by Stephen Frey
“Those pages are important,” Lucas whispered, feeling his life ebbing away.
Conner took the bloodstained pages from the little man’s trembling hand, then clasped the small fingers tightly.
Moments later, Lucas was gone.
Epilogue
Jackie picked up a glass of wine off the table and took a sip. “All right, I want an explanation.” It had been a week since the episode at Gavin’s mansion. A week since they had climbed frantically into Conner’s rental car and raced to the Easthampton Police Station ahead of any more of Franklin Bennett’s men. “What happened out there?”
“Oh, you want an explanation, do you?” Conner asked, grinning as he sat beside her on the couch.
“I think Ideserve one.”
Conner tried to look puzzled. “Why? Just because you were held at gunpoint and almost killed?”
“I think that qualifies me.”
Conner laughed. “Yeah, I guess it does.” He took a sip of wine before he started. “Paul Stone had committed insider trading a while back. After he heard about a lawsuit involving a little biotech company in Massachusetts before the rest of the world did. He found out about the suit from one of the company’s senior executives and made around sixty grand shorting the stock. But Stone was sloppy with the way he went about releasing the information concerning the lawsuit. He did it on the company’s chat board directly from his own computer. The Justice Department nailed him right away.
“While people from Justice were interrogating Stone, he communicated the fact that he was planning to do the same thing with Global Components. But this time he had a partner.”
“Gavin Smith,” Jackie spoke up.
“Right. Now, it turns out one of the guys from Justice who was interrogating Stone used to work at Harper Manning and had been fired by Gavin Smith a couple of years ago. Gavin had fired the guy to cover up for his own mistake, so the guy was looking for revenge big time. When he heard Gavin’s name, he couldn’t believe his luck.”
“And, of course, Justice always wants to nail the biggest dog they can,” Jackie pointed out.
“Always,” Conner agreed. “Which Stone knew and was probably why he told the guys interrogating him.”
“They would have been all over that opportunity right away. Even if the one guy wasn’t looking for revenge.”
“That’s right. So they decided to set up a sting to get Gavin,” Conner continued, “simply by letting the Global Components situation play out. In return for his cooperation, Paul Stone was supposed to be able to stay out of jail when the thing was over.”
“And Gavin Smith set you up to do all the dirty work on Global.”
Conner nodded. “Because he didn’t want to take a risk in case something blew up along the way.”
“But how did Gavin find out there was something going on at Global in the first place?”
“Liz Shaw, the roommate of the woman in Miami that Gavin was seeing, had overheard two Global Components senior executives bragging about what they were doing. How they were creating billions of dollars of earnings out of thin air because they were the smartest guys in town. But Liz hadn’t heard enough for Gavin and Stone to make such a huge bet. They had to be absolutely sure the fraud was being committed,and they had to be able to control when the existence of the fraud was exposed.”
“So they could get in and out of the market quickly.”
“Yes.” Conner nodded approvingly.
“But who was the little guy who died at the mansion?” Jackie asked. “The guy who kidnapped me that morning, and handed you those pieces of paper at the end.”
Conner had been debriefed by the FBI. He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what they’d said, but Jackie deserved to know. “His name was Lucas Avery.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know any Lucas Avery. Why did he come and get me?”
“Amy Richards.”
Jackie raised both eyebrows. “You mean that psycho woman you dated last winter?”
“Yeah, she told Lucas about us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Amy knew that I cared for you,” Conner said softly. “Apparently, she’s been stalking me for quite some time. She’s seen us out together a few times and she told Lucas that was the way to get to me.” He ran his fingers over Jackie’s cheek. He hadn’t realized how much he cared about her until he’d seen the gun pointed at her head. He smiled. “Amy was right. Thatwas the way to get to me. I came back to get you.”
“I know,” she said, leaning forward to kiss him. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Besides, it was because of me that you were there.”
Jackie kissed him again, this time more deeply. “But how did Lucas find Amy?” she asked, pulling back.
“Paul Stone.”
She took another sip of wine. “So who was Lucas Avery?”
“He worked at the West Wing of the White House. Until the president’s chief of staff gave him a special assignment.”
“The president’s chief of staff,”Jackie repeated, wide-eyed. “You mean Franklin Bennett?”
