The Key

by Jennifer Sturman

  Minivans seemed to be the vehicles of choice for Thunderbolt employees; in fact, they seemed to be the vehicle of choice for everyone west of the Hudson. As a result, one car really stuck out, and it gave me a sense of just how much Luisa’s car must have been sticking out during our entire trip. It was a BMW 645ci, and it occupied a space directly in front of the glass annex. The BMW in the parking lot was red instead of black, and it had a hard top while Luisa’s was a convertible, but maybe its owner used another car in better weather.

  “I’ll bet you anything that’s Perry’s car,” I said, pointing it out to Peter.

  “Why would I bet you on that? I never met Perry. How would I know what kind of car he’d drive? Besides, it’s red. Does that make it a Communist car? Is Perry a Communist?” Peter was still a bit testy from the Yuri discussion.

  “Hardly—I think he’s pretty solidly on the capitalist pig end of the spectrum. In fact, I would have pegged him as a limousine type of guy. Or maybe just a Mercedes, but with a driver, so that he can sit in the back and read the paper and act snooty. But definitely not the sort of guy to do his own driving.”

  “Maybe he’s more of a man of the people than you’re giving him credit for—” Peter caught his own words and laughed. “Hey—maybe he’s our guy.”

  “You mean, he’s been sending me annoying e-mails in an attempt to derail his buyout? Somehow I don’t think so, even if he does drive his own car.”

  “Me, neither. Which is too bad, because we still don’t know who or what we’re looking for, exactly, and we’re out of luck if we actually want to get in. There’s a security booth at the gate.”

  “We knew there probably would be,” I answered, but I was still disappointed. I’d held the faint hope that I’d be able to walk in and pull an Erin Brockovich (minus the cleavage, unfortunately), talking my way into a look at whichever files held incriminating evidence and soliciting suggestions from helpful employees as to who Man of the People might be. Our revised, Man-of-the-People-less plan had allowed for us being unable to gain access to the building, but it had seemed worth a try. “Let’s see if maybe there’s a back way, just in case there is and it’s open.”

  “Sure.” Peter put the car in gear, and we cruised around the block. The fenced perimeter yielded a couple of additional entrances, but while these lacked security guards, the steel gates were the sort that could only be opened with a keycard. We considered parking the car and walking in, but it seemed unlikely that we’d make it very far into the building unnoticed given the signs of security we’d seen so far.

  We’d nearly completed our circuit and were passing the front entrance when I noticed something. “Peter—wait. What does that sign say?” He slowed the car and followed my gaze with his own.

  “You can’t read that sign?”

  “I know there’s a sign and that it has words on it.”

  “You can’t read that sign and you’ve been driving? When was the last time you had your eyes checked?”

  “I had them checked.”

  “In the last decade?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re lying, aren’t you?” I tried to look like I wasn’t, but it was becoming all too clear that my lying skills were subpar. “Listen,” he said,“I’ll tell you what the sign says, but there’s no way that you’re driving again until you get glasses.”

  “Fine.” This wasn’t really a lie; I figured that I could renegotiate the driving clause later.

  Peter read the notice aloud:

  SPECIAL SHAREHOLDER MEETING

  VOTE ON PROPOSED SALE OF COMPANY

  SATURDAY, MARCH 18TH

  TEN A.M.

  “Well, that’s convenient,” he said.

  “Among other things.” Mostly it was just incredibly fast. How had they had been able to pull the deal together in a week? Especially with everything that had been going on? “Perry must have called a special session of the board of directors and muscled the buyout proposal through. Now they’re putting it to a final vote.”

  “That was quick work.”

  “Ridiculously quick. Jake mentioned that Perry was eager to keep moving this forward—he didn’t even skip a beat after Gallagher kicked the bucket—if anything, he accelerated the schedule.”

  “Why the rush?”

  “I don’t know. We—the firm—like to turn things around quickly, but this is unprecedented. Less than a week from an initial proposal to a shareholder vote? Jake must have been killing himself the last few days to get it done. At least, when he wasn’t trying to kill other people.”

  “What’s in it for Jake, then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again, frustrated.

  “Are you sure he’s not in on it somehow?”

  “I’m not sure of anything at this point.”

  “Does all of this mean that Jake will be here tomorrow?”

  “He should be,” I said. “Now that Gallagher’s not available, Perry would want someone on hand to answer questions, maybe even to present the deal to the shareholders in the first place.”

  “I’d like to have a little talk with him.”

  “Me, too. Does your little talk involve pepper spray and jumping up and down on his face while wearing cleats?” I was a firm believer in holding a grudge. It was going to be a long time before I got over Jake treating me like a mechanical duck in his personal shooting gallery, not to mention assuming that I’d be too dense to realize it was him.

  “I was thinking more along the line of a baseball bat and his knees.”

  “That could work.”

  chapter twenty-six

  B eating up Jake would have to wait until the next day. I’d read somewhere that the ability to delay gratification is a sign of maturity, and Peter and I were nothing if not mature.

