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New York City
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Amadi hopped his battered bicycle over the curb and sped down Water Street. Old building with a bird, his cousin had said. Recently arrived from Ethiopia, Amadi had joined his extended family in New York. Now, delivering packages twelve hours a day, he made enough money to send a little back to his mother in Addis Ababa.
There is no old building with a bird. Amadi glided between stopped cars, glancing down each canyon he passed. No old buildings, only cliffs of steel and glass. He hopped another curb and stopped at Maiden Lane. People rushed by, mostly suits. Amadi felt invisible, an obstacle like a lamp-post or trash can. There was power in that invisibility, and there was loneliness.
He searched up and down the echoing granite canyon. From the corner of his eye he caught sight of a battered window air conditioner. What devilishness is this? Back from the street, behind a shiny new bank lobby, seven stories of old red brick rose from the sidewalk. Double-hung windows adorned the brick wall. Half of them sported the rusting grill of an air conditioner. Such a place does not pay five hundred dollars for a delivery.
Amadi pedaled a block farther, cut across to Front Street, and cruised down the opposite side. He passed a marble entrance in the algae stained brick. Above the stone lintel, it bore a heraldic shield with the outline of a bird’s head and the motto, Tekeli Li. Amadi allowed himself to coast between the parked cars and traffic. Whatever I have in my backpack, it will certainly get me arrested or killed.
Behind a delivery van, he stopped to consider his options. He could run now and take the consequences. He’d run from Ethiopia and didn’t want to run again. He could return to his cousin and claim he never found the building, but that would be a lie, a lie to his family. Finally, he chained his bicycle to a rack and walked two blocks back to the marble doorway. Invisible man.
Up a short flight of granite steps, through a swinging glass door, Amadi sweated all the way. Not daring to look back, he glanced at the thick manila envelope in his hand: Happy Dragon Imports. “Devils,” he muttered.
Through a second glass door emblazoned with a smiling green dragon, he stopped at a plain wooden counter. Years of wear and cigarette burns showed on both sides of the worn top. A smiling Asian woman took his package and handed him an envelope. The young man counted out five crisp new one hundred-dollar bills.
Amadi dashed back out to the sidewalk, careened around the corner, flew up Water Street, and sprinted another three blocks to a coffee shop. “Triple espresso, milk, sugar, yes please.” He peered out a window, watching. Suits walked by, no one remembered the invisible man and he never returned for that bicycle.
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Augustus Pym Senior felt the pneumatic cuffs tighten on his immobile legs. He counted to five, knowing exactly when they would deflate. Beneath his back, the motorized chair subtly realigned his lumbar support and adjusted the seat elevation. He took the moment to perform a few isometric exercises on his arms and shoulders. Pym had no delusions about his age or infirmity, but he was not about to surrender to either of them.
He turned his attention to the envelope sitting on the polished birch slab that served as his desk. Pym savored the moment. A twitch of his head and the chair docked itself against the block of wood. Inside the envelope, he found a smooth gray packet. Carbon fiber, it was locked with an electronic seal. Pym opened it with a command to his chair and spilled a stack of aging documents out onto his desk.
Bonds, bearer bonds denominated in the tens of millions. Sometimes the old ways are best. He leafed through the pile. Most of these securities had been issued over seventy years ago and few had their coupons still attached. Still, like cash, bearer bonds were always worth face value to the person who held the paper. Thirty-seven sheets, they totaled one point nine billion in U.S. currency.
Almost two billion, still a tiny drop of what had been lost when Hurricane Sandy plowed into New York. His team had been among the first to enter the flooded vaults below the Depository Trust Company. No one knew how many bundles of securities they had managed to smuggle out in those first few hectic days. Unfortunately for his team, none of them had survived for long afterwards.
Pym replaced the stack, re-locked the packet and returned it to his desk. The bonds would go to Zurich. There they would be witnessed by an underwriter and stored in a vault. Pym Investment Trust would never need to liquidate these securities. Instead, they would collateralize a series of long-term loans. Minutes later a young woman swept in, retrieved the packet, and disappeared.
He glanced down at the tiny clock on his chair. Twelve-thirty. His son would be coming up now. He tracked the elevator on another small screen. Four, five, six, seventh floor it stopped.
Augustus Pym Junior, Auggie to his father, Junior to everyone else, much to his son’s chagrin, crossed the thirty feet between the elevator doors and his father’s desk. “So much for our mercs. Lost them! Gone! What do I do now?”
“You know the rule,” Augustus said in a tired voice.
“I know. I’ll never be a true leader until I can sort out my own problems.” The younger Pym took out a cigarette and placed it, unlit, between his lips. He muttered curses as he paced to and fro across the Italian marble floor.
It was one of Augustus Senior’s rules—anything Auggie took upon himself, it was up to him to see it to completion. The elder Pym didn’t even want to know about it. It was Auggie’s problem. His mother had been too soft on Auggie growing up. Of course, Pym knew the real reason for that, and it grated at him after all these years.
“Okay,” Auggie said. “In general terms. What do you do when your mercenaries run away without firing a shot?”
“That would depend on the circumstances.”
“A bunch of Navy SEALs showed up.”
“Ah!” Pym nodded. “I wonder if perhaps you forgot the rule, ‘Know your enemy’?” When his son didn’t reply, he went on. “Did the background checks you ran on your targets turn up any connection to the Navy?” Auggie didn’t meet his eye. “Did you run background checks at all?”
“I did on one of them. Doesn’t matter anyway. They’re gone and I have no idea where they’ve run.”
Pym Senior was fast losing interest in his son’s failings, as well as the rumors of Auggie’s scheming. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples. Patience, he told himself. He’s your son, but at least he’s not your blood. He opened his eyes and twitched his head. His motorized chair undocked from the desk and rolled on silent tires across the room. It stopped in front of an illuminated case.
“Do you see this statue? It’s carved from ivory that was harvested from the tusk of an elephant no longer found in Africa. It has been embellished in gold and precious stones over the past thousand years. But in one night—one bloody night, the Khmer Rouge looted and burned its monastery. Now this thing of rare beauty is mine.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything, Pops? I’ve seen that ugly bit a thousand times.” Junior spread his arms and spun on his heels. “I’m sick of all this bloody crap you’ve surrounded yourself with. What good does it do anyone?”
The old man kept smiling at the illuminated case. “Behind you is an original Monet. In 1992, I purchased it from the Saint Petersburg Hermitage museum. That painting cost me a case of good vodka and a high-quality reproduction. Such were the times in Russia after the fall. With the right contacts you could buy anything.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Don’t you?” Pym asked.
Junior paused, removed the cigarette from his mouth, and rolled it between his fingers. Then his eyes lit up.
“With our contacts all around the world, depending on where they go, I might actually stand a chance of running them down.”
Pym nodded. Perhaps there was hope, if scant, for Auggie yet. “Exactly. Let them run. There is no city, no jungle far enough that our network can’t find them. I would track your targets, will wait until they are far from any help, then fall on them with an overwhelming force.”
His son smiled, a faraway look in his eyes. “And I’ll be there when it happens.”