The Big Fear by Andrew Case Page B

bridges and Brooklyn beyond. A trace of mud was unthinkable.
    She had sensed something about the woman who had looked in this morning. Dull. Severe. Some sort of prosecutor or regulator or lawyer coming by to slap Eliot very gently on the wrist and pick up complimentary tickets to the opera, no doubt. There had been enough of them through the oak office over the past few years. Enough at first that Veronica had dared to hope. That maybe someone would find out and then the whole mess would be over. She would be able to speak up. But each one left with a smile and a backslap, leaving Veronica locked down in her own little terror. Speaking up would only make it worse.
    Veronica never went into the field any more. She visited her companies over the wires, occasionally calling in reinforcements on the ground, eager apprentices that someday hoped to wield her power. They would fly off to remote mines and villages to stomp around and report back on the facts behind the rumors of foreign speculators. Even these kids had it easier than she did; they could use their digital toys to call in a videoconference at a moment’s notice. When she had hit the trails it had been without 3G, without a satellite phone, just her and the toothy man who told her that he had found real gold and dared her to call him a liar.
    She was watching one number as it flashed by. Every few seconds a little bit lower. She would have to time it just right. From twenty-two to eighteen, to seventeen, to fourteen. The panic was under way. Panic was something that Veronica understood. Panic was different than fear. Fear would gnaw slowly, cloud your judgment, lead you to do something you knew you shouldn’t. Panic was clear and straightforward and meaningful.
    Together, all of the prices flowed into unfathomable noise. But if you could pull out one stream of numbers, keyed to one price, and you knew that price’s final destination, that was when everything was worth it. She had been watching the news for the past two years as much as anyone. She knew that all was not right with the newly reborn metropolis. It was easy to point to a host of villains—and Veronica knew that as a speculator on the eighteenth story of a Wall Street office, she was everyone’s idea of a villain in the new regime. She thought she was part of the solution, or that she could be, if she could come out from underneath the fear. If only someone could give her a chance to explain. The number dipped again.
    Little downfalls might be terribly sad for the people involved with them, but for Veronica they were just another opportunity to turn a quick profit. The toothy man with the machete, when his gold mining fraud had been exposed, had jumped out of a helicopter as it surveyed his ruined fortune from a height of eight hundred feet. It wasn’t Veronica who’d killed him, she reasoned. She had only let a gullible world know that he had been lying. His own deceit had been his cause of death.
    The numbers were dropping further. Twelve, then a huge jump to nine. At seven and a half, it was almost down to a third of the price it had been less than an hour ago. Veronica smiled and leaned into her terminal. There would never be mud on her shoes again. It was time to make some money.
    She didn’t hear him come into her office. You never do. Eliot’s soft pale face barely registered. He always floated in silently, awash in expensive clothing and designer accessories, taking in the world he had built.
    “All right.”
    He was holding a thin vinyl binder, crisp tabs taunting her from it. It looked unusual on him. She had never seen him touch a computer or a telephone. The dull facts of the tabs, the binder, the paper, jarred against his gentle fingers.
    “When you have a moment, I’d like to talk to you about some of these.”
    She looked up. She knew it was a mistake as soon as she’d done it. He had marked up the pages. With a pen, maybe even the calligraphic one he kept on his desk that looked