by Stephen Frey
Rusty laughed harshly. “This is the smoking gun, my friend. The ultimate smoking gun. Those pages at the back detail how a man named Alan Bryson, a member of Global Components’s board of directors and the chairman of the board’s audit committee, forced Global to grant him five hundred and fifty thousand in-the-money call options to look the other way when they hired Baker Mahaffey and structured the Fargo Management transaction. As chairman of the audit committee he should have stopped that transaction, and the hiring of Baker Mahaffey. Instead, he made money on it.”
Conner’s brain began to pound. He’d just stepped into some very bad shit. Paul Stone was one thing. Alan Bryson was quite another. “How much money did the treasury secretary make?”
“The options were worth about twenty million dollars at the time of the grant. I think they’re worth almost twice that now.”
“Oh, Christ.”
Rusty nodded. “Yeah, if you intend to use this binder for personal gain, you better think very carefully. Before you tell anybody about what’s in that binder, you may want to get out of this country, too.”
They both heard the front door open far down the corridor.
Conner hustled to the office doorway and peered out. Three men stood in the lobby. A tiny, balding man and two bigger men in dark suits. Conner signaled for Rusty to take a look. “You know them? Are they Baker Mahaffey people?”
“No,” Rusty said, shaking his head. “I’ve never seen any of them before.”
“We better get out of here,” Conner said, bolting to the desk and snatching the binder. “Where’s the nearest stairway?”
“Back down the corridor. About halfway to the lobby.”
Conner stopped at the office doorway, then leaned slowly out and peered down the corridor again. The men had disappeared. “All right, let’s go,” he ordered, bolting from the office. “Where’s the door?” he called over his shoulder as they ran.
“Another fifty feet,” Rusty answered, trying to keep up. “On the right.”
As they headed for the stairway, the little bald man emerged from an office down the corridor.
“Stop!” Lucas shouted, spotting Conner and Rusty. The two other men appeared behind him. “Don’t let them out of here!” he yelled. They dashed past him, racing toward Conner and Rusty.
Conner glanced over his shoulder. Rusty had fallen way behind. “Come on!” he yelled. “Run!”
Hootie Wilson settled into the back of his limousine as the driver closed the door. He was exhausted. He was sixty-two years old and the pressure of running one of Washington’s most prominent law firms was wearing on him. He should have retired by now with millions in the bank, but the divorce from his wife of forty years had set him back.Way back. And all because of that one night of indiscretion.
Wilson sank into the leather seat, thinking about the marble notebook safely stowed in his briefcase. Franklin Bennett was going to be very happy about that. In return, Wilson would have unlimited use of all of those assets the party controlled. Assets his ex-wife’s divorce attorney would never know about.
Lucas stood a few feet away as the two men went to work on the accountant. He cringed as the one wearing leather gloves delivered a wicked right to the accountant’s stomach, while the other one held him up. Then there was another awful thud as the accountant’s internal organs bore the brunt of a second, swift punch.
“Oh, God!” Rusty clutched his stomach and dropped to the cement floor of the deserted Metro station in a tight ball.
“Try now,” the man wearing the gloves said.
Lucas walked to where the accountant lay, and knelt down. He couldn’t imagine what this man was going through. In his entire life, the only real pain Lucas could ever remember enduring was a twisted ankle. “You work for Victor Hammond, correct, Mr. Reeves?” he asked, his voice low.
“Yes,” Rusty gasped, blood trickling from one side of his mouth.
“Who was the other man with you tonight?” The other one had barely eluded them, scaling a tall fence like a big cat going straight up a tree—even as he clasped a huge binder—just as they were closing in on him.
“I don’t know.”
“Answer me!”
“I swear I don’t know.”
Lucas hesitated. “What was in the binder he was carrying?”
Rusty said nothing.
“Mr. Reeves, do I need to have my associates come back over here?” Lucas asked. “I don’t want to, believe me. But if you don’t start giving me answers soon, I will. Now, what was in the binder?”
