47

Five minutes later, Esther spoke with Donald Saunders, who insisted that she come by the clinic. He refused to say anything more, responding to her questions with what she considered a doctor’s typical terseness. Esther thanked and hugged her friends, then asked the security detail to drive her home. She needed to shower and dress for the day ahead.

She disliked going anywhere in someone else’s car. She loved to drive almost as much as she liked the private time to think. She understood the logic in being accompanied everywhere, but in the light of another lovely April morning, all the reasons for the tight security flew out the window. Even so, the first phone call she made once they were under way was to Talmadge. “I owe you more than I can ever say.”

“Careful now.” He sounded enormously cheerful. “I might insist you come to work for me.”

“I don’t owe you that much.”

He laughed and said, “You do a cranky old man’s heart a whole lot of good, young lady.”

“This morning I feel about a million years old.”

“I imagine watching a passel of killers stalk your front garden would do that to a body.”

“I have another request.”

“Name it.”

“Yesterday my number two at the bank was fired. I told her she could come work for me on the hedge fund. But Jasmine needs reassurance that the job and the project are actually happening.”

“She needs a real office in a real company,” Talmadge agreed. “Give me her details. I’ll make the call myself.”

When Esther had done so, she hesitated, then said, “Can you meet me at the studio?”

“Nigh on impossible. I’ve got back-to-back meetings all morning. I interrupted a conference with my tax accountants to take your call.”

Esther decided she did not want to rush through an explanation that amounted merely to suspicions. She did not have enough hard evidence to call it anything else. She especially didn’t want to lay out here what she was thinking, as the two strangers in the front seat were within earshot. So she said, “I’ll check in with you later.”

Esther reviewed her incomings and saw she had thirty-seven voicemails and almost twice as many texts. There was no time to deal with them all, so she quickly scrolled through the messages for anything urgent and spent the remainder of the journey surveying the markets on her cellphone. Suzie’s description of their status as stable went too far. Esther could almost feel the tremors resonate from the charts, up through her hands, as if they were shaking the car and the earth beneath the asphalt.

All the markets needed was one hard shove and they would tumble off the cliff’s edge. But that had been true for weeks now. They were merely one step closer.

Even so, when they pulled into her drive, she could almost feel the cold wind blowing up from the abyss.

The female agent asked Esther for her house keys and security code. Esther refrained from pointing out that the police had kept a car parked out front all night, since her protest would only delay her getting upstairs and into the shower.

The two security agents were fairly easy to ignore. Both were quiet and somewhat nondescript, as though they had developed a persona that allowed them to vanish in plain sight. The woman was a couple of inches shorter than Esther and wore a navy blazer over gray slacks. The driver was male and wore an identical jacket and trousers with a white polo shirt and Ecco lace-ups. They both wore pistols in shoulder holsters under their jackets.

Esther decided to use the moment to phone Detective Sanchez. When the woman answered, Esther thanked her again for coming to her rescue, then described her phone conversation with Hewitt and what this represented. As she talked, the male agent turned around in his seat and watched her. His eyes were a smoky brown, his expression tight. He did not seem to even blink.

Esther hit the phone’s speaker button so her security could hear the detective say, “You’re thinking that these two banks consider you enough of a threat to their illegal activities that they targeted you. What did you say their take was?”

“Around four hundred million for the first week, minus commissions.”

The male agent spoke for the first time that morning. “Four hundred million dollars is a big impetus.”

Sanchez asked, “Who said that?”

“The security driver. And I don’t think you understand. An investment banking division can make that much in a month of normal trading. Less. Everything they’ve done, setting up this off-book project, siphoning in secret funds, none of this makes sense.”

“Same answer,” the driver replied. “Four hundred big ones.”

“I agree,” Sanchez said.

“Not when you look at the risks they’re taking,” Esther insisted. “They would lose their bank charters. Their merger bid would be crushed by the financial authorities. Both company presidents would be fired. Not to mention public humiliation and serious jail time.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“I want you to check and see if any Bermuda-based criminals have recently flown into the US.”

The driver nodded slowly. Sanchez replied, “That’s good thinking.”

Esther went on, “If the two banks are behind this attack, it means they’re planning something much bigger. And everything they’ve done to this point is just part of the ruse.”