“You could spend the rest of your life trying to bring Julian down. And then what?”
He’d been so caught up with trailing Mellow’s every move that he’d never stopped to consider what life would look like if and when he managed to bring down his nemesis.
“And then I’ll move on.”
“If it’s not too late.”
He went to the bedroom and fired up the computer, which had become his prime weapon in an admittedly lame campaign to destroy Julian Mellow. He had bought at least one share in every public entity in which Julian Mellow had an interest, an expensive proposition given the web of holding companies and joint ventures and equity funds he controlled. As a shareholder he received not only annual reports but quarterly filings and proxies—none of which had yet yielded anything that could possibly compromise Julian. But he never gave up hope.
Though he’d been barred from the securities industries, he was free to buy and sell stocks for himself. Still, he didn’t want Julian to know that he was monitoring him, and he knew that Julian employed software that continually checked for cross-ownership of his myriad holdings. Meager as Zach’s “holdings” were, they could well turn up on a short list of investors that could draw Julian’s attention—and perhaps incite some sort of retaliation. So he’d acquired a new identity for the purpose of becoming one of Julian’s investors: Arthur Sandler, a combination of his father’s first name and his mother’s maiden name.
Becoming Arthur Sandler had been no small undertaking. In order to open a brokerage account, he needed a social security number and some sort of established credit. A web search had led him to an organization that provided social security numbers by mail for $50. As far as he could tell, the organization, Eden Services, was a group of antigovernment “bureaucracy” haters. He forced himself not to think about where his $50 was going as he typed in his phony date and place of birth, both of which, he learned, determined the range of numbers on the social security card. Once Arthur Sandler had acquired a social security number, Zach returned to the site to order a driver’s license and found that it no longer existed. Instead, he found a single page with a short statement: “We have been forced to decamp to another site to avoid the predatory tentacles of the federal government.” He thought of those peddlers of stolen and counterfeit goods who would set up shop on a Manhattan street corner one day, do a brisk business for a few weeks, then disappear, only to turn up on another corner in another neighborhood a few days later.
Hours of online searching led him to an email conversation with a man in Washington Heights who said he could provide the documents Zach needed. He spent a long afternoon in a tiny, dark apartment on West 185th Street as a man who identified himself only as Joey painstakingly created a New York State driver’s license containing the photo that Zach had brought with him. Joey employed an impressive array of materials and tools: computer, scanner, Photoshop software, rubber stamps, sheets of Dura-Lar film, X-Acto knife. He deployed these implements with silent, surgical precision.
Armed with a social security number and license, “Arthur Sandler” walked into a bank with a thousand dollars in cash and opened a checking account. He gave as his address a mail drop on Columbus Avenue. A credit card came next, which he used to buy various research reports and other documents concerning Julian’s companies. Finally, he opened an online investment account and began buying shares, transferring more and more money from his real account to Arthur Sandler’s account to pay for them. It was an unintended but not unwelcome consequence of this activity that, in the year since Arthur Sandler had begun buying shares exclusively in companies controlled by Julian Mellow, his investments had increased by more than 40 percent, even in a flat market. Julian, it seemed, had not lost his touch.
Zach had not told Sarah about his alter ego, nor about his investments. The ease with which he concealed so much from the woman he loved was almost as disturbing as the ease with which he’d created an entirely new person, a person with a growing investment portfolio, no less.
Earlier, when he’d Googled Billy Sandifer, he’d found twelve pages of links. He’d only gotten through the first two pages, which were mostly links to sites selling self-published books about the evils of globalization. He continued working his way down the links until he came to an article from the Williston, New York, Courier from four years ago.
EX-RADICAL RELEASED FROM WILLISTON AFTER EIGHT YEARS BEHIND BARS
William “Billy” Sandifer, a former leader of the anti-globalization movement, walked out of the Williston Correctional Facility after serving eight years of a fifteen-year sentence. Mr. Sandifer ignored the presence of several reporters gathered outside the front gate of the prison and got into the back of a waiting Lincoln Town Car.
Mr. Sandifer was convicted of masterminding the 1998 bombing of the headquarters building of the Starret Corporation, a target of the anti-globalization movement because of its ties to allegedly repressive governments in Central America. Roger Morrison, a night watchman, was killed in the bombing. Two other members of the loosely affiliated protest group, which has no name and no centralized organization, were charged with the crime but were never apprehended. Sandifer never spoke publicly about the incident, neither taking nor denying responsibility. His attorneys argued that the bomb was never meant to harm anyone.
As an inmate, Sandifer largely disappeared from the public eye and then briefly reappeared during the 2005 uprising at Williston in which three guards and four inmates were killed. The hostage takers wanted to draw attention to what they considered inhumane conditions brought about by the “privatization” of the facility by the Acorn Correctional Corporation, which purchased Williston from the federal government. Sandifer emerged as a spokesman and negotiator for the inmates, although he was never implicated in the uprising itself. The incident lasted four days. At hearings held afterward, inmates contended that the deaths had resulted from a desire for revenge on the part of the guards, who had already regained control of the facility, and not from self-defense. Sandifer testified at the hearings that he had not seen the killings.
