Shadow Account

by Stephen Frey

  Three times in less than a week. Way too often to be coincidence.

  Saturday afternoon, when they’d said good-bye at Grand Central Station where she’d caught the Number 7 train back to Queens, he made another date with her. For tomorrow night, Tuesday night. He was going to try to figure out what she was doing. Just like he was going to try to figure out what had happened to Liz by going to D.C. today. He had to beat Art Meeks to the cops, or at least have an explanation when they confronted him.

  Conner’s eyes narrowed as he guided the car into the tunnel entrance. It was all too slick, he kept thinking. Remove all traces of the e-mail. Then all traces of the break-in. But why?

  “Dammit!” There was something here he was missing. Something staring him in the face. He gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands. He could feel it.

  The sun was beginning to break through broken clouds when the Taurus emerged from the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. It was beginning to warm up, too. As the weathermen had predicted, heat and humidity had returned to the East Coast during the night. Conner flipped on the air conditioner. As he did, he glanced into the rearview mirror and noticed a black sedan with tinted windows coming out of the tunnel behind him. As he sped around the wide, sweeping U-turn in front of the entrance, the sedan seemed to be pacing him. The same way the car in Manhattan had paced him from Gavin’s apartment to the Port Authority. Maybe it was the same car. He’d never gotten a good look at that vehicle. It had been too dark.

  “Let’s see what this guy wants to do,” Conner muttered, punching the Taurus’s accelerator and speeding west, the panoramic view of Manhattan’s skyline sinking below the horizon.

  The black sedan stayed with him, several hundred yards back, moving out of the lane he was traveling in only to pass through a different gate at the tollbooth to the New Jersey Turnpike. When Conner had made it through the toll, the sedan fell in behind him again.

  A few miles down the Turnpike, he turned off at the Newark Airport exit, quickly paying the toll, then heading for the airport entrance and daily parking. The lot was packed, but he finally found an open spot well away from the three terminals. When he’d swung the car into the spot, he reached into the backseat, grabbed his briefcase, and headed toward terminal B, the middle terminal. Jogging along a narrow sidewalk leading to the massive building.

  Halfway to it Conner spotted a man on his left. Thirty yards away, not carrying a bag. Trying too hard to seem inconspicuous. As he picked up the pace, so did the man.

  Conner sprinted across several access lanes and into the airport. He walked quickly past idle baggage carousels, then up a set of steps to the terminal’s main level. Most of the ticket counters were still dark, and he moved past them to the far end of the terminal. Then back downstairs, racing out the door to the first taxi stand.

  “Where you headed?” the taxi master wanted to know, opening the back door of the first cab.

  “Terminal C,” Conner replied, breathing hard. “I screwed up. Came to the wrong one.”

  “Happens all the time,” the man said, scribbling something on a yellow ticket and handing it to the driver through the passenger window of the front seat. “No problem.”

  Conner ducked into the cab, then held a hundred-dollar bill out the window. “There’s going to be a guy here in a few seconds. He’s going to ask you where I’m going. Tell him exactly what I just told you, but hold his cab here for thirty seconds. Just thirty seconds. Will you do that for me?”

  The smile disappeared from the taxi master’s face, but he snatched the money and nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Thanks.” Conner leaned over the front seat as the cab driver pulled slowly away. “We’re not going to Terminal C,” he said. “We’re going to Amtrak’s Penn Station in Newark. And we’re going there fast.”

  “I can’t do that,” the cabbie protested. “That’s against policy. You told the man you were going to Terminal C, and now I got to go there.”

  Conner pulled another hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and held it up so the driver could see it. “What did you say?”

  The driver’s eyes widened. “I said I can get you to Newark in about seven minutes.” He gunned the cab’s engine. “I hope that’ll be fast enough.”

  Conner looked back at the taxi stand. “That’ll be fine.” He smiled as he watched the man who’d been chasing him duck into the next cab in line, then saw the taxi master amble slowly around in front of the cab to the driver side, squat down, and begin talking. Then Conner was past Terminal C on his way to Newark. “Just fine,” he murmured, settling into the seat.

  Thirty minutes later, Conner was on a train headed for Washington and his eleven o’clock appointment with Victor Hammond. He glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes after six. He thought about calling Jackie, but it was still too early. He didn’t want to wake her up.

  He picked up theUSA Today he’d purchased at the Newark train station, going straight to the Sports section. Then he chuckled, put it down, and picked up the Life section, taking a pen from his shirt pocket and turning to the crossword puzzle. It was the first time he had ever tried one.

  All right, Jo,he thought to himself, humming “Blue Suede Shoes.” Let’s see about this new perspective.

  “They lost him at Newark Airport.”

  “NewarkAirport?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He should have been leaving fromLaGuardia . The shuttle to Washington leaves from LaGuardia Airport. Are there any flights from Newark to Washington?”

  “Not many. Besides, they lost him on his way to Terminal C. There aren’tany flights from Terminal C to Washington.”

  “How could they have lost him?”

  “He ran. He must have realized he was being followed.”

  “Christ!”

  “Which means he suspects something.”

