Montaro Caine Read Online Free PDF

good on his promise to Larry to meet his firm’s clients, he became aware of signs that suggested his behavior was beginning to resemble that of a man under siege. He was drinking more; he was sleeping less. His troubles were enormous—why hadn’t he seen them coming?
There must have been a sign
, he thought. What had happened to his gut feelings? Hadn’t he always been able to detect even the subtlest of shifts in an opponent’s position?
    “People don’t always mean what they want you to think they mean,” his grandfather, still living in retirement in Carmel, California, and fast approaching the age of 100, had told him when he was just a boy. “So you have to listen for something else.”
    “What, Grandpa?” the then six-year-old had asked, looking up at his protector and teacher. Philip L. Caine had brushed away his grandson’s tears as the child cuddled in his arms, wounded by a playmate’s unkept promise to exchange toys.
    Montaro would never forget his grandfather’s answer to that simple question. It would have a profound effect on his life from that moment on:
    “If you listen hard enough, your ears will begin to see things. And one day you will be able to listen to someone and see their real meaning hidden underneath their words. And sometimes you will even find those meanings sitting right on top of their words, as bold as ever, because a lot of people won’t know that your ears can see the truth.”
    Yes, there had been signs, Caine could now admit to himself, toomany for a good ear to miss. Had his instincts shut down suddenly? His grandfather had taught him to search for the meanings that could be lurking underneath his own thoughts. Searching, he realized that he himself was the real object of his anger and not Carlos Wallace, Alan Rothman, or anyone else at Fitzer.
    Unprepared. Damn it. I was unprepared
, Montaro thought. Though he was alone in his office, his body stood tense and coiled as if in readiness for the next assault. So lost was he in his thoughts, Montaro didn’t notice when the summer sun unexpectedly blasted through the stubborn layer of clouds that had been hanging ominously over the city, sending floods of light crashing, splashing, and ricocheting everywhere at once through the canyons of Manhattan. Nor did he notice that the long, greenish-gray tinted window that ran the length of his well-appointed forty-first-floor office suddenly glowed with a golden haze that brightened the room.
    “Mr. Caine, should I be with you at your eleven a.m. appointment?”
    Caine spun away from the window to find his assistant, Jeffrey Mason, standing in front of his desk. Jeffrey, a slight, red-haired man in his midforties, had entered Caine’s office through an interconnecting door from his own adjacent office. Jeffrey had waited several seconds before speaking. Usually, Caine would have felt his presence. This time he hadn’t; his instincts were still eluding him.
    “Oh, Jeffrey,” Caine mumbled.
    “It’s 10:56. They should be here any minute,” Jeffrey reminded his boss.
    “Who should be here any minute?”
    “Colette Beekman and Herman Freich. Do you want me to be here with you?”
    As Jeffrey Mason stood before him, Caine fidgeted with objects on his desk; he twisted paper clips a fraction this way, a quarter of an inch that way, and absentmindedly rubbed a small, smooth, sculpted object that resembled a woman’s compact, an object whose significance Montaro had long since forgotten.
    Jeffrey stood quietly, waiting. He had observed Caine’s nervous rituals over many years and knew that whenever his boss fiddled withobjects on his desk, the man was shifting gears. Sometimes he was shifting up, from casual preoccupation with run-of-the-mill concerns to more critical matters: sometimes down, from a honed, focused concentration. There was much that Jeffrey admired about his boss, but nothing as much as his reflexes in crucial situations.
    “No, I won’t need you here. I’ll