Clawback

by Mike Cooper

  “Fuck, Johnny, I did the best I could!” I felt control slipping. I started yelling into the phone. “They killed every one of her coworkers at the Thatcher. Every one! Automatic weapons and grenades—she’s lucky to be breathing!”

  I was in Central Park, in the wooded Ramble. I stopped walking, not even bothering to shelter from the rain under a tree.

  “I’m not Superman! What do you want? I should go back and get arrested and spend the next ten years in jail? That won’t help!”

  “Hey, no, I didn’t mean that.” He sounded surprised. “Calm down.”

  “Fuck. Fuck!”

  I forced myself to be quiet for a moment, ignored Johnny and looked around. A few early evening joggers were out, the hardy ones who liked to ignore the weather, splashing along in reflective lycra. At four p.m. it felt like night under the drizzling clouds. Thunder rumbled again.

  “I’m sorry. I’m having a really bad day.” I suddenly chuckled in an involuntary, weirdly hysterical manner.

  “I know, man, I know.”

  “It was just a touch of hypothermia and a delayed reaction to the abduction. She’s safe, she’s in the hospital, the cops are on guard.”

  “I hope so.” He paused, a moment’s silence on the phone. “For your sake, too, not just hers.”

  Emotion started to bubble up again, but I jammed the lid on. Time enough later to deal with my shit. Right now I had to focus on Saxon.

  And his masters.

  “Can you look something up for me?” I said.

  “Yeah, sure. Where are you?”

  “On walkabout.”

  “You might want to keep going.”

  “Why?”

  “Haven’t you seen the news?”

  “No, I’ve been chasing heavily armed kidnappers all over the city, remember? Jesus. What news?”

  “The FBI tracked down the bomber—the guy who blew up Blacktail?”

  “But—” Wasn’t that Zeke and me? So much had happened I was losing all the threads.

  “Hayden Pennerton, disgraced hedge fund wunderkind. His name was on the rental car’s papers. Not the name I expected, actually.”

  “Oh. They caught him?”

  “At JFK. He was actually on the jetway when they arrested him.”

  “How about that.”

  “Apparently,” Johnny continued, “he was traveling under a false identity, with a complete set of phony documentation. Plus cash and a bunch of guns. The FBI is being cagey, of course, but ‘unidentified sources’ are talking about an anonymous tip.”

  So the DA finally looked at my mail. “About time.”

  “There’s video up already.” Johnny had obviously been spending too much time clicking through news updates. “A SWAT team, running through the terminal—ski masks, big fucking guns, Kevlar, the whole deal. It’s amazing how many people seem to have their cellphone cameras waiting for this sort of thing.”

  “Good for them.”

  “Traders this morning can’t talk about anything else. One of their own—they don’t usually go down so spectacularly.”

  As I crossed one of the park’s roadways, four cyclists whizzed past. One wore the clear plastic rain jacket that was standard Tour de France fashion in about 1975. They must have been going thirty miles an hour, despite the rain-slick road. I stepped aside, just in time to avoid wheel spray.

  “Is he talking?”

  “Who, Hayden? Not to the media, that’s for sure.”

  How long did I have? Hayden would roll over immediately, of course, but there wasn’t much he could say about me. The bank codes we’d used in recovering Marlett’s money were his—Marlett’s, I mean—and I’d cleared my own transactions subsequently. That trail would die in the Republic of Overseas Tax Evasion, Caymans Branch.

  Forensics on the rental car? The Hooverville labs could be incredibly persistent. Or they might match me some other way. We really do live in a panopticon.

  “All very interesting,” I said. “And it’s now even more important—the favor I need.”

  “Shoot.” He hesitated. “So to speak.”

  “The yacht Saxon took Clara to. Tangible Assets. Who owns it?”

  “Good question.”

  And it was. Theseus’s thread through the entire maze, in fact.

