Maybe the Russians weren't the only ones with an inferiority complex.

"Tell you what," said Gavallan. "Cancel that dinner engagement. Let Black Jet take you public and I'll write you a check first thing in the morning for fifty million dollars. Prime plus seven to be repaid out of the proceeds of the IPO." He stuck out his hand.

Konstantin Kirov hesitated, searching Gavallan's eyes. "I can trust you with my baby? It is not just for me, but for my Russia, too."

"Yes, you can trust me."

"Prime plus five and we repay within thirty days."

"No," said Gavallan, tasting the deal, wanting it more than anything, but never so much as to make a poor agreement. "It has to come from the proceeds."

Giving a fateful shrug, Kirov rose laboriously from his chair and grasped Gavallan's hand. "Yes, we shall work together. You are a believer. I see it in your eyes." He laughed richly. "I tell you something. Between us, I never like BMW anyway. But you must promise to call me Konstantin. In Russia, business is family."

Gavallan stood, and though the handshake was awkward and formal, he found himself laughing with his new client, new friend, and new family member, Konstantin Romanovich Kirov.

They'd moved into a conference room down the hall. A "working room," they called it, and it was fitted for the late nights and early mornings that claimed so large a part of an investment banker's existence. Besides the glass table and low-backed chairs, there was a refrigerator stocked with Coke, Mountain Dew, Red Bull, and, as if an afterthought in their caffeinated universe, Evian. One cupboard held chips, cookies, and candy bars, and another, rumor had it, fresh fruit- though Gavallan had never seen anyone munching so much as a grape. Next door there was a pantry with a microwave oven, a freezer, and a coffeemaker. A paper plate bearing the remains of Gavallan's sausage and egg burrito sat half in, half out of the trash can. A pall of cigarette smoke hovered below the ceiling. Let mortals worry about ulcers, colitis, and quadruple bypasses. They weren't subject to daily deadlines that could cost a firm tens of millions of dollars and their own paychecks that extra, all-important zero.

Gavallan leaned back in his chair, balancing on its rear legs. He'd already gone over the Private Eye-PO's most recent message and its accusations of misrepresentation and fraud. Reluctantly, he'd let everyone in on Grafton Byrnes's secret visit to Moscow and his failure thus far to report in. He did not, however, feel it necessary to tell them about Byrnes's early checkout.

"Listen, people, our back's up against the wall here," he said. "We need to take a close look at our deal books and see if we can find any holes that correspond to the areas the Private Eye-PO is attacking- namely, the Moscow network operations center and Mercury's hardware purchasing. I don't think we will, but I'm not going to my grave like the captain of the Titanic saying, 'She's unsinkable.' No one's leaving this room until we decide just what the heck we're going to do. Comprende?"

His eyes moved from face to face, waiting for someone to pick up the baton. Bruce Jay Tustin, Tony Llewellyn-Davies, Sam Tannenbaum- or "Shirley Temple," as Tustin had christened the blond, ponytailed lawyer- and Meg Kratzer. He was waiting for someone to share his outrage, but outrage, he knew, implied responsibility, and the Mercury deal had been his and his alone from the beginning. Finally, Meg Kratzer chimed in- Meg, for whom silence was an accusation of laziness.

"Look," she said. "We handled all customer and managerial questions in-house. If something weren't kosher about Mercury's Moscow operations, we would have heard about it from one of their customers. Financial, accounting, and operational issues were completed by Silber, Goldi, and Grimm in Geneva. If there were a problem with Mercury's physical plant and inventory, they would have found it- guaranteed! I don't know a bigger tight-ass in the business."

"I do," said Tustin, rolling his eyes and lofting a thumb in Meg's direction.

"I appreciate the compliment, Mr. Tustin," she responded. "It's hard to be more thorough than a Swiss with a microscope and a mandate to inspect. Coming from someone who's such a renowned tight-ass himself, that's very high praise indeed. I will thank you, however, to keep that greasy kid stuff in which you drown your last three remaining hairs off my deal books. I needed a whole bottle of Mr. Clean to get it off last time."

"Very funny," retorted Tustin, above the nervous laughter. "Just so you know, it's pommade. That's French, for 'classy.' "

Meg Kratzer circled the table, passing out a thick red three-ring notebook to everyone present. She was a vital, animated woman, short, stocky, and neatly attired in an olive Valentino two-piece. Her red hair was pulled back into a severe bun. Her blue eyes glimmered with healthy determination. At age sixty-three, she was a mother of four, a grandmother of ten, and self-appointed godmother to Jett Gavallan. She'd put in twenty-five years at a well-known securities house, only to be told when she turned fifty that her shelf life had expired. The termination letter called her "irascible, opinionated, and obstinate," and said she was "unable to meet the rapidly evolving dictates of the financial arena."

Gavallan saw those same qualities as forceful, experienced, and demanding, and found her as up-to-the-minute on all matters financial as the most arrogant graduate of Harvard Business School. She was also articulate, responsible, and possessed of a wicked sense of humor.

As the firm's head of investment banking, Meg had supervised the due diligence performed on Mercury. Its being an initial public offering, this involved the systematic deconstruction and analysis of the client company. Balance sheets were audited; bank balances verified; company officers interviewed (and often investigated); clients telephoned and questioned about their relationship with said company; corporate strategies parsed; and physical assets inventoried down to the last pencil and paper clip. It was a strip search really. With rubber glove and all.

Gavallan pulled the deal book closer, glancing at the Mercury name and logo that adorned the cover. The notebook had to weigh five pounds, and inside it was all the information Meg and her team had collected as part of their due diligence on Mercury.

"Let's start with clients," he said, flipping the notebook open. "Section one."

Section one contained single-sheet summaries of over 150 telephone conversations conducted with Mercury's clients in the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Germany, and Russia. Leafing through the pages, he kept a sharp eye out for those customers based in Moscow. He thumbed past the Czech Ministry of Communication, the Kiev Education Committee, Alpha Bank (Minsk branch office), the Dresden Youth League. All declared themselves satisfied with Mercury's product and services. Finally, he arrived in Moscow: the Moscow Municipal Transportation Service, the Moscow State University department of telecommunications, NTV (one of Moscow's larger television networks). Again, all were satisfied. There were more: Romanov Bank, the Greater Russian Health and Casualty Insurance Company, Nezhdanov Construction, Imperial Aluminum Smelting and Manufacturing.

It's bullshit, Gavallan thought, perusing the summaries. Everything the Private Eye-PO had said is patently false. Unadulterated garbage. And again, he wondered who the man could be, why he was trying to savage Mercury, and why he was making the issue so personal, repeatedly mentioning Gavallan's pride.

When they'd finished with section one, Meg directed them to section three, titled "Company Infrastructure," which contained questionnaires filled out by Mercury's management. In an expectant silence, Gavallan and the others read one job description after another, all dictated by the eager and capable executives who worked at Mercury Broadband. Finally, he came upon one provided by a man he knew, Václav Panišc, Mercury's CTO- chief technical officer- of European operations, a Czech-born doctor of electrical engineering, formerly a professor of computer science at Brno University.