The Prince of Risk

by Christopher Reich

  The Exchange charged a far larger amount to companies that wanted their shares listed, or available for trading. The four thousand listed companies paid annual fees as high as $250,000, earning the Exchange more than $800 million a year. IBM, Caterpillar, Alcoa: they all had to pony up. The NYSE was a very large enterprise indeed.

  “If I might be so bold,” said Mrs. Kennedy, “I’m a little surprised to see you.”

  Astor responded earnestly but not altogether honestly. “I’m surprised to be here. My father sent me a note last night shortly before the accident occurred. It was the first time in years he tried to contact me. I think he had an idea something bad was going to happen. I wanted to ask you some questions to see if you could shed a little light on what he’d been doing lately.”

  “He was a busy man. When he wasn’t traveling, he was hosting guests here at the Exchange or going to meetings.”

  “No doubt he was,” agreed Astor. “Can you tell me if he ever mentioned something called Palantir?”

  Mrs. Kennedy pursed her lips. Behind her rimless glasses, her eyes were alert and perceptive. “Never heard that word.”

  “Never?”

  The woman shook her head emphatically.

  Astor walked behind his father’s desk. The surface was neat and uncluttered. In and out trays set side by side were empty. He wondered if his father had straightened up, knowing that he might not be back.

  “Was he working on anything out of the ordinary?” asked Astor.

  “He was seeing Miss Evans quite a bit,” replied Mrs. Kennedy. “She’s his executive assistant. She handles many of his day-to-day assignments—correspondence with our partners, issues with the listed companies and those wishing to list, just about everything.”

  “Sharp gal,” added Thomasson, still standing in the doorway. “English. She worked for one of the big banks for a few years. She’s been with us fourteen months.”

  “May I speak with her?”

  “She’s not in yet,” said Dolores Kennedy.

  Astor checked his wristwatch and saw that it was nearly eleven o’clock. “Is she sick?”

  Kennedy shot the security agent, Thomasson, a worried glance before returning her attention to him. “She isn’t answering her phone.”

  “Do you mind if I try to contact her?”

  “I’m not permitted to give you that information.”

  “Please, Dolores. It would mean the world.”

  She looked back at Thomasson, who nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “Stay right here. I’ll print up her phone and address.”

  Kennedy left the room and Thomasson stepped away to answer a call. Suddenly alone, Astor spotted his chance. Moving quickly, he made a reconnaissance of his father’s desk. He opened the top drawer. A leather-bound agenda with the current year stenciled in gold print lay inside. He reached for it, his fingers brushing the cover. The agenda would be considered evidence. Taking it would constitute obstruction of justice, an offense that he knew from his ex-wife counted as a felony. The doorway remained clear. This was hardly the time to worry about the law. Astor snatched the agenda and tucked it into the rear of his trousers, taking care to arrange his jacket over it.

  Hardly a second later, Dolores Kennedy returned. “She lives at 1133 Elm Street, Greenwich,” she said, waving a flap of paper. “I’ll give you both her numbers, too.”

  Astor stepped away from the desk. The drawer remained open an inch. There was nothing he could do about it now. He crossed the room to the doorway and took the paper with Penelope Evans’s information. “Thank you, Dolores.”

  “No, thank you,” the secretary replied. “It would make your father happy to know that you cared.”

  “How did you—” Astor cut himself off. “Thanks again.”

  “How did you know?”

  November 1987. One month after Black Monday, the crash that had seen the Dow Jones Industrial Average lose more than 20 percent of its value in a single day, Bobby Astor sat at a table in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons at 52nd and Park. He had not left school surreptitiously this time. He had come by invitation. A lunch in the city between father and son. The head of school was happy to sign his day pass.

  “So you read my paper?” asked Bobby.

  “Of course I read it. So did all of my partners. We’re impressed. In fact, we’re more than that. Half of them want you to quit school and come to work for us right now.”

  Bobby smiled, his cheeks flushing with pride.

  Edward Astor leaned closer. “The other half want to know who you copied your work from.”

