Money to Burn

by James Grippando

  “You own shares of Saxton Silvers?”

  “Well, yeah. The wife and me, we been saving for years, but it just wasn’t keeping up with the way tuition was rising. You seemed like a successful guy. So we talked it over and put the kids’ college fund in the market. That’s not gone, is it?”

  It felt like a knife in my belly. I wondered how many guys like Nick were out there. “We’ll talk about that,” I said.

  My cell rang. Mallory’s cell. I didn’t recognize the number, so I ignored it, figuring that it was probably one of Mallory’s girlfriends trying to reach her. Immediately it rang again-the same caller redialing rather than going to voice mail, as if the message were urgent. I was so out of sorts from what I’d just heard from Nick that I’d momentarily forgotten Ivy’s warning about using the cell phone. I answered it.

  “Michael, it’s me.” Her voice was racing.

  “Ivy?”

  “Shut up and answer this question yes or no: Are you still in New Jersey?”

  Suddenly I remembered the eavesdropping, and I was afraid to say. “Why is that import-”

  “Stop!” she said. “I don’t care where you are. Get to North Bergen and go to the nearest DQ.”

  “What?”

  “Focus, Michael. Listen to exactly what I’m saying. Meet me at the North Bergen DQ. How soon can you get there?”

  “Well, we just got out of a cab so-”

  “Stop it! Less than half an hour or more?”

  “Less-I think.”

  “Good. Get there as fast as you can. You got that? Go to the DQ. Right now! And take the battery out of Mallory’s phone before you go.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it! Remove the battery and go!”

  The call ended, and she was gone.

  Olivia came up the driveway, clearly alarmed by the expression on my face. “Everything okay?”

  I slid the battery off the back of the phone, then looked at Nick and said, “We need a ride.”

  54

  “JUST GOT OUT OF A CAB?” SAID JASON WALD.

  Wald was in the back of a white van that was parked in the bus lot across the street from the Tonnelle Avenue motel. Seated in the captain’s chair beside him, wearing headphones, was his tech expert. Between them was a laptop computer. Weeks earlier, Mallory Cantella’s “boyfriend,” Nathaniel, had given them everything they needed to program Mallory’s cell with spy software. Ivy’s conversation with Michael had come through the speakers on the laptop in real time, loud and clear.

  “How did they get out of the motel without us seeing them?” asked Wald.

  It was their job to let Burn know exactly when Michael and Olivia made a move. A wireless camera on the fence was aimed at the motel room door, with either Wald or his tech guy watching the image on their computer screen at all times.

  “What does the GPS say?” Wald said.

  “For some reason the spyware still isn’t giving me a read from the cell phone.”

  “What about Olivia’s car?” Wald had gone over in the middle of the night and planted a backup under the bumper.

  The tech guy pulled up the satellite coordinates on the computer screen. “The car hasn’t moved.”

  “Of course it hasn’t,” said Wald. “They took a cab. Try getting the GPS reading on the cell phone again.”

  “Definitely won’t work now. She told him to take the battery out.”

  Wald yanked at his hair, as if trying to pull the answer out of his head. “I just don’t understand how they could get out.”

  “I don’t either,” said his techie. “I gave the manager twenty bucks to let me look inside one of the rooms, just like you asked me to. There’s only one way in and one way out-and that’s the front door.”

  “This has to be a ruse. They must still be in there.”

  Wald flung open the passenger’s-side door, jumped from the van, and ran across the street toward the motel, hurdling over the concrete barrier that separated the divided highway. He stopped at Olivia’s car and laid his hand on the hood. It was cold; the car hadn’t moved since they’d pulled up last night. He went to room 107 and put his ear to the door. Silence.

  They can’t be gone!

  He wanted to bang down the door and find out for sure, but if it turned out that they were still inside, what would he say when Cantella answered the door? He needed another plan. A maid’s cart was two doors down. He ran to it and found the housekeeper making the bed inside room 103.

  “Come quick!” he said. “I think my friend in room 107 is sick!”

  She paused.

  “Come!” said Wald. “You have to open the door.”

