Money to Burn

They got off the bridge. Wald steered the Lamborghini around the sharp corner and into an alley, pulling up to the rear entrance of a body shop. It was well after business hours, and all of the paint and body shops on the block were closed. The garage doors were shut, iron burglar bars covered the remaining doors and windows, and coils of razor wire ran like a giant, deadly Slinky along the top of a ten-foot chain-link fence. It wasn’t exactly the ideal neighborhood in which to park a $250,000 Italian sports car at night.

Wald tapped the horn, the garage door opened, and they pulled inside. He killed the engine, and with the push of a button the doors on either side opened at an upward angle like the wings of a butterfly. The two men climbed out of the car as the garage door closed behind them.

Girelli’s radar was at full alert. He’d gone on rides like this before-to warehouses and body shops in Queens-but never as the guest of honor. But he wasn’t worried. Girelli was packing a fully loaded Beretta 9 mm pistol, and Jason Wald was a dolt. That was two strikes against the home team, and the game wasn’t even under way.

“Glad you could make it, Tony.”

Girelli turned, unable to see the man standing off to the side in the shadows, but the distinctive accent was enough to give him pause. Two against one was no problem, unless one of the two was who he thought it was.

The silhouette took a half step forward, and then, with the flick of his lighter, he removed himself from the dark. Girelli’s pulse raced, his fears confirmed by the instantly recognizable face-or more specifically, by that deformed right ear.

The last person Girelli wanted to see tonight was Ian Burn.

36

I WASTED THE RIDE BACK FROM LONG ISLAND. I SHOULD HAVE PUT the top down on the Mini Cooper, cranked up just enough heat to take off the chill, and felt the wind on my face as the lights of Manhattan and the world’s most recognizable skyline swallowed me up. When I bought my convertible, I had signed a contract stating that I would drive it 90 percent of the time with the roof open. It was a marketing joke, but the way things were going, I wondered if they might actually sue me.

Yes, I was sweating the small stuff-like where the hell I was going to sleep tonight.

The Saxton Silvers parking garage was my destination, mainly because it was free and I still hadn’t straightened out my cash flow. To get there, I had to pass the firm’s main entrance on Seventh Avenue. Television crews, photographers, and a phalanx of other people crowded the sidewalk outside the revolving doors, and a line of double-parked media vans hugged the curb. A small but vocal group of demonstrators marched in a circle in the middle of all this. Anger was all over their faces, even angrier words on their handmade signs:

CROOKS!

SCREW YOUR BONUS. WHERE’S MY PENSION?

I was suddenly thinking of Ivy again and that day we’d stumbled into the FTAA riots in Miami. I rounded the block and pulled into the garage.

My Mini made a fu

Apparently, about as much as I knew about Ivy.

Mallory had been right: Over the last four years I’d fooled myself into thinking that I had moved on, but I hadn’t. Perhaps my reaction now should have been one of sheer joy: Ivy is alive! There was some of that, to be sure. But it was much more complicated.

Why did you run, Ivy?

The fu

The timing of it all made me consider a dark possibility: What if Ivy didn’t share the joy I felt over a potential reunion? What if she had come back from the dead, so to speak, only to visit on Michael Cantella a fate worse than death?

Couldn’t be. Or could it?

My thoughts drifted back four years to our sailing trip and the dream I had told her about-the one about riding my bicycle on a dark highway, getting run off the road, and rushing my injured dog Tippy to the DQ. The gist of that strange dream had actually happened: A week before our trip, a black SUV had knocked me into a ravine and left me for dead. Afterward-and this was the reason for the nightmares-I wondered if the driver had been a Wall Street loser with a score to settle.

It’s only go

Why did you come back, Ivy?

Were the last few days payback for ruining her life? Did she finally emerge from hiding only to move my money into an offshore account and make me out as the villain behind the destruction of Saxton Silvers? Did she also destroy my marriage? Was she done with me yet? Those were terrible thoughts about a woman I loved. But with four years to plan it, Ivy was definitely smart enough to implement such a scheme, and with her birthday-orene52/25enero-at the root of my passwords, I had to consider the possibility. And after all, I couldn’t shake the memory that, in my dream, the hit-and-run driver of the SUV had been Ivy.

Stop it. Ivy would never-

My phone rang. It was Eric Volke. He and our CEO had spent the last twelve hours at the New York Federal Reserve in downtown Manhattan, in a room once used to cash coupons on Treasury bills. On the other side of the table had been the masters of the world’s biggest economy-the Federal Reserve chairman, the secretary of the treasury, the New York Fed chief, and the Securities and Exchange Commission chief.

Eric was calling from his limo. “Meet me at my house in thirty minutes,” he told me. “It’s important.”

He hung up before I could ask what it was about.

But I already knew.

37

IAN BURN STARED OUT OVER THE FLAME OF HIS BUTANE LIGHTER.

His fascination with fire was logical enough, given his surname. It was bogus, of course. So was the name Ian, an acronym for “Islamic Armed Nation,” a terrorist organization that Burn supplied with the tools of the trade-detonators, explosives, and munitions of all sorts. He had an especially reliable source of white phosphorous. He was paid with Saudi oil profits that poured into a certain American hedge fund run by Jason Wald’s uncle. “Burn” was a nickname he’d earned by torching anyone who got in his way. Only once had a job blown up in his face-literally. Working with napalm was dangerous stuff. Burn had a grotesque scar on his neck and a melted right ear to prove it, but even that mishap had unfolded true to the old playground adage: “You should have seen the other guy.” It amazed Burn how so many people had never even heard of fifth-and sixth-degree burns, as if the always-fatal flame that caused complete destruction of muscle and bone didn’t belong in a class by itself.

“I’m not the enemy,” said Girelli, but his voice betrayed him, cracking with fear.