It is not clear where Sandifer will reside following his release.
Zach himself had helped engineer Julian’s takeover of Acorn, a three-billion-dollar operator of formerly government-owned facilities, including veterans’ hospitals, government cafeterias, and correctional institutions. Acorn had been one of Mellow Partners’ largest acquisitions, but far from its most successful. The uprising at Williston had drawn attention to the fact that Acorn tended to skimp on such niceties as sanitation and food quality in order to fatten its margins. Julian had been unable to work his usual cost-cutting magic on Acorn and so had never been able to sell it back to the public for his usual stratospheric return.
Acorn had to be the link between Mellow and Sandifer. Questions remained, of course: how had the two men connected? Mellow had not been personally involved in the negotiations during the uprising. And what was the enduring connection, a link that had placed Sandifer on Julian’s Gulfstream jet on the very same day that Senator Harry Lightstone was also a passenger?
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5
Chapter 9
Julian Mellow walked to Harry Lightstone’s townhouse on East 68th Street, between Fifth and Madison, just a few blocks from his own apartment. It was a glorious fall day, the crisp air sweetened by the moldering leaves, the stylish young women heading to work wearing short skirts and light sweaters for perhaps the last time for many months. On such a day the city seemed not only beautiful but governable, as if the clear sky and warm temperature imposed an obligation to behave civilly. At Madison Avenue, he dropped the burner phone Billy Sandifer had sent him in a trash can. It had served its purpose: that call from Danielle in San Francisco.
He rang the doorbell at number 21. Marcella Lightstone answered, as he’d earlier requested on the phone. No doubt she had a small army of servants on staff, but he thought it best that their first face-to-face meeting take place without observation.
“Julian, how nice to see you,” she said, gesturing for him to enter.
The senator’s wife was a tall woman of about forty who could most charitably be described as striking. Her face was long and narrow, as was her nose, giving her an equine look that was at once aristocratic and faintly ridiculous. She was very thin, almost gaunt, coiffed and dressed with enough talent and expense to lend her an air of confidence and polish that, in combination, approximated elegance. She ushered him into a small room off the first-floor hallway. It was paneled in dark wood and filled with antique furniture and dark European paintings. Like Marcella, the room felt expensively put together and faintly ridiculous in its pretensions.
“You probably don’t remember, but we’ve met,” she said once they were seated on facing sofas. “A cancer benefit, I think. Or a museum. About a year ago, you—”
“I don’t remember.” He unzipped his laptop case.
She smiled uncertainly. “I could run upstairs for some coffee.” She sounded doubtful that she could execute such a mission on her own. Her grandfather, Kenneth Kollan, who’d fled the pogroms in Russia for western Pennsylvania, had founded an electronics company and sold it to General Electric, forty-five years ago, for half a billion dollars. It was possible that Marcella Kollan Lightstone had never made a cup of coffee in her life.
He ignored her as his computer booted up, then he double-clicked on the video icon on his desktop.
“You need to see this,” he said. She looked curious but made no effort to get up.
He waited her out. After a few seconds voices could be heard from the laptop’s small, built-in speakers.
“That’s Harry’s voice,” she said, a touch nervously. A moment later, with a faint sigh, she joined him on the sofa. They watched in silence as Senator Lightstone slowly undressed the San Francisco whore. She showed no reaction as the senator got over his initial shock and resumed active, even gleeful participation in what evolved into a very different scene from what he’d been expecting. And she remained silent once the clip ended and Julian returned the laptop to its case, recrossing the small room to the facing sofa as serenely as if she’d just dutifully viewed pictures of a guest’s recent vacation.
“I take it your husband hasn’t mentioned the video.”
“What do you want?” she said in a composed voice.
“I want your husband in the White House.”
“He hasn’t even announced for the Republican nomination. Isn’t it too late to—”
“He will.”
“Has Harry seen…that?” She thrust a long, French-manicured finger at the laptop, as if at a mongrel dog.
Julian nodded. “He’ll announce his candidacy later this week. I imagine he’s putting his speech together as we speak. Haven’t you two been in touch?”
She smiled wanly. Everyone knew the Lightstones lived apart, the senator in Washington, Marcella in New York. They came together occasionally in Pennsylvania, to remind the voters there that Harry Lightstone represented their interests, and at major social events in Washington and New York and whenever their two sons, deposited in a New England boarding school, had a birthday or other milestone that demanded parental participation.
“He may have mentioned it.” The smile warmed a bit. “You do realize that four candidates have already announced.”
“We have a lot of work to do.”
“We?”
“We both want the White House, but neither of us wants to sit in the Oval Office. Real power doesn’t reside there, anyway.”
