Jack Reacher 01 - Killing Floor

while I’m passing through.”
    The guy in the suit nodded. Dropped his gaze.
    “Thing is, you see,” he said, “Mr. Hubble doesn’t work here anymore. We had to let him go, I’m afraid, about eighteen months ago.”
    I just nodded blankly. Then I sat there in the clubby little office and looked at the guy in the suit and waited. A bit of silence might set him talking. If I asked him questions straight out, he might clam up. He might go all confidential, like lawyers do. But I could see he was a chatty type of a guy. A lot of those managers are. They love to impress the hell out of you, given the chance. So I sat tight and waited. Then the guy started apologizing to me because I was Hubble’s friend.
    “No fault of his own, you understand,” he said. “He did an excellent job, but it was in a field we moved out of. A strategic business decision, very unfortunate for the people concerned, but there you are.”
    I nodded at him like I understood.
    “I haven’t been in touch for a long time,” I said. “I didn’t know. I didn’t even really know what he did here.”
    I smiled at him. Tried to look amiable and ignorant. Didn’t take much effort, in a bank. I gave him my best receptive look. Guaranteed to set a chatty guy talking. It had worked for me plenty of times before.
    “He was part of our retail operation,” the guy said. “We closed it down.”
    I looked inquiringly at him.
    “Retail?” I said.
    “Over-the-counter banking,” he said. “You know, cash, checks, loans, personal customers.”
    “And you closed that down?” I said. “Why?”
    “Too expensive,” he said. “Big overhead, small margin. It had to go.”
    “And Hubble was a part of that?” I asked him.
    He nodded.
    “Mr. Hubble was our currency manager,” he said. “It was an important position. He was very good.”
    “So what was his exact role?” I asked him.
    The guy didn’t know how to explain it. Didn’t know where to start. He made a couple of attempts and gave them up.
    “Do you understand cash?” he said.
    “I’ve got some,” I said. “I don’t know if I understand it, exactly.”
    He got to his feet and gave me a fussy gesture. Wanted me to join him at the window. We peered out together at the people on the street, seventeen floors down. He pointed at a guy in a suit, hurrying along the sidewalk.
    “Take that gentleman,” he said. “Let’s make a few guesses, shall we? Probably lives in the outer suburbs, maybe has a vacation cabin somewhere, two big mortgages, two cars, half a dozen mutual funds, IRA provision, some blue chip stock, college plans, five or six credit cards, store cards, charge cards. Net worth about a half million, shall we say?”
    “OK,” I said.
    “But how much cash does he have?” the guy asked me.
    “No idea,” I said.
    “Probably about fifty dollars,” he said. “About fifty dollars in a leather billfold which cost him a hundred and fifty dollars.”
    I looked at him. I wasn’t following his drift. The guy changed gear. Became very patient with me.
    “The U.S. economy is huge,” he said. “Net assets and net liabilities are incalculably large. Trillions of dollars. But almost none of it is actually represented by cash. That gentleman had a net worth of a half million dollars, but only fifty of it was in actual cash. All the rest of it is on paper or in computers. The fact is, there isn’t much actual cash around. There’s only about a hundred and thirty billion actual cash dollars inside the whole U.S.”
    I shrugged at him again.
    “Sounds like enough to me,” I said.
    The guy looked at me severely.
    “But how many people are there?” he asked me. “Nearly three hundred million. That’s only about four hundred and fifty actual cash dollars per head of population. That’s the problem a retail bank has to deal with, day by day. Four hundred and fifty dollars is a very modest cash withdrawal, but if everybody chose to make such a withdrawal, the nation’s banks would run out of cash in the blink of an eye.”
    He stopped and looked at me. I nodded.
    “OK,” I said. “I see that.”
    “And most of that cash isn’t in banks,” he said. “It’s in Vegas or at the racetrack. It’s concentrated in what we call cash-intensive areas of the economy. So a good currency manager, and Mr. Hubble was one of the very best, has a constant battle just to keep enough paper dollars on hand in our part of the system. He has to reach out and find them. He has to