The Aspen Account

by Bryan Devore

  As the band started up, Michael turned to say something to Sarah, when his eyes settled on a familiar image amid the throng. His heart skipped as he caught a profile view of what looked like Alaska’s face. But before he could move forward to catch a better look, the lights from the mansion dimmed, and he lost her.

  24

  JERRY DIAMOND LEANED his considerable bulk back in his chair, sipping his bourbon and gazing out at the Portland skyline. Setting his drink down on the table, he turned back to look at the man sitting across from him in the top-floor bar of the luxurious Continental Hotel. An aging lounge singer in a purple dress stood next to the baby grand piano, singing a slow jazz number.

  “So everything’s finished,” Diamond said to the man.

  “No, it’s far from finished,” the man said in the tone of a professor lecturing a student. “We still have a lot of work to do—you saw so yourself.”

  “But it works, Winston,” the X-Tronic CFO said. “It works, damn it. That’s the important thing. If it works, then everything else is just a matter of implementation.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” the man replied, smiling. “The prototype works. That’s really what matters. The hardest part is finished…but that brings me to my latest concern.”

  “What’s that?” Diamond said, looking back down at his drink. He had long ago developed the skill of looking casually away from a person just as they were about to ask the impossible of him.

  “The financing. It’s time to start running the production facilities. When does my team get final funding?”

  Diamond grimaced. He knew that his associate would not like the answer. “We can’t give it to you just yet. It might take another month or two.”

  Winston choked on his whiskey and started coughing. He looked back at Diamond with watering eyes. “You’re kidding, right? A month or two?”

  “Maybe longer,” Diamond said with a deadpan face, then took a drink of bourbon.

  “Why?” the man asked, leaning forward with both arms on the white tablecloth, palms up. “That could be too long. It’s hard to keep things like this a secret, you know. The longer we sit on it, the more likely something will leak.”

  “That’s a risk we’ll just have to take. The funding can’t be completed until after the merger.”

  The man’s face sank. In a mournful voice, he said, “That’s corporate politics—it has nothing to do with me or my work.”

  Though Diamond was not generally a sympathetic man when it came to funding allocations of X-Tronic’s annual budget, he could understand the man’s disappointment. They both wanted this project to be finished without any unpleasant surprises.

  Reminding himself that the man in front of him was about to make him one of the most powerful and respected CFOs in America, Diamond leaned forward. Now he was the lecturer. He spoke in a calm, reassuring voice. “Look, we can’t spend or announce anything until after X-Tronic resolves this situation with the Cygnus bid. A merger would essentially reset all our accounting records with new valuations. The timing’s critical; we have to be very careful about how we do this. And we’ve done everything possible to safeguard access to the project. Only a handful of people outside your team even know it exists. Nothing will leak.”

  “Seems like an unnecessary risk to me. I hope you guys in Denver know what you’re doing.”

  “We do,” Diamond said, grinning. “Besides, I know your team still has a few small glitches to work out in the software. I could see that much during my tour of the facilities today. This’ll give you enough time to make sure the final design is flawless long before we get into mass distribution.”

  The piano player struck the last chords of the song, and the singer gave a quick bow to light applause. Winston took the final sip from his whiskey and stood up from the table. “I’ve waited five years for this moment,” he said. “I guess I can wait a little longer before it’s announced. Just don’t let Denver get distracted from what we’re trying to do. Merger or not, we’re about to change the software industry forever.”

  “Good night, Winston,” he said as his guest walked away from the table. Despite their strained conversation, he had been very excited by what he saw at the Portland facility today. He couldn’t wait to return to Denver and let everyone know that their plans were right on schedule. Now it was up to the twins to see that the merger went through without any problems.

  25

  MICHAEL FINISHED DRESSING in the darkened room in the east wing of the Seaton estate. Flipping his nylon travel bag over on the empty bed, he pulled a green fleece from the side pocket. Dawn was breaking over eastern Kansas and wouldn’t gray the skies over Aspen for another hour, though songbirds already were stirring in the trees lining the back of the estate.

  Keeping the lights off in his room so that no one would see him stirring at this early hour, he zipped up the collar on his fleece and moved toward the door.

  The hallway outside his room was quiet, and the room next to his showed no light under the door—Sarah was still asleep. He moved quietly through the gray shadows to the softly glimmering banister that curved down the grand staircase to the front corridor on the ground floor. At the bottom he tiptoed past the display cases of costly artifacts that Don Seaton had collected during a lifetime of travels. He felt like a cat burglar skulking about such unguarded wealth in someone else’s home.

  Moving to the kitchen, at the opposite side of the mansion, he stopped at a back door to the outside. Pushing it open as slowly as possible, he peeked out into the cold air. Fifty yards across a field of snow stood a stone building. Lance had told him it was originally a horse stable before his father converted it into a garage big enough to house forty cars.

