"Hales. That damned boutique……"

The fifty-fifth floor of an officetel on Wall Street. Looking down from a floor near enough the penthouse, he had the whole Street in view at once.

The stairway to heaven, which only a man who has succeeded may climb. And what decides who climbs it is the floor a man has taken and sat down on.

Only a man who can look down from a wide space very high up is counted a success on Wall Street.

Robert d'Artois is one of them.

He was sent out to Wall Street to stand for his house.

Tens of billions of dollars under his hand at present. A sum ordinary people cannot picture, and no more than a middling hedge fund across the market as a whole.

The returns he brings in are nothing to sniff at.

There is a separate power standing behind Robert.

A close bond with the von Eisenberg house, based in Switzerland.

The von Eisenberg house is a German noble line that has kept itself unbroken since the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.

Officially its head office is in Zurich. Eisenberg Global Capital moves at least a trillion dollars out of the light.

Who they are rarely reaches the press. Governments and the large hedge funds do not lightly mention them either.

They have managed the great estates of Europe's royal houses down the generations, and they are the byword for money out of the light.

For all the money they handle, they never appear on the social stage where the great men show themselves.

And the vast capital standing at the opposite pole from them is the English nobility, gathered around the Winchester house.

The organisation that power actually runs on is the boutique. The enormous sums built up since the days of the British Empire are still in their keeping.

The British government may run into trouble abroad and they do not so much as nod.

Wall Street's capital battlefield, which might be called the real version of a world war.

This is a ground where unseen powers, tangled…