The Prince of Risk (20 page)

M
ichael Grillo did not like to be kept waiting. The time was ten past nine. He stood beneath the awning of a deli at the corner of 61st and Third Avenue, enjoying the shade. He had a rule about this kind of thing: never smoke more than three cigarettes while waiting for a contact. Staying in one place too long put you in jeopardy of being spotted. Just as dangerous, it signaled desperation to your contact. Grillo dropped cigarette number two and ground it beneath his heel.

He gazed up the block to the corner of 62nd Street, his eyes focusing on the entry to a steel pier and glass office building. His contact worked on the tenth floor of the building, behind a door bearing the words
Johnson, Higby, and Mather, Attorneys at Law.
His contact was not a lawyer. The names on the door were a front. His contact was a twenty-five-year man with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, and the offices of Johnson, Higby, and Mather housed an Agency collections office engaged in the analysis of foreign intelligence.

Grillo checked his watch for the third time in ten minutes. He felt for his Shermans. Instead, he took out his phone and looked at his e-mail. Nothing new had arrived since his contact at the credit bureau had put him onto Edward Astor’s scent an hour before.

“Astor has a credit score of seven sixty-one,” the contact had reported.

“Won’t do him much good now,” said Grillo. “Just tell me what cards he carried.”

“Visa, MasterCard, American Express, the usual. Pays off his balance every month.”

“His salary is listed at five million a year. He can afford it. Just forward me the card numbers.”

After receiving the information, Grillo phoned the credit card companies, specifically the individuals who headed the companies’ antifraud departments. As with the nation’s phone carriers, he had spent considerable time and effort cultivating contacts. Unauthorized sharing of customer records was a felonious offense punishable by hefty fines and prison time. His approaches were made in person and with discretion. On occasion he’d been forced to call on a person’s patriotism, meaning that he’d misrepresented himself as an agent for a United States government law enforcement agency. If his requests were denied he had alternate means at his disposal, namely a crafty, cunning, and completely amoral band of hackers based in Shanghai. But they were a last resort, and not to be trusted.

Copies of Edward Astor’s charges began landing in Grillo’s secure servers soon afterward. By noon he would possess a comprehensive record of all charges the late CEO of the New York Stock Exchange had made over the past ninety days. Grillo was interested not in what he had purchased but in studying the location of his charges to track Astor’s movements.

Grillo’s phone rumbled in his pocket. He looked at the caller ID and answered. “That was quick.”

“You told me to impress you,” said the female executive at the nation’s largest phone carrier. “Check your mail. Just sent over his last three months of calls, including correspondents’ names and addresses.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Prove it.”

Grillo brought up the message on his screen as they spoke. It was apparent that Edward Astor had spent an enormous amount of time on the phone. Page after page was filled with numbers and the names of the individuals or corporations to whom the numbers were registered. He scrolled to the last entries, detailing calls made to and from Edward Astor’s phone on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. He recognized a few names as belonging to well-known corporate supremos. His eye fixed immediately on a call placed to Edward Astor on Friday morning at 9:18. Duration, seventeen seconds. The caller had no name and no address. To Grillo’s eye, that meant the call had probably been made from a throwaway, a cell phone purchased from any corner vendor with a prepaid number of minutes. It might even be from Palantir.

“I don’t suppose the usual will do,” he said.

“I don’t suppose it will.”

“Double, then.”

“Deal.”

Grillo hung up. He accessed his banking app and transferred $10,000 from his work fund to the woman’s numbered account at a discreet Dutch bank in the Cayman Islands. He sent a copy to a secure address he’d set up for Bobby Astor.

Grillo fished out his third Sherman. As he flicked the Zippo and brought the flame toward the cigarette, he saw his contact emerge from the building. He replaced the unlit cigarette in its box, entered the deli, and headed to the refrigerated foods section in the rear. A minute later a portly, bald African-American dressed in khakis, button-down shirt, and club tie sidled up next to him.

“America’s greatest hope,” said Grillo.

“Fuckin’ A,” said Jeb Washburn. “Bring it.”

“There is such a thing as dry cleaning.”

“I appreciate that coming from a man who’s wearing my annual salary. Those Ferragamos you got on?”

“You noticed.”

