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hand beginning to tremble, Nate reached out to feel the arm of one of the suit jackets, marveling at how smoothly the fine wool moved between his fingers. That's when he heard the sound of a car door slamming shut.

Chapter 7

Doug didn't usually return to the house at such an early hour. But that afternoon he'd received a call out of the blue from Vrieger, his old commanding officer. It turned out he was living south of Boston and had heard through friends that Doug worked in the city. He'd phoned around noon from a restaurant not far from the office and asked if they could meet for lunch. Doug's first inclination was to say of course he couldn't, that he scheduled appointments weeks in advance, and that they would have to set a later date. But to tell Vrieger that seemed ridiculous and he found himself saying, yes, it was fine, that he would be there in an hour.

Walking beneath what remained of the Central Artery, he crossed into the narrow streets of the North End, glad to be out of the office for a little while at least.

The last week had been hectic. The Japanese Ministry of Finance's intervention to prop up the country's stock market had finally been made public, causing the Nikkei index to start dropping. Doug had phoned McTeague straightaway, instructing him to trim back Atlantic Securities' positions, limiting their exposure. McTeague had seemed reluctant at first, arguing that it was only a blip, that they would be getting out of the market too soon if they sold now. Eventually, Doug had been forced to make it clear to him that the choice wasn't his to make. The firm's bets, built up over the course of months, were huge by now and would take time to unwind. Done right, however, they could get out with nearly all their profit intact and the whole Finden Holdings operation would still count as a major success. If McTeague's clients wanted to keep going, pouring more money into the strategy, that was their business and their risk.

Making his way up Prince Street, Doug entered the restaurant and found Vrieger at the bar sipping a glass of bourbon, a nearly full ashtray at his side. In the decade and a half since Doug had last seen him, he had put on a bit of weight, but on the whole he looked remarkably unchanged with his ramrod posture and hair still clipped regulation short. He wore a version of his same square metal glasses, as unfashionable now as they had been back in the eighties.

"Christ," he said, when he spotted Doug. "The least you could have done was get a bit uglier."

"Lieutenant Commander, a pleasure to see you."

"So you're a corporate guy, huh? A suit. You always said that's what you wanted to do."

"Did I? To tell you the truth, I don't remember talking about it."

Doug ordered a beer and the bartender produced a few sandwich menus. Before the two of them had last parted in San Diego, Vrieger had told Doug that he planned to sign up for another tour. As he began describing it to Doug now, that third stint of his had taken him back to the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm. Later, in the mid-nineties, he'd run clandestine interdiction off the coast of North Korea as part of a loose nukes operation. The way he told it, he'd pissed off too many captains along the way to expect further promotion. "Truth is," he said, "after Vincennes I didn't really care. I just wanted to keep going." When the navy assigned him desk duty back in Norfolk, Virginia, he'd decided to quit. "That was four years ago," he said. "I thought I'd get a job out at Raytheon. Test battle systems. Something like that. I lasted through about two interviews." Since then he'd been living with his father in Quincy, working at a liquor warehouse.

He reported all this in an affectless tone, his eyes fixed on the television over the bar, where cable news was spooling a loop of satellite images of building complexes in the Iraqi desert, as a commentator detailed the suspicious movement of trucks.

"So what about you? You seem to have done okay for yourself."

Doug told him about getting his first job in New York, and how he'd spent his time learning the business, listening to the geeks and the quants, the pale men in ill-fitting suits who could tell you the yield curve