Free Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover by Mike Cooper Page B

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