6:10 A.M.
PARK SLOPE
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
David Fenner stepped down the front steps of a brick town house just as his wife, Natalie, was coming back from a run.
Fenner had short, tight-cropped brown hair and a laid-back demeanor. He had on a tan corduroy suit, a white button-down, and no tie.
A black sedan—Fenner’s Uber—was waiting at the curb.
“How far did you go?” he said to Natalie.
Natalie stopped and leaned forward.
“Seven,” she said.
“Good for you.”
“What did you do?” she said.
“Five,” said Fenner, walking closer and reaching for her, despite her sweatiness. He embraced her. “I love you, honey. I’ll see you tonight.”
“I love you, too. Seven o’clock,” said Natalie, standing up. “Please don’t be late.”
“I won’t.”
Fenner walked toward the black sedan.
He glanced back at his wife as she ascended the wide steps of their brownstone. The home had cost him $6 million, followed by a $4 million restoration. There was no doubt it was one of the most beautiful brownstones in Park Slope. The money didn’t matter, though. The Fenners were wealthy.
As a student at Babson College, he’d written a computer program that could be used to be the back end of any online gambling site. By the time he was a junior, it was the back end of most online gambling sites, and he sold the code for $120 million the fall of his senior year. In graduate school at MIT, Fenner wrote two computer programs, both of which he sold for a lot of money.
Fenner, like the other three governors of the Fed, was already wealthy before he agreed to help manage the very system upon which their wealth had been created, a system on which America’s money moved in a complex paradigm of black boxes, wires, and air. Fenner, and the other governors, each earned $289,500 a year.
As Fenner looked at his wife stepping up the stairs, he thought about how much he’d accomplished, and a feeling of pride and happiness filled him for a brief moment as he opened the back door of the black Cadillac sedan. He climbed in just as a dark figure, looming inside, turned from the front seat. Fenner saw the gun just as the stranger turned. It was a silencer, he understood that. The man was wearing a black ski mask. Before Fenner’s momentum had even carried him to the leather back seat, the man fired. There was a low thud. A bullet hit him in the chest and splattered blood across the seat and door.
The killer pulled the door shut and started driving. He went for several blocks and parked near a subway station. He took out a small plastic bag, then a pair of wire cutters, and cut off Fenner’s thumb. He put it in the bag, then stuck the tip of a knife into Fenner’s eye socket. He pried out the eyeball, taking it gently into his hand as his other hand slashed the blade through what was left of the veins connecting Fenner’s eyeball to his skull. He put the eyeball in the plastic bag.
The killer climbed out of the car and walked to the subway station, falling in line with the swarm of human beings on their daily commute to Manhattan.