Alumni Association

by Michael Rudolph

  Chapter 60

  Beth found a pile of email waiting for her when she arrived back at the office on Monday morning. She opened the first one and read it.

  Dear Attorney Elisabeth Swahn:

  You have illegally attached the sum of $12,500,000 on deposit in the name of Tanks Investments LLC or Tanks Properties LLC at FirstCaribbean International Bank on St. Kitts. If you do not release that money by bank closing time on Wednesday, you and your family will suffer serious consequences.

  Very respectfully,

  Squad Leader of the BMI Tunnel Rats

  Beth wasn’t conscious of being frightened, but she did feel her heart pounding when she recognized that the email was from the same anonymous sender who had threatened her before. This time, however, she had no intention of ignoring him. She needed to identify him and his group of so-called Tunnel Rats.

  She opened each email, all of which were identical except for the bank names and the amounts. When she totaled the amounts, she realized that the Squad Leader was claiming she had attached $68 million dollars, nearly the entire sum sought by the Pendayans and the FBI combined. If the amounts were accurate, it was a good result for four days down in the Caribbean, but now she had to deal with the Squad Leader’s threat.

  She sent copies of the emails to Sean and Max, and asked Sean to get back to her with the name and IP address of the sender if his techies could track it down. Then she walked down the hall to discuss the threats with Max.

  * * *

  —

  “Did you see the emails I sent you from someone called Squad Leader?” Beth asked as she sat down in Max’s office.

  “I read the first couple. Did you speak to Sean about it yet?”

  “No, but I’m sure he’ll recognize it’s the same wacko who sent me a threat when we first started working for the Alumni Association.”

  “And just because he didn’t try to make good on his threat the first time doesn’t mean you can ignore him this time.”

  “I’m taking it very seriously,” Beth replied. “I’ll see Sean about him as soon as I can.”

  “Good. I’ll go with you.”

  “You don’t have to, but you’re welcome.”

  “On a more mundane matter,” Max segued, “what kind of hours do you expect to put into getting the Pendayans’ money back from the Gartenberg accounts?”

  “Mel and I are working on it with the FBI, so our hours should be under control.”

  “How can you trust the FBI not to grab it all?”

  “They’ve agreed they don’t want the Pendayans’ portion, so it’s safe to cooperate with them.”

  “Let’s keep our eye on the ball here,” Max said. “We were only retained to defend the Pendayans against the Smythe estate, and then to sue Gartenberg for the return of the money he stole.”

  “Both of which we are handling very well,” Beth replied.

  “So let Sean and the FBI handle it from this stage forward while we go back to practicing law, which is what we do.”

  “Can’t yet. We need to get the Pendayans’ money back to earn our contingency fee, and that means getting a court order directing the banks to turn over the funds we attached.”

  “I’m just asking you to keep the hours under control.”

  “Carlos Pendayan also told me they’re thinking about putting us on retainer for their regular international work. I want that business for the firm.”

  “But we don’t have the space or the staff for their kind of high-volume work.”

  “We can gear up in nothing flat. Hire who we need.”

  “You’re the boss now.”

  “Max, you and Clifford got the firm started and established, now you and Mom get to sail off into the sunset while I grow us into an international law firm. The Pendayans’ oil business fits right into that mold.”

  “Your mother and I want you to have babies we can teach how to sail.”

  “I love you too, Max.”

  Chapter 61

  Beth had a restless night, up and down, anxiety versus anger. Then, while dressing for work Tuesday morning, she glanced out her window and saw an unusual red tint to the sky over the East River. From force of habit, she whispered the mantra that blue-water sailors like Max had taught her to trust: “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.” In response, she reflexively threw an umbrella into her backpack before heading out.

  As usual, she was the first to arrive, and entered the security code into the keypad by the elevator to turn off the exterior alarm system for the entire floor. Then she unlocked the oversized double door for their suite, entered, and turned off the interior alarm on the keypad next to the reception desk. It was only after she made a pot of coffee in the lunchroom and took her regular morning walk around the entire suite that she made her way to her own office and turned on her computer.

  She chaired the partners’ weekly meeting at nine-thirty in the firm’s main conference room, and kept it short, to everyone’s satisfaction. By ten-fifteen, she was back in her office with another fresh cup of coffee.

  And that’s when the FedEx delivery arrived. When Beth told the story afterward, she estimated the time by remembering that her coffee was still hot when the receptionist came into her office and handed her a sealed FedEx envelope.

  Beth shook the unopened envelope and thought she heard something granular moving around inside it. She immediately laid it down on her desk and looked at the name of the sender. When she saw the hand-printed name “Squad Leader” on the FedEx label, her head exploded with terror and the certainty that some poison or fatal disease was in the envelope sitting on her desk, inches from her body.