  She followed him out to room 107. Wald retreated a few steps and waited in the doorway to room 103, behind the maid’s cart, where he would be out of sight when the door opened. The maid knocked on the door to 107.

  No answer.

  “Open it!” Wald said, speaking in a hurried whisper.

  She knocked again, harder this time. Still no answer.

  “Open the damn door!” he said, his whisper even more urgent.

  The housekeeper was getting nervous and more than a little suspicious. “I’ll get the manager,” she said.

  Wald cursed under his breath as she walked away. Every fiber in his body was telling him Cantella had somehow escaped, but he had to see with his own eyes. He went to the window. The drapes were drawn, making it impossible to peer inside. He tried the knob, but it was locked. He put his shoulder into the door, but it didn’t budge.

  The maid’s cart was still in front of room 103. He went to it, grabbed a large bath towel, and pulled the gun from his jacket. With the weapon in hand and his finger on the trigger, he wrapped the towel around it, aimed it at the lock, and fired once. The makeshift sound suppressor reduced the noise level to that of a cap gun, and the lock was destroyed. He pushed open the door and burst into the room. The gaping hole in the back of the closet immediately told the story.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  He tossed the powder-burned towel aside, tucked away the gun, and dialed Burn.

  “Cantella’s on the move,” said Wald. “She called him and said to meet at the Dairy Queen.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one in North Bergen.”

  “What street?”

  Wald struggled, no more information. “Hell if I know.”

  Wald could hear Burn’s keyboard clacking in the background. It took less than thirty seconds.

  “It’s on Kennedy Avenue,” said Burn.

  “You want me to meet you there?” asked Wald.

  “No,” said Burn, a certain finality in his voice. “I’ve got it.”

  55

  BECAUSE OF ITS LOCATION ON THE HUDSON RIVER-ON RIVER Road near the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, and major highways-Palisades Medical Center in New Bergen had one of the busiest emergency departments in New Jersey. Nearly thirty thousand patients came each year for lifesaving care.

  No one came for ice cream-and neither did I.

  Meet me at the DQ was a reference to the weird dream I’d shared with Ivy right before asking her to marry me-the one about the SUV running me off the road, forcing me to rush my dog to the DQ for emergency medical treatment. Ivy had conveyed her instructions to me in code, alert to the fact that Mallory’s cell was probably being monitored. “Meet me at the DQ in North Bergen” meant “meet me at the ER,” and the closest one to an actual DQ was at Palisades.

  By my calculations, Ian Burn was having a hot fudge sundae as we spoke.

  “You came to the right place,” she said.

  I was standing by the vending machine in the crowded waiting room when the voice had come from behind me. I recognized it right away, but when I turned in response, the face wasn’t exactly the one I had remembered. She sensed my confusion.

  “Rhinoplasty,” she said, turning to show me her profile. “Pretty nice work, no?”

  She’d cut her hair and darkened it, too, returning to th
e color I’d seen in the photograph online-but it was Ivy, and instinctively I grabbed her and nearly squeezed her to death.

  It’s hard for me to say how long we stayed in each other’s arms. Long-term memories were powerful forces, and just the smell of her hair seemed to unleash an emotional rush that-for a moment, at least-let me forget the circumstances of our reunion. I was remembering things that I had yet to realize I’d forgotten. The ease of our embrace. The warmth of her face against mine. How good her hands felt on my shoulder blades. The first coherent thought to bring me back to earth was a tinge of guilt-a thought about Mallory, about our pending divorce. I pushed that aside as irrelevant, but the magic was slipping away. I was slowly coming back the to harsh reality of the huge problems at hand.

  “Your grandparents are safe,” she said, as we separated.

  We were standing face-to-face, her fingers still loosely intertwined with mine, oblivious to the typical ER commotion around us-the boys playing soccer with a balled-up wad of white medical tape, the sneezing and coughing old man in the corner with the vomit bucket in his lap, the moaning construction worker with the bloody rag wrapped around his smashed finger.

  “You met them at the airport?” I said.

