House Odds Read Online Free PDF

of a battery, you’re probably thinking of the twelve volt battery you got in your car. Well, a submarine battery contains over a hundred cells all wired together and each cell weighs over a thousand pounds, and the battery takes up a big compartment in the sub. And on any boat, size and weight are at a premium and if you can reduce the size of the battery you can cram more stuff into the sub: weapons, slick gadgets, whatever. So the Navy is willing to pay a shitload to gain the extra space.”
    “I get it,” DeMarco said.
    Sawyer bent over and straightened a little flag that was next to one of the headstones, and DeMarco noticed the name on the grave was Murphy, his mother’s maiden name. He doubted he was related to the guy, who’d died during the Korean War, but he found the coincidence spooky.
    “And the batteries are just the latest thing that Reston’s done,” Sawyer said. “Reston Tech was started by a genius named Byron Reston. He was an inventor, kind of a latter-day Thomas Edison, and he’s got about a thousand patents on stuff he designed. What he’d do is find some manufacturing company that needed a major improvement in whatever they were making, and he’d come up with the improvement and then he’d partner with the company and share in the profits. The guy was a wizard. He’s dead now but the company is run by his son and they still do what Byron Reston used to do but on a larger scale, and they hire the best eggheads they can find.
    “Anyway, twenty years ago Reston Tech partnered with a company that made some kind of gizmo for water treatment systems. This was huge because every big city in the country has a water treatment plant and whatever this gizmo was, a filter or some fuckin’ thing, was going to make the process a whole lot cheaper, and the company that came up with it a whole lot richer. Well, two months before the company goes public with this new product, an investor buys a million bucks’ worth of their stock, when the stock’s at an all time low. In fact, it looked like the company was going bankrupt and nobody was buying their stock. Anyway, when the company announced they had a product they could sell to every water district in the country, the stock shot through the roof and the investor made almost five million bucks—and the whole thing just smacked of insider trading. I mean, why would a guy buy so much stock in this failing company unless he knew they were on the edge of a major breakthrough? But in the end, we could never prove anyone was guilty of insider trading and the investor walked away with his five million.”
    Sawyer stopped and straightened another little flag at another grave, and DeMarco wondered if he had some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
    “Six years go by, and this time Reston is working with a company that makes body armor and they come up with a compound that would make the armor lighter but with just as much stopping power as the armor being used at the time. But, just like with the water treatment gizmo, three months before the armor company goes public with a product they can sell to the Pentagon by the boatload, somebody buys a ton of stock, the stock price skyrockets, and the investor makes almost twelve million. But this time we can’t even figure out who the investor is.”
    “What do you mean you couldn’t figure out who it was?”
    “Just what I said. Whoever did this set up a dummy investment company composed of half a dozen people who didn’t exist. The company filed all the right papers with all the right agencies and the people in the company all had Social Security numbers and tax IDs and everything else. On paper, everything looked legit—except the people didn’t exist.”
    “You couldn’t follow the money trail?”
    “Sure, we could follow it. We followed it from one offshore bank to another to another until it finally disappeared into thin air. Remember, this was fourteen years ago, DeMarco, and it may surprise you