  We had been prepared to be unable to gain access to Thunderbolt’s premises, so our plan was to find the local hangouts frequented by Thunderbolt’s employees. There we intended to casually engage happy-hour patrons in discussion of Thunderbolt, Perry, the proposed buyout, and even Tiger Defense in a last-ditch attempt to track down Man of the People and to uncover any possible clues as to what, precisely, was so dirty about this deal.

  As plans went, we recognized that it was fairly lame and that its odds of success were relatively low. It also relied on social skills that neither I nor Peter really had, but we hadn’t been able to come up with more attractive alternatives. I was becoming resigned to the ways in which being on the wrong side of the law, however unjustly, limited one’s ability to pursue justice effectively.

  We still had a few hours to kill between the end of the workday and the beginning of our pub crawl, so we drove off in search of yet another pay phone and more Internet access. While State College had offered nothing but copy shops and Internet cafés, here the pickings were slim. We finally located a public library and pulled into its parking lot. The library’s architect appeared to be from the same school as the architect responsible for Thunderbolt’s plant, but the building compensated for its ugliness with a line of computer terminals inside and a pay phone in the back corridor near the restrooms.

  I called Luisa first to see if there had been any new developments.

  “Did you get the fax?” she asked. “Did any of the stories mean anything to you?”

  I’d scanned the list she’d sent in the car, and nothing had struck me as particularly relevant. I told her as much, feeling apologetic because the list had clearly represented a lot of television watching and Luisa was unabashed in her conviction that television was directly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.

  “You mean we watched all of those vile blowhards on Fox News for nothing?”

  “But you got to see Anderson Cooper, too. He’s not a vile blowhard.”

  She harrumphed her reply.

  “What’s going on with Hilary? Has she found the guy in the suede jacket?”

  “Last I heard, she was watching Jake and Annabel having a cozy-looking lunch and
was pissed that she was skipping her own lunch to do so. But there was no sign of the man following Jake, and I doubt that Hilary would have missed him if he was there. She has a good eye for attractive mysterious strangers.”

  I told Luisa about Jake’s e-mail, and she was appropriately incensed about his attempt to play the innocent. Then she gave me a new number to call for my next check-in. “The IT department here hooked me up with a temporary mobile phone. This number should be safe for a day or two.”

  Peter was waiting, so I thanked Luisa and ended our call, assuring her that we’d get in touch later that evening. I left him loading quarters into the phone and went to one of the computer terminals to check my new e-mail account in the vain hope that Man of the People had reconsidered. But all of the e-mails that had accumulated since that morning were spam.

  I closed out of e-mail and took a moment to scan the latest headlines on the Web. I seemed to be in luck, as a major earthquake had struck Kazakhstan just a couple of hours ago, completely eclipsing me as a story. It seemed wrong that an earthquake was working in my favor, but there wasn’t much I could do about it now. I made a mental note to donate to a relief fund as soon as I regained access to my bank account.

  I stood up and stretched, still cramped from the long car ride. Across the room, I could see down the back corridor and Peter’s profile as he spoke on the phone. A fresh wave of gratitude washed over me. This couldn’t have been a convenient time for him to ditch work and go on the lam with his wayward fiancée. Peter glanced up and, catching my eye, gestured to indicate he needed a few more minutes before tipping the brim of his trucker’s cap in my direction. I hoped he wasn’t getting too attached to this new accessory. Gratitude aside, there was no way I was going to let him keep wearing something that silly-looking after all this was over.

  I returned to my chair in front of the computer. My conversation with Luisa had made me wonder if perhaps I’d accidentally missed something important on her list of stories. I might as well use the downtime to take another look.

  The items on the fax had been carefully grouped, probably by Luisa or Jane, who were the most structured thinkers among my friends. The first heading was International and included a long list of stories about events on other continents: armed insurgencies in the Middle East, political turmoil in Eastern Europe, and trade tensions among Asian nations. I was fairly confident that none of these stories had inspired Dahlia’s fateful call to me and had skimmed through this list rapidly in the car.

  The next heading was National/Politics, and I’d skimmed through that section rapidly as well, focusing my attention on the category labeled Business, thinking that it would be the most likely to yield useful information. I looked over the stories in this category again, and I even pulled up a few related articles on the Internet, but nothing seemed connected to the mess I’d found myself in.

  A quick visual check showed me that Peter was still on the phone, so for lack of anything better to do I turned back to the stories grouped under National/Politics to give them more careful consideration, typing relevant keywords into the search bar. But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t figure out why Dahlia would want to tell me about trends in student test scores, the death of a famed civil rights leader, drug use in suburban America, or Congressional debate regarding proposed health-care legislation. It seemed like Luisa really had had to watch those vile blowhards on Fox News for no good reason.

