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Eatwell grinned. Jagmetti was smooth. He had done his homework. He knew which buttons to push.

“How, exactly, do you propose to feed information to N-tel?”

“You wouldn’t need to worry about that.”

“What do you mean I wouldn’t have to worry?”

“Cheyenne is Cannondale’s first real foray into Europe,” Jagmetti said. “He may understand business. He may understand the North American market, maybe even Asia, but it has never been clear to me that he really understands Europe beyond his Austrian ski holidays and Mediterranean sailing trips. Like most American businessmen, the further he gets away from home, the less confident he becomes.”

“You may be right about that,” Eatwell said.

“I’ve seen it play out before.”

Eatwell was pensive. A plate of gravalax with capers and onions appeared at their table, along with some grainy bread. Jagmetti delicately spread butter on the bread, placed a thin slice of the fish on top of it, and took a bite. It was his way of letting Eatwell mull over the wisdom that he had just imparted.

“So what’s your motivation here, Jagmetti?” Eatwell asked, throwing back a bolt of vodka.

“Money, and boredom, I guess. Helping people fix problems staves off the boredom.”

“Well, that’s just splendid. I’m about to put my faith in a gentleman whose enthusiasm for helping me land on my feet isn’t greed or vengeance, it’s boredom.”

“That, and a dislike for people like Cannondale. Besides, boredom isn’t an awful motivator, is it?”

“Ok then, Jagmetti. Here are the ground rules. We never had this conversation.”

“Done.”

“Whatever you do, you do on your own time and in manner that you deem fitting.”

“Done.”

“We never meet in person again.”

“Fine, although that is unfortunate.”

Eatwell raised his hand for another vodka. “What strange bedfellows we are, Jagmetti,” he said, raising his empty glass in an awkward toast.”

“Indeed.”

There was a certain resonance to it. Men chained together in the hull of a creaky, Roman ship, tethered not so much to the instrument of their burden as to one another — hopelessly rowing somewhere, anywhere, because the alternative, death, was not an option.

“You are all condemned men. We keep you alive to serve this ship.

Row well, and live,” the voice boomed from Braun’s TV.

It could have been the refrain of any of the sonofabitches Braun had come across on the trading floor at any bank on Wall Street. But on this particular evening it was Arrius, the hard-nosed Roman officer who kept the slave galley running in Ben Hur.
Goddam, Heston could act
, Braun thought to himself as he sipped a Diet Coke on his couch. Arrius had summed up a lot of things – row or be thrown overboard.

The testosterone of Wall Street occasionally got on Braun’s nerves, but he put up with it because it paid. Hell, who was he kidding? He had bought into it. Like just about every other guy on the Street, he was biding his time until he arrived at his “number,” his magic “fuck you” figure that would allow him to say sayonara to the Street once and for all at age 45, take up jazz guitar, buy a MiG or move to Florence to become a cobbler. He had crunched the numbers. His figure in liquid assets was $80 million.

He had come far in a short amount of time. In his early days as an analyst, it was pretty cut and dry. The bankers had their fancy lunches, ran their deals, and chaperoned Fortune 500 executives around the Street to unload vast quantities of equities in a dance that hadn’t really changed over the decades. At that stage of his career, guys like him were chained to their desks, rowing along while people threw perks their way like Knicks tickets, or seats behind home plate at Yankee Stadium, or a constant supply of hot women and invitations to dinner at bankers’ homes in the Hamptons.

Then something happened. He couldn’t quite pinpoint when it was. It could have been in ‘92 when Tim Berners Lee introduced the World Wide Web. Maybe it was in ‘94 when Andressen and Clark started Netscape, or when the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road suddenly overtook the bankers as the big swinging dicks, or when the telecom barons set off on their odyssey to build phone networks to the sky for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Who knew? Who cared? All Braun knew was that things had changed for him on a grand scale. Somewhere along the way, the bankers started coming to
him
. Somewhere along the way
he
was inviting the telecom barons to
his
boat and
his
beach house.

He had known what they wanted. He had known exactly what they wanted. They wanted him to throw a little positive coverage their way. They wanted him to keep the good times rolling. They wanted him to verify that it truly was a new world order and they were shaping it with their bold, maverick moves into a cyber frontier that promised to create the kind of better, faster, more nimble world that human beings everywhere deserved.

