The Legacy

HER REAL NAME was Mary Thomas, which she knew wasnt a tag likely to attract the eye of a fast-track Hollywood producer with time in his day for only a cursory scan of a casting sheet. So now she went by Andrea Sage.

A Manhattan native, Andrea had fled the city after completing her studies at N.Y.U., intent upon escaping a tyrannical father obsessed with the idea of her following his footsteps onto Wall Street. She had no desire to commit herself to a lifetime of dealing stocks and bonds. So, the morning after graduation, she slipped out of her parents Upper East Side penthouse, emptied the trust account her grandparents had set up for her on her tenth birthday, caught a taxi to La Guardia Airport and flew to Los Angeles in search of stardom on the silver screen. Andrea was young and beautiful and, at the tender age of twenty-one, ready to conquer the world.

Six months had elapsed since her freedom ride to the West Coast aboard the Pan Am jet, and things hadnt progressed as quickly as she had anticipated. Her beauty had landed her a few bit parts in low-budget films. However, the roles were nothing to write home aboutand she still hadnt. Her mother had no idea where her only child had gone, and Andrea was beginning to feel guilty about not at least calling to say she was safe.

An unusually cool and rainy autumn had transformed Los Angeles from a sunny sanctuary into a depressing land of exile. So on a whim, to try to forget about the looming inevitability of crawling back to Manhattan to face her triumphant father, Andrea took a few days off from her waitressing job at the Beverly Hills Bistro and bought a plane ticket to Texas. She wanted a respite from her cramped studio apartment overlooking the back of a Chinese restaurant, a chance to explore another area of the countryand to see this man who had so captivated the public.

Andrea squinted through the lens of the Bell & Howell movie camera she had purchased the day before, practicing with it before the event began. She stood near a small tree, a few feet from a reflecting pools retaining wall, and aimed to her right, where a crowd was milling about in front of a tall building on the other side of the intersection. Then she panned left and followed the pavement as it snaked away toward the triple underpass at the far end of the plaza. This would be the motorcades route.

As she gazed at the underpass, Andrea heard a buzz ripple through the onlookers. She glanced back to her right and saw flashes of the motorcade approaching. Once more she aimed up Elm Street at the people standing in front of the building across the intersection. This time the movie camera shook slightly. She took a deep breath to calm an inexplicable uneasiness, then began filming as the sleek black open-top limousine made a slow sweeping turn to the left off Houston Street and cruised into her field of vision. She focused on the man in the back of the vehicle, marveling at his overpowering charisma, obvious even through the lens. As the limousine coasted past her, she began to move alongside it, able to shoot the man almost in close-up as he waved to the crowd. For some reason the Secret Service had been lax about security along the route that day.

Moments later Andrea heard a loud poplike a firecracker exploding somewhere in the plazafollowed quickly by a second one. With the second pop, the man in the back of the limousine hunched forward, his elbows up and out, his hands to his neck. Still filming, Andrea continued to half walk, half run along Elm Street. She was vaguely aware of moving past a little girl wearing a red skirt and white sweater who had run past her only moments before. She also sensed a sudden panic in the crowd, as the understanding that something terrible was happening began to sink in. At the sound of the third shot, people began to take cover, and Andrea stopped moving.

Then the fourth shot came. More of a blast this time, it was definitely louder and closer. Instantly the mans head snapped back toward Andrea and a fine red mist sprayed the air, forming a crimson halo around him. The mans body slumped to the left, his brain exposed and bloody.

At once people were screaming and running in all directions, but Andrea wasnt sucked into the flood of panic. She calmly kept filming, detached from the horrible events rapidly unfolding around her, as if the lens somehow protected her. As Andrea watched, the mans wife climbed out onto the limousines trunk and reached for a piece of her husbands head that had been torn away by the killing shot, but she was quickly pushed back into her seat by a Secret Service agent and the vehicle sped away toward Parkland Hospital. Andrea followed the limousine until it was gone, then refocused on the spot where it had been at the moment the red mist sprayed the air. Behind that spot, people were sprinting toward a grassy area and a fence beyond.

Suddenly everything went dark. Andrea panned up, and for a moment the entire lens was consumed by an angry face. Then two large hands tore the camera from her grasp and pushed her to the ground roughly.

A sharp pain shot up her back. You have no right to treat me that way! she screamed.

I have every right, the man snarled. Now get out of here.

Give me my camera! she insisted.

I said, get out of here!

Andrea jumped to her feet and made a grab for the camera, but the man easily repelled her with a thick forearm to the chest, and she tumbled to the ground once more.

Ill give you one last chance, he said through clenched teeth. Leave or Ill arrest you.

One look directly into the mans steely gray eyes and Andreas confident sense of surreal detachment evaporated, replaced by the get-the-hell-out-of-here sensation that she had stumbled upon a hornets nest. She realized it would be pointless to protest any longer, so she turned and scrambled over the grass on her hands and knees, then staggered to her feet and sprinted wildly away through the chaos. When she finally dared to look back over her shoulder, the man who had brutally confiscated her movie camera and the film of President Kennedys assassination was gone.