  The waiter arrived. Edward Astor ordered an old-fashioned. “And give the boy a beer. He thinks he’s an adult anyway.”

  The waiter nodded and left the table. The Four Seasons existed in a parallel universe where mortals’ laws held no sway.

  “I wrote it,” said Bobby.

  “Then tell me. How’d you know?”

  “Like I said in the paper. Prices were too high, given earnings. Not just that, they’d risen too fast. Not just in the States but everywhere. It was all in the numbers. Something had to give.”

  “Everyone reads the same numbers. Everyone knew P/Es were too high. Your timing was specific. ‘Sell everything now.’”

  “The market felt frothy. It just seemed like it was about to give.”

  “You’re fifteen,” Edward Astor said. “How do you know what frothy means?”

  “Things were out of kilter, that’s all.”

  “And this is how you spend your spare time? Studying the market?”

  “Pretty much. And playing poker.”

  “You’re still not answering my question. How did you know the crash was imminent?”

  Bobby looked into his lap, then lifted his chin and met his father’s gaze. “It’s like this, Dad. When I study the numbers and the charts, I get lost in all that data. It’s like I’m swimming in it. All that information becomes part of me. Like in Star Wars. The numbers create some kind of force and I can feel it.”

  “You can feel the force?”

  “Yeah, I can.” Bobby shrugged. “So how did I know the crash was going to happen soon? I just knew.”

  Anger flashed behind Edward Astor’s eyes. His mouth tightened and he rose in his seat. Bobby knew that intuition went against everything his father stood for as an investor. As quickly, his father sat down again. A look of understanding brightened his features. Before he could reply, a diminutive, curly-haired man slid into the booth next to him. The two men spoke quietly for a few minutes. As the man stood to leave, Edward Astor motioned toward Bobby. “Henry,” he said. “This is my son, Robert. Robert, meet Henry Kravis.”

  Bobby shook hands and smiled uncertainly.

  Edward Astor looked into his son’s eyes. “You’ll want to remember him, Henry. The boy’s a genius. One day he’s either going to be richer than any of us or broke and in the poorhouse.”

  Sloan Thomasson was waiting in the antechamber. “Leaving already?”

  “I’ve got what I needed,” said Astor. “Can you help me find my way out of here? I’ll never get back to the elevator. You’re right. It’s like a maze.”

  “No need to go back. There’s an express elevator that goes down to the ground floor. Normally it’s just for the CEO and his guests. If you don’t mind exiting on Broadway, we can take that.”

  “That would be fine,” said Astor. The agenda cut a crease into his lower back. It was difficult to walk without wincing.

  Thomasson showed him to the elevator. “Exit at one,” he said.

  Astor shook hands and thanked him. The ride to the ground floor required less than ten seconds. He rushed out the door and onto the pavement beyond.

  The felon was happy to escape the building.

  12

  Each day before beginning work, Supervisory Special Agent Alex Forza bowed her head and prayed.

  “Dear Father, I ask your blessing that I meet today’s challenges with intelligence, courage, and fortitude, tha
t I give no quarter, now or ever, to enemies of this country, and that I perform my duties to your highest standards and in a manner that will bring credit to the Bureau.”

  She kept her eyes closed a moment longer, allowing the words to resonate, then lifted her head and gazed at the photograph behind her desk. It was a portrait of a ruthless, cynical, manipulative middle-aged man. At fifty, he looked seventy. His hairline was receding, his jowls flabby, his eyes bulging, and he was well along the way to acquiring the toadlike stare of his later years. He was not an attractive man. Yet there was no mistaking the purpose in his forthright gaze, the single-minded and holy commitment to duty that was the cornerstone of his life and that, God-like, he had transferred to the Bureau.

  “And Father,” Alex added in closing, whispering because this was a private matter between the two of them, “no matter what, do not let me fuck up.”

