The First Billion

"Two hundred an hour?" Luca cut in. "Or am I out of date? Three hundred? Four?"

"It's not just about Mercury and Black Jet. You're in this too, Ray… or the Private Eye-PO is. We need to talk. You could be in a lot of danger."

"Danger? Ooh, I'm shivering. Can't you see me shaking in my boots?" He tried on another smile, but Gavallan's grim expression stole his mirth. "What kind of danger?" he asked after a moment.

"I'm not sure exactly. But if I can find you, so can Konstantin Kirov. After all the crap you've been spreading on the Net about his company, I don't think he'll be in a charitable mood."

Something in Gavallan's tone reached Luca. The angry cast to his eye softened and the tension left his shoulders. "Okay, okay," muttered Luca. "But I can't leave now. Take a look at the market. I got to make some money."

"Take a break."

"Got too many open positions. Tell you what, though. I'll stop at noon for fifteen minutes. Believe me, that's all we'll need. Meet me next door at Alberto's. We'll have a cup of coffee."

"Deal," said Gavallan, rising to go, happy to get out of the rancid confines. "See you at twelve. Alberto's, right?"

Luca nodded. "And, Jett? Order yourself a drink beforehand. Something strong. You're going to need it."

Leaving the building, Gavallan turned left and headed down the sidewalk to his car. He didn't see the slender young man in the baseball cap enter the building less than a minute after he left.

28

Luca hardly heard the first shot.

A door slamming, he thought, keeping his eyes on the screens, but then came the moaning, the fevered imprecations not to shoot, followed by another bang. This time the noise was unmistakable. Achingly loud. Frightening. His ears rang, and then he caught a whiff of smoke and his nose began to burn. Cordite, he thought. Yet for all the sensory data, it came to him slowly. A gun. A very, very big gun.

At first, he thought it had to be Mazursky, some kind of joke he was playing, but a glance down the aisle told him he was wrong on that score. The Wizard of Warsaw lay twenty feet away, his jaw opening and closing like that of a fish out of water, eyes wide open, a pitch-black crater on his forehead starting to leak blood.

And for a split second, Luca thought, Jesus, it took a bullet to shut that loudmouth up.

But by then Krumins was yelling and running toward the front door. Halfway there he seemed to leap out of his shoes and slam against the wall, and when he slid to the ground there was a wide, bloody red swath tracing his path.

Gregorio stood up in his cubicle, and his blond head seemed all at once to vaporize in a cloud of red mist. Nevins crawled past Luca down the aisle. The gun roared, and he went flat and stopped moving, without even a grunt.

"Ray?"

Four feet away stood the shooter. The voice gave her away as a woman and foreign, though it was hard to tell by how she was dressed.

"Ray Luca?" she asked again.

"Yes?" he said, frozen, confused, very, very scared. Kirov, he thought. Kirov sent you. "What do you want?"

But she didn't answer. Striking with the speed of a cobra, she wrapped an arm around his neck, brought him to her chest, and laid the pistol against his temple. Paralyzed, he tried to scream, but the words lodged in his throat.

No, no, it can't be. We're going to Disney World. My wife and daughters, we're going to-

29

Along Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, traffic slowed to a crawl. Jett Gavallan braked, trying to see ahead and determine what might have caused a traffic jam at eleven-fifteen in the morning. He caught a slew of flashing lights, bright metal, and the rush of uniformed men and women to and fro. A pair of police cruisers, strobes spinning, barred the street a block ahead. An auto accident, he surmised. And a bad one at that.

"Tony, Bruce, I want you both to listen to me," Gavallan was saying into his cell phone. "No more calls to farm out the bridge loan. It's time we show some confidence in the client. If Lehman wants out, fine. Ditto for Merrill. We'll keep all fifty on our books. End of story. I don't want the market to see us sweat."

"It's not a question of seeing us sweat," replied Llewellyn-Davies. "Just simple financial prudence. If I can unload twenty million of our exposure to Kirov, I'm damned well going to."

"No, you're damn well not," barked Gavallan right back.

"He's right, Jett," chimed in Tustin. "Deal goes south, you'll be thanking us, kid."

"And when it goes through you going to fund me the eight hundred grand we passed up?"

"Youfugginkidddinme?" bawled Tustin. "I'm just an employee, bwana."

"Reconsider, Jett," said Llewellyn-Davies. "That's a right decent chunk of risk you're willing to shoulder for eight hundred thousand dollars."

Gavallan shook his head at their tenacity. Not now, fellas; this is not the time. It was imperative everything continue as before, that he not give the slightest hint he was going to scupper the deal before it hit the street, or that he had an inkling that Grafton Byrnes was in a world of trouble.