The Inner Sanctum

by Stephen W. Frey

  “Kiss me.” He brought one hand to the back of her head, leaned forward, and pressed his lips to hers.

  “Please stop! Please!” Finally she broke free from his grasp and stepped back, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.

  Todd stared at her intently for a moment, then slowly lowered his eyes to the pavement and shook his head. “Jess, I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me,” he said softly. “You know I’m not like that.”

  “I know.” She went to touch his arm, then held back. The strength he had used to hold her head had shocked her. She had not broken free from him, she now realized, he had chosen to let her go. “I know,” she said again. “Hey, I appreciate what you did for me tonight.”

  He nodded dejectedly. “Yeah, sure.”

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  He nodded again, then pulled the keys from his pocket, unlocked the door and slipped behind the wheel. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Todd, don’t leave like this.”

  But he wasn’t listening. He threw the Corvette into reverse, pulled out of the space and raced away.

  As Jesse watched the sleek white car speed through the parking lot, she touched her cheeks. God, that had been strange. He had never acted that way before. So why now? Perhaps Becky would have an explanation.

  Jesse checked her watch in the glow from the parking lot light. Almost three o’clock. She turned and hurried back toward her rental car. There was something else she had to do before she could get some sleep.

  * * *

  —

  As always, the stuffed animals lay neatly arranged on the top bunk, smiling at her from the pillows. Jesse gazed at them sadly from the doorway. Her mother kept the room exactly as it had been the day she left the house for good. She glanced down at the lower bunk, then at the single bed on the other side of the small room. She and her two sisters had grown up here. One day they had been adolescents arguing about boys, the next they had all gone off to lead their own lives. At least it seemed that way.

  “Jesse?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Oh my God, you scared me to death. I’m so glad it’s you.”

  Jesse turned away from the room toward the voice. Connie stood in the dark hallway clad in a long cotton robe. “Hi, Mom. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “It’s all right, but it’s almost four in the morning, sweetheart. I love when you visit me, but why now?”

  Jesse moved the bag behind her back, then dropped it gently to the floor, hoping her mother wouldn’t notice. The bag contained Neil Robinson’s file from the river house, Gordon Smith’s personnel file and the Doub Steel file from LFA, the broker data from Todd linking Sagamore’s money to Elbridge Coleman’s campaign, and the W-2 information matching Gordon Smith’s Social Security numbers at LFA and the Coleman campaign. It contained everything she had accumulated so far since receiving Neil Robinson’s E-mail from the grave. “I needed to pick something up,” she offered lamely.

  “And drop something off, I see.” Connie nodded down at the floor.

  “Uh huh.” Jesse offered nothing more. “Mom, go back to bed.”

  “Can’t we talk for a while? You know how much I love it when you come by.” Connie hesitated. “You’re the only one that really does.”

  “I’ll come out this weekend, I promise.” Jesse took her mother’s hand and led her back to her bedroom. She helped Connie into the bed, then pulled the covers up to her chin. “I love you, Mom.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked her mother’s hair for a moment. “I have something for you,” Jesse whispered.

  “What?” Connie asked softly, already drifting back to sleep.

  Jesse reached in her pocket and pulled out fifty dollars. “Just something I’m leaving in the night table.” She opened the drawer and dropped the crumpled bills inside. “I’ll call to remind you it’s there.”

  But Connie didn’t hear. Her breathing had become regular and she had fallen into a deep sleep.

  Jesse smiled, kissed her mother’s forehead, then moved quietly back to her old bedroom. She picked up the bag containing the information, opened the closet door, and placed the bag on the top shelf between stacks of jigsaw puzzles and board games. The information would be safe here.

  Chapter 27

  Jesse pushed open her apartment door and trudged wearily into the living room. Her eyelids felt so heavy, as if someone were slowly sewing them shut. She had pinched the top of her thigh all the way home from her mother’s, until it was black and blue, to stay awake and had still almost run off the road several times. It was now after six and she had to be awake again by six-thirty at the latest to be at work by eight. She sighed. Maybe Todd was right. Maybe she should just take the day off.

  She had almost reached the bedroom when she touched her palm to her head and turned back toward the kitchen. The cat hadn’t been fed since yesterday morning and had to be starving by now.

  The shadow outlined by morning light streaming through the living-room window curtains seemed surreal at first. The shape registered in Jesse’s brain, but for a split second she did not allow herself to accept its existence. Only when it moved did her heart rise to her throat and her hands to her neck. She attempted to scream, but no sound escaped her lips but a strange choking noise, as if the form’s fingers were already wrapped tightly about her neck.

  Instinctively she turned away from the shadow and bolted toward the bedroom. Suddenly the room was brightly illuminated as the form flipped the light switch.

  “Jesse!”

  She recognized the voice instantly, caught herself on the corner of the wall with her hand and spun around. “David! What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

  David held up a set of keys, then tossed them onto the sofa. “I found them in one of your kitchen drawers the other night when you were back in the bedroom.”

