An early lack of cooperation with the government would deny Templar a settlement advantage, but Tyler wasn't worried about that. The government had, or thought they had, something big on Templar Enterprises, something linking the company with illegal technology transfers. The sooner he figured out what that link was, the quicker he could find a way to fight back. And if he didn't fight back - and win - the consequences would be disastrous. The government would shut them down, suppliers would stop orders and creditors would close in. The company was already operating on a razor-thin margin.
And then there was the call from Noah Gettleman. Apparently the folks out in New Mexico were having a problem keeping their maintenance records straight. Gettleman never got back to him, so there was no way to tell yet if his problem was serious. The next person on the team who ticked Tyler off would be assigned to follow up with Gettleman’s record-keeping issues.
He stared unenthusiastically at his monitor. After everything that had happened, after an entire day of crisis after crisis, only now did he feel a dull, throbbing headache growing behind his temples. He had gone through the preliminary interviews that his staff had conducted with the purchasing department managers. So far, there was nothing that indicated a problem. But the investigation was just starting, and there would be a lot more material to go through over the next few days.
Jacob Jackson promised to supply all the financial records regarding Templar’s government procurement programs, but the CFO told him that would include gigabytes of data, and that printouts of the summaries alone would fill a file cabinet. More people from the accounting department would have to be brought in to go through the information.
Tyler looked up as Dusty walked in. “What’s going on?”
“Here are the rest of the interviews.”
Tyler took the files. “Great. I was just running out of things to do.”
“How about if I give you a hand going through these? I’ll order more pizza and a few beers.”
“Let’s call it a night, Dusty. Tell everyone to go home and get some sleep. I’ll see you first thing tomorrow.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
After Dusty left, Tyler called Teresa’s apartment number with his desk phone. He hoped her roommates wouldn’t pick up.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Teresa.”
“Hey, you!” she said brightly. “Where are you? Are you home?”
“Actually, I’m going to be staying in a hotel for the next few nights.” He glanced around his office. “There was a fire in my apartment this morning.”
Teresa gasped. “What?”
“It was mostly smoke damage. No one was hurt.”
“How did the fire start?”
“They’re say it was set off by a lit flare under the couch.”
“A flare? Do you even own a flare?”
“Not unless you happened to bring one into the apartment.”
“Are you serious?”
“Not at all,” Tyler said with a sigh. “I think somebody broke in and intentionally set the place on fire.”
“Who would do that? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I stopped at your place this morning, around nine. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. It must have happened soon after I left...” Teresa was silent for a few moments, and then added, “Look, you can crash at my place if you want.”
“I think it would be a bit crowded between you, your two roommates and the three cats.” He decided not to tell her about the death threat and photograph that was sent to his office. That would only worry her more. “I’m fine,” he said lightly. “Hey, don’t feel bad for me. The company’s putting me up in a hotel until I’m back on my feet.”
“I’m not worried about you. Now that I don’t have your apartment to clean, I might have to do some real work to make money.”
“Your concern for my welfare is appreciated, Teresa.”
She laughed. “Well, I know you don't like me getting too emotional, seeing as how it interferes with that macho detachment of yours.”
He rested his elbows on the desk and grinned. He could go an afternoon against Bryce, Holloway attorneys and never feel as challenged as he did after a five-minute conversation with Teresa. The way she could pick him apart was unnerving.
“Do you want to get together?” he asked without thinking.
“Is this some backhanded way of making up for last night?”
He glanced around the room. “Yeah, and I really need to get out of this office.”
“Are you sure you’re up for it? I mean, you just -”
“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
“Anywhere?”
“Anywhere in the city.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously.”
“Fine. I want to go to the Red Skeeve.”
Tyler winced. “Is that one of those clubs you’re always talking about?”
“Uh-huh. We can catch a late dinner first.”
“That’s fine. We’re not going to be alone, though. The company has assigned me bodyguard protection.”
“Bodyguards? Are you in danger?”
“Nothing to worry about. It’s just something they want me to have for a few days, due to the… suspicious nature of my apartment fire. I’ll have a driver pick you up.”
“All right,” she replied hesitantly. “Give me an half an hour. No, make it an hour.”
Tyler glanced at his watch. It was nearing eight o’clock. “Nine o’clock, then.”
“We’ll have fun tonight, Samson. I'm glad to see that you're willing to expand your horizons.”
He frowned, not knowing what to make of that. “See you soon.” He hung up, and then picked up the desk phone to call the conference room. When the other line picked up, he said, “Lynn, I'm going out tonight. I’m going to need one of your people to pick up my girlfriend.”
“I don't think this is a good time to be -”
“She’ll be ready in an hour.”
“It's not happening, Mr. Tyler. Not tonight. I don’t have the staff in place for you to make a public appearance.”
“We'll be fine. Perry can chaperone.”
