Chapter 3 - The King of the Floor
The lobby fell into an immediate, unnatural quiet.
The junior analysts who had been laughing near the coffee counter silenced themselves mid-sentence. The security guards at the main turnstiles stood straighter, their shoulders pinning back into rigid, defensive attention.
Through the glass portal strode Garrett Sterling.
At forty-two, Garrett was the Senior Managing Director of Sovereign Mergers and the recognized crown prince of Sterling & Vance Capital. He was the nephew of Arthur Sterling, the firm’s co-founding partner, and the son of Richard Sterling, the powerful Chief Financial Officer who controlled sixty percent of the firm’s operational liquidity. Garrett looked like a magazine profile on the modern financial titan: six feet two inches tall, broad-shouldered, with silver-streaked dark hair combed back with expensive pomade, wearing a bespoke double-breasted navy blazer cut from raw Scottish wool by a Savile Row tailor, and hand-buffed leather oxfords that had never touched a city puddle.
Flanking him like personal praetorians were two vice presidents of the acquisitions division, clutching leather folios and moving with frantic, synchronized half-steps to match his aggressive, six-foot stride.
Garrett was staring down at the glowing screen of an unbranded black titanium tablet, his thumbs scrolling rapidly through foreign exchange futures while he spoke in a sharp, rapid-fire staccato to the men beside him.
"The Tokyo syndicate is bluffing on the debt-to-equity ratio," Garrett snapped, not lifting his eyes from the glass display. "They think the yen’s volatility gives them twenty basis points of room on the mezzanine layer. It doesn't. Tell their legal team in Zurich that if the covenants aren't signed by five o'clock their time, we pull the senior facility and let their secondary bondholders initiate liquidation."
"Understood, Mr. Sterling," the first vice president muttered, furiously typing notes on his phone. "We have the conference room prepped on forty-five—"
"I don't care about the conference room, Marcus," Garrett cut him off coldly. "I care about closing the pipeline before the London markets open."
Garrett did not look where he was walking. He had not looked where he was walking in ten years; he lived in a world where doors were opened for him, elevators were held empty on his arrival, and crowds instinctively parted whenever he crossed a threshold.
He rounded the corner of the central fountain at a sharp, aggressive angle, cutting straight across the restricted perimeter Samuel had established.
His polished right oxford crossed the yellow hazard tape.
His left heel struck the trailing, thick rubber electrical cord of the industrial buffing machine.
Garrett’s forward momentum lurched. His balance broke for a fraction of a second, his shoulder slamming into the brass stanchion that held the velvet cordon. His vice presidents lunged forward, catching him by his arms before his knees could touch the stone, but the impact was violent enough to dislodge the tall, ceramic travel mug of dark-roast espresso he had been carrying in his left hand.
The mug hit the marble with a sickening, hollow ceramic crack.
Twelve ounces of scalding, dark coffee exploded across the floorboards.
A thick spray of bitter, brown liquid spattered across the lapel of Garrett’s bespoke four-thousand-dollar jacket, soaked through the cuff of his Egyptian cotton shirt, and splashed heavily across the front of Samuel Ortiz’s utility jumpsuit, drenching the knees of his trousers and pooling around his worn work boots.
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The entire lobby went completely, terrifyingly airless.
The sixty employees standing in the concourse froze as if struck by lightning. The security guards stopped breathing. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The only sound in the four-story atrium was the quiet, steady dripping of coffee falling from the edge of Garrett Sterling’s sleeve onto the white marble floor.
