The First Billion

by Christopher Reich

  Ker-thump!

  The low-pitched noise came again, confident, brazen. Cate could feel the floorboards shiver, as if the house had been punched in the gut. The noise came from the study. Sure of it now, she acknowledged the first intimation of fear. Her stomach knotted itself into a ball and, holding her breath, she sat very, very still. She was not by nature easily frightened, but of late she’d been on edge. She was, she realized, a woman alone in a three-story house in a part of town that might be called “lovingly frayed.” Or less generously, “down at its heel.”

  The workers!

  It came to her in a shower of relief. At once, her body slackened and her lungs opened for business again. As quickly as her fear had come, it vanished.

  For the last twenty days, her home had been a hive of activity as laborers from every guild assembled beneath her roof to help with the pouring of a new concrete slab beneath the existing structure. She’d learned quickly that tradesmen were no respecters of the eight-hour day. Electricians were as likely to show up at seven at night as seven in the morning. Carpenters were happy to stay until you kicked them out.

  It’s Howie, she told herself, the long-haired foreman who looked as if he couldn’t lift a hammer. He’s come to check on the job’s progress and bum his morning espresso. Caffeine freaks seemed to find one another, and neither Cate nor Howie could start the day without their Lavazza double espressos.

  Or maybe it was Gustavo, the drop-dead-gorgeous Basque bricklayer who didn’t go a day without asking her for a date. “Meez Magnus, we go deen-er together. You like ke-bab? I show you perfect good time, non?” Ten rejections, and still no sign of giving up.

  Three weeks into the project, the cost had skyrocketed from eighteen to thirty thousand dollars, and there was no end in sight. Each day brought a new complication: faulty wiring, rusted pipes, asbestos. Yes, asbestos! Yesterday, she’d learned the hundred-year-old Victorian fixer-upper suffered from a healthy case of softwood termite infestation. Once the slab was completed, the house would have to be tented and fumigated. Cost: seven thousand dollars. Where she’d get the money to pay for it seemed to be no one’s concern but hers, and the cause of one hangnail, a persistent headache, and very soon, if she wasn’t careful, an ulcer.

  Cate had no choice in the matter. The work was obligatory. The building code demanded it, and The Code’s will be done. It had all started because of a faulty outlet. First her toaster blew, then her rice steamer. She called in the electrician, who traced the problem to a frayed circuit box beneath the kitchen floorboards. But the circuit box wasn’t the real problem, he’d informed her while writing out his bill. The house, it turned out, had been built half on a wooden foundation, half on bare earth. It was a code violation of mythic proportions. By law, he was required to inform the building inspector. She asked him how the house had managed to remain standing through a century of earthquakes, including, if she wasn’t mistaken, a couple of doozies in 1906 and in 1989. The electrician didn’t know. He only knew that a bare-earth foundation was against code.

  Code!

  She’d learned to hate the word and had reserved a place for it in her personal lexicon alongside “fascist,” “fibber,” and “philanderer,” three hall-of-fame baddies.

  Even with her name in bold print beneath a weekly column, she barely earned sixty thousand dollars a year. Take away taxes, utilities, car payments, and her mortgage, and she was left with a disposable income of eight hundred dollars a month. Enough for one martini and a cowboy rib eye at Harris’s, a couple of movies, a pair of tickets to a Giants game, and maybe a pair of shoes—all depending on how she filled the fridge. Every time she heard a politician say she was “affluent,” she wanted to brain him.

  Ka-lunk!

  The sound was louder this time, as if someone had dropped a bowling ball onto her precious stained-pine floor. Cate cocked her head, no longer so confident it was the workers. The problem was the thump itself: The quality of the noise, its pitch and timbre, was unfamiliar. She did not recognize it.

  Over the last month she’d become fluent in the buzzes, bangs, and squawks of a construction site. She could rattle off any of a dozen different tasks simply by listening to the frequency of the saw blade or the whine of the drill bit. The thump was not a sledgehammer. It certainly wasn’t a pick. No, the sound coming from the study was that of a large object being dropped upon the floor.