  Saxon was a nasty piece of work, but in the end, just another hired hand. He certainly didn’t have the scratch for a 150-foot supercruiser. Nor could he possibly have orchestrated the slay-to-pay scheme in all its devious glory. A market player with a billion or two to gamble and no morals whatsoever—yes, I realize that doesn’t narrow the field particularly—set it up. He was the guy I wanted to see.

  He’d be the boat’s owner. Saxon had been running to his daddy.

  “Nothing’s coming up on Google,” said Johnny.

  “Well, hell, I didn’t think it would be that easy. There must be databases, though. Boats have to be registered, right? Maybe there are yacht spotters, like the nutcases who track private jets as a hobby? I don’t know. See what you can find.”

  “I don’t spend much time in idle websurfing.” Which was undoubtedly true. I’m not sure Johnny had any interests at all outside the markets. “You need someone who knows how to do this,” he said. “A researcher.”

  “She’s in a hospital at the moment.”

  “Oh.” He paused. “Sorry.”

  I let a beat pass. The rain had turned pretty in the park, and I just watched it fall.

  “Look, it’s going to take a few minutes. Call me back.”

  “All right. Thanks.” But before I hung up, I thought of something. “Hey, what’s going on with Plank Industrials? Are they still in play?”

  “The share price is headed for the moon. No, Alpha Centauri. Up something like seventy percent today.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they arrested Pennerton! Everyone figures Terry Plank is safe now.”

  “The shorts must be hurting.”

  “On the coals.” Johnny laughed. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a short squeeze so pure and clean—not on a Fortune 500 stock. It’s beautiful.”

  “Sounds like you have a piece of it.”

  “Not much.”

  Right. Johnny wasn’t much of a poker player.

  He went back to his computer. “MarineRegistryOnline-dot-com. That looks good.”

  “Well?”

  “They’re asking for a credit card number.”

  “Yeah, that’s how it works. Who the hell does your shopping for you?”

  “The help.” Maybe he was serious. “Give me a half hour.”

  “An address, too, if you can get it.”

  “Right.”

  I tucked the phone away as I came to the edge of the park. A forlorn ice-cream vendor was packing it in, shuttering his cart and folding the umbrella. When the light turned I squished across Fifth Avenue.

  I needed dry clothes, but I still couldn’t go home—even more so now, with Hayden under the bright lights, Rondo getting all kinds of questions and probably every cop in the city looking for me. This neighborhood had nothing but high-end women’s boutiques and bespoke tailors. Finally, in a sandwich-and-gelato multimart, I found a display of tourist gimcrack, including some souvenir clothing. For seventy bucks I got an FDNY hoodie, a T-shirt with the notorious FML subway sign and a huge Yankees umbrella.

  “You want a bag for all that?” The girl behind the counter looked dubiously at the damp bills I handed over.

  “No, I’m changing into them right now.”

  Down the street I bought an oversize, overheated coffee with extra whipped cream. The shop was bright and noisy, one of those places that costs four times as much as McDonald’s but has the same cheap plastic furniture. I sat in a corner, nipping at the scorching caffeine, and examined my half-dozen cellphones. Remarkably, they all still worked. I was about to turn them all off again when the blue-taped one rang. I looked at the number but drew a blank.

  Of course I’d forgotten who I’d assig
ned blue to.

  “Hello?”

  “Don’t you ever answer your phone? I thought you gave me this number so I could always reach you! I’ve been calling for two hours.”

  Ganderson, sounding just like Clara. Was I really so out of sync with the pace of modern life?

  “I turned it off while I went for a run,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Friday’s my long day. Fifteen miles.”

  “Oh. Listen, I’ve got your meeting with Plank set up. Where are you?”

  Meeting? “I have to take a shower.”

  “Make it quick.”

  “But—” I frowned. “I thought Terry was safe. Now that the police seem to have caught the terrorist.”

  “So they say.”

  “You don’t believe them?”

  “I stopped believing the government the same time I stopped believing in the tooth fairy.”

  “Well—”

  “More important, Terry himself doesn’t think he’s out of danger yet. He wants you on board, PDQ.”

