Skinner Read Online Free PDF

not.
    “She’s what you have to offer us, Terrence.”
    He looks down from the ceiling.
    “You got her to leave Disaster City and go to Haiti. Either you can get her to go into the field for me or you cannot.”
    Terrence thinks about Haiti. The Pelican Case full of cash. How heavy it was.
    “There were lives to save in Haiti.”
    Cross allows this.
    “Are there not lives to be saved now?”
    Terrence knows there are. A vast number of lives that may be saved.
    Do they know?
    Still holding the top page of the contract Cross has offered him, he folds it over once, a letter fold, and uses his thumb to sharpen the crease.
    “If I can convince her. Security will be an issue.”
    Eyes shooting to Haven and back to the paper.
    “As I said. She won’t work with him. Obviously.”
    Cross shakes his head.
    “Haven has an asset already.”
    Terrence doesn’t look at Haven.
    “You have an asset.”
    Haven lifts a finger.
    “I have someone else for Jae.”
    Terrence folds the paper over again.
    “Rosalind?”
    Cross shakes his head.
    “We don’t like her for this. Too eccentric. Jae should travel with a stabilizing influence.”
    Haven lifts three fingers.
    “I have a team.”
    Terrence sharpens the second crease.
    “ Team .”
    “Sloan. The new guy. Everybody wants to work with him. And two others. She’ll be bracketed. Highest-value asset. Sloan and his team, they’re very good.”
    Terrence looks at Cross.
    “Jae won’t want anyone from Kestrel.”
    Cross looks at the clocks over the door.
    “You have someone new, Terrence? Looking to package this job? Take a commission on the asset and her protection?”
    Terrence looks at the paper in his hands. It betrays no tremor, no sign of what is in his heart. It’s not too late to stop, he tells himself. But it is too late. And he wouldn’t stop even if he could.
    The abyss is at his feet. He steps into it with a word.
    “Skinner.”
    The atmosphere in the room changes with the speaking of the name. One’s ears might pop.
    The five clocks tick.
    Cross touches a button on his keyboard, and Terrence knows that however many devices may have been recording their conversation to this point, they have all gone dead.
    Cross looks at the surface of his black desk, magic mirror of an equally dark future.
    “ Skinner is gone . You said. Never to return. You said.”
    He looks up from the black desk.
    “Was that not the truth?”
    “I never said dead .”
    For the first time since the conference began, Cross rises, fingertips pressing down bone-white on the black desktop.
    “If he’d been dead that would have been the ideal outcome, wouldn’t it have been? The list of people unsatisfied with that result would have been brief indeed. Fuck. Terrence. If he were dead, you might still own this company.”
    Terrence smiles.
    “I doubt that very much.”
    Cross appears to notice for the first time that he is standing. He lifts his hands from the desk, blood returning, pinking the skin.
    “It’s an absurd notion. A nonstarter. No.”
    Terrence looks at the carpet between his toes, nodding.
    “Like I said, I’ll likely never have another chance to twist your balls. So. No Skinner, no Jae.”
    Cross looks at the bank of clock faces.
    “He’s not viable.”
    Terrence looks at the clocks, watches a few seconds of Cross’s time whirl away.
    “Jae can give someone the inside track on the West-Tebrum attackers. Once word gets out that you have her, she’ll be targeted. I won’t run her out there in the open without the best protection. So she gets Skinner. Or you can’t have her.”
    Cross taps his teeth with his thumbnail, realizes what he’s doing, stops.
    “So strident, Terrence. So urgent.”
    He’s looking at the clocks again.
    “I would be concerned about his focus on the present.”
    Terrence is still holding the folded page of his contract. He opens it, glances inside, closes it.
    “If he’d wanted to do something about Montmartre, he would have done it a long