Breakthrough: A Thriller

By Jonathan Stone

Detective Julian Palmer is taking a break from homicide-or so she thinks. Signing on to assist in a simple insurance investigation, she soon finds herself enmeshed in something far more elaborate. It's a bizarre case, one that leads her from a dead investment banker with a mysterious briefcase, to a renegade inventor in the New Mexico desert, and ultimately, to the investing frenzy of Wall Street in the late 1990's. It also leads her to an unexpected romance with Tom Hartley-a man as lonely as Julian, and as passionate about uncovering the truth.
Welcome to the twists, turns and switchbacks that are Jonathan Stone's trademark. A world of puzzles and mirrors, where the possibilities move as fast as the characters. Where the trail goes from cold to warm to searing hot. And where a beautiful young banker seems to wield more power dead than alive.

In Jonathan Stone's Breakthrough, the collars may be white, but the blood still runs red.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466855601

Jonathan Stone

Jonathan Stone, author of the Julian Palmer novels, is a graduate of Yale University, where he was a Scholar of the House in Fiction Writing and twice won the English Department's John Hubbard Curtis Prize for Best Imaginative Writing. He works in advertising and lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.

Book preview

1

Tom Hartley awoke to find himself being touched by a beautiful woman he’d never seen before.

In any litany of life’s surprises, this one would rate extremely highly. But as so often occurred in the forty years of Tom Hartley’s life, circumstance conspired to render the reality far short of the hope.

Because the parts that were touching were their knees.

Which might still have held promise: the knee, after all, can have its own erogenous qualities, leading as it does auspiciously up the thigh. At the moment, however, Tom’s knee was cloaked in mail-order khaki. And the young woman’s knee was sheathed in a layer of prim white pantyhose, and further protected by a corporate mufti blue skirt descending appropriately below it. And while Tom held every conviction that the knee and the thigh beyond it were as worthy of close study and unbridled esteem as the rest of her so startlingly seemed to be, the young woman’s knees and thighs were for now covered not only by the blue skirt, and beneath that—undoubtedly—the unseen extension of the white pantyhose, but additionally by a stout stack of manila folders and thick documents spread across them.

And—as a final layer of frustrating reality—though Tom’s and the spectacular young woman’s knees were touching, she was obviously entirely unaware of it, ensconced in the seat facing his, as the commuter train car bumped and squeaked, strained and struggled familiarly along.

Tom understood instantly what had happened. In the stifling train car air and heat, waiting to depart from Grand Central and for the train’s electric fans to begin circulating, he had fallen asleep. She had boarded later—no doubt at the last moment, her time at a premium—hurried and pressed and preoccupied, he imagined, with whatever she was working on so furiously now. She had taken the empty seat opposite him, probably one of the last remaining, in one of the less desirable rows where the seats face each other, and where commuters must therefore in some minimal fashion acknowledge one another. These were seats that other commuters conventionally avoided, but they were excellent for stretching out, which is why Tom—early as always—chose them. It was the only way he would ever have found himself in such proximity to someone like her. He certainly would never have the orchestrative skills to knowingly position himself so close.

Curves tucked neatly yet effortfully into the blue suit—like private items stuffed futilely into an overflowing top dresser drawer—she would have been unignorable anywhere in the same train car, much less in the seat across.

And in physical contact, no less.

He regarded their knees again. Still touching. His eyes again made the instinctive relentless travel up from them: ocular adventurers drawn on a journey over which there is no free will—as predetermined as Puritan destiny or Arab fate.

The feeling was foolish, he knew, but undeniable. He felt the electricity of that knee against his, the electricity of possibility, in which the simple fact of the connection itself, physically, bluntly, stirred the voltage.

There was of course the temptation to move his leg. Convention dictated that once one or the other of them became aware of the situation, one would gracefully, uncommenting, move one’s leg a polite few inches away, not giving it another thought.

But one of them was aware of it now. And he was giving it several other thoughts.

Suddenly the young woman glanced up. Looked blankly, unseeing, examining some figure or fact etched into the middle distance in front of her, then looked back down.

Momentary. Unconscious.

Without correcting or adjusting the knee.

How could anyone be so unaware, so unconnected to one’s body? Especially a body like that. That had certainly in its twenty-something extravagantly healthy years, been pursued, courted, romanced, and desired solely for itself, on dozens if not hundreds of occasions. Desired for that body alone, whatever might be contained in the accompanying mind.

