by Mike Cooper
“Everyone lived,” I said, surprised.
“Well, yeah.”
“Now what happens?”
“Now?”
“If the idea was to clear the site, you actually haven’t made much progress.”
Brendt walked up. “Now the slag can cool, that’s all,” he said. “Stopped up inside, it would of taken months. This way they start hauling it away next week.”
Cleaning up and collecting tools shouldn’t have taken long, but somehow they stretched it out an hour. Three sledgehammers were lost, abandoned and buried under the falling masonry. Dave still had his bucket, though. When we finally finished up, he dropped his gloves in.
“Here, take these,” said Brendt. He held out two more sticks of dynamite. They looked just like the cartoons—not much shorter than a paper-towel tube, wrapped in red paper. Splotches on the paper suggested that nitroglycerine had begun to destabilize and leak out. I stepped back.
“You don’t need them?”
“Naw. You can use them to take out that stump you was talking about.”
“Thanks.” Dave added them to the bucket.
“When we gonna get paid?” Video Guy asked.
“Monday.” Brendt brushed grit from his beard. “I’ll collect from the office.”
“Hope they don’t decide to fuck around—sixty-day terms, that kinda bullshit.” All of them had probably done 1099 work and knew how slow big companies could be.
“Nuh-uh.” He flipped his sledgehammer in his left hand, like it was a juggling club. “They’ll see right here what we can do. I don’t think they’ll want us angry with them.”
He threw the hammer twice more, then tried to catch it in the other hand. He missed and it flew out of control, bouncing onto the ground inches from my foot.
“Oops, sorry.” He picked it up. “Hey, Dave, I forgot—might have another job next week. You interested?”
“What is it?” I said. “Blowing up a dam? Setting the national forest on fire?”
He laughed like I was kidding. “Construction. Temporary structure for a party or something. Easy.”
“Maybe.” Dave picked up his bucket. “Give me a call.”
We walked out to the parking lot. The guard saluted us. “Nice clean job, fellas.”
“Thanks.”
“Glad to see everyone coming out what went in.”
“You got that right.”
At the car, I popped the door locks with the remote. Dave pointed at the trunk. “Can you open that up?”
I looked at his bucket, with the two sticks of explosive poking out. “No way.”
“It’s safe enough.”
“Not for me.” Maybe I’d just seen too many vehicles demolished when I was in the service.
“Okay, no problem. Listen, we thought we might go out,” he said. “Get a beer. You want to come?”
“I’ll pass.” I closed the trunk. “Some things to do.”
“Sure. I’ll go with Brendt, then. He’ll drop me off at the shop later.” Dave hesitated, oddly reticent. “You, uh, you want to come over tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” I realized it was true, and not just because New York was apparently a no-go-home zone at the moment.
My brother. I felt a pull.
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
“Awesome.” He grinned, grabbed my hand for a moment, then jogged off to Brendt’s car. The other guys were already moving, trucks turning and squealing tires and barreling out to the exit. By the time I got my car started, only one other vehicle was left—probably the guard’s.
I couldn’t see the top of the rubble pile from here, but a thick plume of smoke rose and bent east with the wind. I wondered what FerroCorp planned to do with the site.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I drove all the way back to Pittsburgh. Coming in on I-376—the Parkway, apparently everyone called it—from the east. Late in the day the sun had finally come out and now it was setting, red and orange behind the city skyline.
Not much of a skyline, compared to back home. But pretty all the same.
Clay Micro was dark. No surprise, on Saturday night. I got out and walked around again, down to the trestle bridge over the canal, along the road, all the way to the front of the grocery wholesaler and back. Not sure what I was looking for. Some sort of clue about the mystery Nissan that had followed me last night. In the falling dusk I couldn’t see much.
I didn’t find anything.
Leaving, I followed the same route I’d taken yesterday. The lacrosse players were gone, but the street was livelier, families home and together on the weekend. I backtracked a block to where the tail had appeared—just another street. They could have been waiting there, or come from anywhere.
I got some takeout at a Foodland supermarket: something green from the salad bar and a container of rice pilaf. Farther down the highway, across the river, I found another roadside motel. This one had several long-haul rigs in the lot. The desk clerk was incurious, the room shabby, the television small. I ate my solitary dinner, then carried the trash out to a garbage can in the parking lot.
While I was out there I took another walk, circling the motel for a block in all directions, checking likely surveillance points and routes in and out. It felt like a lonely edge of the city—sparse traffic, a warehouse type of operation down the road one way and some shuttered stores the other. One of the truckers had left his diesel running, light seeping from the sleeping area behind the cab seats. Maybe he had better television in there.
I finished my paranoid patrol, slipped back inside and brushed my teeth. For a while I sat in the dark, doing nothing. At nine I went to bed.
The life of an itinerant accountant is far too glamorous for most.
—
In the morning, a phone call.
I was halfway into my usual routine of push-ups, crunches and open-hand kata. Pilates for leg breakers, Zeke calls it, but he does yoga himself. The room’s dark, synthetic carpet was unpleasant and dirty close up. Last night I’d found only one set of outlets, behind the television, and I had to scramble to recover my phone from where it was charging back there.
