“George!” she trilled, delighted. She smiled, her pearly dentures smeared with lipstick. “Oh, but this is so very confusing. You’re dead!” Her tone became scolding, as if lecturing a naughty child. “You really shouldn’t be here, George.”

  Bryson smiled, gave her a peck on the cheek, and sat across the table from her. She still mistook him for his father. “You caught me, Felicia,” Bryson said sheepishly, his tone lighthearted. “But tell me again—how did I die?”

  Felicia’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “George, none of that! You know very well how it happened. Let’s not rehash all that. Pete feels bad enough, you know.” She took a forkful of mashed potatoes.

  “Why does he feel bad, Felicia?”

  “He wishes it were him instead. Not you and Nina. He just berates himself over and over again. Why did George and Nina have to die?”

  “Why did we have to die?”

  “You know very well. I don’t need to tell you.”

  “But I don’t know why. Perhaps you can tell me.”

  Bryson looked up and was surprised to see Elena. She put her arms around Felicia, then sat down next to her, clasping in her two hands Felicia’s bony, liver-spotted hand.

  Did Felicia recognize Elena? It was impossible, of course; they had seen each other on only one occasion, years earlier. But there was something about Elena’s manner that Felicia found comforting. Bryson wanted to catch Elena’s eye, to find out what had happened, but Elena was devoting all her attention to Felicia.

  “He really shouldn’t be here,” Felicia said, giving Bryson a sidelong glance. “He’s dead, you know.”

  “Yes, I know that,” said Elena gently. “But tell me what happened. Wouldn’t it make you feel a little better to talk about what happened?”

  Felicia looked troubled. “I always blame myself. Pete always says he wishes they didn’t have to die—he wishes it were him. George was his best friend, you know.”

  “I know. Is it too painful for you to talk about? What happened, I mean? How they were killed?”

  “Well, it’s my birthday, you know.”

  “Is it? Happy birthday, Felicia!”

  “Happy? No, it’s not happy at all. It’s so very, very sad. It’s such a terrible night.”

  “Tell me about that night.”

  “Such a beautiful, snowy night! I made dinner for us all, but I didn’t care if dinner got cold! I told Pete that. But no, he didn’t want to spoil my birthday dinner. He kept telling George to hurry, hurry! Drive faster! And George didn’t want to, he said the old Chrysler couldn’t handle the icy roads, the brakes were bad. Nina was upset—she wanted them all to pull over and wait out the storm. But Pete kept pushing them, urging them on! Hurry, hurry!” Her eves grew wide and filled with tears; she looked at Elena desperately. “When the car went out of control and George and Nina were killed … oh, my Pete was in the hospital for over a month, and the whole time he kept saying, over and over and over again, ‘It should have been me who was killed! Not them! It should have been me!’” The tears were spilling down her cheeks as the painful memory emerged from deep in the confused mind of a woman for whom the past and the present were a mingled palimpsest. “They were best friends, you know.”

  Elena put a comforting arm around the old woman’s fragile shoulders. “But it was an accident,” she said. “It was an accident. Everyone knows that.”

  Bryson reached over and hugged Felicia, blinking back tears himself. She was tiny, birdlike in his embrace.

  “It’s all right,” he said soothingly. “It’s all right.”

  “It must be such a relief for you,” said Elena, sitting beside Bryson in the rented green Buick.

  Bryson nodded as he drove. “I think I needed to hear it—even given the circumstances, even given the confused state of her mind.”

  “There’s a certain observable consistency to her thoughts, even given the confusion, the thought disorder. Her long-term memory is sharp: that usually remains intact. She might not remember where she is at any given moment, but she’ll clearly remember her wedding night.”

  “Yes. I suspect Dunne was counting on her advanced senility in the event that I contacted her for confirmation of his carefully constructed lies. As the sole surviving witness to the events, she’s as unreliable as they come; Dunne knew that, knew she wouldn’t be able to effectively contradict his fraudulent version.”

