Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers)

by William F. Brown

  “No tech people?”

  “Actually, they have two. They even put their photos in the annual report standing in front of a huge satellite dish array in the desert, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, lab coats, and clipboards, trying to look like they knew what they’re doing.”

  “Out in the desert?” Bob scratched his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do they. My guess is, they threw a paper-signing party in Vegas and took some promo shots outside town at that big satellite dish array at the UNLV research center.”

  “So, who are they?”

  “You remember that guy Randy Person and his pal Harry Ingersoll?”

  “The two guys we fired? You gotta be kidding!”

  “Nope, I’m serious as an undertaker.”

  “Person and Ingersoll… as I remember, one of them gussied up his résumé and the other was so abrasive that no one would work with him. Total zeros, both of them.”

  “That’s them. We fired them last summer. As usual, to avoid being sued, nobody outside the office knew about it. One morning they were here, the next morning they were gone; because that was best for everyone, right?”

  “Why do I sense a migraine coming here?”

  “Migraine? Oh, this one’s gonna twist your shorts good. What’s the common thread?”

  “I’m getting a sick feeling you’re gonna tell me it’s Angie.”

  “Give the man a cigar. She knew all about those two. I’m sure you discussed their termination at the board meeting, right? When we let them go, they became a couple of techies she could hire cheap. And Gordon and Kramer are her lawyers.”

  “Strike two,” Bob groaned.

  “Finally, for a two-out, top of the 9th, three-and-two hard-cheese 'I bet you can't hit this' fastball on the inside corner, when I dug deep enough into the papers and tax records of that holding company in Delaware, she’s listed as the freaking Chairman of the Board!”

  Bob stared at him, speechless, unable to breathe, feeling as if something sucked the air out of the room. “That’s gotta be a mistake. Why would Angie do something like that? Are you sure?” As he looked across the desk at Charlie, he could see he was.

  “You know her a tad better than I do, of course,” Charlie smiled, “but I got the impression she never liked one pair of shoes, if she could get two.”

  “Or six, or ten.”

  “Not that I fully understand the intricate working of the female mind, especially hers; but she’s already tried to force you out a couple of times, running straight at you through the Board. When that didn’t work, maybe she decided to make an end run, go for the DOD contract, and put you and the company out in the cold. Do you think she could be that malevolent, that clever?”

  “Angie? You bet your knutchkies she could; but why would she tear the house down around herself? That’s lose-lose, for us and for her… isn’t it?”

  “No, anything but, Bob! Think about it. She’d have the new company, which she would be in complete control of, a handpicked board, her own staff, and she’d have the new DOD contract; albeit with no way to carry it out, but that doesn’t matter. After she wrecks Toler TeleCom, she can come back here and cherrypick whatever tech guys she needs.”

  “You’re right,” Bob said as he slumped back in his chair. “Why didn’t I see it?”

  “Because your mind doesn’t work like that. If she can force you out at this new Board Meeting, that’s even better. She can skip a few steps, merge the two companies, and have it all.”

  “We’ve got to get that DOD contract back.”

  “It’s our only chance.”

  “Yeah, but I’m so damn tired right now. I feel brain-dead. After that woman on the roof, and then Greenway, and O’Malley… I can’t focus.”

  “You’ve got to,” Charlie answered as he closed his laptop and scooped up the papers strewn across Bob’s desk. “I’ll admit you have other ‘woman problems’ right now, but the really big problem is with the live woman you married, not the dead one on the roof.”

  “Yeah, I get it. It’s time for you to go back to your office and think, and it’s time for me to make some phone calls.”

  “You’d better reach out to the Trustees of both of the pension plans, and the banks.”

  “I know, but I’m starting with George Grierson.”

  “The lawyer? Yeah,” Charlie agreed. “He should probably be first.” With that final ugly thought, Charlie drained the last of his scotch and left Bob alone with his phone.

