by Jeff Buick
6
Derek Swanson sat on the deck of his home in Morgantown’s most exclusive subdivision. Behind him was sixty-four hundred square feet of eight-bedroom, seven-bath, West Virginia luxury. In front of him was an acre of landscaped gardens, complete with a duck pond and waterfall. The muted sound of splashing water drifted across the grass and the morning sun poked through the thick branches of the mature sugar maple trees. Two ovenbirds flitted about and a squirrel chattered at the distractions. Swanson’s mind registered none of it.
He sipped his coffee, thinking of nothing but Reginald Morgan. The old man was a fool. A fool who was developing a conscience. And that attack of conscience was going to cost Swanson a lot of money. Somewhere in the range of fifty million dollars. His face took on color as he envisioned the money. Fifty million dollars. He was already rich, but that bump would put him in with the superrich. The ones who owned two-hundred-foot yachts and Caribbean mansions and never looked at price tags.
His housekeeper appeared and quietly refilled his coffee, then disappeared back into the house. His train of thought retreated to the income trust conversion. His experts all but guaranteed a 40 percent rise in stock value, which would pump about thirty-five million dollars into his portfolio. It would also kick in a fifteen-million-dollar bonus that was tied in to company performance. But without the conversion, it was all up in smoke. He needed the conversion, and to get it, he needed three things.
Reginald Morgan onside was number one. Without the old man the deal was dead. The CEO had the power to crater the deal—they both knew it. Morgan had connections inside the bank and at the stock exchange that could kill the deal in almost zero time. Getting him onside was imperative. The second was the bank. DC Trust held close to three hundred million dollars in demand notes, and if they decided the conversion was flawed, then it wouldn’t happen. The bank should be okay. He had a person on the inside, and the file had been dropped on some woman with the promise of a vice presidency if all went well. The bank wasn’t a problem.
That left the Senator Claire Buxton, the pain-in-the-ass politician from Utah. She was on some sort of personal crusade to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide spewing from the Pacificorp’s Hunter 4 plant, close to Castle Dale. And if she were successful, it would affect emission levels from coal-burning plants across the country. If her bill passed through the Senate and Congress, the cost to upgrade their facilities would be astronomical. The additional cost of renewing their infrastructure would send the bank running and stop the approval by the regulatory body at the NYSE. It would drive a sword into the heart of the income trust conversion and cost him fifty million dollars.
But that was one sword that should never get out of the sheath. He had hired one of Washington’s top lobbyists to sway the vote once it hit the committee that determined whether the bill would ever see the inside of the Senate or Congress. The jury was out on the results, but so far things were looking okay.
The problem was Reginald Morgan.
Swanson looked down at his hands. They were soft and manicured and seldom saw manual labor. He wielded great power with those hands by simply holding a pen or typing on a keyboard. Words, contracts, numbers—they were his weapons. He controlled the unions, the mine and plant workers and the financial advisors, with business acumen. Only once had he deviated and used force to resolve a dispute. A violent and militant union rep, a man who had incited the plant workers into a feeding frenzy, had fallen victim to his own tactics. It took his body six weeks to work free of the twine attached to the concrete and float to the surface of a nearby lake. By then the corpse was so bloated it was unidentifiable except through DNA records. Even then, Derek Swanson’s hands had not been the instruments that dealt the blows. That, as almost everything else in Swanson’s life, had been delegated.
Swanson slowly turned his gaze from the peaceful garden to the cordless telephone sitting on the table. One call, that’s all it would take. One call and Reginald Morgan would no longer be a problem. He stared at the phone. The number was still etched in his memory. Four years had passed, yet he still remembered pushing the numbers that had started a series of events that culminated in the death of another man. Could he make the call again? He wasn’t sure.
He sipped on the coffee but it tasted bitter. The sounds from the waterfall seemed louder, and filled his head with white noise. His head pounded from the stress. Could he do it? Could he sentence Reginald Morgan to death? The blood pumped through his veins, pushing against his skin, throbbing. His breath was coming quicker now. Shallower.
He knew what the answer had to be. There was no other way. His hand reached out and he felt the cool touch of the plastic.
He dialed the number and waited.
Decision made.
7
When Utah’s voters elected Claire Buxton to the Senate, they sent a pit bull to Washington. She was attractive, dressed well and wore lipstick, but Claire Buxton was still a pit bull. She was young for the Senate, only forty-three, with two out of three kids still living at home. Her oldest daughter was at the University of Utah, living in residence and studying the sciences, as her mother had done twenty-four years earlier. Claire’s husband, Eric, was the lawyer in the family, but she was the one who had sought public office.
Claire Buxton was never a tree hugger. She ate fast food when she was in a hurry, drove an American-made SUV and begrudgingly recycled her glass and metal containers. But when some of her constituents who lived near the Hunter electrical power plant came to her with health concerns, she took their situation seriously.
The Hunter 4 plant burned coal to produce electrical power. And they burned a lot of it. Fourteen thousand tons a day. And that produced pollution. Pollution that was slowly killing people, including children. And the Hunter plant was merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There were hundreds of coal-burning electrical plants peppered across the US, many of them ignoring the Clean Air Act while pumping thousands of tons of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere every day. And what went up the six-hundred-foot-high stacks eventually came down—as acid rain or snow.