  “Though she just did,” Elena pointed out.

  “She did. But it took a degree of trust, of patience and persistence, of gentleness that I doubt Dunne’s CIA men possess. Well, thank God for you, is all I can say. You’re the one with the gentleness, and I think she picked up on it. Who’d ever have thought that such a gentle creature could have the makings of a deep-cover operative?”

  She smiled. “You mean the phone number?”

  “How’d you get it, and so quickly?”

  “For one thing, I simply thought about where I’d put it if I were her, a place where I could get it quickly. I also figured that if Harry Dunne wanted the administrator to think he was a concerned relative, he wasn’t at the same time going to insist on security precautions.”

  “Where was it, in her Rolodex, right on her desk?”

  “Close. A list of ‘emergency’ contact numbers taped to the top left-hand corner of her desk blotter. I spotted it as soon as I sat down, so I ‘accidentally’ left my purse on the chair next to her desk, and as. we were leaving for a tour, I suddenly remembered. I went to pick it up, spilled out its contents all over her desk and the floor. As I picked things up I took a glance and memorized it.”

  “And if it hadn’t been right there?”

  “Plan B would have required me to leave the purse there longer and retrieve it during her cigarette break. She’s a heavy smoker.”

  “Was there a Plan C?”

  “Yes. You.”

  He laughed, a rare moment of much-needed levity relieving the prevailing tension. “You give me too much credit.”

  “I don’t think so. Now it’s my turn, though. The reverse-number lookup has gotten easy these days, thanks to the Internet. I won’t even have to do it myself—I can E-mail it to one of a hundred search services that’ll get me the address in half an hour or less. Even call it in.”

  “The area code is eight-one-four—where is that? There are so many area codes these days.”

  “The note she scrawled beside it said ‘PA’—Pennsylvania, I assume, right?”

  “Pennsylvania? Why would Harry Dunne be there?”

  “Maybe he’s originally from there? A childhood home?”

  “His accent is purest New Jersey.”

  “Relatives, then? I’ll do a reverse-number lookup; that much should be easy to find out.”

  At one o’clock in the morning there was only a skeleton staff on duty at the Meredith Waterman building: a handful of security guards and one information technology staffer.

  The tough-looking female security guard stationed at the employees’ entrance at the side of the building was in the middle of reading a Harlequin romance, and she did not look happy about being disturbed.

  “You’re not on the admit list,” she said dourly, her long-nailed index finger holding her place in the book.

  The short-haired man in the aviator glasses and the shirt with MCCAFFREY INFORMATION STORAGE SERVICES stitched on it just shrugged. “Hey, fine. I’ll just head back to New Jersey and tell ’em you wouldn’t let me in. Makes my job easier, and I still get paid.”

  Bryson turned around, readying his next riposte, when the guard relented somewhat. “What’s the purpose of your—”

  “Like I told you. Meredith is one of our clients. We do the off-site backup—it’s an after-hours download. But we’re getting digital collation errors. Doesn’t happen a lot, but it happens. And it means I gotta check the routers on site here.”

  She sighed in irritation and picked up the phone, punching a number. “Charlie, do we have a contract with a McCaffrey”—she examined the stitching on Bryson’s shirt—“Information Storage Services?”

  She listened in silence. “The guy says he has to check on something here because of errors or something.”

  She listened again. “All right, thanks.” She hung up, a superior smirk on her face. “You’re supposed to call ahead,” she said with a reproving scowl. “The service elevator’s on the right down the hall. Take it down to B.”

  As soon as he reached the basement level, he raced to the freight-delivery entrance, which he had located during his earlier surveillance. Elena was waiting there, wearing the identical uniform and carrying an aluminum clipboard. The corporate records center was one large belowground room, with a low acoustic-tiled ceiling, buzzing fluorescent lights, and row upon row of open steel warehouse shelves that held endless-seeming lines of identical, tall gray archive boxes. The boxes were arranged chronologically, with just a few entries for 1860, the vcar it was founded by Elias Meredith, an erstwhile trader in Irish linen. Each succeeding year took up more linear shelf space, until 1989—the last year whose paper files were stored here—which occupied an entire row. Each year was broken down into various categories—client records, personnel records, minutes of partners’ and committee meetings, consent resolutions, amendments to bylaws, and so on. Folders were color-coded, with end tabs and bar codes.