Which, at the moment, seemed to be something considerable. Given her concentration to the exclusion of all else. The train bounced, predictably and relentlessly. But her pen’s leaving the paper seemed not to disconcert or interrupt her in the least. Her pen, in fact, stuttered across the paper exuberantly, ceaselessly, like a needle across an EEG, as if directly expressing the attached mind’s energy. No laptop, Tom noticed, like some of the other diligent commuters. Which gave him, oddly, the impression of something more important—something legal, maybe, or more rarified—above the common peck of the laptop, or maybe something not to be stored on a hard drive.

The train rocked from side to side, every head and body and elbow and leg swaying in comic echo, obedient reverberation, a moment later, but still, there was no awareness of the knees for her.

Her intense focus allowed him the privilege of a close, cool assessment. (Cool assessment a technique to contain, to defuse, such beauty): A polished genuine blonde, projecting health and breeding, both in dangerously high doses. A flawless complexion, its sheen, its innate glow, telegraphing a childhood spent outdoors. Smoothly muscled beneath the no-nonsense business suit, judging by her wrists and calves. With pointed nose and high cheeks, she had a slight severity of feature, a somewhat frightening, nearly mechanical perfection—but compensated, softened, by a puffy fullness of and around her lips and cheeks; an elegant little puddle of outdoor American freckles across her nose; and warm, swimming green eyes.

And despite the overall Nordic impression, not tall. Not tall enough to have entertained the model’s life that she otherwise apparently could have. Too compact for that. Compact enough, a body athletic and alert enough, to have no excuse for not knowing where her limbs were, he thought.

Her compactness, he projected as ambition. As energy. As being without the slow-moving, languid noblesse oblige of beautiful tall women. As having, in some sense, something to prove.

A no-nonsense beauty. An unfrivolous beauty. A beauty unreliant on props. One therefore to be trusted in the highest reaches of corporate life, where her beauty was beyond crude jokes, where it—and she—could simply be counted on. A beauty she was so comfortable with, she was free to do whatever she wanted. Free to do whatever it was she was doing now.

Her jewelry looked simple and expensive. A gold necklace of some personal meaning. A tasteful watch. No wedding band. No engagement ring.

He shifted in his seat slightly, carefully, not to jeopardize the physical connection.

Sitting serendipitously across from her, Tom Hartley began to notice—point by depressing point—how profoundly they were opposites. Opposites in every conceivable way that only began with male and female.

She was ineffably but unmistakably on her way up. He—and here he was armed with the facts—was unmistakably on the way down. By the details of her wardrobe, you could tell she had means. By the details of his, it was clear he had none. There was about her very being a sense of purpose. There was about his an aura of listlessness. Tom felt this was all amply evident to anyone remotely observant, without posing a single question or hearing a single spoken word. He could even accurately project, he was sure, that her outlook was optimistic, intensely forward-looking. Approaching her prime. Inhabiting it. While he was watching—morosely and broodingly, as always—his own prime slip away …

Opposites in life station. Opposites in temperament. Talk about strangers on a train.

It made the touching of their knees an all the more remarkable accident to him. Like opposites attracting. As if literally. Magnetically.

He knew himself well enough to recognize, it was only the fact of her beauty that made him attach meaning and energy and excitement to this. If this were a plain or ordinary woman whose knee he were touching, he would be simply civil. Or unconnected. Maybe even somewhat annoyed.

And still, she worked furiously, the papers, the folders, spread on her lap. Wholly absorbed. Pen stuttering across the page as if possessed.

He looked at the documents. Dense with text, and yet at several intervals in them, he could make out the same word printed in all capital letters, which he could read upside down from here: NEWCO.

And the way it was written there, stamped on the page, the thought moored firmly in him: NEWCO wasn’t the name of the company. It was filling in the name of the company. Some other company. Some company whose name should not yet be read in a document.

As his male instincts, his male self, had instantly awakened to the startling beauty opposite him, it was his mind’s turn now—quickly sharpening a degree further, into a new alertness.

He noticed her trenchcoat, carelessly folded, draped partly over the arm of her seat and partly over her briefcase, which stood upright and obediently alongside her in the train car aisle. Leather briefcase; tan trenchcoat: in these details, she was a corporate man—except for the fact of her roaring femininity.

And then he saw the ID tag on the briefcase.

He shifted his posture ever so slightly in his seat to read it. Framed in leather, lettered elegantly and simply, in a script suggesting a long and unruffled tradition that might or might not be the reality: Laura Hodges. Peale Investments.

No home or business addresses. Just name and firm. Dog tag of Downtown.

Investment bankers? Corporate lawyers? A small, private brokerage? Asset managers? Consultants? A blend of occupations and professions that overlapped in his mind, because their worlds, he knew, overlapped, and because he had little firm idea what each actually did.