And the mines that fed the plants’ insatiable appetites for coal produced slurry, a toxic sludge of coal residue, water and oil that was held in huge retention ponds near the mine site.
Claire was on the last section of the Saturday morning paper when her husband padded into the kitchen, still wearing his dressing gown and slippers. A day’s growth of stubble covered his chin. He poured some coffee and joined her at the table.
“You’re up early,” he said. “And dressed. On a Saturday.”
“I fly to Lexington today. On Sunday I’m in Pikeville, Kentucky, to talk with Amanda Chisholm. She’s the young girl who is dying because of the leaks in the retention ponds around Silo Six mine.” She gave him a crooked smile. “Did you forget?”
He slapped himself on the forehead. “Right. Trying to get some leverage on the committee members for your environmental bill.”
“Anything to see this bill pass through committee. It’s going okay so far, but we’ve got some well-connected lobbyists working against it.” She pushed her dark shoulder-length hair behind her ear. She had never been an overly attractive woman, rather nondescript with no outstanding features. Her face was well proportioned, with wide-set eyes and broad cheeks. She fit a size ten after a small struggle with the zipper and wore sensible shoes. “Jack Dunn is leading the charge. And he and his wolves are being well paid.”
“I’m sure they are. I think you’ve pissed off a lot of utility companies.” Eric sipped the coffee and winced slightly as the hot liquid burned his lips.
Claire smoothed the newspaper and folded it back into its original shape. “Some of these plants are complying with the Clean Air Act and the Clear Skies Act and burning their coal clean. Others aren’t. They’re the ones I’m after. The two acts have been around long enough now for these companies to have begun complying. The problem is, when they don’t, the regulators at th
e Environmental Protection Agency aren’t doing anything. And if the EPA isn’t breathing down your neck, why spend hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade your facilities?”
“But if your bill passes through the house, they start to pay,” Eric said. “Big-time.”
She nodded. “Every ton of emission they pump into the air or dump into a retention pond is going to cost them money. A lot of money. Enough that every plant burning its coal cheap and dirty will be scrambling to install new technology to cut down the crap they’re dumping in our air.”
“Crap?” Eric said, grinning. “You going to use that word when you table the bill?”
“Maybe,” she said. “It got your attention.”
“What about the lobbyists? Can they kill it?”
She shrugged. “Jack Dunn is the guy I’m worried about. He’s tied in at every level from the years he spent in Congress. A lot of people owe him favors and he might call in a few on this one.”
“Who hired him?”
“A company in West Virginia is the main player. CoalBalt. They’ve got a few smaller producers in bed with them, but they’re spearheading the push to kill it.”
“I don’t get it. Why don’t they just comply? Under the Clear Skies Act, their emissions have to be down substantially by 2020. Why not do it now?”
“The rumor I’ve heard is that Coal-Balt is restructuring. They’re in the process of converting to an income trust.”
“What does that matter?”
“I don’t understand the economics, but one of my aides gave me a quick briefing last week. If they shift from standard accounting practices to an income trust, the value of the common stocks will rise significantly. And the company will start paying out excess profits to the shareholders. That works well with a utility company, because they have a steady cash flow. But the downside is that allocating large sums of money to fix outdated equipment makes the conversion risky. Payback to the shareholders could dry up and if that happens, the big boys who control the pension funds will dump the stock. That’ll start a freefall. And then they’re in serious trouble.”
“Why don’t they fix their equipment, come into line with the current regulations, then convert in a few years?”
She gave him a sideways look. “You’ve got to be kidding. You can’t figure that one out?”
“Money,” he said. “Someone inside the company stands to profit.”
“Huge. Hundreds of millions of dollars are on the table. The largest benefactors will be Reginald Morgan, the CEO, and Derek Swanson, the president. Morgan could care less—he’s in his seventies and would probably like to see the company move ahead. It’s Swanson. He’s the one who brought in Jack Dunn and his team of sharks.”
“So what do you do?”
“Get the bill through committee, then table it in the Senate. If it passes, it’s off to Congress, then into the Oval Office. That’s what I do, Eric. I get the damn thing through the proper channels.”
“It’s that important to you?” he asked quietly.
“People are dying. Children are dying. Amanda Chisholm is only one of many. It’s got to stop.”
He nodded. “Not to mention what these plants contribute to global warming.”
“Pound for pound, these coal-burning plants are the absolute worst. A lot of the coal they use is either Midwestern or Appalachian, both of which are extremely high in sulfur. Acid rain, global warming, sludge seeping into the groundwater—nothing about these plants using outdated technology is nice. Nothing.”
“And you’re going to stop them.” Eric tested the coffee against his lips, then took a sip.
“Damn right I am,” she said. “2020 is still a long way off.
I want them upgraded or shut down now.”
“That’s my gal. That’s why you were elected. You care.”
“Rare trait in DC. Don’t go running about telling anyone. They’ll think I’m the soft egg in the basket.”
“Don’t see that happening.”
