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What they taught you in the world of high finance was simple really: win or lose. Eat or starve. It was a binary choice.
“Nobody in this world gives you a damn thing. You have to take it, and you take it by working harder than anybody else. Look at your sister and brother. You think they had it easy?”
Yes, his older brother and sister, Danny and Claire. Board-certified neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic, and CFO of a Fortune 100, respectively. They were eight and nine years older than he was, and already minted superstars. They had reached heights he never would. He had been told this so often, nothing could persuade him not to believe it.
when he’d been accepted into West Point. His father had roared, “Playing soldier instead of going out into the world and earning a living? Well, boy, you are off the family payroll starting now. Your mother and I don’t deserve this crap.”
his skills at killing and not being killed placed him at the top of the food chain with orcas and great whites.
He didn’t care why they had picked him so long as he got a shot to make himself as miserable as possible.
And as much as he hated the work and the life that came with it, that penance would never manage to match his crime.
only one more day of toil until his only day off for the week. But his plans were about to be disrupted.
The front room held one of his three roommates, the big-bellied Will Valentine. He worked from home and was employed as a white-hatter, a person hired by tech firms and banks and other industries to try to hack through their security systems.
Another roommate, a Black woman named Helen Speers, was on a mat in the middle of the green carpet doing yoga.
His third and final roommate, Jill Tapshaw, was a truly brilliant person who had started her own online dating company, known as Hummingbird.
Devine was impressed that the man had recited his military CV from memory. Some parts of it even Devine had forgotten.
Cowl’s gray shirt seemed grafted to him like a second skin of liquid chrome.
Great imagery
He threaded his way through sweaty, drunk, and getting-drunk bodies that were coiling and uncoiling around him like snakes before copulation.
He’d served in the Army during Vietnam. He wasn’t West Point. He got drafted. He came back pissed off and against the war. But he fought. He did his job. And the country treated those vets like shit. Not fair to fight your heart out, survive, and come back to that.”
He looked into the face of the smiling but determined reporter from Channel Nosebleed who wanted to know every damn thing in the world.
Channel Forty-Four, but I’m working my way up to the single-digit stations and you might just be my ticket.”
The pavements and buildings absorbed every molecule of heat and threw it violently back at walkers and bikers and drivers. Foul air, driven by funneled winds, could almost burn your nostrils out or lift you off your feet. The subway would blow past underneath, and its thrust would come through the pavement grates with velocity, providing a surprise gust of hot air.
Fantastic description of New York in the summer!
“When you send email, sender and recipient IP addresses are in packet. Then it is directed to gateway or router. Then on to higher-level network. It does this over and over, until it gets to destination email address.”
“Is not being able to trace an email really that catastrophic?” “For me, it is end of world. It means what I do…goes poof. And it means that bad people on internet, they get away with anything, because they are invisible. Get with program.”
The sky was clear, the heat already percolating over the fingertips of the skyscrapers.
All you need is some food, a roof over your head, a few brewskies a day, baseball in the summer and football in the fall, a missus to watch over you, and you can be a happy man.”
It’s called high-frequency trading. Buy it a millisecond before the shares or bonds rise a penny, which in the course of a day they all do, and sell it a millisecond later before the shares or bond prices drop a penny.
“Reality in America. And for your information, we don’t have a ‘justice’ system in this country. We have a legal system.
did a deal with the head guy. It’s all good. Your services are no longer needed.” “I seriously doubt that.” That was a slip on Hancock’s part. He had just divulged something very important.
I like these little tidbits that keep me guessing.
And they were overconfident, cocky because they outnumbered him; that was what separated guys like them from guys like him.
but it would make the man paranoid about relying on those types of communications again,” interjected Devine. “He actually mentioned to me something along the lines of what you just said. He told me for the important stuff, he always went analog.”
“Financial crimes are one thing, killing people is totally something else.”
Her laptop and phone were time-locked and biometric protected, and thus inaccessible.
“We think Cowl is the key link in not just laundering money and buying parts of this country by global players all over the world, but some of the money—billions and billions of it—is going into the coffers of public officials at every level, from local to federal.
“All I can say is there is nothing between us.” Except for a pair of guns, he thought. And secrets.
There was something off here, really off. And he just couldn’t figure out what it was. But I have to.
Am I headed to USDB?”
I don’t know what this means.