  “Intercepted, I guess, is a better word for it. McVee uses any pressure point he can. Family and loved ones are at the top of his list. I was afraid that if he got hold of your grandparents, you’d be at his mercy.”

  “Where are they?”

  “The FBI is protecting them.”

  “According to your mother, you went into hiding because the FBI couldn’t protect you. Why would you put my grandparents in their hands?”

  “They’re tertiary targets who don’t know anything. McVee won’t go to the same trouble to track them down as he would to find me-or you, for that matter.”

  “That makes sense, I guess.”

  “Plus, this time I have leverage,” she said.

  “What kind of leverage?”

  “If the FBI screws up, I blow the lid on Mallory’s friend Andrea-who, by the way, is an FBI agent.”

  It was clear from her tone that Ivy was expecting a serious show of surprise from me. But I wasn’t so shocked. Little things had always made Andrea seem different from Mallory’s other friends-the way she wolfed down pasta at Carmine’s, the blond-in-a-bottle dye job, the way she’d pressed for names when I told her about short sellers. All along, something about her didn’t meet the eye.

  One thing still didn’t make sense.

  “How did you know my grandparents were going to the airport?”

  She sighed and said, “There’s something you should know about me.”

  “You think?” I said with a mirthless chuckle.

  She smiled a little, then led me to a quiet corner of the room where her coat was hanging on the back of a chair. She sat me down, pulled her coat back on, and took a seat facing me.

  “I’ve been monitoring your limo driver’s wireless communications.”

  “What the hell?” I said, shaking my head. “Am I the last guy on earth who doesn’t know how to listen to other people’s cell conversations?”

  “Cell conversations, text messages, e-mails-none of it’s private. All it takes is simple spyware that you can buy on the Internet. The more sophisticated programs don’t even require me to touch your phone for setup. I just plug in the number, program it, and I can see every message you send or receive, and listen to every conversation you have. I can even program my device to ring every time you use your phone, so I don’t have to sit around monitoring you. The only way to break the connection is to remove the battery from the targeted phone.”

  “Which is why you told me to take the battery out of Mallory’s phone.”

  “Exactly. Everyone in the business uses cell spyware now.”

  “And what business is that?”

  “You must have some inkling,” she said.

  There was a semblance of a smile on her face, a gentle understanding in her voice. But it was my most disquieting moment with Ivy so far-the sense that she knew what I knew, that she knew what I didn’t know, and that I had no idea how she knew any of it.

  “Tell me about Vanessa Hernandez,” I said.

  She didn’t hesitate in the least, didn’t even try feigning ignorance.

  “Vanessa Hernandez had no problems with her nose,” she said, showing me her profile. “It was Ivy Layton who insisted on getting the work done.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  Her smile faded. “I was born in Miami. My parents were undercover agents for the DEA. My mom was born in Colombia, so she played the go-between for wealthy American dealers trying to hook up with Colombian suppliers.”

  “Not exactly the Chilean schoolteacher and ex-pat engineer you told me about.”

  “It was the same cover story they told our neighbors in Miami. They were always headed off to another copper-mining project in Chile, when in reality they were infiltrating the cocaine cartel in Colombia. Anyway, when I was five years old, a job went bad in Bogotá. Their target figured out that my father was DEA. My mother watched them drag him out of the car, shoot him in the back of the head, and dump his body on the side of the road.”

  “I’m sorry. Your mother obviously escaped?”

  “Somehow she was able to convince them that she had no idea he was an undercover agent. They let her go.”

  “Did she stay with the DEA?”

  “For a while. But she hasn’t worked with them for years. She got into corporate security as a consultant.”

  “So…which way did Vanessa go?”

  “No interest in law enforcement. But when I grew up and went to business school, the world of corporate espionage intrigued me. I joined a huge corporate security firm and when I was twenty-nine years old, my mother got a call from an old friend on Wall Street. He needed a brainy young woman with guts to infiltrate a billion-dollar hedge fund. That fund was Ploutus Investments. The friend on Wall Street was Eric Volke. Vanessa got the assignment, and that’s when I became Ivy Layton.”