  “Thanks, Einstein.” There was a long pause. “Where’s he going?”

  “No idea.”

  Another pause. “Are there any flights to Minneapolis from that terminal?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll check.”

  “Lucas?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Cheetah. I got news.”

  Lucas glanced at the towel on the floor. He hadn’t bothered to cover the crack at the bottom of the door. “Hold on.” He moved quickly to the door, and put the towel in place. “What did you find out?” he asked, picking up the telephone again.

  “The AB Trust is definitely controlled by Alan Bryson. The financial tracks run through a bunch of offshore corporations and several limited partnerships. Accounts at fourteen financial institutions in all, but Bryson is sitting squarely at the end of the trail.”

  Lucas winced. He’d been praying all night that Cheetah would tell him something different. But he’d had a bad feeling about the AB Trust ever since the young woman had found it Saturday morning. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, and this is important. The year Bryson and the AB Trust got all those options, Global Components switched accounting firms. They fired Deloitte and Touche and hired another firm named Baker Mahaffey.”

  Lucas hesitated. “Why is that important?”

  “Whenever a company switches accounting firms, you need to find out why. There’s always a possibility that the new accountants won the assignment by agreeing to be more aggressive about pumping up the company’s EPS. You know, using a little sleight of hand. What makes this situation even more suspicious is that a man on Global Component’s audit committee got all these options the same year they switched accountants. By the way, Alan Bryson wasn’t just a member of the three-person audit committee, he was the chairman of it.”

  “You’re telling me he was bought off.”

  “I wouldn’t stake my life on it yet. I’m just telling you it’s a good bet. But I’ll keep digging.”

  Lucas glanced at the phone’s dial pad. The white buttons were dirty, and he made a mental note to buy Q-Tips and rubbing alcohol at lunch. “You’ve been b
usy this morning. Is that all, or is there more?” Perhaps there was an opportunity here.

  “There’s more.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Last night, when we met in the parking lot, I told you I’d talked to a friend of mine in New York who works for one specific client.”

  “Yes,” Lucas said, playing the conversation back. “You said the client had an interest in Global Components, too.” He couldn’t believe what he was thinking.

  “That’s right.”

  “You know something more about that?”

  “My friend has a few men who work for him. A couple of other ex-FBI guys who handle the day-to-day investigative stuff.”

  “And?”

  “And he lost one of them a few days ago on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. My friend believes the guy was pushed off a fire escape.”

  “How does that tie in?”

  “He’s a loyal guy. Eye-for-an-eye and all that. But he hasn’t gone after anyone yet. He’s sure he knows who killed his guy, but he’s been standing down.”

  “I still don’t understand why this is so important,” Lucas said.

  “It means the mission is more important than the man. It means that there’s something huge at stake.”

  Lucas closed his eyes, debating whether to tell Cheetah what he’d learned about Alan Bryson.

  “Anything else on Bryson?”

  “No,” Lucas answered curtly. “Call me when you have more.”

  “Right.”

  Lucas hung up the phone and leaned forward, putting his face in his hands. Five years ago, Alan Bryson had quietly settled an incredibly ugly sexual harassment suit with a female subordinate at Morgan Sayers. A woman who had secretly taped Bryson promising her promotions in exchange for sexual favors. It had cost Bryson $12 million to keep the woman out of court and the story out of the papers.

  But Lucas had a friend from Northwestern at Bryson’s Manhattan law firm. And, an hour ago, he found out what had happened.

  For Bryson to have forced Global Components to hand him 550,000 deep-in-the-money options, there had to be a good reason. As managing partner of Morgan Sayers, he would have been wealthy. But even Bryson wasn’t wealthy enough to gin up $12 million without tipping off his wife.

  So, like any good capitalist, he’d been opportunistic.

  14

  “Thanks for meeting with me on such short notice, Mr. Hammond.” Conner sat in front of the accountant’s desk, gazing out the large window behind Hammond at the dome of the Capitol in the distance. It was Conner’s first time in Washington, and he’d been impressed by the classic architecture on the short ride from Union Station to Baker Mahaffey’s offices on Seventeenth Street. “It was good of you to do this.”

  “You were lucky to catch me,” Hammond replied. “I’m on the road constantly. I’mthe top earning partner in Washington, and top five in the entire firm. You don’t achieve what I have by sitting around. Remember that as you go through your career, Mr. Ashby.”

  Hammond was completely self-absorbed. Conner had sensed that about the man right from the start. But, at this point, Hammond was his only connection to Liz. So he was willing to stroke a healthy portion of ego to get what he needed.

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  Hammond had white hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion. Despite the white hair, Conner guessed that Hammond was no older than forty-five. He had a sleekness about him that belied age. And he spoke with a deliberate precision that made it clear he knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “How are you set up here?” Conner asked. “Do you have responsibility for all companies in this geographic area? Or do you—?”

  “At Baker Mahaffey we don’t believe in being generalists,” Hammond broke in. “One can’t provide truly value-added advice when one is involved in many different business models. A bank versus a company that makes furniture, for instance. So we specialize. I run the firm’s manufacturing practice for the entire East Coast. I’m responsible for manufacturing companies headquartered from Maine to Florida. Other people handle service companies and the financials.”

