Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover (7 page)

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.

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.

I
t 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 city, 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.

I parked to one side. Dave came out from the shop, a sponge in one hand.

“Hiya, Silas!”

“Hey.”

Funny thing—he looked less like me every time I saw his face. Increasingly I saw the individual personality engraved there: the laugh lines and a crease above his nose and a faint scar on one cheekbone.

“Putting a shine on the Charger,” he said. “Don’t mind if I finish up, do you? I need to get the wax on.”

“Want help?”

“No! No, that’s okay.”

The hood was closed today, whatever tuning he’d done yesterday complete. Swirls of light-colored wax covered most of the car’s exterior, everything except the driver’s-side panels. Dave knelt, dipped the sponge in a bucket of water, then the can, and gently wiped more on.

“I like the old-fashioned paint,” he said. “There’s a shop over in Uniontown did this for me. But it needs waxing regular.”

I remembered buffing my folks’ car in high school—Saturday afternoon, warm in the bright sun, baseball on the radio. For a year or two there I cared a lot about what I drove and how I looked in it.

Bouncing around in Humvees and MRAPs, the vehicles constantly getting shot and blown up and breaking down, somehow ended that simple pleasure. Cars were just dull machines to me now.

Not that I’d say so to Dave. “Looks real nice.”

“Needs to sit an hour.” He wrung the sponge out, put it to dry on a shelf and carried the bucket to spill out the water on the gravel. “Want a beer?”

“Nope. Too early.”

“Beer’s pretty much all I drink.”

So much for a quick goodbye.

We sat in the same spot, next to a workbench in the first bay. The refrigerator was close to hand, a battered wooden chair and two stools were available and an old CRT television sat on a pass-through counter into the office. That room was smaller and just as cluttered as the shop, albeit more with stacks of grimy paper than metal parts and tools.

“I been thinking,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” I hadn’t known Dave long, but he seemed to start a lot of conversations that way.

“What I was saying yesterday, about the scrap and the casinos and all, you know I was messing, right? All that petty-ass lawbreaking—only a fuckwad would do that.” He drank some Rock Green Light. “I mean, more than once.”

“Hard to disagree.”

“Right. Because you go to jail, and listen—I know—jail’s fucked up. You do not want to be there.”

In my career I’d come to see that, no, some people
did
want to be in jail, but of course that only strengthened Dave’s point.

“So why aren’t the
bankers
behind bars?” he asked. “I figure you can explain this to me. Those assholes on Wall Street pretty much destroyed the world economy, right after they sent all our jobs to China. And what happens?—they keep getting, like, million-dollar bonuses at Christmas. And buying yachts and shit, going skiing in France.”

It was almost poignant how limited Dave’s imagination was. I’ve spent some time in the plutocracy. As a mere hired hand, of course, somewhere between the pool boy and the first footman, but I’ve seen some of the estates. Private islands, castles on the Rhine, Connecticut-sized cattle “ranches.”

Not to mention that a million dollars was more or less cafeteria change. Real bonuses, the kind the managing directors hand themselves, can run ten or a hundred times that.

“It’s not complicated,” I said. “They run the game. The house always wins.”

“And the politicians—?”

“Owned. Everyone knows that.”

“Yeah.” Dave tipped his chair back. “Well, that ain’t right.”

I almost laughed. “Who are you, Wyatt Earp?”

“No. But why not? Town needs a sheriff.”

“Good luck with that.”

“I guess it’s not what you do, huh?”

“No.” I felt a pang of . . . something. Embarrassment? Disappointment? “No, I can’t say I’m righting wrongs.”

“Does make you wonder why nobody’s taken a rocket launcher into Goldman Sachs, though.” He put his bottle down and looked over at me, kind of thoughtful. “Maybe you can help
me
out instead.”

A shadow crossed the sun. Or maybe I just felt the first inkling of what
family
could mean.

“Well, I don’t—”

“See, I owe some money.”

“So does everyone else in America.”

“It’s a problem,” he said. “A big problem.”

But we never got to discuss it.

Engine noise outside. We both looked up, just as a familiar, dark blue car squealed off the road and bounced into the lot. Doors on both sides sprang open. Behind it, an older, beat-up vehicle roared in from the other direction, skidding to a halt so hard its nose practically scraped the dirt.

Three men came out of the cars holding assault rifles. One was very tall.

“Down!” I yelled, diving off the chair. “Down, down!”

Bullets slammed into the walls, the doors, the bench, smashing tools and ricocheting off loose metal everywhere. Auto parts crashed to the floor, adding to the din and dust and smoke. I crab crawled straight to the office, five feet away. Too much noise and adrenaline to hear anything, but I glimpsed Dave rolling the other direction, headed for the last bay.

The cinderblock walls were beautiful. Any other building material would have perforated like cardboard under the hail of firepower.

The office window blew in, shattered by a three-second burst. I ducked the shards, swept all the crap off Dave’s metal desk, and peeked through the frame.

We were totally boxed. Two men remained at the blue Nissan, one crouched behind the hood and one behind the trunk, sweeping their weapons across the shop’s front. Another guy sprinted for the adjacent field, holding his rifle like he’d done this many, many times before. In a few seconds he landed behind the tractor Dave had left out there—perfect sightlines across the shop’s rear.

