She stared out the window for a few minutes, before lowering the window shade and turning her attention to work. She had surprisingly little to go on besides open-source information—newspaper and magazine articles she’d found on the Net and a Wikipedia brief. The Bureau had no information on either company. Private military companies and security consultants fell under the CIA’s purview, and she hadn’t had time to reach out to her contacts at Langley. She had tried to reach a colleague at MI5 en route to the airport, but it was late in the U.K. and he hadn’t responded. She settled for leaving a message.
One thing was clear. GRAIL had grown and prospered in the years since its founding. Articles mentioned contracts with the United States and British governments totaling tens of millions of dollars. A download from the company’s website offered its mission statement:
To provide a highly professional and confidential military advisory service to legitimate governments.
To provide sound military and strategic advice.
To provide the most professional military training packages currently available to armed forces, covering aspects related to sea, air, and land warfare.
To provide advice to armed forces on weapon and weapon platform selection.
To provide a totally apolitical service based on confidentiality, professionalism, and dedication.
Alex put down the paper. GRAIL could call itself an international security consultant all it wanted, but as far as she was concerned, it was still a private military company, or as they used to say in the Old West, a gun for hire.
She leafed through the remaining newspaper articles discussing the firm, but the reports failed to hold her interest. Instead she found herself thinking about Bobby. The burst of sentimentality she’d been witness to at Cherry Hill wasn’t like him. Was it because his life had been threatened, or had he really changed? She chastised herself for considering the possibility. Maybe she was the sappy one. In her experience, people rarely changed. If anything, their dominant personality traits grew stronger, and more dominant, as they aged. In Bobby’s case, those traits counted as arrogance, stubbornness, overconfidence, and, she had to admit, generosity.
Alex forced Bobby from her mind. Sitting straighter, she tried once again to read the documents. Air travel made her tired, and the words quickly grew fuzzy. A dozen espressos couldn’t stop her eyelids from drooping. Bobby came to her thoughts again. She imagined his touch on her skin, the texture of his cheek against hers…
With an effort, Alex fought off sleep. Her memories frightened her. Every relationship had its good times. Why were they always so much easier to remember than the bad times? The plane banked and flew due east. Darkness enveloped the aircraft. Her last thought as she drifted off to sleep was not about work but about him.
Bobby.
Did he really mean it about giving things another go?
57
“Did you find him?”
Astor slammed the door closed and slid across the back seat.
“He’s waiting now.”
“And you didn’t use your phone?”
“I found the last pay phone in the city and said exactly what you told me.”
“All right. Floor it. I have to be at Central Park West at seven.”
Sullivan put the Audi into gear and started the drive uptown.
Astor leaned his face against the window, watching the city go by. He was thinking about Septimus Reventlow and wondering what kind of game he was playing. It was understandable that he might want to put more money into the fund yesterday…but today? Shank had been right when he’d called Astor a crazy man. And what to make of Reventlow’s tepid attempt to purchase a share of the firm? Maybe the man had better contacts in China than he did. Time would tell. Anyhow, Astor wasn’t planning on waiting until tomorrow at three to line up the funds he needed.
The Audi hit a pothole, jolting Astor and sending a twinge of pain through his arm. The anesthetic had worn off an hour ago and the wound ached intensely. He felt for the bottle of pain relievers in his pocket. Vicodin. Strong stuff. He dropped it back into his pocket. Instead, he used the pain to focus his attention on his current predicament.
Astor was not one for deep thought. He did not hold with Frost and the “life unexamined” nonsense. Or was it Socrates? Another fault of his truncated education. He preferred to read military histories and biographies of generals and decorated soldiers. He knew that a good general leads from the front. He liked to think that he lived from the front, with his eyes locked on the horizon. Yet if there was ever a time to stop the tanks, to take a long look back and ask how he had gotten here, this was it.
It seemed like yesterday that he was turning the keys in the door of his first office, at 21st and Madison, in some leftover space he leased from First Boston, and taking his first step up the ladder. He had no lofty goals, either monetary or social. He never once said, “I want to make a million dollars a year” or “ten million,” or “I want to be worth one hundred million by the time I’m forty.” He simply went to work each day at the appointed hour and dedicated himself to his job, which meant analyzing annual reports, watching the market, and picking stocks better than the next guy. The secret came in the repetition of this cycle, day in, day out, year in and year out, without fail. Was he ever the best at picking stocks? Of course not. But on some days he was better than average, and when you added those days together they were enough to enable him to rise to the top of his profession.