  The final item on the list was about the progress of a new appropriations bill through the Senate Armed Forces committee. The futility of the entire effort made me sigh as I typed in “Senate Armed Forces” and “appropriations” and hit enter. With another sigh, I clicked on the first article returned by the search, a link to a Washington Post article from Tuesday’s edition with the headline: Senate Armed Forces Committee Debates Appropriations Bill.

  I was already halfway through the article before I realized that there was a familiar name in the very first paragraph. I returned to the beginning and read it again, more carefully this time.

  The Senate Armed Forces Committee continued its debate today on the new appropriations bill. “We are confident that we will ultimately deliver a bill that provides our military with the resources it needs to protect American interests at home and abroad,” said Committee Chair Senator Philip Brisbane (R-PA).

  The man in the accompanying picture looked older than he had in the one Man of the People had sent me, but it was the same guy. I wasn’t sure that I’d want to be called Flipper rather than Philip, or even Phil, but nicknames aren’t always the result of personal preference. It was easy to see how Philip could morph into Flipper after a few keg-stands.

  Dahlia must have seen a clip from the press conference on the news, and, as the official keeper of Gallagher’s Rolodex, she must have known that Brisbane was in it and added things up on her own. She may even have scheduled meetings or conference calls for Gallagher, Brisbane, and Perry, although it would have been unwise of them to leave a public record of any tête-a-têtes outside of the occasional Princeton alumni event. Perhaps she’d even watched the Tiger deal unfold and recognized a similar pattern.

  The article continued, nicely clearing up some other matters for me:

  Senator Brisbane has been under intense pressure since Congressional Democrats launched an unexpected attack on his leadership last week, citing the unusual length of time the bill has spent in Committee as emblematic of Republican foot-dragging.

  The appropriations bill has important ramifications not only for the military but for the nation’s defense industry. U.S.defense contractors, many of whom have been struggling in the current industrial climate, are eager to see this bill passed. Several of these companies have been lobbying committee members aggressively.

  The article went on to identify a number of companies by name and to discuss their lobbying efforts in greater detail. Thunderbolt Industries wasn’t on the list, but it didn’t have to be. There was no need for Thunderbolt to openly lobby the Senate Committee when its CEO went “way back” with the Committee’s chairman.

  Everything about the deal that hadn’t made sense before now made complete sense. Thunderbolt’s revenues were in decline and its current stock price was languishing because it had lost out on an important contract, one that Brisbane had used his position and influence to steer away from Thunderbolt in order to depress the company’s performance. As a result, Perry could do his buyout at the depressed price, not to mention win concessions from the union. Then, once the appropriations bill passed, Brisbane could steer a few fat contracts Perry’s way. Thunderbolt would flourish, and Perry could sell the company at a handsome profit, generating equally handsome returns for his investors. The previous shareholders would lose out, but I doubted Perry and his investors cared.

  And I had a pretty good idea as to who some of those investors might be. I wasn’t sure how they’d managed it—probably through an intricate tangle of trusts and front companies to mask their conflicts of interest—but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn that Flipper Brisbane and Glenn Gallagher both had considerable interests in the “investor group” backing Perry’s management buyout.

  Meanwhile, the accelerated schedule for getting the deal done was undoubtedly a direct result of the heightened pressure the esteemed senator was under to finalize the appropriations bill. Once the bill was approved, the ways in which Thunderbolt could benefit would cause the company’s stock price to pop. If Perry didn’t get the deal done before this happened, he and his investors would lose out.

  The scope of both the planning and the duplicity was breathtaking, but they’d had practice, after all. I was sure that if I did a little more research, I’d find that the Tiger buyout had followed the same pattern.

  And then I realized something else. If Jake had worked on the Tiger deal, he’d had a chance to see Gallagher, Perry, and Brisbane pull their first scam. While it was unlikely that Gallagher had confided in Jake, much less cut him in on either deal, Jak
e must have figured out that Gallagher and his cronies were attempting a repeat performance of their first success.

  This time, however, Jake had also figured out a way to get a piece of the action. Because the investment had been made during Gallagher and Annabel’s marriage, its proceeds would probably be fair game even under the most stringent of prenuptial agreements. If the investment generated the same sort of returns the Tiger investment had generated, it would mean enough money to set anyone up for life, even in the style to which Annabel was accustomed.

  But neither Annabel nor Jake would be able to enjoy those proceeds if the deal didn’t go as planned.

  chapter twenty-seven

  I’ d found the key that unlocked the answers—or most of them, at least. But I still needed proof. And I needed it soon, ideally before Thunderbolt’s shareholders agreed to sell their company at an artificially depressed price the next day.

  I was so deep in thought that when Peter placed a hand on my shoulder, I gave a startled yelp. A librarian promptly shushed me from her post at the checkout desk, her glare disapproving behind thick glasses. I mouthed a sheepish apology, even as I wondered whether the glasses came with the job or were a prerequisite to getting it. She continued to glare at me for a long moment before returning to stamping whatever she was stamping.