  The thump was a stranger, and it scared her.

  Only then did Cate pick up her watch from the nightstand and look at the time. It was 4:06. The streetlights reflecting off the dense fog had lent the sky an eerie luminescence, feigning sunrise and providing a false dawn.

  4:06.

  Cate stared at the dial, anger and fear welling up in her in equal parts. No workman showed up at a job site at 4:06. Even Bob Vila didn’t go to This Old House until six-thirty at the earliest! Suddenly, she was wide awake, her senses honed, her radar on full alert. She could smell the oil from the cement mixer parked out front. She could hear the ticking of her watch, the hum of the PC on her desk. The screensaver ran on a loop reading, “John Galt is dead. John Galt is dead.” Her capitalist manifesto.

  Someone she did not know was inside the house. There was an intruder in her study. Call the police. She reached for the phone, but froze halfway there, paralyzed by an older and more wrenching fear. There were worse things than physical peril.

  Retrieving her hand, she slid her back against the headboard and waited for a footfall on the landing, for the door to her bedroom to be flung open. For a few moments, the house was silent, and Cate decided it was better for you to go get them than for them to come get you. Gathering her courage, she placed her feet on the ground and stood. For once, she’d make impatience her strong suit. She took one step and stopped, but only for a moment—just long enough to double-check if her sanity was in its proper place, tucked between her aversion to cigarettes and her love of Vermeer—then padded across the room to the bedroom door. The wood planks were cold to the touch and groaned at her meekest step.

  Slowly, she ordered herself, concentrating on rolling her feet from heel to toe. You’re a Shaolin priest walking on rice paper, she said, quoting from the bible of late-afternoon TV. Calmly, Grasshopper. But to her revved-up ears, she sounded like a newly shoed colt crossing the smithy’s floor.

  Cracking open the door, she peered to her right and left. The landing was empty, dusted with a sheen of plaster that glowed in the dark like some phosphorescent algae. There were no lights on in the house. Advancing on the staircase, she began to get the motion right, heel to toe, rolling her foot, and her tread fell as delicately as a doe’s.

  But if her steps were controlled, her mind was running full tilt. She remembered that she hated living alone and cursed herself for moving out of Jett’s four-thousand-square-foot home in Pacific Heights. At the same time, she reminded herself she’d had no choice, even though leaving had been the hardest thing she’d ever done.

  Continuing her spate of recriminations, she turned to the alarm system—or more specifically, to her practiced nonchalance about turning it on at night. What was the point? With so many workmen traipsing in and out of the house at all hours, it was better to keep an open door. Besides, it was hardly as if there was much to steal: a ten-year-old TV, a few silver candelabra, a stereo she had yet to hook up since her return to singledom.

  Her neighborhood on the fringes of Haight-Ashbury wore its poverty like a genteel curse. Rusted VW vans, twice-repainted Olds 98s, SS Camaros with fat racing stripes running across their hoods, lined the curb, their bumper stickers badges of membership to a bygone era. “Drop in, Turn on, Tune out,” “Age of Aquarius,” and her favorite, “Keep on Truckin’,” with the magnificent Crumb icon strolling along flashing the peace sign. On a sunny Saturday afternoon you couldn’t pass two houses without hearing Mason Williams’s “Classical Gas” or catching the scent of Colombian Gold wafting from an open window.

  But you didn’t put in the alarm t
o protect your possessions, a wise voice reminded her. You installed it to protect yourself. You always knew they would come. You should have known it would be now.

  Laying a hand on the banister, she began her descent. There were fourteen steps to the first floor, the lower six sick with termites. With every step, she craned her neck farther over the rail, curiosity winning over fright as to what or whom she might discover.

  Ka-thunk!

  Cate stopped cold, frozen so still she might have been geologically petrified. Silhouetted against the ivory wall, her figure was slender, well-proportioned, and if ten pounds heavier than she would have liked, the more fit for it. She ran three times a week, made it to Pilates every Saturday morning, and ate enough Cherry Garcia to make it all for naught. She liked to think of herself as strong and capable, but alone in her house at 4 A.M. the opinion seemed boastful and ridiculous. Refusing to budge, she asked herself who it could be banging away in her study so contemptuously, who the interested party was who was practically daring her to come down and ask what the hell was going on.

