a full cup. Jordan felt a stab of humiliation, and hoped Wilson wouldn’t take it farther.

Wilson was drunk, drunker than Jordan, drunker than most of them. His desk had had a bad year — the second in a row — and everyone knew that unless Stack made him a charity case, Wilson was done. That was why Wilson’s people were whooping at Fishman’s lousy jokes — they needed a lifeboat. Tomorrow, when Jordan’s team was getting their numbers, Wilson would be packing up the wife and kids and heading back to New York.

Making a scene now would only add to Wilson’s disgrace: a bitter has-been hastening his transformation into a never-was. Jordan wasn’t eager to hear the rest of whatever Wilson had to say, though — no doubt something to the effect that Jordan was just an empty-suited puppet on Stack’s string — and he especially wasn’t eager to have his team hear it. He stared at Wilson, readying himself for the verbal punch. After a few seconds, however, Wilson backed down.

“To Whitney Gilman,” he said, raising his cup into the air. “And to the forex desk, for riding out the storm.”

“To Whitney Gilman!” the table roared, in enthusiasm and relief.

A few minutes later, after chugging a cup of tea, Jordan made his move. He had hoped to catch Stack alone, but Stack was still glued to Reingold and Zhu. The banquet was over, the crowd was dissipating, and the three were now standing at the head table, waiting to follow everyone else to the door. Jordan worked his way across the room, as confidently and soberly — as possible.

“Mr. Reingold, Mr. Zhu, I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m Emerson Jordan. I run the currency desk. I just wanted to say goodnight to Alan.” Turning to Reingold, he added: “It’s a pleasure to see you again, sir. We met last year in New York.”

“I remember,” said Reingold. “And I gather you had another good year.”

“Well, thanks, yes, we did,” Jordan said. “But we had help. Especially this afternoon.”

As he said this, Jordan nodded toward Stack.

“I hear you made a stirring comeback,” Reingold said, smiling. “Have you met Mr. Zhu?”

“I haven’t yet had the pleasure, sir,” Jordan responded, shaking the hand of the billionaire real estate mogul everyone assumed was one of Stack’s key guanxi. “You’re quite a celebrity on the trading floor, sir.”

“It’s a privilege to do business with the firm,” Zhu said. “Thanks for stopping by, Emerson,” Stack said, speaking for the first time. His tone was courteous, but it was also a kiss-off.

Jordan was going to respond with a play for time, when Reingold jumped in: “Yes, thanks for stopping by. X.D. is giving us a ride back to the Hive. Why don’t you come along?”

It had been a rough early afternoon, but since then, Jordan’s luck had taken a turn for the better.

X.D., as Mr. Xiaodong Zhu was known (a concession to foreigners’ inability to pronounce even the simplest Mandarin), was chauffered around town in a forty-two-foot stretch Hummer — the kind, Jordan reflected, that only drug dealers and rap-stars would be caught dead in back home. The Hummer had two PC-equipped desks, fully reclining seats, a fifty-inch flat-panel HDTV, and a lounge. In addition to the driver, it was staffed by a steward, who navigated, checked traffic via the government-sanitized Internet, refilled the mini-bar, and, at every stop, brushed grime off the car with a feather duster.

On board the Hummer, the four men settled into the lounge, and Zhu’s steward opened a bottle of Laphroaig, pouring four glasses. Zhu reached for one, raised it toward his guests.

“I have promised to show Mr. Reingold my car,” Zhu said. “Before I do, however, I would like to toast Mr. Jordan.”

“Here, here,” said Reingold.

Jordan considered playing along, but decided not to risk it. “I’m sorry?” he said.

“One of my companies was overweight with baht this morning,” Zhu explained. “We needed some time to convert before the Ministry meeting. Without your help, we’d never have gotten out.”

“I see,” said Jordan, even though he didn’t.

“Thanks to your efforts,” Zhu continued, “some folks in New York temporarily concluded that the Ministry wasn’t going to relax the peg. Unfortunately for them, this conclusion was wrong.”

“All’s well that ends well,” Reingold said, raising his glass.

So that explained Jordan’s temporary $280 million loss — and the near — heart attack that had accompanied it. Stack’s contacts had floated rumors to grease Zhu’s wheels — and Draco had fallen for them. No wonder Stack had been so cool. Remembering the depths of the afternoon’s panic, the walk of shame across the trading floor, the conviction that an entire year’s worth of work (and, likely, his job) had vaporized, Jordan once again felt the heat of humiliation flood into his cheeks. Would it have killed Stack to let him in on the game? This must have been the story that Wilson had threatened to spill at dinner — that the currency desk’s ‘god among men’ was so blind that he didn’t even see he was a pawn.

Zhu slipped out of his seat and headed forward, with Reingold following. As plush as it was, Zhu’s Hummer was more luxurious than the G5 in which Reingold had just floated across the Pacific, so its interior could hardly have been of interest. But Zhu’s conglomerate had paid Whitney Gilman $172 million in fees that year, so if necessary, Jordan knew, Reingold would lick the tire treads.

Zhu and Reingold’s departure left Jordan alone with Stack — the moment he had been trying to engineer all evening. To Jordan’s annoyance, however, Stack took the opportunity to check his BlackBerry. As Jordan watched Stack scroll through e-mails, he took another sip of his Laphroaig, felt its warmth radiate outward from his throat and stomach, emboldening him.

“Well, that certainly sheds some light on this afternoon,” Jordan said, aggressively.

Stack stiffened ever so slightly, and his thumbs stopped working the BlackBerry keys — a reaction that, for him, was almost frenzied.

“All’s well that ends well,” Stack said, without looking up. In the long, infuriating silence that followed, Jordan took another swig of Laphroaig.

“Speaking of ending well,” Jordan said, “I—”

“This is not a good time,” Stack shot back, again without looking up.

“Well, can we talk before the final decisions are made?” Jordan asked.

“They’ve already been made,” Stack said. “And this is not a good time.”

“When—”

“It’s not a good time,” Stack said again, sharply, suddenly looking straight at Jordan. “And the politics in New York” — at this, Stack nodded toward Reingold, who was hunched over a computer with Zhu in the belly of the Hummer — “have made this a challenging year.”

Stack returned to his BlackBerry, leaving Jordan to chew on this — and to chase it with another belt of Laphroaig. So Stack was going to fall back on the “challenging year” crap? He was Alan Stack — not some dime-a-dozen managing director — surely he could do better than that. Maybe the bonus pool was just fine and Stack was hoarding most of it for himself. That was what some of the sleazier managing directors did: duped their people into thinking that the department had gotten stiffed, then kept the lion’s share.

Jordan’s indignation was getting up a good head of steam when a bolt of fear arced through him. Maybe there was another explanation for Stack’s frigidity. Maybe Jordan’s name was already on the execution list. It was Reingold, after all, who had invited Jordan on this last supper of a limo ride. Maybe Stack just didn’t want to break the news to him tonight.

“We aren’t the only game in town anymore,” Jordan said, a feeble threat, and one that, to his embarrassment, sounded as awe-inspiring as a mouse squeak.

“We’re the best game in town,” Stack replied, still engrossed in his BlackBerry. “And we are only as good as our team.”

Stack stopped short of pointing out that Jordan was only as good as his team, a pulled-punch that, in another mood, Jordan might have appreciated. In his current mood, however — drunk, over-caffeinated, and deep into his Laphroaig — he wasn’t grateful. Instead, he felt shafted and exposed. And he was still feeling that way another Laphroaig later, when they reached their destination.

The Hive was a ninety-seven-story needle two blocks from the glittery Pearl TV tower in Pudong. It had been designed to symbolize industriousness and dedication — to facilitate work, to honor work, to beatify work — and it did this by eliminating the need for its inhabitants to do anything but work. Many of those who worked in the Hive, including Jordan and Stack, also lived, shopped, ate, worked out, and drank there. The lower third of the building housed condos. The middle third restaurants, grocery stores, health clubs, night clubs, and the only mid-building heliport in the world. (The best tables in the sixty-third-floor restaurants hung above the heliport’s doors, so diners could watch executives nip to and from the airport and Hangzhou like bees.) The top third held the most expensive office space in Shanghai.

Such was the Hive’s self-sufficiency that the year-end banquet was the first time Jordan had left the building in over a month. He usually used the main door, in the building’s west lobby, overlooking the Huangpu. When Zhu’s Hummer pulled up that evening, though, it was to the southern lobby, which existed exclusively for VIPs. The instant the vehicle stopped, the doors opened and two valets reached upward with white-gloved hands.

Reingold got out first, followed by Stack and Jordan. Inside the Hummer, Zhu nodded goodbye as the steward cleared the Scotch glasses and wiped down the table. A valet swung the door shut, and the Hummer pulled away.

Reingold led them across the lobby to the elevators. He paused in front of them and turned to Jordan. “Nice to get to know you, Emerson.”

“Thank you, Mr. Reingold,” Jordan replied weakly, having persuaded himself that he was done.

“X.D. gave me this to give to you,” Reingold added, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out an envelope. “Another token of his appreciation. He looks forward to seeing you again.”

Jordan took the envelope. The elevator door opened, and Reingold and Stack stepped in.

“Goodnight, Emerson,” Stack said.

“Goodnight, Alan,” Jordan replied, wondering if he would ever see him again.

Alone in the lobby, suddenly aware of how drunk he was, Jordan fingered the envelope Reingold had given him. He opened it and found a key card, the kind used to operate most of the elevators and doors in the Hive. The card bore no markings, nothing to indicate what it provided access to. Jordan stood in front of the elevators for a moment, examining the card. When the doors opened again, he decided what the hell and stuck it into the slot.

The doors closed and the elevator began to ascend, but the screen displayed no floor numbers, so Jordan had no idea how high he rose. Higher than his floor, certainly, high enough that his ears popped and his booze-addled brain fought back a wave of seasickness when the elevator finally decelerated.

The doors opened to reveal an unfamiliar foyer, one that looked as though it had been airlifted from a Victorian exhibit in an art museum. The room was furnished with ornate chairs and lamps, Impressionist paintings, and — Jordan did a double-take — a fireplace with a crackling fire. On the far wall was an antique desk, behind which stood a Caucasian woman Jordan had seen somewhere before.

“Good evening, Mr. Jordan,” she said, as Jordan stepped out of the elevator.

“Um, good evening,” Jordan responded.

The woman crossed the room to shake his hand. “I’m Sarah Lewis. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Mr. Zhu asked me to look after you. Follow me, please.”

She led Jordan through a door and down a hallway, the parquet floor creaking under her shoes. At the end of the hall, she slid a key card into the slot beside a door, then held it open for him. By now, he had a good idea of what to expect inside.

Zhu’s fantasy boudoir wasn’t your average bordello bunk room. Rather, it was a four-room suite, complete with a stocked refrigerator, six-foot bar, seventy-two-inch flat-panel TV, 500-thread count sheets, and, surprise surprise, a plexiglass Jacuzzi mounted in a floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

“If you don’t like heights,” Sarah said, while giving him a tour of the bathroom, “I recommend the jets.”

After showing him around, she lifted the TV remote off the bedside table and held it up.

“If you would like company,” she said, “click here to bring up our interactive catalog. We would be happy to accommodate any special needs.”

A video hooker catalog — nice touch. Despite this innovation, Jordan felt a wash of disappointment. He was enjoying the company he already had.

“What button do I press to ask you to have a drink with me?”

“We don’t have a button for that,” Sarah Lewis replied. “And I don’t drink on the job. But if that’s one of your special needs, I’ll be happy to pour you one.”

“I have a lot of special needs,” Jordan said, smiling.

Since joining Whitney Gilman, Jordan had made it a practice to wake up every morning at 4:55 a.m. He did this seven days a week, on the theory that it had a self-regulating effect on his evening activities. The theory was flimsy — the evenings went on no matter how exhausted he got — but one positive side-effect was that after eight years, Jordan no longer needed an alarm clock. To reduce the risk of falling back to sleep, moreover, he had instituted a policy of standing up the moment he awoke, an aggressive maneuver that often left him grasping for support as blood drained out of his head.

In the predawn blackness, Jordan awoke and stood up. This time, the brain drain was so severe that he slumped to his knees. Head hanging, palms flat on the rug, he thought he was going to black out, but he kept still and the feeling passed. After several deep breaths, his strength returned, and he lifted himself to his feet — at which point he remembered where he was and why he felt so bad.

The “where” was Zhu’s fantasy pad, high up in the Hive. The “why” was the lack of sleep and the fact that he was still, indisputably, drunk. Head pounding, Jordan glanced at an easy-chair, the last place he remembered being. The glasses were gone (Lagavulin for him, water for her), as was the jacket draped over the back of the chair. Looking down, he discovered that his clothes were gone too, replaced with silk boxers. He hadn’t undressed — he was pretty sure of that. He also didn’t remember browsing through Zhu’s video catalog. But someone had removed his clothes and tucked him into the bed. And the same someone, he discovered after some shaky steps to the closet, had hung up his suit, shirt, underwear, and socks.

In the darkness, Jordan picked up his wallet, keys cards, and BlackBerry from the bedside table. Reflexively, he checked the markets and headlines — New York had closed higher — along with his e-mail. In the seven hours since the end of the banquet, eighty-six e-mails had accumulated in his inbox, mostly blasts from the research and trading desks in New York. This was a good sign: He hadn’t yet been canned. He scrolled down the list, looking for anything time-sensitive, and was about to toss the BlackBerry on the bed when he found her note.