  Conner nodded respectfully. “Maine to Florida. That’s impressive.”

  “Of course, I travel to quite a few cities outside the region to audit client facilities in other parts of the United States and the world.”

  Conner glanced at a bookcase beside the desk. On the top shelf, inside a small frame, was a photograph of Hammond and a woman Conner assumed was Hammond’s wife. “Must keep you busy.”

  Hammond chuckled without smiling. “Let’s put it this way. I’m on a first-name basis with a lot of flight attendants.”

  Conner glanced at Hammond’s left hand. No wedding band. “Traveling gets old.”

  “It sure does,” Hammond agreed with a sigh. “And the more I do it, the less I like it. Especially with terrorism in the back of your mind every time you get on a plane these days.”

  “I can understand that. I—”

  “I was actually in the air on the morning of September eleventh,” Hammond continued. “On my way down to Miami.”

  “Must have been nerve-wracking.”

  “More of an inconvenience really. The pilots put us down in Atlanta. I had to rent a car and drive the rest of the way to Florida.”

  “You’re a dedicated man.”

  Hammond looked up, a curious expression on his face. “What do you mean?”

  “You kept going,” Conner said, glancing at the woman in the photograph. If she was Hammond’s wife, she hadn’t aged gracefully. Or there was a big age difference. Maybe there was another reason Hammond wanted to get to Miami so much that day. “You didn’t come back to D.C.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Most people would have turned right around and come home. What you did shows a lot of dedication to your client.”

  “My wife and I don’t have children,” Hammond explained, understanding the inference, “and her family lives in the area. She went to her mother’s after that plane went into the Pentagon. Hell, she was fine.”

  Conner gestured at the photograph. “Is that her?”

  “Huh? Yeah.” Hammond glanced at the photograph, then quickly away. “You know, if I’d been on any of those planes that went into the Trade Center or the Pentagon, I’d have made damn sure they didn’t reach their targets. At a minimum we would have ended up in a field like the plane in Pennsylvania.”

  Conner shifted in his chair. “I think it’s tough to understand what it was like to be on those planes. It was a terrible tragedy, and that’s probably all we’ll ever really—”

  “Look, I only have a few minutes,” Hammond broke in impatiently, checking his Rolex. “In fact, I’ve got to catch a flight this afternoon. So why are you here, anyway?”

  Before Conner could answer, the office door opened and an attractive brunette walked to where Hammond sat. She handed him a note, turning her back to Conner as she leaned against the arm of Hammond’s chair. Conner noticed Hammond nod subtly up at her, then watched her fingers graze the accountant’s shoulder when she turned to walk back out.

  “There’s another good reason not to travel,” Conner observed, nodding at the door when the woman was gone. It was a risky thing to say. Hammond might be offended. But Conner had only a few minutes with the man, so he had to build a bridge quickly.

  Hammond’s eyes flashed to the door. “Yup.”

  Conner saw a slight smile crease Hammond’s face.

  “A man who works as hard as I do deserves a few perks.”

  Conner smiled back. “The founder of our firm has the same attitude.”

  “That’s Gavin Smith, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same Gavin Smith who ran Harper Manning’s mergers and acquisitions group for so many years?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The son of a bitch,” Hammond said good-naturedly. “He isn’t just a legend on Wall Street. We know him in the accounting world, too.” He c
huckled. “I’ve lost a few clients thanks to him. Companies he bagged for his clients who were audited by the acquirer’s accounting firm the next year. Of course, he helped some of my other clients get bigger by acquiring companies for them. And we earned bigger audit fees because there were more divisions to examine. I guess after it’s all said and done, everything turned out even.”

  “He’s been a force on the Street for years.”

  “Didn’t I see an article about him inForbes orFortune a few months ago?” Hammond asked.

  “Both actually, but he was on the cover ofForbes .”

  Hammond snapped his fingers. “I remember those articles. They described how he was starting his own firm.”

  “Yes. It’s called Phenix Capital. Which is why I came down today, Mr. Hammond.”

  “Call me Vic,” Hammond offered. “Everyone here does. I hate formality. Gets in the way of business.”

  Conner’s mind flickered back to Wednesday night’s e-mail. It had been addressed to “Victor.”

  “Conner.”

  Conner glanced up. “Sorry. As I was saying, I came down to Washington today to introduce you to Phenix Capital. We want to find ways to work together.”

  “Why did Gavin leave Harper Manning?” Hammond wanted to know. “The articles weren’t clear.”

  Conner was ready for the question. “There were differences over management styles. Gavin felt that after making Harper Manning so much money for so many years, he didn’t need the kind of day-to-day oversight he was getting.” That sounded plausible. Not the whole story, but enough.

  “I can understand that. Fortunately, my managing partners in New York give me a lot of leeway.”

  “You make them a lot of money. Anyway, Gavin decided to start his own firm specializing in merger and acquisition advisory work.”

  “When was that?”

  “Two years ago. I joined Phenix last August. We now have thirty people at the firm.”