Chapter 14: Neptune's Voice on a Burner Phone

The phone rang at 5:58 a.m., which meant someone had been waiting since before I arrived.

I'd come in early because the alternative was lying in my apartment in Astoria staring at the ceiling, running the badge number through my head like a broken ticker — M. Hermes, maintenance, supervised by the chairman's office — and at some point around four-thirty I'd decided that productive dread was marginally better than stationary dread and packed my bag. The building had let me in without comment. The lobby guard on the early shift was not Griffin. He'd looked at my badge, looked at my face, and gone back to his phone with the incuriosity of someone who had learned not to find certain things surprising.

Floor twelve was empty. The overhead lights were on their overnight setting, three-quarters dim, which made the trading floor visible through the glass partition as a long dark room full of dormant screens. I'd made the coffee myself — there was a machine in the kitchenette that Griffin had explained to me on day two, which required a specific sequence of buttons because someone had reprogrammed it and never told anyone how — and I'd been at my workstation for eleven minutes, color-coding yesterday's voice memos into the legal pad system, when I heard it.