“Information about a company named Global Components.”
Now they were making progress. “What kind of information?” Lucas asked.
“Information about fraud Global has been committing over the past several years.” Rusty could barely speak his stomach hurt so badly.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“Information about Alan Bryson.”
Lucas leaned down very close to the accountant’s ear. “From now on, I want you to answer so only I can hear. Speak only after I squeeze your right hand. Do you understand?” He put his ear next to Rusty’s mouth and squeezed the man’s hand.
“Yes,” came the faint reply.
Lucas put his lips back to the accountant’s ear. “What information was in that binder concerning Secretary Bryson?” He moved his ear to the other man’s lips and squeezed.
Thirty minutes later they tossed the accountant onto the Metro tracks, a blindfolded, moaning heap. The man wearing the black gloves had delivered one last howitzer to the stomach, then they’d sprinted away. There was no reason to do anything else to him. The accountant had no idea who they were, and he’d have enough problems when the Global Components scandal broke. If he was able to get himself off the tracks before a train came through the station.
Lucas glanced back through the car’s rear window at the Capitol. The brightly lit dome was disappearing behind them. Next stop, New York.
An hour ago, the “Paul Stone Cell” had reported in to Franklin Bennett. Now Bennett wanted Lucas and the two other men to get to Queens as quickly as possible. Bennett had given that order to Lucas after Lucas had called to report that he had come within a hair of obtaining the binder. It was then that Bennett had explained in detail what was going on with the other cell.
Lucas smiled to himself as he turned his back on the Capitol. Threatening Bennett with the marble notebook had been pure genius. Suddenly he was on the inside. Suddenly he and Bennett were pals. Which would last only as long as Bennett was scared. But he had a plan in place to keep Bennett away from the important things he’d recorded. Brenda was phase one of that plan.
The Paul Stone Cell had begun as a legitimate insider trading investigation, Bennett had explained. The Justice Department had Stone dead to rights for buying put options on two thousand shares of a small publicly traded biotech company just ahead of very bad news about a product liability lawsuit that was about to be filed against it. News that Stone had released himself onto the company’s chat board. As the share price dropped when the bad news was released, Stone had made thirty bucks on each share he controlled, pocketing sixty grand in an afternoon. But he’d been sloppy about how he’d released the bad news. And the Justice Department had tracked him down.
When investigators had questioned Stone under the bare bulb, he’d broken. And, in an attempt to cut a deal, had admitted he was planning another insider trading scam. But this time the stakes were bigger. And he claimed to have a partner. A man named Gavin Smith. Somebody in the room had gone ballistic at the mention of Smith’s name. Seems a few years before, Smith had fired the guy from an investment bank named Harper Manning for no reason at all. And the guy had vowed revenge.
But the guy never had a chance to exact that revenge. Through his senior-level contacts at the Justice Department, Bennett had heard aboutwhy Paul Stone was targeting Global Components for his insider trading scam. Stone suspected t
hat the senior executives at Global were committing fraud, and Bennett knew that Secretary Bryson had been on the board of directors of Global Components. That this was one of those forty-three combinations he’d originally instructed Lucas to investigate. So Bennett had taken control of the Paul Stone insider trading investigation himself. The lower-level people who’d been in the room when Stone was trying to cut his deal and had mentioned Gavin Smith, had been removed from the investigation completely and been replaced by Bennett’s men.
Control of the Stone investigation provided Bennett with critical information. And when Lucas called to tell Bennett that he and the two associates had come within a hair of getting a binder that would have given Bennett proof of exactly what they were looking for—incriminating information on one of the jewels—Bennett had ordered Lucas to get to New York because that was where the binder was headed. Paul Stone had reported to his contact at the Justice Department, and that contact had reported to Bennett, through Sam Macarthur. It was all coming together.
