Jade Cabral strides into the 21st century as a golden guy. Brilliant and beautiful, with a California cool and a Harvard education, he is poised for wealth and success in New York’s Financial District.<br><br>But Jade harbors a secret flaw, a thirst for revenge against Se?or Rodriguez, the California landowner who deprived his father – Se?or’s out-of-wedlock son, John Virgil -- of his family’s rightful inheritance and place in the world. Jade thinks if he succeeds in New York, he can make up for every loss and humiliation his family has endured at the hands of Se?or. That searing quest leads him into the arms of Nan Spencer, a lovely, fragile socialite, and to the top of the financial world, the Twin Towers, on September 11, 2001.

Seamless Sky

He had come to the city like many young men, fresh out of Harvard “B” school and ready to make his mark. Only later when he had left and longed to return did he realize that he, like everyone else, could come and go and come again, or stay forever, and he would never make a mark on the place. It was the city that left its mark on him.


Like the past, it moved with him wherever he went—the internal city—for he, too, was an island.


America was flush in those days—he would smile later to think just how far removed those not-so-long-ago times had become—and no place was flusher than New York. Making money in Manhattan in the late nineties was like managing the New York Yankees, he thought. With all due respect to Joe Torre and the ghosts of Casey Stengel, Joe McCarthy, and Miller Huggins, an idiot could do it.


Chapter 10