The Prince of Risk Read online

  Penelope Evans lived at 1133 Elm, a two-story Colonial set well back from the road. A circular drive led down a slope to the house. A Range Rover was parked near the front door. A flagpole stood in the center of a broad lawn. On this fine day, no flags were hoisted.

  “Looks like she’s home,” said Astor.

  “Give her another call,” said Sullivan.

  For the past ten minutes, Astor had been calling to alert Evans of their impending arrival. She had not answered. He was worried. Sullivan drew the Audi up behind the parked car and killed the engine. Astor opened the door. “Wait here.”

  “Sorry, boss, you got no say in this one.” Sullivan climbed out of the car, moving like a man twenty years younger. The two men walked to the front door. A welcome mat said “Keep Calm and Drink Scotch.” Astor had been right about the sense of humor. He knocked and met Sullivan’s gaze as they listened for a response inside the home. He knocked again. No one came to the door.

  “What do you think?”

  “Nothing good,” said Sullivan.

  Astor retreated down the walk and approached the Range Rover. He noted a parking sticker for 12 Broad on the windshield. “It’s her car,” he said. He looked back at the house. The silence he’d remarked upon earlier no longer pleased him. To his ear, it wasn’t quiet. It was deadly still. “I think the case could be made for us to assume that Miss Evans is in danger. Isn’t there some law allowing us to…”

  “Break in?” suggested Sullivan.

  “Gain access to administer aid.”

  “She could be at a friend’s house or taking a walk. Maybe she has two cars.”

  “Bullshit, bullshit, and bullshit,” said Astor. “She knew we were coming.”

  “I’m just making you aware of the situation before we do anything we might regret.”

  Astor crossed the lawn and tramped through a flowerbed fronting a bay window. The curtains were not drawn, and he had a clear view into Evans’s living room and past it, into the foyer. The house appeared clean and orderly. There was no sign of activity within. He placed his ear to the glass. He caught a distant rumble that might be voices.

  “Anything?” asked Sullivan.

  “Maybe something from upstairs. TV or radio.”

  Astor continued around the side of the house, opening a latched gate and sliding past the garbage cans, then walking another few feet to the back yard. A portable sprinkler attached to a garden hose irrigated the lawn. The grass was waterlogged and soggy. Water spurted from a leak at the head of the hose, flooding a 10-square-foot expanse of lawn.

  “Someone isn’t worried about their water bill,” said Sullivan.

  Astor jumped onto the red-brick veranda at the rear of the house. The sliding doors opened easily. “Hello,” he called, sticking his head inside. “Miss Evans?”

  Sullivan pushed past him, his service pistol drawn and held at the ready. “Stay behind me,” he commanded. “And don’t touch a thing.”

  “Whatever you say, detective.”

  Sullivan passed through the dining room and into the foyer. The air inside the house was warm and close. Clipped voices drifted from upstairs.

  “Miss Evans? Penelope? This is Robert Astor. Are you home?”

  No one replied.

  Sullivan started up the stairs, the pistol held stiff-armed in front of him. Astor followed at his shoulder. It was the television that Astor had heard through the window. With every step, the voice of a news commentator grew louder. The master bedroom was situated across a landing at the top of the stairs. The wood floor groaned beneath their steps.

  Sullivan halted at the doorway. “Oh boy.”

  Astor looked into the room and immediately turned away.

  Ten steps away, a woman with long brown hair lay on the floor next to the bed, eyes wide open. She wore only panties and a brassiere. A thin line of blood trickled from a knife wound to her chest.

  “Is she… ?” asked Astor.

  Sullivan knelt down and felt her neck. He nodded, then looked more closely at the wound. “Whoever did this was some kind of pro.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look. There’s relatively little blood. This guy managed to get the knife into her and puncture her heart so quickly it instantly stopped pumping. That takes practice.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Stay put.” Sullivan checked the bathroom and closets, then ducked into the hall. “No one here.”

  Astor stepped inside the bedroom. An open suitcase sat on the bed, half filled with clothing. He looked at the television and noted that it was tuned to CNBC. A magazine lay half hidden beneath the bed covers. He tugged at the corner and saw that it was a professional journal titled Information Technology Today. The journal was opened to an article about something called “application software frameworks in the energy management sector”: “Our platforms allow for building and managing complex monitoring, control, and automation solutions…”

  Astor put down the journal, uninterested. He returned his gaze to the dead woman. “Is it her?”

  Sullivan picked up a framed photograph on the dresser and compared the radiantly smiling woman to the corpse. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  Sullivan took hold of Penelope Evans’s body, feeling her arms and neck. “She’s still warm. Less than an hour.”

  “We could’ve gotten here.”

  “And it could have been us lying there beside her. Whoever did this was good. He got into the house, came upstairs, and killed her without her even knowing he was here. You heard those floorboards. They squeak if an ant walks over them. This guy is a phantom. He floated in here.” Sullivan headed to the door. “We should go.”

  Astor grabbed him by the arm. “I think you mean we should call the police.”

  “It’s too late to do her any good. I’ll make a call from the city.”

  “We can’t just walk away. She deserves better.”

