Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover

by Mike Cooper

  “Okay,” he said when I finished. “Good enough for now. I’ll see if they want something written.”

  I breathed the forest air. “One more thing,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was followed on the way out.” I described the dark blue car.

  “You sure?”

  Sometimes Ryan could be stupid, but that’s okay. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “How long were you inside?”

  “Forty-seven minutes.” Yes, of course I checked.

  “So the CEO . . . um, Brinker?—he had plenty of time to call someone. Probably just wants to know who you are. Can’t really blame him, right?”

  Like I said, Ryan was good on the physical side. Maybe not so good on the thinking-it-through part.

  “Nothing in the background material suggested Brinker is anything but an overpaid company executive,” I said. “It turns out he’s crooked, but there’s no mention of gambling or brushes with the law or a bad reputation or whatever.”

  “So?”

  “So how did he know who to call?”

  “Oh.”

  Projection bias. For people like Ryan and me, being followed by shady characters probably carrying guns, that’s just part of the working day. We get used to it.

  If you’re not careful, though, you can forget that the rest of the world doesn’t live that way.

  “Not to mention,” I said, “that the A-Team must have gotten on site in about forty-five minutes.”

  “Maybe they’re really efficient.”

  “Uh-huh. Or maybe they were already on call.” If they’d been there from the beginning, of course, I wouldn’t have had so easy a time of it inside. “Either way, there might be more going on here than they told you.”

  “I’ll be sure to—wait, hang on.”

  I heard another phone ring in the background.

  “It’s . . . yeah, it’s them again,” Ryan said. “Gotta go.”

  “Remember, even if they stiff you, I still get paid.”

  “Next round at Volchak’s is on me.” He clicked off.

  I’d been standing in the trees long enough to start to get cold. Still nothing suspicious on the road. Something cracked in the woods, but it was probably just a big dumb animal wandering around.

  I dialed another number, again from memory.

  “Clara Dawson.” No caller ID, so she’d assume it was a professional call. “What can I do for you?”

  “Hi, Clara.”

  “Silas!” She laughed. “It’s been . . . hell, it’s been days!”

  Clara’s career had well and truly taken off last year. We’d both gotten tangled up in a series of high-profile killings on Wall Street. As the banksters went down, one by one, most of America seemed happy to cheer on the assassin. Clara figured out what really happened—predictably, a massive pile of money was at root—and her reporting vaulted her from hardscrabble blogger to distinguished journalist and pundit, all in one go.

  I’d had something to do with the investigation as well, but Clara left me out of it. Not many journos can actually keep a secret. Even more remarkably, after our relationship first went decidedly nonprofessional and then, unfortunately, back to just friends, we’d managed to remain, well, friends.

  Sometimes I wondered. Paths not taken. Choices not made, possibilities not pursued. But my gray-zone existence didn’t exactly mesh with high-profile journalism. It’s just as well we didn’t try harder to make it work—jail for me and disgrace for her would have been the inevitable outcome.

  As it is, we talk, have dinner occasionally, sometimes go running together. She doesn’t use me for a source too often, and I don’t ask for favors. Much. Mostly, it works.

  “You know,” I said. “This job and that. It never ends.”

  “Tell me about it. Or rather, don’t, not now—I’m expecting another call.”

  “I’ll save the social graces, then. What do you know about a company called Clayco? Or one of their divisions, Clay Micro?”

  “Nothing. What should I know?”

  I heard a faint clatter in the background—her keyboard.

  “Not much,” I said. “A little assignment I’m about to wrap up.”

  “Mostly defense. Military-grade avionics, telemetry . . . founded in the sixties, still private.” She was reading from some online profile. “Sensor integration, large-scale data analysis. Fairly high-tech.”

  “I got that.” Standard background, right off the internet.

  “They seem to have focused on missile technology—guidance systems and so forth. Can that be right? That sort of technology is dominated by the majors. Raytheon. Lockheed.”