  J. Edgar Hoover stared back mutely.

  Alex took a seat at her desk and began sifting through the incident reports that had come in the night before. The stack was thicker than usual for a weekend, and she suspected that many of the calls were false alarms, or what she called “Al Qaeda alarms.” The first report validated her suspicion. A passenger riding in a taxi complained that the cabdriver had made derogatory comments about the United States and was, in his estimation, “a friggin’ terrorist.” The time of the call was 1:30 a.m. The caller left his name as well as the cabbie’s and the taxi medallion number. Alex classified the report as “nonurgent” and started a pile to the right. When time allowed, one of her investigators would call and interview the complainant. She felt confident that the city would be safe until then.

  Alex headed CT-26, the Bureau’s threat assessment squad tasked with investigating claims of suspicious activities pertaining to acts of terror on United States soil. “See something, say something” was the watchword of the day, and the citizens of New York had taken it to heart. The hotline received north of fifty calls a day, and it was up to Alex and her team of twenty-six investigators to separate the chaff from the grain.

  Alex had been given command six months earlier in an effort to provide the squad with a more aggressive stance. She’d made a name for herself in the bank robbery squad and child crimes before joining the CT pool five years back. There were agents who had more arrests, but none could match her take-no-prisoners attitude. No one gave the Bureau more than Alex Forza.

  One glance at her office testified to that commitment. There was no couch, no coffee table, and no chairs for visitors to sit in while they were shooting the shit. Meetings were conducted standing up and face-to-face. Other than the photograph of J. Edgar Hoover, the walls were bare. The only furniture was her desk, her chair, and a bookcase, all standard issue. She was not, however, without a flair for decoration. A handheld battering ram lay against one wall. Her prized Benelli twelve-gauge assault shotgun stood in a corner next to it, along with her Kevlar vest. The office was everything she’d ever wanted.

  Alex powered through a dozen incident reports, finding none to be urgent. An hour had passed when Jim Malloy popped his head in the door. “Hey, Alex, you already here? Thought you’d sleep in and get some rest.”

  “I’m the boss,” she answered. “I ask those questions. Why aren’t you grabbing forty winks?”

  Malloy stifled a yawn as he entered the office. “Me? You kidding? I got home just in time to wake up my little cherubs. Guess who gave them breakfast and looked after them while his wife slept an extra hour?”

  Alex frowned. “So you show up at work tired and your wife is fresh as a daisy. Bad decision.”

  Malloy’s disposition soured. “I’ll remember that.”

  Alex pointed to the photo of Hoover. “You think he came to work tired so he could let his wife sleep?”

  “He wasn’t married.”

  “Not officially, at least.” Alex cracked a smile to show that the boss was human.

  Malloy wandered over to the corner and picked up the battering ram. “This the thirty-five-pounder?”

  “Little Bess.” Little Bess weighed thirty-five pounds. Big Bess weighed fifty. As the first woman to make the FBI’s SWAT team, Alex had been rewarded by being allowed to carry Little Bess up five flights of stairs every other Saturday when the team met to train. She didn’t mind one bit.

  Malloy dropped the battering ram. “We get the warrant for Windermere yet?”

  “Not enough to go on. No way to tell if the picture is real or fake. Plus no imminent threat. We wait another day. If our guy doesn’t show, I’ll call the judge.”

  “Fair enough. Still, I wonder what—”

  Alex’s phone rang and she raised a hand to interrupt Malloy. “Yeah?”

  It was Jason Mara, one of her squad members, calling from Inwood. “Our guy just came home.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” said Alex, but she was already snatching her blazer off her chair, burying an arm in one sleeve and lunging for her vest. “When did he show?”

  “A minute ago,” said Mara.

  “What took you so long to call?”

  “You serious?”

  “Shut up and listen. Get that place locked down. He is not to leave the premises under any conditions. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s out there with you?”

  “DiRienzo.”

  “Good. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

  Alex hung up and looked at Malloy. “Let’s go earn a beer.”

  13

  The call had come in three days earlier.