“I noticed they run six bills in the Bloomingdale’s shoe department.”

“That’s why I left our government’s service.”

Washburn picked up a package of sliced ham and pretended to look for the sell-by date. “You better be careful, or you’re not going to be around to enjoy those fancy Eyetalian loafers, Mr. Grill-O. You’re barking up some very dangerous trees.”

“What can you tell me?”

Washburn put down the ham. “About Palantir? A little and that’s already too much. Let’s get out of here. I don’t like being penned in like this.”

Grillo and Washburn left the deli and headed down 61st. Foot traffic was light, and the steady stream of cars passing enabled them to speak without fear of being overheard.

“Like I said,” Washburn began, “I only know a little, and that’s all I want to know. Don’t suppose you want to tell me what this is about?”

Grillo shook his head.

“Fair enough,” said Washburn. “All right then, here it is. Palantir’s some kind of far-out software platform that collects information from about a trillion sources off the Internet and analyzes it for possible threat scenarios.”

“Sounds like a straightforward data-collection tool.”

“Nothing straightforward about it. It started as one of the crazy-assed projects financed by DARPA, but at some point the government lost control of it.”

DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “Did DARPA cut the funding?”

“On the contrary. They wanted to double-down. It was better than anything they expected.”

“Better?”

“More powerful. It was too good at what it did.”

“And that is?”

“Predict future events. A real-life Eight Ball. You remember that thing you shake and wait for the answer?” Washburn stopped and pulled Grillo into a doorway. “It was Afghanistan that did it. Palantir’s mandate was to upload and integrate all our intel over there and see if it could tell us what was going to happen. We’re talking everything from combat after-action reports to local police chiefs’ threat assessments, provincial reconstruction team reports, Agency intel—everything. Palantir just vacuumed everything up.”

“And?”

“It worked,” said Washburn. “That was the problem.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It started predicting when and where attacks would take place, the probability of Afghan troops rebelling against us, transport choke points. It was too much.”

Grillo had served a ten-month tour in the AfPak theater as a company commander with the Fifth Marines. Hellmand Province. It had been a bloody summer. “We could have used something like that.”

“Don’t you see, man? Palantir wasn’t just looking at today and tomorrow. It was looking at next month, next year—
and it told us we were going to lose
. That did not go over well at the Pentagon. No siree, Bob. The four-stars over in Virginia were not keen on a top-secret, multimillion-dollar experimental software platform that predicted that the United States of America didn’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning that conflict. They had serious blood and treasure invested.”

“But you said DARPA wanted to double-down.”

“Sure, DARPA did. They’re a bunch of mad scientists. Not a soldier in the lot. It was the men with the scrambled eggs on their covers who wanted to shut it down.”

“What happened?”

“That was the end. Goodbye, Palantir. Whoever created Palantir disappeared. Went off the grid.”

“And that’s it? No one’s heard from him since?”

“You expecting him to make contact after we dumped him?” Washburn gave him a look. “Sounds like you’ve been talking to him more recently than we have.”

Grillo pulled a grimace. It meant “No comment.”

Washburn gave him a thump on the shoulder. “I’m outta here. Any of my bosses see me talking to a rich-ass boy like yourself, they’ll think I’m pulling an Aldrich Ames.”

“In this case, I’d say it’s the opposite. You’re helping the good guys.”

“Good guys?” said Washburn. “Who are they?”

“You know who they are.”

“Maybe I do. You’re one of ’em, Grill-O. That’s the only reason I’m here.”

The two men reached the corner of Fifth Avenue and stopped before crossing, allowing the pedestrians to stream around them.

“Look, Jeb, my client would like to thank you for your services.”

“No way,” said Washburn in horror. “I do this for God and country.”

“Maybe I’ll buy you a pair of shoes. Ferragamos.”

“Buy my wife a pair. Size seven. Don’t ask me how I know.”

“You got it, Jeb.”

Washburn turned and looked Grillo in the eye. “You still smokin’ those nasty cigarettes?”

“Shermans? Yeah. Want one?”

“Hell, no. Just wondering why a smart, suave motherfucker like you wants to kill himself.” Washburn laughed. “Cigarettes ain’t bad enough, now you go asking about Palantir. Tell you something for free, Grill-O. Your days are numbered.”