  Time was extremely limited: they knew they could not stay down here for much more than an hour before Security would begin to wonder what was taking so long. They divided up responsibilities, with Bryson surveying the paper files and Elena sitting at the computer terminal and examining the records-management database. This was an electronic records-tracking and inventory-management system, up-to-date though not password-protected. There would be no reason for it to be protected, since it was set up for ease of use by the bank’s record clerks.

  It was laborious work, made even more difficult by the fact that they had no idea exactly what they were looking for. Client records? But which clients? Records of large money transfers to offshore accounts? But how could they distinguish between a wire transfer that was nothing more shady than the semilegitimate parking of clients’ assets offshore to avoid scrutiny by the IRS, or by a divorcing wife—and one that might be the beginning of a long sequence of transfers from one offshore bank to another, eventually ending up in the pocket of a senator? Elena came up with the idea of using the computer to search for them—by feeding in key words and pulling up file references. Yet after an hour they still had nothing.

  In fact, they began to find documents missing, whole sections of them. After 1985, there were no partners’ income records or earning statements to be found. It was not as if the documents had been removed. Elena was able to confirm, by poring over the electronic database manager, that not a single document pertaining to monies brought in by the partners was to be found after 1985.

  Frustrated, increasingly tense as the minutes ticked by, Bryson finally decided to narrow his focus to just one partner: Richard Lanchester. He proceeded to examine all the Lanchester files—personnel, compensation, clients. The story they told was, just as the Lanchester myth had it, one of the genesis of a Wall Street whiz. He started at Meredith Waterman immediately after graduation from Harvard, and did not do grunt work for long. Within a very few years he emerged as an aggressive bond trader, generating huge income for the firm. He soon headed the department. Then he added another specialty—currency speculation and investment. The money he made there made what he was doing before look like begging for pocket change. Richard Lanchester had become, in ten years, the biggest earner in the bank’s history.

  The Wall Street whiz kid had become a financial powerhouse, making himself and the other general partners extremely rich through his deals, and most of all through a complex series of financial trades. He had apparently mastered the delicate art of trading in financial instruments called derivatives, placing immense, multibillion-dollar wagers on stock-index futures and interest-rate futures. Essentially he was gambling on a massive scale, the casino being the global capital markets. He kept winning and winning and winning; no doubt, like a true gambler, he believed his luck would never run out.

  It was late in 1985 when his luck ran out.

  In 1985, everything changed. With rapt fascination, sitting on the cold concrete floor of the records room, Bryson came upon a thin folder of internal auditors’ reports that described a reversal of fortune so abrupt, so devastating, that it was almost impossible to believe.

  One of his immense bets, on Eurodollar futures, went bad. Overnight, Lanchester had lost the bank three billion dollars. This exceeded the bank’s assets many times over.

  Meredith Waterman was insolvent. It had survived a century and a half of financial crises, even the Great Depression; and then Richard Lanchester lost a bet, and America’s oldest private bank was broke.

  “My God,” Elena breathed as she looked through the auditors’ reports. “But … none of this was ever made known to the public!”

  Bryson, as astonished as she, shook his head slowly. “Nothing. Never. Not an article, not a mention in the press—nothing.”

  “How can this be?”

  Bryson glanced at his watch. They had been down here for almost two hours; they were pressing their luck.

  Suddenly he looked at her, eyes wide. “I think I understand now why we couldn’t find any partners’ income records after 1985.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they found a benefactor. Someone to bail them out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He got up, found the gray file box that was marked, blandly, PARTNERSHIP INTEREST ASSIGNMENTS. He had seen it but hadn’t bothered to open it; there was far too much to look through and that seemed unlikely to yield anything interesting. He opened the box and found only one thin manila file folder inside. The folder contained fourteen thin, stapled legal documents of no more than three pages each.

