"Seventeen bid, seventeen and a quarter ask," announced Bruce Jay Tustin from his post behind a dozen color screens and monitors. "We're going up, up, up!"

The issue had been priced at $14 a share and after thirty minutes of trading, demand had lifted the shares 20-odd percent to $17. Checking a screen above Tustin's shoulder, Gavallan saw that buyers outnumbered sellers three to one. It was a far cry from the bonanza days when one new issue after another would double or triple on its first day of trading, but Gavallan wasn't complaining. In a rational world, a first day's gain of 20 percent qualified Incisex stock as "popping" all the same.

"I think we can open the champagne now," he said to an assembly of four men and two women standing to one side of the room. "Mr. Kwok, would you do the honors?"

On cue, Wing Wu Kwok, a newly hatched associate who had accompanied the Incisex brain trust on their two-week road show across America, uncorked a bottle of Moët & Chandon, filled a half dozen flutes, and offered round a silver tray bearing beluga caviar, toast points, and china dishes brimming with chopped egg white and diced onion.

Gavallan accepted a glass of bubbly and raised it high. "To Incisex and that rarest of all marriages- profit and the public good. Cheers!"

There were huzzahs all around. Hugs and handshakes followed the clinking of glasses.

"May the sun be ever in your eyes," Tustin chimed in, "and the wind at your ass."

"Here, here." Gavallan managed a smile, but just barely. Two hours' sleep had left him exhausted and haggard. With Grafton Byrnes's predicament increasingly weighing on him, it was difficult to maintain a cheerful façade. If no one had remarked upon the dark circles beneath his eyes, it was only because he was the boss.

For a few minutes, he mingled with the executives from Incisex, taking refuge from his worry in the cloak of chief executive. He slapped some backs, he partook of the caviar, he extolled his clients' rosy future. But even as half his mind concentrated on projecting a carefree exterior, the other half remained fraught with doubt. Two words from his best friend had turned Cate Magnus's hotly worded suspicions about Kirov and Mercury into Gavallan's worst nightmare.

"Everything's copacetic."

Gavallan had to imagine the rest. Grafton Byrnes was being held against his will somewhere in Russia and would never return. He knew too much. He was sure to be killed, if he wasn't dead already. It was all that simple. That terrible.

Pondering his conclusions, a new thought dawned on Gavallan, one that his trusting mind decided was more frightening than the rest. If Kirov felt so secure that the Mercury offering would come to market that he would risk kidnapping Byrnes, he had to have someone in place at Black Jet to push through the offering despite the chairman's opposition, someone highly enough placed in the company that he might persuade Jett that Byrnes's disappearance was a coincidence, nothing more.

As quickly as it had come, the lull on the trading floor abated. Lights began flashing on the checkerboard consoles that connected Black Jet to over a hundred banks, brokerages, and financial institutions around the world. Voices boomed as traders greeted their clients with news of the strong offering. Casters groaned as the bankers recommenced their daylong jitterbug.

The trading room of Black Jet occupied the entire western length of the fortieth floor. Desks ran perpendicular to floor-to-ceiling windows, twelve carrier decks bisected by a flight tower constructed from the newest in flat-screen monitors. Currencies were to the left of the room, followed by bonds, options, and finally, equities, both domestic and international. Chairs were situated at four-foot intervals and nearly every post was occupied by a man or woman, standing, seated, or in some pose in between. One hundred forty traders in all, and when things heated up, the place took on the frenetic currents of a Middle Eastern bazaar. It was the Casbah gone California, Evian and Odwallah replacing hookahs and hashish.

Gavallan leaned a hand on Tustin's desk, marveling at his ability to goad the price of the stock ever higher. Picking up a receiver, he patched himself into Tustin's call.

"Hey, Brucie, what d'ya got for me on Incisex?" The voice belonged to Frank MacMurray, a trader at Merrill Lynch.

"Her name's 'sexy' and I can give you a block of ten thousand at 18."

"Eighteen? Last bid's 17½. Gimme a break."

"Got ten other johns lined up right behind you, Frankie," Tustin said. "But listen, pal, since you're cute, I'll cut it to 177/8. Buy or fly."

"Done, and get me ten more at the same price."

"You're filled."

Tustin aimed a finger at another flashing button, this one connecting him with Fidelity Investments, the nation's largest manager of mutual funds. "Yallo, Charlie, what are you looking for?"

Gavallan knew from reading the "book" that Fidelity was a buyer of Incisex. They'd loved the stock's story and planned to build a position in it in one of their biotech funds. Accordingly, they'd given an indication they'd take 10 percent of the issue. No one firm would be allotted a full 10 percent of the offering- in this case over five hundred thousand shares. As it was important that Incisex had a broad and liquid market, Black Jet had a duty to sell shares to a great many customers, some of whom were retail brokerages- Merrill Lynch, Paine Webber, Bear Stearns and the like- that would in turn pass on their allotments to their own clients. To say you wanted 10 percent was equivalent to requesting as much of the new issue as Black Jet might give you. Powerhouses like Fidelity, Strong, Janus, and Vanguard couldn't waste time following small positions in hundreds of stocks. When they committed to a new stock, they expected the issue manager to help them acquire a meaningful stake in the company, somewhere upward of 2 percent of the offering. All through the day, Fidelity would be phoning to buy more shares- especially as the price continued to rise.

"Yo, Brucie, give me everything you got at 18."

Tustin checked his screens for available shares. Many of Black Jet's clients had bought the stock not to buy, but to "flip"- that is, to sell after an hour or two with the expectation of making a small, risk-free profit.

"Got you five grand at 18 and another five at 18 and a teeny," said Tustin. A teeny was a sixteenth of a point. It was Tustin's job to mark up the stock each time he made a sale as a commission to Black Jet. The amount of his markup depended a lot on how good the client was. In the case of Fidelity, one of the firm's best clients, he would slap on a sixteenth at most. "And this just in: a block of twenty thousand at 183/8. You a buyer?"

"Send 'em over," said Charlie. "We're buying and we're buying big. We're starting to feel good about this baby."

Tustin put down the phone, grinning like a madman. "Five days from now, it'll be Mercury's turn. Two billion dollars. Oh yeah, we're hitting the big time!"

"Yeah, Mercury," said Gavallan, the words stale in his mouth. "Great."

Tustin stared at him oddly. "You okay, Jett? You look kind of like shit. You go out after the ball last night? It was that Nina, I bet. She looked like a goer. Wearing anything less, they'd have arrested her. You always get the sexy ones. But then, you're the boss."

If Tustin was cheeky, it was no more than his usual self. Everyone was in a grand mood since Byrnes had resurfaced; Incisex's successful launch had capped it. Instinct told Gavallan not to reveal his suspicions about Byrnes's situation. He'd explained that Graf was remaining in Moscow for the weekend and would be accompanying Konstantin Kirov to New York come Monday. The words "prisoner" or "hostage" never entered the discussion.

"I'll tell you what Graf's really doing," Tustin went on. "He's shacked up with some Russian babe. I've heard they're lookers over there. Yeah, that's it. Graf's getting himself some commie cooze. Probably got a dozen of them in bed with him."