Show description

When the house’s ground floor appeared thirteen hours later, she helped Pho sweep the stinking mud and three drowned chickens from his house while his wife burned incense to the river god. That afternoon, Pho waded down to the open-air market and bought vegetables and more kerosene. Stefani went with him, sloshing through water that surged to her thighs and trying not to think of snakes. She watched shoe salesmen hose the mud out of ladies’ pumps and men’s sneakers; she watched hawkers sell plastic ponchos and tourists film the wreckage with Baggies strapped over their video lenses.

Just what she needed. A view of the water. “Welcome back to the Oriental, Ms. ” Her personal butler held out a silver tray with a glass of orange juice and a copy of The New York Times. Stefani Fogg was thirty-nine years old. She had a slight frame that encouraged most people to think she was frail. She was a pretty woman with the face of a pixie: like her body, it was a face calculated to deceive. Under the fringe of jet-black curls her brown eyes were assessing and shrewd. “Wharton School,” Oliver Krane had murmured over lunch at his corporate headquarters in Manhattan seven months before; “and prior to that, Stanford.

Tidbits and come-ons and clues she couldn’t resist-but he never sent them directly. They appeared on the seat of a taxi she had just flagged down, or folded into her morning paper. Once she was handed a spreadsheet with her oysters in the old bar at Grand Central Station. She knew she was being followed—surveillance was child’s play for Oliver Krane—and the knowledge aroused her. She liked the thought of moving under a watcher’s eye. She began to dress each morning with Oliver in mind. More important, she examined Krane’s stock as though it were under consideration for inclusion in Galileo, measuring its performance against those few risk-management competitors she could find in the marketplace.