  Again she entertained the notion that it was a burglar, but she knew better. Nor could she bring herself to believe it was a rapist, a psychopath, a deviant, even a garden-variety lunatic trying to lure her downstairs to have his way with her. It was none of them. Or anyone else, for that matter, who might have randomly chosen her home to break into on this damp, foggy night.

  She knew why there was someone in her house and she knew what they were looking for. She had known for some time that her existence could no longer be accepted with a tolerant grunt or dismissed with a paternal wave. Not with events moving as quickly as they were. It amused her that some people might think her dangerous. Cate Magnus, graduate of the East Coast establishment: Choate, Georgetown, Wharton. She, the failed painter, exiled executive, sucker for beat-up Jeeps and obscure French films. The reporter with a dozen great ideas for books and never the tenacity to complete an outline, the lifelong fugitive from romantic misadventures. Why should anyone be afraid of her? She was someone whose fingers felt more comfortable teasing the keys of a computer than the trigger of a gun.

  Cate stared at the pistol in her hand, dull, gray, and bluntly menacing. For the life of her, she could not remember fishing it from the cache on the side of her bed. She noticed, too, that she was wearing her panties and nothing else. Great. Get the gun, but forget your clothes. Show ’em your boobs, then shoot.

  No, countered the wise voice again. You’re still fooling yourself. You’re a searcher, a collector, a seeker of the truth. You are a woman with a vendetta and the means to exercise it. In fact, you’re very dangerous. Never more than now, and you know that, too. As for the gun, don’t be coy. You trained five nights a week for a year so that you could hit a nickel at twenty paces. Why did you steal it from your boyfriend’s house if not to use it?

  The thud came again. Ka-thump.

  Suddenly, she knew what they were doing. There were two of them. There were always two. They were trying to get into her safe, the little fireproof model she’d picked up at Home Depot to protect her zip drives and her journals against fire. They were lifting it and dropping it or banging something on top of it in some brutish attempt to pry it open.

  Cate reached the first-floor foyer. At the end of the hall, the door to the study was shut, a light burning beneath the crack. She advanced a step, holding the gun in front of her. They really were insolent, she thought, praying anger would fuel her courage.

  Something warm and feathery brushed against her leg, and Cate nearly jumped out of her skin. She wanted to scream, but found her heart already lodged in her throat. She looked down and stifled a shrill note of terror.

  It was Toby, her gray Angora. Toby, the meowing mauler of Menlo Park, whom she’d threatened to get rid of a hundred times because the damned kitty never shut his mouth. “Shh, Toby.” She reached down to pet him, but he was already gone, bounding upstairs to doze in the folds of her duvet. “Coward,” she hushed after him.

  And straightening her body, she summoned the will to open the study door. I’m a dangerous woman, she thought proudly, taking another step. I can plug a nickel at twenty paces. I can—

  She didn’t hear him coming. Not a footstep or a whisper or even a breath of wind. One second she was alone, the next a large, sweaty hand had clamped itself over her mouth. Cate struggled to turn, to drive an elbow back and into his ribs as she’d learned in self-defense class, but the man was upon her, pulling her into his body, his free hand locking onto her wrist, wrenching the gun loose with one furious twist.

  “We’re in the library,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you to join us.”

  Cate stopped squirming and allowed the man to guide her into her study.

  Two men stood by the safe. They’d managed to open it, God knows how. One was perusing her journals, the other tearing through her desk. She knew their type, if not their names. The crew cuts, the aggressive eyes, the pumped-up shoulders and size-twenty necks.

  “What are you looking for?” she said when he’d removed his hand.

  “You know what,” replied the man holding her. “Why are you talking to the police?”

