by Bryan Devore
THE ASPEN ACCOUNT
BRYAN DEVORE
Copyright © 2012 Bryan Devore
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9852413-1-5
Copyright © 2012 Bryan Devore
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Published in the United States of America.
ISBN-10: 0-9852413-1-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-9852413-1-5
Those who wish to acquire favor with a ruler most often approach him with those among their possessions that are most valuable in their eyes, or that they are confident will give him pleasure.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1527
Virtue alone is for real; all else is sham. Talent and greatness depend on virtue, not on fortune. Only virtue is sufficient unto herself. She makes us love the living and remember the dead.
—Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 1647
Prologue
Vail Mountain, Colorado
KURT MATTHEWS FELT as though he had just made a deal with the devil—a deal he had no intention of keeping. As he sat gazing over the forty-foot drop, a cold gust brushed across his face and nearly blew the lit joint out of his gloved hand. He looked out over the tops of the evergreens and aspens sloping down below him. Hearing a rustle behind him, he swore at how easily he had let himself be lured into the secluded woods in the ski resort’s back bowls. He fought to appear relaxed.
“You’re doing the right thing, Kurt,” said the voice behind him. “Just do what you’re told for the next month and everything’ll work out fine.”
Right. Something sarcastic in that tone—he was just being toyed with. To his right, through the trees, the trail ran past like a white, frozen river, a group of four skiers working their way down the far edge of its challenging terrain. How hard would it be to get off this ledge and escape through the woods? He was a good skier, and he would have a fair chance of racing to safety if he could just get out of the trees and onto the open trail.
“A month is a long time,” Kurt said without turning around. “I don’t see how you can keep it a secret.” If he wanted to make it out of these snowy woods alive, he had to sound convincing, as if he would help keep it all under wraps.
“My God,” the voice said. “You really don’t know what you’ve stumbled on, do you?”
There was a brief silence, then a sudden hiss behind him—the sound of a fast movement in ski clothes. He must have made a mistake, said something wrong. He spun around just as something hard thwacked across the side of his head. Though the heavy ski boots slowed him, he still managed to get one hand on the front of his attacker’s red ski coat. Looking into his attacker’s eyes, Kurt felt rage explode inside him as the man cocked the metal baton for another strike. Kurt lowered his head and tried to lunge, but the baton arced again, knocking his hand from the coat and sending him reeling backward. He felt himself slide on the snow, toward the drop-off.
Frantically, Kurt scrabbled in the snow with his hands, then tried to dig in with his elbows as he slid backward. A second later, he felt the snow disappear underneath him. Falling over the ledge, he fell through the air, his speed gaining. His left thigh hit something hard, but he kept falling. Then, with a thudding jolt, he was lying in the snow, looking at the rocky ledge above.
Pain shrieked through his back. His legs felt as if they were someone else’s, and raising his head, he saw a bright red stain in the snow. Rolling sluggishly onto his stomach, he glimpsed a skier gliding by not fifty yards away, through the trees. Stabbing his gloved hands deep, he struggled to haul himself a few feet forward through the loose powder, ski boots dragging behind him like useless clubs. A group of three snowboarders floated past, weaving in and out of the outermost trees with barely a sound. He cried out, knowing he was too far back in the trees to be heard. As another bolt of pain shot through his head, he dragged himself forward another few feet.
A swooshing sound came from above—his attacker was skiing around the rocky ledge to get down to him. Adrenaline fired, pulsing through his body as he hauled himself forward, toward the open trail, still a hundred feet away.
You can do this, Kurt told himself. Stay focused. You can make it . . .
Pulling himself through the stand of pale aspen trunks, half blinded by the pain, he heard the swooshing above him grow louder.
1
MICHAEL CHAPMAN KNEW that he had just made the biggest mistake of his young life. Sitting in the small cubicle padded with puncture-friendly walls, he rubbed his temple to ward off a looming headache. He had gotten a little too careless during the past few months, taking too many chances, and now some of them had caught up with him. He looked at his watch: almost three—the conference meeting would begin in a few minutes. Rising from his ergonomically designed chair, he straightened his tie, took a deep breath, and walked toward the corner conference room at the end of the long hallway.
“It’s just a game,” he whispered nervously to himself, walking through the offices of the largest international accounting firm in Denver. “Stay focused—it’s just a game.”
The Pike’s Peak conference room was one of eight gravitas boardrooms spread throughout Cooley and White, in its towering office building downtown. A smooth white marble conference table stretching the length of the room was surrounded by twenty black leather chairs. As Michael entered the room, he glanced out the window. Seeing the snow-capped Rockies rising in the distance behind the Front Range, he recalled his job interview with Cooley and White, nearly two years ago in this very room. So much had changed during those two years that he only vaguely remembered the excitement he had felt on joining the firm. Now, with his career on the line, he just needed to keep his anxiety at bay long enough to survive the meeting.