  “It’s where they started, back in the seventies.” I’d read the same material she must have been looking at. “Now they’ve got some sort of niche in tactical guided arms. Like a soldier fires a rocket from a shoulder launcher—they’re not wire guided anymore, the nosecones are smart enough to make their own decisions. Sounds all Skynet to me, but Clayco’s on the cutting edge of this sort of thing.”

  “And you’re working on Clay Micro?” Pause. “It’s small, relative to the parent. One of six or eight divisions. They make seismic sensors. Tracking earthquakes, maybe, that kind of thing.”

  “Underground nuclear tests, I think, but nowadays more useful for geological surveys—the kind they use looking for oil, for example.”

  “Fine. That’s Clay Micro. So what?”

  “How do the financials look?”

  “Dunno. They’re private. Give me a minute.”

  I waited, leaning against the rental car. My eyes had gradually adjusted to the dark forest, but it was still difficult to see anything. The moon either hadn’t risen or was behind clouds. I couldn’t see through the tree cover.

  “Clay Micro’s initial investors snuck in some strong antidilution provisions,” Clara said.

  “Hmm.” The way it works is, the first guys bringing cash to the table usually end up with a big piece of ownership. Fair enough. But when later investors buy in—and nobody makes it on just one round of financing—the first team can see its stake diluted. “That’s common enough.”

  “They got full ratchet.”

  “Oh.” Not so common after all. Full ratchet meant a guaranteed-percent piece of the pie. Company founders desperate for financing certainly had worse options—death-spiral convertible bonds, anyone?—but full ratchet was usually great for those first investors and lousy for everyone else. “How’d that work out?”

  “What you’d expect, it looks like. The founder got squeezed out a few years later, around when they were acquired by Clayco. It wasn’t called Clay Micro until then, of course.”

  And in the end the founder might well have lost his entire stake, even though the company itself apparently did well. Another happy Wall Street story. “When was that?”

  “Late nineties. There was some press on it. But that’s about it . . . No other significant acquisitions. Clayco’s gone to the debt markets a few times since then. Borrowings are what you’d expect for their size. Nothing’s jumping out here.”

  About what I thought. “Okay.”

  “Oh, wait!”

  “What?”

  “They’re part owned by Sweetwater Institutional Investors.”

  “Sweetwater . . . Wilbur Markson?”

  “Exactly. The Buddha himself.”

  Good God.

  You’ve heard of Wilbur Markson. You’ve probably seen his folksy, down-to-earth op-eds or heard him on TV or—if you were very, very lucky—bought a few shares of Sweetwater when it was the counterculture’s first, early foray into ethical investing. After graduating from Oberlin, Markson ran a food co-op in the 1970s before getting interested in the stock market. From the very beginning he stuck by several principles: no to toxic chemicals, tobacco, children’s cereal; yes to sustainable energy, organic foods, animal-safe health and beauty products. He popularized responsible, guilt-free capitalism, rode a wave of rising markets and became a billion
aire.

  He’s now beaten Wall Street by double digits for more than thirty years. Sweetwater’s annual meetings are like tent revivals, with fans swooning and begging pictures. And for all that, Markson lives a modest, mid-American life: married to his college sweetheart, still in the same Ohio farmhouse he grew up in, cheerful and decent. If guys like Dick Fuld and Lloyd Blankfein are the dark oberleutnants of capitalism, Markson is Main Street personified, the everyman investor made good.

  Everybody loves Wilbur Markson.

  “Markson owns Clayco?” I’d been working for the most honest and well-respected figure of American capitalism and didn’t even know it. “What the hell’s he doing in the missile business?”

  “That’s where the money is.” Clara took a jaded view. “Smart weapons are better than dumb ones—they don’t kill so many people. Or something like that. I assume that average annual revenue growth of eighteen percent was the real draw.”

  “That’s not bad.” I thought about it. “Was Markson in from the beginning?”

  “Like, was he in on the squeeze-out? Let me see—”

  “It’d be out of character,” I said. “And then some.”