  “She’s dead. She doesn’t deserve anything except us trying to find who did this.”

  Astor released his grip. “I’m sure we can explain things…”

  “You don’t have time for that. Mr. Shank needs you back in the office. Call the Greenwich PD and you’ll be lucky to be home by midnight. There’s a bounty on rich assholes like you these days.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “You think anyone would holler if you spent a few days in the cooler?” Sullivan leaned closer, and when he spoke, it was with the tempered voice of experience. “I spent my whole life as a cop. I know what cops can do. You take this to the police, you’re going to be the lead story on the national evening news. Tomorrow morning your picture’s going to be on the front page of the Post with some kind of headline making it look like you’re the prime suspect. It’ll make you nostalgic for that last gem they ran in the Post about you and your girlfriends at the beach. You want press like that? You want it now?”

  Astor gave Sullivan a hard look. He was pretty smart for a dumb cop. “I’m not naive. If I explain that we’re looking into my father’s death…”

  “Look at her. Look!” Sullivan forced Astor to step closer and gaze at the body. “She’s hardly wearing a scrap of clothing. One of those cops you have so much faith in is going to pocket a couple of C-notes and allow a photographer to get a shot of her. This stuff sells papers.”

  “Even so, we need to stay.”

  Sullivan looked at his watch. “From what you’ve told me, I think we can assume that whoever killed your father had a hand in killing this woman. You want to help both of them, start looking around for clues. You can’t do anyone any good from inside a police station, can you?”

  Astor considered this. “No, I don’t suppose I can.”

  “You got ten minutes.”

  26

  Concealed in a grove of birch trees on a hilltop across the road, the monk watched the house.

  He’d known that Astor and Sullivan were coming. He had been listening as they drove from the city. He was
listening now. He could hear them speaking, though their voices were muffled and at times indistinct. This was to be expected, as Astor carried his phone in his pocket.

  Wind rustled the branches and made the sound of a flowing river. For a moment he knew serenity. The feeling took him back to his years at the temple. He was there again, a shaven-headed boy running barefoot across the cold stone floors, bowing before his masters, waiting for his commands.

  He had arrived at age six, a thin, weak boy. The master had asked him one question: “Are you prepared to eat bitter?”

  “Yes,” he responded. And so the training had begun.

  For twelve years he rose at dawn and went to bed at midnight. He studied and meditated. He did as he was told. But mostly he trained. Three hours of calisthenics and physical exercise every morning. Four hours of wushu, or martial arts, in the afternoon. His discipline was Baji kung fu, the most rigorous of the schools. He trained until his fists bled and his legs would not carry him. He suffered. He did not complain. He ate bitter.

  And in the end, he was awarded the monk’s orange robe.

  But that was not to last.

  For he had desires that life in a temple could not satisfy. Desires not appropriate for a man or a monk. Not even a warrior monk.

  “Ten minutes,” he heard someone inside the house say. It was the older man, with white hair and red face.

  He considered his instructions. It would be so easy to return to the home and finish the business. He knew the value of cleaning one’s trail. He saw himself moving up the stairs, his bare feet caressing the warped wooden floorboards, moving effortlessly, silently. Floating. He loved the feel of the knife in his hand, its weight, its promise of death quickly delivered.

  At the temple they had taught him the way of the fist and the staff and, later, of more exotic instruments: nunchakus, swords, pikes, and lances. In countless shows and exhibitions, he had thrilled audiences with his mastery of them all. No one moved more quickly, more elegantly, more forcefully. But exhibitions were not enough. The warrior monk had wished to put his skills to more practical use.

  It had started when he was sixteen and his blood ran hot for the first time. He would leave the temple at midnight. Even then, he walked so quietly the master could not hear him. He would roam the hills and pass through surrounding villages. He would peer into homes until he found a suitable choice, inevitably a girl, young, innocent, unsuspecting. He would enter and stand beside her. He would wait until his heartbeat matched her own and he knew serenity.

  He was invisible.

  He was silent.

  He was death.

  The warrior monk stared at the home. Fingers that could crush a larynx caressed the knife’s handle. It would be so easy. They would not know he was among them until it was too late.

  It was not to be.

  Above all, he was an obedient brother.

  The warrior monk called 911.

  “Hello,” he said, in an English an American would swear was his own. “I’m walking my dog and I saw some men breaking into the house at 1133 Elm.”

  He hung up before they could ask his name.

  Five minutes later, he heard the sirens approaching.

  He turned and retraced his path up the hill through the birch trees. He walked as he had been taught so many years before. His feet touched the leaves but left no track.

  He did not make a sound.

  He floated.

  27

  Astor stepped over Penelope Evans and leaned onto the bed to pick up the magazine.

  “Hey!” shouted Sullivan. “What did I say about not touching anything? Use a handkerchief, or better yet, just leave things be.”

  Astor pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to retrieve the magazine. Information Technology Today was not exactly what he figured a thirty-five-year-old woman read in her spare time. The magazine lay open to an article titled “Next-Generation Solutions for Connecting Devices.” The first paragraph discussed a company in Reston, Virginia, called Britium. It began, “This cutting-edge software has fundamentally changed the way devices and systems connect, integrate, and interoperate with each other and the enterprise.” It got worse from there. He skimmed the remaining pages with an eye toward one word: Palantir. He put down the magazine disappointed.

