Chapter 1:

The harbor wasn’t busy, but there was activity. People were scattered over the dozen or so docks, cleaning and securing boats, drinking, partying and eating late suppers. Some were still plodding their way in from the lake. I felt safe.

I made my way down the last dock, to the spot where we were supposed to meet. I purposefully scanned each boat and tried to make eye contact with everyone I saw. No one seemed to be waiting for me.

Near the end of the dock, I stopped and looked south toward Chicago’s skyline. I checked the nearest docks. No one appeared to be watching me. I looked east across the water. Lakeshore Drive, which ran between the harbor and Lake Michigan, was at a standstill with bumper-to-bumper traffic in both directions.

It was almost dusk. A boat emerged from an underpass, puttering in towards the docks. There didn’t seem to be anyone driving or even on board.

Then a head popped up.

I saw a flash. And another. Something pierced my chest. Then my neck. Gunshots.

The impact pushed me back and to my right. My hands moved to the pain. My legs tangled and gave way. I stumbled and fell face first into the lake.

Chapter 2:

My name is Philip Osgood. I’m a bond trader. For the past twenty-five years I’ve run a small hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut. The same year I opened the fund I met the man responsible for me being shot. His name was Emile Coulon.

That was back in 1994. I was thirty-four. That year I’d decided to leave the bank I was working for on Wall Street and start my own fund. It was a risky move, but one I never regretted. The day I met Emile I was moving into my first office since branching off on my own. The office was an interior, glass-fronted room on the first floor of a modern, six-story building in Greenwich, next to the train station. It was a far cry from my corner seat on a massive trading floor on the 48th floor of a skyscraper on Manhattan’s southern tip, overlooking the Statue of Liberty, but it suited my needs.

I met Emile on a Saturday. I was setting up the ten-by twelve-foot room. The furniture, an L-shaped desk, a credenza and three chairs, had been delivered the day before. My task that Saturday was to place and secure a small satellite dish on the building’s roof, then connect a cable to the dish, drop the cable through a pre-existing conduit, down six stories to the ceiling level of the first floor, snake it above the ceiling panels in the hallway of the first floor to my office, to the wall beside my desk, down through the wall to a hole near the floor and finally to connect the cable to my computer.

When you worked for a money center bank in New York, especially in the 1980s and ‘90s, if you wanted a new computer or phone bank or almost anything else, the “tech guys” took care of it. This was all new to me. But to be honest it was all pretty simple and kind of fun.

Once the satellite was secured on the roof and the cable was dropped and connected to my computer, things got a little trickier. To monitor the markets I traded, I could lease a Bloomberg terminal like the one I’d used at the bank, for $1800 a month, or use a satellite feed to get quotes directly from the exchanges on which I traded, for $125 a month. I went for the $125 satellite option.

I was told I could save another $250 by installing the satellite myself. I was skeptical, but the man on the phone representing the company that provided the feed assured me that the process wasn’t too difficult. While he built my confidence, my wife Jenny, who could only hear my half of the conversation, looked less than certain. Still, I enlisted her help and she gamely worked with me.

Jenny’s contribution began after the cable dropping was done. When she arrived, I was sitting behind my modest desk, sweaty and soiled, reading an instruction manual. I’m not sure she saw Gordon Gekko when she looked at me, but she kept her thoughts to herself. I explained that her role would be to sit at my desk and stare at the computer screen, to which I’d connected the cable from the satellite dish that I hoped was still on the roof. She was to watch the screen and let me know if I acquired a signal. She rightly asked how I intended to find that particular signal in all of outer space. Ever the naïve optimist I proudly showed her the tools that had come in my satellite installation kit: a cheap-looking plastic compass, an even cheaper-looking azimuth and a few Allen wrenches. At that point we’d only been married for nine years, but she was already pretty good at knowing when I was in over my head. She gave me a familiar look.

I considered explaining that the azimuth would help me to point the dish in the direction of the celestial object, in this case my satellite, expressed as the angular distance from the north point of the horizon to the point at which a vertical circle passing through the object, my satellite, intersects the horizon, but I thought better of it. Instead, I took my cheap tools and my brand-new first cell phone and left for the roof. Truthfully, I didn’t think there was a chance in hell I’d find the satellite, but anyone who has ever been married surely understands that I couldn’t back down. I headed up.

Thirty minutes later my cell phone rang. It was Jenny.

“How’s it going up there?”

“Fine. How are you?”

It was windy on the roof, but I heard a satisfied chuckle.

“Give me twenty more minutes. I think I’ve got this.”

“Sure, honey.”

I hung up and got back to work. Thirty or forty minutes later I called my office.

A lovely-sounding woman’s voice answered the phone. “Hello. Hapless Investments. May I help you?”

I ignored her. “Have you seen the signal?”

She kindly responded, “Nothing yet.”

“Okay. Stay on the line. I think I’m close.”

I put the phone on speaker and laid it on the roof then looked at the three-foot dish, pointing into space. I reread the azimuth instructions and adjusted the dish slightly.

“Holy shit!”

“What?”

“There’s a signal. You did it. You found the fucker!”

Jenny didn’t often swear. She was in shock. I think I was even more surprised.

For the record, that signal held for three years, until a storm shifted my dish. Celestial navigator that I was, after the storm I went back to the roof and, again, found the signal.

At any rate on that first Saturday back in 1994, I gathered my tools and headed down to my sure-to-be impressed wife. All the way down I imagined my triumph. Would she kiss me? Look at me in awe? I tried to put on my most matter-of-fact, humble look as I stepped into my office.

Things never work out the way they’re supposed to. She was talking to some guy.

I stepped in.

Jenny smiled. “Hello, Copernicus.”

God but I loved her.

She teasingly ignored the lustful look in my eyes and said, “Phil, this is Emile Coulon. He has the offices across from yours.”

Coulon smiled and extended his hand. “Hey Phil, nice to meet you. Jenny was just telling me that you actually found the satellite.”

I liked him from the start.