  “And it looks like Markson didn’t start buying until a few years ago, long after. He’s clean.”

  An operation as shady as Brinker’s would have no place in an upright, ethically pure empire like Markson’s. He’d shutter them immediately, or sell out and call the police. And not everyone would like that—for example, the many people who’d lose their bonuses, their jobs or their freedom.

  That could certainly explain why I’d been hired—or Ryan, but to the same effect. If a faction on the board learned before Markson that Clay Micro was a cesspool, they’d have a strong reason to clean it up ASAP.

  Very strong.

  “That’s interesting,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “Not now.” Probably not ever, but it depended on how things went from here. “I told you, it’s a little job. Nothing your readers would care about.”

  Clara laughed again. “I know you, Silas.”

  “No, really.”

  “All of your jobs are interesting to someone.”

  “Tell you what, when I’m done, we’ll have a drink. I’ll outline the story, you decide if it’s worth running down.” She’d never source me directly, so anything for print would have to be backstopped by redundant reporting. Often that meant more effort than could be justified, which Clara understood better than anyone.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “And if you hear anything . . .”

  “I’ll look into Clayco, see if anyone’s talking about them.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  We chatted another minute, then Clara’s call came in and she hung up on me. I stood in the woods, staring into the murk, wondering what I’d stepped into.

  Wilbur Markson?

  —

  I got back in the car, plugged the phone into the dash to top off its charge and bumpity-bumped back to the blacktop. Dinnertime had come and gone hours ago, but I had some personal reconnaissance to finish up.

  Back through Clabbton and out the other side. Again, the woods closed in quickly. I turned onto a county road, which twisted and turned as it rose toward state forest. By now the moon was up and I could see the countryside fairly well.

  I crossed a four-way intersection under a blinking yellow, no cars coming from any direction. A diner appeared on the right, closed and empty. A small field contained big dark lumps—cows, maybe, hard to tell.

  And a mile later I found Barktree Welding.

  The shop could have been built in the 1940s: ancient layers of white paint flaking from concrete brick. It sat close to the road, the way they were placed when most traffic was Model A’s on unimproved dirt. A battered pickup slumped by the side of the garage. All three bays were dark, their doors pulled shut, but a blue light glowed behind a window on the second story. It looked like an addition, a room or two built atop one end of the shop.

  Someone was watching television. The business seemed buttoned up for the day. The owner might have an apartment up there.

  I slowed and stopped by the side of the road, just where it began to curve around the hillside. Peering back I could see a machine in the small field beside the garage—an old diesel tractor, with that boxy hood that looked like 1950. In the moonlight it appeared that half the field had been mowed, then the job and tractor abandoned in the middle.

  I waited a few minutes. When I saw a headlight glow coming through the trees on the road below, I started up again and drove quietly away.

  Barktree Welding was owned by Dave Ellins.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The pictures I’d found—a dirt-track fan website, some Facebook tags—they hadn’t lied.

  He looked just like me.

  I’d woken early, after a surprisingly restful night. The roughnecks in the other cabins really did shut down at a reasonable hour—by eleven the music had stopped and the gamers were quiet, and at midnight I could even hear crickets in the trees, dodging bats.

  Before dawn boots were clumping on wooden floorboards. Toilets flushed, sinks ran. Quiet greetings as the men walked outside. Truck doors slammed, cab radios came on, vehicles rumbled out the drive and accelerated onto the road.

  It was Saturday, but the drillers must have been on a frontier schedule. I wondered if they took Sunday off.

  I felt like a sleepyhead layabout when I finally emerged, yawning. Clouds in the east banded yellow to pink to white. Trees dripped, dew or overnight rain I couldn’t tell.

  The Chamber of Commerce couldn’t have ordered up a better morning.

