Ruthless.Com

Chapter Ten

"Seriously, Jason, this ought to be called 'Cholesterol Corner' or 'Arterial Sclerosis Way' or something," Charles Kirby said, looking down at his Rudy Guiliani hero sandwich, which contained a precarious mountain of corned beef, pastrami, Muenster cheese, and Swiss cheese, with a dripping mantle of Russian dressing and coleslaw at its lofty summit. Altough he had been tempted by the Barbra Streisand, with its multiple strata of turkey and roast beef, he'd found himself incapable of reading its name off the menu, thinking it had a rather unmanly ring.

"Why's that?" Jason Weinstein said, and stretched his mouth to encompass a pastrami, corned beef, and liver-heaped Joe DiMaggio, which he'd chosen over a Tom Cruise only because he'd never been a big fan of the latter's movies.

Kirby pushed his chin at the window. "Well, with that Lindy's Famous cheesecake place on the corner, and the Famous Ray's pizza joint across the street, somebody could build a famously successful practice opening a walk-in cardiac center on the block, don't you think?"

Jason shrugged indifferently, bit into his food, and reached across the table to grab a half-sour dill off the pickle dish, visibly chagrined over its nearer proximity to Kirby. Why Jason hadn't simply asked him to pass the pickles across the table rather than opting for the boardinghouse reach, as his grandmother would have called it, was something that Kirby couldn't for the life of him understand. He was a Wall Street lawyer, for God's sake. Where the hell were his dining manners?

He reached for his knife and fork, cut a wedge off his sandwich, and ate it in silence, having decided that any attempt to raise it to his mouth would result in an unstoppable landslide of sliced meat and cheese — Jason's ability to perform that gravity-defying task notwithstanding.

Suppose you need to have grown up in Brooklyn, he thought.

Jason chewed and swallowed with unfettered relish. "Better than sex, isn't it?"

"Maybe not for me," Kirby said. "But pretty good, I admit."

Jason gave him a look that said there was no accounting for taste.

"Okay, talk. Why'd you spring for lunch?"

Kirby sat for a moment.

"You represent the Spartus consortium. Or at least your firm does," he said. "I want to know who's buying its stake in UpLink."

"Whom you happen to represent."

"There isn't any conflict of interest," Kirby said. "The sale's a matter of public record—"

"Or will be once the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed," Jason said. "To be accurate."

Kirby shrugged. "All I'm asking is that you save me some legwork."

Jason lowered his Joe DiMaggio to his plate and regarded it with a kind of lusting admiration.

"You suppose they cure the meat themselves?" he said.

"Come on, Jase," Kirby said.

Jason looked him. "Sure, why not, but you never got it from me," he said. "The high bidder's a firm in Michigan called Midwest Gelatin. I don't guess I need to tell you its specialty."

Kirby scowled. "Some local jelly producer has the capital to buy up thousands of shares of UpLink? You're shitting me."

"I speak the truth," Jason said. "And that was gelatin, not jelly. It's used in everything from home insulation to sneaker insoles to ballistic testing. There's also a pharmaceutical variation which goes into the headache pills you gulp by the bottle. For your information, Midwest happens to be the largest chemical manufacturer of its type in the country."

"It public or private?"

"Number one," Jason said. "It's a subsidiary of a canning company which is wholly owned by a public corporation that manufactures plexiglass sheeting. Or chinaware, I frankly forget which."

Kirby considered that while Jason dove into his sandwich.

"Are you aware if there's anyone, um, of note, in Midwest Gelatin's upper management? Or that of its parent companies?"

Jason was looking at him again.

"You want to follow the paper trail, find out who's behind the move on UpLink, I suggest you talk to Ed Burke when we get to the park," he said.

"Our Ed?" Kirby pointed to the front of his uniform shirt, on which the word STEALERS was printed in gold capital letters. "The first baseman?"

"The canner's one of his biggest clients," Jason said, nodding. "Just please promise that my name won't enter the conversation."

"Thought I already had."

Jason shook his head. "No, no, you didn't."

Kirby made the scout's honor sign with his index and middle fingers.

"Promise," he said.

Satisfied, Jason turned to watch a thin, elderly-looking waiter scoot past the table with a tall stack of dishes expertly balanced on his arm.

"He's been working here since I was a kid," he said. "Three decades hustling on his feet, can't imagine how he does it."

"Could be he loves it here as much as you do," Kirby said.

Jason's gaze continued following the waiter's energetic trajectory down the aisle.

"Bet that's it," he said very seriously, and took another huge bite of his improbable sandwich.