  Three hours later, he tossed his pen on the desk and shook his head. Pension plan trustees, bankers, and lawyers — he felt drained. Angie had them in a vice and was tightening it as fast as she could. Still, he looked down at the yellow legal pad sitting in front of him. It was covered with doodles, but there was not a serious thought about Toler TeleCom to be seen. He had drawn dramatic sketches of airplanes, water towers, and police cars, plus the intricate, overly stylized initials “CHC.” This was getting him nowhere, he realized, as he turned and looked out the window. Angie and the DOD contract might be his big problems, but the woman on the roof refused to be pushed aside. Every time he closed his eyes, she was there, lying on her back in the brown gravel, staring up at him, with Lawrence Greenway’s long fingers wrapped around her throat. She was there, hovering front and center in his conscience, and she was not going away until Burke did something about her.

  Reluctantly, he pushed the pad of paper away, opened the keyboard drawer to his desk, and turned his eyes to his computer monitor. The Army spent years and tens of thousands of dollars teaching him to act on instinct, to trust his gut, and to make life-and-death decisions on a very short list of facts. After six months on this job, his sharp-edged tactical training was being dulled by computer searches, too many meetings, and mountains of e-mail. Sad but true. Now, there wasn’t a problem he needed input on or an issue he could create, or even think of creating, that Google wouldn’t bury him under a mountain of useless online information in the time it took to type it into a search engine. It was paralysis-by-analysis, the usual cause of stagnation in the business world, and it drove him crazy.

  However, the second critical skill the Army taught him was to know your enemy. His fingers dropped to the keyboard and he typed in ‘Consolidated Health Care.’ He barely hit Enter when a cascading list of newspaper and magazine stories filled the screen. Below the search box it said, “About 11,370 Results. 0.27 seconds.” Wow, he thought. In the new age of information overkill, it became incredibly easy to hide things. All you have to do is leave it out in plain sight halfway down a list like that. Who would ever find it? Still, he knew he must try. Jumping around from subject to subject, from corporate information, to press releases, to newspaper and magazine stories, he could see CHC ballooned up in a very short time from one inner-city clinic to a major Medicare provider in the “urban” Chicago area and surrounding states, but O’Malley’s numbers were already out of date. They did $87 million in business last year, primarily Medicare and Medicaid, with a staff of five hundred and twenty-five employees at seventeen corporate and clinic locations, plus several new drug-manufacturing operations in India and Pakistan. No wonder Chief Bentley went into protective overdrive when Burke and Travers came knocking. No question, CHC must be Indian Hills biggest employer and taxpayer.

  CHC’s website was very slick, with beautiful, full-color photography, professional shots of the Indian Hills headquarters, the clinics in the city, and their new pill factory in India, as well as a long list of departments and subjects. Funny, but the more Bob saw, the less he knew. Digging through their official corporate reports and filings, he saw the same multilayered structure with interlocking corporations and holding companies that Charlie noted with Symbiotic Software. Like everything these days, domestic or foreign, from cars and refrigerators to corporations, it was damned hard to tell who owned what anymore, where anything was made, what it was made of, and whether it might kill you if you ate it. The most frequent answer now seeme
d to be China, and, “You really don’t want to know.”

  Their website was an electronic version of their annual report. Taking a cue from Charlie, he clicked to the back pages, where he saw what he was really looking for — the names, photos and bios of the Board Members, Principal Officers, and Executives of CHC. Front and center on almost every page was the smiling, debonair face of Lawrence Greenway. He was the President and CEO, apparently a child prodigy who was born and raised in Chicago, and earned a Doctor of Medicine from Loyola and an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern. Not exactly chopped liver, Burke thought, and not to be underestimated. There followed some headlines and a collage of photographs showing the truly pioneering work Greenway did at his inner city clinics and what they were now doing overseas.

  On the last few pages, he saw the photographs of the other Officers and Department Heads. His eyes immediately picked out the photograph of Eleanor Purdue. As O’Malley said, she was CHC’s Chief Financial Officer and head of accounting. However, looking through the rest of the list and at the other photographs, he did not see Salvatore DiGrigoria, Tony Scalese, or anyone else with so much as an Italian last name. Figures, Bob thought.