“Paul Nessin would disagree.”
“No one understands the limits of the federal government more acutely than the president himself. New York is the center of power in this country. Washington is a branch office.”
Her lips parted. Though she clearly appreciated his arrogance, she was not quite prepared to smile. Still, her desire, her hunger, was evident. Julian suspected that she had no interest in politics, and even less in the prestige of being First Lady. Her Jewish grandfather and parents had never been fully accepted by Pittsburgh’s business and social elite. She’d had it much easier. From birth, precious few things had been beyond her grasp. The White House was one of them.
“How can you help Harry?”
“I can get him elected.”
“Do you really…” She couldn’t finish.
He nodded. “But I’ll need your…” He’d never asked for help from anyone. “Your input.”
“What can I do?”
“Keep Harry in line.”
“That’s never been a problem.” She smiled demurely. “In any case, he wants this as much as I do.”
“Not true. There are limits to his ambition. Men with limits can be dangerous. I prefer to deal with ruthless men, men who will do anything to get what they want. You always know where men like that stand, what buttons to push. Men with limits are harder to control. You never know how hard to push, or where. That’s where you come in. You have no limits.”
She leaned forward, prepared to protest, then sat back and crossed her legs. “Harry and I celebrated at a restaurant in Pittsburgh the day after he won election to the House. He raised his glass—I think there were tears in his eyes—and said he wanted nothing more from life than what he had: a family, a seat in Congress. I almost spat champagne at him. Even after five years of marriage I had no idea our dreams were so different.” Her mouth puckered in disgust. “But you figured it out right away.”
“My real talent is sizing up people, not companies.”
“I still don’t understand why,” she said. “If New York is where power lies…”
“Why isn’t important,” he said quickly.
“You can get the president on the phone any time you want. What difference does it make to you if it’s Paul Nessin or Harry Lightstone?”
He said nothing.
“Is it about some company you own? No, you’re beyond needing favors on taxes or antitrust. It can’t be about kicking Nessin out of office; you’ve never been considered particularly political, and in any case, there are safer bets than Harry.”
He waited her out in silence.
“Although you probably think you can control Harry more easily than the others. Is that why you settled on him?”
He considered answering, then thought better of it. He’d chosen Lightstone because there had been no other choice. The Democratic incumbent was beyond even his reach. The Republican frontrunners had turned up depressingly clean, despite the relentless and well-compensated efforts of Billy Sandifer to uncover something useful. Lightstone had the tax-cutting, family-values, antigovernment bona fides that a Republican needed to get the nomination, and there was an approachable, just-folks aura to him that took the edge off what was really a fairly radical ideology. And there was something else: Lightstone was weak, which made him a risky bet, but also controllable. “I think Harry will make a fine president,” he said.
Her eyebrows arched ever so slightly. “How did you find out, by the way, about his proclivities?”
He offered the tiniest of shrugs.
“He likes me to stand on a chair when we kiss.” She smiled, almost warmly. “A lot of wives put up with much more.”
Julian stood up. “It’s important we not be seen together,” he said, taking a card from his suit pocket. “This is my cell phone number. Use it to contact me.”
“I’m not sure I completely understand my role.”
“You will.”
She stood up, face suddenly flushed with anger. “Let’s be clear about something. I don’t need this.”
“No, but you want it.”
She opened her mouth but said nothing. Julian picked up his laptop and left her.
Chapter 10
Zach waited until Sarah left for work to begin Googling. He quickly found a reference to a speech Senator Lightstone had delivered at the Saint Francis Hotel to an association of manufacturers. There was nothing more about the speech, but he spent some time clicking ar
ound various San Francisco sites and stumbled on a story about the murder of a prostitute in the Castro district. Halfway through the story he came across a paragraph that drew his interest:
The victim was last seen leaving the Saint Francis Hotel on Union Square at approximately ten o’clock last night. A hotel security official confirmed that the victim had been seen by several people leaving the hotel through the Post Street exit. He refused to comment on the possibility that the victim had been engaged in prostitution with a guest of the hotel. He did, however, confirm that the hotel has provided a guest list to the San Francisco police.
The prostitute had been in the hotel at the same time as the senator. Zach printed the article and placed it inside a folder that he labeled Lightstone. He called the American Association of Manufacturers and was eventually connected to a friendly-voiced woman who identified herself as Peggy Lustig, director of conferences and events.
“I’m putting the final touches on an article for the Chronicle about the conference earlier this week at the Saint Francis,” he told her.
“Fantastic. We certainly appreciated the small item in yesterday’s edition, but obviously a more thorough piece would be great. I wasn’t aware that the Chronicle had sent a reporter to cover the event.”
He charged ahead. “Do you happen to recall what time Senator Lightstone finished his address?”
“I’m not sure of the exact time. It was after dinner…about nine thirty.”
Presidents' Day Page 5