The only thing clear was her working feverishly.

And when he glanced back at her work—as if fate itself were a fellow passenger, sitting alongside, somberly dressed yet chaotically inclined, as always—the stack of papers in her lap had reshuffled to reveal a letterhead: Cartmann Systems. Sober red, blockish, old-fashioned lettering.

Was it a carelessness on her part? In her hurry to leave the office, in her hurry to finish her portion of the deal, or in an arrogant cavalier recklessness of her youth or her beauty, had she neglected to take the necessary precautions? For he felt fairly sure, somehow, that NEWCO was simply the standard protective code word that kept preparatory documents from disclosing the name Cartmann. He felt somehow certain, sensed from someplace within him where complexities got sorted and reduced to the elemental, that Cartmann Systems and NEWCO were one and the same.

It was difficult from upside down to make out any more of the dense black documents.

But he saw a handwritten note. By the hint of the mostly covered-up red block letters at the top of the note—letters obscured, but the shade of red identical—he could assume it was a piece of Cartmann stationary. Upside down, it was unreadable as well. But an eccentric scrawl. A bold, arrogant scrawl that indicated the burden was on the reader to read it, not on the writer to make it legible. Suggesting—Tom’s mind whirring now—the hand of someone arrogantly high up the food chain.

He notices again the furious pace of her work.

He feels the pulse, the excitement rise in him.

Cartmann Systems.

His New York Times is curled against him like an affectionate pet. Still unread.

His trusty New York Times. His train companion of years.

He reaches carefully for it, not to disturb or ruffle his other train seat companion.

Unfolds it carefully, like a treasure map—the treasure map it may now suddenly be.

He makes a show of scanning the front-page headlines …

CLINTON BACKS ACCORD.

DOW CONTINUES RISE.

HARLEM ARRESTS ARE PROTESTED.

 … before opening the paper. Turning past the obits and the puzzle, his favorites, to the financial section.

He knows this is ridiculous. He knows it’s probably not listed here. The odds are overwhelming it’s a private company—too small, too unknown, too narrowly held, to be in the newspaper. There are only a few thousand companies listed and traded on the exchanges. There are tens of thousands more that are privately held, that on any given day are buying, selling, or merging with others that are privately held—to which Peale Investments might be providing professional services.

Nevertheless, he feels his heart pound. He tries to quell it, to bring calm and reason back as he proceeds.

He is only a printer. The son of printer. Manager of a small printing business that was already a dinosaur when he inherited it, a business dying slowly, with maximal pain and suffering, inch by inch, year by year. But he is an adult. He reads the newspaper on the train. He is not stupid.

He doesn’t even bother checking the NYSE listings. He scans the American Stock Exchange listings, before turning past the absurdity of those as well. He looks more closely at the NASDAQ. Cartmann. Cartmann. Nothing.

Well. So that’s that.

He begins adjusting the paper’s bottom hem to close it, still idly scanning …

There.

CART. Cartmann Systems.

A surge of adrenal alertness shoots through him as he focuses on the tiny numbers:

Year’s high 2¼. Low 1¹⁄8. Last 1¼. Thinly traded. Low priced.

He glances carefully over the paper’s edge at her. Still diligently working. He frames her beauty above the letters and numbers of fine print. Perfect border for this little corporate miss, this little corporate hit.

He begins to feel a surge of certainty, a gambler’s sense, a player’s rush …

Discreetly, behind the newspaper, he takes out his pen.

In the margin of the stock quote column, next to the NASDAQ listing, he jots her name: Laura Hodges. Peale Investments.

As if at the writing of her name, she glances up once more.

His heart skips. His breath catches a moment.

She looks blankly in front of her a moment—considering, counting, or computing something briefly—before looking back down to her work.

Laura Hodges, Peale Investments: He carefully, soundlessly, tears and trims around the four words, folds the slip of paper with one hand, and tucks it into his shirt pocket.

He shifts back in his seat, shuts his eyes. So not to risk their eyes meeting. To indicate, to pretend, no awareness of her at all.

The train rumbles out into the country, a steel snake slithering into the sunset, the dirty windows magnifying, as if savoring desperately day’s remaining light. And as if some unwritten but rigid rules have been relaxed, as if some silent generalized tension is now released, soon low, barely audible conversation has materialized around them. Golf scores. Sailboat races. Kids’ baseball leagues. A sunny, verdant, sumptuous world to which Tom feels no connection.

