Daniel Murello sat looking at the panoramic view of Manhattan. Several years earlier he had taken over the office from the previous tenant, an insurance salesman. There were only a handful of rentable spaces with full, unobstructed views of the city north as far as the Upper West Side and south almost to Wall Street. The others were occupied either by large corporations or individuals with long-term leases. Murello had spent more than a year researching them. This office required the least effort to obtain. When the insurance salesman committed suicide, six weeks after Murello had become his partner in a new venture, Murello pulled down the blinds the previous tenant had put up, stripped the office bare, and reoriented the energy in the room toward the nexus of the glass-covered north and west walls. There he put a simple but very expensive metal desk and leather chair. The desk was long but narrow and did not impede his view out the window. It was positioned facing the windows, so anyone entering the room would have found Murello with his back to them. But no one ever came in. The office door led to a reception area; immaculate but empty. The sign on the door leading from the hall to the reception area read The Catalyst Fund. There were rarely any visitors who got as far as the reception area, only the occasional lost investment banker or tourist. The exception had been two years earlier when the woman he was seeing showed up unexpectedly. Dating for Murello was just another business proposition; he formed no emotional attachment but he had physical and social needs. The physical needs were simple and he found it easier to maintain one or two women who appreciated his charm and good looks and were happy to service him during the honeymoon period of the relationship. Once that was over, he quickly dropped them. The end of the honeymoon period was marked by their need to get to know him better, something he had no interest in. He could have relied on the services of professionals, beautiful young call girls who were only too happy to make a few thousand a night. But ironically Murello preferred the sincerity of a “real” girlfriend; it helped him maintain his façade. Same with the social needs he had. There were times he had to interact at certain events and a companion was necessary. Business. This particular time, the woman he was dating had been in a coffee shop and seen Murello enter the building across the street where his office was. She had no idea what he did for a living except that it had vaguely to do with finance and he must be good at it because there was plenty of money. She followed him in, unable to get his attention by calling across the busy intersection. When she came into the room where Murello was making a call, she overheard several sentences. They were likely innocuous comments without context, but they related to an important deal. He explained away the call and the office – it was not like any she had seen before – and made plans for dinner that night. She never made it to the restaurant where Murello sat until late, looking like the concerned boyfriend. The woman was found, strangled and beaten after a brutal mugging a few blocks from the restaurant.
There was no telephone service in the office. When Murello made calls it was with a cell phone. Internet connectivity was done wirelessly, parasitically off any one of dozens of Wi-Fi hotspots within a hundred yards of the street below or in the surrounding building. This allowed him to use his laptop to anonymously tap into someone else’s network and surf the Web or send email. Murello had a thirty-year lease, matching the lease between the building’s management company and the owner of the building. At some point, he would acquire the entire building. The Catalyst Fund currently had seventeen billion dollars in assets, mostly in stock holdings of various forms. There were a few billion in real estate throughout the world, and one billion in cash distributed among a dozen foreign currencies. No more than twenty percent of the fund was in play at any one time, earning an average of 11% net profit annually. However, one half of the seventeen billion dollars was used to make bold, unpredictable moves. Five or six times each year, the Fund entered an industry and made a huge gamble. It staked a contrarian position, or anticipated an enormous event, and came out on top. The industries varied, but the moves were always large and unexpected. Under normal circumstances, the Catalyst Fund would receive the same attention as a Warren Buffett; every decision scrutinized, every move copied. But the it worked under a dozen different umbrella companies, none of which could be traced back to the Fund. None of which could be traced back to Murello. All of which were controlled by him.
Murello used an encrypted virtual private network, a technology that set up a digital tunnel from his computer out to the Internet using a hijacked connection he picked out of the air with a scanning device attached to his laptop, to check his email. His actions were untraceable. He logged in to one of his many, ever-changing email addresses. His disappointment showed as he read the message from Helen. There was another delay on the Ventrica.