by Davis Bunn
As soon as the voice came on the line, their evening grew far less frivolous. He knew instantly that this caller was not the sort who would take time out for idle chatter. Whatever this man had to say, it would be bad.
The caller confirmed it with his first words. “I’ve got some serious juice.”
“Hold on.” Terrance hit the mute button and looked over at Don shuffling paper like a coach going over his early-season playbook. “You know about the chap who is counsel for the SEC?”
Don glanced up. “I know we’re paying a retainer to some joker who hasn’t done diddly for us.”
“He’s about to earn his keep,” Terrance said, and hit the speaker button. “Go ahead.”
“What, we’re into public performances here? I don’t think so.”
“Nonsense. I’m totally alone.” Terrance hushed Don’s paper rattling with a look. “I merely want to jot down some notes as we talk.”
“Long as you don’t jot down my name.”
“Certainly not. You mentioned something about bad news?”
“Bad as it gets. Unless, of course, you’re squeaky clean.”
Terrance watched Don as he spoke. “Well, of course we are.”
His contact announced, “The Securities and Exchange Commission is growing concerned about possible irregularities in your company’s books.”
Since Insignia was traded on the New York Stock Exchange, any possible illegality that implicated the senior management required a direct intervention and public inspection of their accounts.
Don huffed like a guy taking a blow to the solar plexus. This shook Terrance harder than any news the Wall Street guy might deliver.
“You say something?”
“Just clearing my throat.” Terrance couldn’t quite erase the tremor from his voice. “Can you perhaps give me further details?”
“What, you’re saying this isn’t enough? Give me a break here.”
“We are indeed grateful. But details might prove crucial.”
“All I know is, they’re planning to make a public announcement before they pounce.”
Terrance watched Don grow paler still. Making a statement at the outset of an investigation, rather than once the teams arrived and began digging, meant they were confident of finding something. “You’re certain of this?”
“The confab ended an hour ago. They brought in Legal. Meaning me. From what I heard, they’ve got everything but the smoking gun.”
Don grabbed his notebook and wrote out a single word. His papers spilled unnoticed to the floor as he jammed the page in front of Terrance’s face. When?
Terrance struggled to keep his tone light. “I’d certainly appreciate hearing your best guesstimate as to when they’ll arrive.”
“Sooner rather than later. I’d say you’ve got until the end of this week. Four days max.”
Terrance and Don silently tried to come to terms with the news. The caller finished, “You don’t call, I don’t answer.”
“Understood,” Terrance said.
But the line was already dead.
Terrance punched the button and said to his superior, “This is not good.”
“Tell me about it.” Don tried to rub the blood back into his features. “But at least we know more than we did five minutes ago.”
Terrance pointed at Don’s papers sprawled all over the carpet. “We need a minimum of four more weeks to put these plans into motion.”
“There’s no time for that. We’ve got to act now. Tonight.”
“But the timing is not up to us.”
“Isn’t it?” Don stared at him. “You heard what your contact just said. Our train’s about to hit the wall.”
“We still haven’t answered the most crucial question. Unless the pair we want to pin this on chooses to disappear now, they can always deny involvement.”
Don Winslow had a wolf’s face. Everything drew back from a fleshy predator’s nose. Big bony growths encircled eyes that glowed almost golden, holding a fierce life and no compunctions whatsoever. Don Winslow was as close to a true psychopath as Terrance had ever known. Terrance envied Don’s utter lack of remorse and coolness under the strain of wrongdoing. Like now.
Don replied, “That’s the first dumb comment I’ve ever heard you make.”
“But—”
“Pay attention, hoss. Either we clean up our tracks and get ready to show the world three pairs of lily-white hands, or we’re toast.”
Terrance knew Don wanted him to say the words for them both. The chasm yawned there before him. He remained mute.
Finally Don said it. “They’ve had their chance to disappear. Now we’ll just have to make it happen.”
Terrance found it odd, how it seemed as though they had always been headed in this direction. From the very beginning. “How?”
“You find out their movements for the next few days. We need them together and away from here.” Don stooped and gathered his papers. “Don’t we have the auditors and outside counsel coming in?”
“In four days. It’s their periodic review.”
“Well, at least that’s in our favor.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“You just be ready. We’re going to war. That’s all you need to know.”
Upstairs, Don appeared his normal rumpled self. It was hard to tell whether the man’s frenetic force was new and genuine, or just an uncovering of his constant interior state. Don said, “Quarter past three, and this day already feels two years old.” He pointed at the ceiling. “Our man Jack has needed some major help staying sold on the idea.”
“Tad late to be altering course.”
“He knows that. Which only makes his grousing worse.”
The phone buzzed. Don hit the speaker. His secretary announced, “Your guests are in the boardroom.”
“Tell Jack five minutes.” Don cut the connection and went on, “Been on the horn twice more with New York’s finest.”
“What did they want?”
“About what you’d expect. Have we heard from either of the missing employees, what were they doing so early at the bank.” Don held out his hand. “One of those files for me?”
“Yes.”
He leafed through the pages. “We have any unfinished business?”
