“What are you doing?” I cried in alarm. “Those are the bonds! The real ones! That’s a billion dollars’ worth of paper you’re setting fire to! Are you mad?”
“Perhaps,” he said with a smile, his flame-colored eyes turned golden in the firelight. “I’ve wired the Depository from Paris with the serial numbers of the counterfeits in their vaults. I thought it best to destroy all trace of how they might have arrived there—just in case the Vagabonds ever got wise and tried to do unto us as we’ve done unto them. Our point has been made nonetheless. Those brokers and bankers who refused a physical inventory will have trouble explaining how the securities they sent there are forgeries—though the clients they sold them to will be protected by their proof of purchase—Oh, do sit down, my dear—you’re making me nervous, standing on one foot like that.”
I was making him nervous! I sat on the edge of the table and watched as he lit one paper after another until the mass caught fire. At last, the flames died down to a mass of crumbling ash, and the wind lifted and moved it away in slow curls across the parapet. By morning, a billion dollars would have disappeared without a trace, along with our theft. Were the next thirty-two years of my life to be like that, too? Tor came to me and drew me into his arms as if he’d read my thoughts, and buried his face in my neck and inhaled my hair.
“I have to go home and water my orchids and think about this for a while,” I told him, my arms around him. “When I got into this wager, I had no way of seeing I’d be a different person at the end. I’m not prescient like you.”
“Clearly,” he said as he kissed my throat and held me away to search my face. “But instead of worrying about yesterday or tomorrow, what of today? I have the feeling there’s something we’ve left undone.”
“Undone?” I said, surprised. “What does that mean?”
“Don’t you see that—although we’ve stopped the Vagabonds in their progress—anyone choosing to try the same again could do so, with or without a country of his own, as they might have done? Furthermore, any bank can easily buy up another using overvalued stock as part of the purchase. There’s simply no way, through the international economic system, to ensure that bank assets are properly valued or insured—or that any greedy bastard who comes along tomorrow can’t pull the same caper as today.”
“What does this have to do with us?” I asked.
“With you at the Fed—examining their reserves and asset liquidity,” he said, smiling that strange and dangerous smile as he looked at me in the moonlight, “and me analyzing acquisition portfolios through the exchanges, we ought to do a rather thorough job of it, wouldn’t you say? I’d wager that I could knock off more illicit mergers and corrupt takeovers than you could in, say, a one-year time frame. What do you think of that, my little competitor?”
I shot him a look of indignation—but I couldn’t stay sober for long. I started to laugh.
“Okay—how much do you want to bet?” I said.
A Biography of Katherine Neville
Katherine Neville (b. 1945) is an American author, best known for her spellbinding adventure novels The Eight, A Calculated Risk, and The Magic Circle.
Neville was born in the Midwest and from an early age spent many of her summers and holidays in the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. She would listen with fascination to the yarns of cowboys, miners, lumberjacks, riverboat folks along the Mississippi, Native Americans, and the legendary Mountain Men of the Rockies. These tales sparked her early desire to have adventures and to become a storyteller herself. However, that desire was to be deferred for quite a while.
While growing up, Neville disliked having to sit in stuffy classrooms, listen to lectures, and take exams. She preferred to be outside climbing trees. Instead of reading the dull texts assigned in her history, geography, and social studies classes, she escaped into sagas like The Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts, swashbuckling adventure tales like Rafael Sabatini’s pirate novels Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk, and Captain Blood, and Jules Verne’s fantasy adventures 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. When she was sixteen, she saw a movie that changed her life: Lawrence of Arabia. The film thrilled Neville more than all those imaginary tales combined and inspired in her a yearning to live in a wild and remote foreign land one day.
Throughout high school and college, Neville earned money by drawing and painting people’s horses, dogs, and grandchildren and by teaching art classes. Later on, during years of economic boom and bust, she turned to modeling to support herself. Not only did she get to meet interesting new people, she had an opportunity to work with highly skilled photographers and learn the art of photography. Eventually, she saved enough money to buy a Nikon F and a set of lenses, and she started snapping shots of everything and everyone.
When Neville graduated from college, she found that job opportunities for women were limited. After searching for work in several cities, she took a national exam for a new field called data processing, scoring in the top one percent nationally. It landed her a job in New York at IBM in the Transportation and Utilities industries, automating businesses for clients like Con Edison and Long Island Railroad. She became a devotee of early computer wizards Admiral Grace Hopper and Alan Turing and discovered a passion for code making and breaking. This was the inspiration for her first novel, A Calculated Risk, which she would complete nearly twenty years later.
The techniques Neville used in designing these large, complicated computer systems would later prove vital to handling the complex themes, intricate plots, and large casts of characters of her novels. But writing did not come