Sarah Lewis Seeing her name brought everything back. Just a few hours earlier, he remembered, she had expertly accommodated (some of) his “special needs,” needs that Zhu’s catalog would only have exacerbated, needs that often intruded in times like these. Despite her repeated attempts to excuse herself, he’d kept asking her to stay. He had even, pathetically, insisted on her watching Casablanca with him, in the hope that it would kindle something. (It hadn’t — and he had fallen asleep during the flashback sequence.) Now, he clicked on the e-mail, and the message filled the screen.

Very personal. No Mr. Jordan, and a tantalizing vagueness too. What “end” was she referring to — the movie or the evening? The note gave Jordan hope that, magic key card or no magic key card, he would see her again.

Thought you should see this, the note concluded, adding a link to a video file.

Jordan clicked the link and sat down on the edge of the bed, having no idea what to expect. As the file loaded, he glanced toward the windows. The BlackBerry’s luminescent screen reflected off the dark glass, a glowing spot of blue among the lights of a predawn Shanghai.

The video began to play, and at first Jordan couldn’t tell what he was seeing. Then the image brightened, and he realized it was the view from an elevator security camera. The elevator doors opened, flooding the image with light, and a man in a suit got in. He inserted a key card into the console, stepped to the back of the elevator, then turned around and looked up toward the camera: Stack.

The image jiggled as the elevator began moving, and after twenty seconds jiggled again as it came to a halt. Then the doors opened and Stack walked out.

The scene switched to a waist-level shot of Stack emerging from the elevator into a familiar Victorian room with impressionist paintings and a fire. Recognizing the setting, Jordan’s heart began to race. Had they taped him too? Had the whole Zhu fantasy thing been a setup? Stack approached the camera, reached out to shake the hand of a woman who appeared in the foreground. (Sarah? Jordan couldn’t tell.)

Next shot: an empty hallway. The woman appeared, walking past the camera — Jordan still couldn’t see her face — and Stack followed behind. At the end of the hall, they paused in front of a door. The woman inserted a key card and opened it. They both disappeared inside.

Jordan had a queasy notion of what was coming next: a video of his boss in action — a sight he wasn’t anxious to see. He’d also broken out in a sweat. What had he done last night? Was he sure it wasn’t something worth filming? Why had Sarah sent him this, anyway? Was it a warning?

The scene switched again, and for a moment Jordan was confused. Instead of the Zhu fantasy suite, the room looked like a classroom, with the camera looking out from what would have been the blackboard. The room was empty except for the teacher’s desk and a single pupil, a pretty girl of perhaps eleven or twelve, seated at a desk in the center of the frame. She was dressed in a black skirt and white shirt, the ubiquitous uniform of Japanese grade-school students. (First the banquet, and now this — did Stack have some sort of Japan fetish?) The girl appeared to be copying something from the blackboard: She would look up, look down to write in her notebook, and look up again.

The classroom door opened, and the “teacher” walked in — and Jordan’s fears were confirmed. The girl stood to bow low to Teacher Stack. Stack strode toward the front of the classroom and sat at the desk, his back to the camera.

Jordan felt sick. Was this a standard option in Zhu’s video catalog — or one of Stack’s “special needs”? Was this how his hyper-cool, hyper-professional boss spent his leisure hours — indulging in power-trip kiddie fantasies?

The girl stood beside her chair, head bowed. Teacher Stack rose, picked up a fistful of papers from the desk, and began shaking them at her. He was yelling now, his head and shoulders jerking as he barked. Jordan had never known Stack to so much as raise his voice, so this alone was startling. Stack moved toward the girl, who remained motionless with her head bowed. He stopped in front of her, still yelling. Then, of course, she dropped to her knees.

A moment later, Jordan was on his knees too, beside Zhu’s luxurious toilet. He gagged, his hands gripping the bowl, and a Scotch-flavored flame surged up his throat. He swallowed hard, closed his eyes, waited for the next heave. It came, and Jordan expelled it, spraying the porcelain brown. Head hanging, hand groping upwards, he found the handle and pulled. The toilet flushed white, splashing Jordan’s face with cool water. He stood, staggered to the sink, and turned on the tap. He plunged his hands into the stream and doused water on his burning cheeks. Then he leaned on the counter and let water drip from his chalky face into the sink.

Images rushed through his head, one after the other — power fantasies that even Stack himself might have warmed to: Jordan as ninja, Jordan as heavyweight champion, Jordan as axe murderer, Jordan as righteous gunslinger. Had he been sober and rested, he might have realized that it was more than just the video fueling his fantasies, that his resentment toward Stack had been building for years. And it might have occurred to him that he hadn’t been fired yet, that he could have misread Stack the night before, that twelve hours — twelve drunken hours — of reeling year-end emotions weren’t worth betting a career on. He might have realized that pictures were worth a thousand words, but others weren’t worth the hard drives they were stored on. But Jordan wasn’t sober, and he wasn’t rested, and he wasn’t thinking any of that. Instead, as the water dripped away, his churning emotions condensed into a single, simple concept: payback.

Turning from the sink, Jordan strode back into the bedroom and picked up the BlackBerry. Several years earlier, when e-mail scandals had temporarily terrorized Wall Street, a techie friend had taught him how to send e-mails with untraceable return-path information. Thumbs clicking frantically, Jordan logged off the network, logged in again as an administrator, and returned to the e-mail. He copied the video file into a new e-mail. In the “Subject” field, he typed A Message From Alan Stack, and then skipped to the “BCC” field. From a pull-down menu, he selected Global Sales and Trading, a distribution list that included some 11,000 Whitney Gilman professionals worldwide. Then he pressed send.

What does it feel like to walk into your own execution? Jordan was sure he was about to find out. Seven hours earlier, after escaping from Zhu’s lair and returning to his own Hive pad, he had sent Fishman an e-mail implying a hang-over and asking him to take over for the morning. Then he had unplugged every communication device he owned and crawled into bed. When he awoke, just after noon, he had remembered the Stack e-mail and been hit with a bolt of terror and regret: What had he done?

He had considered camping in his apartment, but figured that, in the event they hadn’t yet traced the e-mail, this would be a dead giveaway. So, he had showered, dressed, and headed for the trading floor. Now, as Jordan approached the desk, he was glad to see that little had changed. Fishman leaned toward him.

“You’re not going to believe what you missed.”

“Do tell,” Jordan said, steeling himself.

As Fishman told it, the e-mail had hit Whitney’s trading floors like a bomb, blowing an otherwise ordinary morning to smithereens. No one knew where it had come from, but the Australia guys had opened it first: A bizarre pederastic-sado-fantasy in which Stack fucked a schoolgirl on a teacher’s desk. Within an hour, the video had bloomed on a thousand desktops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Moscow, Paris, London. The administrators had caught up with it, finally, ripped it off every server in the firm, but not before some bastard had posted it on the Internet. The networks had it now, and had been showing clips all morning, along with profiles of Whitney Gilman and headshots of Stack. The Shanghai government had demanded an apology, as had the Japanese government, and everyone was expecting a similar demand from Beijing. The firm’s Executive Committee had called an emergency meeting in New York in the middle of the night. And Stack! Poor Stack. He’d been picked up by the police at his apartment that morning and taken in for questioning. No one had seen him since.

As Fishman’s story unfolded, Jordan felt like a kid who had tossed a cigarette in a garbage can and burned down a city. The knot tightened in his chest again, and his hands dampened with sweat.

“You’ve got to see the video,” Fishman concluded. “It’s some sick shit. I’ll send you the link. Oh, and Reingold’s been calling you.”

“Reingold?”

“He’s holed up in Stack’s office, doing damage control. One of Stack’s secretaries keeps calling.”

“What does Reingold want with me?” Jordan asked, his heart pounding like a kettle drum, sure that this was it.

“Got me,” Fishman said. “Give her a call.”

Hand shaking, Jordan dialed Stack’s number. Lauren answered, confirmed that Reingold wanted to see him immediately. Now getting fired seemed like a dream scenario — he’d be lucky if he didn’t get jailed. Jordan stood up and set off across the trading floor, a dead man walking.

The translucent walls and floor in Stack’s office were dark, the only light coming from a strip of glass behind the desk. Reingold was in Stack’s seat, surrounded by the heads of Asia Wealth Management and Investment Banking, along with the regional general counsel, the head of HR, and the head of PR. Of course the lawyers and HR folks were there: Reingold would need witnesses. Security guards were no doubt waiting just outside the door.

As Jordan entered, everyone was staring at a speakerphone in the middle of the desk. Reingold looked up.

“Karl?” he said to the speakerphone. “Emerson Jordan has just walked in.”

Karl, Jordan assumed, was Karl Eichenwald, Whitney’s CEO.

“Hello, Mr. Jordan,” said Eichenwald’s disembodied but unmistakable voice. “Glad you could join us on this fucking peach of an evening.”

“Emerson,” Reingold said, “we’ve got a situation here, so we’ll be brief. Other than myself, I believe you were the last one to see Alan last night. I’ve told everyone how we rode back from the banquet together. After that, Alan and I went upstairs for a nightcap, and then Alan headed off — to his apartment, I thought. Did you see Alan again last night?”

So they were going to interrogate him first. Interrogate him, find out what he knew, then shoot him.

“No,” Jordan said.

The general counsel jumped in.

“Was he behaving normally on the ride home? Was he drunk?”

“Not that I noticed,” said Jordan.

“Any idea where the video was shot?”

Jordan’s heart skipped. “No,” he lied.

“Any idea who would have sent this video around?”

“No.”

“Well, whoever it was ought to be fried alive!” Eichenwald’s voice boomed. “Stack’s in need of some serious therapy, but whoever spammed this thing around has fucked the rest of us. Issue the statement. I’ll do a press conference in the morning.”

“I’m not sure that’s wise, sir,” the general counsel said. “We haven’t authenticated the video. We haven’t interviewed Stack. We haven’t even gotten all the basic facts.”

Authenticated the video?” Eichenwald boomed. “What the fuck is there to authenticate? The head of our Asian trading organization is on four networks banging a twelve-year-old!”

The speakerphone chirped as Eichenwald hung up.

“Well, I guess we’re done,” another voice said through the speakerphone, one Jordan didn’t recognize. “Thanks for the rapid response. Can’t say I agree with the Chinese about living in interesting times.”

“Hopefully, they’ll be less interesting in the morning,” Reingold said.

The speakerphone chirped several times in succession: the rest of the board disconnecting.

Reingold looked up. “Thanks, everyone.”

The executives rose and filed past Jordan toward the door.

Reingold stood up and walked toward him. “There’s one other thing we need to discuss,” he said. Jordan’s heart raced again, as Reingold placed a hand on his shoulder. “I have to go apologize to Shanghai’s mayor on the firm’s behalf, so I don’t have much time. I’ve spoken to most of our big clients this morning, including X.D. I’ve explained the situation, told them that, regardless of what happens, they’ll be in good hands. And they will be.”

Why the preamble? Jordan wondered.

“No matter what else happens,” Reingold continued, “Stack’s done. For now, he’s on administrative leave, but I suspect he won’t be coming back. We need a new head of Asian trading. And I’m looking at him.”

“Excuse me?” Jordan said.

“The press release will be on the wire in ten minutes. Eichenwald has already approved it. He wanted me to congratulate you on his behalf. Our clients are happy with our choice — they’re ready to help you however they can. X.D., especially, would be eager to hear from you this afternoon.”

“I’m not sure what to say,” Jordan replied, meaning it.

“Give it time,” Reingold said, patting Jordan’s shoulder again, turning toward the door. “Congratulations, Emerson. I’ll be out of your new office this afternoon. Enjoy it. And don’t let me down.”

For the first time in his life, it seemed, Fishman wasn’t completely in the loop. He had been busy, though, thinking everything through. When Jordan sat down, still in shock, Fishman was positively bursting.

“So, is Reingold on cloud nine, or what?”

“I’m sorry?” Jordan said.

“You’ve just had a private meeting with our next CEO,” Fishman said, “a man who until this morning was an also-ran.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember Beston? The heir apparent? Well, the reason Beston made the late surge to the front of the CEO lottery was because of Stack. Stack had lost confidence in Reingold, and threw in with Beston. But now Stack’s toxic, and everyone who ever knew him is running for the fumigator. There’s no way Beston can distance himself. So that leaves Reingold, the man who was suspicious of Stack to begin with. He’s our new CEO.”

“Interesting,” Jordan said, his heart pounding again.

“Yes,” said Fishman. “And I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of him.”

“Oh?”

“Rumor is he’s got a girlfriend in the Hive. An American — Sarah Something. Lives upstairs. One of the bond guys runs the StairMaster with her in the gym, and he saw her coming out of Reingold’s apartment this morning. Now, Reingold can fly his jet-copter into the heliport, take a couple of meetings, and then bang away all night long. How’s that for convenience? Doesn’t even have to leave the building.”

Jordan sat frozen, ostensibly watching headlines tick up the screen.

“And you want to know the kicker?” Fishman continued. “I just talked to a buddy of mine who’s obsessed with that Stack video. Has been playing it again and again, all day long. He has all this fancy equipment, and he says that he’s pretty sure the thing’s a fake. The first part’s okay — that’s Stack riding up the elevator, shaking the woman’s hand — he’s sure of that. But the kiddie porn thing? In the whole sequence with the girl there’s only one shot where you see Stack’s face, and my buddy doesn’t think it’s really him. Says he’s blown it up to the pixel level, and he thinks Stack’s face was cut-and-pasted from the first part, the elevator segment. Something about the angle — looking up when he should be looking out. In any case, he thinks Stack has been framed.”