“Hello?”
“Silas, yo.”
“Johnny!” I dropped into the room’s single chair. “What are you doing up? It’s Sunday.”
“The markets run twenty-four hours now.”
“Sunday morning?”
“It’s a perfect time. Everyone’s hung over on this side of the Atlantic and out watching cricket or whatever the fuck on the other side. Thin participation—lots of opportunity.”
“If you say so.”
Johnny and I go way back—all the way to New Hampshire, in fact—and after separate paths we both arrived in the financial world. He landed on the slightly more legitimate side, running an incremental fund downtown. Three billion of alternative-asset money. Big enough to ride the waves, small enough to catch them in the first place. His style is distinctly out of fashion, relying as it does on short-term technical trading. A little rumormongering, good contacts around the Street, fundamental instinct. Now that the high-frequency shops have largely taken over—behemoths with ultrafast pipes and computers that place millions of orders on nanosecond latency—traders like Johnny are going extinct. They’re like the old pit traders: almost entirely gone, just a few blue jackets left for show on the floor of the NYSE.
Johnny has managed to stay ahead, partly through intellectual brilliance but mostly by obsessive, nonstop immersion in real-time data every waking moment. He wakes up, he turns on twenty flat-screen terminals, he goes to work.
“I still can’t believe you’re sitting in the office at dawn on Sunday.”
“I don’t sleep much.” Which I knew was true. “Anyway, that’s not why I’m calling. You okay?”
“Well, shit. Zeke asked the same thing yesterday. I’m fine.”
“Good.”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t want to worry you—”
Too late
for that. “What happened?”
“Visitors. They just waylaid me.”
“What, at home?” Johnny had a big, renovated loft in Soho, the sort of thing an investment banker buys with one year’s bonus and then sells during the divorce. Johnny got the place in foreclosure—yup, happens all the time among the one percent, too—because it was walking distance to work. But the building had a lobby with permanent staff and a private elevator. I couldn’t figure where he might be accosted.
“No, here at the office. They talked their way past security downstairs—you know, ID cards in little leather cases—and banged on my door until I let them in.”
He had a dozen traders and some administrative staff on one floor of a hundred-year-old building on Beaver Street, but none of them worked Sunday. Of course.
I stood up, suddenly feeling confined by the drab little motel room. “Which agency?”
“What?”
“Were they from Justice? SEC? What the hell, has the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau started fielding agents?”
“They weren’t government.”
“But I thought you said—”
“That was downstairs. Give a little credit here, I think I’m smarter than a rent-a-cop.”
“So . . . ?”
“I don’t know. One man, one woman. She did most of the talking.”
A woman? “What’d she look like?”
“Nice. Blond hair, expensive cut. Some kind of dark jacket, soft pants. I dunno. The guy was just, you know, a guy. Blue suit. His head was shaved.”
Like I said, eyewitnesses are pretty much useless. Still—“Zeke might have seen her, too,” I said.
“Yeah, she seemed more like his part of the economy than mine.”
“What did she want?”
“You.”
I walked to the window, stood to the side and pushed the drape open a few inches. Daylight, momentarily dazzling.
Johnny keeps a little money of mine in a beneficiary account. We talk, now and then, usually on the phone. Once a month maybe we have dinner, often in the middle of the night when Johnny finally leaves his trading room. We don’t have many friends in common.
What I mean is, it’s not an obvious connection. Not the sort of lead you’d run down after canvassing friends and neighbors. But given Johnny’s profession, it might seem like an important one to someone worried about my involvement in top-drawer corporate finance.
Say, some shady, multimillion-dollar improprieties at a Pennsylvania manufacturer.
“What’d you give them?”
“Nothing. We haven’t talked for weeks, I have no idea where you are or what you’re doing.”
“Were they happy?”
“Didn’t seem to care much, actually. She asked a lot of questions but never reacted particularly.”
The motel’s parking lot was emptier now, the tractor trailers all gone, maybe a fourth of the spaces still occupied by other vehicles. Nothing seemed out of place.
“I have to ask, why did they . . . why did you talk to them at all?”
“I don’t know.” He paused. “They didn’t threaten me or anything. They were just kind of implacable. Like we were absolutely going to have a discussion no matter what, so don’t even bother objecting.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Also, the woman—” He stopped.
“What?”
“I’d say . . . she’s really good-looking.”
I had to laugh. “Sounds like she ought to be on the floor. If she can turn your head, she can probably roll traders all over the market.”
A door slammed outside. A man walked past my window, coming from another room, and got into a silver two-door parked down the row. He sat for a moment, then the brake and running lights came on, and the car backed out.
“What else?” I asked.
“Nothing. They left.”
“Did anyone else see them?”
“I suppose, but you know how it is—they were paying attention to their screens, not some visitors they didn’t recognize. You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“I’m not sure. I did a job this week at a company division in Pittsburgh called Clay Micro.” I gave him the thirty-thousand-foot overview. “So it looks like simple housecleaning, though the management here might have a few more dirty diapers than most. It might not even be related. The kind of people visiting you and Zeke are just . . . disproportionate.”
