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take, it meant “No shit, Sherlock.”
    But not once had he heard the word
Palantir.
    Astor shifted in his seat. He was made uncomfortable by the notion that in his final moments, his father had reached out to him. Astor had no brothers or sisters. His mother had died of cancer when he was ten. There had been no valiant struggle. She did not “fight cancer.” She never had the chance to be a “survivor.” She was diagnosed. She went to the hospital. A few weeks after that, she died. It was over, beginning to end, in three months. It was summer, too, he remembered. A sweltering July spent inside Sloan-Kettering hospital waiting for his mother to die. It was the smell that stayed with him most. Ammonia, disinfectant, and a lemon cleaner used to polish the floors. Somehow it still hadn’t been enough to camouflage the odor of death. He had sworn never to go to a hospital to die.
    After that, it was just father and son. Astor went off to prep school in seventh grade and never really returned home again. He saw his father on vacations, but briefly, in segmented, scheduled bursts, never more than three or four days at a time. These included a few days at the beginning and end of summer, wedged in between ten-week stays at sleep-away camp in Maine. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break involved travel to resorts in places such as Vail, St. Moritz, and Bermuda where outdoor activities served to maintain a respectful separation between the two.
    It was better that way.
    The trouble began at fourteen. Astor was expelled from his first school in ninth grade, his second in tenth, and his third in eleventh. It was never a question of intelligence. When he applied himself, he received top marks. And of course there was the question of the PSAT, on which he earned a perfect score, and the fact that he was named a National Merit Finalist. The problem, his teachers agreed, was motivation, or rather the lack of it.
    Astor begged to differ, but he was in no mood to share his family secrets with strangers.
    It required the intercession of his father and a considerable donation to the school fund to find him a place for senior year. He made it all of two weeks before being dismissed for “unbecoming conduct,” namely running a sports book out of his dorm room. Alcohol and marijuana were also found. The fact that ten teachers, including the school’s chaplain, were his largest clients was not brought up at his adjudication.
    And so that was the end. At seventeen, Astor asked to be declared an emancipated minor. Broke and free of all family ties, he graduated from a public school in western New Hampshire, where he lived with the family of a close friend.
    So why me?
he wondered, staring at the message. If his father had no other immediate family, he had many close friends, most of whom held positions of considerable power. Surely they were better placed to find out what
Palantir
meant. Why reach out to a son he hadn’t spoken to in five years?
    The question stayed with him as the helicopter banked and the sapphire surface of the Atlantic Ocean enveloped the windscreen. The radio squawked and the air traffic controller gave them clearance to land.
    “I have the stick,” said Astor.
    “The stick is yours,” said his pilot.
    Astor lifted the collective and brought the chopper over the landing pad, nose up, and the wheels touched down firmly.

7
    M arv Shank was waiting by the elevators when Astor arrived. “Hey, Bobby. Half day? I didn’t get the memo.”
    Astor checked his watch. The time was eight-thirty, but Shank looked as if he’d been at work for hours. His shirt was untucked, his tie askew, his face moist with perspiration. Astor patted him on the shoulder. “I knew I could count on you not to bring up my father.”
    “You hated the guy. What’s to bring up?” said Shank, hurrying to keep up. “Wanted to make sure I grabbed you before anyone else. Press conference at nine-fifteen from Shanghai. U.S. trade