“Where did the sex part come from, then?” Jordan said, feeling sick.

“My friend thinks it’s from some dime-a-dozen porn flick, the kind piled eight feet deep in Xiangyang Park.”

“And Stack?”

“Stack’s toast. He’ll rot in prison until they finally let him call a lawyer, and even then he won’t be able to do much. It’s not like the folks at the embassy are clamoring to save him, not with that horrific video going around. He’ll get off eventually — if my friend can spot a fraud, the forensic gurus can too — but it won’t be anytime soon. R.I.P., Stack. Meanwhile, I wonder who they’re going to get to run things around here.”

Just then, as Jordan watched, a Whitney Gilman press release blipped onto the screen.

Everything i’m not by Lauren Sanders

Tel Aviv, Israel

Ten Counting backwards

Middle of summer and Tel Aviv’s wilted to its roots. But a deep chill cuts through Ben-Gurion. Outside the tarmac steams, monstrous 757s nose-to-nose with military planes, security everywhere. Look matronly, I’d been told: Former combat soldiers comprise airport security, and everyone knows the army’s stocked with mama’s boys. I’m wearing a long floral skirt, loose-fitting T-shirt, sensible shoes, purple beret covering my head like a religious woman. The band of my skirt is soaked.

One security officer approaches a man a few people ahead of me, who presents his passport, Israeli, and the back and forth begins. I make out a few words... Nothing... I go to travel... Paris. Closer to the checkpoint, I fear the religious drag might be all wrong; everyone hates the orthodox. I take heavy breaths, heart like full magazine fire, counting backwards... ten exhale, nine exhale, eight, exhale... a technique from my days on ice, those last few minutes before pushing off when you’re led into position based on a coin toss. Random. Waiting for a signal, the gunshot, and it’s do die. Counting was the only way to clear my head. Still is... four, exhale... three, exhale...

A soldier moves into another line full of tourists, careful to keep the nose of his M16 to the left. The IDF has an arms code peppered with words like humanity and dignity. Soldiers respect their rifles. No solace as they advance, and I know I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing, and probably for all the wrong reasons: guilt, loyalty... My father says all people are motivated by sex or money. As a teenager, declaring myself the opposition, I’d float examples to ruin his theory, and ask about, say, nuns. “Sex,” he replied. “God is sex.” The president (can’t remember which one): “That’s too easy, Jen. Watch the State of the Union. See the way the idiot smiles, rolls his fist, senators, dignitaries, special guests sitting and standing like puppets, the eyes of the whole world on him up there at the podium, and you know he’s doing it all for the friggin’ lead pipe in his pants.”

My father is crude in a way that can delight as much as disgust. He knows the feeling of hundreds of thousands of eyes on him, the lead pipe. He’s made me what I am today, standing a few travelers from interrogation, limbs on alert, stuffed with enough stolen information to detain me in the Holy Land — and not how I’d like it. I start the count all over again, ten, exhale...

Nine. The conference (five days earlier)

She finds me at the bus depot, grabbing my arm as I’m about to board the shuttle in the thick, dusty parking lot. “What are you thinking?” She pulls me back, lemony rose scent eclipsing burning fuel, vegetable oil, falafel. “You make it so hard to see you with those drab clothes. I have to find you, don’t I?”

She’s got loose brown curls, dark skin, and freckles. Lips like a blow pop. Israeli women might be the sexiest in the world. Utterly brazen and comfortable in their skin.

“You look much better than I thought,” she says, leading me to a creamy white sports car. A little Honda. “You don’t photograph well. And the stories make you so hard and serious. But you’re okay. Ma?... What? What’s the problem?”

I nod. “Nothing, I—”

“Why are you standing there? Open the door.”

“Are you from the conference?”

A quick stare, candied lips cracking slightly. “Get in,” she says.

As a child, I could recite the exact number of city blocks to my father’s office. I knew when the streets got skinnier, the buildings taller, where we’d come upon the World Trade Center. My father hated the towers from the moment they went up, said they blighted the district. His revenge was buying up souvenir T-shirts and dumping them into the river, buying because he would never rob anyone of their livelihood — not if they were making less than he was. Week after sunny week, cotton shirts bobbed around lower Manhattan, from above resembling a wispy cirrus cloud, said my painterly mother, who like all of us mourned when the police caught up with him. That was the first time he made the cover of the New York Post

Wall Street begins with an old church and ends at the river, the New York Stock Exchange its sire. My father liked being near the exchange, though he rarely visited the floor. He’d made a name shoveling his family’s millions into venture capital and private equity, ideas thrilling him more than commodities. The family had traded in dry goods, which seemed as remote as amber waves of grain, you don’t hear much about dry goods anymore. My father claimed his was the tallest building on the street, and maybe that’s why he hated the towers. From his windows, you could see past the Empire State Building, out to the row houses in Queens and Brooklyn, airports and wetlands, industrial New Jersey. “Take a look at my shtetle, Jen,” he said, lifting me up high and despite his tight grip on my hips I felt dizzy, the drop so far and only a thin pane of glass between me and the end. I read somewhere that people who work on high floors in offices are more likely to have affairs. Something about the thin air and subliminal sense of danger keeps them keyed up. Like driving through a city on pins and needles.

“Always there is so much traffic,” Gila says, as we inch along Ha-Yarkon. She’d given me a few hours to relax at the Sheraton, read through the conference literature. The government had invited me to present on international philanthropy. Once I was a competitive speed skater; now I spend my days handing out the family’s money, though many of my father’s assets have been frozen since he disappeared. “The people of Tel Aviv, they like to go out, dress well, eat well... They don’t let much get in the way. The city is full of pride. Always they compare it to New York City — of course, most people who say this have never been to New York City. But they are very cosmopolitan and alive. Makes a lot of traffic.”

“If I were an urban planner,” I offer, for a moment actually considering it, “I’d invent a city without cars.”

“Hold on.” Gila smiles, then turns off the main boulevard, steadying us through venous streets, tourists left lagging beneath the palms. For me, Tel Aviv has always conjured Miami Beach with its concrete terraces, salty-dog air, and long, languorous summers, hotels shooting up against blue-green water... and Jews. All the little old ladies who argue with you in supermarkets and eat dinner at 5 o’clock. But a few generations have given the natives their own look, a tougher dark skin, mirrored in the metallic skyscrapers shooting up around the flat white boxes, many of them historic. The city’s also got its own twin towers, though they’re fraternal: one rectangular, one round, and still they smack of tragedy.

We pull up in front of a coastal bar in Yaffa, the old Arab port, now low on Arabs, high on cafés. Inside Gila signals a man in a gauzy black linen suit who kisses the air next to her cheek two times as Israeli men do and bows reverently, then leads the two of us to a secluded outdoor table overlooking the black-and-white waves, tiny lava lamps strung along the patio, chairs like ice cubes. Very chic, Gila says. She orders a clear liquor that clouds when you add water. I wanted a Coke but with the waiter in front of me say Scotch, neat. I am not supposed to drink, a little wine with dinner, but... Gila’s studying the way I lift my glass and swallow, as if she knows.

“You must be tired,” she says. “I hate flying over the Atlantic. Small flights, sure, but anything more than two hours... I try to set my watch two days before to the new time. Sometimes I take a little hashish, a pill. I have a pill if you’d like.”

I say no thanks, order another Scotch. Gila tells me she learned to fly planes in the army, often winged undercover into Lebanon, Syria, Iraq on fact-finding missions. There were no female fighter pilots when she served and she was training in psychological warfare. I ask what’s psychological warfare and she says strategy. You study your enemy, learn his mind, his methods, so you can defeat him. I say dumb American things like “wow.” I ask when she served, trying to guess her age, and she says between the Intifadas... mid-’90s? She’s younger than her talk, younger than me, and though she’s posturing I am enjoying our conversation, the thick winds coming off the sea, slow songs from the ’80s, American. Chic? I ask if she was ever in combat.

She shrugs, “Every day I am in combat.”

“I meant in the army.”

“Ah, you have romantic thoughts about the Israeli army.” She smiles, I believe. Hard to tell with her. “Americans think, Women serve, they let the gay people in, everyone’s on reserve, it’s egalitarian, but it’s really so much macho bullshit.”

“My brother used to say the same.”

“What?”

“He came over here to serve.”

“You have a brother?”

“He’s dead.” I blurt this out so fast I’m stunned. I don’t share personal information easily, if at all. Gila’s face ices over, and that’s exactly why. When you drop bombs, you’ve got to clean up the debris. “It wasn’t here, happened a little later,” I nervously add. She is silent for a long while, then shakes her head. “I had no idea.”

“Well, it’s not something for the bio.”

Staring beyond me, as if she might not have heard me or might have but despises the levity, so damn American, she repeats herself. She had no idea. Around us, others laugh, converse, provoke, and we’re stuck in the silence... until her phone coughs up a symphony.

I jump slightly. “Sorry.”

She purses her lips, raises a forefinger, shakes her head. “No.” All of this one seamless gesture before she fishes the yammering phone from her bag and checks the number, her face a declarative sentence. I feel feverish.

Gila doesn’t take the call but says we must go. She has work still for tomorrow. It’s been a long night, we agree. Then silently leave the café.

Eight. Why I don’t drink

Late into the night, fueled by Scotch and jetlag, wishing I’d taken her pill, then playing out worst-case scenarios — you betray a lover, cause an accident, someone’s death, your own, why am I doing this? — the way I’d practiced in rehab, when counting wasn’t enough... I Google her. Gila Zyskun is a common name. I find the conference website. She’s on the staff list, no picture. Beyond that, a roulette wheel of possibilities: graphic novelist, advertising executive, espionage consultant, entomologist, rare-glass collector, government bureaucrat, teenage chess champion. I flip on the TV: CNN: I’m old enough to remember the network’s coming of age during the first Gulf War. At twenty-three, I was here with my brother and felt the fear of Scud missiles pointed at damp, wintry Tel Aviv, the smell of gunpowder over the Mediterranean, people trolling the streets in gas masks, the orthodox lobbying for expensive masks to fit their beards inside, the anti-Semitism rabid in this seaside town. Tonight there are hard-luck stories of those displaced by the pullout. I’m captivated. Sleep experts say Thomas Edison revolutionized insomnia when he invented the lightbulb, extending the day into oblivion, to say nothing of TV sets and wireless Internet. I throw open the curtains and stare out at the charcoal waves to remind myself it’s nighttime, a few hours away from the conference, and I am so small.

Seven. Slacking off

Gila Zyskun shows up the next morning at the Sheraton in a tight miniskirt, curls still wet, maroon-tinged sunglasses, balancing coffee in tall paper cups like martini shakers. She’d called from downstairs, said take your bathing suit, we’re going to the beach, be fast. Though my day was slated for panels and prospecting, I’d fallen asleep thinking about her, the way her pinkie nail grazed the rim of her cloudy glass, her tall tales of moonlit reconnaissance — overnment bureaucrat? entomologist? — and while it’s impossible to visit this country without thinking of my brother, our stay at the kibbutz, all the fig trees we’d planted, the hash in Dahab, I wish I’d left him out of it. Loose lips sink ships.

That was a propaganda campaign during the Second World War: how the gossipy women back home could fuck up troop movements over a cup of coffee.

In the lobby, Gila hands me a caffeine cocktail, says she thought it would make me less disoriented. “I’m juiced up already,” I say, but it tastes very good.

“There is never too much coffee. That’s why Israel has so many cafés. We take coffee sitting down; it’s hard to find anywhere with paper cups. Starbucks couldn’t make it.”

“I thought the politics drove them out.”

“Everyone always assumes politics, sometimes it’s just life,” she says. We are walking through the parking lot. It’s already hot and my bones are jumpy, expectant. I see her Honda a few cars off. “It’s my turn now for a question,” she says, as we split, each to our own side. “Why did you stop skating?”

Her lock clicks open like a shot. “Did I tell you that? When—”

“You don’t remember,” she shrugs, pulls open her door, still looking at me over the roof. I remember drinking a few Scotches and telling her my brother was dead. Not much more. “Jetlag is very powerful. Once after a terrible rocky flight I married a man I just met.”

“Married? You don’t seem the type.”

“I’m not.”

She dips beneath the roof, slams the door. Beyond the parking lot, frothy waves tumble into the beach, already too crowded. Years ago I watched a woman dive from the top of this hotel. Saw bodies on the beach hive together, as if in a disaster film — tourists, police, men in fatigues — but it was too late. The Sheraton is a tall building and she’d landed on concrete. People couldn’t fathom it. Even in a land where soldiers caressed their guns in restaurants, poised always to shoot, and Arab children threw rocks at tanks (this was before the era of suicide bombers), nobody wanted to believe a pretty young woman — Dutch, no less — would throw herself from a building. But sometimes everywhere you look is death.

Inside Gila’s car, I let the cool leather vanquish me. We are going to a beautiful place, she tells me. Private, she says knowingly. We can swim, have lunch at the spa, even return for the afternoon sessions. Nothing is too far from anything else.

Israel is paved with primitive two-lane highways. Marc and I hitchhiked everywhere, once he’d had enough of the army and quit. He left me frantic messages, begging me to come, just don’t tell the old bastard — my father had arranged the army after the cops seized fifty pounds of mushrooms from Marc’s apartment, Hefty bags full of them. The old bastard was capable of tectonic shifts in time and space, could bend the law with one phone call. He’d been prospecting in Israel since the Six-Day War, helping to modernize the desert ravaged for centuries by explorers and asylum seekers, his belief in the land holy, rehabilitative. The Jews would make a man of my brother. But my father underestimated Marc’s resistance, and though I was about to begin aggressive training for my second Olympics, the one I’d fantasized about every day since flopping Calgary, I left the country to be with my brother. I never qualified.

