Union Atlantic Page 0,70

at ten or ten thirty and, finding the lights out and no car in the driveway, waited by the side of the garage until eleven thirty or later. Most nights the sky had been clear, the trees on top of the hill by Ms. Graves's house visible in black profile against a dome of pinhead stars. Sitting on the cool grass, he'd wondered what his father would have thought of him, waiting there in the dark for this man. Or what he would have thought about the things Nate had done with Doug already. It was a habit of late, this guessing at his father's judgment of the things he did or said. Yet no matter how often he tried it, the result was always the same: it didn't matter. Nate wanted it to, but it didn't. Imagining his father's reactions was just an end run against his being gone, his having chosen to go. As if an endless hypothetical could keep him alive. The fact was, if Nate wanted to sleep in Doug's bed, no one but Doug could stop him. He was already that free.

With no idea where to go, Nate stepped into the back hall of the house. From the kitchen, a procession of waiters in black trousers and white smock shirts appeared, sliding past him, trays of wine balanced at their shoulders. One of them, a narrow-faced redhead with thyroidal eyes, spread his bulbous glance down Nate's bare chest like a cat stalking a bird, a lubricious grin playing across his lips as he sped by, leaving Nate feeling as alone as he ever had.

IGNORING THE PARKING minders trying to wave him in, Doug sped past the entrance to the field and turned right at the intersection, and then right again, winding his way around to the far side of the property. He'd attended plenty of the Hollands' parties over the years and was in no mood for one this evening, but his business with Jeffrey couldn't wait any longer.

All weekend, he'd camped out in a conference room with the door locked and McTeague on speakerphone, as they worked through each fabricated transaction until by Sunday night he'd assembled the full picture: Atlantic Securities, and not its supposed clients, held thousands of futures contracts obliging it to purchase Nikkei tracking shares at a price hundreds of points higher than where the Japanese index now traded. As they presently stood, McTeague's positions represented a loss of more than five billion dollars. With each further drop of the Nikkei, the loss grew exponentially.

For the moment, Doug had taken the only practical step: he'd kept McTeague in place and continued to funnel him enough cash to cover the margin and hold the positions open so the losses would remain, for now at least, unrealized. But he couldn't keep Holland out of the loop any longer. For one thing, Finden Holdings was running out of money to lend Atlantic Securities and would need more from Union Atlantic as early as tomorrow. More important, they had now reached a line over which Doug had no intention of stepping alone. Setting up a single-purpose vehicle like Finden Holdings to get around regulatory limits was one thing; it skirted rules without quite violating them. But what Atlantic Securities and its parent bank would have to do now to survive was altogether different: deception of the exchange authorities and the deliberate misstatement of the company's exposure to the shareholders and the public. Doug knew well enough how the principals defended themselves in investigations of this sort of thing. They did what Lay had done at Enron - claim ignorance of operational detail. Cutting the occasional corner might have been an implicit part of Doug's job in special plans, but he had no intention of letting Holland play dumb on a scheme this size.

When he saw the lights of the party through the trees, he pulled to the side of the road. He hadn't walked twenty yards along the fence when he glanced to his left and noticed a high juniper hedge, which seemed oddly familiar to him, almost as if he'd dreamt of it. Coming closer, he recognized the gap in the bushes and the white gravel drive. It was the Gammonds' house, where his mother used to clean, where he used to pick her up in the afternoons, its brick façade smaller than he remembered it, the shutters painted white now rather than dark green. He'd never come to the Hollands' from this