Reynold Armitage's twenty-two-room duplex was in a palacial landmark building with balustrades and cornices and an ornate iron-and-glass marquee shading its Fifth Avenue entry opposite Central Park. The trappings of status and wealth were as evident — some would say egregiously evident — within his apartment as they were without; passing through the front door, one entered a long, wainscoted reception hall leading into an octagonal salon and then a living room with a parquet floor, massive fireplace, and haughty oil portraits under a vaulted ceiling. Continental silver gleamed on antique tables, Venetian glass goblets and decanters winked diamond points of light from breakfront cabinets, and dynastic Chinese vases perched like fragile blooms atop finely wrought marble gueridons.

Marcus Caine found it all very impressive, though not nearly so much as the scrupulous attention Armitage had payed to concealing the matrix of integrated electronic systems designed to compensate for his physical disabilities — most of which relied upon Monolith's leading-edge voice-recognition technology.

Ordinary men fit their homes with handicap access ramps, priviliged ones with lifts and elevators, he'd once told Caine. I want you to give me something better than either.

Caine sat sipping his vermouth as the parlor doors opened seemingly of their own volition, and the master of the house made his entrance… the grandiosity of which was unaffected by his wheelchair-bound condition. In a certain way, rather, it lifted him from the merely pretentious and gave him an air of solitary dauntlessness. Don Quixote stalking windmills, Ahab versus the white whale, persistance against any odds. It was the warp and woof of highest drama.

"Close," Armitage said in a barely audible undertone, his power wheelchair carrying him forward with the faintest mechanical hum. Behind him the double doors swung quietly shut. "No interruptions, take messages."

He came up to his guest and halted the chair with a joystick on its left armrest. Once it had been on his right side, but over the past several years that hand had become too seriously atrophied to be of any use.

''Marcus," he said, raising his voice to a normal level. "Sorry to have kept you waiting, but I was on a call. Fortunately you look quite settled. Absorbed in meditation, even."

''Admiration,'' Caine corrected. He indicated his surroundings with a slight flick of his hand. "This is a fascinating room."

An intense man of fifty with a narrow face, dark, watchful eyes, and a widow's peak of straight black hair, Armitage appeared surprised.

"And here I've always seen you as all business," he said. "It seems you're growing, Marcus. In fact, my estimate of you soared to new heights after your appearance at the U. N. I really want to compliment you on that one."

Caine gave him a cool glance. "Do you, now?"

"Absolutely. You came across as very likeable, which is everything from a public relations standpoint. There are pollsters who measure that sort of thing, as you're surely aware. How else would we know which celebrities to hire for product endorsements and situation comedies?" A sardonic grin crept across his lips. "I'd give you a clap on the back if I could."

Caine tried not to look uncomfortable.

"Have you considered," he said, "that I may have learned a few tricks from watching you on television?"

Armitage shook his head. "I occupy a unique niche. My readers and viewers don't have to like me, just listen to me. And they will as long as my financial advice is solid… and I'm able to communicate it." He paused and swallowed, the muscles of his throat straining to perform the basic function. "Would you like Carl to refill your glass, or should we get right down to what you wanted to discuss?"

"Til pass on the drink, thanks." Caine wondered if Armitage's brittle references to his disease were shading his own impressions of how quickly it was advancing, or whether his speech in fact seemed thicker than when they'd last sat face-to-face. It was entirely possible, he supposed. That had been well over a month ago, and the progression of ALS could be rapid even with experimental drug therapies. "Tell me how things went with the president of MetroBank."

Armitage looked at him. "Don't hold me to this, but I think I've convinced Halpern to accept your bid."

Caine felt a stir of excitement. "Are you serious?"

"What's important is that he seemed to be," Armitage said. "Of course, he's going to need his board of directors to rubber-stamp the sale, so it might be prudent to hold off celebrating until after he meets with them next week."

Caine ignored the caveat. His face was suddenly hot. "Their stock comes to, what, nine percent of UpLink?"

"Closer to ten, actually," Armitage said.

Caine made a fist and jabbed it stiffly in the air.

"Son of a bitch, this is fantastic," he said. "Fantastic."

They were quiet. Reynold's crippled right hand twitched a little as a dying nerve cell in his brain misfired, his padded wrist brace rapping the armrest of his chair. Caine looked away. Nine percent, he thought. Added to the stock purchase already in the works, it would give him a hugely dominant share of UpLink. He'd have what he wanted, and so would the goddamned Chink who had him by the balls.

Several minutes passed before Armitage broke the silence.

"I hesitate to do this," he said, "but there's something I'd like to ask you on another subject."

Caine shrugged absently. "Sure, go ahead."

"It concerns the problem in Singapore… that Blackburn fellow who was poking around over there."

"Forget it," Caine said. "It's finished."

Armitage cocked an eyebrow.