“Yes.”
“What was the assignment?”
“Lucas was supposed to make certain there wasn’t any bad stuff floating around out in the ether about top members of the president’s administration, specifically the vice president and the secretaries of treasury, state, defense, and energy.”
“You mean the Beltway Boys,” Jackie said.
“Yup. But apparently Bennett had another agenda. And Lucas figured it out.”
“What was that other agenda?”
“Bennett really wanted the information so he could take the president down.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“Project Trust.”
“You mean the subject of the speech the president made last week? Nailing all of you Wall Street types to the wall.”
Conner grinned at her. “Yes. I guess some very influential people inside the president’s party didn’t care much for Project Trust. He was going to propose a seventy-five percent tax rate on all income over a million bucks. And some kind of net worth tax, too.”
Jackie whistled softly. “Jesus. I’ve got some clients who’d be pretty upset about that.”
“Lucas figured out what Bennett was really up to, and he found out something very bad about one of the Beltway Boys.”
“Which one?”
“Let me come back to that.”
“Okay.”
“So Lucas figures out everything, but he horse trades. He won’t tell Bennett who the bad guy is or what he’s done until Bennett promises a big career in the party. Money, perks, the whole nine yards. Bennett agrees, but crosses his fingers behind his back. Thing is, Lucas had an insurance policy.”
“Those pages he handed to you at Gavin’s.”
Conner nodded. “Yes. He’d written everything down.”
“And what was the binder Lucas kept asking you about?”
A few days ago Conner had accompanied FBI agents to Harrisburg to retrieve the binder at the Greyhound bus station. They were going to use it as evidence against Franklin Bennett, Alan Bryson, Sam Macarthur, and Vic Hammond, as well as the Global Component executives. As Phil Reeves had said, it was the ultimate smoking gun.
“It was a binder an accountant at Baker Mahaffey put together in case he ever had to negotiate with the authorities. It detailed the fraud at Global Components as well as what the Beltway Boys had done. It showed that he had been coerced. Not that it’s going to help much,” he said, thinking back on the news of Phil Reeves’s violent death.
“No, it won’t,” Jackie agreed somberly. “Was this Beltway Boy a director of Global Components?”
Conner clapped several times. “Damn, you’re good.”
“It’s my business, Conner. I have to be good.” She paused. “But what does Lucas have to do with Justice? How did he know about you?”
“Franklin
Bennett found out about what was going on at Justice with Paul Stone and Gavin Smith, and the fact that they had uncovered something nasty about Global Components.”
“So he figured he might be able to find out about the Beltway Boy that way as well,” Jackie reasoned.
“Yes.”
“And that’s the connection from Lucas to Paul Stone.”
“Right.” Conner slid his hand behind Jackie’s neck and pulled her mouth gently to his. He was going to take her to Hawaii and propose to her while they sat on a surfboard in a quiet lagoon on top of the turquoise water. In fact, he knew exactly which lagoon it would be. He’d found it one day by himself when he’d been to the Islands surfing the Banzai Pipeline. He chuckled. He might even find his way out onto the Pipeline once or twice while he and Jackie were there.
“What are you laughing about?” she asked, poking him in the ribs.
“Nothing, nothing.” He wanted to tell her so badly how he was going to propose.
“So?”
“So what?”
“So which one of the Beltway Boys was it and what did he do?” Jackie asked.
“Oh, right.” Conner picked up the remote and flicked on the television. “Check it out.”
They watched for a few moments as a commercial ended. Then a reporter appeared on the screen.
“Back to our top story,” the reporter said excitedly. “Shares of Global Components have plunged to three dollars and ten cents in the last hour of trading due to the massive financial fraud uncovered this morning at theFortune 500 giant. In a related story,” the woman continued, “Treasury Secretary Alan Bryson has been implicated in the exploding scandal.”
ALSO BYSTEPHENFREY
THETAKEOVER
THEVULTUREFUND
THEINNERSANCTUM
THELEGACY
THEINSIDER
TRUSTFUND
THEDAYTRADER
SILENTPARTNER
Shadow Accountis a work of fiction. Names, places, and
incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by Stephen Frey
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request from the publisher.
e-ISBN 0-345-47215-2
v1.0