  I drew a deep breath, trying to get my arms around the whole thing. “Your mother knows Eric?”

  “Yes. She’s in a taxi right now, on her way to meet up with him. Eric promised me that he would keep the two of you safe while this plays out between me and McVee.”

  I paused again, still overwhelmed. “So when you and I met, you were doing corporate espionage for Saxton Silvers?”

  “No. Eric hired me for WhiteSands.”

  I knew WhiteSands. Sometimes its services complemented those of Saxton Silvers, and sometimes Eric was criticized for holding such a large ownership stake in a publicly traded company that, at least on the investment-management level, competed with Saxton Silvers for business.

  “But you were spying,” I said.

  ‘“Spying’ has such a negative connotation. Eric knew that someone was manipulating the stock of WhiteSands, and he was convinced that the man behind it was Kyle McVee at Ploutus. The basic MO was similar to what just happened to Saxton Silvers. McVee used FNN reporters to spread rumors about WhiteSands, and McVee’s hedge fund bought low on the negative rumors and sold high on the favorable ones. Eric suspected that McVee was behind it, but he couldn’t prove anything. My job was to expose his plot by going to work for Ploutus and reporting my findings back to Eric.”

  “Is that why McVee wanted you dead?”

  “That was only the beginning,” said Ivy.

  She suddenly stopped, and the expression on her face alarmed me.

  “Ivy?”

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  “What?”

  She was staring out the window into the parking lot. “Your driver.”

  “Nick?” I said as I turned and looked. His Chevy was about a hundred feet away, parked beneath a tree. The sun was setting and the streetlights had just flicked on; their glare at dusk made the weblike crack in the windshield all the more evident. Nick’s head was facedown on the steering wheel.<
br />
  “They got him,” said Ivy.

  56

  IAN BURN ENTERED THE EMERGENCY ROOM THROUGH THE AMBULANCE entrance. No one stopped him. He figured Cantella and Ivy were keeping an eye on the main entrance to the ER. By entering from the other side, where access was restricted, he would catch them off guard. He started down a maze of sterile corridors, guided by the signs marked WAITING ROOM. Ironic.

  He couldn’t wait to get there.

  Cantella’s limo driver had been a good source of information over the past few weeks. The tip about Cantella’s true destination had been Nick’s best yet. And his last. In an operation this big, Burn never kept people around after they were no longer needed. That held true even for the little guys-especially the little guys. It was always the housekeeper, the limo driver, or the bartender who ratted you out and sent you to prison. Nick had served his purpose and needed to go-though the cracked windshield and brain splatter were regrettable. His 9 mm Glock pistol had been too much firepower for such a close-range shot.

  “Excuse me, sir. Can I help you?”

  It was an elderly hospital volunteer. Nobody policed the halls of the “authorized personnel only” area like a seventy-year-old woman from Jersey who worked for free.

  Burn ignored her, picking up his pace. He had no time for delays. Six months of tracking Ivy Layton had taught him plenty about the way her mind worked. She felt safe in public places, and probably the last thing she expected was for Ian Burn to walk into a crowded waiting room and start shooting. It was a risky maneuver, even for Burn, but acting contrary to a target’s expectations was the key to success in his business. Reporting back to Kyle McVee that Ivy Layton had slipped away again was not an option.

  The gray-haired hospital volunteer came after him.

  “Sir, this area is restricted.”

  He knocked her to the floor and pushed through the double doors that led to the ER waiting room. The old woman’s scream turned heads and robbed Burn of the element of surprise, sending Ivy and Cantella running across the waiting room at full speed. The automatic glass exit doors parted, and Ivy was flying through the opening with Cantella on her heels when Burn spotted them. He raised his semi-automatic pistol and took aim. The sick, the injured, and the healthy alike scattered in every direction, screaming and diving for cover beneath the chairs and behind gurneys as Burn squeezed off six quick rounds. The echo off the tile floor and walls of painted cinder block sounded like cannon fire, and the shots shattered the glass doors as they closed. There was hysteria all around, but Burn’s focus was unshaken.