New York City
April 16
Come on, come on, come on. Calliope Garland willed the indicator bar on the monitor displaying the percentage of download completion to move faster. Fourteen percent, twenty-seven percent. Then it seemed to stop at thirty-two percent as if it were deciding whether to continue. She rubbed the side of the CPU, encouraging the beast to comply. She checked the time on her phone: 10:17 p.m. The slick, suited brokers and analysts had abandoned their laptops and balance sheets for dirty martinis—and other pastimes with “dirty” as the descriptor—at a chic nearby nightspot Stock around the corner. The offices of Gentrify Capital Partners that occupied the top two floors of the Financial District tower were all but abandoned. The low hum of a vacuum cleaner down the hall and the faint voice of a newbie client-retention specialist trying to earn his stripes were all that remained. No one should interrupt her.
Her little undercover assignment was proceeding seamlessly. Farrell Whitaker, her boss at the news site where she worked, The Harlem Sentry, smelled a rat at this prosperous asset management firm, so he sent her in to investigate. She arranged to be hired as a part-time receptionist through a temp agency and had worked at the front desk for two weeks when she caught her target’s eye. Calliope’s editor had then arranged for the target’s personal assistant to get wind of a massive federal investigation in the offing, and the woman had quit without notice. Badda bing, badda boom, Calliope was in.
Gentrify Capital Partners was housed in a soaring monolith at the bottom of Manhattan. The office was a shrine to eighties’ financial corruption. From the sky-lighted two-story reception area to the interchangeable super-model receptionists to the boys club of Ivy League analysts, the place was a throwback. It was as if the man who created it, Philip “Phipps” Van Gent, had developed his fantasy business model during the era of Ivan Boesky and Michael Miliken, and had duplicated that world without update.
Calliope had worked at The Sentry for nearly two years, longer than any of the other dilettante jobs she’d had over the past six years. She actually liked it, but it would soon be time to move on. Where would she go next? Maybe a nanny in London or an aid worker in Khartoum. She shook herself out of her revelry. First, she needed to make sure she didn’t end her career as an investigative reporter with a literal bang.
At the moment, she was sitting at Phipps Van Gent’s desk—nothing out of the ordinary. He often called her from the road to retrieve some piece of information or update a spreadsheet. Other than the late hour, there was nothing suspicious about her presence. Furthermore, the minions seldom popped in to see the boisterous CEO, on the rare occasion he was in the office. Despite the fact that half of this floor was a private apartment, and his office alone was bigger than most Manhattan studios, the eccentric man spent most of his time at his estate in Greenwich or on his yacht, currently anchored in Palm Beach. No subtle, hidden-gem locations for Phipps Van Gent; he chose the most obvious ways to display his wealth.
Fifty-eight percent.Calliope glanced around Van Gent’s inner sanctum. Other than the desktop computer she was currently breaking into and his rarely-used personal laptop sitting open on the desk—a pin-dot of light at the top of the screen—one would hardly suspect this was a place of business. She wouldn’t describe the office as gaudy, more like an elite hodgepodge. It was as if the decorator, or more likely Van Gent himself, had selected the most expensive item in any given category and put it in the room. Calliope guessed his tactic: if a potential client knew art, he or she would be impressed by the Rothko over the fireplace or the Hopper behind his desk. If they knew antiques, the imposing Goddard and Townsend desk would elicit a response. It was the same with the Persian rug, Tiffany lamps, and the ego wall filled with photos of Phipps with Oscar winners, heads of state, professional athletes, and so on and so on. It was the very definition of conspicuous consumption.
Ninety-one percent.She rolled her eyes. She could afford any or all of these items in her own right but preferred the sparse interior of her Brooklyn brownstone, decorated with thrift store furniture, quirky accents, and street art. The photos she displayed were of people and places that mattered to her: Calliope with her mother playing in the sand on a beach in Corsica, her dog, Coco, looking at the camera lens as if it were edible, her mother and stepfather looking at each other as if no one else existed.
She had conducted dozens of these surreptitious fact-finding missions. Most were as simple as watching who came and went or copying shipping records or a calendar. Computer piracy was a little out of her league, but Farrell had a bee in his bonnet about this particular story. Based on the proudly displayed photos of her publisher Occupying Wall Street years ago she could guess why. Nevertheless, her role had always been observer, not filcher. She should simply be telling Farrell that the files existed, not duplicating them. She shuddered at the implications of this little theft. Some people in some very high places were going to be livid.
Download complete. Just as she sighed her relief and reached to snatch the little flash drive from the port, she noticed another document on Van Gent’s desktop. It was titled “Golf Scores,” but the “S” in “Scores” was a dollar sign: “Golf $cores.” She clicked on it, and a password prompt appeared. She checked under the keyboard—where Phipps had told her his login information was kept—and sure enough, there, on another Post-It, was a second password. She entered it and voila. The document consisted of a single-page spreadsheet listing a series of numbered codes Calliope couldn’t interpret.