The other three audit associates, already seated, were avoiding eye contact with him. Michael was their supervisor on the current audit for Pipco Industries, one of the Denver office’s twenty biggest clients. The engagement had gone like clockwork for the first two months, but as pressure for the work deadline mounted this past month, things had suddenly turned disastrous. Now he and his three subordinates waited for the emergency meeting called by his boss, John Falcon.
The door to the conference room opened, and Falcon strode into the room. For a senior audit partner working an average of a hundred hours a week, the man still found time to stay remarkably fit. Rumor had it that he slept only four hours a night. His jet-black hair and trim, tanned physique belied his fifty years, and his nonstop energy had made him one of the most successful of the firm’s forty partners. Falcon stood stiffly across the table, staring at the four auditors and making no attempt to hide his ire.
With over seven hundred offices across the globe, Cooley and White was one of the biggest international accounting firms in the world, and its Denver office was more than twice the size of the next largest firm in the city. And Michael well knew one of the main reasons for the firm’s dominance: mistakes were not tolerated.
“This is a complete disaster!” Falcon said, pressing his palms to the conference table and leaning forward. He stared a hole in each of them. “I can’t believe you’ve upset a client that pays us over a million dollars a year! Do you realize that the CFO personally called me to complain?”
The young auditors squirmed in silence. Michael su
ddenly realized that they were all in much more trouble than even he had thought.
Falcon turned from the table and moved to the window. Thirty-seven floors below, the city awaited a winter storm that was already swallowing up the mountains before their eyes.
Michael focused on keeping his composure. Half an hour ago, he could almost taste the strong lime margaritas at the Rio in LoDo’s bar district, where he was to meet two coworkers, Kurt Matthews and Todd Osgood, for an early happy hour. Now all he wanted was to keep his job.
Falcon turned from the window, rubbing his forehead. “Look,” he said evenly, “I just spent thirty minutes in a meeting discussing how we’re going to respond. Do you guys realize how serious this is? We lost original invoice documents that belonged to the client. How the hell could that have happened? Michael, you’re the senior on the engagement—it’s your job to supervise the team in the field. Care to explain what happened?”
Despite his effort to relax, Michael could already feel the sweat beading on his forehead. “This was a big misunderstanding,” he said. “No one knew what happened to the documents. The client thought they had given them to us, but we thought they still had them.”
“Well, which is it?” Falcon demanded.
It was me, damn it, Michael thought to himself. I broke firm policy—took the original documents from the client’s premises and hid them in the trunk of my car for two days. There was no other way. “We don’t know,” he said. “The documents turned up a few days after we noticed they were missing.”
“They just ‘turned up’?” Falcon said, raising his eyebrows in mock astonishment.
“I found them,” said the young blonde woman sitting next to Michael. Her fingers fidgeted on the table without her knowing it as she withered under his gaze. “They were buried under some of the workpapers in the audit room.”
“They were with our papers the whole time?” Falcon asked. “So the client was right—we did have them.”
“No,” she replied. “We had already looked through everything when they went missing. I searched everything—we all did. I swear they weren’t there before.”
“But they were there, Amanda,” Falcon insisted. “If you had found them the first time you looked, we would have avoided all this.”
Leave her alone, Michael wanted to say. It’s me you want. After two days I put them in a pile of work papers where I knew someone would find them. She’s innocent. But all he said was, “It’s not her fault, John. We all stacked workpapers around the area, and the client kept bringing things in and out. These just got misplaced in the shuffle.”
“You’re missing the point here,” Falcon said. “Misplacing the documents for a few days wouldn’t have been the end of the world. It’s what happened next that really upset the client.”
“The accusation,” Michael said.
Falcon nodded. “It was way out of line. Do you realize how bad it looks that you guys accused the client of misplacing these docs, only to find out that you had them the whole time? Do you know how serious that is? The client’s procurement manager was terrified she would get fired over this, and the controller was taking heat from the CFO. Then the documents turn up in our files, and everyone realizes the whole thing was really our fault. Christ, people thought they were going to lose their jobs. This has struck a real nerve with the client—I’m doing everything I can to keep us from losing their business.”
“John,” Michael said, “I’m sorry this got so out of control, but I’ve apologized to the CFO and everyone else involved. We had a long talk, so hopefully things will calm down at Pipco.”
“Well, that’s something, at least, but it may be too little, too late. I was also appalled that you didn’t properly document the sales transaction of the discontinued operations. You should know better than to blow past an issue that important. You were careless.”
