The October List

it.’
    ‘Race?’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    She whispered, ‘You have me to thank for the Princeton Solution, remember? You owe me.’
    Daniel steered toward the buoy and throttled back, as if giving the VLCC, which must’ve outweighed Boat by a hundred thousand tons, a head start. The speedboat’s exhaust bubbled, the wind hissed and behind them gulls shrieked a plea for chum.
    ‘Ready?’
    She cried, ‘Go!’
    Daniel rammed the throttles forward and Boat sprang away, her needle-shaped bow lifting high as they sprinted for the buoy.
    Boat and the massive tanker were on intersecting forty-five-degree courses. Every second it grew bigger and darker as they wedged toward each other. Soon the VLCC was an otherworldly thing, visible only in outline and running lights and occasional amber dots of windows. An unstoppable shape, absorbing the entire sky, yet still growing, growing.
    ‘It’ll be close,’ Daniel shouted. They both glanced to their right at the crude carrier, then ahead to the buoy, which was three hundred yards away.
    Then two hundred.
    One …
    ‘Close!’ Daniel repeated in a ragged shout. ‘It’ll be close. I can stop. You want me to stop?’
    Her heart pounding, a primitive drum, electrified by the speed, by the looming nearness of the massive vessel, by the presence of the man at the wheel, inches from her, Gabriela leaned closer and put her head against his. ‘Win,’ she whispered. ‘I want you to win.’

CHAPTER
5
     

5:00 p.m., Friday
1 hour, 30 minutes earlier
     

 

 
     
    Limoncello’s was not busy.
    Perhaps it would be, probably would, since the restaurant was in the heart of Wall Street and it was Friday. And the place overlooked picturesque New York Harbor, offering a view of boats and endless waves, rising and falling like a metronome. This was just the spot for traders and brokers, who’d toyed with millions of other people’s dollars in the last eight hours, to celebrate their good decisions, to forget the bad.
    But now, late afternoon, the bar was half empty. Those business folks who’d arrive later were still at their desks or writing up tickets on the floors of the closed exchanges or at health clubs and on jogs through Battery Park.
    Here particularly, near the water, you could smell autumn in the air.
    Gabriela wove through the brass- and oak-accented room, returning from the toilet and sat in the high chair at the bar, which she’d occupied for the past half hour. She slipped her black-and-white-checked jacket off, hung it over the back of the stool. A white silk blouse was tucked primly into a knee-length pleated gray skirt. She wore black hose and mottled burgundy-and-black high heels; she would change into her black flats – her walking-to-work shoes – later; that comfy pair were on the floor, in the faded Tiffany bag she used for footwear transport.
    She resumed editing documents she’d been poring over since she’d arrived. The top one was headed Open Items for Accountant . Several entries she crossed through completely. Others she marked with precise asterisks, each line of the sunburst an equal length. Beneath these were a half-dozen sheets headed with the names of companies and below that Balance Sheet and P & L. There wasn’t a single sheet that listed assets below $250 million. Another said, CP Personal Accounts .
    She then turned to another contract, headed Short-term Commercial Lease. But there was nothing brief about the contents. Twenty pages of dense type. She sighed and started through it again, pausing once to note herself in the mirror. Her hair was pulled back severely and pinned, which made the auburn shade lighter, for some reason.
    She edited the lease some then looked out the tall windows, sipped wine and caught a glimpse of City Pier A. The structure wasn’t as large as other piers farther north, in Greenwich Village and in Midtown, but this one had more history. The Professor had been particularly interested in the sagas of Downtown Manhattan and would spend hours reeling off stories to her. Built in the 1880s for the Department of Docks and the Harbor Police, Pier A had been witness to the relentless expansion of the city. She noted the seven-story clock tower, which had been built in 1919. The elaborate timepiece was a memorial to the U.S. soldiers killed in the First World War. This was particularly poignant, considering that the original pier had been built by the son of a famous Union general in the Civil