Timothy's Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

horny,” she says.
    “So what else is new?” he says.
    Timothy Cone is a scrawny, hawkish man who’s never learned to shave close enough. Samantha Whatley is a tall drink of water with the lean body of a fashion model and the muscles of a woman at home on a balance beam. He is taller, but stooped, with a shambling gait. She is sharp-featured: coffin jaw and blue-green eyes. His spiky hair is gingery; her long auburn hair is usually worn up, tightly coiled. His nose is a hatchet, and his big ears flop. Her back is hard and elegant. His skin is pale, freckled. She is dark, with a ropy body that holds secret curves and warm shadows. He is all splinters, with the look of a worn farmer: pulled tendons, used muscles.
    They have nothing in common except …
    Naked on the floor mattress they have another skirmish. Not combat so much as guerrilla warfare with no winners and no losers. They will not surrender, either of them, but assault each other with whimpers and yelps, awaiting the end of the world. They think capitulation shameful, and their passion is fed by their pride.
    They recognize something of this. Their relationship is sexual chess that must inevitably end in a draw. Still, the sweat and grunts are pleasure enough for two closed-in people who would rather slit their wrists than admit their vulnerability.
    Shortly after midnight, he conducts her downstairs and stops an empty cab.
    “Take care,” she says lightly.
    “Yeah,” Cone says. “You, too.”
    Then he goes back up to his desolate loft, eats both strawberry tarts, drinks a jar of vodka, and wonders what the hell it’s all about.
    The offices of Pistol & Burns, Investment Bankers, on Wall Street, look like a genteel but slightly frowsty gentlemen’s club. The paneled walls display antique hunting prints in brass frames. The carpeting seems ankle-deep. Employees tiptoe rather than walk, and speak in hushed whispers. Even the ring of telephones is muted to a polite buzz. The atmosphere bespeaks old wealth, and Timothy Cone is impressed—not for the first time—by the comfortable serenity that avarice can create.
    He is kept waiting only ten minutes, which he endures stoically, and then is ushered into the private office of G. Fergus Twiggs, P&B’s Chief of Internal Security. This chamber, as large as Cone’s loft, is more of the same. But on the floor is an enormous, worn Persian prayer rug, and on the beige walls are oak-framed watercolors of sailing yachts, most with spinnakers set.
    G. Fergus Twiggs is a veritable toby jug of a man: short, squat, plump, with a smile and manner so beneficent that the Wall Street dick can see him with a pewter tankard of ale in one fist and a clay pipe in the other.
    He is clad in a three-piece, dove gray flannel suit of such surpassing softness that it could have been woven from the webs of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant spiders. But the pale blue eyes are not soft, nor do they twinkle. They are the unblinking, basilisk eyes of an investment banker.
    “Thank you for coming by,” Twiggs says genially, shaking hands. He gets Cone seated in a leather chair alongside his mastodonic desk. “I needn’t tell you how upsetting this entire matter has become; the whole house is disturbed.”
    “Look, Mr. Twiggs,” Cone says, “there’s not much I can do about the Wee Tot Fashions deal. The cat is out of the bag on that one. You’ll just have to take your lumps.”
    “I realize that. The problem is how to prevent it from happening again.”
    “You can’t,” Timothy says. “Unless you figure a way to repeal human greed—and I doubt if you can do that. Listen, how do you define insider trading?”
    “Define it?” Twiggs says, looking at him curiously. “Why, it’s the illegal use of confidential information about planned or impending financial activities for the purpose of making a personal profit.”
    “Yeah, well, that sounds very neat, but it’s not that simple. Insider trading has never been exactly defined,