14

New York City

“Awww, shit, Weiss.”

Turns out Danny Weiss wasn’t a conspiracy theorist at all. Turns out he was right.

And now, as a reward for being right, he’s twisted in a heap with his left shoulder against the wall on the dusty side of a Popsicle orange futon, bleeding out through a severed carotid artery.

“Shit, Weiss. Shit!” Havens punches his fist into his palm and leans down to look in Weiss’s eyes. “Stay with me, Danny!” To his surprise there is a glint of recognition from Weiss. He tries to talk, but the only sound is a wet suck of air through his throat wound. Fear and adrenaline burns inside Havens like flames. Trembling, gasping for his own breath, he starts to rise, knowing that Weiss will be dead in seconds but realizing that the only hope is to call for help. But as he begins to move, Weiss reaches out and grabs his hand. He holds Weiss’s fading gaze, squeezes his hand, and feels an object in the young man’s still warm palm. It almost drops into the pooling blood, but Havens clasps on to it at the last second: a small red flash drive. Havens tries to speak: “Danny . . .” But Weiss shakes his head a fraction of an inch each way and then glances up toward the wall behind him. Havens follows the dying man’s gaze, and his eyes settle on a large whiteboard, covered with a rainbow of symbols and letters. It’s barely a glance, but the information pops out and into him, swirling through his brain as a wave of nausea rises up from the pit of his belly. He closes his eyes halfway through reading these words scrawled across the bottom in red:

 

The gods may love a man, but they can’t help him

when cold death comes to lay him at his bier . . .

He reopens his eyes, looks away from the board and back at Weiss. But Weiss’s eyes are glazed and frozen. He’s bending back down toward Weiss when he hears footsteps coming up the hallway stairs. He straightens and listens more closely. Because the front door is open, it’s easy to hear the steps, and they’re definitely coming up the stairs. Quickly. Unless someone has called the police—and he’s heard no sirens outside and this sounds like one set of approaching feet—he determines that it’s the killer coming back to finish up. He steps backward, turns, and leaves a set of bloody footprints as he makes his way to the window. It pops up easily, and in a moment he is out on the iron grill of the fire escape. He starts to close the window but thinks better of it when he glances at a pair of legs entering the room.

He crawls to the top rung of the rickety iron ladder, swings his hips around, and begins climbing down. Every fourth step he looks up to see if he’s been discovered. It’s only a matter of time before whoever it is—cop, neighbor, killer—discovers the bloody footsteps leading to the open window. Two stories down, with one to go, he stops. There is no longer a ladder. As he grabs the edge of the grate and prepares to swing his body around to the hanging position, he peeks up once more and sees movement in Weiss’s window. A man’s bald held thrusts out, looks right and left and then down. When his eyes lock with Havens’s, there’s a moment of confusion, then mutual recognition. It’s Laslow, the fixer from the club last seen harassing the bottle girl.

In an instant Laslow is out the window and lunging toward the first ladder. Havens hangs from the edge of the escape and drops to the sidewalk. He falls to his hands and knees and starts scrambling, running before he’s fully up. He heads east along the empty sidewalk of 93rd Street. At the corner of First Avenue he allows himself his first look back and, thinking that he might have seen the flash of a body under a distant street lamp, he begins to run even faster.

At Second Avenue he sees the first pedestrians and car traffic, but still not enough of either in which to get lost. He turns left and zigzags southward through the cross streets, between Second and Third, then Lex, Park, and Madison, finally staggering into the darkness of Central Park at the entrance at 79th and Fifth.

As he runs, he calculates. He creates several models that consider the likelihood of Laslow catching him (high), knowing him (absolutely), and/or how quickly he might get information about his address from Rick Salvado and make his way to his apartment (fifteen minutes, a half hour if he had to go back to Weiss’s place to find or finish whatever prompted his return).

There is no question about whether any of this will happen. The only variable is when.

Only under the cover of trees on a silent footpath does he allow himself to slow and look back to see that no one is following him. For Havens, Central Park at night never felt so safe.

As he walks, glancing back every twenty steps, heart desperately thumping, he thinks about Weiss and can’t help but feel that this is all his fault. In addition to making a fortune off the misfortune of others and losing his wife and his child, now he’s brought death upon an innocent young idealist. After all, he’s the one who put Weiss on the case of looking into the validity of the positions held by their own employer. He’s the one who asked him to look for philosophical inconsistencies and numerical irregularities.

And he’s the one who didn’t object when Weiss told him about the proprietary, insanely powerful, and in all likelihood highly illegal financial tracking software he’d somehow just gotten hold of.

Yet when the young man called him yesterday, breathless and incredulous, he refused to let him tell his story. His theory. Havens told Weiss to come to him when he had facts. Confirmation. He told Weiss he wasn’t interested in stories and gave him his all too familiar lecture about the danger of words, and how only numbers, only the truth of data, could reveal anything worth acting on in the financial world. Weiss begged Havens to hear him out, but he refused. He said it would only skew his read on the only thing that mattered: the data.

Only as he approaches the exit on the west side of the park, near 59th Street, does Havens realize that Danny Weiss’s small red flash drive is in his front pocket.