T
he CH-53 Super Stallion carrying the eight members of Team Three approached the Tamondo oil rig from the south and touched down on the landing platform at 8:20 local time. The rig was a hive of activity. The night crew had four hours remaining on their shift, and the roustabouts and roughnecks could be seen scrambling among the rig’s catwalks, tending to the giant drill that turned twenty-four hours a day, bringing heavy crude to the surface. Nearly half of the sixty-five-man shift worked in confined environs deep inside the rig, where temperatures routinely hit 100 degrees and the mechanical noise was deafening. Only a few people noted the helicopter’s arrival, and they were quick to turn their heads and quicker to forget that the bird had ever arrived. Word had spread about a group of visitors inbound from Mexico. Word said to keep your eyes closed and your mouth shut. None of the crew had a problem with that. Roughnecks knew how to follow orders.

The members of Team Three jumped onto the deck. A supervisor in a hard hat and sunglasses led them to a private dining room adjacent to the chow hall. A regal spread awaited. Pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, fresh fruit, baked goods, and a variety of juices filled the buffet table. The mercenaries loaded their plates and ate quickly and without comment. They had been given instructions, too. Eat. Get in. Get out. And shut the hell up.

Thirty minutes after touching down, they returned to the landing platform and boarded the refueled helicopter. At two minutes past nine the helicopter took off and banked north toward the coast of the United States of America. At no point had anyone checked their travel documents, though technically they had arrived from a foreign country. Nor had anyone made an official notation of their presence. For all intents and purposes, Team Three had never set foot on the Tamondo rig.

Two hours later, the CH-53 landed at the Noble Energy compound in Houma, Louisiana. Team Three hit the tarmac and walked to a waiting van. Again, no travel documents were checked. No customs officials were present. What was the point? To watching eyes, the team was just another crew happy to be back on dry land after their two-week stint at sea.

Team Three was on American soil.

“W
here we headed?” asked John Sullivan.

“Cherry Hill.” Settling into the backseat, Astor caught Sullivan’s look of surprise. “You heard me. And step on it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sullivan navigated north to Delancey Street and crossed the East River on the Williamsburg Bridge before merging onto the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. At 10:15, traffic was light, and the vehicle made good time driving north, reaching I-495 in just fifteen minutes.

“Got your wheatgrass if you’re interested,” said Sullivan when the ride had smoothed.

“Screw my wheatgrass.”

Astor stared out the window glumly. How quickly they deserted the cause. At the first signs of adversity, they all fled like rats from a sinking ship. Marv had likened the firm to the
Titanic.
If he was right, the rats were the smart ones, and Astor was the fool rushing around the deck mustering the band to play one last waltz. He felt a blackness nipping at his heels. It wasn’t fear. It was doubt, which was more ill-defined and thus more dangerous.

On an early trip to Paris with Alex, he had visited the sculpture garden decorated with many larger-than-life artworks by Rodin. One black marble piece showed a powerful, confident man poised in reflection, his countenance gripped by a terrible uncertainty. Gripped by doubt. It wasn’t audacity that killed a trader. It was doubt. Doubt led to indecision, and only the decisive survived on the Street.

Astor played back the conversation with Longfellow and Goodchild. Their reasoning was sound. China was posturing. Some sort of political gamesmanship was occurring, but in the end Astor was right. And Magnus Lee had confirmed it.

Screw doubt.

“I know it,” said Astor aloud, banging his fist on the armrest.

“Everything okay, boss?”

“What?” Astor shook himself back to the real world. Leaning forward, he clutched his driver’s shoulder and gave it a friendly squeeze. “Yeah, Sully. Never better.”

Cherry Hill sat on top of a broad grassy knoll overlooking the expanse of Oyster Bay. It was an old Victorian pile built in the 1880s, when the Roosevelt family had lived nearby on Sagamore Hill. Over the years each owner had added on a room or a terrace or a porch until it resembled a sprawling hotel more than a home. The Astors had purchased it in 1950 for the then astounding sum of $175,000. Following in the tradition of their predecessors, they’d expanded the kitchen, built a sauna on the second floor, and added a gymnasium on the third for Edward, then a boy.

A paved road wound up the slope and emerged from an orchard onto an immense lawn that collared the estate and made Cherry Hill look like a frosted white decoration atop a wedding cake.

