Even now, as he readied himself to emerge from the shadows, he didn’t know who’d dragged that scent through that city, only that it had vanished like windblown smoke.
He glanced at his watch and then shielded his eyes as he stepped into the glare of the light-polished street to hail a cab. A quivering in his chest upwelled into a surge of self-doubt, and with it the dread that the scent he’d followed had been of his own manufacture and that it would now lead him, if not into the crosshairs of an unknown enemy, into an abyss of his own design.
CHAPTER 1
San Francisco private investigator Graham Gage handed his Rollaboard to the chauffeur, and then climbed into the backseat of the Town Car stopped at the slick and frozen curb in front of terminal one at John F. Kennedy Airport.
“Thanks for coming out,” Federal Reserve Chairman Milton Abrams said, the words emerging as a sigh. “Sorry I was so cryptic on the phone. The flight must’ve felt like a red-eye into the unknown.” Abrams made a show of surveying the solid shoulders on Gage’s six-foot-two frame. “And a cramped one at that.”
Gage inspected Abrams’s face. He found it difficult to make out beneath the lined and sagging flesh the academic who’d first sought him out two decades earlier. Back then, as an assistant professor of finance at MIT, Abrams had viewed economics as a form of play, mathematics as a form of poetry, and algorithms as a form of magic. While his days had been spent in intellectual combat and in a struggle for mainframe time, he celebrated his nights in a dream world of weightless possibilities and of ambition without responsibility.
But that game had come to an end six months earlier, with his appointment by the president and his confirmation by the Senate. Now he resided in a nightless world of twenty-four-hour securities markets and currency speculation, of war and terrorism, of human-made and natural disasters, all of which bore down on him at subatomic speed and seemed to have etched away his youth.