Mindy closed the toilet seat and sat down, watching him go through his medicine cabinet. “I don’t want you to have to worry about details,”
she said. “You’re going to need all your concentration to handle the readings and interviews.”
“Mindy,” James said, putting a bottle of aspirin into a Ziploc bag.
“You’re making me nervous. Don’t you have something to do?”
“At three in the morning?”
“I could use a cup of coffee.”
“Sure,” Mindy said. She went into the kitchen. She was feeling sentimental about James. In fourteen years of marriage, they’d never spent more than three nights apart, and now James would be away for two weeks. Would she miss him? What if she couldn’t manage without him?
But that, she reminded herself, was silly. She was a grown woman. She did practically everything herself anyway. Well, maybe not everything.
James spent a lot of time looking after Sam. As much as she liked to complain about him, James wasn’t all bad. Especially now, when he was finally making money.
“I’ll get your socks,” Mindy said, handing James his cup of coffee.
“Do you think you’ll miss me?” she asked, placing several pairs of worn socks into his suitcase and wondering how many pairs he would need for two weeks.
“I can do that,” James said, annoyed by all the attention. Mindy came across a hole in the toe of one of his socks and stuck her finger through.
“A lot of your socks have holes,” she pointed out.
“It doesn’t matter. No one is going to see my socks,” James said.
“So will you miss me?” Mindy asked.
“I don’t know,” James said. “Maybe. Maybe not. I might be too busy.”
In a last-minute panic, James left the apartment at four-fifteen A.M.
Mindy considered going back to sleep but was too keyed up. She decided to check James’s Amazon rating instead. Her computer came on, but there was no Internet service. This was strange. She checked the cables and turned the box on and off. Nothing. She tried the browser on her BlackBerry. Also nothing.
Paul Rice was now up as well. At five A.M. on the dot, he was to launch his algorithm in the Chinese stock market. At four-thirty A.M., he was seated behind his desk in his home office, a cup of café con leche sitting neatly on a coaster nearby, ready to begin. Out of habit, he plucked a pencil out of the silver holder and examined the tip for sharpness. Then he turned on his computer.
The screen flashed its familiar and comforting green — the color of money, Paul thought with satisfaction — and then ... nothing. Paul jerked his head in surprise. Powering the computer should have kicked on the satellite system and Internet backup. He clicked on the Internet icon. The screen went blank. Finding a key, he unlocked the cabinet doors behind him and looked inside at the stacked metal hard drives. The power was on, but the array of lights indicating the exchange of signals was black. He hesitated for half a second and then ran downstairs to Annalisa’s office. He tried her computer, which he’d always joked was like a Stone Age tool, but the Internet was out there as well.
“Holy fuck!” he screamed.
In the master bedroom next door, Annalisa stirred in her sleep. At the celebration dinner the night before, the Rices and Brewers had consumed over five thousand dollars’ worth of rare wines before helicoptering back to the city at two A.M. She turned over, her head heavy, hoping Paul’s voice had come from a dream. But there it was again: “Holy fuck!”
Now Paul was in the room, pulling on his pants from the night before. Annalisa sat up. “Paul?”
“There’s no fucking Internet service.”
“But I thought ...” Annalisa mumbled, gesturing uselessly.
“Where’s the car? I need the fucking car.”
She leaned over the bed, picking up the handset on the landline. “It’s in the garage. But the garage is probably closed.”
In a frenzy, Paul buttoned his shirt while trying to hop into his shoes.
“This is exactly why I wanted that parking spot in the Mews,” he snapped.
“For just this kind of emergency.”
“What emergency?” Annalisa said, getting out of bed.
“There’s no fucking Internet service. Which means I am fucked. The whole fucking China deal is fucked.” He ran out of the room.
“Paul?” she said, following him and leaning over the banister. “Paul?
What can I do?” But he was already in the hallway, punching the button for the elevator. It was all the way down in the lobby. Glancing at his watch, Paul decided he didn’t have time to wait and began clatter-ing down the steps. He burst into the lobby, waking the night doorman, who was dozing in a chair. “I need a taxi,” Paul shouted breathlessly. “A fucking taxi!” He ran into the empty street, waving his arms.
When no taxis appeared, he started jogging up Fifth Avenue. At Twelfth Street, he finally saw a cab and fell into the backseat. “Park Avenue and Fifty-third Street,” he screamed. Pounding on the divider, he shouted, “Go, go. Go! ”
“I cannot run a red light, sir,” the driver said, turning around.
“Shut up and drive,” Paul screamed.
The journey to midtown was agony. Who would have thought there would be traffic before five A.M.? Paul rolled down his window and stuck his head out, waving and shouting at the other drivers. By the time the taxi pulled up in front of his office building, it was four-fifty-three A.M.
The building was locked, so it took another minute of kicking and screaming to arouse the night watchman. It was another couple of minutes to get upstairs and use his pass to unlock the glass doors of Brewer Securities, and a few more seconds to run down the hall to his office.
When he got to his computer, it was five-oh-one and forty-three seconds.
His fingers flew over the keyboard. When he was finished, it was five-oh-one and fifty-six seconds. He collapsed on his chair and leaned back, putting his hands over his face. In the two-minute delay, he had lost twenty-six million dollars.
Back at One Fifth, Mindy Gooch poked her head out the door.
“Roberto,” she said to the doorman, “there’s no Internet service.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “Ask your son, Sam.”
At six-thirty, she woke Sam up. “There’s no Internet service.”
Sam smiled and yawned. “It’s probably Paul Rice’s fault. He’s got all that equipment up there. It probably knocked out the service in the entire building.”
“I hate that man,” Mindy said.
“Me, too,” Sam agreed.
Several floors above, Enid Merle was also trying to get online. She needed to read the column composed by her staff writer in the wee hours of the morning, to which she would add her trademark flourishes.
But there was something wrong with her computer, and desperate to approve the column before eight A.M., when it would be syndicated online and then appear in the afternoon edition of the paper, she called Sam. In a few minutes, Sam and Mindy appeared at her door. Mindy had pulled on a pair of jeans below her flannel pajama top. “No one’s computer is working,” she informed Enid. “Sam says it has something to do with Paul Rice.”
“Why would he be involved?” Enid asked.
“Apparently,” Mindy said, glancing at Sam, “he’s got all kinds of powerful and probably illegal computer equipment up there. In Mrs.
Houghton’s old ballroom.”
When Enid looked doubtful, Mindy said, “Sam has seen it. When he went up to help Annalisa Rice with her computer.”
Annalisa herself was nervously pacing the living room with her cell phone in hand when Maria came in. “Some people are here,” Maria said.