Claire Buxton sat quietly for
Claire Buxton sat quietly for a minute, thinking about the last four years in the Senate. The backroom battles, her doggedly sticking to her convictions while others fought to influence her decisions. Men sitting across the table, powerful men, knowing when they dealt with her they had to make concessions. A reputation built on integrity and honesty. No graft, no all-expense-paid junkets to the Caribbean, no wavering on her principles. No compromises.
She smiled and said, “No soft eggs here, Eric. No soft eggs here.”
8
Traffic was light, almost nonexistent, and the town’s churches were filled. The elderly citizens of Morgantown were dressed in their Sunday finest and the slow toll of the belfry bells echoed across the manicured parks and freshly painted clapboard houses near the city center. The scent of magnolia blossoms tinged the hot July air, and there was a stillness to the leaves that spoke of quiet country living. That little piece ofAmerica that existed mostly on postcards. A perfect Sunday morning.
It was also a perfect morning to plan a murder.
Derek Swanson sat in the park, alone on the wooden bench, watching a gaggle of young girls play with the geese next to the pond. The sound of their laughter drifted across the grass, a bitter reminder of the evil nature of his business. He didn’t want this. It wasn’t part of his plan, never had been. Reginald Morgan was a decent man, perhaps a bit too honest for his own good. There would be no pleasure in knowing the old man’s blood was on his hands. None at all.
A nondescript rental car pulled up to the curb and an equally nondescript man exited and walked across the grass to the bench. His stride was more a movement of his legs that propelled his upper body simply because it was attached at the waist. Like Clint Eastwood. He’d always thought Darvin’s gait totally aped Eastwood’s. But his face was much less memorable. He had light brown hair, cut to the top of his ears and always perfectly groomed, and was clean shaven. His skin was pasty white despite the hot July weather. There were no redeeming features, just average eyes, puffy cheeks and slightly thinning brown hair topping off a five-ten body. The kind of person no one ever remembered. Perfect if you were a hired killer.
Darvin reached the bench and sat down next to Swanson. Neither of them offered to shake hands. Darvin spoke first. His voice was tinged with an East Coast accent. Nearby, Virginia, West Virginia perhaps.
“So you have need of my services again, Mr. Swanson,” he said. There was a coolness, almost a detachment, of the voice from the body.
“I do.”
“Did you bring what I asked?”
Swanson handed over the legal-size envelope. Darvin tilted it and the contents slid into his free hand. Inside was an eight-by-ten photo of Reginald Morgan—the one they gave to the media for press releases. The itinerary for one of the Royal Caribbean ships, the Brilliance of the Seas, was detailed on a separate sheet of paper. Two bundles of money, one hundred thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills, appeared briefly, then disappeared into the inside pocket of the man’s light summer jacket.
Darvin studied the face on the photo. “He’s an old man.
Why not wait for him to die of natural causes?”
“I don’t have the luxury of time.”
Darvin’s lips curled imperceptibly. “Yes, that’s usually the problem.” He glanced at the schedule for the cruise ship. “Do you want this to be an accident, or would you like to send someone a message?”
“No message. No reason to make sure everyone knows he was murdered. Over the side of the ship is fine.”
Darvin nodded. “Then over the edge it will be.”
“Brilliance of the Seas has already had one passenger go over the side. George Smith. He was a Canadian on his honeymoon. You think this will raise any flags?”
The killer chuckled, a cold clucking sound. “Anytime someone disappears flags are raised. But when it’s on a cruise ship, there’s really nothing they can do unless someone catches the person throwing t
he victim over the railing. The ship, which is invariably registered to some country like Panama, is in international waters. Maritime law rules, and until they dock, the ship’s captain is the only person who can apply that law. Cruise ships are wonderfully easy places to kill people.”
“Then why is it costing me a hundred large?” Swanson asked.
Darvin leaned back against the bench. “Do it yourself. Save the money.” He pushed the envelope that was sitting on his lap an inch closer to Swanson. The other man made no move to take it. “Didn’t think so. You have your reasons for wanting Reginald Morgan dead and I’m not about to ask what they are. All you have to do is pay me. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap, as AC/DC would say.”
“Who? What?”
“They’re a rock band. It’s a song. Never mind.” He stood and walked back toward his car. Then he stopped and looked back. “Hope you said good-bye to Mr. Morgan. You won’t be seeing him again.”
Derek Swanson almost threw up. He choked back the bile and sucked in a few sharp breaths. A solitary cloud touched the edge of the sun and cast a blanket of shade over the park. What had he done? Killing the union rep was reprehensible, and sleep had been difficult for months after. But this, this was completely different. He knew Reginald Morgan. In some ways, he knew the man like a father. And now he was the instrument of the man’s death. For money.
Fifty million dollars. He envisioned the scope of what fifty million could buy. The yacht, the house in Europe and the Caribbean, a position in society only a handful of people ever achieve. And fifty million was seed money for more. Stocks, real estate, new businesses that needed capital, franchises, new technology—the list was astounding. He could parlay fifty million into a quarter billion inside five years. If he played his cards right, he could hit the elusive billionaire status sometime in his late sixties.