At the beach, we climb up on big rocks and lay out a few towels. Gila has come prepared. She says I can change into my suit but don’t worry about the top. It’s European style. The water is a shallow green today, like a drained emerald. I don’t want to be topless in front of her, plagued by an atavistic terror of shared hotel suites, locker rooms, shower stalls: You’re afraid to look but more afraid to not-look too hard. But you get good at pretending. We lie next to each other absorbing the day, talking easily.

When she stands and rolls her arms through the holes of her gauzy shirt, I don’t want to go. We have a reservation, she says. A seaweed wrap before lunch.

To be wrapped I must take off all my clothes, hand over my body to the experts. Gila lies next to me, naked, and I’m not-looking because this is what women do. These thoughts surprise me. Nothing about my life now is closeted. Ours is a concealed terrace, sunny but embedded in a cool granite fortress, a fleet of leafy green plants on the floor. Bodies wrapped, our eyes are covered with plastic goggles and faces rubbed with a sandy cream. Years ago I took a mud bath in the Dead Sea, let the salt hold me up like a million tiny fingers. It’s impossible to drown, Marc said, and I felt light as a souvenir T-shirt in the East River.

Every so often a young woman sprays gentle streams of water, moistening the seaweed. I feel like an eel. A happy little eel falling in and out of sleep, relaxed in way I can’t remember ever being without drugs.

“Hello, Jen.”

I rip off my goggles. My father’s standing in front of me, and Gila’s disappeared. Bisected by cubist rays, he’s light and dark and larger than ever. I sit up slightly, afraid to crack my cellophane cover. “What are you doing here?” I ask, and he smiles — obviously the wrong question: Gila Zyskun is a rat.

“It’s great to see you.” He lights a cigarette, leans back against the granite. “I miss you. I hate being so out-of-pock-et.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Dad. Everyone’s going crazy looking for you. I’ve got lawyers harassing me, not to mention the feds... What makes you think they’re not tailing me?”

He smiles. “What’s it they say? Everyone’s got a doppelganger.”

“Shit! I should have known, the minute I heard Israel—”

“Let’s face it, your brain’s just not wired that way,” he says, dispirited I’m not the canny apprentice he’d always wanted. He shifts in the piercing rays, and I see stars, I think, I’m dizzy. I cup a hand against my forehead, twist my neck up into the sun, and our eyes meet, the stars really millions of tiny gnats, and I’m suddenly shamed, the contours of my body wet and shiny, hidden but not, the theory of latex. “Put on your clothes,” he says. “We’re having lunch.”

The early settlers survived on tilapia, my father tells me, as we’re served colorful plates of fish, hummus, pickles, pink radishes, tomatoes and cucumbers diced infinitesimally small, what they call salad. Tilapia is peasant fish; the kings ate trout. We sit on another terrace, this one also scooped into the side of the mountain but with a long dining table. We squeeze together at one end, a waterfall rushing behind us, the air cleaner and cooler than it should be on a sticky summer day. My father eats voraciously, in between bites signaling staff to bring us more food, wine, his laptop, bantering as if it hasn’t been nine months since we’ve seen each other.

“More fish?” He pushes a platter of smoked trout under my nose. I roll my eyes and break off a piece with my fork.

“Sorry about you and...”

“Barbara.”

“Right... Never liked her. How’s your mother?”

“Come on, Dad.”

“She’s my favorite, you know that.”

“She’s living in the mountains with Lionel. They’re into race horses and Fresh Air kids. And what’s going on here?”

“What?” he says, palms open, shoulders up like Gila’s, innocent as the state of Israel... What, what did I do? We’re staring but it’s hopeless: I can take him down with one look. He exhales deeply, pours another glass of wine, and the tale flows from his mouth like something out of the Old Testament. I am not in Israel for a conference. He needs my help.

Six. The kite

My ride back to Tel Aviv comes in a small sport utility vehicle with tinted windows, the driver, Moti, a stout, surly man with no neck. When I ask where’s Gila, my father steels and I know there are things he’s left out of the story, things too indecorous even for a man on his fourth wife, and I want to spit in his over-tanned face, but count... ten exhale, nine, exhale...

At the Sheraton, they still believe I am here for a government conference. “Shalom, Shalom!” they greet overzealously, asking how my day went, was there anything I needed. No, nothing, thank you, I’ll be in the gym. Forty-five minutes on the elliptical trainer gets my heart up, though I hate pumping in place, you lose the gorgeous expanse of speed. It’s your everyday corporate hotel. The gym is well equipped. In my room there are movies in English, bottles of water, free wireless, plush pillows, and a feathery comforter that reeks of stale anonymous sex. I climb under the covers and check my e-mail, when a window pops up on my screen. I’m not set to receive instant messages, but there she is: Meet me at the bar in Yaffa.

Backdropped once more by the Mediterranean, the gurgling lava lamps, ’80s lounge music, I let her apologize. “I shouldn’t even be here,” she says. “It’s dangerous.”

“What’s the danger?”

“I know he told you.”

“He said you were lovers.”

Caught sipping from her cloudy glass, she holds the liquid against the roof of her mouth, lowers her chin slightly, swallows. My neck is hot, back hot, eyes burning white, it’s all the confirmation I need. “He is a very interesting man,” she says.

“He’s a thief.”

We are silent for a moment, then she says it started as business. Says she’d been researching for him in New York, angling her way into other VC companies and investment banks, helping him figure out who was backing what, how he could bridge the right startup then liquidate it before his partners knew what hit them. Much of it was legal, she says, there’s no law against misrepresenting yourself nor using information obtained in bad faith. He made many enemies and far too much money for his tax returns — and here’s where his story gets nebulous. For years he’d been skimming profits and funneling them into Israeli accounts; before the towers fell you could do this under the radar. She liked his mind, she says, even the way he ordered meals was tactical, and he was audacious in business, could convince investors an empty shell of a company was hot issue stock... What was it like growing up with that? Big, I say, everything about him was enormous, even his absences.

Her phone goes off, that damn score, Beethoven maybe, blaring like a nervous breakdown. She looks at the number, a revelation in those few seconds, embarrassed. “Hello! Hello!” she says, some intimacy to it. “Nothing, really... I’m in the car... Sure...”

Up she goes, and I’m grateful. Cell phones: how one can ramble across from another at a table, uncivilized on any level, particularly dicey when it’s my father’s lover and he is on the other end and we are out late.

You learn over the years when people are holding back. Afraid to jump in, they extend, obfuscation teasing nightcaps, long anecdotes. Should we walk along the beach? she says. The water glows in moonlight. They say it’s phosphorus... or the remnants of oil spills. The soldiers are not far away. You get used to them. Gila drops her bomb: After the army she was recruited by Mossad. She helped develop new technologies for the field and learned how to gather information, a commodity as valuable as dry goods once were. But disillusion quickly set in, she hated politics, and she took her skills to market. She is what they call a kite.

I kick off my sandals, feel the sand between my toes as we stroll. “So you’re the thief.”

“I am simply pulling together data, same as I used to for Mossad. If I have to tell a story or rearrange things to get what I want, it’s what I do. Stealing, I don’t know. I think you must want the thing before you can steal it.”

“You’re as delusional as he is. If you take something that’s not yours, it’s stealing. You just give him the out if you’re caught, he can shrug, What? Who is she?

I touch her arm, slow us down. She is a brisk walker.

“What?” she says, then turns away, utterly still for the first time since we met. The chatty one in her skirts, glasses without frames. This woman who’s maybe romanced members of Parliament and worked her way into corporations with ten levels of security. She raises her head slightly, eyes reflecting moonlight like a raccoon’s. “In Mossad I learned to be more cunning than anyone at the table, to think out of the box. We were bold, risky, we had no choice. We created systems that could detect a heartbeat ten feet outside of a tank, all kinds of surveillance devices tapping into databases, and still we killed so many wrong people. Where do you put that? There’s no place for it. But money, it makes more sense. People think—”

“Stop it with the ‘people think,’ okay, I’m not interested in your little philosophies.”

“Then what interests you? From what I can tell, nothing.”

“That’s not true, you have no idea.” I hear my voice crack, blood coursing under my skin, Gila steady as a news-caster. She is so much like my father: clever, manipulative, “audacious,” everything I’m not. I work this through in less than thirty seconds, while she’s not-looking, trust me, I know not-looking, and then I’m babbling about the sea, the stars, how different this country is from the one I’d traversed with Marc, and somehow we’re conversing again, bumping into each other slightly as we walk. Desire always gets me by the throat first. Then elsewhere. The various twitches and puls But the throat...

She walks a step in front and takes my arm. “Shhhh.”

“I—”

Regah, regah! Do not speak a word, don’t move!” She sits me down, then disappears into the sand, up over the board-walk. Left in shadows, I wish I were armed with something other than a BlackBerry. Fear and desire share a path to the heart. I count backwards until she appears, stuffing a shiny object inside her shirt — definitely not a BlackBerry. “It’s nothing, just him.”

“Who?”

“He often has me followed.”

I realize she’s talking about my father. “Sounds like you two have a great relationship.”

“Come, we’ll take you to the hotel. I must go to him.”

Five. Old habits die hard

At the Sheraton, she drops me without a word, and I know my father’s on to me. I twist open a midget bottle of Scotch and suck it down in one sip, lying back on the lonely comforter. Hotel beds make me want to come, but this time it’s more. Gila Zyskun is not like any of my father’s lovers, though she asked about them. At first they liked to care for me, be my best friend. Some insisted we “go shopping,” a ridiculous activity. Gila laughed, she hated shopping too. The few he married stopped trying. A hand on my arm, she understands, her father had been a notorious philanderer, a general, and that’s all we need, so different from those who’d endlessly probe, How did it feel? in the name of love. Like my father, I have failed every relationship in my life, but Gila doesn’t care, says we’re more alike than different. I come so fast it’s clear: I don’t trust me either.

Four. An unbelievable story

The three of us have lunch at an upscale Russian restaurant in Herzliya. This is diamond money, my father says, tapping his thin, manicured finger on the crisp white linen. Marc had the same fingers, long and elegant, a few neat black hairs above each knuckle as if they’d been perfectly embroidered. You wouldn’t think such pretty hands capable of such mischief.

My father divulges the plan over bowls of creamy pink borscht, blinis, caviar — comfort food, he says. On Sundays, as a boy, his father took him to visit Russian relatives in Brighton Beach and on the way home they ate lunch. He misses New York but won’t endure a trial. “I’ll die first,” he says, and he’s not joking. Gila says he carries vials of hemlock, at any moment ready to cut out on his own.

The plan is simple. I am to take a jump drive to Paris and deliver it to an associate, who’ll move the contents accordingly. Simple until I know how I’m carrying — “It’s small and thin,” my father says. “Undetectable as a tampon. And there’s something else you should know.”

“Don’t bother her with that,” Gila says, worried, I think. Spying has taught her to be stoic, controlled.

“She has to know, everyone’s on edge. The police are being extra-vigilant.”

“It’ll just make her nervous.”

He glowers at Gila, then me, knows something’s up, maybe? Her concern warms me, then nurtures paranoia: What if this conversation is staged? “Look, Jen, there was trouble here recently. Something like twenty companies were busted for spying on each other... It’s an unbelievable story. One day out of the blue, this mystery writer calls the police and says parts of his unpublished novel are appearing all over the Internet and they trace it to a virus planted on his computer—”

“No, not a virus,” Gila interrupts. “It was a Trojan horse, you know that.”

“Same thing.”

“No, it is not the same, the Trojan is much smarter, you have to invite it in. Tell the story right or don’t tell it. Already, you leave out that he was writing with his wife, they were a team, but the son-in-law was related to the wife.”

“He was after the husband, trying to humiliate him.”

Voices raised, the vein under my father’s left eye pulsing, Gila’s long neck coiled, they argue back and forth about who did what and when, a slick coat of oil congealing over the untouched blinis. The gist: Upset over his breakup with their daughter, the former son-in-law hacked into the mystery-writing couple’s computer with spying software, mining whatever he could and releasing it on the Internet, at times altered to sully the man’s reputation. He’d also sold his Trojan to a number of private detectives who used it to spy for their corporate clients.

“They were very sloppy,” Gila says.

“Israel has one of the most competitive business climates in the world,” my fathers says.

“They left a trail longer than a rocketship to the moon.”

“Without that writer — writers,” he winks at Gila, “they would have been fine, which is the takeaway here: Don’t mess with the family.”

“What’s on the drive?” I jump in, speaking loudly, as much to topple their excitement, the current between them, as to figure out what I’m in for. They angle toward me, my father no doubt wondering how much to divulge, whether it’ll make a difference. Everything I own, he says. No need to elaborate, it can’t be legal, and though my father’s gall shouldn’t stun me, throughout my life I’ve been his foil, I am slightly taken aback that he’d sacrifice me for his crumbling empire.

Gila excuses herself to go to the restroom, silencing my father and me as we stare, traces of her lingering, the after-glow. He sighs, “Did she tell you she worked for Mossad?”

I nod.

“She’s come up with things you wouldn’t believe if you saw them in a James Bond movie. Can’t imagine what I’d do without her. She’s amazing.”

“Oh, I know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

My own version of the Israeli shrug: “What?