  Returning to the long page of Google search results, he found a list of press releases and news stories, mostly related to Lawrence Greenway’s recent testimony in front of US House and Senate hearings on Medicaid and Medicare fraud and abuse. In several of the photos, Greenway appeared to be sitting comfortably in front of a bank of microphones at a witness table in one of the hearing rooms. Dressed in his usual impeccably tailored suit with his raven hair slicked back, he looked to be the confident lord of everything he surveyed. From the exhibition he put on in his corporate lobby the day before, Burke doubted the senators or congressmen at that Washington hearing could lay a glove on the man.

  As he glanced through the accompanying articles, he found himself in a quick double take. Rather than dodge questions or mutter platitudes, Greenway took the offensive. “Shame on you!” He sat at that hearing table and wagged his finger at the assembled congressmen. “You’re the ones who wrote this horribly crafted legislation, not we in the medical services industry. All it does is invite fraud and abuse from our competitors. To top it all off, you take massive campaign contributions from the very people you’re supposed to be regulating. That makes a mockery of the entire process.”

  Well, you can’t accuse the man of not having chutzpah, Bob thought as he found himself laughing aloud. It was as if Greenway was daring the congressional committee to come after him, convinced that they couldn’t touch him. He was probably right. He was slick, and he believed he was bulletproof. Interesting.

  The flurry of news stories and press releases that followed the hearings appeared to have been generated by CHC’s corporate public relations staff. They were designed to get the company’s version of the facts out first, to brag about all the good things they did, and to spin them in the print and electronic media far ahead of anything that the legitimate press might manage to dig up on Greenway or CHC. Even if they did, CHC’s PR people would jump on any real story or question and bury it under a blizzard of subsequent misinformation. However, while Greenway might think he was bulletproof, Bob wondered if that was the way Salvatore DiGrigoria looked at all this unwanted publicity. The Mob usually preferred to stay way below the radar, not to tweak Congress, and not to get their faces plastered all over the morning newspapers. No, he thought, that was not something Old Sal would have appreciated, which may be why he sent in his pet pit bull, Tony Scalese.

  Bob leaned back in his desk chair and stared out the window again. It was all so obvious, he thought. He spent less than a day, a few hours really, and was he the only one who could connect the dots? Lawrence Greenway was a crook on a massive scale. Graft and corruption with federal contracts was nothing new, but Bob drew the line at murder and was determined not to let Greenway get away with it.

  The sun was going down. He was not accomplishing a damned thing here in the office, and he knew he needed some fresh air. He turned the monitor off, locked his desk drawers, pulled on a blue nylon windbreaker, and headed for the door.

  Downtown, on the 32nd floor of the Federal Building, US Attorney for Northern Illinois, Peter Francis O’Malley III, was also staring out his office window into the setting sun. He leaned back in his desk chair, his stocking feet propped up on his window ledge, thinking, and getting even angrier than Bob Burke. Finally, he spun the chair around, and glared up at his assistant, FBI Agent Mike Hanover, who stood in front of his desk like an obedient Doberman, waiting patiently for his master’s orders. He had worked for O’Malley for six months, ever since O’Malley received his Presidential Appointment to the position. O’Malley was the third US Attorney for whom Hanover worked, and while six months was not a long span in a government position like this, Hanover had already learned to detest the intense, miniature Irishman. Today was one more painful lesson as to why.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass Mike! Keep digging until you find something, and don’t come back until you do. If that smartass Burke won’t jump in front of Greenway’s train, then I guess I’ll have to throw him there and see what happens.”

  “Chief, we’ve been digging, but the guy’s clean. He’s a war hero.”