And then Hazelton is announced, the mop-haired train conductor drawing it out, long and ceremonial. The commuter express train’s first stop, the pristine hamlet closest to the city, the mere utterance of whose name summons up a bright swirling canvas of wealth—of acreous lawns like snug emerald harbors, protected by huge, grand trees, trimmed and shaped attentively. Hazelton, the first stop, arranged that way, he’d bet, by powerful passengers in the days when they could get away with that sort of thing—arranging the transportation and schedules of millions specifically for themselves. Hazelton, called out once more dutifully to wake the smugly dozing elite. Tony, inviolate Hazelton, the sweat of armies of immigrant workers preserving its topiary splendor and picture perfection.

At the conductor’s call of Hazelton, she glances up, gathers the papers and folders in to her schoolgirlishly, somehow—or is it, Tom reflects, like pulling the winnings, the pile of chips, off the table. She stuffs them into her briefcase with a manic efficiency, and then, only then—as she stands up, is about to dance her way between his knees and the seats to the aisle—glances at him, and smiles.

A smile that’s brief, practiced, smooth, inaccessible. Genuine and false. Wonderful and infuriating.

She seems unaware that there’d been the physical connection. In the aisle, she grabs her trenchcoat roughly and heads for the door. It gives him the chance to observe just two strides, but they speak considerably to him. Strong, athletic, constrained by the tailored suit, by the indoor life, but a life that’s her choice nonetheless.

The doors open, and in two more identical strides, the beautiful young Laura Hodges of Peale Investments exits into the fragrant evening, the sun jutting red over the trees, its severe angle burrowing and creasing into her face and clothes. No waiting, eager dessert-smeared children. No sleek corporate-twin husband. Maybe a glum, silent, occasional lover somewhere, servicing her mutely and efficiently, but not here greeting the train.

He watches her walk off the raised concrete platform in a herd with the other commuters. He imagines the suburban equivalent of riding off into the sunset: driving off into the woods in a spotless German sedan. Loner, desperado, modern corporate female version. The train doors shut; the train lurches onward.

Cartmann Systems. Cartmann Systems.

He tries to relax. He can’t let it go. The schoolboy itchiness, the buzzing in his head …

He slumped asleep in his seat on the evening train, rumpled and rueful as ever, and after a brief nap has awakened into—was literally touching—stunning possibility.

Sex and money. The great twin lusts. Conjoined, inextricable, beckoning.

He’s always believed that a beautiful woman would save him. Now it appears he may actually be right.

2

Tom Hartley sits at dinner in a house that hasn’t changed in forty years. The trees in the yard are immensely taller and fuller, wild and unrecognizable compared to the fragile saplings of his childhood. But inside the heavy red front door, time has stopped. The same objects, at the same angles on the same bowing shelves. The same couches and chairs, already tired-looking decades ago, fabrics now sheer, almost ghostly. A museum-like fidelity to an ordinary past. Nothing moved or replaced or different. Except his mother’s enormous television in the den. And, of course, his computer, in his little home office under the eaves on the third floor.

As he eats the modest dinner she’s made him—tuna casserole, peas, a small dry baked potato—his mother, having eaten much earlier, as is her custom, is rattling around in the old walk-in pantry.

Bam!

Something falls. A can.

Bam! Bam!

Another couple of cans.

The loud thuds shake Tom from his silent distraction. He smiles. What on earth are you doing in there?

In answer, more banging.

Mother, whatever it is, let me reach it for you.

I wanted to surprise you with a blueberry cake, comes the voice from inside the pantry. I thought I could reach that old cake mold of mine.

Tom shakes his head. Mother, please. Let me.

Vivian Hartley rolls out of the pantry in her gleaming wheelchair.

"I can’t do anything anymore," she complains, but breezily.

"You can’t do everything," counters Tom, more cheerful than he feels.

Devouring instead a store-bought dessert, a bowl of ice cream—fine with him, makes no difference, though he’d never say as much—he bears the narrow circles and curls of conversation. He is one of her few interactions, some days her only one with the outside world. (Tom Hartley, representative of the outside world—hah!) He marks the time, tries to graciously accept and freshly appreciate the dinner waiting as always for him at the kitchen table. Does his level best to suffer and tolerate and endure the love of the woman with whom he has spent the past forty years, and with whom he is now statistically likely to spend the rest.

And how was it today? Why does she even ask, he wonders, knowing the shrugging silent evasions, the mute avoidances, the mists of his answers. Why does she even bother?

Mouth full, his shrug says Fine.

Anything interesting?

An aimless spin of his dessert fork to indicate: Not really.

Andy came around about spraying the trees.

Tom raises an eyebrow, looks up at her.

