Odds Against Tomorrow Read Online Free Page A

his slumlord father and his mother, a matriarchal tornado tearing across the midwestern plains—and he started to wonder whether $266,213 was much too high.
    The e-mail icon illuminated.
    Dear Mr. Zukor,
    I agree. There is no time to lose.

    Thanks,
    Alec
    Mitchell reread the note, the ginger ale going flat on his tongue. The intercom rang. It was the night guard at the desk downstairs. Mr. Zukor had a visitor.
    3.
    “Mitchell,” said Alec Charnoble, extending a long, bony arm. “If I may.”
    It was not a bright idea, he realized now, inviting a maniac to his office at four in the morning. Even his most masochistic colleagues had gone home—even the tactical research analyst across the hall, who every night wandered the corridors repeating phrases that he seemed to find soothing, such as “Gaussian processes are stochastic processes, stochastic processes are Markov processes, and Markov processes are Gaussian processes.” The international market analysts—the BSE Bears, the Bolsa Bulls, the Hang Seng Sheep, the Micex Mice—they were on the clock all night, but they worked upstairs in the Penthouse. It had occurred to Mitchell, just before the elevator chimed, that he had blundered into a new type of worst-case scenario. The worst scenarios were always the ones you didn’t anticipate, at least not until too late, but now it was so plainly obvious that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it coming: the madman would be very strong, he would have tools, large, dull steel tools, and a metal glint in his eye.
    But when the elevator doors parted, Mitchell was surprised to see a man who seemed nothing like a killer, at least not the kind who committed the act in cold blood. Alec Charnoble more closely resembled the type of businessman who, with the press of a button, detonates mortgages or pension funds in some suburban hamlet on the other side of the country. He was tall but thin, with a weak, hollow chest, wheaten hair, and gray oval eyes. His navy pin-striped suit and yellow tie were cleanly pressed; despite the hour he seemed as alert as a bright bronze bell.
    “Alec Charnoble,” said the man, his face creasing in a tight grin.
    Without asking permission, Charnoble carried a chair into Mitchell’s cubicle, so that the two men had to share the space. Their knees grazed.
    “I never listen to preambles,” said Charnoble, “so I won’t bore you with one.”
    Mitchell shifted in his chair and his leg pressed against Charnoble’s. A tepid queasiness passed over him like a blush.
    “Imagine something terrible happens,” said Charnoble.
    “I do. Often.”
    “Really.” Charnoble frowned, impressed. “It should not be difficult for you then. Well, say this building is destroyed. So-and-so many people die—”
    “So-and-so?”
    Charnoble pushed back his shirtsleeves as if he were preparing to conduct some serious bit of manual labor—to dig a grave, for instance. Mitchell noticed that Charnoble wore two watches, one on each slender wrist.
    “You need an example? Take Seattle. You’ve seen what happens. It’s really not fair, is it. The victims’ families take out their anger on the corporations. The company’s investors, tallying their massive financial losses, are equally enraged. Why didn’t you move the office out of danger? Why didn’t you plan for this? The investors, like the families of the dead, also want money.”
    Charnoble tapped his forefinger into his palm in somber emphasis of his point.
    “Money,” he repeated. “Money. Money. Money—”
    “Listen,” said Mitchell. “I’m just about to finish a project here. Can you leave me your card?”
    Charnoble pretended not to hear. “The corporation,” he continued, “has only one response: We didn’t see it coming either . Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in Seattle, this response doesn’t hold up in court. And because they have no catastrophe coverage, they’re out, at the very minimum, several hundred million dollars.”
    Mitchell