  A woman in Long Island phoned the hotline claiming to have witnessed her neighbor unloading crates of military hardware from his car at three in the morning. The report was verified and a written copy forwarded to CT-26, where it landed on Alex’s desk.

  The mention of military hardware graded the call “urgent.” Alex vetted the source herself. The woman was named Irene Turner and lived in Inwood, a scruffy lower-middle-class neighborhood on the southern tip of Long Island. Inwood had plenty of temporary residents, some organized crime, and a significant foreign-born population, but it was the town’s proximity to John F. Kennedy International Airport, a major international freight hub, that piqued her curiosity and made the hackles on the back of her neck stand up.

  “I saw guns,” the woman named Irene Turner explained.

  “Really? What kind?”

  “Well, actually boxes full of guns.”

  “Boxes of guns?”

  “They were really crates with markings on them. I’m Russian. The writing was Cyrillic.”

  Alex hadn’t caught an accent. “Have you lived here long?”

  “Since I was four. My parents were refuseniks. We emigrated in 1982. I have my American passport.”

  Alex’s interest ratcheted up a notch. “Please go on.”

  “It was past three in the morning. I don’t sleep. I was downstairs in the kitchen making coffee. From my window, I can see into his garage. Of course, he doesn’t know this. Otherwise he would think I’m some kind of crazy for watching him so much.”

  “Do you know your neighbor’s name?”

  “Oh, no. We don’t speak. He moved in a couple of months back, but I don’t see him much. He’s nice-looking. About thirty. Tall. Fit.” She giggled. “He has a nice behind.”

  Alex began to get a picture of Irene Turner. Thirty-five years old. Single. Lonely. A life lived looking through windows. “About the guns…”

  “Yesterday night he came home late. He opened the back of his truck and that’s when I saw them. The crates. Green with rope handles…”

  “And Cyrillic writing on the side.”

  “It said Kalashnikov.”

  “Excuse me, Ms. Turner, I don’t mean to be rude, but how can you see that far?”

  “The writing on the side was yellow. It was easy to read. I took a picture.”

  “A picture?” Alex smiled to herself. The technology these days. Every man a spy.

  “With m
y phone.”

  Alex asked her to send the photograph to her own phone. Fifteen seconds later she had it.

  The picture was terrible. It was dark and out of focus and of course taken from 50 feet away. Still, there was no mistaking the olive-drab crate with rope handles and some kind of yellow writing on the sides.

  Alex considered this. Wooden crates with rope handles. Cyrillic writing. Whatever was inside the box—Kalashnikovs or Tokarevs or little wooden matryoshkas—it sounded as if it were military issue and a resident of Nassau County should not be in possession of it.

  Alex ended the call after confirming Turner’s address and that of her neighbor and extracting a promise from Turner to come to the FBI’s office in Chelsea for an interview the following day. After that, she walked into the bullpen and waited until all her young lions raised their heads and gave her their attention.

  “Gentlemen and gentlemen,” she announced, with the theatricality she reserved for promising leads, “we have a live one.”

  14

  Alex stood beside Jim Malloy at the door of 1254 Windermere. “Ready to go?”

  Malloy nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  Alex rapped twice on the door, then stepped back so that the keyholder could see her. She pushed her shoulders back and lifted her chin. She liked this moment best. The moment before the real job began. She never knew what she might find out, what crime she might discover, what threat she might mitigate. Too much of her job involved waiting, analyzing, convincing, and cajoling. This is what she had joined the Bureau for. Catching bad guys.

  The house was a two-story clapboard with a shingle roof built in the early ’40s. A fringe of lawn out front needed mowing. An American flag hung limply next to the door. The owner was one Maxim Ustinov, an immigrant from Russia like Irene Turner, the neighbor who had called in the report, but Ustinov was just the landlord. The tenant, or in FBI parlance “the keyholder,” was a thirty-one-year-old male named Randall Shepherd. According to the owner, Shepherd was a model tenant. He had moved in on June 1 on a twelve-month lease. A cashier’s check in the amount of $9,000 had covered the security deposit as well as the first three months’ rent.