Bennett had explained all of this to Lucas as the young accountant from Baker Mahaffey was first beginning to cough up blood.
When Lucas was at Exit 8 on the New Jersey Turnpike, an hour outside New York, Bennett had called again to tell him that it had been Conner Ashby who had escaped from Baker Mahaffey with Phil Reeves’s binder. There was a surveillance camera at the accounting firm’s office, and they’d taken possession of the tape to make certain no one at the firm saw footage of Lucas and the other two men breaking in. From that tape they’d also identified Conner Ashby.
It was four o’clock in the morning when Lucas and the other two men pulled up in front of 662 Greenport Avenue. Amy Richards was waiting on the sidewalk, as Bennett had assured Lucas she would be. The man in the front seat got out and opened the rear door of the sedan for her.
“Thank you for meeting with us, Ms. Richards,” Lucas said politely as she slid onto the seat next to him and the car accelerated away from the curb.
“No problem,” Amy answered. “I’m happy to do anything to help you get Conner Ashby. I had no idea he was a criminal. Just another Wall Street insider trading thug, huh? At least, that’s what Paul told me.”
“Mr. Stone is exactly right,” Lucas agreed, acting as if he actually knew Stone. “Conner Ashby is a criminal.” She’d bought the story about Ashby so easily. Because she wanted to, Lucas realized. Less than thirty-six hours ago she’d called Stone from a cab outside a Manhattan restaurant to tell him that she’d do anything to take Conner down. In turn, Stone had called his contact at Justice. Five minutes later, Bennett had known about it, too. “Stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from ordinary people like you and me.”
“I hate him,” she snapped. “He’s a snake.”
“So you’ll help me find him?”
“Yes, I will.” Amy smiled. “And I know just how to do it.”
Amy Richards ended up in the East River. Her body was never recovered.
23
Conner trudged across the terrace toward the table. He’d driven all night on the back roads of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Wary of using Interstate 95 or the New Jersey Turnpike to get to New York. It seemed obvious that they would cover the major routes to try and intercept him. Once through New York, he’d followed the same procedure on Long Island, staying off the LIE and the other primary roads. It had added a couple of hours to his trip, but greatly increased his chances of getting here—and surviving.
“Good morning, pal,” Gavin said cheerfully, putting down his newspaper. “How are you?”
“Okay,” Conner answered. He ought to be exhausted. Strangely, he wasn’t. Once he’d made it past Manhattan, he’d caught a second wind. He eased into a chair opposite Gavin, taking in the scents of the ocean and the freshly mown grass. “Always on Wednesday,” he murmured, gazing down the terrace at the waves breaking onto Gavin’s beach. They were small, nothing he’d bother surfing. Suddenly, he wanted to go to Hawaii.
“What was that?” Gavin asked curiously.
“They always cut your grass on Wednesday. It’s Thursday morning and it smells like they just cut it. It was the same last week.”
Gavin chuckled. “I think you’re right, pal. I think they do cut it on Wednesday.”
Conner began to recline into the chair, then forced himself to sit back up. He couldn’t allow himself to get comfortable. He could feel exhaustion coming on again, and he needed to stay alert. “It’s nice out here.”
“Yes, it is. I love it.” Gavin folded his hands in his lap. “Well, you’ve had yourself a hell of a few days.”
“Yeah, I have.” He’d called Gavin after making it out of Washington and relayed what he’d uncovered over the last twenty-four hours about Global Components—and Paul Stone.
“Two billion dollars a year of buried expenses in Minneapolis,” Gavin said softly.
“Thanks to Global’s accountants at Baker Mahaffey.”
“It’s incredible. Global has always been such a great company. I never did any business with them during my career at Harper Manning, but I always admired the numbers they put up.” Gavin paused. “Except for that one time a few years ago. I guess we know now how the execs were able to get the numbers back on track.” He shook his head. “Still, it’s going to be terrible watching the company crash and burn when word gets out.”
