The art-deco building on West 57th Street in Manhattan has twenty floors, but one particular elevator only services three of them: the underground parking garage, the nineteenth, and the twentieth. At five minutes to eight, its doors opened onto the second of those and I stepped into the reception area of Royce, Wilkins and Dunn, a privately-held currency trading firm. The Royce Foundation, a non-profit chartered to fund global education, fight infectious diseases, encourage international understanding and mutual cultural respect, had a suite of offices to the right and down the hall.

This is where I work. The commute is a pleasantly short one for me. My apartment is the same building’s entire top floor.

Royce, Wilkins and Dunn employs a total of one hundred thirty-five persons, half of whom are traders scattered about the globe in key financial centers. Mr.’s Wilkins and Dunn are not among those employees. Because Mr.’s Wilkins and Dunn don’t really exist.

My uncle, Jackson Royce, created the fictitious partners when he established the firm with eight and a half million dollars of seed money shortly before my sixth birthday. To say my uncle is a financial genius is like saying Einstein was good at math. When he handed over the reins of the business to me two-decades later, the pot had grown to just under nine-hundred million. Maybe even more importantly, he also taught me his insights and theories about international currency exchanges with which I’ve managed to continue building the company’s extensive capital holdings. Meaning, I haven’t screwed up what he built. Yet. Give me time, I’m still young.

I stepped into the lobby and was greeted with a gleaming smile by the young, attractive receptionist. She always greets me with a gleaming smile. I really like that.

“Good morning, Mr. Royce!”

Actually, okay, the young, attractive receptionist greets everyone with the same gleaming smile, but she has this remarkable talent of making you feel like she pulled it out and shined it up just for you.

“Hi, Elise. Nice earrings.”

Her cheeks flushed pink. “Oh. Thank you. Mr. Williams hasn’t arrived yet, but everyone else is in the conference room.”

My secretary, Mary Elle Goldberg, wasn’t at her desk, so I reached into her side drawer to steal some of the peanut M&M’s she hides there. At exactly that moment, Mary Elle’s nasally voice came from inside my office.

“All you have to do is ask.”

Frak. Caught in the act. “I know. Sorry. You know I can’t resist these things.”

“I’ve begged you to let me put a jar out. Then you don’t have to sneak mine.”

“Not a chance. I have no will power. If they’re out, I’ll just keep eating them and I’ll weigh three-hundred pounds in a month’s time.”

She emerged from the doorway, an imposing figure even though she’s pushing sixty and barely pushing five-feet tall. Mary Elle is part Jewish mother, part Mother Superior, and part staff sergeant.

“What’s wrong with that? You could stand to put on some more weight. Women like a man with meat on their bones, even those skinny-Minnie models you like to date. As good a cook as you are you’d think you could eat more.”

“I’ll remember that, Mary Elle. Thanks.”

I popped another colorful candy pill in my mouth as I headed toward the conference room. Titus Lucretius was the first to say, you are what you eat. Tragically, he went crazy after imbibing a love potion, wrote poetry between fits of insanity, and eventually committed suicide. Without ever knowing the joy of a peanut M&M.

Waiting for me in the conference room were four of the five members of what we lovingly call The Team; my core group of confidants and strategists. Cleat Williams had yet to arrive, but Leon Collancia, Nancy Albrighton, Frank Smith, and Jennifer Parks-Hudson had all been with me since the very beginning. Not the beginning of the currency business; the beginning of the Foundation. After the successful completion of our last assignment, the Brazilian rescue, this morning’s meeting was for the purpose of selecting our next special project.

I settled into one of the high-back leather chairs, facing away from the expanse of windows which looked out onto West 57th. The hum and bustle of the street didn’t stand a chance against the thick double-paned windows, nor could anyone outside monitor the conversations inside, thanks to the constant white noise being pumped into the airspace between the glass panes. All of our electronic correspondence is double-encrypted. Our phones are scrambled and untraceable. And every employee, including myself, accepts that our actions at work and away are constantly monitored by our internal security division, headed up by a former FBI agent. The Foundation is unapologetically obsessed with security, maybe to the point of paranoia. But that paranoia has kept us all alive and out of prison so far, with just a few close, okay, very close, calls. No small feat considering how many enemies we’ve made and how many laws we’ve broken. Can’t make an omelet without sacrificing some eggs, right?

