5:57 A.M.
METRO-NORTH TRAIN STATION
MT. KISCO, NEW YORK
A silver BMW M5 pulled into the parking lot of a suburban train station, outside New York City. The lot was already crowded, even now, at just before six on a Wednesday morning. Men and women taking the early train to get to the city and their jobs at large financial institutions, hedge funds, PR firms, publishers, media conglomerates, and a thousand other high-paying professions which kept the train crowded on a Wednesday morning. Everyone trying to get ahead—or stay ahead. Of course, the ones who were already ahead, far ahead, could show up whenever they wanted to.
Phil Lawrence was already far, far ahead, though he didn’t show it, at least not ostentatiously. He first retired at age thirty-four, though now, at forty-eight, that year of retirement was hard to remember. He and his wife had traveled the world, staying in the finest hotels and resorts, visiting the South Pole and Tibet, and more than twenty other countries in between. His fraternity brothers at Saint Anthony Hall had not anticipated Lawrence’s success. After all, he’d graduated from Columbia, where his academic record had been mediocre at best. At St. A’s, he was known for his pool-shooting skills and his ability to attract women. After graduation, Lawrence had asked his father for a $100,000 loan, all of which he’d invested in a cross section of oil companies at every part of the supply chain, along with a mirror-image investment across the emerging biotech industry. By the time he was twenty-five, he’d paid his father back and had almost $70 million under management, most of it his own. When his father and a few friends were allowed to invest, Lawrence—by thirty—was running $8 billion, $6 billion of which was based on capital appreciation, rather than new investors. Lawrence made approximately 20 percent of all capital appreciation.
Lawrence had been approached by a multitude of hedge funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, and family offices. All wanted to acquire his fund. He contemplated a few offers to come aboard, with total investment freedom, and autonomy over a much bigger piece of capital. But Lawrence knew that if he worked for someone he would have to explain how he saw the patterns in the numbers, how he could look at tens of thousands of documents quickly, not really reading them—raw financials—and somehow process the blur of numbers and see patterns which told him something.
He sold his company to Black Rock when he turned thirty-four. He was already a billionaire and this just added to it. After his year of travel, he couldn’t take it anymore. He hated being retired. Lawrence couldn’t handle not putting himself in the middle of the complex, massively simultaneous data flow of the economy. He realized during that year that it wasn’t about the money.
He repeated what he’d done as a younger man—starting with $100,000, which he again, for symbolic reasons, borrowed from his father. Again, he repaid the money and within a calendar year had turned that initial investment into $220 million.
It was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Richard Baum, who called Lawrence and recruited him.
“Have you ever heard of the governors of the Federal Reserve?” said Baum.
“No,” said Lawrence.
“The four Fed governors manage the actual day-to-day, minute-by-minute trading platform for U.S. Treasury securities,” said Baum. “It’s called Fedwire. Basically, the financial transactions of the United States government run through the four governors. During any single day, that amounts to almost three hundred billion, in a year over one hundred trillion dollars of activity. I’m calling you, Phillip, because I’d like to ask you to be one of the governors.”
On the radio was sports talk, a NYC station. Mike Francesa was both praising and excoriating Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots, for something. Lawrence was laughing as he parked his car and hit a button on the console, turning it off.
It was his usual space, the corner of the lot nearest the train tracks, the spot he parked in every day.
He did notice a shadow as he turned off the car but didn’t think anything of it. Had he been watching, he would have seen a dark figure move to the left rear of the M5 as he parked.
Lawrence opened the door but before he could begin to step out of the car, a long black suppressor appeared in the opening of the door. Behind it was a man in a ski mask. The man pumped the trigger. There was a low metallic thwack. A suppressed, hollow-tipped bullet ripped through Lawrence’s throat. Another thwack and this time the metal tore dead center into Lawrence’s chest, shooting blood across the far window.
The man tossed the pistol onto the ground. He lifted Lawrence and threw him to the passenger seat and climbed in, shutting the car door behind him. He pulled off the ski mask and took a plastic bag out of his pocket. He grabbed Lawrence’s right arm, finding his hand, then his thumb. He removed a set of steel wire clippers, quickly grabbing the base of Lawrence’s thumb. He squeezed as hard as he could, twisting the clippers so the blades dug in. Blood poured all over the center console of the car. The killer cut the thumb off at the joint.
He tossed the wire cutters to the floor and pulled a small blade from his coat. He inserted the tip of the blade next to the dead man’s eye, along the edge of the orbital socket. Like plumbing an oyster, he scooped the eyeball out, cutting veins, then stuck both the finger and the eye into the plastic bag, which he put in his coat pocket. He looked around the parking lot and climbed out and shut the door to the BMW, then moved to the train platform, just as the 6:06 to Grand Central Station came rolling into Mt. Kisco.