“Just another example of corporate executives taking advantage of their positions,” Conner observed. “Defrauding shareholders for their own gain.”
“I can’t believe all those things about Paul,” Gavin said sadly. “The insider trading. Allowing those two women to stay at my place in Miami. Setting you up by using one of them.” He glanced over at Conner. “Did you ever have any idea that Liz Shaw was working with Paul?”
“Not until yesterday.”
“I ought to be pissed off that you found out about my place in Miami by snooping around my apartment. But, under the circumstances, I guess it’s a good thing you did. If Paul had been able to follow through with this Global Components scam, there’s no telling what might have happened to Phenix Capital. If he’d been caught, and I’m sure he would have been,” Gavin said, interrupting himself, “the SEC might have shut us down. At minimum, we all would have been caught up in the proceedings against him.”
“I wasn’t snooping around your apartment,” Conner replied. “I told you, I was just looking for a—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gavin cut in. “Jesus, what an idiot I am. No wonder Paul wanted to know where I was all the time. He was afraid I’d go to Miami without him knowing and find out he was keeping strippers in my condo.”
Conner looked up. “You really had no idea Paul was letting those women stay there?”
Gavin shook his head. “No. I’d given him the keys to the place a few years ago because he said he wanted to take Mandy down there for a romantic weekend. He must have made copies of the keys then.” Gavin banged the table. “You think you know someone, pal, but I guess you never really do.”
“You know me,” Conner said firmly.
Gavin nodded. “Yes, I do,” he agreed quietly.
Conner glanced toward the ocean again. “What are you going to do?”
“The only thing I can do. Turn Paul in.” Gavin sighed. “This will present quite a challenge for Phenix Capital, Conner.”
“Actually, it will present aproblem , Gavin. Not a challenge.”
“Right, a problem.” Gavin hesitated. “Will you stay on at Phenix?”
“If you want me to.”
“Of course, I do,” Gavin said firmly. “In fact, I’m going to need you to take on more responsibility. This weekend we’ll discuss your equity stake in Phenix. And how I’m going to get Paul’s back,” Gavin muttered under his breath.
“Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“You deserve it.” Gavin rubbed his eyes. “How could I have been so stupid? I’m usually a better judge of character. I should have listened to you before.”
>
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Conner said gently, standing up.
“I’m sorry I lied to you about Pharmaco,” Gavin offered. “That was wrong. But I knew you were very worried about our financial condition. Look, this other mandate is real,” he said firmly. “It’ll be at least a twenty-million-dollar fee.”
“Great.”
“I’ll let you talk to the CEO yourself.”
“Okay.”
“There will be at least a couple of million in it for you.”
“It’s all right, Gavin. I know you’ll take care of me.” Conner nodded across the terrace at the mansion. “I’m going to catch a few hours of sleep. Can I use the same bedroom I did last time?”
“Sure. And help yourself to whatever you want. Grab a bite to eat before you go upstairs. There’s plenty of stuff in the kitchen.”
“Thanks.” Conner took a couple of steps toward the mansion, then stopped and turned around. “There is something I want to talk to you about.”
The old man was about to pick up the newspaper. “Oh? What’s that?”
“Remember when you told me that senior guy from Baker Mahaffey called you the other day?”
“Vaguely.”
“That was how you knew I was in Washington.”
“Oh, right,” Gavin said, snapping his fingers.
“What was his name?” Conner asked.
“Youmet with him.”
“I know, but I can’t remember. How did he introduce himself on the phone?”
“Victor Hammond.”
“Did the conversation go well?”
“Very well. We spoke for at least ten minutes. He’s a good man. I think there’s a lot of business we can do with him.”
“Did he ask you to call him anything else during the call?”
“No.”
Conner looked off toward the ocean. If they’d spoken for ten minutes, Hammond would have asked Gavin to call him Vic. “Did Hammond really call you, Gavin?”