“I’m sorry about the problems on the engagement,” Michael said, “and I take full responsibility for what happened, but I think we can still—”
Falcon’s upraised hand cut him off, and Falcon shook his head as if to say there was no point in continuing the discussion. “It doesn’t matter anymore. All of you have been pulled off the engagement. It was the client’s request, and to be honest, I agree with them. We can’t afford to lose them. You will transfer all your files to me, and I’ll forward them to the new team that will be out there next week.”
Falcon strode toward the door and opened it while motioning for everyone to leave the room. “I still need to decide what we’re going to do with the four of you, but for the time being I think you all need to give some serious thought to everything that went wrong on this engagement.”
The mortified staff auditors rose from the conference table and left the room with eyes lowered, unable to look at the senior partner as they walked past. Michael put himself last in the procession so he could offer one final apology, but before he could open his mouth, Falcon shut the door so that they were the only two in the room.
“This is your third project in a row where something has gone seriously wrong,” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” Michael replied. But he offered no explanation, no rehearsed defense, nothing to counter the grave indictment. He knew he had been pressing his luck for the past few months, and for the first time, he considered the terrifying possibility that he had finally pushed it too far.
Seeing that Michael had nothing to say in his own defense, Falcon shook his head. “The others will all get negative evaluations in their employee files for their part in the project, but for you this is a little more serious.” He looked at his watch. “I’d like to take a moment to cool down, but then I want to see you in my office in fifteen minutes.”
When Michael finally walked out of the room, he looked at his watch and made a quick note of the time. Fifteen minutes. That might give him just enough time to leave the building and make an urgent call in case this proved to be the end of his career at Cooley and White. Walking down the hallway as fast as he could without drawing attention, he grabbed his coat from his cubicle and moved past glass-walled offices and more cubicles to the marble-floored elevator bay. Hitting the button, he stepped back and looked again at his watch. Fourteen minutes. He would need to hurry.
2
MICHAEL WALKED OUT the revolving glass doors to the Wynkoop Courtyard, where fat clumps of snow drifted like goose down on the faint breeze. On sunny days, the courtyard had a lunch crowd of three hundred, but today’s storm had left it under a foot of snow, and empty. To make sure he couldn’t be overheard by anyone coming or going from the building, he walked into the center of the plaza. He stepped out into the open, lowered his head, and punched in a number on his cell phone as wet snow fell down the back of his jacket collar.
“Glazier,” a crisp voice answered.
“It’s Chapman.”
“Michael? What the . . . ! You can’t just call me like this. We’re scheduled to talk next week.”
“I wish it could wait, but there’s something you need to know right away.”
“Make it brief.”
“Something happened today,” he began. “There were some mistakes made on a project.”
“Any trouble for you?”
Michael swiped the snow off a concrete bench with his arm and sat in the center of the desolate courtyard. “I didn’t think there would be. I’ve been in this situation before, so I assumed I would still have a little breathing room with the firm.”
“You assumed?”
“Damn it, Glazier. It’s right before busy season. The firm can’t afford to let anyone go this time of year. A slap on the wrist—that’s all I expected. It’s the only way this’ll work, and you know it.”
“Not if you get fired. You can’t let that happen, no matter what. It would ruin everything.”
Michael squeezed the phone tight. His fingers were getting cold. He looked at his watch: six minutes.
“I’ve been pulled from my current project. My entire
team’s being reassigned. And now I have to meet privately with Falcon.”
“Shit! What did you do?” After a brief pause, the voice known as Glazier said, “Look, too much is riding on the line. I don’t care what you have to do—just make sure you still have your job at the end of the day. I don’t have to tell you what’ll happen if you get fired—too many people are depending on you.”
“I’ve gotta go, Glazier. I just wanted to update you. I’ll touch base later.”
Michael snapped the phone shut and turned to look up at the dark monolith that housed Cooley and White. Even in the muted light of snowfall, the building’s black windowed surface had a slick sheen that earned it the nickname of the “Darth Vader building.” It was an image of power, but also of gloom and despair. Walking back across the snowy courtyard, toward the revolving doors and the inviting warmth inside, he felt as if he were heading back into the lion’s den. Glazier’s words lingered in his mind: . . . just make sure you still have your job at the end of the day. His contact was right, of course. Everything they had done together for the past three years could be destroyed in the next twenty minutes of his life.
* * *
“Michael. Please, come in.” Falcon’s demeanor had softened in the short time since their last meeting, and Michael was terrified that the man was taking the polite, respectful attitude often extended to someone before they got the sack.
He glanced around Falcon’s office, taking in his surroundings, as if he might somehow save his career by understanding the man who now held it in his hands. On the shelf sat a family photo, a black-and-white that reminded him of one of those old Austrian films set in the Alps. There were professional certificates from various states and universities, and a watercolor of aspen groves in a hanging valley.
