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counsel does.”
    So Charnoble was a Brumley man. That meant he was either a genius or a crank. He had impressed powerful people in his past.
    “That makes sense. Only Brumley would devise something this devious.”
    Charnoble’s grin was a fault line splitting open a freeway. “Look, these old shops—they’re like spiderwebs.” He gestured at the spreadsheets on Mitchell’s desk. “We’re the flies. Before I started FutureWorld, I was just like you—a quant. I would’ve been stuck there forever, pricing risk, valuing employees’ lives. The same grunt work you’re doing at Fitzsimmons.”
    Mitchell turned the spreadsheets facedown.
    “After Seattle,” continued Charnoble, “Brumley saw an opening. That’s what they do, after all. They see windows of opportunity and they jump through them. They understood how consulting could indemnify. It’s an old trick, really. McKinsey, Bain, BCG—they’ve been swiping clients from the old insurance Goliaths for more than a decade now. Consulting firms are more nimble, and much less regulated, than the insurance multinationals. Seattle only confirmed that we don’t even have to compete with insurance firms for catastrophe money. Catastrophe is all ours. We’re going to make a killing.”
    “In a manner of speaking.”
    “Exactly!” Charnoble’s eyes glittered like mica. “Brumley spun FutureWorld into its own company—the way JPMorgan did back in the nineties with RiskMetrics. They needed a quant to lead it, and I was there.”
    Mitchell had studied RiskMetrics in Advanced Financial Engineering. The firm’s statistical model was now obsolete, but it had been the pioneer in the field, the Ford Model T of the risk industry. For all his sublimated deviousness, Charnoble knew the literature. He had mastered Risk; he had studied the canon.
    “Brumley doesn’t want our competitors to catch on, at least not until we’ve cornered the market. So we have our own office, our own LLC, our own stationery.”
    “Where is FutureWorld’s office?” asked Mitchell.
    “Downstairs. Second floor. How do you think I got here so fast?”
    “Oh. Right.”
    “It’s temporary, though, this address. Brumley leased the office before I was brought in. It’s not good for FutureWorld to be in the Empire State Building. Too hot.”
    “You think something bad is going to happen? Based on your research?”
    Charnoble pursed his lips.
    “Another attack?” Mitchell groped absently for his calculator. “What are your numbers?”
    Charnoble laughed—a cold, sickly expulsion of air. “You’ll have to hire FutureWorld in order to find out. To find out what the future”—and here he took a histrionic pause—“will cost you.”
    At the elevator bank Charnoble handed Mitchell a business card.
    “I bet Fitzsimmons is happy with you. You must be good.”
    “Equity, Assets, and Derivatives isn’t hard. It just eats your life.”
    “There’s something about you,” said Charnoble. “I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but, well, it’s your eyes.”
    “Sorry. My eyes?”
    “They communicate urgency. Urgency, and even fear—fear of a great danger coming on.”
    “That probably explains my success with women.”
    “It’s a gift I don’t have,” said Charnoble. “I can’t imitate it either. No matter how much I practice in the mirror.”
    “You practice in the mirror?”
    “It’s essential, in this line of work, to frighten clients. To convey a sense of implacable doom, in a manner of speaking. I’m no good at it. I come off as too cheerful or else too nervous. See, Mitchell—I know my limitations.”
    Charnoble’s finger found his palm and twisted inside it.
    “It’s not difficult to scare people during hard times,” he said, taking a confidential tone. “The challenge is to scare them during the hopeful times, in the lulls between catastrophic events, when FutureWorld’s services start to seem like an unnecessary luxury. When I look at you I start to