But that was not to last.
For he had desires that life in a temple could not satisfy. Desires not appropriate for a man or a monk. Not even a warrior monk.
“Ten minutes,” he heard someone inside the house say. It was the older man, with white hair and red face.
He considered his instructions. It would be so easy to return to the home and finish the business. He knew the value of cleaning one’s trail. He saw himself moving up the stairs, his bare feet caressing the warped wooden floorboards, moving effortlessly, silently. Floating. He loved the feel of the knife in his hand, its weight, its promise of death quickly delivered.
At the temple they had taught him the way of the fist and the staff and, later, of more exotic instruments: nunchakus, swords, pikes, and lances. In countless shows and exhibitions, he had thrilled audiences with his mastery of them all. No one moved more quickly, more elegantly, more forcefully. But exhibitions were not enough. The warrior monk had wished to put his skills to more practical use.
It had started when he was sixteen and his blood ran hot for the first time. He would leave the temple at midnight. Even then, he walked so quietly the master could not hear him. He would roam the hills and pass through surrounding villages. He would peer into homes until he found a suitable choice, inevitably a girl, young, innocent, unsuspecting. He would enter and stand beside her. He would wait until his heartbeat matched her own and he knew serenity.
He was invisible.
He was silent.
He was death.
The warrior monk stared at the home. Fingers that could crush a larynx caressed the knife’s handle. It would be so easy. They would not know he was among them until it was too late.
It was not to be.
Above all, he was an obedient brother.
The warrior monk called 911.
“Hello,” he said, in an English an American would swear was his own. “I’m walking my dog and I saw some men breaking into the house at 1133 Elm.”
He hung up before they could ask his name.
Five minutes later, he heard the sirens approaching.
He turned and retraced his path up the hill through the birch trees. He walked as he had been taught so many years before. His feet touched the leaves but left no track.
He did not make a sound.
He floated.
27
Astor stepped over Penelope Evans and leaned onto the bed to pick up the magazine.
“Hey!” shouted Sullivan. “What did I say about not touching anything? Use a handkerchief, or better yet, just leave things be.”
Astor pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to retrieve the magazine. Information Technology Today was not exactly what he figured a thirty-five-year-old woman read in her spare time. The magazine lay open to an article titled “Next-Generation Solutions for Connecting Devices.” The first paragraph discussed a company in Reston, Virginia, called Britium. It began, “This cutting-edge software has fundamentally changed the way devices and systems connect, integrate, and interoperate with each other and the enterprise.” It got worse from there. He skimmed the remaining pages with an eye toward one word: Palantir. He put down the magazine disappointed.
A stack of paperbacks was piled high on the night table. Most were crime fiction by best-selling authors. The books confirmed his first thought. She did not read Information Technology Today for fun.
Astor poked his head into the bathroom. He saw nothing of interest and retreated through the bedroom and turned into the hall. He found Penelope Evans’s office on the opposite side of the corridor. Thick curtains stifled the daylight. A lamp burned on the desk, illuminating a raft of papers. In the room, it was still night.
Astor approached the desk cautiously, keeping in mind Sullivan’s admonition not to touch anything. He had never been arrested, but as a registered representative of the New York Stock Exchange and a principal of the National Association of Security Dealers, his fingerprints were on file and easily retrievable. Again he wrapped his fingers before thumbing through the stacks. There were articles downloaded from a variety of newspapers and periodicals, the subjects ranging from the latest batch of Silicon Valley startups to the growing influence of sovereign wealth funds on Wall Street to local concern over the sale of a chunk of Icelandic soil to foreign buyers.
Iceland?
Astor sorted through a stack of annual reports perched on the corner of the desk. The first few came from high-tech companies listed on the NASDAQ. There was a manufacturer of silicon wafers, a provider of routers and switches-something that would be classified as “Net infrastructure”-and an aerospace company involved in the manufacture and launch of communications satellites. He thumbed through the first few pages of each. Again he was unable to find any mention of Palantir. Nor did he find anything that struck him as sinister or alarming, or that in any way might be related to his father’s murder. In fact, the reports had nothing in common except the fact that they all concerned newly listed companies, the oldest having gone public a year earlier.
Thinking this might be the thread, he checked to see if all shared a common underwriter. They did not. A dozen different banks had participated in bringing the companies to market. He knew the underwriters to be upstanding firms.
Astor continued checking the annual reports, if less studiously. The emphasis was on technology, but there were more traditional industries as well, and these companies were not exclusively American. There was a South African mining company, an Australian maker of heavy equipment-tractors, trucks, backhoes, and the like-and a well-known German manufacturer of electronic components, primarily high-fidelity audio and communications equipment. It was only as he replaced these that he noted that the reports dated back several years. The most recent came from 2008.
He looked again at the German electronics company’s report and remembered that the organization had been taken private by a well-known private equity firm several years back. Other than that, nothing.
A laptop sat open on the desk. Astor clicked the mouse and the screen blossomed to life. Another article, not about “next-generation connecting devices” but a piece from the Financial Times about the Flash Crash of May 2010, which occurred when a breakdown in the orderly matching of buy and sell orders caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plummet a thousand points in minutes, only to regain two-thirds of the loss minutes later.
“The cause of the sudden precipitous decline had been thought to be a single faulty sell order that in turn triggered computer-driven programs to rush thousands of sell orders to market. A new analysis suggests that the cause might have stemmed not from the first massive sell order but from an error in the New York Stock Exchange’s proprietary trading platform…”
Astor consulted the laptop’s History panel, scouring the list of websites Evans had most recently visited. Not annual reports this time, but corporate websites. A manufacturer of silicon wafers and another of microchips, both stalwarts of Silicon Valley. A petroleum company. An American glass manufacturer with ties to the computer industry. They might be a crosscut of the NASDAQ. Tech heavy, to be sure, but not exclusively.
Still no mention of Palantir. Still no common thread.
Sullivan poked his head into the room. “Time’s up.”
“That wasn’t ten minutes,” said Astor.
“Who cares about ten minutes? Don’t you got ears?”
It was then that Astor heard the siren. The wail came and went, still far away.
“Who called?”
“My guess? The killer. He’s watching the house.”
“But why?”
“That’s a no-brainer. He doesn’t want us to find anything.”
“I need a second,” said Astor.