  I had no idea what those initials meant. Old folks are always giving the new generation shit for textspeak, but they have plenty of their own inscrutable jargon, IMAO.

  “Fine. I’ll see him. But let’s agree on a minimum, okay?—if I get there and he’s changed his mind, I still get a day’s pay.”

  “No problem. Sure.”

  I looked at the phone. No problem? No nickel-and-dime outrage? Ganderson might actually be worried.

  “So where is he? Some private estate, surrounded by militia? An underground bunker? Iowa?”

  “No, no. He never left Manhattan.”

  Ah. Not bad. Whoever was running Terry’s security had some smarts. The most dangerous times are when you’re moving, not when you’re hunkered down, so it made sense for Terry to have gone to ground in place.

  “He’s going to make a public statement,” Ganderson continued. “Later this evening. He wants you around to double-check, keep an eye out, like that.”

  I started to see why Ganderson was concerned. “Public statement? Why bother?”

  “Too much speculation around his company. He wants Plank Industrials out of the news, for good. Standing up in front of a crowd, and nothing happening, makes the point that he’s safe and the hyenas should hump off elsewhere.”

  Hyenas? Oh, the press.

  “And I’ll be there to make sure nothing does happen,” I said.

  “Exactly. Absolutely sure. You and a few dozen other guys.”

  “I need an hour.” I could have headed straight over, wherever Plank was, but it might be a good idea to clean up first.

  “The news conference is going to be at the Grand Plaza. You can meet us there. Call when you arrive and I’ll tell you where we are.”

  Nice. The Grand Plaza was a vast, ornately luxurious hotel-slash-conference-center on Broadway. Anesthesiologist conventions, celebrity weddings, Russian oligarchs visiting the Big Apple—an apotheosis of twenty-first-century public culture. I’d heard they maintained a green room just for A-list paparazzi. “Is Plank staying at the hotel?”

  “That’s classified.” Ganderson coughed—no, he was laughing. “Operational security, you know.”

  “Got to go,” I said. “I’ll be there within the hour.”

  “Good.” Ganderson clicked off.

  It wasn’t just the job. If Plank was really still in the crosshairs, Saxon would be holding the rifle.

  And if Saxon was ready to kill someone else tonight, despite everything he’d gone through today—well, I could be there, too.

  Another ringtone. I shuffled through my collection while taking a long gulp of coffee. This time I was pretty sure whose it was.

  “Johnny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wasn’t I supposed to call you?”

  “Were you?”

  “Never mind. Do you have a name?”

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “How much did MarineRegistryOnline-dot-com charge you?”

  “Don’t worry about it. On me.”

  A long pause.

  “Well?” Not that I was impatient or anything.

  “Sorry.” Johnny was clearly distracted. “Some action in Plank Industrials options. Futures spreads widening…there’s some serious buying going on there.”

  Options, because the exchange was closed, and shares wouldn’t be traded again, publicly, until tomorrow morning.

  “He’s doing a press conference tonight,” I said.

  “The market appears happy to have heard that.”

  “So what’s the name?”

  “Name?”

  “The yacht!”

  “Oh, right. It’s registered to an entity called Waterborne Inclinations, LLC.”

  I waited. “And?”

  “So I tried to look them up. They’re incorporated by a brass-plate law firm in Bermuda.”

  “Along with five thousand other tax-avoidance vehicles, no doubt.” The tax havens were filled with such offices: one room, one attorney, and one extra large file cabinet. Their only advertising was typically a small nameplate screwed to the door.

  “You’d need a big-gun lawyer to hack through the holdings trail,” Johnny said.

  “And far more time than I have.”

  “Right. So I googled the bugger just to see what might come up. Turns out they’re not trying to hide—or not trying hard.”

  “You found the owners?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Johnny paused to set up his revelation. “But I turned up some news clippings—maritime trade press releases, that sort of thing. Waterborne Inclinations has done some other business, like renting a yacht club for a reception, chartering a party boat, and so forth. They don’t lay out an org chart, but every event was owned or headlined by Aldershot Capital Partners.”

