“Target Alpha made a transmission.”
Halfway around the world, Magnus Lee answered at once. “A call?”
“No, sir. A text.”
“Go on.”
“It was a single word. We might have pulled down jibberish.”
“What was it?”
“Palantir.” The technician enunciated each syllable as if it were its own word. Pal-an-teer.
Lee blinked several times in rapid succession. He always did when he received disturbing news. “I see. And who was the recipient?”
“We don’t know who uses the phone, only that it’s registered to an American company. Comstock Partners, Ltd., with an address at 221 Broad Street, New York. The owner is Robert Astor.”
Lee knew the name, of course. “Place a tag on the number. Initiate surveillance. Grade it ‘urgent.’”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep up the good work and I’ll see to it that you receive a transfer home by year end.”
Afterward, Magnus Lee strode to the window. From his living room on the eightieth floor of the city’s newest and most sought-after residence, he enjoyed an unmatched view over a prosperous metropolis. Sparkling new skyscrapers, towering edifices of glass and steel, carved up the skyline, engineering marvels all. In between them stood more construction cranes than a man could count. He saw streets filled with new cars and an ocean crisscrossed with the wakes of a hundred freighters and ferries.
Everywhere he looked, he saw the future, and the future was money.
A last transmission.
PALANTIR.
Lee blinked rapidly again. He thought of the years of planning, the enormous investment, the hard work. Mostly, though, he thought of himself. His rise to power could not be stopped. Not now. Not when all was so close to fruition.
He regarded the name of the company he had written down and its owner.
Comstock Partners.
Robert Astor.
Lee drew a deep breath and held it inside him, seeking his center.
He had a vision of a pebble striking a placid pond. As it sank, ripples spread outward toward the shore. Concentric circles expanding one after another.
The pebble had struck the water.
The ripples must not be allowed to reach the shore.
5
“How’d he take it?”
Alex kept her eyes on the dash as she buckled her seat belt. “I don’t know.”
“He wasn’t upset?” asked Special Agent Jim Malloy. Malloy was thirty, a three-year man who’d come to the Bureau after putting in six years with the navy, first as a diver, then as a SEAL, with two deployments under his belt.
“Oh, he’s upset. He’ll just never let you see it.” Alex checked her BlackBerry. “Anything go down while I was inside?”
“Nada. Place is silent as the grave.”
The “place” was 1254 Windermere Street in Inwood, Long Island, site of a surveillance operation Alex had mounted to look into the activities of a possible arms smuggler-or worse.
“Two days,” she said. “He’s got to come back soon.”
“Maybe he’s on vacation.”
“He might be gone, but he ain’t on vacation. You saw the pictures. He’s got to come back sometime. And when he does, we’ll be waiting to speak with him. All right, then-andiamo.”
Alex spun the car in a tight circle and pumped the accelerator to scatter some expensive Italian gravel as she left the driveway. She turned right on Further Lane toward the ocean and had the Charger doing sixty in six seconds. The estate faded from view. In the rearview, it looked like a dollhouse all lit up. Alex couldn’t get away fast enough.
Malloy caught her looking. “You really didn’t get any of it?” he asked.
Alex dropped her eyes from the mirror. “Of what?”
“It. The money. Word is you didn’t take a penny in the settlement.”
“Word is correct.”
“Nothing?”
“Nada.”
“But look at it…It’s…it’s…”
“Yes, it is a beautiful home with a beautiful view and beautiful polished gravel that he imported from a beautiful quarry in Carrara, Italy.”
“He’s a billionaire,” protested Malloy. “No one walks away from that.”
Alex laughed to herself. Her ex-the billionaire. People used the word in the same tone as messiah. “He’s no billionaire. Don’t believe everything you read.”
“But close?”
“Closer than me.”
“And so?”
Alex looked at Malloy. He was a new father with infant twin daughters at home. It was no wonder that money was a concern. “Don’t worry about me, Jimmy. I’m doing okay.”
“On a buck and a quarter a year?”
“A buck fifty. I’m an SSA now.”
“That and a dime will buy you a double latte. It’s Manhattan.”
“He takes care of Katie. School, sports, vacations, all of it. The apartment in the city’s in her name.”
“Still…how could you let that go?”
“Easy. I don’t want anything to do with him. Don’t you see? I take a cent of his money, I’m still Mrs. Robert Astor. That’s over, Jimmy. I’m Supervisory Special Agent Alex Forza.”
“That’s an expensive name.”
“Worth every fuckin’ penny.”
Malloy laughed, but she could see that he didn’t get it. Money. Alex hated everything about it. Extending an arm, she activated the GPS and looked at the directions to Inwood. “Forty minutes. I say we make it in thirty.”
Malloy grasped the armrest. “Shit.”
“Twenty-nine minutes, forty seconds,” said Alex later as she guided the Dodge off the Long Island Expressway and onto the broad, potholed boulevards of Inwood.
In the passenger seat, Malloy had turned an interesting shade of green. “Must be a record.”
“Thought you SEALs were used to this kind of thing.”
“I didn’t like the helo flights either,” said Malloy. “But at least I could take Dramamine.”
“Fresh out.”
Alex drove up Atlantic Avenue and turned onto Windermere Street, slowing as she approached the rendezvous point. It was a street of single-family clapboard houses. Waist-high chain-link fences enclosed front and back yards. She lowered the window. The bracing scent of fresh salt air was gone, replaced by those of jet fuel and brackish water. Inwood was a shithole and it had the smell to go with it. She pulled to the curb behind a van parked a block up.
The time was 12:50. She waited, letting the engine tick down, her eyes running up and down the road. No late-night dog walkers. Sparse traffic. A few lights burned in upstairs windows. Except for a police siren a few streets over, the neighborhood was asleep.
She left the car, walked to the van, and knocked twice on the window. “And so?” she asked when it had rolled down.
“Nothing,” said the driver. “I’m telling you the guy has flown the coop.”
“Maybe,” she said. She thought of the picture. Of the olive green crate with the yellow markings and the foreign alphabet. She thought of what was inside.
“What do you want to do?” asked the driver.
“We wait,” she said.
6
Monday morning traffic was a bitch.
Bobby Astor surveyed the line in front of him and shook his head. The Hamptons were done. Ten years ago, he could zip out to the house on a Friday afternoon without breaking a sweat and leave early Monday morning to be back in the office by eight. No more. Fridays worked fine, but the return leg was a bear. This morning was a perfect example. After a straight shot out of Amagansett, past Southampton, and across Long Island, he’d been stuck on the far side of the East River, circling, for twenty minutes.
“How much longer they keeping us in the pattern?” he asked.