“No. None.”
“Ready to face the hired guns?”
“Anytime.”
He smiled at Terrance with all but his eyes. “As of this morning, how much do we look to clear on this?”
Terrance held the door for his boss. “Why don’t we go upstairs and share that bit of news with our guests?”
The boardroom had the powder-keg scent of coming tempests. Whatever lighthearted chatter the five men and two women might have brought in with them, Jack Budrow had successfully choked off. His pallid features and clenched jaw shrieked calamity. The company chairman gripped the arms of his chair so hard that his knuckles looked carved from chalk. “You’re late.”
“Sorry, Jack.” Don nodded his greeting to the room and slid into his customary slouch in the nearest open chair. He waved his hand at Terrance. “You know our in-house numbers whizzo.”
Terrance grimaced with all the skill of an actor entering the role of a lifetime. “Good afternoon, all.”
The two external board members watched Terrance with worried gazes. Insignia’s outside counsel and external auditors greeted him with subdued murmurs. Terrance could almost see the antennas searching the air for danger. And who they were going to blame.
Jack said, “You know I detest being kept waiting.”
“Just going through the wreckage one last time,” Don replied.
The senior attorney cleared his throat. “That, ah, does not sound good, Don.”
“It isn’t. Believe me. I assume you all have heard about our missing employees.”
“I was just filling them in,” Jack said.
“Right. We would have preferred to postpone this meeting until we know more. The day has already he
ld enough trauma. But this can’t wait.” Don waved at Terrance. “Might as well go ahead and destroy their day.”
“Enough histrionics. Just get on with it,” Jack groused.
Terrance remained where he was, staring down the table’s length to the company’s chairman. Jack Budrow’s grandfather had started the family business from the front porch of the family home. Back then it had been known simply as Budrow’s Dairy. Jack’s father had made the name change, realizing that Budrow’s was too cracker to fit a company he intended to grow into an empire.
The dairies had been expanded to include beef cattle ranches. A total of fifty thousand Florida acres. Then came the orange groves and fruit-packing plants. Another twenty-seven thousand acres total. All bought at near Depression prices.
Nineteen years later, the builders started stopping by the farm.
Palm Beach was expanding west. Lake Worth was about to move from sleepy cow town into the big league. Budrow owned or controlled under long-term lease almost every available acre. Jack’s dad led the builders through a merry waltz around his cow stalls. He pretended to have no interest whatsoever in selling. Finally one came up with the idea of not buying the property outright, but rather taking Budrow on as minority partner. Which was what Budrow had been after all along.
One development led to another. On and on, each one richer than the next. The state tried to condemn other parcels for building the Florida Turnpike and the Bee-Line Expressway. Budrow hired an army of lawyers and held out for a minor fortune.
Then the mouse kingdom came calling. Overnight, Budrow’s fortune was multiplied tenfold.
The old man remained in feisty control right into his nineties. Finally a massive heart attack felled Jack’s father one midsummer dawn as he stooped over his cane, supervising the milking operations on his family homestead. A man with a personal fortune of almost half a billion dollars, coming to rest in a pile of dirty hay. The local press had a field day.
At the age of sixty-three, a bitter and impatient Jack Budrow had finally inherited full control. Despite Jack’s best efforts, however, he could not fill his old man’s shoes. He tried. Time and again he tried. But the massive South American ranches he invested in never panned out. The Patagonians might herd good beef, but they proved even better at milking empty promises. Whenever Jack or one of his minions flew down, they were handled like royalty, flown about on a company chopper while the locals painted visions of vast holdings and untold wealth. Just a little more time and money, they repeatedly promised, and the half-million acre spread would finally start turning a profit. But Insignia’s gold just kept sliding into a bottomless pit. When the board finally revolted and forced a sale of the interlinked ranches, Insignia retrieved one and two-thirds cents on the dollar.
In concept, Jack Budrow’s other business projects made sense. But his move from minority investor into full-on owner of Florida hotels could not have been worse timed. The terrorist strike and subsequent slide in Florida tourism hit hard.
But bad business decisions were only part of the problem. Jack Budrow remained in his father’s shadow long after the old man rested in his grave. He was nervous and defensive. He hated to be told he was wrong. He found slight everywhere.
He also loved to spend.
Jack Budrow’s first act as CEO was to turn half of Insignia’s top floor into his own private fiefdom. The renovations cost Insignia almost nine million dollars. Insignia now had two private jets, an executive dining room that was staffed eighteen hours a day, a box at TD Waterhouse stadium, a box at Daytona, and another for the Buccaneers’ home games. The outside shareholders might be screaming in protest, but Jack Budrow personally controlled over half the company’s voting stock. Those who were close to Jack came to believe that the CEO took little pleasure in his lavish lifestyle. Jack Budrow spent to show the world who was king.
A couple more bad judgment calls, a few more real-estate deals that went south, and suddenly Jack Budrow was gasping for financial breath. Without his power cushion, life was proving a terribly rough ride.