We wouldn’t be leaving through the back door.

On the other hand, I now had my own weapon out. Ten rounds available, and one spare magazine. I ducked to the other side of the window frame, counted two, and raised up long enough to fire three times.

Nobody got hurt, but it kept them in place for a moment. Silence returned abruptly as everyone stopped shooting.

“Silas!” Dave called from the opposite end of the shop. “Silas!”

“I’m okay!” I yelled as loud as I could. “I found the M16. Where’s the box of frag grenades?”

“
What?
” But our assailants began firing again, cutting him off.

Of course they’d figure out I was bluffing soon enough. Bullets slapped the wall behind me and the ceiling—the two at the Nissan were firing slightly upward from their position, through the window. Chunks of asbestos rained down from shredded ceiling tiles.

I moved to the side window, now also broken, and put a round into the hood cowling of the tractor in the field. Just to keep that asshole in place.

“Dave? You hurt?”

No answer. I returned to the front, and saw that we weren’t going to settle in for a siege: the men had gotten back into their car, and the driver backed it into the road. I was pretty sure they were the same two I’d confronted at the restaurant.

I fired twice, starring the windshield, but they must have been hunched down below the dashboard.

Anyway, good riddance. I stood up and gave them the finger through the window. “Yeah, fuck
off,
motherfuc—”

Oops, that was a little premature. The driver was only aligning the vehicle, making sure he was pointed directly at the office so the engine block would remain between me and them. He started forward, and the other guy held his rifle outside the window—impossible to aim very well like that, but on full auto all he had to do was pull the trigger in my general direction. I ducked back down as bullets slammed all around.

They were going to drive their improvised APC right into the bay, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

Or—hang on. I went to the floor and looked around the frame of the door between the office and the bay. The Nissan was moving forward, halfway to the shop, and they didn’t see me immediately.

I steadied the Sig in two hands, aimed, and shot the welding gas tank Dave had left out there.

KA-WHUUUUMP!

They were right alongside. The fireball engulfed the entire side of the car as the tank exploded. Both left-side tires blew, and metal shards tore across the car’s panels. The driver yelled in pain.

At that exact instant, I heard an engine roar into life from the last bay. Tires screamed—and Dave’s Charger leaped out of the garage so fast it actually went airborne coming off the concrete pad. The car hit the gravel, spun left, and went into a long skid that somehow ended with Dave exactly centered on the blacktop. He fishtailed about one degree, rammed the accelerator all the way to the floor, and left a smoking trail of rubber on the pavement. A second later he was gone, disappearing around the curve at warp five.

Okay, well, I couldn’t really blame him.

The man in the field found his range and started putting rounds through the side window, irregularly spaced, keeping me on the floor. The Nissan wasn’t moving, but I could see motion. The passenger door opened, apparently kicked from inside. The driver must not have been hurt that bad, because he reached up over the dash and pushed out the windshield glass, knocking it onto the hood. The rifle came up next, naturally, and he fired a long burst at the garage’s concrete floor.

Which was smart, because the bullets hit and then traveled parallel to the ground, six inches above it. I’d already rolled back into the office, fortunately.

Options were diminishing rapidly. For nearly a minute I just lay there, curled up, listening to bullets crack over my head and into the walls. Plaster and furniture fell to pieces all around.

Then over the din, I heard a heavy truck on the road, downshifting with a
BLAAAT
from the airbrakes. The fusillade lightened, then stopped—and the truck’s engine roared, apparently accelerating. I hunched up to peek through the window frame.

Dave was in the cab of the flatbed I’d parked by earlier. The truck swung off the road at, Jesus, fifty miles an hour? I had a half second to think
Fuck he’s going to crash right into the fucking BUILDING!
—

—when Dave yanked the wheel around, throwing the entire truck out of control. It slewed left, but the momentum was far too much, and the vehicle went over on its side. Somehow this happened exactly alongside the Nissan. The stack of cinderblocks flew off the bed and hammered onto the car, pounding it into a pile of junk.

The truck continued to slide across the gravel, finally stopping when it smashed into my rented Malibu.

I couldn’t see how anyone might still be alive under that rockslide of bricks, but a moment later one of the men was shoving his door open and trying to crawl out. When his arm was mostly outside I fired, aiming for the elbow, and he pulled back. The guy over by the tractor yelled, the words meaningless.

Dave pushed up his own door, opening it like a tank hatch, and looked cautiously out. I waved him back down just as Tractor Boy fired a few rounds.

Then . . . nothing. Silence finally settled over the scene. I waited.

Thirty seconds. A full minute.

Well.
That
was fun.

I breathed a few times, nice and slow.

“Silas?” Dave’s voice came from inside the truck cab. “We good now?”

“Not yet,” I hollered back. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Anything
else
.

Tractor Boy was suddenly up and running, sprinting for the squashed Nissan. I followed him with the pistol, but didn’t fire—I’m not good enough to hit a moving target with a handgun, and I had to think about conserving ammunition. He reached the door, yanked it all the way open, pulled out first one man and then the other. Out in the open, the big one must have been seven feet tall. All three glanced my way, rifles more or less at ready, but no one moving to shoot.