  Each was headed PARTNERSHIP INTEREST ASSIGNMENT. He read the first one with a racing heart. Although he knew what it would say, it was nevertheless stunning, even terrifying, to see on the page.

  “Nicholas, what? What is it?”

  He read phrases aloud as he skimmed. “The undersigned agrees to sell all rights, title, and interest in my interest as a partner in the partnership … . In consideration thereof … succeed to all rights and liabilities associated with that interest.”

  “What are you reading? Nicholas, what are these documents?”

  “In November of 1985, each of the fourteen general partners in Meredith Waterman signed a legal document selling their stake in the partnership,” Bryson said. His mouth was dry. “Each of the partners was directly and personally responsible for the more than three billion dollars of debt that Lanchester had run up. Obviously they had no choice; they were all backed into a corner. They had to sell out.”

  “But … I don’t understand—what was there left to sell?”

  “Just the name. An empty shell of a bank.”

  “And the buyer got—what?”

  “The seller paid fourteen million dollars—one million to each partner. And they were extraordinarily lucky to get that. Because the buyer was now saddled with billions of dollars of debt. Fortunately for him, he could afford it. Part of the condition of the sale was that each partner was required to sign a side confidentiality agreement—a nondisclosure agreement. A vow of secrecy. Enforceable by the threat of having their payment — the money disbursed over five years—revoked.”

  “This is … it’s so bizarre,” she said, shaking her head. “Am I understanding this right? Are you saying that in 1985 Meredith Waterman was secretly sold to one person? And no one knew it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But who was the buyer? Who’d be crazy enough to make such a deal?”

  “Someone who wanted to become the secret owner of a prestigious, highly regarded investment bank—which he could then use as a vehicle. A front for illicit payments around the world.”

  “But who?”

  Bryson gave a small, wan smile, and he too shook his head in puzzlement. “A billionaire named Gregson Manning.”

  “Gregson Manning—Systematix … ?”

  Bryson paused. “The man behind the Prometheus conspiracy.”

  There was a quiet scuffing noise, which jolted Bryson—the sound of a leather shoe scraping against the concrete floor. He looked up from the files, which were spread out on a small table before them, and saw the tall, stout man in a blue security-officer’s uniform. The man was staring at them with undisguised hostility. “You—hey, what the goddamned hell … ? You’re—you’re supposed to be from the computer company. What the hell are you doing here?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  They were nowhere near the main bank of computers, the server on the other side of the large room. A file box, clearly labeled, stood in front of them; the fourteen legal documents spread out like a fan on the table.

  “What the hell took you so long?” said Bryson in disgust. “I’ve been calling up to security for the last half hour!”

  Gimlet-eyed, the security man regarded them with suspicion. His two-way radio crackled. “What the hell you talking about? I didn’t get any calls.”

  Elena got up, waving her clipboard. “Look, without the service contract, we’re just wasting our time! It’s supposed to be left for us in the same place each time! We’re not supposed to dig around for it—do you have any idea how much data’s going to be lost?” She gesticulated wildly, thrusting an index finger toward his chest.

  Bryson watched her, impressed; he followed her lead. “Security must have shut down the system,” he said with a petulant shake of the head, getting up slowly.

  “Hey lady,” the guard protested, facing her, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking—”

  Bryson’s hands shot out like the strike of a cobra, grabbing the security man’s throat from behind with his left hand, and striking, with the hard edge of his rigid right hand, the brachial plexus nerve bundle at the base of the neck. The man went suddenly limp, slumping into Bryson’s arms. He set the unconscious guard down on the floor gently, dragging him the short distance to the warehouse shelving, propping him up in the aisle between two rows of shelves. He would be out for at least an hour, possibly more.