“Don’t do anything stupid, Jen.” He cuts a fork into a hardened blini, me down to fourteen. “This is disgusting... Hey!” He barks a few words of Russian at the waiter, lights a cigarette, and we’re eye to eye.

“I’m not sure I’m going to do this for you,” I say.

“Then you might as well drive a stake through my heart.”

Gila returns as the waiter sets down another set of plates: blinis, chicken, salmon, chilled shots of vodka. “More food?”

“I take care of my people,” says my father, stubbing out his cigarette, then piling his plate. We eat together, talking of a gentrifying Tel Aviv, how to smoke a fish... through much of it, her toe tickling my ankle.

On the way home, Gila and I go shopping. We park off Allenby and walk to the shuk, but there’s nothing to buy. I wanted metal stalls with Oriental rugs, hookahs, kaffiyehs — years ago I’d bought one like Arafat’s in solidarity with the opposition. But now it’s just jellied sandals, cheap jeans, underwear, plastic sunglasses. Global capitalism run amok. Sensing my disenchantment, Gila takes me down a block to a bustling street fair. We stop and listen to a woman with eyes like caverns busk a Hebrew folk song, the refrain a desperate Anee rotzah, Anee rotzah (I want, I want)...

After my mother left, my father stayed late at the office. He’d fall asleep on his couch, then take long walks through the Fulton fish market, bargaining in the coldest hours for the catch of the day. Mornings we’d find men in thermal sweatshirts with grizzled faces and thick leathery fingers being served soft boiled eggs in tiny silver cups, strips of bacon, thick slices of toast dripping with butter, and my father, upon noticing Marc and me shyly hovering in our pajamas, beamed, “See how they taste it, it’s like they’ve never eaten an egg!” I have inherited his romance of the working class, a propensity for self-aggrandizing acts of tenderness.

Gila raises the corner of her mouth at the singer. “So horrible,” she says. I agree but toss a few coins in her sack, and we move silently, flanked by artists in canvas tents hawking jewelry, ceramic pots, stained-glass icons. A mime tries to engage us in faceplay, but we break away, walking toward the sea.

“You put that Trojan horse on my computer,” I say finally.

“Not that one... Mine is much better,” she says proud-ly.

“How long have you been spying on me?”

“For a little while only. We had to make sure you would come.”

“And here I am,” I smile. This time she holds it but has to go. Before dropping me off she tells me to keep my computer on.

Three. The ballad of the Trojan horse

Myth has it the Greeks won the Trojan War by sneaking their army into a giant hollow horse and rolling it into the city of Troy for the grand pillage. Gila stuffed her soldiers into “conference” files I’d blithely downloaded but swears there is no danger, my data is safe with her. It’s not the data I’m worried about. After midnight, my hotel room dark but for the computer screen, we talk through tiny windows:

— are you in love with him?

— interested, sure... but love?

— you have to understand, young men are filled up with themselves, they have nothing to say but who they are

— he’s more than twice your age

— this means nothing to me, if you saw him in action you’d understand

— that’s twisted and disgusting

— in business... you have a dirty mind

— better than dirty money

— he said you wouldn’t understand, you were too serious and wouldn’t respect who I am in this world, and for some reason I want to show you you are all wrong

— i’m waiting

— it’s more complicated than you think

I’m typing a response when the phone rings, then

— pick it up

Static on the other end, what sounds like a recorded message: “Go to the window and undress, then turn on the TV loud enough to be heard. Put on your clothes in the bathroom and crawl low to the door...”

I do as I’m told, slipping out the back stairway that empties onto the beach. Gila Zyskun is downstairs in a Fiat with black windows.

We drive over a bridge out toward the desert. She can’t promise we’re not being followed but has a friend in real estate. Development is rampant on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, technology still booming. Here they move systems to market faster and cheaper, there’s no time to waste. She tells me my father cycled some of his dirty money into backend machinery for electronics, computers, smart bombs. Gila drives quickly, every so often sipping from a bottle of clear liquid, then handing it to me. It tastes like licorice and motor oil, and I’m drinking again, better than not-drinking. Yemenite disco on the CD player, we drive through poorly lit highways, long past the Bauhaus curves into a half-baked lot with multiple excavations, two cranes dipped like gazelles. She pulls up in front of a trailer, shuts off the car. I reach for her. She stops me, says she must go in first, five minutes later, me. Five excruciating minutes in a hot, dark car, lights in the distance tingling like space saucers, half expecting my father to beam in beside me, defiance fanning desire. You have to want the thing before you can steal it, and I want, I want! Ten exhale... nine exhale... a bang, loud click... the trigger? I scream. But it’s just the car door, Gila’s return. She covers my mouth and drags me into the trailer. Locking the door behind her, she clicks on a portable lantern, and we’re in musty shadows.

“You lost count or something?”

I steady myself against the faux-wood paneling, then burst out laughing.

Ma? What? You don’t believe me, but you don’t know how many people are after him. This is no joke.”

“Gila—”

“You think you know—”

“Shut up.” I step forward and grab her by the shirt. It tears. She closes her eyes. I push her against the cardboard wall. Her lungs floating up and down, I run my hand along her ribs under the holster. “Take this off,” I say, ordering the way I like, sensing it’s what he does. She unbuckles the leather strap, gun bouncing against the flat carpet, then rips off her shirt. I step back to look — gold ring through her belly button, compact breasts, neck like an expensive vase, all hot issue — then open onto her, my tongue flicking her nipple as my hand slips under her skirt, fast and cheap.

“We have only two hours,” she confirms, clamping down on me, and for two hours we dive in and out of blissful waves of fucking.

Two. Drinking from my father’s cup

The next morning I call the emergency number my father’d given me. Okay, I’ll do this thing for you, Dad, I tell him, but then we’re even, you can’t ask me for anything else. I hear him talking to someone on the other end... her?

“I had a feeling you’d come through,” he says, holding a beat, “for me.”

A few hours later he arrives at my hotel room with two men in heavy cologne, tight gelled hair, black T-shirts, and perfectly creased jeans, so obviously bodyguards. Used to be brown leather jackets tapered at the waist, accentuating how puffed-up they were in all the right places. I kissed one once to see if his lips were as robotic as the rest of him: They were. A few weeks later he was gone.

“Nice laptop,” my father says, eyeing the screen I’ve kept up all morning waiting for her, as if he’s also expecting someone to come galloping through on the Trojan. “Personally, I hate Macs.”

He removes his silver cigarette case, and though I point to no-smoking symbols all over the room, he lights up. Rules are superfluous to him. A decade ago, when Republicans in Congress tried to ban flag burning while civilians sued cigarette companies for hooking them on cancer, my father had American flags stenciled on his Dunhills, so he could burn old glory every time he lit up. Libertarian to his bones, he abhors too much government and too little personal responsibility. In other words, he’s been very lucky. He’s smoked for five decades, survived two heart attacks, is crammed with plastic tubes under his ribs, and outside he’s Dorian Gray — he’s been done, of course, a few slices around the eyes and chin, and keeps his finely cured mane a dark, distinguished gray. We all know the story: Something’s got to bear the scars. He lies back on my bed, defiantly kicking up his feet, and puffs, the edge of his cigarette curved down like a retired dick, and I hate how sex seeps into every inch of me. He spills on the carpet, deliberately. I unwrap a glass, take it to the bathroom, and run the tap.

“Let me tell you something, Jen,” he shouts from the bed. “Time is an invidious mind fuck. You look around one day and everything’s unfamiliar. All these people working for you, they’re little womblets, your favorite suit’s hopelessly out of date, rings don’t fit, and even though you’re getting fat, and I’m talking way beyond love handles, it feels like you’re evaporating.”

I hold the water glass in front of him.

“Your brother was lucky,” he says, and I feel a hole opening in my chest. “There’s something to be said for pissing away the whole damn thing.”

“He was twenty-five. He drove into a mountain going ninety miles an hour, and don’t pretend you don’t know why.”

“He was never that bright.”

Chest throbbing, the glass in my hand shakes. “Why do you have to be such an asshole? You almost had me feeling something for you.”

“What? The kid was born with one testicle, couldn’t read until he was eight... He might have been retarded.”

I throw the water in his face.

“Hey!” he shouts, sitting up and shaking a few drops from his hair. The bodyguards step toward me but he warns them off. “Listen to me: Whenever you went away, he slept in your goddamn bed, his head on that little monkey thing looking like — Serena always said you two acted really weird together.”

“What are you saying?”

“Maybe there’s another side of the story where I’m not the villain, maybe it’s you.”

“Fuck you!” I stammer backwards, then regain my footing. “And fuck this... And you know what? I fucked your girlfriend last night.”

He stands up, towering over me, and gives his head a final shake. A bead of water hits my nose like a razor. “Jen, Jen, Jen,” he says, “do you think I’m stupid? You think I don’t know what’s going on here? Why do you think—” He slips forward, punches his right hand against his heart, eyes squeezed together tightly, then through gritted teeth to one of his bodyguards: “You need to get me somewhere.”

Oldest of the three competitive skating sports, speed skating is the most misunderstood. It lacks the glorious partnerships that give figure skating its connubial thrill, compounding defeat with total psychological annihilation. Gone too is the vicious orgy of hockey, players so convinced they’re one organism they think nothing of slamming their stick over the head of the opposition. Speed skating, especially long track, is more psychological. You study your enemy, learn her mind, her methods, so you can defeat her. But when it comes down to it, you’re out there circling those three thousand meters of ice alone.

I am outside Tel Aviv, perhaps not far from where I heedlessly entered Gila last night, in a hospital waiting room with Dan the bodyguard. We sit together looking at Israeli magazines, CNN. On screen, an orthodox woman with a New York accent cries, “Never did I think I’d live to see my country take away my home!” Dan nods in agreement, calls government officials Palestinian sympathizers, trying to enlist me in this opinion, but I’ve heard how the settlers steered their Trojan horses, sometimes carting possessions into Gaza under cover of night, and once you’re in, well, my father might say possession is nine-tenths of the law, if I hadn’t laid him flat on his back. Or perhaps it was her, lips dripping enough to sink a fucking fleet — how else would he have known... unless they’d planned it. I can’t figure out who’s playing who, I’m not that bright, but this country has a way of raising the stakes.

I bury my head in my hands, feel a palm on my back, Dan whispering, “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,” and though I’m not sure what he means, I let him rub my shoulders until the doctor comes out.

He won’t shake my hand, he’s orthodox, but in Hebrew says the rabbi will be fine. “His heart is strong, the hardware is doing its job, perhaps he ate something.”

“The rabbi?”

“Of course, he is first a father to you.”

“I’d like to see him.”

One. If I were a suicide bomber

Anyone here will tell you it’s easier getting out than in. But decades of terrorism have refined suspicion of air travel into policy. After the towers fell — the first and only time I remember seeing my father truly unhinged, he knew so many people who worked on high floors, and his lawyer and best friend, Chuck Birnbaum, had been finishing up a cozy breakfast at Windows on the World with a young woman who was not Chuck’s wife — America turned to Israel for lessons in airport security. But nobody takes seriously questions from U.S. airline workers about whose hands might have fondled their luggage, not even the interrogators. At Ben-Gurion, men (and the odd woman) trained in espionage do the asking, randomly swapping questions to make even the most seasoned traveler squirm.

When they finally get to me, I’m as wilted as the city outside and long past counting. For the past hour, I’ve tried to forget I am a Trojan horse, crammed with hot accounts and registers where two nights earlier Gila’s heated tongue had trailed, the spoils of my father’s dirty little war, and perhaps it’s his dream of dying in the Holy Land, how sickly and unkempt he looked in that hospital bed despite the doctor’s assertions as he clued me in: I am carrying the key to every one of his off-shore accounts, decades of profits gleaned from his years on Wall Street and reinvested all over this tiny country, even in the settlements, which pleased neither the Israeli government nor the opposition — how did he ever talk me into this?

“Who is taking care of your children?” a security officer asks in English, after checking my fake passport and itinerary.

“My sister-in-law,” I shrug, suitably religious, maternal, uxorial. “She knows how difficult it is for me to leave my family.”

He nods, mama’s boy through and through, and part of me thinks it’s too easy, this is El Al, and another part feels like skating, feels like sex, the world heightened into a short incandescent stretch, and maybe that’s the big secret of crime: It’s exhilarating. The officer flips again through my passport, then slaps it back and forth against his palm. “Why are you carrying only one bag?” he asks.

“It’s all I need.”

“No gifts for anyone?”

“I’m cheap.”

He smirks, and I am through security: mule, liar, my father’s emissary, feeling closer to him than I can ever remember, but he’s warned me — there are undercover security people on every flight.

In the passengers’ lounge, I open my computer and tap into the Internet, hoping for a sign, but... Just before Marc and I ended our trip, I fell apart. There’d been an older woman from Britain (she was all of thirty-five!) who cornered me on the roof of the hostel with a view of the boardwalk, the beach, the muddy brown Sheraton. Up on the roof from where we’d watched the pretty Dutch girl dive to her death, this woman came up behind me, slipped her hands around my stomach, down my inner thighs, and squeezed. “If we were stranded on a desert island together,” she whispered, “these are what I’d eat first,” and I fell hopelessly in love. We snuck away to the Sinai together, leaving Marc to put together the pieces, and when we returned several days later, she unceremoniously took up with a Palestinian dishwasher, dragging him up to our rooftop parties, kissing him flagrantly in bars haunted by travelers, as if she’d started eating from my heart. As the years move on, I remember less and less of her, can barely reconstruct her face, while Marc looms large: one of his graceful hands gripping my shoulder, he smiles, “Even the old bastard’s got better taste than that.”