  Ten minutes ago, Michael had heard the soft purr of a car engine arriving at the estate. Unable to see any activity from his window’s limited view, he had thrown on enough clothes to sneak outside. Seeing the dim lights in the frosted windows of the old stables, he moved across the snowy field in slow, cautious steps. The snow was overrun with footprints from the party, so there was little chance of leaving a trail. Reaching the limestone wall of the stables, he moved along in the building’s shadow.

  Without warning, a beam of light shot out from the darkness, just missing him standing flat against the wall. He dropped to his knees and hugged the shadow of the building as another car pulled into the front drive of the stables. He heard a car door open and close, then footsteps crunching in snow before disappearing into the building.

  Inching his way toward the front of the building, Michael saw a black Mercedes parked with its front bumper pressed against a high snowbank. Tracks led from the car to a small side door, still ajar, next to the main doors, which were closed. Following the footprints, he peeked into the doorway just in time to see a tall shadow shrink and disappear up a ramp to an unseen room.

  As he stepped into the old stables, his feet crunched softly on the gravel floor. He crept along, feeling his way, until he came to a makeshift board ladder that led up to a square hole in the ceiling. Realizing this was the best way to move closer to the light without the risk of being seen, he climbed hand over hand up the rungs until he found himself in a huge attic with rafters angling in sharp upside-down V’s. The attic’s board floor stretched the length of a basketball court.

  Looking for joists through the slim gaps between the boards, he crawled along the planks at a snail’s pace, gently redistributing his weight with each movement to minimize the chance of creaking boards. After what felt like an eternity in the darkness, with slivers of light shooting through the spaces between the boards and striping the roof above, he had advanced far enough from the square hatch that he could now see down into the main room. A half-dozen men stood in the center of a peculiar cluster of fine automobiles, as if they were a gang of thieves admiring a heist they had just made. In the center stood Lance and Lucas Seaton, speaking in low tones. Michael could not catch a word they said.

  Though he did not recognize the ot
her men, he memorized every detail he could. Their suits, too formal and luxurious for a dawn meeting in an old stable, suggested something shady. They appeared stiff and obedient in the presence of the twins, yet their confidence was apparent in their nods of agreement with whatever the twins were discussing. Michael guessed them to be lawyers or bankers perhaps. But whoever they were, they seemed to be working for the twins, and clearly they were working in secret.

  Realizing that he had learned all he could from his hidden lookout, Michael became acutely aware of his exposed position. Sooner or later the meeting would conclude, and if he didn’t make it back into the mansion before then, he could easily be caught out. He turned and crawled back toward the square hatch that led down from the attic. Knowing he would be blind while climbing back down the ladder feetfirst, he peeked through the hole, searching for any sign of life below—he had been forced to crawl so slowly across the attic floor that he could not be certain the meeting was still going on. Somewhere outside in the distance, a dog started barking. He feared that the other overnight guests from the party were beginning to wake. He didn’t have much time to get back.

  Sensing no movement below him, he started down the ladder. He expected at any moment to hear a voice yell out at him. But no sound came, and soon enough, his feet were back on the ground. He moved to the door and left the stables. The car sat undisturbed out front, and a dim blue glow over the eastern peaks announced the approaching day.

  A smile broke over his face as he felt the exhilaration of having escaped undetected, but it was wiped away as he rounded the corner of the building and found himself face-to-face with a short, stocky man standing shin-deep in the snow. He wore a thick cashmere coat so long it dragged the surface. The man’s rosy cheeks revealed that he had been in the cold air for some time, but his shiny brown eyes seemed quite focused, as though he could tolerate a great deal more discomfort without being distracted.

  “Are we lost, Mr. Chapman?”

  But before he could answer, he heard noises behind him. Jerking his head to look back at the stable’s side door, he could now see a glimmer of light where he had left it cracked open. The men must be walking down the ramp from the main room and would soon be outside the stables. He had to move fast. “Just stretching my legs,” Michael said to the man. “Couldn’t sleep . . . feeling better now, though.” He walked quickly, trying to move past the man and make it back to the mansion before the men inside the stable came out. But a strong hand grabbed his arm.

  “You’ll never make it in time. Come this way.” And without another word, the man pulled him to the side of the building. They stood in the shadows as the other men exited from the building and exchanged a few final words. Then the Mercedes pulled away as the twins and the other men hiked through the snowy field back toward the mansion.

  “Who are you?” Michael whispered.

  “Name’s Hopkins. I work for Mr. Seaton.”

  “Don Seaton? What kind of work?”

  “I’m the butler. What happens on the property is my responsibility.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Who said I was looking for you?”

  “Who were you looking for?”

  Hopkins didn’t answer. He watched the dark silhouettes moving across the field to the mansion.

  “You knew my name,” Michael continued.

  “Mr. Chapman, I’m required to be familiar with all overnight guests at the estate.”

  “What were you doing out here?” Michael persisted.

  Hopkins turned away from the field after everyone had disappeared back into the house. His shiny brown eyes gleamed at Michael from the shadows, with an intensity that commanded attention. “Mr. Chapman, this never happened. We never met. Neither of us was ever here.”

