Black Market

Caitlin Dillon was looking from the window at the theatrical cloud display and talking about how soon they'd be back in New York-and what Arch Carroll wondered was whether he'd really kissed this woman. Or if it had been nothing more than a passing hallucination.

Manhattan

When Carroll returned to 13 Wall Street, all that remained was for him to clear out his desk and leave the world of pointless stakeouts and twenty-hour workdays. It was easy and mostly painless, he thought. Something he probably should have done a long time ago. He'd had enough cops and robbers for one lifetime.

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Walter Trentkamp came in. The FBI man walked slowly across the room. He leaned against the cluttered desk and sighed loudly.

“I'd quit, too, if I had an office like this.” Trentkamp frowned. He stared around the room. “I mean, I've seen bleak before.”

“What can I do for you, Walter?”

“You can reconsider the decision you made in Washington.”

“Did somebody send you up here? Did they tell you to go talk some sense into Carroll?”

Trentkamp pursed his lips. He shook his head. “What'll you do now?”

“Law,” Carroll lied. It was something to say.

“You're too old already. Law's a young man's game.”

Carroll sighed. “Quit, Walter. Quit it right now.”

Trentkamp continued to frown. “Nobody knows terrorists the way you do. If you leave, lives will be lost. And you know it. So what if your goddamn pride is a little wounded right now?”

Carroll sat down hard behind his desk. He hated Walter Trentkamp just then. He hated the idea that another person could see through him so easily. Walter was so goddamn smart. There was an impressive superiority that peeked through his policeman's facade every now and then. “You're a manipulative son of a bitch.”

“Do you think I got where I am without some small understanding of human foibles?” Trentkamp asked. He held out his hand. “You're a cop. It's in your blood. Every day you remind me a little more of your father. He was a stubborn bastard, too.”

Carroll hesitated. With his own hand in midair, he hesitated. He could choose-right now he had a choice.

He shrugged and shook Trentkamp's hand.

“Welcome back on board, Archer.”

On board what? Carroll wondered. “One thing I want you to know. When Green Band is settled, I quit.”

“Sure,” Trentkamp said. “That's understood. Just keep in touch until Green Band is settled.”

“I want to be a free man, Walter.”

“Don't we all?” Walter Trentkamp asked, and finally smiled. “You're so fucking cute when you pout.”

16

Manhattan

On the second floor of 13 Wall, meanwhile, Caitlin Dillon sat in dark silhouette on a high wooden stool. Most of the overhead lights in the room known as the crisis room had been dimmed. She listened to the soothing electronic whirr of half a dozen IBM and Hewlett-Packard computers, complex machines she was entirely comfortable around.

It had been Caitlin's original idea to collect and evaluate all the available newspaper information and police intelligence flowing in over the word processor consoles. The news arrived in sudden, urgent bursts, streams of tiny green letters that came from both the financial sectors and the police agencies all around the world. As she sat there, her eyes hurting from the glare of the screens, she pondered two things.

One was the scary and real possibility of a total international financial collapse.

The other was the intricate and almost hopeless puzzle of her own private life.

Caitlin was aware that she had lived her thirty-four years subject to two strong and contrary urges, two radically different pulls on her energies and emotions. Part of her wanted to be a traditional woman: feminine, desirable, the kind of woman who loved to dress in expensive things from Saks, or Bergdorf Goodman, or Chloe and Chanel in Paris.

The other separate and equal part was independent, highly competitive, and ambitious, possessed of an unusually fierce will.

Many years before, Caitlin's father, who was a deeply principled and intelligent investment banker in the Midwest, had tried to stand up to the large Wall Street clique of firms. He had lost his battle, lost an unfair fight, and been thrown into bankruptcy. Year after year Caitlin had listened as he'd lectured bitterly against the injustice, the unfairness, and sometimes the utter stupidity built into the American financial system. In the same way that some children grow up wanting to be crusading lawyers, Caitlin had decided that she wanted to help reform the financial system. She had finally come east as a kind of avenging angel. She was fascinated and repelled by the self-contained world of big business and by Wall Street in particular. In her heart of hearts Caitlin wanted the financial system to work properly, and she was fierce, almost obsessed with the application of her moral position as the SEC enforcer…

It was likewise the independent, nontraditional part of Caitlin that enjoyed other mild eccentricities-like wandering the streets of New York in tight-fitting Italian jeans, crumpled oversize T-shirts, leather boots that came almost to her butt.

She might happily devote a particular Sunday afternoon to some exotic Italian recipe from Marcella Hazan-but she could easily go weeks abhorring the idea of doing any cooking at all, avoiding all housework in her East Side apartment. She was proud of earning almost six figures a year at the SEC, but sometimes she wanted desperately to throw it all over and have a baby. Sometimes she was afraid she might never have a child. She ached with the idea the way one ached from a real loss. And she had no idea, absolutely none, whether these opposing impulses could ever peacefully coexist.

She had been thinking along these lines ever since that surprising kiss on the Washington – New York plane. It had been quick, casual, yet she had the instinctive feeling she wanted to go beyond that first kiss with Archer Carroll. But where?

What was she thinking of, anyhow?

She hardly knew Carroll. His kiss had been the kiss of a stranger. She wasn't even sure if it had meant anything to him or whether it had been something thrown up by the peculiar circumstances of the flight, his way of relieving tension, and disappointment, and more than a little justified anger.

I don't really know the first thing about him, she thought.

A shuffling noise made her turn, and she saw Carroll in the doorway. She was embarrassed, as if she suspected he'd been standing there, reading her thoughts.

He had his arm in a fresh white sling, and he looked pale. She smiled. She'd already heard about the success of Walter Trentkamp's personal appeal, and she was relieved-decisions made under duress were almost always the wrong ones, she knew. Carroll's impetuousness was part of his charm. But one day, she thought, one day he might run into the kind of serious trouble from which there was no escape.

“I had Michel Chevron all ready to talk about the European black market,” he said.

“Don't keep blaming yourself.”

“Somebody knows all of our moves. Christ, who knows what Michel Chevron could have told me?” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. She was reminded of a restless, agile prizefighter warming up.

“How's the arm? Hurt?”

“Only when I think about Paris.”

“Then don't think.” She slid off the wooden stool. She wanted to go across the room and somehow ease his discomfort, his embarrassment. “I'm glad…”

“Glad?”

She stared at him. Carroll had a vulnerable quality that inspired her to strange sympathies and concerns, but also to anxieties she couldn't quite articulate. He had a lost-boy quality; maybe that was it.