  “Find something, goddammit! I want leverage. Dig up some dirt on him, or his company or that slut of a wife of his — I don’t care which or how, only when. And don’t worry about him not being dirty; he will be when I get through.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Angie lay naked on a lounge chair on the massive pool deck of her father’s big house — now her big house — in Winnetka, finishing what was left of a bottle of the best Riesling she could find in his wine cellar. Decisions, decisions, she complained, unable to make up her mind whether to spend what was left of the afternoon out here finishing the wine, or go to the club for an early evening “tennis lesson” with Klaus the “pro.” Ever since Bob moved out, there was no one around to pester or harass when she got horny. That bastard! Fortunately, at that moment her housekeeper Consuelo stepped out the rear kitchen door and cautiously approached her. Angie’s temper was notorious, and the hired help knew she did not like surprises.

  “Mee-sus Burke,” Consuelo said softly, “there’s a Mee-ster O’Malley at the front door to see you. His card say he is the US Attorney…”

  “Yeah, I know who he is.”

  “He does not have an appointment, so I told him you were unavailable.”

  “No, you can send him out here,” she answered as she put on her dark sunglasses and made a half-hearted effort to cover herself with a huge Turkish towel, leaving some of the more delicious areas partially exposed.

  “Si, Mee-sus Burke,” her housekeeper smiled hesitantly. “And… it is almost 4:00 now. I be leaving soon, so I put your salad in the refrigerator.”

  “That’s fine, Consuelo. Bring us a couple of your special Texas Teas before you leave, por favor, and make his strong enough to peel paint.”

  Several minutes later, Consuelo returned, escorting a short, handsome man in an expensive blue suit.

  “Pardon me for not getting up, Mr. O’Malley, but that might be a problem.”

  “I completely understand, Mrs. Burke,” O’Malley laughed as he took the lounge chair opposite her. “A beautiful woman like you should take advantage of the sun while you can.”

  “Flattery only works on me if you’re trying to get in my pants, Mr. O’Malley, and I don’t think that’s what you’re trying to do, is it?”

  “No, no, not at the moment,” he laughed.

  “That’s good, since I’m not wearing any.”

  Only then did O’Malley realize how quickly this woman put him off his game, and that almost never happened to him. The sun was behind her and shining uncomfortably into his eyes, while she wore dark glasses, and he could not see her eyes at all. Did she plan it this way? Knowing what he already knew about her, he wouldn’t be surprised. That was when the houseke
eper returned and placed a tall icy glass in front of each of them.

  Angie raised her glass toward him. “To the wheels of justice, Mr. O’Malley, may they not run over your foot,” she said as she took a sip from her glass.

  He laughed as he tipped his glass up and took a big swallow, suddenly coughing as the potent mixture of almost straight tequila hit his throat. “Sorry about that,” he told her. “Must have gone down wrong,” he added as he coughed a few more times.

  “Sometimes Consuela doesn’t measure very well.”

  “So it seems. Anyway, I’m Peter O’Malley, I’m the US…”

  “I know who you are.”

  “That didn’t sound very warm and friendly, Mrs. Burke.”

  “You can call me Angie, and let’s say I’m not a huge fan of the US Government at the moment.”

  “Ah, the DOD contract your company lost.”

  “Lost? We didn’t lose anything, it was stolen; and unfortunately, it isn’t my company at the moment, as I suspect you already know. Is that why you are here? Are you launching an investigation of Summit Symbiotics and those colonels over at DOD procurement?”

  “No, no,” he smiled as he picked at the seam of his trousers. “Actually, I’m here for some information on your husband.”

  “Bobby? He’s not here and I doubt he is coming back. As I’m sure you know, we aren’t exactly on the best of terms at the moment, business or personal. We’ve separated.”

  “So I hear. I actually spoke with him this morning in his office regarding a murder he claims to have witnessed last night. I know that has nothing whatsoever to do with your company; but frankly, he wasn’t as friendly or cooperative with my investigation as I hoped he might be.”

  “That doesn’t sound like him; he’s about as ‘straight arrow’ as they come, but he doesn’t like being pushed around.”