  Breakfast was fried eggs and pancakes in a diner across the road—I didn’t even have to drive, it was less than a hundred yards away. Some old guys in a booth, wearing seed caps and canvas jackets, drank coffee and talked about the Penguins. A few pipeline workers were scraping up the last of their lumberjack specials. A television mounted in a ceiling corner above the cash register was on but silent, the morning-show talking heads showing teeth and yammering mutely away.

  “Six-twenty?” I wasn’t sure I correctly read the scrawl on the tab the waitress dropped off. “Is that right?”

  “No charge for the refills,” she said.

  “Thanks.” I put down a ten. The food was indifferent, but for that I would have gotten a small OJ in Manhattan.

  On the other hand, no newspapers. Yeah, yeah, everyone makes fun, but I can’t use a smartphone or a tablet—everything you do online is tracked, and I’m neither skilled nor diligent enough to reliably circumvent the relentless data hoover. One basic cellphone and a wad of cash is the most I’ll carry on a job. Security through obscurity.

  So I stared out the plate glass instead. The motel cabins were almost empty now; one SUV and my rental were the only vehicles still parked out front. Traffic passed, back and forth, down toward Clabbton and up toward the hills.

  “You just hire on?” said the waitress, taking my plates away. “Saw you walking over from Annie’s just now.”

  In the city, wearing a suit, people assumed I was a businessman. Out here everyone looked at me and saw an Okie well digger. Context is all.

  “Family business,” I said, same as at the motel. Simple, consistent lies are the best.

  “Nice day for it.”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  Back at the cabin I collected my toothbrush, dropped a couple bucks on the bed, and ran a damp washcloth over the door handle, sink taps, table edge—it took only a few minutes to clean the room, and basic precautions make good habits.

  But when I found myself wiping down the masonite key fob, I realized I was stalling.

  Second thoughts, now that I was so close.

  There was no reason I had to follow through and see Dave Ellins in person. He’d reached me through my Vegas mail drop—a guy out there does me a favor, forwa
rding the occasional letter, but he thinks I’m New Jersey mob, and he doesn’t have anything but an uptown PO box number. Anyway, the whole story was ludicrous: long-lost brothers, given up at birth to different families? A tabloid fairy tale. Dave, whoever he was, might have duped my last set of foster parents, good-hearted and rather dim as they are. That didn’t mean I had to go along.

  I walked out, closing the door with my hip, and walked around back, under the pines. I stared through the trees, thinking.

  The problem was, if he found me once, maybe he could find me again.

  And if he could, so could someone else.

  Fine. Best get it over with—find out who Dave really was and what he wanted. I walked quickly to the Malibu, settled the Sig’s holster as comfortably as I could in the driver’s seat, turned on my phone and got going.

  My mood improved. Making a decision always makes a difference.

  The route went by quicker the second time, daylight and familiarity bringing everything closer. As the hills closed in, dark patches appeared on the road, then puddles—it must have rained harder farther up. Mist drifted among the trees, rising from damp ground. The morning sun would dry it all out, but the hollows were still half in shadow, the night cool lingering. The last bits of town dwindled away. Occasional barbwire and fading NO TRESPASSING signs were nailed to the trees; gravel pullouts had broken gates or nothing at all.

  It felt like leaving civilization. I’d really become a New York urbanite, my natural environment no longer the woods and backlands of my youth.

  —

  Dave had company.

  Three men stood in the muddy lot in front of Barktree Welding.

  The discussion was exuberant, or maybe an argument. Hard to tell as I drove past. Hands thrust and pointed and gestured. I didn’t catch the words, and it was hard to say how serious they were. One might have been laughing.

  I didn’t slow down, looked over once and then returned my face to the road ahead.

  A few hundred yards farther I pulled over. Overcast hung so low it hid the tops of the steep, wooded hills rising all around. I’d stopped at what looked like a building site; the ground had been roughly prepared, raw dirt graded more or less flat. A muddy flatbed carrying a large stack of cinderblock was parked in the middle. Steel bands securing the bricks to pallets were cut and hanging loose, and a few of the bricks had been unloaded onto the ground.