“Clay Micro is part of Clayco?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re majority owned by Sweetwater Investments.”
Figures he’d know that. “Yeah,” I said again.
“So in effect, you’re on the clock for Wilbur Markson.” Johnny laughed. “What’d you do, cheat on the preemployment personality test?”
“Apparently, someone really doesn’t want Markson finding out how deep into the swamp Clay Micro is.”
“But they hired you.”
“I know. Could be the Clay Micro CEO instead, trying to clean things up . . . it’s confusing.”
We went round at it another minute, until Johnny got bored. I didn’t have any new ideas.
“You’re there now?” he said. “In Pittsburgh?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you should stay a little longer.”
First Zeke, now Johnny. “Why?”
“I said they didn’t threaten me.” He paused. “But the woman did threaten you.”
“How?”
“Like they weren’t going to stop looking. The sooner they found you, the better. But all unemotional, like she was talking about grocery shopping. That made it almost . . . scary, you know? ‘We’re going to tear this city apart, there’s nowhere he can hide’—as a simple statement of fact.”
“Hmm.”
I heard some clacking at Johnny’s end. He was probably getting back to work, drawn by the irresistible pull of the screens.
“Let me know if you hear anything about Clayco,” I said.
“I’ll ask around.”
“And Johnny? I’m taking you serious and all.”
“What?”
“If you think they’re dangerous, they’re dangerous. Don’t fuck around.”
“Sure. I already told the beezers downstairs, and called the management company, too. They won’t get inside again.”
“No, that’s fine, but what I mean is, this isn’t a trading opportunity, okay? At least not now. You find something out about Clayco, call me first. I’m feeling a little exposed.”
“Sure, okay.”
“I mean it.” I didn’t think Johnny would sell me out for a few points of alpha.
Probably.
“Take a vacation,” he said. “Tour the sites. See the Liberty Bell.”
“It’s Pittsburgh, not Philly.”
“Whatever. I’m just saying, maybe you don’t want to meet this woman in person.”
“Really good-looking, huh? You just want the field to yourself.”
“Never.” He laughed. “I’d sooner sleep with a pit bull.”
“I thought you already did.”
“So I know what I’m talking about.”
After we hung up I tried to finish the kata, but I was too distracted. Shotokan is mostly about mental focus, and the conversation with Johnny had ruined mine.
I thought about the woman in New York. She was making fast progress, hardly slowed by all the chaff and evasion in my background. Zeke said she had a reputation.
Dave said Silas Cade had a reputation.
I wondered what she was doing, right then. Arriving in Pittsburgh, this hotel’s address in hand? Eating breakfast? Finishing a two-hour combatives workout?
Whatever, she was probably being more productive than me. I sighed and got up.
CHAPTER NINE
It was time to leave. Fuck the threats. Stop in and say goodbye to Dave, then back to New York.
Johnny and Zeke were well meaning, but I needed to be back on home turf. If Catwoman was looking for me in the ci
ty, I’d damn well meet her there. The hills and forests and decaying steel mills out here were unfamiliar, and you make mistakes when things are unfamiliar.
Some long driving, then, later today. I hadn’t flown into Pittsburgh, and I wouldn’t fly out. As far as possible, I never fly. Depending on your viewpoint, you could regard that as a success story for the TSA.
See, all the ID checking and scanners and take-your-shoes-off and the pat downs and shampoo confiscation—none of that’s going to catch a terrorist. Because the thing is, a terrorist who blows up airplanes, he does that once only. By definition. Nobody knows who the next terrorist is going to be—certainly not the TSA, which is always fighting the last scenario.
So the watch lists are pointless if you’re worried about Al Qaeda or Timothy McVeigh. But they’re great for screwing with citizens who just like to travel without the whole world knowing. False IDs work if they’re good enough, sure, but they cost real money—and even then, you still have to go through that damned endless line, with cameras and inspectors and full-body radiation. It’s a risk.
I hate risk.
Instead, I’d driven here three days ago. Six hours on the turnpike, a long drive. In my own car, which was registered to a legitimately incorporated limited liability company in White Plains, all excise fees paid up, license plates shiny, the inspection current. I put it in the Pittsburgh airport’s central parking—long-term is always too far away from the terminals, and no one cares if a vehicle’s been left for a week or two—and walked over to the Alamo desk on the baggage floor.
True, I’d had to use a false license. But it didn’t go into a federal database, and it wasn’t actively cross-checked against anything except the credit card’s payment history—which another PO box LLC was careful to keep fully paid. Now I’d return the rental, pretend I was getting a flight out, and no one would ever be the wiser.
I pulled into Barktree Welding midmorning. The welding tank Dave had used for the barbecue cart still stood abandoned in the middle of the gravel out front. The bay doors were all open again, perhaps for fresh air—the day had turned beautiful, clear and sunny, a light breeze bringing the smell of trees and moss down from the hills around us.