  Hopkins paused to make sure there was no misunderstanding. There was none. “Now it should be fine for you to return to the main house,” he went on. “The twins never linger on the main floor. But watch the windows. Don’t let anyone see you.”

  Michael moved past Hopkins to look around the corner. “Why are you helping me?” he asked, but when he turned around, the man was already out of sight, around the corner of the building.

  26

  THE BLACK LINCOLN Town Car turned off the FDR Highway and into the parking area of the Downtown Manhattan Heliport. The DMH, the premier heliport in New York City, catering mostly to top business executives, was only a few miles south of Wall Street, on the L-shaped Pier 6, which stuck out into the East River just north of the Staten Island Ferry.

  Don Seaton stepped out of the limousine and walked with Marcus toward the terminal. Even on a Sunday afternoon, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was busy coordinating ship activity along the East River. Moving through the small security station, the two men were soon walking with a pilot down the wide concrete pier, to a blue Dauphin AS-365 helicopter. Stepping into the spacious aircraft, Seaton stretched his legs and started reading one of the files in his lap.

  The bird lifted off, stirring a wide circle of white ripples that trembled in the river below. Rising into the air, they banked over the Brooklyn Bridge and followed the river as the field of gray buildings faded away behind them. Seaton looked out at the Empire State Building, still an imposing, beautiful feature of the skyline after all these many decades. Sunlight glinted off the countless glass-skinned buildings, making New York look, from the air, like the cleanest city in the world. Out the opposite window, he could see in the distance the Statue of Liberty, standing alone above the cold gray water. Flying over the city, Seaton could not help feeling a sad hollowness. He reflected briefly on the vigorous young man he had once been, and compared him to the sagging face now reflected in the window. And reflecting on the long and eventful life he had lived, he could not but wonder how much further he would be able to go before the end found him. Perhaps, he thought with an uncharacteristic sense of gloom, this would be his last time ever to see New York City.

  Within minutes they landed at one of the Teterboro Airports, where they again made their way through security before being escorted to the private Learjet, where Captain Steiner was waiting to take off.

  Once they were in the air, Seaton scanned through some additional investigative documentation relating to Lance and Lucas during their university days. “What does all this prove?” he asked Marcus after closing the file.

  Marcus was sitting across from him, at one of the small tables near the back of the fuselage.

  “It proves they are capable of a lot more harm than we originally thought.”

  “You can’t really conclude that based on just this.”

  “Sir, I had one of my contacts at the Bureau take a look at this information. She’s a profiler, and I figured her opinion wouldn’t hurt.”

  “That’s taking things a little far, isn’t it, Marcus? An FBI shrink? We don’t even know for sure if the boys have been up to anything. So they’ve taken a different stance than I on the Cygnus merger talks. So they’re distancing themselves from my ideas and have been trying to persuade the board to change strategies. I can handle the board, and I can sure as hell handle my own sons.”

  Marcus said nothing as his boss turned to look out the window.

  “Okay,” Seaton conceded after his brief objection. “So what did your friend say?”

  “She said the thing that most interested her, the one thing that we need to be most cautious of, is that the twins have always been together. She didn’t see any evidence of competition between them, no evidence of disagreements or disloyalty. Everything they have been through, they have been through together. They feed off each other’s strengths, and they give each other confidence to pursue things that neither would attempt on his own. That was the main warning she gave. She said that as long as they’re together, they will continue to be fearless before others. But she also warned that they have become so dependent on each other that if they are ever separated, there’s no telling just how unbalanced or destructive they
may become.”

  Seaton felt the jet being gently pushed around by soft turbulence. He closed his eyes. The conversation with Marcus had fired him up at first, but now he felt weak. As a businessman, he found the background history and analysis about his sons very concerning. As a father, he found it terrifying. He was seventy years old, but instead of having a strong understanding of the circles he lived in, he had suddenly found himself blindly feeling his way in life. Everything he had thought true, all the assumptions he had believed and lived by, had melted away. And he feared more than ever that something horrible was taking place in his own kingdom. With his eyes still closed, he could almost feel the speed at which the jet was burning across the skies, taking him toward his distant home in Aspen, where he would prepare for the coming board meeting in Denver. Things were moving too fast, and he feared that everything would soon spin out of control.

  * * *

  The Learjet 60 XR descended over the Sawatch Range of the Rocky Mountains. It was a little after six on Sunday evening, four hours after Seaton and Marcus had left New York City. The sun had set almost an hour ago. The jet shook as it hit some sudden turbulence: they were passing between Elbert and Harvard, two fourteeners not far outside Aspen, which many pilots called “the Goalposts.”

  “Mr. Seaton?” a woman’s voice called out.

  Seaton turned his head away from the black window to find the flight attendant waving at him from the front of the fuselage. She was holding the satellite phone next to a leather ottoman.

  “You have a phone call, sir. A Mr. Darryl Mitchell from New York.”

  He looked at his watch. He would be impressed if Mitchell had already gotten him some information.