Sullivan spotted the striped tape stretched across the front door first. “We’re late,” he said. “The feds have already been by to have a look.”

Astor opened the car door before the Audi came to a halt. He was out and striding across the gravel forecourt as Sullivan hurried to join him.

“Tampering with evidence is a felony. Be careful what you touch.”

Astor stopped at the top of the front stairs. “It’s my house. I have every right to go in. Besides, who you going to tell?”

Sullivan reached his side. “Have it your way. But let me take a look first. We don’t want any surprises.”

Astor noted that the alarm system was disarmed and the door locked. He fished in his pocket for his old key. It worked like a charm. “You’re the only one who knows I’m here,” he said, ducking under the tape as he pushed the door open. “Be my guest.”

Sullivan passed beneath the tape and entered the foyer, his pistol held in front of him. “Wait here. I’m going to do a quick walk-through.”

“Knock yourself out,” said Astor.

Sullivan padded down the stairs five minutes later. “All yours. Looks like the feds took a look around and left everything here. I’d count on them being back anytime. They’ll be taking another look now that Penelope Evans is dead, too.”

From his vantage point in the orchard, the warrior monk fashioned his plan.

A car was parked in the gravel drive, a large silver SUV. The front door of the house stood open, a band of yellow-and-black tape strung across the entry. The stocky white-haired man with the florid cheeks paced back and forth on the porch. Astor must be inside.

Kill him, his brother had said.

The warrior monk revered family above all. He would not disappoint him.

Bobby Astor walked into the house and time stood still. Ten years had passed since he’d last set foot inside. The occasion had been Thanksgiving or Christmas. It had been a happy time. Katie was five or six. Alex’s career with the Bureau was starting to hum. Comstock was doing well, and his father had just sold his own firm to one of the big boys for an ungodly sum.

It was a time before their falling-out.

A time before Astor had confronted his father about the events of his childhood.

The black belt.

Three words, and they conjured up an immediate and unsettling terror that after thirty years had lost none of its ability to paralyze him.

Astor pushed away the words, pretending he did not hear them.
Pretending that nothing had happened.
He turned a circle on the parquet floor, studying the vaulted two-story entryway. It was more a minstrel’s gallery than a family foyer. His eye ran up the staircase, past the stodgy oil portraits of his father and his grandfather, Edward and Frederick Astor, respectively. Why was it ever the dream of first-generation immigrants to emulate the immigrants who had come before them?

Of course Astor wasn’t his family’s real name. He had discovered his true lineage when he was thirteen and home on break from prep school. Having pilfered two of his father’s Cohibas, he and a buddy were searching for matches to light them. The first place to look was his father’s desk. There, stashed away in his top drawer, was a stiff, yellowing envelope marked
Private
in archaic, curling script. Astor was a born snoop. He could have asked for no better invitation. He opened the envelope at once. It contained his grandfather’s immigration papers, naming him not Frederick Emile Astor but Feodor Itzhak Yastrovic of Lvov, Poland. Stunned, Astor replaced the document and fled from the room. Bobby Astor was not an itinerant Polish Jew. He was an American blueblood born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, educated at the Horace Mann School, and confirmed at All Saints Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay, New York. He never looked at the envelope again.

Astor tucked away the memory. There were other secrets within these walls, other lies that best remained concealed.

The black belt.

Astor climbed the stairs slowly. He held the piece of blue stationery with the word
Cassandra99
in his hand. The stationery came from one place and one place only. The top right drawer of his father’s desk. He did not stop to admire his father’s portrait. Nor did he marvel at the Swarovski crystal chandelier made a century earlier for his Imperial Majesty, Charles I, the last Emperor of Austria. His pace quickened with each step, so that when he reached the first-floor landing and started down the hall, he was moving briskly and passed his father’s bedroom without peeking in.

Later, he told himself. There would be time after he searched the office.

Astor stopped in his tracks.

There was no later.

Edward Astor was dead. He would never have the chance to explain. He would never have an opportunity to reconcile with his only son. The time for that was gone. Astor would have to reconcile for both of them. He was done running.

