The Businessman
Steel, glass, concrete and smog. Contracts to sign, meetings to finish, clients to meet and so many coffees to drink. Luke Stark is an unstoppable worker, a self made man, he carved his way through the ruthless ocean of finance by devouring one shark after another. Today he's ready for the most important contract of his life, the one that will change everything. With his secretary Raph (who's just waiting for the right moment to stab him in the back), he awaits after months of negotiations the very mysterious Mr. World, an obscure but extremely powerful figure: he owns the most influential companies in the world and keeps himself far from cameras for this reason. Some say he doesn't even exist. But a shadowy investigator is closely following this meeting: if he can't get to Mr. World's tax havens, he'll at least get Luke Stark!
The Businessman
Luke Stark
Luke Stark is an unstoppable worker, a self made man, who carved his way through the ruthless ocean of Wall Street by devouring one shark after another. His dream? A villa in Florida, a Cadillac, and to steal the boss's mistress, Miss Alotta Fagina. Today he's ready for the most decisive contract of his life, the one that will change everything. The meeting with the sinister lobbyist Mr World could be the most important of his life.
The Secretary
Raph Deal
Raph is the most ambitious secretary on Wall Street: he always carries two phones (one for important calls, the other to pretend he's busy), has memorized 847 financial acronyms that he doesn't know the meaning of, and his desk is a museum of useless corporate gadgets. He dreams of replacing Luke by stealing all his clients, but for now he limits himself to sabotaging his meetings by preparing decaffeinated coffee and "forgetting" to put through the most important phone calls.
The Key Client
Mr. World
No one has ever seen Mr World's real face. Some say he changes identity every week, others whisper that he's actually a consortium of three (and a half) different people, and some swear they met him simultaneously in London and Tokyo. He owns banks that own other banks, controls funds that control governments, and his signature is worth more than the GDP of small nations. His contracts are legendary: a handshake from him can crash markets or create new currencies. When he arranges a meeting, he always arrives late, only speaks through intermediaries, and disappears before anyone can take his picture. It is said that he alone has the right of coinage.
The Lawyer
Frank Gary
Frank Gary is the only man in the world who has seen Mr World face to face more than once... and he can't tell anyone about it because of a confidentiality agreement he drafted himself. Tall, thin and always dressed in charcoal gray, Frank is a legal war machine and can turn any handshake into a binding contract. He attended Harvard, Yale, Oxford and a mysterious Swiss university that doesn't appear on any map. In 1972 he won a lawsuit against himself and got paid by both parties.
Max Law hasn't slept since 1980: he replaces sleep with predictive algorithms and intravenous coffee. He has six monitors on his desk, twelve cell phones and a brain that calculates Tokyo Stock Exchange fluctuations in real time while chewing painkillers. Graduated simultaneously from three different universities, Max can predict a financial crash simply by scrutinizing the color of a broker's shoes. He has personally invented 47 new financial derivatives, 23 of which are illegal on at least four continents. When Mr World needs numbers, Max provides them before Mr World even knows he needs them. He has committed suicide three times and resurrected six times.
The Police Officer
Magnus NYPD
How could we forget Magnus, a Los Angeles police inspector transferred to New York finance because of that nasty business on Morgue Street? Magnus is a loose cannon, an uncontrollable element with a frank tendency to take justice into his own hands. He's been hunting Mr World, the faceless lobbyist, for almost a decade in a desperate attempt to infiltrate his empire. Magnus knows that Mr World exists, even though everyone considers him paranoid. He has followed his traces from Zurich to Panama, from Hong Kong to the Caymans, always one step behind the phantom of global finance. Today, if he can't get World, he'll at least manage to give Luke Stark a ticket... for speeding?