Black Market by James Patterson Page A

the podium. Her hair, a sleek chestnut-brown color, was bobbed at the shoulders. Long legs, slender waist. Tall-maybe five feet eight. She looked, if anything, even more intriguing than she'd seemed that first night in Washington.
    She was staring down at him. Her brown eyes were very calm, measuring everything they saw. Yes, she was staring directly down at Carroll himself.
    “Are you expecting trouble during my briefing, Mr. Carroll?” Her eyes had fastened onto his Browning, his beat-up leather shoulder holster. He was suddenly embarrassed by her question and the way his name had sounded through her microphone. Those pale red lips seemed to be lightly mocking him.
    Carroll didn't know what to say. He shrugged and tried to sink a little deeper onto his seat. Why didn't he have one of his usual wisecracks to throw back at her?
    Caitlin Dillon smoothly switched her attention back to the audience of senior police officers and heavy-duty Wall Street businessmen. Without missing a beat, she resumed her briefing at exactly the point where she had interrupted herself.
    “In the past decade,” she said, and her next chart efficiently appeared on the screen at her back, “foreign investment in the United States has skyrocketed. Billions of francs, yen, pesos, and deutsche marks have flowed into our economy to the sum of eighty-five billion dollars. The Midland Bank of England, for instance, took full control of the Crocker National Bank of California. Nippon Kokan purchased half the National Steel Corporation. The list goes on and on.
    “At this rate, I'm sorry to say, the Japanese, the Arabs, and the Germans will very soon control our financial destiny.”
    As she recited exhaustive facts and numbers that defined the present situation in the financial community, Carroll listened attentively. He also watched attentively. Nothing could have drawn his eyes away from her, short of a second Wall Street bombing raid.
    There was a disarming twinkle in her eyes, an unexpected hint of sweetness in her smile. Was it really sweetness, though? Coyness? How could she hold down the job she had if she was shy and retiring and sweet? “Sweet” was not in the Wall Street lexicon.
    She was chic-even in a conservative, salt-and-pepper tweed business suit. She looked stylish and somehow just right.
    Most of all, though, she looked untouchable.
    That was the single word, the most precise idea floating through Carroll's head, that seemed to sum up Caitlin Dillon best.
    Untouchable.
    In Carroll's experience, neither he nor anybody he knew ever actually got to meet the spectacular-looking women you all too frequently saw in midtown New York, in Washington, in Paris. Who the hell
did
get to know them?… Was there a matching species of untouchable men whom Carroll never bothered to notice?… What sort of man woke up with this Caitlin Dillon woman next to him? Some superwealthy Wall Street lion? One of those buccaneers of the stock arbitrage game? Yes, he'd bet anything that was the case.
    His attention drifted back to her speech, which was a succinct description of the Green Band emergency, of the current state of Wall Street's insufficient computer records, and of the stoppage of all international transfers of funds. She had some sobering and scary material up there on the podium.
    “Surprisingly, there's still been no further contact by the terrorist group, whatever kind of group they are. As you may know, no actual demands were made. No ultimatums. Absolutely no reason has been given so far for what happened on Friday.
    “There'll be another meeting after this, for my people and for the analysts. We have to get something going with the computers before the market opens on Monday. If not… I would expect major unpleasantness.”
    The meeting room became still. The scraping of feet, all paper shuffling, stopped.
    “Are we talking about a stock market panic? Some kind of crash? What sort of major unpleasantness?” someone called out.
    Caitlin