Breakthrough by Jonathan Stone

Author:Jonathan Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

33

The baby is asleep.

Julian stares at the screen.

Her ignorance would be laughable, if it weren’t for the corpses of Nathan Cartmann and Laura Hodges.

But she is dealing with her own ignorance and ineptitude the same way she has dealt with everything else in her self-contained, self-sufficient life.

She is attacking it.

While Amy sleeps—still most hours of the day—she is no longer wandering the apartment aimlessly. She is surfing, digging in, learning. Doing on-line training for stockbrokers and accounting, taking the self-tests. She is taking a crash course; she is a graduate student locked away with an infant and a computer and the financial texts from her frequent trips to the local library within comfortable strolling distance from the apartment, and little else. And she is learning a lot.

The first significant lesson she has learned, amid the myriad deals and the filings: money is always available. There are puddles, pools, streams and rivers and oceans of cash, undiscovered basins and reservoirs held high in the mountains. This is a difficult lesson for people like her, she knows. People who spend their lives steeped in the perception and experience that there isn’t enough of it. That it’s hard to get your hands on it. It takes a perceptual shift to realize that actually, the opposite is true: there is money all over. It is like a huge beast on a leash, sleeping, lethargic, curled in the sun, breathing its steady, predictable, low-interest-rate breath, but ready at a moment’s notice to rise on all fours, to wag its tail eagerly and begin barking out its power and essence. Give it a reason. That’s all it asks. Give it something to do. Give it something to chase, and it is up and running, flying happily across the field. It’s working, it’s in the hunt, and that’s really all it wanted.

But it’s not just financial education she’s finding. She’s getting a little more understanding of who Laura Hodges was. Stroking, treading, in these pools of capital. In the high, hidden lakes and deep streams of financial Eden. Laura’s beautiful schooled stroke in these waters, perhaps belying her quick labored breathing, her struggle to stay afloat.

Because Laura Hodges was a woman in a man’s world, as much as Julian Palmer has been. Homicide investigation; high finance. Men’s arenas, male bastions, where women are still the interlopers. An attractive woman, swimming those lakes and streams with the extra curves, the extra baggage of her femininity. Not knowing her at all, Julian feels an identification with her. In only a fleeting sense of her from a few sketchy biographical facts, from a few deals done, from a few blinks and phrases on a screen across a vast digital universe, Julian feels sisterhood.

She is attacking it. Focusing on the problem. Trying to lose herself in her research. In her computer screen. Trying not to let her thoughts drift to anything else.

* * *

Tom rides the train, staring out the windows, thinking about the feel of the slender hand in his, the feel of that body against his.

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