  God, had he seen the file after all? Was that why he was here? Had he come back for it? Had she interrupted a burglary? The questions spun through her mind. And all the time she kept thinking about his signature on the Doub check she had found in the LFA file cabinet. “What were you doing going through my kitchen?”

  “You told me to get a beer. I did. The cap got stuck and wouldn’t twist off, so I was looking for a bottle opener. Was that something I shouldn’t have done?”

  “No.” She had told him to get a beer that night. “But you had no right to take the keys.”

  “Why the hostility, Jesse?” He took a step toward her.

  She moved back, maintaining the distance between them. She could not be certain of his intentions now. Sagamore was somehow entangled in the Elbridge Coleman campaign and LFA. The people there could no longer be trusted, and David Mitchell was one of those people. “I don’t appreciate people taking my keys without my permission. Can you understand that?”

  “You should be more careful,” he said ominously.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said.”

  David was exhausted. She could see it in his eyes. He too had been up all night. “Why are you here?”

  He hesitated for a moment. “To help you,” he murmured quietly, his voice suddenly subdued.

  “What do you mean?”

  It was foolish to play games at this point. “Look, I’m going to be honest with you.”

  “That would be nice.”

  He ignored her cynical tone. “I saw the file in your kitchen the other night.”

  “What file?”

  “Don’t play games.”

  For the first time Jesse heard a chilling, almost menacing tone in David’s voice. “You mean the file concerning Elbridge Coleman’s campaign.”

  “Of course I do,” he shot back.

  Jesse quickly analyzed the possibility of fleeing. There was no way to make it to the fro
nt door. David would block her escape easily. “So you saw the file. So what? My boss had an active imagination.”

  “I told you, Jesse, I’m here to help.” He had seen her gauging the odds of escape. “If you want to leave, go ahead. I’m not going to stop you.” He stepped to the side of the room. “I care about you very much. I’m here to help. You have to believe that. You have to trust me.”

  She wanted to believe his words. She wanted to trust him. But there was something strange in his eyes now, a desperation she hadn’t seen before, a desperation that might mean he was actually telling the truth—or that he might be willing to do almost anything to extricate himself from a nasty situation.

  “Just give me a minute to explain. If you don’t believe what you hear, then leave. I promise I won’t stop you.”

  “All right.”

  “Good. Jesse, the truth is that Sagamore Investment Management Group isn’t what it appears to be. We aren’t better than anyone else at investing. We’re playing an insider’s game. That’s how we’ve been able to generate such incredible returns for so long. We play with a stacked deck.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “I’ve had suspicions for a long time, but I wasn’t able to prove them,” David continued. “Tonight I did, at least to myself. What I have wouldn’t be enough to convict anyone in a court of law, but a ten-year-old would see the patterns in the stock trading and know what the senior people at Sagamore are doing.”

  He was offering up his information without requiring anything in return from her. That was a good sign. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Sagamore plays on the inside with defense stocks. We buy stocks in other industries too, but we focus on defense. There are lots of companies that deal with the Department of Defense in some way, so there is a wide array of stocks we can buy. The DOD budget is almost three hundred billion a year. That’s a lot of money for anyone to spend, so it involves many different firms. We buy the stocks ahead of good news, like the awarding of a huge DOD contract, and sell ahead of bad news.”

  “You shouldn’t tell me this. I’m an agent of the federal government,” Jesse said quietly. “I have a responsibility to alert my superiors.”

  “You aren’t going to tell anyone and you know it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t have any real proof. If you told your superiors what I’m telling you, they’d start an investigation, which Sagamore would quickly hear about. It would take weeks or even months to get the investigation going. By that time people at Sagamore would have had time to erase any proof that they were trading on the inside.”

  He was right. “But how could Sagamore trade that way on a consistent basis? For so long? The firm has posted incredible results for years.”

  “Because Sagamore has a contact in the Senate. A very powerful contact. A man who not only alerts our executive committee of impending news regarding defense companies ahead of time but can actually award massive amounts of the DOD budget to specific companies secretly, on his own authority. A man who controls the black budget. I’m sure he’s paid very well by Sagamore for what he does. Probably through numbered offshore accounts.” David shook his head, remembering the shadowy meeting with Senator Webb two and a half years ago. A meeting in which he had naively believed he had bribed the senator, but in which, in fact, they had effectively sucked David into the conspiracy. It all made so much sense now. “Imagine what that means.”

  It didn’t take much to imagine. “Give me an example,” she said evenly. “An example of how Sagamore trades on the inside.”

