The Prince of Risk Read Online Free PDF

I’m an SSA now.”
    “That and a dime will buy you a double latte. It’s Manhattan.”
    “He takes care of Katie. School, sports, vacations, all of it. The apartment in the city’s in her name.”
    “Still…how could you let that go?”
    “Easy. I don’t want anything to do with him. Don’t you see? I take a cent of his money, I’m still Mrs. Robert Astor. That’s over, Jimmy. I’m Supervisory Special Agent Alex Forza.”
    “That’s an expensive name.”
    “Worth every fuckin’ penny.”
    Malloy laughed, but she could see that he didn’t get it. Money. Alex hated everything about it. Extending an arm, she activated the GPS and looked at the directions to Inwood. “Forty minutes. I say we make it in thirty.”
    Malloy grasped the armrest. “Shit.”
    “Twenty-nine minutes, forty seconds,” said Alex later as she guided the Dodge off the Long Island Expressway and onto the broad, potholed boulevards of Inwood.
    In the passenger seat, Malloy had turned an interesting shade of green. “Must be a record.”
    “Thought you SEALs were used to this kind of thing.”
    “I didn’t like the helo flights either,” said Malloy. “But at least I could take Dramamine.”
    “Fresh out.”
    Alex drove up Atlantic Avenue and turned onto Windermere Street, slowing as she approached the rendezvous point. It was a street of single-family clapboard houses. Waist-high chain-link fences enclosed front and back yards. She lowered the window. The bracing scent of fresh salt air was gone, replaced by those of jet fuel and brackish water. Inwood was a shithole and it had the smell to go with it. She pulled to the curb behind a van parked a block up.
    The time was 12:50. She waited, letting the engine tick down, her eyes running up and down the road. No late-night dog walkers. Sparse traffic. A few lights burned in upstairs windows. Except for a police siren a few streets over, the neighborhood was asleep.
    She left the car, walked to the van, and knocked twice on the window. “And so?” she asked when it had rolled down.
    “Nothing,” said the driver. “I’m telling you the guy has flown the coop.”
    “Maybe,” she said. She thought of the picture. Of the olive green crate with the yellow markings and the foreign alphabet. She thought of what was inside.
    “What do you want to do?” asked the driver.
    “We wait,” she said.

6
    M onday morning traffic was a bitch.
    Bobby Astor surveyed the line in front of him and shook his head. The Hamptons were done. Ten years ago, he could zip out to the house on a Friday afternoon without breaking a sweat and leave early Monday morning to be back in the office by eight. No more. Fridays worked fine, but the return leg was a bear. This morning was a perfect example. After a straight shot out of Amagansett, past Southampton, and across Long Island, he’d been stuck on the far side of the East River, circling, for twenty minutes.
    “How much longer they keeping us in the pattern?” he asked.
    “We’re next in line. Just waiting for the pad to clear.”
    Astor loosened his shoulder harness. It was a gorgeous day, with blue sky as far as the eye could see. Looking south, he enjoyed a clear view to Atlantic City. Through the Perspex canopy of the Aérospatiale AS350 “Squirrel,” he counted four helicopters circling the Downtown Manhattan Heliport.
    Astor shot a glance at the tablet in his lap displaying a summary of world financial markets. Europe was off 2 percent on fears that the incident in Washington had been a terrorist attack. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng had dropped 4 percent before rebounding. China had its own problems, and the deaths of three American financial luminaries would have no effect, either positively or negatively, on them. Futures on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and the S&P 500 were sharply lower.
    Astor brought up a list of his open positions. One column tallied his profits and losses, the sum total shown in bold numerals at the bottom. The