Raold Amundsen: Adventure is just bad planning.

I nodded towards the empty seat, “I see Mr. Williams slept late again.”

Jennifer Parks-Hudson pushed a folder to me. “He’s on his way. Some sort of problem at the tunnel.”

“That’s what he gets for living in Jersey.”

Mary Elle came in with a cup of coffee and set it before me. French Roast, burr ground fine, brewed extra dark. “Anyone else?”

They all thanked her but declined. As she was leaving, a large form loomed in the conference room doorway, startling her.

“Oh, my! You scared me to death, Mr. Williams!”

He backed up a step, bowed, and did his best swooping by-your-leave.

“I get that a lot, ma’am.”

“Usually from his Internet dates,” I quipped.

He threw me a dirty look, but it had no teeth in it. Both of us knew when it comes to bad dating choices, I was by far the easier target. Simply by virtue of my net worth, my romantic adventures are regularly featured in the city’s tabloids. The writer almost always describes the girl as either a supermodel, a rising starlet, or beautiful heiress, as if those are the only women I’d be interested in. It’s the unfortunate side-effect of having money and being a single guy in the big city. Page Six even coined a brilliantly creative verb for when I’ve been seen out with someone and then happen to go out with someone else. They call it being “Kyled.”

Ha,ha. I’d like to Kyle that hack writer. And then there was this one: Last week’s headline under a picture of a sweet girl I had dinner with twice -- Rolled Royce. I’m sure her parents are aglow with pride. She hasn’t returned any of my calls. Everyone else found it hilarious. Including the people sitting around me in the conference room. Except for Cleat.

I caught his eye as he moved over to the table. “Thanks for showing up, big guy. You need a vacation or something?”

The chair was a tight fit. As he squeezed himself into it, the leather complained with a ruffling fart. “Nope. Some fool in a panel truck thought he was in a Formula 1. Tried to cut across two lanes at rush hour. Took out three cars.”

Leon Collancia, the foundation’s foreign government liaison who was a former Deputy Secretary of State, offered a suggestion, “Move back into the city. You can afford it.”

“No thank you, sir. I like having a yard. My kids gonna grow up knowing what it grass feels like under their bare feet.”

No one in the room could argue with that reasoning, so Nancy Albrighton opened her folder and began handing out file of the potential projects.

My eyes roamed to the large plasma screen TV on the wall behind her. The image there switched from a talking head on the financial network CNBC to a beer commercial featuring a rather shapely blonde.

“Hey, Nancy, there she is again. That girl I told you about.”

She looked up at me then turned to the TV, “What girl?”

Nancy was our lead detective. It was she who could pull the disparate threads of information from the Internet or government databases to weave a clear picture of a person’s comings and goings out of thin air. She was a John Jay grad, well into her forties, somewhat portly, and the mother of five, all of whom had tested IQ’s in the genius range.

And I fully enjoyed driving her nuts. “That girl! The one in that commercial.”

“I don’t see a girl. I see a rear-end in a white bikini.”

“Well, that rear-end belongs to a girl. And I think I know her but I can’t be sure. So please, do that thing you do and find out who she is.”

“You actually recognize her by her butt?” Leon asked incredulously.

“I will not find her,” Nancy said. “You don’t really know her. You just want to get that bikini off her.”

“Nancy. You’re being provincial.”

“You’re being a pig.”

She was right, of course. I was being a pig. “I don’t see why you would object.” But a pig with a sense of humor. “Look. Consider it a challenge. To test your skills.”

“No.”

The man at the far end of the table was Frank Smith, the foundation lawyer. A former corporate attorney with a wit as dry as a Texas summer. He settled forward onto his elbows.

“And should Ms. Albrighton track this comely lady down, and should she manage to acquire some method by which you would contact her, what, pray tell, would you say? ‘Hello, I’m certain we’ve met before. I recognized your bikinied derrière on a television advertisement.’”

Before I could answer, Cleat piped up, “Naw. He’ll use the same line he always uses. ‘Hi. Does this handkerchief smell like chloroform to you?’”

Traitor. I level him with a look.

