Union Atlantic Page 0,21

back offices in London were starting their day now and would begin to notice that Union Atlantic's payments were being held up. A call or two out to the trading desks where the young jocks sipped their coffee, stroking the fantasy of the one-day killing, and the lines would start to hum, bank stocks getting ready to head lower at the bell. He could see the sheen on the hard black plastic of the phones that would start to ring, the five-screen stations at Roth Brothers feeding Reuters and Bloomberg, the digital glide of ticker tape high along the wall, servers linked, nested, and cooled on the floor below, batching for export the first of the day's reports to the redundant facilities in Norfolk or Hampshire, windowless steel barns surrounded by fence and barbed wire.

"Remarkable how total the distraction can become, no?" Charlotte had said a few months ago in one of their loopy conversations. "Just don't forget yourself in the midst of it all."

Lifting his eyelids, he gazed at the figures running along the bottom of the silent screen. On his BlackBerry, he found the number for Mark Darby, his counterpart at the Bank of England, and left him a voice mail telling him there had been a glitch, that Union Atlantic's accounts would settle before the start of business in New York. Darby would get the word out and if all went well, in the next hour London might still open smoothly.

"Isn't there some regulation against men our age being up at this hour?" Jeffrey Holland asked in that warm, charming voice of his, after Helen finally patched him through. He knew perfectly well that Henry had at least ten years on him, and thus, true to form, the question doubled as a compliment. Henry figured it was the poor compensation that had kept Holland out of politics.

"Not to my knowledge, but I'm sure Senator Grassley would introduce a bill if you put a word in his ear."

Holland chuckled. He'd helped nix a reporting provision the Fed had wanted in the latest markup of the finance bill.

"I should mention it to him. No phone calls after nine o'clock."

"So did you have any warning on this Taconic business?" Henry said.

"None at all. I heard about it today. They must have moved around between lenders. They certainly didn't come to us."

Henry found this difficult to believe but chose to let it pass.

"Do you know this fellow Premley?"

"I've dealt with him once or twice. They brought him in to fix the place up and sell it. Not such a good bet, apparently."

"Between us, the Discount Window just extended them thirty of what they owe you."

"And you think we should roll over the rest?"

"Well, you've got an uncovered position yourself. It's two thirty in the morning."

He could hear what sounded like ice being put in a glass. Holland swallowed and cleared his throat. He wouldn't resist now. In the worst case, Union Atlantic would end up writing off the loss for whatever they couldn't recoup. Alerted to its weakness, Holland might even try to buy Taconic, once its stock price fell into the basement. A flap with the shareholders three months hence measured little against his bank being technically illiquid when the markets opened. They both knew this. Besides, Henry regulated Union Atlantic Group. Holland would offer terms now. The call itself was all that had been necessary.

"It must be an odd job," Holland said. "To have to keep imagining the real disaster. The whole leveraged shooting match falling to pieces."

Henry had wandered again onto the balcony, where the breeze had picked up off the water, the waves a bit larger now, boats bobbing against their posts, the fronds of the shaded palms swaying. How could anyone not imagine it these days? After the currency scares, 9/11, the Argentinean default, each of them managed one way or another. The system, in the public eye, still strong, people's faith in the value of the money in their pocket such a basic fact of life they couldn't imagine it otherwise. And yet if you'd been on the calls with the Ministers of Finance or with Treasury on the twelfth and the thirteenth - Henry from Basel, his senior staff some of the only people left in lower Manhattan other than the fire and rescue crews - you knew it could have gone differently. One more piece of bad news and the invisible architecture of confidence might have buckled.

About this Holland was right. Henry was