Her computer genius friend immediately came to mind. Twitch will know what this is. Then, as if Calliope had conjured her, the disposable cell phone in her pocket buzzed.
“How did you get this number?”
“Please.” Calliope could hear the mischief in her friend’s voice. “How goes the wet work?”
“Nerve-racking.”
“Oh, take a picture of his desk photos. Be interesting to see who’s in Van Gent’s inner circle. It’ll take the Feds forever to get a warrant for that office.”
Calliope turned back to the monitor and extended her hand to snap a picture of the cluster of framed photos on Van Gent’s desk when a device mounted on the side of the screen started beeping.
“Shit. I’m setting off the cell phone detector on the monitor. I gotta go.”
Calliope cut Twitch off mid-protest, pushed back in the chair to stay out of range of the device, and snapped the picture. Then she tossed the disposable phone into her purse and returned to the mysterious “Golf $cores” document.
When she tried to drag the document to her flash drive folder an ugly noise sounded and an additional password prompt appeared. She re-entered the second password, and the evil wonk sounded again. Double-checking the letters and numbers, she retried it and was denied a second time. In a final attempt, she entered the original login password. At the third failed attempt, a box appeared in the center of the monitor: initiating security protocol.
Now she was sweating. A countdown clock in the corner of the monitor was ticking down from five. Four... Three… At zero the screen went momentarily blank. Was that the distant bing of the elevator’s arrival? No way was this going unnoticed. She imagined a tiny room with an IT tech sitting at a desk filled with monitors and drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup while alarms clanged and red lights flashed, signaling the breach. Who knew? Phipps was a strange guy. At this very moment, his wall safe sat open above the credenza. She could see stacks of cash and documents. Honestly, if she took several thousand dollars and left a note on the safe door, she didn’t think Phipps would care. It wasn’t that money didn’t matter to him, it was more like money wasn’t real.
Calliope shook away the thought and returned to her task. Something bad was happening, something very, very bad. A progress bar appeared in the middle of the screen. Below it, commands flashed: removing files, wiping backup server, clearing logs. With each notification, a new progress bar would start and run up to 100%. Calliope didn’t know much about computers, and she certainly didn’t know if touching something would improve or exacerbate the situation, so she sat there and watched until the screen went dark and an ominous message appeared in the center of the monitor: security protocol complete. All the more reason to skedaddle. Just as she was reaching down to extract the flash drive, the imposing double doors to Phipps’s office flew open with such force the knobs put a dent in the drywall.
Boof. Ten blocks north of Gentrify Capital, Miller “Tox” Buchanan was in the basement security room of a Chinatown office building. He was being held by two men and beaten by a third. The punch was nothing, but Tox needed to make this look good. A series of jabs and he stifled a yawn. Qi was maybe five-five, a full foot shorter than Tox, but he was well-built. Nevertheless, the blows were about the same force his buddies nailed him with when he told a bad joke. He just needed to keep these guys busy until his partner, Steady, got the cameras and bugs planted.
Their client’s son had been abducted two days earlier by her estranged husband. She came directly to Bishop Security for help. The security company was an offshoot of defense contractor Knightsgrove-Bishop. Heir apparent, Nathan Bishop, had eschewed the CEO position in favor of running this humble branch. Bishop Security took a variety of national and international jobs—bodyguard to black ops—but the team’s pride was The Perseus Project. Born of ghosts haunting Nathan Bishop after his childhood friend, now wife, Emily Webster Bishop, had been abducted, The Perseus Project worked to rescue victims of kidnapping. They rarely charged money, and they never received recognition.
This was exactly the type of case for which Perseus was created. The missing boy’s father was a powerful man with connections to organized crime and enough money to buy silence. The good guys needed to break into his Manhattan offices, plant the cameras and bugs, put a trace on his technology, and have a quick look around; some damning evidence would be a useful deterrent to repeat attempts to abduct the child in the future.
Tox had the easy job: distract the security guys with a little poker—and a little cheating—until exactly 11 pm. To be fair, Tox didn’t have to get caught cheating, but this beating was far less painful than listening to these jackasses’ incessant chatter.
“You think this is funny, you fucking giant?” Qi’s face was red with exertion.
Tox shrugged. He must not have been as good an actor as he thought. Qi shouted something over his shoulder in clipped Mandarin. A moment later Tox thought he felt the floor rumble. He was pretty sure he was imagining the Jaws theme. Then a man appeared in the doorway. The mammoth was nearly as wide as he was tall. This beating was about to take a bad turn.
“Hey, Qi, do you have the time?” Tox asked.
“Ten-forty-three. Why? You in a hurry?” The men holding Tox chuckled.