He retraced his steps until he stood at the doorway to the bedroom and peered inside. The room was as he remembered it: the vast bed with the white bedspread, the maple furniture that might have served a founding father, the windows looking over the orchard and the expanse of Oyster Bay.

He stepped inside the room like a man mounting the gallows.

The black belt.

The punishments always took place here in his parents’ bedroom, and in the early evening. There was a strict protocol about them, a procedure that never varied. It began with a summons, his father’s operatic baritone trumpeting his name from upstairs.

Master Robert Frederick Astor.

Always the full name. Always uttered without a trace of malice or anger.

Come.

Astor had only vague memories of the actual crimes. Once he had played with his father’s double-edged razor blades and cut himself. When asked about the gash on his finger, he had lied and said he caught his hand in the medicine cabinet. The evidence was discovered lurking at the bottom of his parents’ toilet, where he’d tried valiantly to flush it away. Astor was mischievous by nature. Fibbing came easily. Even then he had courted trouble. At some point, boyish dares hardened into adolescent transgressions. The sentences were never unjust.

With dread he would climb the stairs. (It was years before he’d learned to camouflage fear with arrogance, bravado, or confrontation.) Trembling, he waited at the bedroom door, palms sweating, stomach sick with anxiety.

Enter.

There stood his father, Edward Everett Astor, Wall Street supremo, chairman of the school board, pillar of society, a man of untarnished rectitude. He was not a tall man, but broad across the shoulders and barrel-chested. He wore his hair slicked back with pomade. At day’s end, a few strands hung loose and he had the rough, capable air of an accomplished seaman. He had removed his jacket and tie and stood with his white shirt unbuttoned. In his hand he gripped his black crocodile belt, folded double, and in the manner of Bligh on the
Bounty,
he tapped it threateningly on his thigh.

How do you plead, Master Astor?

Guilty, sir.

Astor had learned early on never to proffer excuses. Excuses were an extension of the crime and merited further beating.

The punishment is ten lashes.

Astor advanced to the bed. He lowered his trousers, then his underwear, and bent over, hands scrubbed, trimmed fingernails clutching the bedspread. A final indignity demanded that he himself signal the punishment.

Please begin, sir.

The strokes were administered crisply and with brute force. The punishment was meted out in full.

One.

Astor heard the snap of leather against flesh and jolted in his shoes. He was breathing hard, the paper in his hand crumpled into a ball. He looked around the room, half expecting to find his father still there, belt in hand. He met only his reflection in the mirror. He stared at himself, remarking on how much son resembled father.

Astor sat down on the bed. Carefully he flattened out the stationery. He felt lighter, somehow freed of a burden. The past had no claim on him. From here on out, his actions were his own. He was not assisting his father out of guilt or fear or some long-repressed need to repent for sins either real or imagined. He was helping him for another reason.

Because it was the right thing to do.

The monk circled the home to the rear. When he was sure the older man could not see him, he dashed across the lawn and mounted a short flight of stairs to the raised back porch. He peered in a window. The kitchen was as large as his childhood home. The door was locked. So were the three windows nearest him. He needed only three seconds to climb the drainpipe and hop onto the roof that skirted half the second floor. He ran to the wall and pushed his body against it. He paused, finding his center, then peeked into the window to his right. The room inside held two single beds. The door to the interior hall was closed. He tried the window and found it locked, too. The next window was locked as well. A wraparound terrace met the corner of the roof. He hopped the railing and landed on the decking. He waited again, allowing his heart to slow, his senses to come to life. He had no idea where in the house Astor might be, or if he was alone. The Audi had already been parked in front when he had arrived. It had become necessary to use other means to ascertain Astor’s whereabouts and intentions since he had destroyed his phone.

The monk peered inside the window. Astor was seated on the bed inside, his back facing him. The monk continued to watch, hoping to catch a glimpse of a second person if there was one. He placed a hand against the wall, feeling for vibrations within the home. All was quiet. This close he could sense Astor’s energy. The man was strong, aggressive. A fighter, but too arrogant and headstrong for his own good. Still, it was a powerful energy, and the monk would find pleasure in defeating a formidable adversary. He looked more closely into the room, drawn by Astor’s spirit. It was then that he observed the mirror and noted the dark triangle in the lower quadrant that was his face and hair.

A moment later Astor saw it, too, and jumped to his feet.