“I’m telling you now.”
“When did it happen?”
Paul looked at his watch. “About forty minutes ago.”
Annalisa sat back in the seat. “I’m astounded, Paul. But what does it mean?”
“It was my idea, but Sandy and I pulled it off together. We sold one of my algorithms to the Chinese government in exchange for a percentage of their stock market.”
“Can you do that?”
“Of course I can do it,” Paul said. “I just did.” Without missing a beat, he addressed the driver. “Change of plans,” he said. “We’re going to the West Side heliport instead.” He turned to his wife and patted her leg. “I thought we’d go to the Lodge for dinner to celebrate. I know how much you’ve always wanted to see it.”
“Oh, Paul,” she said. The Lodge was an exclusive resort in the Adirondacks that was rumored to be stunningly beautiful. Annalisa had read about it years ago and mentioned to Paul that she wished they could go there on their anniversary. But at three thousand dollars a night, it had been too expensive back then for them to even consider. But Paul had remembered. She smiled and shook her head, realizing that her slight dissatisfaction with Paul in the last couple of months was something she’d made up in her mind. Paul was still Paul—wonderful in his unique and unfathomable way—and Connie Brewer was right. Annalisa did love her husband.
Paul reached into the pocket of his pants and withdrew a small black velvet box. Inside was a large yellow diamond ring surrounded by pink stones. It was beautiful and gaudy, exactly the sort of thing Connie Brewer would love. Annalisa slipped it onto her right middle finger. “Do you like it?” Paul asked. “Sandy said Connie has one just like it. I thought you might want one, too.”
“Oh, Paul.” She put her hand on the side of his head and stroked his hair. “I love it. It’s stunning.”
Back in the Gooches’ apartment, Sam rifled through his mother’s underwear drawer and, finding a pair of old leather gloves, tucked them into the waistband of his jeans. From the toolbox in the cramped coat closet, he extracted a small screwdriver, a pair of pliers, an X-Acto knife, wire clippers, and a small spool of electrical tape. He stuck these items in the back pockets of his jeans, making sure the bulges were covered by his shirt. Then he rode the elevator up to Enid and Philip’s floor and, slipping through the hallway, took the stairwell up to the first floor of the penthouse apartment.
The stairwell led to a small foyer outside a service entrance, and there, as Sam had kno
wn, was a metal plate. He put on his mother’s gloves, took out the screwdriver, and unscrewed the plate from the wall. Inside was a compartment filled with cables. Every floor had a cable box, and the cables ran from one floor to another. Most boxes contained one or two cables, but on the Rices’ floor, due to all of Paul’s equipment, there were six. Sam tugged the cables out of a hole in the back and, using the X-Acto knife, cut away the white plastic casing. Then he clipped the wires and, mixing them up, spliced the wrong wires together using the pliers. Finally, he wrapped the newly configured wires in the electrical tape. Then he pushed the cables back into the wall. He wasn’t sure what would happen, but it was guaranteed to be big.
16
Under regular circumstances, Paul Rice, the early riser, would have been the first to discover The Internet Debacle, as it would be later referred to by the residents of One Fifth. But on the following morning, James Gooch happened to be up first. Following his triumphant book reading the night before (“Four hundred twenty books sold, it’s practically a record,” Redmond had boasted), James was booked on the first flight from La Guardia to Boston at six A. M.; from Boston, he would go on to Philadelphia, Washington, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, and then Houston, Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. He would be away for two weeks. As a consequence, he had to get up at three A. M. to pack. James was a noisy, nervous packer, so Mindy was up as well. Mindy normally would have been testy about this disturbance to her sleep—considering sleep the most precious of all modern-day commodities—but on this day, she was forgiving. The evening before, James had made her proud. All the years of supporting him were paying off when they easily might not have, and Mindy found herself imagining enormous sums of money coming their way. If the book made a million dollars, they could send Sam to any university—Harvard, or perhaps Cambridge in England, which was even more prestigious—without feeling a pinch. Two million dollars would mean university for Sam, and maybe the luxury of owning a car and housing it in a garage and paying off their mortgage. Three million dollars would get them all that plus a tiny getaway home in Montauk or Amagansett or Litchfield County in Connecticut. Beyond this, Mindy’s imagination could go no further. She was so accustomed to living a life of relative deprivation, she couldn’t picture herself needing or wanting more.
“Do you have toothpaste?” she asked, following James into his bathroom. “Don’t forget your comb. And dental floss.”
“I’m sure they have drugstores in Boston,” James remarked.
Mindy closed the toilet seat and sat down, watching him go through his medicine cabinet. “I don’t want you to have to worry about details,” she said. “You’re going to need all your concentration to handle the readings and interviews.”
“Mindy,” James said, putting a bottle of aspirin into a Ziploc bag. “You’re making me nervous. Don’t you have something to do?”
“At three in the morning?”
“I could use a cup of coffee.”
“Sure,” Mindy said. She went into the kitchen. She was feeling sentimental about James. In fourteen years of marriage, they’d never spent more than three nights apart, and now James would be away for two weeks. Would she miss him? What if she couldn’t manage without him? But that, she reminded herself, was silly. She was a grown woman. She did practically everything herself anyway. Well, maybe not everything. James spent a lot of time looking after Sam. As much as she liked to complain about him, James wasn’t all bad. Especially now, when he was finally making money.
“I’ll get your socks,” Mindy said, handing James his cup of coffee. “Do you think you’ll miss me?” she asked, placing several pairs of worn socks into his suitcase and wondering how many pairs he would need for two weeks.
“I can do that,” James said, annoyed by all the attention. Mindy came across a hole in the toe of one of his socks and stuck her finger through. “A lot of your socks have holes,” she pointed out.
“It doesn’t matter. No one is going to see my socks,” James said.
“So will you miss me?” Mindy asked.
“I don’t know,” James said. “Maybe. Maybe not. I might be too busy.”
In a last-minute panic, James left the apartment at four-fifteen A. M. Mindy considered going back to sleep but was too keyed up. She decided to check James’s Amazon rating instead. Her computer came on, but there was no Internet service. This was strange. She checked the cables and turned the box on and off. Nothing. She tried the browser on her BlackBerry. Also nothing.
Paul Rice was now up as well. At five A. M. on the dot, he was to launch his algorithm in the Chinese stock market. At four-thirty A. M., he was seated behind his desk in his home office, a cup of café con leche sitting neatly on a coaster nearby, ready to begin. Out of habit, he plucked a pencil out of the silver holder and examined the tip for sharpness. Then he turned on his computer.
The screen flashed its familiar and comforting green—the color of money, Paul thought with satisfaction—and then…nothing. Paul jerked his head in surprise. Powering the computer should have kicked on the satellite system and Internet backup. He clicked on the Internet icon. The screen went blank. Finding a key, he unlocked the cabinet doors behind him and looked inside at the stacked metal hard drives. The power was on, but the array of lights indicating the exchange of signals was black. He hesitated for half a second and then ran downstairs to Annalisa’s office. He tried her computer, which he’d always joked was like a Stone Age tool, but the Internet was out there as well.