Union Atlantic Page 0,83

ineluctable than ever. He heard the drawer of the bedside table open and close.

"Here. Up on your knees."

Doug's hands grasped him at the waist, pulling him backward. He turned his head to look up at him but again Doug told him to close his eyes. A thick warmth pressed up against his ass and then, after a moment of struggle, he felt a sudden, sharp ring of pain coil up through his body and into his head, making the blood beat at his temples and forcing him to gasp for breath.

"Don't worry. I'm not going to rape you."

That he would lose control of his bowels seemed certain but when that sensation ended he found himself able to breathe again, breathing and sweating, still in great pain but a pain that moved too fast along the tips of his nerves to make him want to stop.

He felt Doug's pelvis flat against him and the muscles of his back and neck released and he let go, the vigilant self finally fading as the thrusting began, the shock of it driven into him over and over.

From the base of his spine some liquid locked deep against the bone released and burst up into his skull, heating his brain to the edge of fainting. Leaning down on his forearms, his forehead to the mattress, he held on for another few seconds and then came without touching himself, his head jerking sharply backward, his shoulders contracting down his back.

A few strokes later Doug pulled out of him and rolled flat on the bed.

Nate stood and headed quickly for the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

"You all right?" Doug called out a few minutes later.

"Yeah," he said, leaning against the tiled wall of the shower, the old dread of discovery and the basic penal shame washing back over him with the scalding water.

Chapter 15

From the window of his office on the tenth floor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Henry Graves looked down over the crowds rushing westward along Liberty Street and up Nassau toward the Fulton Street station. Those who hadn't already been let out early for the Columbus Day weekend moved with more than their usual haste toward the buses and subways that would drain them from the city by the tens of thousands, emptying them into Jersey, Westchester, and Long Island, where supermarket inventories had already dropped a few points and the local banks had balanced their sheets for the week and sent their people home.

Downstairs, the Open Market Desk would trade Treasury bills for another half hour but the volume would be light. Soon Fedwire would settle, clearing everything from corporate bond sales to the credit card purchases of the secretaries and mutual fund salesmen hurrying now along the street below. Over the weekend when these people went to the movies or the mall they would swipe their cards through magnetic strips and thus do what for centuries had been the sole province of kings and parliaments: they would create money. Short money to be sure, but money nonetheless, which until that moment had never appeared on a balance sheet or been deposited with a bank, that was nothing but a permission for indebtedness, the final improvisation in a long chain of governed promises. And as they slept, the merchants' computers would upload their purchases and into the river of commerce another drop of liquidity would flow, reversing their commute, heading back into the city to collect in the big, money-center banks, which in the quiet of night would distribute news of the final score: a billion a day shipped to Asia and the petro states.

Behind him he heard his secretary, Helen, enter and turned to see her carrying a bouquet of lilies in a crystal vase. A beam of the expiring sun shot through the globe of water in her hands, spraying light across the dark portraits over the couch and dancing briefly on the paneling.

"Who on earth are those from?"

"Me," she said, clearing a place on the coffee table. She was a tall woman and had to bend nearly to a right angle to adjust the stems, her hand reaching up to brush her graying hair behind her ear. Most women her age at the bank had cut theirs short and wore skirts and jackets of a uniform blue or black. Helen, who was English, looked more like a tenured scholar in some branch of the humanities, dressed in formless cotton trousers, a turtleneck, and a red