My flight is called over the loudspeaker. I shut the laptop and walk with a group of religious women to the gate, feeling somber. I know Gila is my father’s girlfriend, know she’s probably betrayed me, yet I walk seamlessly through the gate comforted she’s part of the data snug inside me. It’s only when I’m in my seat, looking out the window at the green army planes, that I spot her standing on the tarmac in her miniskirt, sunglasses on top of her head, arguing with a soldier. She raises a fist in his face as if she’s about to pound, tears streaming down her cheeks, and I’m looking, then not lookin so hard it’s worse. A stake drives through my gut: My father is dead.

Due diligence by Reed Farrel Coleman

Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Trisha Tanglewood didn’t bother with the safety card in the seat pouch in front of her, nor did she bother listening to the flight attendant’s sonorous reading of the evacuation procedures. Her disdain was neither an expression of fatalism nor boredom, but of familiarity. Ms. Tanglewood knew more about commercial aircraft than most human beings who didn’t actually design them for a living. It was a safe bet she knew more about the 737–700 than the pilot at the controls of the updated Boeing, certainly more than the cabin crew.

“Excuse me... Kathy,” she read the flight attendant’s winged name tag, “can you tell me, are these engines GE CFM56-7B26s or 27s?”

A blank stare washed over Kathy’s face. Trisha might just as well have asked her for the gross national product of Burkina Faso.

“I’ll make sure to ask the pilot,” Kathy said, recovering nicely. “Enjoy the flight.”

It was silly, she knew, harassing flight attendants this way, but it comforted her.

“You seem to know a lot about planes,” said the man in the next seat.

Trisha started — usually on top of everything, she hadn’t even seen him there. She just hadn’t been herself lately. No, that wasn’t really true. In spite of the self-confidence and competence she wore like armor in the halls of Paisley Shutter, Trisha had, since her father’s death eleven months before, been functioning in a state of psychological vertigo. An executive at Sikorsky had once told her that flying a helicopter was like playing the piano while balancing one-legged on a basketball. She hadn’t quite gotten it the first time she heard it. These days, she understood it perfectly.

“I said, you seem to know an awful lot about planes,” he repeated.

She looked at the man. He was forty-ish, ruggedly handsome, with a square chin and lined face; a refugee from Marlboro Country. He had a mouthful of straight white teeth and shiny, silver-gray hair like her father’s. She noticed too that he had his armrest in a death grip, and that his speckled blue eyes darted nervously to and from the cabin window.

“I do indeed,” she said. “And there’s not a lot to worry about, so try and relax.”

“You a pilot or something?”

Trisha laughed. “Or something.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’m an investment banker,” she said, as if that explained something.

The man nodded. “I’m Pete Dutton, by the way.” He removed his hand from the armrest and offered it to her.

“Trisha Tanglewood.” She briefly shook his hand. He had a firm grip and a surprisingly dry palm.

“Pleasure to meet you, Trisha.” He tipped an invisible hat.

“Yes, a pleasure.”

“How is it that a banker knows so much about planes?”

“I spent seven years analyzing the aircraft manufacturing industry — the last two years as chief analyst.”

“Really?”

“Really. If you’d like to discuss the relative merits of this aircraft as opposed to, let’s say, the Airbus A320, or why some airlines prefer Pratt & Whitney power plants over GE or Rolls Royce, just let me know.”

“No thanks. Too much knowledge makes me even more unsettled,” Pete said, trying to smile and failing. “I already have enough trouble thinking of jets as gas tanks with wings.”

“Well, that’s essentially correct; wings and seats.”

“Great. You’re a real comfort.”

As if on cue, the pilot wound up the turbofans and the jet began its urgent rumbling down the tarmac. Then they were off, gradually leaving Miami behind and beneath them. Trisha could see the near panic in Pete’s face as the servos repositioned the flaps and the bottom seemed to drop out of the starboard side of the aircraft, the captain turning west into the setting sun. In her own way, she was just as unsteady.

She had gotten what she thought she had wanted, a kick up the ladder. No longer could she hide herself in the shadow of tail fins or rotor blades. Trisha had been forced out of her cozy titanium, aluminum, and carbon fiber womb. The whole manufacturing sector was her gig now, all of it, everything from baby bottles to ball bearings, from farm equipment to pharmaceuticals. The days of simple, seamless trips to Seattle and Toulouse were no more. She was far less familiar with her new arena, an arena with a distinctly Third World flavor.

Trisha knew she was good at managing herself and her career. She was more than good, she was superior, and had handled her small team deftly. Problem was, the team had grown exponentially. And as much money as was at stake in aircraft manufacturing, it was penny-ante compared to the whole manufacturing shebang. Shebang, she thought, what a silly word, but her dad had used it all the time. He was full of quaint phrases and cowboy wisdom. Even now she had trouble accepting he was gone. Other than her job, he had been all she had. He would have been so proud of her. Remembering him, his crooked smile, his rough good looks, the day he gave her her first saddle, Trisha looked past Pete Dutton and out the window into the deepening night. And she found her eyes drifting back toward Pete’s face.

He seemed an interesting man, polite and unafraid to show vulnerability. She could count on one finger the number of male colleagues who would have dared display fear in front of her. On the Street, fear was weakness and weakness was death, and you never let it see the light of day. You battened it down, you plowed it under. You swallowed that bastard whole.

Trisha already had her tray table down, her Dell out of its case and booting up before the flight attendant had gotten past the first sentence of her announcement. She called up the file marked MM/ZIPS/H.1 Six months earlier Paisley Shutter had been retained by Mega-Mart, Inc., one of the world’s largest big box retailers, to look into the feasibility of acquiring PriceStar, Inc. PriceStar was an undercapitalized, debt-heavy, second-rung player in retail space, but the one big asset it possessed was its offshore textile plants. Their profit margin on their in-house clothing lines was the envy of the industry. And now that takeover talks had progressed from flirtation to third base, Trisha was going down to Honduras to make sure all the numbers that her team had given her checked out.

She owed due diligence not only to Mega-Mart, but to herself. Partnerships at Paisley Shutter didn’t get handed out like Halloween candy, and especially not to women. In fact, Trisha Tanglewood was the first woman under the age of forty to have even sniffed a partnership. Some of her male colleagues had warned her off making the trip at all. They were full of sage advice and playful chiding, but she understood the old-boy code better than they suspected. Her taking this trip not only made her look good, it made them look bad — worse than bad, lazy. Like her dad used to say, “If the crows’re gonna caw anyhow, you might as well give ’em a reason.” Fuck ’em! was the way they said it on the Street.

“Christ, how do you deal with all those figures?” Pete spoke up, peering at her screen. “Gimme anything more than three digits either side of the decimal point and I’m befuddled.”

Reflexively, Trisha slammed her laptop closed. She did it with such force that passengers from surrounding rows snapped their heads about to see what had happened.

“Whoa — sorry about that,” Pete said. “I didn’t mean to peek.”

“It’s okay,” she lied.

“No, it’s not. It was rude, and my momma schooled me better than that.” He pressed the call button.

Trisha didn’t know what to think but said nothing.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Pete said when the flight attendant arrived, “but is there an empty seat somewhere? The lady wants to do her work and I’m afraid I’m disturbing her.”

“That’s not necessary,” Trisha said. “I’m fine.”

“Well, that’s a good thing,” said the flight attendant, “because we’re out of empty seats. Will there be anything else?... No? Enjoy the rest of your flight.”

There was a moment of awkward silence before Pete stood up and moved to the front of the cabin. Trisha’s face burned. She felt like an idiot, but what could you do — paranoia was standard equipment in her line of work, like a cell phone or a BlackBerry. How many deals had been poached by someone shoulder surfing at a Starbucks? How many times had she done it herself? Mistrust came with the territory.

Jesus Christ, Trisha wondered, what had happened to her? Where was the girl who’d won those blue ribbons for her trick riding back home in Wyoming? She stared out at the stars and thought of her father, and of Dancer. They once the two most important things in her world. Dancer was a roan, and to Trisha, the most graceful animal on God’s earth. She had been too young to remember her mother’s death, and Dancer’s was her first encounter with grief. Now everyone who mattered was gone. Suddenly there was little solace in her new title, and little protection in her paranoia.

“I hope you’ll accept this in the spirit of reconciliation,” Pete said, catching her off guard once again. He carried two plastic glasses filled with champagne.

“Where did you—”

“Ssshhhh!” He winked, sitting back down. “It’s a secret.”

“But how?”

“I make this flight twice a month, usually up front. Let’s just say the flight attendants and I have an understanding. Cheers.”

They drank and Trisha found her face forming a smile. It was an unfamiliar feeling.

“I’m sorry for overreacting,” she said. “Paranoia’s an occupational hazard.”

“The fault was mine, but no more apologizing. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They shook on it. Trisha held onto his hand a little longer this time. This silly encounter was the first relief she’d had in months. She even felt a bit of a buzz. This man had that rare quality of both relaxing and exciting her.

“What do you do that you’re down here twice a month?”

“I’m sort of in HR.”

“Human resources? Who with?”

“I’m on my own, really — a consultant.”

“A headhunter?”

“Sort of. It’s a little more complicated.”

“Interesting?”

“Challenging, more like. Now, what about you — you do lot of business travel as part of your mysterious banking business?”

Trisha laughed. “No mystery — just visiting clients. And, yes, I travel a lot, though not to Latin America before.”

“You like it — the travel part, I mean?”

It was a simple question — a throwaway question from one stranger to another, to be answered without thinking — but it brought Trisha up short. New York, Seattle, Toulouse, Tegucigalpa — they were, she now realized, all the same to her. One airport, one Town Car, one conference room, identical to all the rest, and how different really was her apartment from a hotel room? Did she mind the travel? What the hell else was she going to do with her life? What else was there to it? It took her nearly a minute to answer.

“I don’t... It’s... it’s part of the job,” she said finally. Just a few words, but she felt as if she’d said too much. She wanted to look away, but those speckled blue eyes held her

Dutton nodded. “It wears on you after a while, though, doesn’t it? The strange food, the strange smells, the money, the language — everything’s an effort. And there’s always something to look out for. The water, local customs, the neighborhood you’re in — you’re always on your guard, and especially down here. You can never just relax. You can never rest.”

Trisha Tanglewood felt her throat close up and her eyes start to burn, and she managed to wrench her gaze from Dutton’s to the inside of her champagne glass. She took a sip, and then a full swallow. Dutton put a hand on her arm, and she flinched.

“You all right, Trisha?” His voice was a comforting rumble. “I didn’t put my foot in it again, did I? You looked so sad for a minute there — homesick almost.”

His eyes found Trisha’s again, and she felt utterly exposed. Homesick? Didn’t you need a home for that? For Trisha, home was where the money was — Hong Kong, Tokyo, the fifth circle of Hell, wherever — it washed around the world, and she followed in its wake. Suddenly her life in New York seemed so empty and insubstantial — all her acquaintances spectral and hollow and half a step from spinning into space. Certainly the men she saw were no anchors — their main concerns had to do with finding the hippest new proxies for the size of their dicks. She was sick to death of their finest this and most exclusive that, and she swore sometimes, if she heard another word about the hottest new anything, she’d scream.

The scariest part was that it had taken a total stranger to recognize the sadness in her. Sure, there had been condolences when her father died — the Take-as-much-time-as-you-need speech from the senior partners, and the Let-me-know-if-there’s-anything-I-can-dos from her colleagues. But it was all pro forma — the thing that one did, like mucking the stalls at day’s end. And here was this total stranger...

“My daddy died about a year ago,” she found herself confessing in her spontaneously returned Laramie accent. “My momma died when I was little, so it was just me and him forever.”

“Sorry doesn’t come close, does it? Listen, I’m gonna be in Teguze for about a week, and it’s a city I know pretty well. Why don’t you let me show it to you, or at least take you to dinner? I’d like to hear about your daddy, if you wouldn’t mind sharing.”

No “Dinner would be lovely,” Trisha heard herself say, “but I’ve got to go north for a day or two, and then—”

“I understand,” Pete saved her from the awkward explanation. “You’ve got that mysterious business to do.”

Trisha managed a smile. “Not so mysterious.”

Pete smiled back and took out a business card. He scrawled a number across the back. “You can reach me at this number anytime. This way there’s no pressure if you change your mind, and at least we had a pleasant flight together.”

Trisha looked at it. It wasn’t so much a business card as a calling card. There was his name, a Miami phone number, and a cryptic e-mail address on heavy beige stock. No company name, no snail-mail address, no title. Trisha studied it, hesitating, wondering if she should return the courtesy. He noticed her pause, and let her off the hook again.

“No card necessary. Remember, no pressure.”

After two more glasses of champagne, Pete Dutton drifted off into sleep. For her part, Trisha went back to her work, occasionally twirling Pete’s card in her fingers and smiling. Yes, he reminded her of her daddy, but there was something else about him, something sweet and comfortable, but also a little bit elusive. She liked it. The boys on the Street all fancied themselves masters of the universe, but disarmed of their Pings and their squash rackets they were a relatively impotent bunch. Impotent was the last word she would associate with Pete Dutton. When she put his card away on final approach to Toncontín International, Trisha noticed she was more than a little wet.

