T. Bunn - Drummer in the Dark

They had landed in Paris with a generation of ragged nobility. Pavel’s father became an expert at using his tattered titles to mask the fact that he was nothing more than a beggar with an attitude. When their welcome wore out, they had shifted first to London and finally to New York. There the last of his mother’s jewelry had purchased a neighborhood grocery in the Bronx.

From his shamed and embittered mother, Pavel inherited a desperate hunger for all he had never known, and mannerisms as empty as his titles. From his father he learned the grim reality of poverty, and an unyielding determination to make it in this new world where money was king.

Isolated by his dedicated arrogance, Pavel had grown ever more confident that he was born to a ruler’s mantle and a monarch’s loneliness. He had excelled in school because it was the means to an end. Afterward he had accepted a job with Lehman Brothers for the same reason. In the late eighties, when hedge funds began to grow in popularity among the rich and mighty, Pavel went on his own. Fourteen years and some good guesses and lucky breaks later, he was ready to breach the final barrier, to finally arrive at his destiny.

The main building was crafted of glass and cream-colored stone. To either side swept halfmoons of outbuildings-research to his left, legal to his right-both fronted by Corinthian pillars of Brazilian marble. A smaller rendition of the main building stood opposite Hayek’s penthouse window, its three floors given over to sales and administration. The internal pathways were of the same stone as the buildings, surrounding an oval plaza emblazoned with an immense H in polished onyx. Semitropical flowers bloomed in carefully tended profusion. At the ring’s center stood a lake whose placid surface was marred by fountains and the passage of six swans. When the occasional visitor arrived from Wall Street and asked why he had moved so far south, Hayek always showed off this spread. In truth, however, he had left New York because secrets were too hard to hide there, as he had learned from bitter experience. No, his Florida fiefdom was intended to do little more than house his mercenaries and prepare in secret for the battle ahead.

This Monday, however, Hayek railed silently at the unseen flaw to his realm. The crystal clarity of his plans was blurred by ripples of uncontrolled risk. And from the most dreaded of sources.

Behind him there was a knock on the door. When he did not respond, the door opened and feet marked a measured tread to stand before his desk. Only one man was permitted entry day or night. Jim Burke knew his boss well enough to realize that whatever he carried, however urgent, it would wait until Hayek’s musings were done. For an American, the man was not too poorly trained.

Finally Hayek turned from the window and his future. “Well?”

“Our man has just confirmed that Bank of America is going ahead as rumored.”

Hayek slid into his seat. “He is certain?”

Burke remained standing because he had not been invited to sit. “He’s already received his notice. His plane should be arriving in three hours. Apparently B. of A. is canning their entire San Francisco trading staff and consolidating operations in Chicago and New York.”

“Will the market absorb them without our intervention?”

“No way. I’ve checked. Wall Street is already shedding its own dead wood. Chicago is stagnant.”

“So their traders should be panicking about now.”

Burke showed momentary unease. He was paid to arrive with all the answers already in place. “I didn’t ask anything specific. But it sounded that way to me.”

“The twenty-five traders and support staff have been selected?”

“Ready to roll.”

“Bring them in. Today. Remind them of their primary restriction.”

“Total secrecy,” Burke confirmed.

“More than that. They are a covert cadre. They must remain a tight-knit clan, isolated and apart. Any association whatsoever with the other traders and they will be instantly dismissed. All of them. Make sure they understand that.” He pointed Burke into a chair opposite his desk, reached for his phone, and instructed his secretary, “Have Mr. Ready come up.”

Burke watched him replace the receiver. “I don’t trust Colin Ready. Not an inch.”

“I am well aware of your feelings toward Mr. Ready.”

“He’s got access almost everywhere in our system. Not to mention the warped areas in his background. He’s a hacker in corporate sheep’s clothing.”

Hayek inspected his number two. The man was really quite repulsive. Hair cut so short his scalp was visible, eyes as tight and manic as fiery pellets, clothes of unerringly bad taste. But highly intelligent. And extremely loyal. “You realize, of course, that our guests in gray are spies.”

Burke showed surprise at Hayek’s sudden change of direction. “Yes.”

“Someone with the paranoid tendencies of our Brazilian investors,” Hayek went on, “would not be content with mere muscle.”

Burke’s eyes widened. “You think Colin Ready is a mole?”

“You may look into that, but discreetly,” Hayek replied. “And in the meantime, I am meeting with our Brazilians to complain about their gorillas. We can’t have infiltrators rambling about, sticking their noses into everything. They must be identified and controlled. Otherwise they could destroy us.”

Colin set down his phone, took a deep breath, and muttered to the empty cubicle, “This could grow very bad very quickly.”

He slipped into the jacket he kept on hand for visits to the royal chambers. He then checked his reflection in the feng shui mirror hanging from the back wall, the one Lisa had hated so much he had removed from his apartment and claimed he had thrown away. Overhead hung Lisa’s final gift, a plaque reading “Destiny is reprogrammable, if seen from a higher perspective.” The words mocked him as he headed upstairs.

Only Lisa had assuaged the soul-eating loneliness that wrenched him whenever he turned off his machines and entered loathesome reality. So long as she had remained alongside, the lonelies had never managed to strike. Now that she was forever gone, they never departed. Even the myth of her presence, and the one-sided futility of arguing with someone who had abandoned him for good, was better than staring the void straight in the face.

The number of gray-jacketed goons in the front reception area had multiplied like malignant spoor. The one who had slammed Colin into the upstairs window burned him with a look as he stepped into the elevator.

Once more Colin was shown directly into Hayek’s inner sanctum. The Unabomber was there, today clothed from neck to ankles in shades of brown-shirt, tie, pants, belt-anchored at both ends by equally bizarre black, his eyeglasses almost as heavy as his shoes. Burke was definitely the group’s most deviant relic from the twentieth century.

Hayek directed him to the chair beside Burke. “Curiosity is not always an excusable offense, Mr. Ready.”

“Pardon me?”

Burke rapped out, “Stay away from the upstairs balcony.”

“Oh. Yes, of course.”

Hayek continued, “Now update us on this hunter.”

“I’m sorry, who-”

Burke snapped at him again. “The Havilland female.”

“She is hardly that. A huntress, I mean.” His chair’s angle was terrible. Colin could feel Burke’s death rays drilling into the side of his skull. “This weekend she has done nothing more than cash a check, fly to Washington, and attend a conference in Maryland. To be frank, I regret bringing her to your attention at all. I thought she would be a stronger quarry.”

“And yet she attended this conference in College Park.”

“Well, yes. But I hardly see-”