Bradstreet Gate by Robin Kirman

Author:Robin Kirman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804139328
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-07-07T07:00:00+00:00

14

Charlie had never seen the city so empty, so still. Walking through Times Square, to his office, he’d paused to stand on the island between Broadway and Seventh, under the flashing ads and lights, to stare out at sidewalks free of tourists and vendors peddling Big Apple souvenirs, closed his eyes, and heard not a single shout or honking car.

Many had simply fled Manhattan; those who remained ventured out only for work and then burrowed away at home. All the presidential speeches and all the mayor’s imprecations couldn’t make the city buzz again, and though word was that the terrorists would win if we abandoned our capitalist habits, and shopping sprees and sushi dinners were deemed small patriotic acts, for this brief time, the crowds could not be roused onto these streets, and Charlie could step out every morning into this strange, desolate, concrete island.

A few people he knew (one of his neighbors, a secretary at the office) had gone, in the weeks following 9/11, to visit what was now being called Ground Zero, but Charlie didn’t feel that he needed further proof of the horror. With his apartment window open, on days when the wind blew from the south, he could smell the chemicals and smoke. At night, looking out from his office, he could see the lighter patch of sky from the fires that still burned at the site.

In the halls of Warren Welch, no one dared speak about anything else: I was this close to taking a job at Lehman…My buddy’s roommate got out just in time. During two companywide meetings, Welch offered the firm’s official statement on the matter. The world had changed, though business, it seemed, would go on much as before; the only salient difference for Warren Welch employees was a new focus on investing in security technologies. Welch had asked Charlie, in particular, to seek out projects relevant to the moment: x-ray systems, retinal scans.

Such projects—though doubtless poised to turn huge profits in the coming months—seemed to Charlie to have very little to do with what had gone wrong that gruesome Tuesday in September. Udi’s take on the disaster felt far more pertinent: 9/11 was the result of an intelligence failure—specifically a failure to synthesize intelligence. They’d talked about it, for long hours over the phone, how big data-mining systems, as ambitious as those Udi wanted to implement, could be a central line of defense in what was being called “the war on terror.”

Now was the time to think on a grand scale, according to Udi; and Charlie, shaken by the events of that fall, craving a change, couldn’t help but be stirred by his friend’s boldness. To balance it, though, he proposed bringing Roger in as a fourth partner. After Harvard, Roger had gone on to law school in Chicago; he’d trained in contract law, which would prove useful to them in negotiating future deals, and he could offer what Charlie felt he and Udi needed most—a cautious perspective. If Charlie were to give up his job at Warren Welch, he told both Udi and Roger, he needed Roger on board with him.

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