If anyone wanted to see where all those textile jobs from Georgia and North Carolina had gone, they’d just have to hop a plane from Tegucigalpa to San Pedro Sula in the northwest of Honduras. That’s where Trisha Tanglewood spent her first two days in-country, and where PriceStar, Inc. had its main textile plants, or maquilas, as the locals called them. But PriceStar was just one of many firms to set up shop in the free trade zones. Driving in from the airport, Trisha saw Oshkosh B’Gosh, Maidenform, Hanes, and Wrangler factories, and more than a few South Korean and Taiwanese plants. Mile after mile, the long, low structures slid across her car window, and by the time the driver pulled up to the largest of the PriceStar buildings, Trisha had begun to think of the whole country as one big free trade zone. But vast as these plants were, Trisha knew, and as fixed in the landscape as they seemed, they’d empty out tomorrow if it suddenly became cheaper to work in Thailand or Tibet. It was simply smart business.

If she didn’t know better, Trisha would have thought San Pedro Sula was the patron saint of inertia. There seemed to be shackles on the hands of the clocks as she ground through two days of meetings with her team and the PriceStar executives. She was struggling to pay attention, and found herself thinking that maybe her colleagues in New York had been right. You could pore over the same spreadsheets in Manhattan, and with a lot better air-conditioning. By 3 p.m. on her first day, Trisha was almost regretting making a show of her meticulousness.

As a matter of courtesy and protocol, she strolled the factory floor with the Honduran operations manager, a PriceStar exec, and a Paisley Shutter analyst named Ellis Quantrill. Although he was a member of her team, Trisha wasn’t terribly fond of Quantrill. Just thirty, WASP-ishly handsome, and bred for success, Ellis fancied himself quite the shark. He made no secret of his desire to go very far, very fast, and at any cost... any cost to others. She’d seen his type before, the eaglet hatched first who pushes its brother out of the nest. What Ellis hadn’t learned yet was that there is always a bigger eaglet. Always.

Their relationship was rocky from the start. At first, Ellis had tried to be the teacher’s pet — solicitous and deferential to the point of obsequious. Then he’d tried to make himself her indispensable ally and coconspirator — always ready to share a confidence, always fishing for one in return, and always the latest in rumors, speculation, and snarky political gossip from across the firm. When neither approach had gotten him far, he’d taken a different — riskier — tack: coming on to Trisha at the golf outing last May. He’d kissed her hard on the mouth behind the pro shop at the country club in Armonk, and Trisha laughed in his face. On reflection, she realized she’d have done better to slap him. That was the peculiar thing about Ellis’s type: They’d eat dogshit to get ahead, but not if anyone was watching. Personal embarrassment was intolerable. From that ill-fated kiss forward, Ellis Quantrill had put Trisha Tanglewood in his crosshairs. She knew it, and he knew she knew it.

The factory was clean and modern. Most of the machinery was new, and what wasn’t, was perfectly maintained. The workers sat in neat rows, and they moved quickly. Still, the production area was terribly noisy. There were a lot of hand gestures and head shakes, and very little speaking. Near the end of the tour, Ellis tapped Trisha on the shoulder and shepherded her into an empty break room. Christ, she thought, what now? Some new ploy to curry favor? Was he going to profess his love this time? That would be a novel approach. They took off their ear protection.

“Noisy, isn’t it?” he said.

“What do you want, Ellis?” Trisha enjoyed being curt with him.

“Just a quick word about tonight.”

“What about tonight?”

“We’ve set up a thing this evening—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa — the only thing I’m doing tonight is getting in my bed by 8.”

Ellis grimaced in mock pain. “It’s set already. No clients — just you and the team, for drinks, dinner, more drinks — very casual. You know the drill.”

“Christ, Ellis, why the hell didn’t you run it by me first? I can barely keep my eyes open as it is; no way I’m going to—”

“I know you’re beat, but it’s important to them. I don’t care one way or the other myself, but these guys have been down here for weeks now, working sixteen-hour days. A night out with the new skipper — a chance to let their hair down, maybe collect a few attaboys — it’ll mean a lot to these kids.” Trisha shook her head, but Ellis was undeterred. “And it won’t hurt you, either, to build some support amongst the rank and file — a little grassroots loyalty.” She kept shaking her head, but more slowly. Ellis gave her one his ironic frat-boy grins, and a tone to match. “Come on, chief — don’t pussy out on me. Have another coffee, and be a man.”

Fucking Ellis, Trisha thought, and forced a thin smile in return. “I’m back at the hotel by midnight, or it’s your ass.”

Trisha had only the lowest expectations when it came to enforced camaraderie, but — while she wasn’t about to suckle Ellis Quantrill to her bosom — she had to admit that the evening wasn’t horrible, at least not to start with. The Paisley Shutter team that had worked so hard on the Mega-Mart — PriceStar project assembled in an Asian restaurant that featured a mix of Thai, Korean, and Japanese foods. A bizarre setting in the midst of northwest Honduras, to be sure, but just one more blur to set atop all the other blurs that had become Trisha’s over-caffeinated day. Someone — Ellis probably — knew that she rode, and the team presented Trisha with a miniature saddle, smaller than her cell phone, as a souvenir. It was an exquisite piece of local craftsmanship, and it was even Western-style. Saki and champagne and local beer flowed freely, and Ellis made a point of keeping his distance. Trisha caught just glimpses of him, and only now and then. She appreciated his restraint.

As things wound down, the men in the group did the Cuban cigar thing, while the women gathered around Trisha to give her the lowdown on shopping and restaurants back in Tegucigalpa. Trisha found herself engaged by the conversation and felt something like her old self again. It was the longest time she’d gone without thinking of her dad in months.

“But there’s one thing,” Pam Richter, a junior analyst, said, her voice turning suddenly serious. “When you’re in Teguz or anywhere in-country, you don’t want to—”

“Come on, Pammy, don’t spoil the evening with this shit,” chided Maggie Wilson, a five-year Paisley Shutter vet. “It’s nonsense and Trisha’s only going to be here a few days.”

Trisha waved away Maggie’s concern. “No, go ahead, Pam,” she said.

“It’s not safe for American women to walk the streets alone in certain parts of the cities, especially after dark.”

“Why only American women?” Trisha asked. “Baby thieves!” Pam blurted.

“What?”

“It’s a Central American urban legend. You know, like the one back home — about a couple who snatch a kid in Toys ‘R’ Us and change his clothes in the bathroom and dye his hair. The baby thieves myth is even bigger here, and in Guatemala too.”

“I’ve never heard that one,” Trisha said. “I only know about the poodle in the microwave.”

“Well, boss, here the myths and legends are a little more... um, radical. Here the story goes that rich American women fly down, pick out their babies, have the mothers executed, and ship the kids back to the States to raise as their own.”

“Jesus Christ,” Trisha breathed. “That’s... horrible.”

“It’s also a load of crap,” Maggie said. “Whenever the government feels threatened, or the economy takes a hit, they spread these rumors around. The good old U.S. of A. still makes one hell of a convenient scapegoat. And it’s not like our government hasn’t screwed with folks down here before. The trouble is, the rumors linger even after they’ve served their political purposes — and especially in the poorest areas.”

“That’s why it’s not safe,” Pam said, and then she read her boss’s face. “Shit, I freaked you out, didn’t I? I’m sorry to have mentioned it. I...”

Trisha managed a smile. “No, that’s okay — and I appreciate the heads-up. I’m just tired is all. Maybe we better call it a night.”

But it wasn’t all right. Pam’s story had somehow brought all of Trisha’s vertigo and sadness rushing back, and the alcohol had only made things worse. Trisha stared at the table, and at the tiny saddle she’d been given, nearly lost amidst the empty glasses, overflowing ashtrays, and sodden napkins. At some point it had acquired a tiny rider — a stiff-limbed man made from skinny plastic straws. He was tilted and reeling, barely hanging on above a puddle of Scotch, and Trisha felt very much the same. She looked up and saw Ellis Quantrill standing ten feet away. He raised his cognac to her, a mischievous smile on his face. Had he been listening? No, she thought, it was just booze and paranoia.

Back at the hotel, she took a long hot bath. Her thoughts kept drifting to Pete Dutton, and after a while her fingers drifted to her pussy. She masturbated over and over again, imagining any number of ways Pete Dutton might have her, or she him. Her orgasms were as intense as if the sex was real, and it scared her a little. She found she liked being scared, that it heightened her climax and took away some of her sadness. She found his card in her purse and placed it on her bedside, but didn’t call the number.

She still hadn’t called thirty-six hours later, when a plane returned her to Tegucigalpa. Trisha had the driver take her straight to the hotel. The sky was turquoise blue and cloudless, but the streets of the capital city spread out before her in a muddy blur. She was exhausted and headachy. The traffic noise mixed with colors around her, the colors merged with indistinct shapes, and pretty soon the whole world was sliding away. She couldn’t focus on anything, and she found herself filled with... what... homesickness? She missed her old job; she missed her dad; she even missed Tommy Skilling, the first boy she’d let slip a hand into her panties, in a car on a roadside just north of Laramie. She hadn’t thought of him in years. She opened the door to her hotel suite and her world came back into focus.

There on the desk sat a spectacular arrangement of orchids, and a single white rose. The card read: No pressure. Pete

She finally made the call.

Later, at the PriceStar maquila on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, Trisha felt fully awake for the first time since Miami. Both her own people and the PriceStar execs noticed the change, though they weren’t necessarily happy about it. The woman who’d struggled to keep the drool off her chin during the sessions in San Pedro Sula was spitting out questions like a Gatling gun. And if the answers didn’t come as rapidly in return, she did not hide her displeasure. Even Trisha recognized she was being hard on everyone, but she was enjoying the high of her own adrenaline, and fuck ’em if they couldn’t take the heat.

The morning smelled of spilled champagne, orchids, and sex. Pete’s flavor still lingered in her mouth, with grace notes of herself. And she was gloriously sore. Pete had been everything she had imagined, and more. He seemed to see right through her, to read her, and somehow he’d known exactly how far to push things and just when to draw back. The real surprise, however, had been her. For the first time in years she’d held nothing back — not her hungers or her fantasies or her screams. Dinner was great. Maybe. She realized she couldn’t remember a thing about the meal.

Pete was gone. There was no surprise in that. He had warned her he had early business, but that he would take her to dinner again tonight, if that’s what she wanted. If she wanted! At the moment, it was all she wanted. When she left the suite, Trisha placed a twenty-dollar bill in an envelope for the chambermaid. Given the state of the bedroom, it might not have been enough.

Walking past the reception desk, the clerk got her attention

“Miss Tanglewood, por favor. We have a message for you,” he said, handing her a note.

The note was in English, but very cryptic: If you want to see how PriceStar makes such profits, come see the real factories.

There was an address, which Trisha showed to the clerk. He did not try to hide his worry.

“This is not a place for a...” he searched for the word.

“A woman,” she offered.

“For anyone, but especially for an American. It is a slum. Very dangerous. Very dangerous.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

Trisha took a deep breath and gathered her thoughts. It was late in the game for this kind of bullshit — fucking late. There’d been questions up front about how PriceStar, a chronic underachiever by all other measures, had managed to outperform its competitors when it came to the profitability of its in-house label, and for a while there’d been whispers of unsavory labor practices. But those kinds of rumors — of child labor, beatings, virtual slavery — always circulated in trade zones like this, and PriceStar had checked out. At least, that’s what Ellis and his team had assured her, and they’d been on the ground here for weeks. No one had even hinted...

“Damn it,” she whispered. This had to be investigated — that’s what due diligence was all about. But she couldn’t very well ask the PriceStar execs about it, nor could she ask anyone on the Paisley Shutter team — she wasn’t about to give one of them, especially not Ellis Quantrill, a chance to shred their way out of this kind of fuck-up. If there was a fuck-up. She put the note in her purse and called the only person in Honduras she could trust.

“They’re called cuarterias “ Peter Dutton explained, driving his rented Jetta through the narrow streets. “It means in English. They’re these long tracts of wooden buildings with tile roofs, dirt floors, and connected rooms. Usually six or seven people to a room.”

“Oh my god.”

“It’s rough, but they’re good people. We’ll be okay.”

“Why did the desk clerk warn me that this was a bad place for Americans?”

“Well, there’s the obvious reason. Money. They’re good people, but they’re sometimes desperate too.”

“And the baby thieves myth,” she said.

“Yes, that too. It’s bullshit, pardon my French, but these are poor people with no education.”

“I understand.”

“Can we change the subject?” he asked.

“Please.”

“Last night was...”

“Yeah, I know, Pete. For me too. I’ve never felt like that before.” His face reddened, and that made her smile.

“Here we are,” he said, rolling to a stop. “You ready?”

“Let’s go.”

Before they got five feet, Trisha stopped and pointed at the noisy gas generator right outside the door they were about to enter. “What’s this for?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

Pete Dutton had tried to warn her she might not like what she was about to see, but words were inadequate to the task. Inside, ten girls — the youngest about eight years, the oldest about fourteen — dressed in filthy, frayed frocks, were ankle-tethered with leather straps to sewing machine tables. Most of the girls kept their heads down, unfazed by the man and woman who had come through the door. One girl — bony, with a harelip and the most haunting brown eyes Trisha had ever seen — stared with frank curiosity. This did not go unpunished. A squat man with a cloudy left eye, who stank of alcohol even above the smell of urine, snapped a switch across the harelipped girl’s hands.

Pete locked a hand on Trisha’s forearm. “Don’t do any-thing,” he said. “Let me handle this.”

Dutton called the man over and whispered something to him. Cloudy Eye grunted. But when Pete slipped a twenty-dollar bill in his hand, his mouth split into a gapped brown-toothed grin. He stepped outside.

