The Aspen Account

by Bryan Devore

  “Legal, maybe, but not ethical,” Wes whispered. “That’s confidential information.”

  “You’re a journalist’s protected source, relaying confidential information,” he said. “I can protect you from any fallout from that. The attorney general can protect you. And if we’re right about this, it would have been unethical of you not to help us.”

  Wes crossed his arms, pressing the breast of his charcoal suit jacket against his tie. “You and I both know the attorney general doesn’t know anything about this. And even if he wanted to, he couldn’t save my job. It could ruin my career.”

  Andy shook his head. “I can even protect you from that.” He slapped his friend on the shoulder. “Now, you’d better get. We’ll talk again soon—I promise.”

  As the two went their separate ways, Andy flipped open his cell phone and scrolled through the directory to “Sarah Matthews.” But after selecting it, he paused and glanced around the rotunda as if looking for a tardy colleague. Too many people coming and going for him to see if anyone was watching him. He moved from “Dial” to “View Contact” on the menu and noted her work number. Then, snapping the phone back on his belt, he moved across the cavernous room to the bank of wooden call boxes straight out of the 1930s. Stepping inside one, he pulled the folding door closed, plunked a few coins in the slot, and dialed Sarah’s number on the pay phone.

  “This is Sarah.” A busy newsroom clamored in the background.

  “It’s me,” he said. “I have what you asked for. Meet me at the Union Station light rail in thirty minutes. South platform. Buy a ticket for the E line all the way down to Arapahoe.”

  “Moscow rules?” she said jokingly.

  “Yes, actually. This time it has to be. Someone could be watching me. Be on time.” He hung up the phone.

  * * *

  Sarah slung her purse over her shoulder and crossed the floor of the newsroom to the elevator bay. Outside the Denver Post building, she looked over to the Capitol, where a man was hurrying down the long flight of steps that stretched down the hill to the street. She could tell it was Andy by the way he scampered along: two steps at a time, one hand sliding along the metal rail, head lowered, tie flapping behind him in the wind.

  She had to make it to the Sixteenth Street Mall bus station before Andy. It was the quickest way to Union Station, but she couldn’t ride the same bus as he—Moscow rules. They had joked about it when investigating Bruce McCleery, the crooked Denver Public Works manager, but now he was deadly serious about the precautions. Tucking her purse under her arm, she picked up her pace as fast as she could without attracting attention.

  She stepped inside the first bus in line, just before its doors closed. As it pulled away from the station, she looked out the back window in time to see Andy hit the sidewalk at a trot and jump into the next one.

  She leaned her head against the window and looked up at the wall of glass skyscrapers going past. When her bus got held up at a stoplight, she could hear Andy’s bus catching up, and as the light turned green, she glanced back and made eye contact with him through the window before they both looked away. Moscow rules? Who were they kidding? She was a first-year staff reporter for the Post, and he was an assistant attorney general with less than three years’ legal experience. Yet they thought they could track down and expose every corrupt element in the system, one crook at a time. It was something they had often talked excitedly about in Manhattan coffeehouses and bars when they were studying at Columbia. It had seemed such a perfect combination at the time: a young prosecutor and a young journalist working together in secret. He would give her sources and information she couldn’t otherwise obtain; she would ruffle some feathers in the press and help raise the public outcry for investigations he couldn’t start on his own. Then he could prosecute the slimeballs she exposed. A divine collaboration—in theory, anyway—though they had always allowed for the possibility that they might be biting off more than they could chew. But it had worked, and a crooked bureaucrat had fallen. Now they were really getting ambitious—leaping from a smalltime government graft case to a potentially enormous scandal involving what could be an extensive network of corporate executives at one of Kurt’s clients. But, understandably, Andy was getting nervous. She only hoped she could convince him to trust her a little longer.

  The moment the shuttle bus stopped at the end of the line, she was on the street, and walked a few blocks without looking back. At Union Station, she navigated through the crowded terminal, bought her ticket as Andy had instructed, went out the back of the enormous building, and proceeded along the concrete pedestrian bridge to the light rail platform.

  The 2:35 train arrived just as she reached the end of the walkway. She took the steps up the empty car and waited. She had been there half a minute when she heard pounding footsteps and looked up to see Andy practically leap through the open doors. Panting from his run, he didn’t look at her, watching instead the concrete bridge he had just walked over. Nostrils flaring and chest heaving, he watched with the intent gaze of a hunter—or was it prey? After a few seconds, Sarah, too, grew worried enough to raise her head and look down the bridge. On the far side, a heavyset man lumbered toward the train as fast as he could, one hand holding on to a dark brimmed hat, the other holding his side. But before he could make it halfway across the bridge, the electronic ding sounded, and the doors slid shut. The three-car train pulled away from the station and was soon gliding at speed toward the south end of Denver.

  “Who was that?” Sarah asked as the little train hurtled along its elevated track. The cars on the freeway below them moved at practically the same speed, giving her the eerie sensation of standing still while the world rolled past.

  “I don’t know,” Andy replied. “Maybe nobody, but he was with me since I got on the Mall Ride. He see you? Get a look at your face?”