The companies he had written about in the 90s were full of promise. They were so far out on the cutting edge that he occasionally thought it ridiculous to even attach quantifiable measures to them. It was game-changing stuff. No one ever tried to put a price tag on democracy, or freedom, or peace.
How could they?
he used to think to himself.
Wasn’t it equally unrealistic to slap a price tag on the impending possibilities that the new technologies would offer? Wasn’t it silly to assume that by crunching numbers and pulling together spreadsheets one could even hope to quantify what the future held – a future based on clean technologies, brain power, and meritocracy?

For a brief period of time in the later part of the 20
^th
century, Braun and his clients had made long-term bets that would liberate humanity from the soul-sapping yoke of doing things the way they had always been done, and nobody was going to tell them otherwise. Then the bottom fell out. But it didn’t have to stay that way. Sure, he knew history never fully repeated itself, but an echo wasn’t out of the question. He remained confident that the market was about to awake from its slumber, and when it did, he was going to be damn sure that he was there.

Braun turned his attention back again to the movie. Judah had won the chariot race, Pontius Pilate had commended him for “a great victory,” Messala had waved off the doctor’s amputation knives and hissed his last words. Now Esther was trying to temper Judah’s sustained rage against Roman tyranny.

“It was Judah Ben-Hur I loved,” Esther said. “What has become of him? You seem to be now the very thing you set out to destroy, giving evil for evil. Hatred is turning you to stone. It’s as though
you
had become Messala! I’ve lost you Judah.”

“No you haven’t,” Braun said out loud, reaching for a bowl of baby carrots that he had put out for himself. “Judah is still hot for you, don’t you worry.”

In 1626, Dutchman Peter Minuit was rumored to have bought Manhattan from its Native American inhabitants for twentyfour dollars worth of beads and trinkets. If that story is true, however, the ultimate con or deal, depending on how you choose to look at it, came 41 years later when, under the Treaty of Breda, Holland traded Manhattan to the English, in part, for a

small nutmeg producing island in the East Indies called Pulau Run. The Dutch also got Surinam out of the deal.

At that time, nutmeg wasn’t just a mace-colored seed cut out of a fleshy fruit resembling a peach; it was the world’s most valuable commodity after silver and gold, which at least partially explained the Dutch decision to give up New York.

I could use a deal like the one the British got,
Zlotnikov thought to himself as he sipped a Coke in a Moscow café. It was the sweet taste of nutmeg in the Coke that had gotten him thinking about the exchange between the Dutch and the English. He had read somewhere that Coca Cola was the biggest consumer of nutmeg in the world.
Maybe nutmeg was the secret ingredient in Coke
. Go figure.

Zlotnikov waited for a call on his cell phone from one of the drivers for a big Russian tuna named General Volskov. Volskov was the man that Riga-Tech and Jagmetti had worked with to secure the communications satellite for Cheyenne.

Zlotnikov’s cell phone went off. He had programmed his Nokia to play the Scandinavian drinking song “Helan gar” when it rang. The song reminded him of some very drunken times in Helsinki when he was in his late 20s.

It was Volskov’s people. The car would be there in a few minutes. Zlotnikov finished his Coke and thought about coffee-colored women on warm islands where nutmeg was sprinkled on everything.

***

Hayden sat alone in Benbow’s beat up, borrowed office in Brooklyn reading confidential files under a solitary light. He was pouring through background on Jagmetti, as well as General Volskov.

Jagmetti couldn’t have been more different from his parents. He won scholarships to Switzerland’s best schools, as well as to the London School of Economics. He didn’t travel much. His clients seemed to come to him. He apparently excelled at cross country skiing. Otto didn’t appear to have close friends in his life, nor did he have a woman.

General Volskov was a renowned tough guy. He had a background similar to the siloviki – the group of former and corrupt KGB officials that Putin had surrounded himself with at the Kremlin. That said, Volskov hadn’t been fully accepted by them. He also had a weakness for swarthy young women from across the former Soviet Union. Volskov enjoyed entertaining such women in his dacha outside of Moscow.