“We have five minutes,” Pete said.

“Her!” Trisha said, pointing to the harelipped girl.

That evening the sex was more intense, if less satisfying. Trisha had gotten so mind-numbingly drunk that she barely remembered asking Pete to hit her as he rode her from behind. In fact, it was only when she looked in the dressing mirror and noticed the palm-shaped bruises on her flanks that she recalled making her demands. She brushed her fingers across the bruises. The pain had been only a temporary fix. The weather outside had deteriorated, as if to match her mood. The skies were eclipse dark and a biblical rain threatened to drown the city. Trisha would have welcomed the water over her head.

“Something’s come up,” she said to Susan Blum, her assistant in New York. “I’m taking the day to handle some loose ends. I’ll call everyone here. By tomorrow, we should be back on track.”

Even as she spoke, Trisha could not get her head around what the harelipped girl had told her and Pete. Her name was Linda, and she was twelve. She was the eldest of six children, the daughter of a whore who had no idea who the fathers were of any of her children. Recently, her mother had gotten very sick. So about three months ago, the whore had “sold” her eldest child into pseudo-slavery. The girl worked fourteen-hour days and made a few lempira per piece. None of the clothes she sewed had labels, but yes, a man from PriceStar occasionally came to talk to Jorge, the cloudy-eyed overseer who sometimes made the girls fuck him.

“I am a smart girl,” Linda said through Pete. “I may be ugly, but I hear things, I see things.”

But Trisha had no proof. She could not stop a multi-billion-dollar deal based on the word of an abused twelve-year-old Honduran girl. She needed something real, something tangible, something to bring to the firm. Even then, she wasn’t quite sure it would do any good. These sorts of deals have a kind of self-sustaining inertia, especially this late in the process. Trisha had explained to Linda that she needed proof.

“Okay,” said the little girl, “I understand. You come to my house tomorrow night and I will bring your proof. Other girls, too, to tell their stories.”

Trisha had reached into her bag to give money to Linda.

“No! No! Not now!” the girl shouted in English. Then in Spanish to Pete, “Jorge will just take it. Bring it tomorrow night. Bring money for all the girls.”

When she clutched Trisha’s hand and kissed her fingers, Trisha found it hard to take a breath.

The rain had gone from biblical to drizzle. Pete picked her up in front of the hotel at 9:00. Trisha got in the backseat. There was someone in the front with Pete. He was a bull-dog-faced fellow of thirty with red skin, thick arms, and flat affect.

“This is Paolo,” Pete said. “He works for me. He’ll have your back. He speaks perfect English. Right Paolo?”

“Very perfect. The best,” he said in an accentless mono-one.

“What about you? Aren’t you—”

“I wish I could, but I’ve got business of my own to handle. And besides, the two of us in that area at night... We’d attract too much of a crowd. The wrong kind of crowd. You’ll be much safer with Paolo. Trust me. No one is apt to fuck with him. Isn’t that right, Paolo?”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

Please, please, Pete, forget your business. I’m scared out of my mind. I’ll do anything if you come with me. I’ll do anything...

“Okay,” she said.

They drove into the mountains that surrounded the city. Trisha was numb, frightened about getting into a situation over which she would have very little control, but remained silent. When Pete turned off the main road and into a neighborhood of cuarterias it was hard for Trisha to know if these were the same slums she had been to the previous day. Places, times, dates... It was all starting to run together into another indistinguishable blur.

“It’s right over there,” Pete said, pointing to a shabby door as he rolled by. “I’m going to leave you and Paolo off at the end of the row. I’ll be back for you in...” he checked his watch, “half an hour, tops.” He reached over the seat and squeezed Trisha’s hand reassuringly. “You’ll be fine. Paolo will see to that. Right, Paolo?”

“I’ll take good care of the lady.”

“Good,” Pete said. “I’ll be right back in this spot in a half hour.”

Paolo and Trisha got out of the Jetta. Pete beckoned Trisha to his rolled-down window. She knew he wanted her to kiss him, which she did with little enthusiasm, the rain pelting her cheeks. He smiled at her when their lips parted. There was, she thought, something disquieting about his expression. Then, as she watched his taillights disappear, Trisha shook it off. It was her own discomfort, she thought, projected onto Pete.

“Let’s go,” Paolo urged, placing his meaty hand around her bicep.

Paolo didn’t bother knocking and just pushed back the shabby door to the harelipped girl’s house. The inside was lit by a string of bare bulbs. The tamped-down dirt floor was not muddy, but was dark with moisture. The room was crowded and noisy and smelled of a sickening mixture of wet garbage and feces.

Linda sat on a crude bench, a young baby wrapped in a blanket cradled in her twiglike arms. There were children of varying ages all over the place, the older ones staring at Trisha and the big man at her side. The younger ones cried or played, happily ignoring the strangers. There were adults too, mostly haggard old women, probably not nearly as old as they looked. There were a few younger women as well, but no one, in Trisha’s estimation, who looked like the whore who had sold her child into a life of slavery and rape.

“Ask her where her mother is,” Trisha told Paolo.

He did as she requested and translated the answer. “She’s out sucking strangers’ cocks for some lempira.”

Some of the women laughed. Trisha failed to see the humor.

“Okay, ask her if these are the girls and women who will talk about PriceStar.”

“Yes,” Linda answered herself.

Again some of the women laughed. Again Trisha failed to see the joke.

“You have the money?” Linda asked in perfect English.

Trisha removed an envelope which contained five hundred American dollars in twenty-dollar bills.

“Let me see it, touch it,” Linda said in Spanish. Paolo translated.

Trisha Tanglewood slowly removed the cash from the envelope and placed it in Linda’s bony left hand. Linda showed the money to the baby in her arms and cooed something in the child’s ear. Then, when she was done, she looked up at Trisha. On the harelipped girl’s face was a cruel, almost feral smile. It made Trisha’s blood run cold. She could feel herself blanch, feel the strength run out of her through the soles of her shoes and seep slowly into the shifting wet earth under her feet. All the individual sounds in the little room became a muted ringing in her ears. A wave of nausea slammed into her and she nearly fainted.

Linda’s malformed lips and darting tongue shaped words which Trisha’s eyes read but could not understand. They repeated the words again and again. She was shouting them. Now everyone was shaking their fists at Trisha, shouting, but the shouts just blended into the ringing. Somehow Trisha found the strength to ask Paolo, “What are they saying? What are they saying?”

Paolo turned to look Trisha right in the face. His flat affect seemed to vanish, replaced by a broad mirthful smile. “Baby thief. They’re calling you baby thief. Run!” he screamed. “Run!”

In a quieter cuarteria, no more than a mile away from where Trisha Tanglewood was now running for her life, Peter Dutton was taking cover and comfort in the house of a sixteen-year-old whore. He found her disappointing. Even at sixteen she was so experienced as to be robotic, but he let her finish what she had started. He needed at least another five or ten minutes. He wasn’t much for regrets, but he had really enjoyed fucking the broad from New York. What she lacked in expertise, she made up for in enthusiasm. A shame, he thought, to waste that kind of talent.

When he finally came, he yanked the Honduran girl by the hair to make sure she swallowed. He couldn’t abide spitters. He zipped up and threw two twenty-dollar bills onto the damp earthen floor. She smiled at him with more feeling than she’d displayed the whole time he’d been there.

The skies had opened up once again, and as he closed the driver’s side door, Pete could hear the cries of Baby thief! Baby thief! spreading through the slum like an airborne virus. Not a soul noticed as he drove off into the blackness.

Trisha kept herself in great shape, and she’d gotten a good lead on the mob. Unfortunately, a good lead when you have no idea of where you’re going, or the terrain you’re going on, or what lurks around the next dark corner, is of limited value. Suddenly, a searing pain tore through her left shoulder. A rock! Shit, they’re throwing stones. They’re going to stone me to death! Trisha picked up her pace, but to no avail — the next rock caught her square in the jaw. Only adrenaline and her instinct for self-preservation kept her legs moving, and then only for a few more steps.

She toppled face-first into the mud, and into the netherworld between consciousness and coma. Things she heard, things she felt, all seemed like they were happening to someone else. She could sense her body move with each kick, but the pain was remote. Above her, buried in the clouds, she heard the roar of an ascending jet. She could not distinguish what kind of aircraft. It suddenly occurred to her that the flight attendant, Kathy, had never gotten back to her with the answer to her question. It’s funny what you think about. Then something bounced violently against her skull and the world turned a silent shade of black.

A few hours later, Peter Dutton met with Ellis Quantrill at a prearranged spot on the road to Toncontín Airport.

“Is it done?” Quantrill wanted to know.

“Like you wanted, painful and nasty. It’s going to be hard to identify her. I got the call a few minutes ago from my man confirming it.”

“Excellent. That’s the other forty grand, plus expenses,” Quantrill said, handing over a sleek leather attaché case.

“Boy, she must’ve really pissed you off.”

“I don’t think that’s any of your affair. Now, I’ve got to go and act shocked. Goodbye, Mister...?”

“Dutton will do,” he said, walking to his car. “And remember, if anything should happen to me in the near future, I’ve seen to it that you’ll go in a manner far worse than Miss Tanglewood. My colleagues will make it last much, much longer.”

“Are these sorts of threats really necessary?”

“Due diligence, Ellis. Due diligence.”

About the contributors:

Megan Abbott is the author of three novels, the Edgar-nominated Die a Little, The Song Is You, and Queenpin; and a nonfiction study, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. She lives in Queens, New York.

Richard Aleas is the author of Little Girl Lost, which was nominated for both the Edgar Award and the Shamus Award for Best First Novel, as well as its sequel, Songs of Innocence. By day (and under a different name), Aleas is a managing director at a $25 billion investment firm that Fortune magazine once called “the most intriguing and mysterious force on Wall Street.”

Peter Blauner is the author of six novels, including Slow Motion Riot, which won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and The Intruder, which was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Peg Tyre and their two children. His most recent book is Slipping into Darkness.

Henry Blodget lives in New York City.

Tim Broderick was born and raised on the southwest side of Chicago, and currently lives on the northwest side with his wife and identical-twin daughters. His first book, Something to Build Upon, was published by Twilight Tales, and his graphic novel/mystery series Odd Jobs can be found at timbroderick.net.

John Burdett, a native of England, is a former lawyer whose practice ranged from barefoot counseling in the tough suburbs of Southeast London to high finance in Hong Kong. He is the author of various novels, including Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo, and Bangkok Haunts. He lives in Bangkok, Thailand.

Reed Farrel Coleman is the Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America. His sixth novel, The James Deans, won the Shamus, Barry, and Anthony Awards for Best Paperback Original of 2005. The book was also nominated for Edgar, Macavity, and Gumshoe Awards. His short stories appear in several anthologies, including Dublin Noir, These Guns for Hire, and Hardboiled Brooklyn.

Jim Fusilli is the author of the New York City — based Terry Orr series, which includes Closing Time, A Well-Known Secret, Tribeca Blues, and Hard, Hard City, which was named Best Novel of 2004 by Mystery Ink magazine. He also writes about rock and pop music for The Wall Street Journal. His book on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds was published in 2005 by Continuum.

James Hime is the author of the Jeremiah Spur novels and has a thirty-year relationship with Wall Street as a tax lawyer, real estate capital markets expert, Internet entrepreneur, and, most recently, the CEO of a bioscience company.

Lawrence Light, the Wall Street editor of Forbes magazine, has won many journalism awards. He is the author of Too Rich to Live and Fear & Greed, the first two books in the Karen Glick mystery series, about a financial investigative reporter.

David Noonan, a senior editor at Newsweek, is the author of the nonfiction book Neuro and the novel Memoirs of a Caddy. He is currently at work on a second novel.

Twist Phelan, commodity futures trader and former plaintiff’s trial lawyer, is the author of the legal-themed Pinnacle Peak mystery series, each featuring a different adventure sport. Her investment advice to would-be day traders? “Go to Las Vegas. You’ll lose the same amount of money, and the drinks are free.” Find out more about Twist and her books at www.twistphelan.com.

Stephen Rhodes is the pen name for Keith Styrcula, a fourteen-year derivatives specialist who is the Chairman and Founder of the Structured Products Association. He is the author of two suspense thrillers, including The Velocity of Money, which has been translated into four languages. “At the Top of His Game” is an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Spontaneous Combustion. His career on Wall Street includes senior roles at JPMorgan, CSFB, and UBS.

Lauren Sanders is the author of two novels: With or Without Yo and Kamikaze Lust winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many publications, including Book Forum, American Book Review and Time Out New York. Sanders is coeditor of the anthology Too Darn Hot: Writing About Sex Since Kinsey. She lives with her partner in the nation of Brooklyn.

Mark Haskell Smith is the author of Moist, Delicious, and Salty, as well as an award-winning screen-writer. He lives in Los Angeles, where he invests in short-term tequila futures.

Peter Spiegelman is the Shamus Award — winning author of Black Maps, Death’s Little Helpers, and Red Cat which feature private detective and Wall Street refugee John March. Mr. Spiegelman is a twenty-year veteran of the financial services and software industries, and has worked with brokerage houses and central banks in major markets around the world. He lives in Connecticut.

Jason Starr, winner of the Anthony Award and the Barry Award, is the author of eight critically acclaimed crime novels, including Cold Caller, Nothing Personal, Bust (cowritten with Ken Bruen), and his latest thriller, Lights Out. Before turning to fiction writing, Starr was a financial reporter, writing for magazines such as Financial Worl and Crain’s New York Business.