  “A plane called the A-100,” he answered. “It’s a new fighter-bomber being developed by General Engineering & Aerospace for the Navy. The plane has been secretly under development for the last two and a half years. Its existence will be announced very soon. The contract will total a hundred and fifty billion dollars over seven years. It will make GEA’s stock price at least five times what it is now. Two and a half years ago, just before the A-100 contract was awarded to GEA, Sagamore purchased a billion dollars’ worth of GEA stock. You can check the SEC filings. The investment is a matter of public record. The timing of the contract and the investment is no coincidence, Jesse. I promise you.”

  “Which senator controls the black budget and works with Sagamore?” She was riveted.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter.” She suddenly realized why Sagamore would want to manipulate the contest between Elbridge Coleman and Malcolm Walker. Coleman was going to be the next in line—the next man to control the black budget so Sagamore could keep trading on the inside well into the twenty-first century. “Who is it?”

  “I’m not going to tell you, Jesse. Frankly, I think it’s better that you not know.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  He nodded hesitantly.

  “But how could Sagamore keep it secret? If this has been going on for years, as you say, why hasn’t anyone ever come forward?”

  Simple, he thought to himself. The almighty dollar. “Jesse, the average annual compensation for portfolio managers who have been with the firm more than five years is over two million dollars. Why would anyone come forward? And it isn’t like Sagamore is such a huge place. There aren’t that many people who have to keep the secret. People are screened carefully before they’re given a job offer.”

  “Money wouldn’t keep everyone quiet. The guilt would get to someone.”

  “Don’t bet on it.” David knew better. “Besides, there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “As portfolio manager, by the time you realize what’s going on, you’ve broken about twenty laws pertaining to the securities business. From insider trading to embezzlement, fraud, and bribery. You name it, you’ve done it. And the most insidious part is that you don’t even realize what you’ve done until it’s too late.”

  That sounded like a guilty man rationalizing. “But someone would cut a deal with the authorities. Immunity for information.”

  “Why, Jesse? Why would someone voluntarily go to the SEC to cut a deal? You tell me what’s easier—playing the game at Sagamore and earning at least two million a year, or feeding the federal government information, feeling good about yourself for a little while, then living the rest of your life in the poorhouse because you’ve been blackballed by the industry. And you would be, too. No one would hire you. And once the government is finished with you, do you think it’s going to take care of you? Not to the tune of two million a year, anyway.”

  “So, have you?” she asked evenly.

  “Have I what?”

  “Have you broken twenty laws pertaining to the securities business?”

  David ignored her. “We can talk more later, but we need to get you out of here, Jesse. Right now.”

  She was frightened by the intensity of his voice and the fear she saw in his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “I think you’re in danger.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of that file in your kitchen. I went through it quickly the other night. I believe everything in it is true, Jesse. Whoever wrote it was either being fed information by an inside source or was a genius. I’m certain the senior people at Sagamore are attempting to manipulate the election. It only makes good sense. Their Senate contact, the one who controls the black budget, is getting old. If they don’t do anything to address that problem, once he’s gone they’ll be left without their lifeline, without their ability to outperform the market every year. So they need a younger man, someone who can ultimately replace their contact. But they want the young man to be in the Senate concurrently with their contact so an orderly transition can be orchestrated.” David paused. “And I’m sure they want Malcolm Walker gone too. In the worst way possible. So they get two for the price of one in this election.”

  It was just as she had surmi
sed. “My God,” she whispered.

  “Yes. It’s incredible. What’s most frightening of all is that the man in the Senate controlling the black budget has to be working with someone in the Pentagon. The senator can appropriate, but he needs help with contracts. He needs someone senior in the Pentagon as well.”

  Jesse’s mouth ran dry. What had seemed unimaginable only a few days ago—just Neil’s active imagination—was suddenly becoming a conspiracy of immense proportions.

  “But the most important thing right now is to get you out of here,” David urged again, taking a step toward her.

  She saw the move but didn’t step back this time. “The only person at Sagamore who knows about that file is you. Why would I be in danger?”

  “Do you think it’s just coincidence that you became such good friends with Elizabeth Gilman so fast?” He had to persuade Jesse to trust him completely.

  “Obviously you don’t.”

  David shook his head. “No, I don’t.” He saw the disappointment in her expression. “I don’t want you to take that the wrong way. You’re a bright woman and you could certainly hold your own as a portfolio manager at Sagamore. But I’ve been around Elizabeth more than four years. If nothing else, she’s a businesswoman. She has a wonderful way with people, but the bottom line is she doesn’t allow emotion to cloud her judgment when it comes to Sagamore. She knows there will be a great many applicants from which to choose, applicants with much more experience in the business than you have. It just doesn’t make sense for her to latch on to you the way she has. It’s a hunch, I’ll admit. But I’m sure I’m right.”

  “Do you know for a fact that she’s involved in all of this?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Jesse, she’s Sagamore’s managing partner.” David was suddenly irritated. “The pattern of insider trading I traced goes back years. She knows. Don’t kid yourself.”

  “Is there anything you aren’t telling me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve told me you have a hunch they know about the file, but you haven’t told me for certain they know. Do they know?”