“We're not taking that kind of risk. We don't know who or what -”
“I'm not asking you, Lynn,” Tyler interrupted. “I need a break. I'll only be gone for a few hours. No one needs to know.”
He could sense Lynn did not like the idea one bit. She muttered something under her breath and said, “You don't exactly endear yourself to people, do you, Mr. Tyler?”
“I appreciate your cooperation, Lynn.”
Tyler hung up, and with a frown, straightened his collar and tie, wondering what, exactly, the Red Skeeve was going to be like.
***
“You don't exactly endear yourself to people, do you, Mr. Tyler?”
“I appreciate your cooperation, Lynn.”
The conversation terminated with a hang-up. Static sounded for several seconds before Merrick removed her headset and reached over to switch off the receiver unit on the desk. She had tapped into Templar's phone system months ago. The physical tap located in the building’s basement junction box was of the same type she was using on Tyler's apartment complex. The tap was based on a military design, untraceable from the source phone and difficult to detect as a secondary, encrypted radio transmission. With it, she was able to monitor and record every internal phone call in the building.
The lights in the bedroom were dimmed and the curtains drawn over the windows. Merrick sat before her computer. She wasn’t wearing any makeup or a wig. Her real hair was only a few inches long and chestnut brown in color. Her eyes were a pale blue, accenting a thin face with model-high cheekbones and thin lips. It was a canvas for which she could transform herself into a woman (or, occasionally, a man) of almost any appearance.
She was looking at the ‘Red Skeeve’ website. It wasn’t very well-designed, but the site gave her the
information she needed about its location and opening times. She paused to take a quick sip of mineral water as she checked a few other online sources referencing the club.
Five minutes later, Merrick shut down her computer, stood, and stretched. Her body was lean and taut. She was wearing black shorts and a green tank top that rode crookedly across her chest. She walked over to the large window, pulled open the curtains and gazed out over Central Park, wondering why she didn’t spend more time here at the Park Avenue residence. This was, after all, her largest Manhattan safe house, and the one that carried the highest rent. She paid for the sublet in cash under a false name and had never actually met the owner. Over the last few years she had decorated the apartment opulently with mostly Asian furnishings, painstakingly choosing everything from the step tansu to the hand-painted silk screens.
Her sneakers left indents across the plush white carpet as she entered the spacious living room, where the only furnishings were the wall-mounted plasma screen television, a leather upholstered couch with coffee table, and a motorized treadmill.
She started the treadmill and eased the slider control to a speed of a fast walk. Then she picked up the remote from the cup holder and turned on the television. On the screen, a reporter was standing on the sandy grounds at the perimeter of the Thomas Dorian Space Center. Large buildings stood behind him, shimmering in the desert heat. As the news report began, Merrick increased her speed to a slow jog.
“As one of the largest private space corporations today, Templar has influenced several critical pieces of legislation in Washington, laws that have included some very favorable tax breaks for the industry. It is those tax breaks, virtually tailored for a specific company, that have drawn significant criticism from opponents.”
The reporter turned sideways to show the compound behind him. “Another issue facing the company is safety. No one knows the potential risks of Templar’s new orbiter class. NASA shuttle flights once carried an estimated one-in-one hundred risk of disaster. Templar claims its orbiter is as safe as a conventional aircraft.”
Merrick smiled to herself. Tax breaks and disaster risks. That was nothing. Templar Enterprises had problems that went right to the company core.
For nearly two years now, the company had been the conduit for a small but extremely lucrative smuggling operation. With a handful of inside conspirators within both the company and the Department of Defense, Merrick had organized a very secret and very lucrative operation.
Templar Enterprises bought large amounts of surplus material from the government, and Merrick had arranged for some of the purchased material to be intentionally mislabeled on the government side. During transit, she would divert those goods for her own resale to Lanton and other middlemen. She had no shortage of customers; Asian buyers bought the bulk of the technology, and several of her South American contacts were always in the market for scrapped weapon components.
As with any government service, the purchasing process created a massive amount of duplicative paperwork. Originally, this complexity actually made the smuggling easier, but now that Merrick was trying to eliminate evidence of her actions, she realized that covering up her entire operation on both ends would be a difficult, if not impossible task.
Seventeen million dollars in a little less than two years could be considered success by any measure. It was not as much as she had hoped to make, but now that her operation was on the verge of exposure, she decided that Templar Enterprises had been used for all it was worth. She had spent the last month methodically going over all the database records she could access. Electronic supply lists, price requests, inventory accounts, and even bills of lading had been deleted or carefully altered. The only records that Merrick could not change were hard copy records, but they did not worry her much. Others could fight over the lingering discrepancies, if they were ever discovered at all.
After this week, she was out of the business for good.
She couldn’t wait.
Her cell phone chimed. Merrick stopped the treadmill and walked over to the driftwood and glass-topped coffee table to pick up one the dozen cellular phones arranged in two rows. There was a small static crackle as the encryption system kicked in.
“Yes?” she said.
