She wasn’t trying to cheat. She wasn’t trying to swindle anyone. She was just trying to do well, to make money for the bank, which in turn would mean more bonus money for her. Her own needs were fairly basic. Her one-bedroom apartment, west of the gare, was, for Geneva, relatively inexpensive. She bought her own groceries and cooked her own meals. She did not have a car and did not want one. What she did want was to help her father. What she really wanted was to redeem him, but not even money could do that. He had served two years in prison because, trusting and inattentive, he had worked for a friend who was swindling everyone who walked into his office except the cleaning lady. The friend was rotting in a federal prison now and would be forever. Catherine’s father was out of jail, but he was unemployed and unemployable. Her mother had left him and married a man who owned an outdoor equipment store in the Adirondacks. Catherine’s father was living in a studio apartment in Flushing, Queens. The lake house in New Jersey where he had loved spending weekends, despite the occasional appearance of scavenging black bears, was long gone. The house had an expansive view of a pretty small lake, where every afternoon her father would canoe. Catherine’s dream—to buy him another lake house, to see him paddling there during golden hour, to help him forget the ruin of his life. All that was required was money. And one step to achieving that was for the DAX to go up. Which it hadn’t, and it was almost too late. Catherine could possibly postpone the reckoning by filing paperwork for offsetting trades that would settle in the future. Except they would never settle, because she had never actually made them.

“Catherine.” It was Barnstable again, his damn smile again, walking her way again. She moved a stapler to the edge of her desk to discourage his sitting there. He probably wouldn’t want to sit on a stapler. Worst case, she could pick it up and staple his ass.

He casually slid the stapler away and sat on her desk.

“Michael,” she smiled. “How’s it going?”

He glanced up at the screens. “Another day, another trillion dollars sloshing around. You grabbing any for us?”

“Doing my best,” she said. And added, “I could be doing better.” She swiveled her screen so he could see it. “Report from a minerals analyst in London. Scandium’s trending up. Those mines in Central Asia . . .”

They really were a good investment, and a bargain because other investors were staying away.

“Catherine, we discussed those.” Barnstable shook his head in sympathy. Verging almost on sorrow. He so hated denying her anything.