"How was it taken care of?" he asked.

Caine shook his head like a dog shaking water off its fur. The subject troubled him and he didn't like it impinging on his thoughts. What was it with Armitage's seeming compulsion to make him uneasy?

"I neither know nor have any interest in knowing," he said.

"Has anyone conclusively determined why the man was spying on you?" Armitage persisted.

"I told you, I stick to running my business. It isn't my direct concern."

"Not yet, anyway," Armitage said flatly.

Caine shot him a glance. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"Don't be irritated," Armitage said. "I'm only pointing out that you'd do well to stay on top of even the more disagreeable aspects of your endeavors. If my health problems have taught me anything, it's that control can slip away in a blink."

Caine set his glass down on the table beside his chair.

"Well, thank you for the advice," he said, and rose to his feet. "I'll put it under my belt."

The thin, vaguely scornful grin had returned to Armitage's face.

"Leaving already?" he asked.

Caine nodded.

"I have a flight home to catch tonight," he said. "As you suggest, I need to keep a close eye on things, which includes making sure the Left Coast hasn't fallen into the Pacific while I've been away."

Armitage regarded him steadily, "Marcus, my friend," he said. "You're finally learning."

"This is all a bad dream," Ed Burke said. "Right?"

"I wish," Charles Kirby said.

It was the bottom of the eighth in the Stealers-Slammers contest with the Slammers leading 6–0, the Stealers at bat, one man languishing on second, and the third up, Dale Lanning of the law firm of Lanning, Thomas, and Farley, a strike away from going down to obliteration.

Huddled with his teammates in the dirt patch behind home plate, Kirby watched the Slammers' outfielders move in so close they could see the flop sweat glistening above Lanning's upper lip. While no one would have challenged his reputation for getting legal adversaries to back away from his clients, his display of batting skills had prompted a very different reaction on the diamond.

"Maybe he'll pull it out under pressure," Burke said.

"I'm not optimistic."

Kirby snatched at a cluster of dandelion pods floating past him in the diffuse early autumn light. There had been a time when you wouldn't have seen dandelions in the city any later than mid-August, he thought. But over the past decade New York summers had gotten longer and warmer, so that fall seemed more a calender event than a true seasonal shift. The previous year, in fact, the trees had remained in lush foliage until a January freeze finally snapped the deep-green leaves off the branches. They had hit the sidewalk and scattered like bits of glazed ceramic.

Deciding he'd postoned the inevitable long enough, Kirby turned to Burke and gave him a confidential little nod, motioning him aside from the rest of the team.

"Ed," he said, "I need to ask a favor."

"Let me guess," Burke said. "You want me to kill our batting ace before he causes us further humiliation."

Kirby opened his hand and released the dandelion seeds into the air.

"Actually, I'd like you to tell me who's behind the raid on UpLink," he said. "I'm talking about the person moving the chess pieces."

Burke looked at him. "What makes you think I've got that information?"

Kirby just shrugged. Burke pushed some dirt around with the toe of his sneaker. At the plate Lanning let a low pitch go by, and adjusted his grip on the bat.

"I give it to you, I'm putting in a great big whopping chit," Burke said.

Kirby nodded. And waited.

"There's a firm called Safetech in Dan vers, Massachusetts, that designs and manufactures polymer glass replacement products," Burke said. "Security panels, hurricane-resistant windows, antiballistic laminates, and so on. Its clients range from real-estators to department-store chains to the State Department and DEA. Safetech is the corporate entity making the acquisition… through various offshoots."

"The person," Kirby said. "I want to know the person."

"I was just getting to that," Burke said. He looked down at his foot, still scuffing out tracks in the dirt. "Safe-tech's front men are a pair of MIT grads who were rich with technical know-how and nothing else. When they came up with their business concept, they took it to someone who offered them an interest-free startup loan in exchange for a silent partnership in the operation. A fifty-one percent share."

"Not an unusual deal if you need to raise finance capital," Kirby said. "Nor is it the worst."

Burke shrugged. "What counts is the two underfunded brainstormers found the lending terms acceptable."

"And the identity of the generous third party is…?"

Burke looked at him again.

"Marcus 'Moneybags' Caine," he said. "Your boy Gordian's number-one detractor."

Kirby took a deep breath, released it, and gazed out at the plate in time to see Dale Lanning swing his bat a mile high of the ball.

Burke bent to pick their gloves up of the ground, and handed one to Kirby.

"That's allll, folks," he said, frowning. "Time for us to let the prosecutors score more points. I'm telling you, this has got to be a goddamn nightmare."

Kirby appeared to be looking out across the field at something Burke couldn't see.

"It is," he said, slipping on his glove. "It very definitely is."