I turned as Moniza approached, pulling a hand from the pocket of her peacoat. She was a small but attractive woman with sleek black hair and immaculate Queen’s English. She wagged a device that looked like any old tablet. Supposedly, it used ambient noise and data streams to junk up surveillance devices without the surveilling party knowing. We’d met in public this way before. We walked past each other, stepping to the corner of Tower One, pretending to read the names. The water inside the fountain rushed into the center, a steady, soporific roar.
“And you tease me about James Bond shit. What was it that couldn’t wait?”
“Relax, darling, those are our offices.” She nodded to the fortress of glass and steel. “I’m flying down to Charlotte tonight. I didn’t have time to set up anything too clandestine.” I waited, and she chewed her tongue. The chances that Tara had private investigators following me were real, and I desperately wanted her to make this quick. “I thought I owed it to you to know: A source told me the SEC has opened an investigation into Tara. If the FBI gets involved, it could mean a Title III on your boyfriend’s phone.”
“A wiretap?”
She nodded. “Be careful what you say to him. And I’d talk to a lawyer sooner rather than later.”
“Do you think Fred did anything illegal?”
She ticked her head in ambivalence. “It’s become quite difficult to say what’s illegal anymore. On Wall Street or in Washington. Either way, I felt you deserved to know. It was never my intention to stitch you up.” Her voice was cool but sincere.
“I did it of my own free will.” I was thinking of Fred. The summer of ’35, after I’d delivered the file to Moniza, he and I spent some time apart. He went to London while I stayed in New York. When he returned, he was bearing an early edition of Sense and Sensibility, which he’d hunted down at a rare book dealer because, he said, he’d once heard me say it had been my favorite book in college. It was then I realized, to my dismay, that I still loved him.
“It may be that this will turn out a mere footnote in high finance anyhow.”
“What do you mean?”
I ran my hand over a name on the lip of the fountain: Jane Marie Orth. Just another woman who had no idea her life would come to an end at the hands of violent and insecure men.
“There’s something going on in the markets. My contacts who were around in 2007—they’re unnerved. There have been two years of falling housing prices all over the coasts and the insurance companies are canceling every homeowner policy they can wriggle out of.”
“ARkSTORM put them in a tough spot.”
“Yes, but insurance losses coming due can’t explain the whole situation. Maybe your partner and his fund did something illegal and maybe not. But it’s all the legal activities that appear to be the problem at the moment.” Before I could inquire further, she said, “Okay, that’s probably more gabbing than is safe. Good luck, Jackie.” And she peeled off into the wind, making haste toward One World Trade.
Riding back across the Upper Bay, passing the Statue of Liberty, I watched the cranes of the shipping yards and the field of wind turbines behind the calm green lady. I thought about the first time I’d visited the city to attend a friend’s wedding with Jefferey. How impossible and epic this place had seemed. How small it made my life in Chicago feel. Back on Staten Island, I rode the train past the abandoned graffitied buildings of the shore and the seawalls of sandbags now protecting inland structures from king tides and storm surges.
Carmen asked me how the appointment went, and I gave her a relieved look like the test results had been fine. I returned to the open-office section I shared with a snarky woman named Liza and a bitchy queen named Garrett, but I could hear one voice booming from the room catty-corner to us, stuffed in the back of this otherwise open space. Liza and Garrett wore noise-canceling buds as a defense. Talking into a pair of ARs for a remote interview, Kate Morris sat with her feet on her desk, hands folded over her stomach.
“I don’t have a comment—that’s a question for the scientists,” she said. “But it’s definitely something to freak out about. You know, if you need something to freak out about…” She paused, listening. Then, “All these whining, bitching corporations saying I’m trying to ruin them, that I’m saying they need to be buried alive—that is all true. I am. And they do.”
The summer of ’35, with Fred in London, I was going to the gas station every day, at first to bring the kids food, then to hold a sign myself. After three weeks, the protest had grown, and a crowd of twenty to thirty people stationed themselves around the clock. Drivers began to avoid the place, the NYPD was reluctant to intervene, and soon similar blockades had broken out at other gas stations across the five boroughs. Mayor Bowman refused to make arrests. The memory of D.C. loomed large, as these were the first major protests since that awful summer. Soon, there was nowhere in New York City to buy gas. That third week, I ended up trading stories with one of the other protestors and mentioned my background in advertising and PR.
“No kidding?” said the woman. She was no teenager. Maybe early thirties, and she always came to stand with us before her bar shift. “I should hook you up with my friend. She works with Morris on Staten Island. She was literally just talking about how they’re looking for people with your background.”
That was how I ended up connecting with Holly Pietrus, who sounded keen to bring me in to interview. She was especially interested because I was independently wealthy. “We can’t pay anyone. We barely have enough money to keep the lights on.” They’d set up shop on Staten Island, she explained, because it was proximate to the media capital and rents were all plummeting as the flooding got worse. On a shoestring budget, they could afford office space with a modicum of security, as long as you didn’t mind the occasional sewer system failure.
For the first time in years, I sat at my desk all night just drawing, trying to create a branded image for whatever exactly was happening in the streets. I brought my sketch pad to the busted brick building where Kate Morris and a staff of a dozen had taken over the second-floor offices of a former computer repair center. It still had the sign, TOTAL SYSTEMS, INC., bolted above the door.
“Obviously, we’re getting a deal on it,” Holly said. She led me through grimy hallways to a gray-carpeted space with a conference table flanked by four large offices with windows looking in and no doors. Each room was cramped with desks, messy with laptops, tablets, and VR goggles. Young women pecked away at screens, keyboards, and the air itself. Holly had enormous purple bags beneath each eye, yet her voice was chipper, eager to share their plans. “We’re coordinating with nearly a hundred and fifty volunteer captains around the country, and they’re working with a thousand protests or blockades of various infrastructure and political offices. We want to create pulses of widespread disruption, trying to hit every level of society, and then ramp it up each month. We’re seeing our best results in the typical places: major cities, college campuses, and wherever there’s a Fierce Blue Fire Outpost. Right now, the name of the game is recruitment, trying to get more bodies.” We entered a bleak room past the main area with a sticky round conference table. It was the only office with a door, and it took me a moment to understand it belonged to the boss, who’d essentially chosen to work from a bunker. “Have a seat. I’ll go get her.”
I’d barely taken my résumé from my purse before Kate swept in. The outsized presence I’d always studied from afar, the way she moved with an almost masculine certainty, was now personal and vivid. She jerked the other chair out and thumped her butt into it as her elbows crashed to the table.
“I hear you’ve got PR experience.” She wore jeans and a gray sweater fraying at the cuffs and collar. Her mass of hair was tied up behind her head with a pencil stuck through the knot, strands of white and gray leaking out of the dark blond.