  As soon as she was able to force herself back into control, she took her cellphone and called 911 to report the receipt of a suspicious envelope. Then she photographed the FedEx label and the contents of her entire desktop. She turned off her computer, threw her backpack over one shoulder, and left her office with the FedEx letter remaining unopened on her desk.

  While standing in the hallway, she again dialed 911 on her cell, and this time followed it up with a call to Sean’s direct line at the FBI.

  “I think we’ve been the victim of a terrorist attack,” she said as soon as Sean answered the phone. “I just received an envelope from the Squad Leader with some granular substance in it.”

  “Are you okay?” he replied calmly, but with a tinge of serious worry in his voice.

  “I don’t know for sure. I didn’t open it.”

  “That part’s good. Okay, sit tight. I’ll have a hazmat crew there in five minutes.”

  “I already called 911 twice, but no one’s here yet.”

  “Have everybody stay in their offices until we can sort it out.”

  “I will. Hurry, please,” she said. “I love you,” she whispered into the phone, “and I wish we had gotten married.”

  Beth then went over to the receptionist’s desk, sanitized her hands with Purell from the bottle always on the front desk, and told the receptionist to do the same. She complied, but not without a quizzical look questioning her employer’s motivation.

  Beth told the receptionist to send a text alert to everyone in the firm: “Shelter in place! Suspicious envelope in Beth’s office!” When the receptionist heard this, she froze up, totally unable to type out the message. Beth reached for the keyboard, sent the message herself, and then spent the next few minutes calming the sobbing receptionist.

  The first responders to arrive on their floor were the police and the EMTs. They were followed almost immediately by the hazmat crew, dressed in their yellow space suits.

  The hazmat crew examined Beth and the receptionist for signs of any illness. They were busy taking blood and saliva samples when Sean arrived with a cadre of FBI agents and assumed control of the investigatio
n.

  When Beth explained what had happened, Sean ordered the hazmat folks to put an immediate quarantine in place.

  Hazmat began their protocol by entering Beth’s office to conduct a careful assessment of the situation. One of them picked up the FedEx envelope with a pair of tongs and placed it inside a portable airtight container. Another one took several of Beth’s desktop supplies to check for possible contamination.

  When finished with their lengthy inspection, they locked Beth’s door pending the lab results.

  Sean spoke with the senior hazmat agent and instructed him to have his team deliver the envelope and specimens to the FBI lab downtown.

  For the next couple of hours, the quarantine remained in effect, signs posted conspicuously, yellow tape blocking the entrance to the suite. The police and FBI continued to take statements and examine the entire floor to make certain that the threat had been contained.

  Fortunately for those in the law firm, it didn’t take long for the substance report to come back from the FBI lab. Sean called to let Beth know that the lab had indeed found a powdery substance inside the FedEx envelope, but that it had turned out to be rice and talcum powder, so the envelope was harmless.

  By 3:00 P.M., the police and FBI had completed their investigation and the quarantine was lifted. Control of the premises was returned to a bunch of frightened and concerned law firm personnel, several of whom immediately went home complaining of health issues.

  Late that afternoon, Beth received another email from her anonymous pen pal reminding her that “the deadline is tomorrow for the release of Gartenberg’s money” and warning that “the next package will be a lot more than talcum powder for your body.”

  She angrily hit REPLY, pounded in “F**k you!” complete with asterisks, then replaced the asterisks with plain English before she vented her fury on the innocent SEND icon.

  Chapter 62

  Beth was on a quest to catch the Squad Leader and punish him. He had terrorized the office staff with his contamination scare, and that required the application of justice. Then she intended to use him to get Gartenberg.

  Initially, she checked with the police to see if they had FedEx tracking information on the envelope or if they had traced the sender of the emails. Unfortunately, they had a long backlog and many cases pending, so nothing had been done.

  She then called Sean, and while waiting for him to call back, she began making a list of all the possible bad guys she could think of, anyone who might have it in for her or the firm. She annotated the list by adding their addresses and occupations.

  Sean called her back to report that the sender of the envelope had paid cash for the delivery, so there was no credit card information. His return address on the label also turned out to be bogus.

  According to Sean, the sender had delivered the package by hand at eleven on Monday to a FedEx office at Twenty-third Street and Third Avenue, a residential area of New York City. The time and the location suggested to him that the sender either lived or was employed within a walk of the FedEx office. When Beth compared Sean’s information with the addresses on her list, she was able to cull many of the names.

  The next step was to trace the sender of the threatening emails. She opened up the first email from him, isolated its header and identified its internet protocol, or IP address. Then she patiently copied the header and pasted it into a software application the firm had recently bought to trace email.

  The result of the IP trace wasn’t precise enough to nail down the sender’s exact address, but it was good enough for Beth to narrow his general location to an area around Gramercy Park, probably close to Second Avenue and between East Twenty-second and East Twenty-fourth Street. When she applied that criteria to her bad-guy list, she was surprised that Chord Masters was the only name that fit her parameters.

