The Prince of Risk A Novel(8)

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



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

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

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

PALANTIR.

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

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

No one replied. The earpiece filled with white noise.

“Marv…you there? Marv?”

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

But not once had he heard the word Palantir.

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