  It took me a moment.

  “Aldershot—that’s Ganderson’s firm!”

  “Yes.” Johnny sounded pleased with his accomplishment.

  “He hired me to find himself?” I was arguing with myself, really, the same conversation that had been running inside my head all day.

  “You don’t think someone like Ganderson could be behind the killings?”

  “Actually, no, I think it would be just someone like Ganderson. A ruthless and amoral hedge fund, trying out unorthodox strategies to rig some trades.”

  “So there you go.”

  “But every fund manager is like that. The successful ones, anyway. The real problem is that Ganderson hired me.” Repeating myself.

  “Uh-huh. To do what, exactly?”

  “To find out who might be assassinating lousy fund managers.”

  “Why?”

  “To avoid bad publicity—”

  “Or any publicity at all,” Johnny said. “The kind that might, you know, interfere with his scheme.”

  “Sure,” I said. “If he was responsible, he might hire me—but not to find him out. That’s just stupid.”

  “I dunno.” Johnny’s shrug was clear over the phone. “Ganderson may have written you some checks, but he also owns the boat that the number-one bad guy ran to when he was in trouble.”

  Indeed. I couldn’t work it out in my head, not in any logical way.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Johnny.

  “Ganderson said Terry Plank wants me at his press conference, in case Carlos the Jackal shows up.”

  “Still planning to go?”

  I thought about it. Around me office workers drank their end-of-day pick-me-ups, ate stale pastries from the morning delivery, talked on their own cellphones. The novel writers had gone home. The counter staff looked like they wanted their shift to end ASAP.

  I knew the feeling.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Even though—”

  “Maybe Ganderson set it up; maybe he didn’t. Either way, he’s at the center of the whole thing. And he’s invited me to show up in the same room with him—armed.”

  “I guess.”

/>   I suddenly wished I hadn’t thrown away the SCAR.

  “Armed,” I said again. “I don’t think I can pass this chance up.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Grand Plaza was as imposing as its name. A hundred and twenty years old, built of carved sandstone and brick, it occupied an entire block near Times Square. Ten flags drooped in a row from brass poles extending over the broad entrance. A team of bellmen, valet drivers and concierges briskly managed the traffic in and out the sweeping glass doors. Even the smokers’ area was well maintained, with its own Art Nouveau awning, a pair of bronze ash stands and a blower discreetly drawing secondhand smoke away from the sidewalk.

  I stood by the entrance to an ATM machine across and down the street, pretending to talk on one of my cellphones while I studied the hotel.

  A two-day conference was in progress: “Innovation and Strategic Investment in Distressed Assets, Eleventh Annual Sessions.”

  Or as the finblogs shorthanded it, “VultureFest XI.” You might have expected a lower profile from this crowd, but public opprobrium means nothing to guys whose best deals generally involve mass layoffs, pension stripping and fire-sale liquidation. At six p.m. they were probably sitting down to dinner inside. Ignoring the keynote, thinking about which strip clubs to visit later. Ganderson would be in his element, but I wasn’t sure what Plank Industrials was doing there. Decades-old midwestern factories, big-steel manufacturing—exactly the sort of “distressed assets” that investors like these live to dismember. Imagine a baby bunny, blundering into a pack of dire wolves.

  On the other hand, if Terry Plank wanted to make a very public statement, it wasn’t a bad choice of venue. Reporters were on standby, hoping to catch examples of vulgar excess and plutocratic disdain, populist titillation for their readers. I even saw two television vans. It was hard to tell at a distance, but Clara’s friend Darryl might have been standing outside one of them, thumbing a smartphone.

  Otherwise, no action. No police and nothing unusual in the tide of pedestrians sweeping past, mostly workers on their way home in the rainy evening. Cars sloshed along Broadway, honking now and then, but with little enthusiasm. Umbrellas jostled. The doormen whistled taxis. It all looked perfectly normal.

  The decoy phone rang, right in my ear. I jumped, half deafened.

  “Why aren’t you inside?” Ganderson, sounding harried.