It was Terrance who had discovered that Jack was using company accounts as his private source of funds. Some people might think a man earning a seven-figure salary and sitting on several hundred thousand shares would not require additional funds. But Jack could outspend the Pentagon.
Terrance had shown the good sense to come to Don Winslow. Already he and Don had been building a rapport of shared avarice.
Don had instantly agreed with Terrance that this was the venom they needed. Two days later, Don Winslow had walked into Jack’s office and gently sunk in his fangs.
Don had gone to Jack with not an ultimatum but an offer. Look at these minor misdeeds, see the danger you’re putting yourself into? The feds would love to nail you for things that five years ago would have cost you a slap on the hand. You know as well as I do how the atmosphere’s changed. They’ll nail your hide to the wall. We’re talking twenty years, Jack. Which at your age is tantamount to life. Is that what you want?
Don accepted Jack’s sweaty panic as all the answer he needed. Then he laid out the plan he and Terrance had cooked up. A way for Jack to gain so much money that not even Jack could run through it easily. Or so Don had claimed.
Which had led them to the day’s events.
Terrance walked around the room, setting down his files with the solemnity of a mortician.
Don and Terrance played tag-team, laying it out. The seven visitors grew increasingly ashen. Jack Budrow did not speak at all.
Two and a half hours later, the company’s outside counsel placed the call over the speaker phone. He was put straight through to the chief of the SEC’s investigatory arm, an old golfing buddy. The SEC chief greeted him with, “I’m on my way out the door. I’m due at a reception the governor is hosting for—”
“You’re going to be late,” the attorney ordered.
Don and Terrance listened as the attorney put the news in perfect legalese, how an in-house investigation had revealed that two executives, Val Haines and an associate in the pension funds division, had embezzled funds. How the company’s pension funds both in the U.S. and Great Britain had been systematically stripped bare. How yesterday evening Don and Terrance had finally uncovered both hard evidence of the theft, and the scheme’s outside partner.
“You got a name?”
“The New York corporate account manager at Syntec Bank.”
The intake of breath was audible. “You can’t be serious.”
“Our two employees were apparently lost in the bomb blast. Since their disappearance this morning, we have been searching the pair’s private files and confirmed they were indeed the perpetrators.”
“You’re telling me the two guys you lost—”
“Actually, it was one man and one woman, a Ms. Marjorie Copeland.”
“Whatever. These two and a bank exec got themselves blown up so totally they can’t even identify how many other bodies might be in there, and these are your culprits?”
“That is correct.”
“Have you notified the authorities?”
“As I said, we are just now working through the ramifications of what we have discovered. You are the first person outside this room who is privy to the discovery.”
“So it wasn’t terrorists. Who planted the bomb, I mean.”
“That’s our reading as well.”
“If the bank exec was culpable, as you say, he might have been scamming other corporate clients.”
“That’s a distinct possibility.”
There was another pause. Terrance could almost hear the mental gears grinding in the Wall Street office. After all, this call was from a company they were preparing to investigate. The SEC man’s tone grew harder. “There will be a formal complaint lodged about your attempt to keep this from the authorities.”
“On the contrary.” Their counsel was subdued, but equally firm. “No such attempt has been made. We are the ones bringing this matter to the SEC’s atte
ntion.”
“Only after the perpetrators have vanished.”
“Only after they have been identified,” the counsel corrected. “We could not discuss it prior to being certain who they were for risk of having the real perpetrators take notice and flee.”
The SEC chief mulled that over. “All right,” he sighed. “Let me have the bad news. How much are we talking about?”
It was the counsel’s turn to take a very shaky breath. “It appears that there were two schemes, one relatively small and another that is, well, somewhat larger. We are uncertain that we have uncovered everything. We think so, but—”
“Ballpark figure.”
The counsel shuffled through the file’s papers, dragging out the moment.
“I’m waiting.”
“Somewhere in the vicinity of $422 million.”
The SEC guy groaned. “How much can you recover?”
The counsel looked at Jack Budrow. Terrance also risked a glance. The CEO was greyer than the counsel. Jack was apparently realizing just what this would mean, having such funds stolen under his watch. The board would search out a sacrificial lamb. Why not the founder’s son, the exec most of them had come to loathe?
“I’m waiting,” the SEC guys said. “How much is traceable?”
The counsel cleared his throat. But the obstruction was not dislodged. “None of it.”
“What?”
“As I stated, all of the funds were channeled through the Syntec Investment Bank.”
“And?”
“The bank is gone. Their entire records department was shredded by the explosion.”
The SEC chief was shouting now. “What about backup!”
“That too. We have spoken at length with the Jersey head office. This was a quasi-independent arm.” The counsel was visibly sweating. “Syntec operated like many small banks. Their home office maintained no detailed duplication—”
“A full investigatory team will be arriving on your doorstep tomorrow morning!” His rage had a scalding effect. “Heads are going to roll!”
Terrance stood in the boardroom doorway, watching Consuela usher out their guests. The auditors and outside counsel clustered like an anxious flock by the elevators. Their faces wore uniform expressions of sickly dread. They knew the score. A hit this big would strike their careers with the effect of wrecking balls.