I’d like to save them, of course, she says. But, well… Vivian pauses, looks into her lap. He left an estimate … it’s so much money.

He feels it as an accusation. He knows after all this time that it’s not, but he still feels it that way. What do you want me to say? he offers up finally. "It is a lot of money." Not needing to know the exact figure. Whatever it is, it is for them substantial.

I don’t want them to die, she says, as if she hasn’t heard him utter a word. Great old trees. She looks over her bifocals at him, suddenly portentous. Your father planted some of them. She dangles it, then backs off the tactic as if recognizing it is unfair.

So. Have them sprayed. Emotionless, long past exasperation at these tautologies. He is an empty vessel …

Maybe I should, she says slowly, vaguely weighing.

Maybe you should, he says snappily, pushing the thought brusquely at her.

I don’t know, she says, still vague, almost dreamy, disconnected. What do you think?

"What do I think? He feels his own evil little smile forming. I think you should do what you think you should do."

She looks at him, shakes her head. Past exasperation herself.

Their uneasy truce, their tepid alliance, is like the house’s third inhabitant. As well-worn and lived-in as any corner of the somber, brown-shingled Cape. This is still, Tom feels, his father’s house. Joseph Hartley’s was the soul alive in it, its fullest inhabitant, and Vivian and Tom, wife and son, occupy it only warily, carefully, politely, as warily and carefully and politely as they now circle one another. Funny, he can remember exactly this same wariness and politeness with one another from when he was ten. Thirty years later, it is unchanged. The same unbreakable pattern. Through the inane weave and suffocating weight of conversation, he will occasionally feel the impulse to scream out, to howl in protest, as he suspects she must, too. The problem being, what exactly would he—would either of them—say?

So he suffers their truce, inhabits it silently, until old Viv heads for the soporific evening lineup in front of the big television. To take her invigorating nightly bath in it, open her old pores to it, the stuttering, syncopated light of the wide world beyond. Letting Tom safely, uninterrupted, and with no discernible change of routine, head for his own screen.

*   *   *

Midnight, under the third-floor eaves. The computer monitor blinks and winks in the snug, dimly lit room. Papers, books, scattered. A coffee mug. A candy wrapper. Vivian Hartley in her wheelchair can’t get up here to clean. It’s Tom’s little hideaway. An attic room that has caught the clutter of decades. The clutter of a lifetime.

The modem is on the floor. The monitor is one color, the CPU another. An extra keyboard leans against the desk. Cords are spliced. It all has the unmistakable look and feel of the computer hobbyist. Though the reality is that it’s cobbled together to save money: a short step up from computer scrap.

Keystroke. Keystroke.

Tom dials the phone from the keyboard.

Click. Click. Pause. Click.

He’s on-line. He feels, ironically and as always, both a sense of home and a sense of motion. Of freedom and liberation, yet of belonging, of centeredness. A small, reliable rush.

Keystroke. Keystroke.

Click. Click. Click.

A series of bright screens flash urgently, self-importantly. The E-Line Discount On-Line Trading screen comes up. An account he’d opened with high ambitions, through a free promotion. Then hadn’t used for high paralysis and fear.

Keystroke, keystroke. Click, click, click.

Tom scrolls to the quotes screens. Types: CARTMANN SYSTEMS into the blue-colored rectangular search box. Hits Enter.

There it suddenly is. Cartmann Systems—CLOSE 1¼.

He takes a breath. Looks at the keys.

Keystroke. Keystroke.

Screen. Screen. Screen.

FAIRVIEW SAVINGS ON-LINE—a quaint little red-brick, white-pillared icon next to it. Thanks to banking’s merger mania, even the corner thrift was on-line. And the on-line bank account had come with the introductory offer of a free, full link to the on-line brokerage of your choice.

Click. Click.

Screen. Screen.

ACCOUNT OF: VIVIAN HARTLEY.

When she could no longer get to the bank herself, and since he was a computer buff in his own minor way, why not do their banking on-line? It was perfect, he’d said, for someone in a wheelchair. Neither of them mentioning that she didn’t know how to work the computer, and that the computer was up the stairs. Nevertheless, she’d agreed.

Tom scrolls to the last number.

TOTAL SAVINGS: $20,225.

He pauses.

Removes his hands from the

Reviews for Breakthrough

[danhammang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Who says that the great fiction writers don't use the crime genre? Stone's prose is elegantly crafted. He unfolds his plot with an almost mystical viewpoint. His heroes and villains look at and inhabit their world, wondering about life's great possibilities while unrolling devious schemes and unshakeable pursuit. A great read.