A slightly garbled voice replied, “He’s not easing up on this, and we’re running out of time.”
“You just do what you’re supposed to do. I told you, he’s contained.”
“What if he isn’t contained?”
“Then we implicate him.”
“Will that work at this point? I mean, maybe we should -”
She cut him off. “This is all part of our plan. Something we both agreed to. Are you saying now that we miscalculated?”
There was a long pause.
“What should I do, then?” she pressed.
“I don't know.”
“Of course you don't know,” she told him, with a sarcastic edge. “If our man gets out of control, then I’ll deal with him. Right now, everything is going according to plan. By the way, this is the second time you’ve called me with that same cell phone. I told you to dispose of them after each use.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Next time, call me on number thirty-three. And only call if it’s important. These phones aren’t cheap, you know.”
She hung up and tossed the phone back on the table.
It beeped again.
Frowning, Merrick hesitated and snatched up the phone. Scowling, she snapped it open. “Yes?”
“Hi, Jennifer?”
“Uh, yes,” Merrick said, subtly softening her voice. “Who is this?”
“It’s April from the Woodcrest Real Estate Office.”
“Oh! Hi, April. What’s the good word?”
“Uh, I tried the other number you gave me, but it had been disconnected.”
“Yes, that phone was … stolen. This is my old number.”
“I see. I’m sorry for calling you so late in the evening, but I just heard from the owners of the property. They’ve accepted your offer.”
“That’s great,” Merrick said, walking across the room and falling into her recliner.
“The other bidder pulled out. Financing problems, I heard. Anyway, the property is yours. Congratulations!”
Merrick smiled. “I have to tell you, April, you just made my night.”
“When do you want to set up the closing?”
“I have a few things to wrap up here in New York. I’ll give you a call next week to make arrangements.”
“Sounds great. Talk to you then.”
Merrick leaned back, spread out her arms and kicked out her legs.
“Yes!” she shouted.
Humming to herself, she went into her bedroom and entered her walk-in closet. Racks of clothes and costumes hung from the three walls. Arranged neatly on the floor were dozens of pairs of shoes. After a few minutes of searching, she pulled out three dresses. She walked over to the long makeup desk in the corner. It was covered with Styrofoam heads, each wearing a wig of different colors and lengths. Cluttering the desktop was modeling wax and tools, bottles of Spirit Gum Adhesive, liquid latex, brushes and sponges, and, of course, cases of makeup. She flicked on the lights around the large oval mirror and held the dresses up before her, one at a time.
“No,” she muttered, tossing the tight red dress onto the bed. A moment later, the light green off-the-shoulder number was also rejected. That left her with the black silk dress. She held it up and nodded.
She hung the dress on a hook behind the door and sat down at the desk. She stared at her reflection in the mirror. She squinted, ran her fingers through her cropped hair, and then looked over at the assorted Styrofoam heads.
Since Teresa Keller had dark hair, Merrick figured that might be Samson Tyler’s preference. Merrick was very skilled with prosthetic makeup. If she had kept a few photographs of Teresa, she was sure that she could have made herself look nearly identical to the woman. However, for this evening, Merric
k did not need to impersonate. She simply needed a look that would capture attention.
She picked up the foam head with a wig of long, straight black hair. She held it up before her.
“Tonight,” she told herself with a crooked grin, “I think I’ll go Goth.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“You know this isn’t my kind of place.”
“Oh, don't be such a pain.”
“At least you’re within the dress code.”
“Relax, Samson. You look fine.”
Dressed in a blue skirt cut nearly as high across her thighs as her blouse cut low over her chest, Teresa shivered in the cool night breeze. She huddled beside Samson, who could not have looked more mismatched with her, dressed in a conservative charcoal suit and red silk tie. Though he knew Teresa frequented these trendy places, it was a side of her that he had never seen in person. It would take some getting used to.
“This wasn’t what I expected.” He glanced around at the sprawling crowd ahead and behind them. The line extended from one corner of the old brownstone all the way down to the end of the block. And it was still early. Teresa had said that people would actually wait - sometimes for hours - just to get inside the Red Skeeve. The club was one of those places that had sprung up out of nowhere. It would probably be closed and forgotten next month, but tonight it was the hottest place off Bleeker Street. From inside they could hear the deep, pumping bass.
Tyler never cared for the party scene. He hated the loud music and the closeness of strangers. He grimly recalled that the last time he had gone to a club was because the girl he was dating wanted to go to this ‘hot’ new nightclub that opened. He had avoided taking her there for a month.
When she threatened to break up with him, finally he took her. He had a lousy time, and the relationship ended a week later.
That was nearly two years ago. He hoped history would not repeat itself.
Perry Newbold, the bodyguard assigned to him for the evening, stood behind the two, looking rather inconspicuous with a loose button-down shirt and jeans. Somehow, he seemed to know what to wear to this place. At the very least, Tyler thought that Perry should have warned him about what he was getting into.
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