  “I’m not.” Her fear had vanished, cowering before her mammoth indignation. “You’re wasting your time.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He let her go and spun her around, and for a moment she thought that was it, he was moving to the rough stuff right away. She had no illusions about her ability to guard her secrets. If they beat her, she would talk. Instead, the man brushed by her and devoted himself to a tour of her bookshelves. She remained where she was, quiet, suddenly embarrased by her nudity, covering herself.

  After a few minutes, the man gave up his perfunctory search. “Anything?” he asked, turning to his colleagues.

  Shrugs were their only response.

  He approached Cate, taking her face in his meaty hands and bringing it close to his. He was older, with pitted cheeks, black eyes, and a slit for a mouth. “Keep your mouth closed,” he whispered. “Understand?”

  When Cate didn’t answer, an angry expression contorted his face. “Understand?” he said again, squeezing her cheeks and twisting her jaw.

  “Yes,” she managed to grunt. “I understand.”

  A minute later they were gone, leaving the front door open behind them. Cate walked to the door and shut it. As an afterthought, she turned on the alarm. But as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, a smile of bitter satisfaction played on her lips.

  She had them on the run.

  20

  Stop it there!” shouted Howell Dodson, deputy assistant director of the FBI, slapping a palm onto his desk. “I want to hear the last part again.”

  Roy DiGenovese reset the digital recorder, punching the play button when he’d gone back exactly thirty-one seconds. A tinny voice began to speak, the Eastern European accent faintly noticeable.

  “And what about the Private Eye-PO?” asked Konstantin Kirov. “What do you plan on doing to him? Surely you do not expect us to sit still while our good name is besmirched.”

  “I have some people on it already,” answered Jett Gavallan. “With any luck, we’ll have him located by tomorrow, day after at the latest.”

  “And then? All of us have our part to play to insure Mercury’s future. We expect you to take any and all measures to silence this man. Nothing can stand in the way of Mercury Broadband’s going public. Nothing.”

  “And nothing will. I’ll see to it the Private Eye-PO’s mouth is shut—permanently, if I have my way. In the meantime, these receipts refute his accusations nicely. I’d say we’re back on track.”

  “Good,” said Kirov. “It’s time to put an end to this tomfoolery. There’s already been enough snooping.”

  The recording ended, and DiGenovese turned the machine off.

  It was eleven-thirty in Washington, D.C., and outside the temperature registered a sweltering ninety-two degrees. From his office on the second floor of the
J. Edgar Hoover Building, Howell Dodson, chairman of the Joint Russo-American Task Force on Organized Crime, could see the early lunch crowd making their way to the mall in hopes of staking out shaded benches or dipping their big toes in the Reflecting Pool. It wasn’t much of a view. The prime offices were on the opposite side of the building, facing south and offering a panoramic vista of the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and Mr. Thomas Jefferson, fellow Son of Virginia. One day he hoped to gaze out at the Lord of Monticello, but good views required good politicking, and good politicking required a cunning he did not possess.

  “What do you say, Roy?” Dodson asked in a slow Williamsburg drawl, his voice the texture of cured tobacco. “Mr. Gavallan talking prudent business practice or did we just hear collusion among conspirators?”

  “That depends on Mercury, sir. If the business is legit, I’d say we listened to a bunch of execs who want to stop someone from bad-mouthing their stock. If not, we just tuned in to a group of criminals discussing murder. Me, I opt for the latter. I think we caught some crooks red-handed.”

  “So the Private Eye-PO is correct? Mercury’s nothing but ‘a scam dog with mucho fleas’? That what you’re saying, Roy?”

  “We’re getting the same information from our informant in Moscow. Why shouldn’t we believe it?”

  Dodson couldn’t help but chuckle. Three years in the Bureau and Mr. DiGenovese still considered an informant’s cant the holy scripture. The boy was a greenhorn. Yes sir. Nothing but a big-city hick. Dodson himself wasn’t so much interested in whether what the Private Eye-PO said was correct as in how he came to be in possession of the information. And for that matter, just who in the hell he was. “What’s the latest on finding this boy? Mr. Chupik have any luck?”