  “I don’t think so. What’s going on?”

  He handed her the thumb drive. “Here’s some of what you asked for.”

  “Some?”

  “I had to take some things off the list.”

  “Why?”

  As the car gently rocked through a curve, Andy grabbed the plastic handgrip attached to the metal bar above him. “We have to be careful about this, Sarah,” he said.

  His eyes were fixed on the two plastic seats next to an open space reserved for wheelchairs. Sarah had seen that look enough times to know that his legal mind was whirring along, working through a problem.

  “There’s a fine line between what’s legal and what’s not,” he said at last. “I had my man pull the list of client names that match with employee assignments at the firm. I also had him match employees with their supervisors. It’s an internal document distributed within Cooley and White. It’s considered confidential information by legal standards, but I can defend our actions in obtaining it under the whistle-blower provision of the code. I just need to make the argument that my man came to me with concerns about the firm’s management activities. But that’s as far as I can go without crossing the line—absolutely no employee files or firm workpapers relating to client records. Under the right circumstances I could subpoena that information, but I just don’t have any reasonable suspicion right now to authorize an action like that.”

  Sarah knew he was right. She had been so eager to get information about Cooley and White and Kurt’s clients, she had just bulled her way forward, requesting everything without considering the legal ramifications. “But you at least got me the names of all employees and how they match with the managers and client assignments?” She was leaning against the Plexiglas divider near the door, wondering whether the little thumb drive contained enough information to identify who at Cooley and White was working with Kurt.

  “Yeah. It should be current.”

  The light rail began to slow for the next stop, and the freeway traffic, which had been keeping speed alongside them, overtook them and rocketed past.

  “Now, what’s this all about?” he asked.


  She turned away to look out the window. Outside, an old woman had risen with great effort from a bench on the rail platform and was inching her way toward the train’s open doors. The conductor waited patiently, watching her in his side mirror.

  “Kurt spoke to me about Cooley and White a few weeks before his death,” she said, still looking west. “He was suspicious—said he had found something he might need me to write about. He thought he might have some kind of story. Said he couldn’t tell me anything until he looked into it more . . . Now he’s dead. I have to find out what he was looking for. I just know he’d want me to be doing this.”

  Andy had moved toward the door. “Be careful what you look for,” he muttered. “You might not like what you find.”

  “You think I’ll find something?”

  He shook his head. “I meant, be careful about expecting to find something. I just don’t want you creating a story in your head because of Kurt—convincing yourself of something that may not be there at all.”

  “He was onto something,” she replied. “I just know it. And he knew it, too. You didn’t see the look in his eyes—I did.” She looked down at the thumb drive as if it were a long-sought treasure. “He was scared of someone at Cooley and White—someone he worked with . . . someone who’s on this disk.” She slipped the thumb drive in her purse and looked up at him, her eyes ablaze with cold green fire. “This could be the big one, Andy—the one we always dreamed about. Remember Columbia? Wanting to change the world? This could be it. My brother was as smart as anyone in that firm. If he thought something was wrong, then we have to look for it—we have to finish whatever he started.”

  8

  MICHAEL STOOD IN line outside the Church nightclub. After two busy days at X-Tronic, his colleagues from Cooley and White hadn’t had much trouble persuading him to join them for Friday happy hour at a sports bar downtown. After a few hours, they had dispersed, but he wasn’t ready to call it a night. The Church was only four blocks from his apartment, so it had felt like an easy detour during his cab ride home. Standing in the cold air, he watched a white Hummer limousine stop in front to deposit a dozen well-dressed VIPs, who were whisked past the bouncers and into the club. Turning up his coat collar for warmth, he shrugged his shoulders in playful flirtation and tried out his smile on the girl in front of him.

  The line crept forward a few steps. Michael looked up at the old stone church, which had been converted into a dance club. The sidewalk where families once promenaded after Sunday worship was now crowded with pale-skinned, black-clad goths, techno enthusiasts, and other, less easily categorized members of the local underground music scene.

  Twenty minutes and twenty dollars later, he was finally inside the club. The house music’s amplified bass line came thumping through the floor as he headed toward the old church’s main sanctuary, where the action was in full swing. Here was just the temporary escape he needed.

  Michael stopped to take in the scene. There must be three hundred people in the main room alone, where four separate bars surrounded the dance floor. The high, vaulted ceiling, shot through with flashing lasers, gave the room a cavernous feel, with eerie qualities of echo and reverberation. Just as he was marveling at the visual effects, a burst of dry-ice “smoke” shot up from the floor, rising slowly into the air as a cloud consumed the vanishing dancers. The smoke climbed a few feet above his head before drifting into a barrage of blue lasers that momentarily formed an eight-foot ceiling, a tightly packed blue grid that hovered low over the dance floor. Michael reached his hand into the air and watched it turn blue as it penetrated the ceiling of lights.

  He closed his eyes and focused on the intoxicating energy of the music. His mind drifted back into a memory of warmth and adventure: a time in his life that he had all but forgotten—nights spent in the maze of underground clubs of Berlin, Prague, Krakow, and Budapest. He danced alone, eyes closed, envisioning himself back in Eastern Europe. A blissful smile broke across his face.