Once the laughter died down, the meeting got underway. The team members followed along with our own copies of the reports as Nancy read through the list of twenty candidates, detailing their various dire situations. A few were couples whose children were missing. A woman whose husband disappeared to avoid paying child-support. A CEO who emptied the corporate account and vanished into thin air.

The projects usually fall into one of two categories: either someone disappeared against their will, or it was their will to disappear. Regardless of which, it was the Royce Foundation’s real purpose, as opposed to the one cited on federal tax documents, to find them, and either return them to their loved ones, or turn them over to the authorities. Under the cover of our international charitable works, we can go places, do things, influence people, like no other organization on earth. Our criterion is simple: we take on the cases that no one else can solve, and those are almost always the most intriguing and challenging.

When Nancy finished listing the subjects, we began debating the virtues and difficulties of each.

By the time they’ve reached this stage in the process of elimination, every one of these cases was deserving of our attention. This meeting was for the purpose of finding that one case that could make a difference, one case where the victim or victims had no other place to turn. But there also had to be an element that went beyond the typical missing-person story. Something different. Compelling. And with that kind of vetting, the victims themselves come under scrutiny.

Jennifer, a stunning brunette who was Nancy’s main investigator, had already done some digging. Her turn to go down the list.

“The Wilsons, specifically the father, Robert, has a bit of a gambling problem. We have reason to believe their daughter, Sandy, is actually being held as a marker for his debts.

“Patricia Cruz fits the profile of a classic teenage runaway. I found a family services report from four years ago in which she said her older brother was molesting her, but she then recanted that and there were no more reports. Her parents posted a ten thousand dollar reward, but they don’t seem to have done much more than that. They’re always happily available for tearful television interviews, though, and are shopping a reality show.

“Interpol and the FBI are closing in on Grayson Filk. He couldn’t resist sending a text to one of his mistresses. Seems he misses her terribly. He even attached an X-rated photo to demonstrate just how much. If anyone cares to see it . . .?”

She glanced around the room.

“No? Really? It’s quite impressive, at least from the angle from which he shot the picture. Amazing what a wide-angle lens can accomplish. Anyone?”

No one took her up on the offer.

And so it went, on, and on, case by case. But all this was procedural, of course. We’d already found our next project. Every person at the table knew it the moment Nancy recounted the woman’s story. And after wading through the sad details of all twenty cases, I spoke up.

“Subject number three. Casey Peterson. Let’s talk about her.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said, opening back up that folder. “Her case came to our attention when she joined a discussion on the Missing Loved Ones group site.”

Fifteen minutes later, the vote was unanimous, and the team members separated to begin working on their individual parts of the plan.

I returned to my office, by way of Mary Elle’s M&M stash, scanned the currency rates on my computer, and placed a call to London.

“Mickey? You seeing what I’m seeing with the Yuan? Yeah? That can only be coming from the G-4 report. Scoop up another two-mil. One point eight one target. Got it? Thanks.”

Cleat’s massive form appeared in the doorway. He’s been a friend of mine since college, and we know more about each other than most married couples. So there is never any mincing of words.

“You do know we might not win this one.”

I closed my eyes and rubbed at the gnawing ache in my temples. I felt the old clouds beginning to gather, and dreaded the next few hours. “I know.”

“The trail’s more than a decade old.”

“Yep.”

“All we got is a woman who thinks she saw her dead brother on someone’s Facebook page.”

I blew out a long sigh, popped a candy into my mouth, and sat forward. “Okay. It’s a thin start, I admit. We’ve had thinner.”

Cleat snorted. “Not much.”

“C’mon. We don’t really know what we have or don’t have until we start digging. Same as always. We should be able to find out pretty quickly if he died there, in which case we can give this woman a solid end to all the wondering.” Which was a concept I could relate to. But I didn’t say that. “And what if he didn’t die? What if we do find this guy?”

The big man eased onto the corner of the desk, reached over, and plucked a blue M&M out of my hand. “Well, I guess that would at least give one happy ending to that shitty day.”

I looked up at one of the framed photographs on my office wall; the one my uncle had taken during a visit to downtown Manhattan on my fifth birthday. It was of me, grinning, hair tousled in the wind, and the entire city of New York spread out beyond us.

The picture was taken from the observation deck atop the south tower of the World Trade Center.

“That it would,” I said.