TRADING FLOORS AT New York Citys largest and most powerful brokerage houses can be intimidating places. The cavernous rooms are often raucous, typically devoid of warm and nurturing decor, and always staffed by aggressive, impatient opportunists buying and selling massive amounts of stocks and bonds and other financial securities with house money. These opportunists sit side by side at long narrow desks resembling lunch counters. In front of them are the two primary tools of their businessphone banks and computer screens constantly relaying market information. Traders base their split-second investment decisions on this information, as well as on the tips they receive over their many phone lines. Sometimes they remain within their capital limitspredetermined, management-imposed dollar amounts they may commit to transactionsand sometimes they dont. Caffeine is a traders only dependable ally, while ulcers and the fortieth birthday are mortal enemies. On these floors tempers flare regularly, physical confrontations occur more often than most would admit, stress is constant, and privacy is nonexistent. It is a god-awful career, except for one thing. Traders can make more money in a year than many people can in a lifetime.

Cole Egan scrutinized his three computer screens for any hint of what was going on at the Federal Reserves Open Market Committee meeting in Washington, but the markets were dead calm. That would change in a heartbeat and all hell would break loose if the Fed officials suddenly exited the meeting and made whatup until yesterdayCole had considered an unexpected announcement. An announcement that could send his huge government securities portfolio plummeting into a death spiral.

Every six to eight weeks, the chairman and district governors of the worlds most powerful central bank convened behind the tightly shut doors of an ornate Washington conference room to determine the general course of interest rates in the United States. At the conclusion of most meetings the Fed took no action, and interest rates continued to fluctuate with supply and demand as traders bought and sold bonds and money-market instruments for their clients and firms. But if the Fed announced new targets, interest rates spiked or fell to those levels almost instantly. The Fed was that powerful.

In front of Cole lay two keyboards. With them he could access Reuters, Bloomberg and the Internetall the real-time information services a nineties trader required. But nothing in those databases could give him what he really needed right now, which was a listening device planted inside the Federal Reserve conference room. As far as he knew, no one had that.

Cole gazed out the window at the skyscraper across Fifth Avenue. He didnt allow others to see it, but the waiting was killing him. Yesterday, lower-level Fed officials had sent subtle signals to the market that the committee might raise interest rates to head off a sudden spurt of inflation. For the last month Cole had been betting that the Fed wouldnt raise interest rates at this meeting and had structured his portfolio accordingly. If the Fed raised rates even slightly, his portfolio could lose millions of dollars in seconds, because he would be stuck holding securities earning a rate of return that was less than what the market was offering. And there was no chance to get out at this point, because the market had already moved against him in anticipation of the Fed announcement. If he sold now, hed be selling at a huge loss.

Cole took a deep breath. If the announcement he was dreading came and his portfolio tanked badly, senior executives sitting in plush offices on the top floor of Gilchrists world headquarters building would hit the roofright before they sprinted down to the trading floor to rip his heart out. There would be no compassion from them, only punishment. Cole shut his eyes tightly. Even with the chaos constantly swirling around him, trading could be a lonely business.

Gilchrist & Company was a powerful brokerage house, rivaling such preeminent firms as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch in its ability to raise capital for corporations and governments around the world. It also rivaled those firms in its ability to trade stocks and bonds for its own account and earn billions of dollars each year in profits. To ensure its proprietary trading success, Gilchrist hired only the best and brightest individuals, constantly snatching top-performing people away from other Wall Street firms or cherry-picking the cream of the crop from the nations most revered business schools. Compensation packages for those lucky few were lucrativemillions each year if you were successfulbut there was a catch. You had to consistently make money for the firm, and lots of it. One losing year was tolerablebarely. Two in a row and you consumed your morning coffee and bagel at the unemployment office.

During his first few years on Gilchrists trading floor, Cole had enjoyed reasonable success buying and selling government securities with the firms capital. He had hit no home runs during that time, but he had smacked plenty of singles and doublestrading floors are rife with sports analogiesand as a result, hed been paid solid, though not earth-shattering, year-end bonuses. Coles January bonus checks were made out for several hundred thousand dollars. Not close to the tens of millions the home run hitters earned, but he was happy nonetheless. After all, six-figure checks were nothing to sneeze at. Particularly for a guy from the blue-collar side of a small upper Midwest town on a lake.

Unfortunately, Coles performance had taken a turn for the worse. Last year he hadnt been able to buy a hit, and he had lost twenty million dollars of the firms money. Now he was approaching the end of an even worse year. He was on the bubble, and everyone on the trading floor knew it.

How you doing there, sport? Lewis Gebauer asked smugly, ogling a young woman in a short, tight skirt who was walking past them.

Fine, Lewis, Cole replied curtly, glancing quickly at Gebauer and then back at the computer screens.

Gebauer was grossly overweight and almost bald, with pallid skin that hadnt seen the sun in years; and he sported ties and shirts permanently stained by the fat-laden foods he consumed in huge quantities. Despite his offensive physical appearance, he had deluded himself into believing that he was quite a ladies man, and he kept a close eye on any woman who visited the trading floor. He was insufferably obnoxious and universally disliked, but he traded government bonds with startling success. In the last five years he had earned more than three hundred million dollars for Gilchrist & Company, buying and selling the U.S. governments thirty-year debt obligation. As thanks for his performance and to make certain he wasnt lured away by a competitor, Gilchrist senior executives had bonused him sixty of those three hundred million. Gebauer lived in an opulent stone mansion in Connecticut with his third wife, a twenty-six-year-old platinum blonde hed met at a bar in Manhattan and married two days later.