The Prince of Risk (3 page)

O
utside, Astor snaked through the crush of guests to the bar. “Vodka,” he said to the bartender. “Make it a double.”

“Any brand in mind?”

“The kind that’s eighty proof.”

The bartender filled a glass with ice, poured in a few fingers of vodka, then placed the bottle next to it. Astor picked up the glass and walked toward the guest villa. Several people approached to congratulate him on the dive. He ignored them. He was done talking for the night.

Inside the guest villa, he changed back into his clothes. He picked up his phone and saw that it was already filling with voice mail. First was a text message from a number he didn’t recognize. Astor was careful about his privacy. He gave his number only to friends whose own numbers he catalogued. The text was from a local area code. Something about the number rang a bell. He opened the message.

One word.

PALANTIR.

It meant nothing to him.

The message had arrived at 11:07, more than an hour earlier. He placed his thumb on the Delete key, then changed his mind. Alex had said that his father had died around eleven. He called the number. After seven rings, the call went to voice mail.

A smoky, bourbon-aged baritone spoke. He had not heard the voice in five years. Even so, it took only a syllable to make the hair on his arms stand to attention and send a current of undistilled dread from head to toe.

“You’ve reached Edward Astor. Leave a message.”

Astor picked up the glass of vodka, walked to the pool, and poured it in.

“Hey!” he shouted as he jumped onto the diving board and walked to the end. “Everyone, listen up.”

No one paid him any attention. He stuck his pinkie and index finger into his mouth and whistled. The music skidded to a halt. The guests turned his way.

“Party’s over.”

T
wo thousand miles to the northeast, the sun was rising on a desolate, windswept plain guarded on three sides by the youngest mountains on the planet. Heather and scrub rose in scattered stands. Vapor from sulfur hot springs seeped into the air. It was a land that time had forgotten. The region was known as Aska and it lay in the center of the North Atlantic island nation of Iceland.

Until a year ago, Aska had been the exclusive domain of ecotourists and wilderness enthusiasts. Visitors to the island flocked to the famed Ring of Fire, the scenic road that skirted the country’s dramatic coastline. Locals preferred the southern coast, where temperatures could be counted on to be a few degrees warmer than inland. With the nearest road a three-day walk, only the hardiest men and women ventured so far into the island’s interior.

All that changed when an international investment group purchased a 200-square-kilometer tract in the region and announced its intention to build an upscale eco-resort. Pictures of the planned resort were printed in the
Morgunbladid,
the nation’s oldest newspaper. Opposition was vocal and immediate. Icelanders had a long history of distrusting foreigners. It was not the resort itself they minded. It was what lay below it. Ceding valuable gas and mineral rights to a group whose allegiance was unknown would be imprudent at best.

More immediate concerns won the day. The global banking crisis of 2008 had devastated Iceland’s economy, wiping out the country’s banks and saddling its citizens with a whopping debt of 60,000 euros per person. A project that would inject hard currency into the economy was a godsend. Prudence be damned.

Questions about the investors’ origins were answered perfunctorily. The group was domiciled in the Cayman Islands and maintained executive offices in New York and Singapore. The primary shareholders were impressively capitalized corporations with lofty-sounding names like Excelsior Holdings and Sterling Partners. The sole executive to visit the island was a tall, dark-haired man named Magnus Lee.

Lee was a mystery from the start. From afar, he appeared Asian. He had an Asian’s black hair and a certain nimbleness about his step. But there was nothing Asian about his size and the breadth of his shoulders. Close up, one couldn’t help but stare at his blue eyes, which one smitten woman likened to her country’s glaciers. He spoke English like the Queen, and was heard speaking the czar’s Russian to a fishing executive from St. Petersburg. Talk about his nationality was short-lived. Icelanders knew a gentleman when they saw one. Most important, he had money. Barrels and barrels of money.

One year later, the first phase of the resort was complete. A road had been built. Grounds had been cleared. A billboard showing a color representation of the finished structures held pride of place atop a rise of the razor-sharp pumice. An iron fence topped with concertina wire encircled the building site. Yet of the hotel itself there was no sign. Inside the fence was only a single low-slung, windowless concrete edifice. And next to it (and far more impressive) a freestanding satellite dish.

Construction would end there.

Mr. Magnus Lee did not intend to build an upscale resort, eco or otherwise. He had purchased the land to listen. From the remote plains of Aska, he could maintain the clearest contact with a network of surveillance satellites positioned in geosynchronous orbit above the Northern Hemisphere.

At 3:07 local time, a chime had sounded on the console of the lone technician working at the site. The chime indicated an intercept of a communications device under surveillance and graded urgent. In this instance, the device was a cellular phone. The number appeared on the screen, followed by its designation, Target Alpha. Procedure required the technician to notify his master at once.

“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.

“H
ow’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.

M
onday 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.

“We’re next in line. Just waiting for the pad to clear.”

Astor loosened his shoulder harness. It was a gorgeous day, with blue sky as far as the eye could see. Looking south, he enjoyed a clear view to Atlantic City. Through the Perspex canopy of the Aérospatiale AS350 “Squirrel,” he counted four helicopters circling the Downtown Manhattan Heliport.

Astor shot a glance at the tablet in his lap displaying a summary of world financial markets. Europe was off 2 percent on fears that the incident in Washington had been a terrorist attack. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng had dropped 4 percent before rebounding. China had its own problems, and the deaths of three American financial luminaries would have no effect, either positively or negatively, on them. Futures on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and the S&P 500 were sharply lower.

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.

After that, it was just father and son. Astor went off to prep school in seventh grade and never really returned home again. He saw his father on vacations, but briefly, in segmented, scheduled bursts, never more than three or four days at a time. These included a few days at the beginning and end of summer, wedged in between ten-week stays at sleep-away camp in Maine. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break involved travel to resorts in places such as Vail, St. Moritz, and Bermuda where outdoor activities served to maintain a respectful separation between the two.

It was better that way.

The trouble began at fourteen. Astor was expelled from his first school in ninth grade, his second in tenth, and his third in eleventh. It was never a question of intelligence. When he applied himself, he received top marks. And of course there was the question of the PSAT, on which he earned a perfect score, and the fact that he was named a National Merit Finalist. The problem, his teachers agreed, was motivation, or rather the lack of it.

Astor begged to differ, but he was in no mood to share his family secrets with strangers.

It required the intercession of his father and a considerable donation to the school fund to find him a place for senior year. He made it all of two weeks before being dismissed for “unbecoming conduct,” namely running a sports book out of his dorm room. Alcohol and marijuana were also found. The fact that ten teachers, including the school’s chaplain, were his largest clients was not brought up at his adjudication.

And so that was the end. At seventeen, Astor asked to be declared an emancipated minor. Broke and free of all family ties, he graduated from a public school in western New Hampshire, where he lived with the family of a close friend.

So why me?
he wondered, staring at the message. If his father had no other immediate family, he had many close friends, most of whom held positions of considerable power. Surely they were better placed to find out what
Palantir
meant. Why reach out to a son he hadn’t spoken to in five years?

The question stayed with him as the helicopter banked and the sapphire surface of the Atlantic Ocean enveloped the windscreen. The radio squawked and the air traffic controller gave them clearance to land.

“I have the stick,” said Astor.

“The stick is yours,” said his pilot.

Astor lifted the collective and brought the chopper over the landing pad, nose up, and the wheels touched down firmly.