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.'
Chapter Eleven
Although it was only a little past eight in the morning, Zhiu Sheng had noticed a dramatic reduction of trade at the floating market as the motor canoe brought him to where the waterway narrowed and the wooden stilt houses of impoverished locals came crowding up on either bank. Most of the peddlers and buyers had appeared at daybreak, preferring to get their business out of the way before the heat and humidity became too oppressive — the former with their goods displayed on the decks of small boats or log rafts, the latter poling along in shallow dugouts, or arriving via klotoks like the one he had hired, forming long lines of slow-moving watercraft in the canals twisting through outer Banjarmasin like the tentacles of some languorous octopus.
Zhiu saw small boats loaded with bananas, star fruits, lichees, melons, and salaks; with green vegetables; with fish, eel, cray, and frog; with selections of precooked foods. Conspicuously, he did not see a single vender selling chicken meat, once the largest source of animal protein for Indonesia's citizens, now an imported delicacy served mainly to foreigners in Jakarta's expensive restaurants. Rising feed prices coupled with the devaluation of the rupiah had devastated the poultry industry when the so-called 'Asian miracle' lost its glow, resulting in most of the native breeding stock being liquidated. The American chicken farmers had moved in to exploit the livestock shortage and essentially captured the market… their success ironically assured by the greed of Chinese and Malaysian feed producers, who had refused to lower their prices or extend credit to the Indonesians.