  Chapter 63

  Beth called Sean to tell him she thought that Chord Masters had sent the FedEx letter. Sean was skeptical because of the extensive injuries Chord had sustained in his motorcycle accident. When Beth, however, mentioned Chord’s current residence at a rehabilitation clinic less than two blocks away from the FedEx office that received the letter, Sean was convinced enough to have one of his agents visit FedEx to review their surveillance tapes.

  The tapes showed a hooded man in a wheelchair entering and leaving the FedEx office just before and after the contaminated envelope was dropped off for delivery. That was sufficient evidence for Sean to determine the FBI should interview Chord. He spoke with Laura and asked her to bring Chord in as soon as possible, and suggested that she also invite Beth in to observe.

  * * *

  —

  Chord appeared in his wheelchair at the FBI offices, accompanied by Mike Duane, an attorney that Tripp Masters had retained to represent his nephew. They were not informed of Beth’s presence on the other side of the two-way mirror. Beth had expected to see Chord in a wheelchair, but she was still shocked at his frail appearance.

  The interview began with Chord invoking his Fifth Amendment rights in response to every question Laura asked. Rather than simply terminating the interview, Laura suggested that the FBI was willing to plea bargain on charges related to the email threats and the contaminated FedEx letter, but only if Chord cooperated fully with their efforts to prove their fraud and money-laundering cases against Gartenberg and Benetez. She said that if they made a deal, he could expect to do between five and seven years at a minimum-security facility.

  Attorney Duane said his client might be interested in the deal if it included complete immunity from any charges related to the fraud and money-laundering cases. This was a possibility that Sean and Laura had already discussed, and Sean had authorized her to make the offer since they had no hard evidence of Chord’s complicity.

  After Laura offered Chord immunity, he and his attorney took a brief recess to discuss it and without much hesitation decided to accept.

  Laura immediately put Chord under oath and began questioning him. In response, he confessed on the record to five individual felony counts of sending criminal threats to Beth by electronic mail, one for each of the emails he sent to her under the assumed name “Squad Leader of the Tunnel Rats.” He then confessed to forty-seven individual felony counts of attempted terrorism for sending her the contaminated FedEx letter under the same assumed name, one count for every person quarantined in the law firm’s offices as a result of the letter he sent.

  When Laura asked Chord who the Tunnel Rats were, he said they were a group of postgraduate cadets who’d hung out down in the Bordentown tunnels to smoke and drink during their free time at BMI. Gartenberg had been their leader. Al LaVerne and Luis Benetez were the only other names he could still remember.

  Then he remembered that Elias Strauss had also been a member, even though he wasn’t a jock. He and Gartenberg liked to play around with the junior school cadets and then take dirty pictures of them touching each other.

  Laura then asked Chord about his motivation for the crimes. He responded by stating that Gartenberg still owed him $500,000 for pushing through approval of the original BMI subdivision application and then Gartenberg had called him from some place he owned down on Aruba and promised him another million dollars if he threatened Beth until she released the attached bank accounts. Half of the money was supposed to be paid up front, but none had been paid, just like before. Chord needed the money and figured that threatening Beth was the only way for him to get it from Gartenberg.

  The next line of questioning related to what Chord knew about Gartenberg’s present location. He said that as far as he knew, Gartenberg had sailed back to Antigua. Gartenberg called him on a satellite phone every day or so to get the latest on his threat campaign against Beth; last night’s call was from Antigua.

  Laura finished with Chord’s confessions and decided it was time to see what he knew about Gartenberg’s money-laundering scheme with
Benetez. She began by thoroughly reviewing the conditions of immunity with Chord and his attorney.

  She then questioned him about the money laundering for almost two hours. Chord remembered every detail of the funding arrangements and transfers that Gartenberg made during the BMI sale, and he disclosed every step of it in response to Laura’s questions.

  When Laura was satisfied that she had exhausted Chord’s knowledge, she called a five-minute break and left the room to ask Beth next door if she had any additional questions. Beth was also satisfied so Laura went back in and closed the deposition.

  Chapter 64

  When she got back to the office, Beth briefed Max on what Chord had disclosed and the terms of the plea bargain he had negotiated with Laura. After Max congratulated her on catching the Squad Leader, she told him that she wanted to go down to Antigua to nail Gartenberg, an idea he disliked the minute she mentioned it.

  “Beth, you’re getting the money back for the Pendayans, and you nailed Chord as the Squad Leader. Let the feds deal with catching Gartenberg.”

  “I want to be the one who catches him.”

  “So do I, but life is too precious to risk it chasing him.”

  “That’s sweet, Max, but the FBI is after bigger fish than Gartenberg.”

  “Then how about he’s a malicious wack job who blames you for leaving him broke and on the run?”