"All right, all right, listen then," he said into the phone. "It's about Mercury. You have to tell Jett everything I'm about to say verbatim. You got that? Verbatim. You won't believe it."

And for the next sixty seconds he rattled off everything he'd seen inside the Moscow network operations center, stopping only when the Mercedes sedan had pulled to a halt ten feet away. "You got that?"

The voice sounded shocked. "Yeah, I got it. It just sounds a little crazy. I mean, that's not even possible, is it?"

But Byrnes didn't answer. By then, the door of the Mercedes had opened and Tatiana, or Svetlana, or whatever the gorgeous pickpocket with the satin blue eyes wanted to call herself, had stepped into the Russian night. In her hand she held her friend's nickel-plated Colt revolver, and she was pointing it at his chest.

"Allo, Graf."

At precisely 7:15, Jett Gavallan ducked out of his office, took the elevator to the garage, and jumped behind the wheel of his Mercedes. The rain had stopped and traffic was light as he pulled onto the street two minutes later and accelerated east toward the Embarcadero. He didn't like being away from the office in the mornings; even the most important client meeting left him feeling like a choirboy locked outside of chapel. But today, there was nothing to be done. He had an appointment to keep, one that required discretion and a degree of stealth. One that on no account could be handled inside the walls of Black Jet Securities.

To his left, Chinatown passed in a blur of weeping pagodas and shuttered storefronts. Steering around slower cars, Gavallan made good time, managing to make every light on Pine Street without seeing so much as a hint of yellow. He did not notice the silver Ford Taurus tucked neatly into his lane three cars behind him, following at a discreet distance. If he had, he would have had no reason to be suspicious of it. The FBI was a professional organization. They had made it a point to change their tail car every day since taking up surveillance on Mr. John J. Gavallan ten days earlier.

Gavallan focused his mind on business. He had an earnings review at ten, and to prepare for it he'd spent an hour studying the firm's pro forma revenue estimates for the second quarter. The results were not encouraging. He was beginning to wonder if it wasn't the market that had gone sour, but his own touch.

"Nine years," he whispered to himself, recalling the arduous climb from one-man band to multinational touring act. Today, it felt like ninety.

Gavallan had founded Black Jet Securities one year out of Stanford Business School. He'd had offers from plenty of blue-chip firms- IBM, Goldman Sachs, Ford- but he'd turned them down. Six years in the Air Force had left him wary of institutional authority. Instead, he rolled up his sleeves, took a job with Sutro & Co., a smallish California investment bank, studied for his registered rep's license, and taught himself the investment business. Twelve months later, he quit his job and hung up his own shingle, taking with him a few of his largest clients and eighty thousand dollars in savings.

For a year or two, he was content to act as a broker-dealer, hiring registered reps and managing clients' money. But south of town, in Silicon Valley, things were happening that quickly caught his eye. Something called the Internet was springing to life, and overnight, companies eager to capitalize on its heralded, but unproven, potential were sprouting up like mushrooms. While their products and strategies differed wildly, they all shared one common trait: a dire, unquenchable need for cash.

It was into this market that Gavallan jumped headfirst in the fall of 1996. He didn't know much about initial public offerings, but that didn't matter. Nor did a lack of pedigree or track record. Jett Gavallan had something none of his rival investment bankers did. Something his business school profs would have labeled a "unique point of differentiation."

During the Gulf War, he had flown twenty-six missions at the controls of an F-117 Nighthawk, the angular black jet known to the world as the Stealth bomber. And there was nothing that a gaggle of laboratory-bred "techies" liked hearing better than what it was like to man the controls of the world's most technologically sophisticated aircraft and drop a laser-guided smart bomb smack on the top of a pack of kaftan-clad, Uncle Sam-jeering camel jockeys. Forget Quake. Forget Doom. Forget Tomb Raider. Here was the real McCoy. A first-person shooter with blood on his hands. And they would be proud to have him battle the wizards of Wall Street to secure funding on their behalf.

For two years, Gavallan traveled between the towns of San Mateo, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto. His first clients were small ones, rinky-dink start-ups happy to raise ten million dollars on the Pacific Stock Exchange. Computer jocks with dirty fingernails who worked in their pajamas. He did eight IPOs the first year. Twenty the second. In time his reputation grew, and with it the quality of his clients and his company's revenues. Black Jet's annual gross rose in a vertiginous spiral. Sixty million dollars, one hundred forty, four hundred. Amazingly, the firm managed to break a billion before the bubble broke and things went to hell.

Since then he'd been fighting to keep his head above water. The company was still making money, just not enough. He was sized for growth, not stasis. Euphemisms like "ramping up," "burn rate," and "top-heavy" and their connotations of boom and bust weren't solely the preserve of Silicon Valley.

He could imagine the earnings review later that morning. Retail brokering was coming back nicely, but nothing like it had been. IPO activity was only just recovering. M &A was off 20 percent the last two years. Only trading was making money, landing on the right side of the latest big leg up. As each managing director reported his or her results, their eyes would creep toward Gavallan. He knew the downcast glances, the uncomfortable silences, the nervous laughter by rote, each person wondering when the ax would fall, and whose head it would be thumping into the wicker basket. God, he hated being the executioner.

"We're not running a charity," Byrnes had said during their last meeting.

Gavallan was all too aware of the fact. Three times in the last year he'd dipped into his savings to fund increases in Black Jet's capital. He'd liquidated his portfolio of stocks, sold off a large chunk of real estate in Montana he'd been planning to build on for his retirement, and cashed out of a promising hedge fund. This morning, he would take the final plunge- a second mortgage on his home. After that… An old adage about tapping a dry well came to mind.

Arriving at the Embarcadero, he was pleasantly surprised to find an empty space in front of the building. He parked hastily, telling himself that the space was an omen of good things to follow. Entering his attorney's office, Gavallan laughed at his desperation. He knew there was no such thing as good luck. Just good timing.

Special Agent Roy DiGenovese, on temporary assignment to the San Francisco field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, double-parked the silver Ford Taurus a safe distance shy of Gavallan. Keeping the engine running, he rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. A glance in the side-view mirror confirmed that DiGenovese was Sicilian in looks as well as name. His hair was black, his eyes the color of midnight wine, his beard pushing up stubble three hours after he'd shaved. He had the brooding, patient gaze of a hunter, and a hundred years ago he might have been found wandering the rugged landscape of southern Sicily clad in chamois pants and a sheepskin vest, a lupara slung over one shoulder, tracking the wolves that regularly ravaged his family's flock. Today, DiGenovese might still be called a hunter, but his prey was decidedly human, and his arsenal more subtle than his ancestor's twelve-gauge shotgun.