  After a few minutes, he opened his eyes and saw that he had subconsciously gravitated toward the center of the dance floor. He pushed himself through the thick crowds to one of the side bars, got a drink, and went through an arched vestibule into another room. It seemed a perfect haunt for party vampires. A dozen false windows along the stone wall were illuminated with red backlighting that flushed the space with a darkroom crimson glow.

  A young woman sitting alone on a couch near the wall caught Michael’s eye. Long jet-black hair veiled her face. She leaned back into the couch with a confidence that told him she was not searching for anything in life—that what she wanted, she took. He watched her for a moment, then swallowed the last of his drink and went to the bar for another.

  Waiting for his second drink, he turned back to face the crowd, just visible over a low banister. As he watched the ebb and flow of people amid the loud techno beat and flashing lasers, thoughts of his father came unbidden to his mind: the boy, the small-town hero, the college prodigy and eventually the brilliant professor. Michael turned back to the bar and grabbed his drink. He had lost so much when he moved to Denver. He had strayed far from the path that his father and grandfather might have imagined for him. He was haunted by what he had become, by the thought that the great and worthy father would no longer recognize the son, that even his grandfather might question his motives from the grave. His job kept him so busy that he rarely found time to reflect on the chain of decisions that had brought him to Denver in the first place, or the hidden agenda that had brought him to Cooley and White. But the alcohol and the solitude, even here amid the noise and movement of the club, gave him too much time to think about his past decisions and the risk he was willing to take because of his family’s past. He just had never imagined that there would be such a high price to pay for his self-determined mission to revive his family’s lost legacy.

  As he leaned back against the bar, he again caught sight of the young woman as she rose and walked toward the stairs to the club’s basement rooms. Turning at the stairs, she looked at him and gave a little grin as she beckoned him with two slow curls of her index finger. Then she turned and disappeared down the stairs.

  He finished his drink, grabbed another, and went down the stone staircase into the enormous dungeon below the main dance floor. The only illumination came from the spinning strobe lights mounted on the ceiling. Through the darkness, he saw her in the middle of the small dance floor, flanked by a hundred silhouettes. As he approached shyly from the side, he watched her dance with a slow seductiveness that was as aloof as when she had been sitting by herself. Her head was lowered so that her hair continued to veil her face.

  She stopped dancing when she saw him. Lights flashed, illuminating their faces at random intervals, allowing their eyes to meet between intervals of darkness. Smiling playfully, she moved in closer and began dancing against him until one of his legs rubbed between her thighs. He couldn’t always see her in the moving shadows, but he could feel her. He wrapped an arm around her lower back and pulled her close, and they moved together in a lazy dance.

  Her scent intoxicated him, as if she existed solely to seduce him. Something about the blend of isolated strength and solitary vulnerability reminded him of himself. The idle thought came to him that he was feeling pretty drunk. He leaned in and kissed her before she had a chance to resist. But the moment his lips touched hers, their tongues entwined. She pulled him off to a small brick alcove.

  “What’s your name?” he managed to yell over the music.

  “Alaska.”

  “I’m Michael.” He paused, bemused. “What’s your real name?”

  She had a mysterious smile and a sly look in her eye—a gamer.

  “Nice to meet you, Michael, but now I have to go.”

  “Wait. Can I at least get your number?”

  “No, but you can tell me yours and maybe I’ll remember it.”

  “I’ll write it down,” he said.

  “No, just tell me. If I can’t remember it, then
I must not have been that interested.”

  After he told her his number, she leaned up on her toes and kissed him one last time. Then, as she pulled away, she bit his lower lip, hard enough to hurt, before running up the staircase.

  He watched her disappear around the corner of the passageway. Reaching a finger up to his lip, he brought it back down to see a trace of blood. He shook his head. Definitely a gamer.

  Making his way back to the main dance floor, Michael grabbed his jacket from the coatroom. Outside, he found the city’s outlines pleasantly blurred by the alcohol and a pale blanket of snow, with more drifting down in great, feathery clumps from the dark orange clouds that reflected the city lights. He was surprised at the sudden metamorphosis. Only three hours ago, the skies had been empty and the cold ground gray in the moonlight. How quickly the world could change the moment he looked away.

  Shuffling through the snow, he quickly covered the four blocks to his apartment building. He went straight to his balcony, where he looked out at the hazy skyline through the storm. A smile crept onto his face, and he started to laugh—laughed because he had met a beautiful woman tonight and because he had gotten drunk in a church.

  And then, just as suddenly as it had come, his laughter turned to despair, like the laughter of a prisoner overcome by solitude. He didn’t know how much longer he could continue to work for the firm, but Glazier had made it clear that he couldn’t leave. He had come too far in the past few years. He had found himself an opportunity to atone for his grandfather’s failures. How proud the old man would be if he could see him right now. Michael prayed that he was doing the right thing. How would he ever salvage his career and his father’s respect if he was wrong. Even Glazier, his own handler, might crucify him if he couldn’t pull this off. Gazing out at the snowy night, he realized that he had never been more terrified of what the future held.