  A stack of paperbacks was piled high on the night table. Most were crime fiction by best-selling authors. The books confirmed his first thought. She did not read Information Technology Today for fun.

  Astor poked his head into the bathroom. He saw nothing of interest and retreated through the bedroom and turned into the hall. He found Penelope Evans’s office on the opposite side of the corridor. Thick curtains stifled the daylight. A lamp burned on the desk, illuminating a raft of papers. In the room, it was still night.

  Astor approached the desk cautiously, keeping in mind Sullivan’s admonition not to touch anything. He had never been arrested, but as a registered representative of the New York Stock Exchange and a principal of the National Association of Security Dealers, his fingerprints were on file and easily retrievable. Again he wrapped his fingers before thumbing through the stacks. There were articles downloaded from a variety of newspapers and periodicals, the subjects ranging from the latest batch of Silicon Valley startups to the growing influence of sovereign wealth funds on Wall Street to local concern over the sale of a chunk of Icelandic soil to foreign buyers.

  Iceland?

  Astor sorted through a stack of annual reports perched on the corner of the desk. The first few came from high-tech companies listed on the NASDAQ. There was a manufacturer of silicon wafers, a provider of routers and switches—something that would be classified as “Net infrastructure”—and an aerospace company involved in the manufacture and launch of communications satellites. He thumbed through the first few pages of each. Again he was unable to find any mention of Palantir. Nor did he find anything that struck him as sinister or alarming, or that in any way might be related to his father’s murder. In fact, the reports had nothing in common except the fact that they all concerned newly listed companies, the oldest having gone public a year earlier.

  Thinking this might be the thread, he checked to see if all shared a common underwriter. They did not. A dozen different banks had participated in bringing the companies to market. He knew the underwriters to be upstanding firms.

  Astor continued checking the annual reports, if less studiously. The emphasis was on technology, but there were more traditional industries as well, and these companies were not exclusively American. There was a South African mining company, an Australian maker of heavy equipment—tractors, trucks, backhoes, and the like—and a well-known German manufacturer of electronic components, primarily high-fidelity audio and communications equipment. It was only as he replaced these that he noted that the reports dated back several years. The most recent came from 2008.

  He looked again at the German electronics company’s report and remembered that the organization had been taken private by a well-known private equity firm several years back. Other than that, nothing.

  A laptop sat open on the desk. Astor clicked the mouse and the screen blossomed to life. Another article, not about “next-generation connecting devices” but a piece from the Financial Times about the Flash Crash of May 2010, which occurred when a breakdown in the orderly matching of buy and sell orders caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plummet a thousand points in minutes, only to regain two-thirds of the loss minutes later.

  “The cause of the sudden precipitous decline had been thought to be a single faulty sell order that in turn triggered computer-driven programs to rush thousands of sell orders to market. A new analysis suggests that the cause might have stemmed not from the first massive sell order but from an error in the New York Stock Exchange’s proprietary trading platform…”

  Astor consulted the laptop’s History panel, scouring the list of websites Evans had most recently visited. Not annual reports this time, but corporate websi
tes. A manufacturer of silicon wafers and another of microchips, both stalwarts of Silicon Valley. A petroleum company. An American glass manufacturer with ties to the computer industry. They might be a crosscut of the NASDAQ. Tech heavy, to be sure, but not exclusively.

  Still no mention of Palantir. Still no common thread.

  Sullivan poked his head into the room. “Time’s up.”

  “That wasn’t ten minutes,” said Astor.

  “Who cares about ten minutes? Don’t you got ears?”

  It was then that Astor heard the siren. The wail came and went, still far away.

  “Who called?”

  “My guess? The killer. He’s watching the house.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s a no-brainer. He doesn’t want us to find anything.”

  “I need a second,” said Astor.

  “We don’t have a second,” said Sullivan, taking hold of his arm and yanking him away from the desk.

  Astor wrested free and returned to gather up the annual reports as well as the articles Evans had printed out. “You said look for clues. These are clues.”

  “I said look. Not steal. That’s obstruction.”

  “I’ll let you explain once we’re arrested.”

  Astor brushed past the detective and continued down the hall to Evans’s bedroom. Something in the first few paragraphs of the article Evans had been reading had stuck in Astor’s mind. He wasn’t sure what had caught his attention, only that it might be important. “Get that magazine on the bed,” he said. “My hands are full.”

  Sullivan stood frozen in the doorway, as if nailed to the floor. “We don’t have time.”

  “Just do it.”

  “But—”

  “I need it.”

  Sullivan swore under his breath, then pried his feet loose and retrieved the magazine.

  The sirens were louder now. Not one but two police cars.

  Astor stopped at the bottom of the stairs, frightened, unsure whether to leave the house the same way they’d come. Sullivan nearly knocked him to the ground in his rush for the front door. “Forget the back,” he said. “Move.”