When Russell explained to Edmund precisely what the subprime loan crisis was going to mean to CDOs and other financial products and for the system as a whole, Edmund was unnerved and excited at the same time. He immediately, and secretly, used his own money to short his own firm and made bets on the failure of other companies exposed to CDOs. He continued to sell the doomed bonds even when disaster was inevitable. He made staggering amounts of money and after a while he told Russell, a loyal company man who’d never dreamed of acting that way, what he was doing. As Edmund predicted, Russell wanted in, and Edmund gave him some of his action.

As the banking catastrophe unfolded there were many victims: investors who’d lost their money, shareholders who found their stocks worthless, countless workers who lost their jobs. Men like Edmund Mathews and Russell Lefevre were not among them. Amid a clamor that the bankers involved should go to jail, they left the firm with close to $100 million in compensation between them.

Edmund had enjoyed his first weekend of unemployment to some extent, taking Darius to soccer practice without bringing his BlackBerry, having dinner with Alice and another couple in town, reading the Sunday paper. But by 9:05 A.M. on that first Monday, he was bored stiff. In his home office, he had two screens showing Bloomberg and MSNBC and he noodled around, making minor trades for a few tens of thousands of dollars through his online account. At ten, he called Russell and suggested they get back in the game on their own.

Okay, Russell, what’s the problem?” Edmund said, after handing Russell a glass of ice water. The men stood at either end of the island in the middle of the state-of-the-art kitchen. Edmund flipped Russell a place mat before he could put his water-beaded glass on the butcher block.

“I was playing tennis with Teddy Hill—”

“Teddy Hill? He’s got to be sixty-five. I hope you went easy on the old boy.”

“Ed, this is serious. I play with Teddy because he knows everyone, and he tells me things he hears. As he did today. When he told me, I practically ran off the court, left him standing there.”

“Told you what, Russell?”

“We’re being shorted big time.”

Russell was right. This was serious.

When he called Russell during his first Monday of alleged freedom, Edmund found that Russell was as anxious as he was to get something going. Unbeknownst to Edmund, Russell needed to be earning. In 2008, he found himself personally long on real estate, owning a portfolio of properties in Florida and California suddenly worth a lot less than their outstanding mortgages. When Russell had fixed his problem, he was low on cash and needed to leverage his severance money into something more substantial.

As they had done many times as part of a large corporate group, the two men took a weekend away to a hotel in Boca Raton to brainstorm. Before getting down to business, Russell insisted on going to the local mall to pick up some T-shirts for his four kids. Edmund waited for Russell outside the Gap and watched people passing by.