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The Chinese say ghosts hover over bar doorways to beguile the unwary, to enchant and entrance and entrap them within. But Con didn’t need enticement to enter Chinese bars. He knew all the friendly ghosts and hung red lotus flower lanterns for them on tall bamboo poles. In the seventh lunar month, when the gates of Hell opened and hungry ghosts were unleashed from the yin of their sepulchral existence to roam the yang of ours, Con welcomed them with a nod and a wink and drinks on the house.

 In this way he hoped to avoid sharing their destiny.

 Con straddled the Old and New World crossroads of San Francisco’s North Beach and Chinatown, but his heart now lay to the East; he knew China was in the ascendant, and he wanted to leave the tender ennui of the fading West behind.

 On this scorching Columbus Day weekend, much hotter than normal for early October, the cafes and bars west of Divisadero with shady outdoor tables did a roaring trade. The day seemed like a reprieve from an inevitable fate, one of those languid days that came along only late in the year, classic Indian Summer, the air completely still and not a cloud in the sky on the Bay side of the peninsula, the heat only bearable because the humidity was just about perfect.

 Only at the tail end of late afternoon in the Beach did the overcast from the Pacific transform into surreal cotton wool clouds. They advanced like clockwork from the Irish Triangle and the Avenues, floating low over the Sunsets and Cow Hollow, drifting down and gathering speed, skimming the ramparts of Nob Hill and Russian Hill and Chinatown before finally enveloping Coit Tower in a soothing cocoon of mist.

 In they’d flee in dim sum flotillas, descending, as if on a mission, over the by now pissed off sunbathers and alcoholics (not necessarily mutually exclusive) in Washington Square Park, sucked toward the Oakland Bay Bridge and the frigid waters of Alcatraz and Treasure and Angel Islands.

 Con knew the heart of the Beach, a village within a town, the confluence of the old Italian nabe and the new, thrusting, business crazed, cellphone addicted Chinatown. The Chinese won eventually, buying up previously Italian property, formerly Irish and German and Basque property, once native Costanoan Muwekma Ohlone and Miwok property, which no doubt once upon a time belonged to the native Costanoan dinosaurs.

 The new Chinese overlords were in a feeding frenzy for years, much like the Japanese decades earlier in their kamikaze quest to buy up every tract of real estate on the market in Los Angeles and Honolulu and Sydney.

 The inglorious return of Herr Majesty’s Hong Kong to mainland China by Britain’s Christopher Patten hadn’t helped (Con was sure General Patton would have handled things differently with Red China — ‘Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to make the other poor, dumb sonofabitch die for his country!’), causing a mass exodus of Hong Kong dollars — Snakehead and Triad dollars — to flee the opium colony prematurely to find their way into businesses and property, legitimate and not so legitimate, predominantly in the safe havens of Vancouver, London and San Francisco.

 And now look what’s happened, Con thought.

 Us Brits have got a lot to answer for, still screwing everyone royally all over the world, even into the brave new sodding millennium.

 Wok the fuck...

 Shift happens, right?

¥ ¥ ¥ ¥

 Con had targeted his crew with one overriding factor in mind:

 Trust.

 If you want to pull off the second biggest heist the world has ever seen, play God with over two hundred and fifty billion US dollars, maybe much more, Con figured it was wise to recruit some buggers he could trust.

 He knew them all well enough: Peach especially, but that was a lifetime ago; none were career criminals, well, Fitz not so career as such; and all had pressing motives to take this incalculable personal risk for their own reasons, Vlad now at the head of the queue — well, you think a four-way split of two hundred and fifty billion US might motivate you?

 The upcoming takedown culminated a private crusade, an obsession in Con’s dreams and nightmares for the past two years of his life, a primal vendetta with more tangled roots than even he dared suspect.

 Quite simply, at year’s close, Con aimed to shake the world financial markets to their core:

 Paralyse neXus.

 That would do it.

 neXus, the world’s premier credit and debit card computer payments system.

 neXus, the electronic Enforcer, the pusher and enabler.

 neXus, the snakehead mother ship host for 23,957 engorged and wriggling banking larvae infesting every single financial orifice in every single corner of the world.

 He layered it out to them as the biggest ever heist in modern financial history, the ultimate long con requiring patience and finesse and cunning and guile. He promised them they’d put the mark on the send so beautifully, so exquisitely, so perfectly, so silently, that at the denouement the so-marked wouldn’t even know what had happened, its life-breath secretly stolen over six rainbow days.

 On the seventh day his crew would rest while neXus thrashed planet wide like a deadly-wounded beast, unable to heal and restore without their beneficent supplication.

¥ ¥ ¥ ¥

 Con’s three zeros blind spot squared away, he spent the next eighteen months making plans for the takedown, always meeting Fitz at Vesuvios, always Vlad at O’Reilly’s, always Peach at Toscas, always Maryann and friendly ghosts’ company in hidden Chinatown dens.

 In this way they each came to love their bars. They knew that once inside they could drink in the spirits of the spirit world.

 They loved their bars because they could command encircling booths where no one interrupted them and where they felt important and were treated with respect. They sat huddled over computers and blueprints and the mundane world faded away. People came and went, ghosts came and went, but nothing mattered because their bars were an intimate members only club for them alone.

 They loved their bars because nobody rich would come in and make them feel bad. The girls were pretty, the ghosts were prettier, and the men were jolly and loud.

 And they loved their bars because they were dark too, and that made it even better; no glare or shine distracted them from their plotting, and from dim back booths their future worlds took on the bewitching shimmer and dazzle of regeneration, renewal, the certainty of unlimited new hope.