Storm Front

Storm began collecting his clothes, which were strewn in various rooms of the suite. He already had a lie prepared for Xi Bang: He was being called to London for breaking soy-related news and would have to rejoin the Finance Ministry at some later time to finish his story.

He kept expecting he would find Xi Bang somewhere, perhaps reading the paper or sipping coffee. Perhaps there would even be time for a brief but rewarding reconnoitering of any territories that had been left unexplored the previous evening.

But she wasn’t in the sitting room. She wasn’t on the balcony. She wasn’t in the bathroom, either.

As Storm found the last of his clothing, he acknowledged what he should have known the moment he saw the empty bed:

Ling Xi Bang was gone.

CHAPTER 10

NEW YORK, New York

From its burnished walnut lockers to the portraits of its past presidents that hung on the walls, the Trinity Health & Racquet Club smelled like old money.

With good reason. Everyone there had it. Lots of it. On the rare times when the club actually accepted a new member, he — and all but two members were male — had to put up a nonreturnable fifty-thousand-dollar bond in order to gain access to its indoor and outdoor tennis courts, its racquetball courts, its squash courts, its fitness center, and its dining and locker room facilities, which included the best sauna in lower Manhattan. The fifty grand requirement was not because the club particularly needed the cash. Its endowment was now somewhere over thirty million dollars, enough to run the club for nearly three years without collecting a single dollar in dues. It was just to keep out the riffraff.

G. Whitely Cracker V was a legacy here — the third generation of Crackers to belong. His grandfather, Graham W. Cracker III, had been one of the founding members. His portrait hung on the wall just outside the dining room. Whitely’s father, G. W. Cracker IV, had served three terms as president. His portrait was near the bar.

It was widely anticipated, even expected, that someday Whitely would take his turn at the helm; and that when his term was over (or his two or three were over), he would also be immortalized in oil-based paint.

In the meantime, Whitely came here for his biweekly tennis match, an event he treated with only slightly less reverance than a priest treated high mass. He always played singles — against a rotating cast of opponents — and one of his secretary’s jobs was to make sure at least one of his usual adversaries was available. If the opponent dared be a no-show, Whitely was too nice to say anything to the man’s face. But the offender might suddenly find that his locker had been moved — strictly because of some remodeling, of course — so that it was next to a pillar or wedged in a corner.

The match simply was not negotiable for Cracker. Whatever was happening in the markets didn’t matter. Whatever was happening in his personal life didn’t matter. There were two times each week when Whitely Cracker was simply unavailable to the outside world, and it was the hour and a half — or two hours, if the match went long, into a third set — that he dedicated to this game.

Which is not to say he took the sport itself that seriously. In truth, it was more about having an excuse to get out and run around, to keep himself in fighting shape. Whitely was only a modestly good tennis player. His fitness and court coverage were his best assets. His serve was not particularly imposing. His fore-hand, while steady, scared no one. His backhand was famously erratic. His net game was such a disaster he only wandered up there when forced by circumstance.

But, ah, he played with passion. He prided himself on being able to routinely beat better players on grit alone. And his secretary understood that she should attempt to schedule him a better player before she turned to the lesser ones. Losing did not bother Whitely Cracker. He would rather lose to a good player than beat a mediocre one.

On this day, Cracker was losing. He was playing Arnold Richardson — of the New Jersey Richardsons — who had played number six singles when he was at Dartmouth. Richardson’s strokes were far superior to Whitely’s. And even if Whitely could occasionally outlast him during a rally, it wasn’t enough for him to mount a serious threat.

Richardson won the first set 6–2 and was up 3–1 in the second when there was a parting of the two sides of the heavy plastic curtain behind the court. From the opening emerged Lee Fulcher, a developer who fancied himself a Trump-in-waiting but was really just a mid-sized player in the outsized game that was Manhattan real estate.