Volskov had been entrusted with overseeing Russia’s spent nuclear fuel. The Northern Fleet’s main storage facility for nuclear waste on the Kola Peninsula was known to be leaking radioactivity, so spent fuel was being sent to Andreeva Bay on the western shore of the Litsa Fjord about 45 kilometers from the Norwegian border. Problem was, it was being stored in open concrete tanks, which were full. Spent fuel types TK-11 and TK-18 were therefore being placed on the ground in containers near the overfilled tanks. The unsecured storage of the fuel violated any number of Russian and international regulations. The fear was that if something wasn’t done before the upcoming winter, the containers could develop cracks from ice and snow, and radioactive material could leak into the Fjord.

Putin inherited the whole situation from Yeltsin, who had ignored it. Yeltsin had denied access to the area to experts from Norway and the U.S. It was not a headache Putin needed, so he put the thumb screws to Volskov to clean it up with the help of the Russian civilian nuclear inspection organization, Gosatomnadzor. Volskov had been pushing back, claiming he needed more funds, but Putin had made it clear that he would need to make do with what he had. And what galled Volskov most about the whole situation was that it was taking valuable time away from his private money-making endeavors, like using his position to help secure satellites for Western companies such as Cheyenne.

Volskov’s office was a shrine to former Soviet might. There were medals and sashes and photos of him standing proudly alongside Gorbachev, Chernenko, and Gromyko. He had a menushka doll of Ronald Reagan that got more diminutive with each layer, and a pair of Texas longhorns mounted on his wall — a gift from an American businessman who had decided to ingratiate himself to the Russians by sending over a small herd of cattle via a Federal Express jet.

Volskov was an imposing figure at six feet, three inches tall. Slim and polished with silvery hair, he had a booming voice.

“Sadityes, pozhalusta,” Volskov said, offering Zlotnikov a chair. “Moscow can be hot during the summer, no?” He wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

“Too hot, General. I’ve come to talk about the satellite. When do you think we can get it up? The American wants it up.”

“Next week,” Volskov said. “This American — Cannondale. What is his situation?”

“We usually communicate with him through his people. He tends to keep his distance.”

“A good businessman, no?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t worry about a thing. How are things at Riga-Tech?”

“Not bad. The officers of the company applaud the government’s recent decision to increase satellite launches.”

“Yes, I bet they do,” Volskov said, slightly annoyed by Zlotnikov’s sycophantic air. “Are we done, here?”

“We are. I wish you a good weekend, sir. How do you plan to spend it?”

The way Zlotnikov said it made Volskov shoot him a glare that was perhaps too revealing. Then again, maybe it was just an honest question.

“With my family, of course, in the country.”

“Ah, it’s a good time of year to be in the country.”

“Indeed, it is. Good luck to you. You will keep me informed, no?”

Zlotnikov showed himself out. It was a Friday. Volskov would indeed keep his promise to meet his family in the country for the weekend, but not before a little dalliance with a 17-year-old Uzbek girl who had recently been introduced to the good general.

Roughly 8,000 man-made objects larger than a softball circle the globe at any given moment. From deep inside of central Kazakhstan, one of the most remote places on the planet, number 8,001 was about to be introduced. The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was built in 1955 on a barren steppe at the Tyuratum junction on the right bank of the Syr Darya River where herds of wild horses and desert camels roam. Tyuratum was originally a water pump station on the railroad linking Moscow and Tashkent, an unlikely birthplace for the space race.

Steeped in secrecy, the Russians had given the facility multiple names over the years to throw off the Americans — Zarya, Leninsky, Leninsk, Zvezdograd. Yelstin was the first to call it “Baikonur.” In an odd bit of post-Cold War irony, the Kazakhs now claimed rights to the facility and charged the Russians $115 million a year in rent.

Baikonur, the oldest space launch facility in the world, was beginning to show its age. Paint chipped off buildings. Above all, the staff lacked the kind of camaraderie and fire that they’d had during the Space Race. Ideological verve had given way to commerce. Sputnik 1 — the first satellite — was launched from Baikonur. The rocket that carried Yuri Gagarin lifted off here. The founding components of the International Space Station left from this plot of land, and yet on this particular day, the minions who worked inside the facility saw it was merely a site where a communications satellite called “Cody” was getting primed for some rich American guy with a company in the Netherlands. General Volskov had come through with the satellite, just as he had promised.