The First Billion

"A rough few days, Mr. Gavallan?"

"You can say that."

"I know you had wished to speak with Mr. Kirov alone. Fine by us. Still, I'm sure you'll be happy to know we've taken some steps to see that Mr. Kirov does not flee the premises. If you'll just follow me for a moment."

Dodson led the way down a short corridor, stopping at an unmarked door and knocking once. An African-American agent wearing a navy windbreaker with the yellow letters FBI stenciled on its breast poked his head out the door and said, "Kirov's here. We got him on the closed circuit. He's just leaving the specialist's booth. Did you get what you wanted?"

Dodson gri

As the agents conferred, Gavallan peeked into the waiting room. Eight men and women dressed in the same navy windbreakers stood around drinking coffee, shooting the shit, and checking the pumps on their street-sweeper shotguns. It was the FBI's Tuesday morning coffee klatch.

"They're going to stay in here, right?" he asked.

"Strictly backup. I'm sure we won't have the slightest need for them."

"All right then," said Gavallan. "Let's go."

67

Cate waited in front of the visitors' entrance to the Exchange, pacing back and forth, craving a cigarette, though she'd never smoked in her life. The morning air was cool and invigorating, the sidewalk bathed in the shadow of the surrounding skyscrapers. Still, she was sweating. Every minute or so, she checked her watch. Where was he?

She searched the parade of faces, men and women walking purposefully up and down the street. Businessmen in three-piece suits, tourists in shorts and T-shirts, artists carrying sketchbooks and easels. At the corner of Wall Street and Broad, street vendors were selling black-and-white photos of Manhattan, magazines, financial texts. The pavement pulsated with the vibrant human cargo. Hugging her arms around herself, Cate wondered if she was doing the right thing. She knew very well the consequences of her actions. Once taken, there would be no going back.

"He'll serve two or three years, tops. And there's no guarantee of that," Pillonel had scoffed in the archives of Silber, Goldi, and Grimm's headquarters. "Besides, it's not the government he should be afraid of, it's his partner."

She thought of the nasty little dacha north of Moscow, the crude torture chamber with its floor stained black by blood. She remembered Alexei and Ray Luca. She forced herself to imagine the countless others who had suffered or died at Kirov's hands, and the countless more who would surely follow. The blood ties to her father, frayed and fragile, unraveled yet further and finally broke, taking with them her doubt. Someone had to stop her father. At last, she had a way.

A tented canopy had been erected on the sidewalk. Beneath it, two long tables were stacked high with caps and T-shirts bearing the Mercury logo. Handsome young men and women were giving the merchandise to passersby, along with brochures describing the company. Cate looked on, disgusted. It was a fraud, a farce, a fairy tale with a very unhappy ending.

She stopped her pacing long enough to check her watch and compare the time against that of the clock on Federal Hall. Both read 9:20. Her heart raced. Where was he?

"Ekaterina Kirova?"

"Da?" Cate spun. A wiry, dark-haired man attired in a neat houndstooth jacket stood in front of her. She'd never met him before, but she knew him intimately: the soulless eyes, the distrustful smile, the shadow of a beard pushing up an hour after shaving. "Dangerous," Pillonel had said of her father's partner. His krysha. "From the bandit country."

"You have something for me?" he asked.

Retrieving the compact from her purse, she removed the last disc and told him what he would find. "Hurry," she said.

But in contrast to her anxious demeanor, the Chechen was all too relaxed. He held the disc between his fingers, examining it this way and that as if deciding whether or not to purchase an expensive piece of jewelry. "No need. Everything is already taken care of."

"What will you do?"

The man from the bandit country met her gaze, and she felt a chill pass through her. Saying nothing, he slipped the disc into his pocket, bowed ever so slightly, and walked off.

The party of three had grown to six. Dodson and Gavallan led the way. DiGenovese, Haynes, and the muscle came behind. Haynes and his two agents had do

Dodson pulled up at one of the double doors leading onto the floor. "All right, Mr. Gavallan. Here we are. You heard Agent Haynes. Kirov just left the specialist's booth and is on his way up to the podium. Lead on. And remember- calm, brisk, and orderly. We find Kirov and we take him into custody."

The New York Stock Exchange was divided into four trading rooms: the Main Room, the Garage, the Blue Room, and 30 Broad Street. There was no hierarchy among them. The Exchange's seventeen trading posts, scattered across the floor like giant bumpers on a billiard table, were divided evenly between them. Wide passageways lead from one room to the next. But when people thought of the Big Board, it was the Main Room they envisaged. It was here that trading was inaugurated from an elevated podium every morning at nine-thirty, and here that was halted every afternoon at four.

Gavallan led the way into the Main Room. It was large and airy as a convention hall, two hundred by two hundred feet. The ceiling stood several stories above a century-old plank floor. American flags of every size and shape dominated the décor, sprouting from every trading post and hanging on every wall. Brokers' booths ringed the floor's perimeter. Ninety percent of orders to buy and sell shares traveled electronically through the "superdot" computer system directly to the specialists' booths, where they were automatically mated, buyer with seller, at an agreed upon price. This 90 percent, however, accounted for only half the share volume that traded each day. The remaining 10 percent of trades accounted for the other 50 percent of the volume, and these large, or "block," trades required the human attention of both broker and specialist.

Lowering his shoulder, Gavallan nudged his way through a knot of brokers talking last night's hoops and walked onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Keeping a driven pace, he wound his way across the floor, passing the trading posts where IBM, 3M, Freddie Mac, and AIG were traded. The posts bristled with television monitors, flat screen displays, computer keyboards. Eleven minutes from the opening- 9:18:25, by the digital clocks hanging high on every wall- each was surrounded by clumps of specialists balancing their orders prior to the start of trading. It was difficult to see more than fifteen feet ahead.

Gavallan reached the post that housed the electronic offices of Spalding, Havelock, and Ellis, the specialist firm assigned to trade Mercury's stock. The booth was a hive of activity. Twenty or thirty brokers crowded around Deak Spalding, the firm's top trader, shouting to be heard. It was a scene that played out whenever there was strong demand for a stock, or strong pressure to sell it.