Fiduciary Duty (14 page)

I got on the road headed back to Ohio. Outside Fort Wayne, Indiana, I stopped at a rest area and filled up the gas tank. Then I parked the van and went inside to empty my bladder. After that, I got a sandwich from one of the fast-food places and sat down at a table. The food was predictably greasy. I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings, so I was shocked when a man sat down across from me.

“Mr. Reynolds,” he said, “one of people you have been looking for is my employer, John Smith. If you come with me, you can meet him.”

Chapter 6. The Offer

I was too surprised to say anything at first. I looked across the table. The man sitting there smiled back at me. He seemed to enjoy my discomfort, but not in a malicious way.

“Relax, Mr. Reynolds,” he said, “If I wanted you dead, or rather, if my employer wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

I looked at him closely. He looked like he was in his mid-50s, with thinning sandy blond hair. His appearance said “former boxer” – complete with the cauliflower ears and the nose broken multiple times. He was also heavily muscled under his leather jacket. But something told me that at least part of his appearance had been earned outside the ring. This was a very dangerous man, one who had killed a lot more people than I had.

He nodded at me, as if he was aware what I was thinking. Then he winked, and smiled disarmingly.

“So, do you want to meet Mr. Smith?” he asked.

“And if I don’t?” I asked in return.

“Just get up and walk away,” he said, “You’ll never see me again.”

I looked at him hard. “I can walk away, just like that? And you would let me live, knowing I’d still be looking for him?” I asked, incredulously.

“With all due respect, Mr. Reynolds, my employer has been hiding for much longer than you have been looking for him. He has spent a lot of money making himself hard to find. You don’t know where he is. You don’t even know what he looks like,” he told me, “But we know what you look like, and we know who you are and we can see you coming. So, yes, you would be free to walk away.”

He let that sink in for a moment, and then continued, “You may find it hard to believe right now, but Mr. Smith is sympathetic to a lot of your goals. In fact, he may be willing to put some resources at your disposal that would help you with what you’re doing.”

He paused once more, and then continued, “But this meeting is a one-time offer. If you walk away, you’ll never hear from us again. ”

He leaned back. His posture told me he had said everything he would say, and it was now up to me.

“OK,” I told him, “Where and when?”

“I’ll take you to him now,” he replied as he stood up. “Hand me your keys. I’ll have someone follow behind in your van.”

I thought about it for a few seconds. If they had wanted to kidnap me, they didn’t need my cooperation. They could have gotten to me simply by breaking into my house in the middle of the night. Heck, they could have been waiting for me in Canton.

Still, when I gave him my keys, it was not without a bit of fear. Now I couldn’t even run. Another man, slim and nondescript, walked up to him, took my keys and walked away.

“What do I call you?” I asked.

“My name is Frank. Frank Jamison,” he said. He winked again, and walked out the door.

We got into his pickup, a new Ford 150, and headed west out of the parking lot. My van followed us, and several nondescript sedans followed further behind.

I was a bit concerned, but Frank kept up his end of the small-talk, clearly attempting to put my mind at ease. It didn’t work. About fifteen minutes later, we arrived at a private airstrip. There were two small private jets parked on the tarmac. We pulled up to one of them, and then Frank and I got out.

Two men, both wearing expensive jeans and sport coats came out of the larger jet. One waved a wand over me. It warbled over my cell-phone which I pulled out and handed over. He looked at it, turned it off, and pulled out the battery.

“You’ll get this back later,” he told me, slipping the phone and the battery into his pocket. The certainty with which he said it was more reassuring than Frank’s 15 minutes of chatter.

After that, the second newcomer patted me down. He nodded at Frank.

“OK,” Frank said. “Let’s go meet the man.”

He gestured for me to walk up the steps onto the plane.

The plane was brightly lit and simply but tastefully decorated. In the main compartment, there were four comfortable leather seats around a table. A man in his sixties who looked a little too slender for his own good was standing next to one of the seats.

“Ah, Mr. Reynolds, I’m glad you came. I am John Smith, but please call me John,” he said, extending his hand.

Not knowing what to do, I took his hand and shook it.

“Please, have a seat,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind if I also call you John. I really don’t like formality.”

I nodded. It was his show and I didn’t know where it was going. I sat down. He sat down across from me. Frank, who had followed me in, took a seat next to me. The man who took my cell phone stood inside the plane, just next to the door. Something about the way he moved told me I’d rather wrangle with Frank Jamison than with him.

“Before we start, can we get you anything? Water? A drink?” Smith asked.

My throat had gone dry, so I asked for water. Frank got up, took a bottle of water from a small refrigerator, handed me the bottle and a cup of ice, and sat down. I took the opportunity to look around. The cockpit door was closed. However, I could see two men standing just outside the door of the plane.

“I realize you might still be worried something is going to happen to you,” Smith said, “Please don’t. You have my assurance that as long as you don’t attack me, no harm will come to you.”

I wasn’t entirely reassured, but at this point I had little choice in the matter. I tried to keep a poker face.

“Let’s start with how we found you. I’m sure you’re curious,” he continued.

I nodded.

“I’ve been tracking information for a long time. I built my first computer when I was a kid and I’ve been playing with data ever since then. Most people are afraid of numbers, but I love them. They speak to me, they show me patterns and they tell me stories. These days I don’t have the time to do as much of the work myself, so I have a great team of people and they look for the stories in the data for me,” he said. I thought I detected a bit of wistfulness in the last sentence.

Smith went on, “The stories I am most interested in are anomalies, events that are unlikely. I’ve made a lot of money tracking anomalies. And recently, my team spotted a very odd anomaly. An unlikely number of people with more than a quarter of a billion dollars invested in shares of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange died in unusual ways in a relatively short period of time.”

He counted on his fingers, “An electrocution, a cross-bow bolt, a falling tree, and most impressively, a combination of an OD, a drowning, and a feeding frenzy by sharks.”

Jamison smiled and nodded – that last one did sound impressive. Meanwhile, I was wondering about the falling tree.

Smith went on, “Several of these deaths were deemed accidents. In the remaining cases, there were no credible suspects and the perpetrators went out of their way to make sure nobody but the target was hurt.”

Smith and Jamison looked at me, but I kept a poker face on.

“It was an interesting anomaly, but a lot of anomalies are simply random events. So I wanted to understand this anomaly. Was it random, and if not, who was doing it and why? My team went to work collecting additional information. By analyzing purchase records, they started tracking people who either were in the immediate vicinity of the assassinations or who had the resources to be there but couldn’t be placed somewhere else when the assassination took place.”

“You can do that?” I asked, “You know who buys what and where?”

“Yes,” he replied, “You would be surprised at what we can access. Not quite as much as the NSA or the FBI, but I have better people. I pay much better.”

He continued, “Of course, my team didn’t know if all the events were related so they started compiling lists of people who could have been involved in three or more of the deaths. The team identified a total of 114 people who could possibly have been associated with all four deaths and another 6,407 who could be involved in three of them.”

I kept my poker face on.

“Then they started looking at motivations,” he continued, “The time and effort needed for three or more of these events, I believe, requires a very strong base, motivation: idealism, money, power, ambition, fear, jealousy, revenge…”

He counted the options off on his fingers as he said them.

“Let’s just get this out of the way,” I interrupted, “This isn’t about revenge. There are a lot of people out there who made a choice to allow, or even encourage a business to engage in behavior that harmed a lot of people. They did it to my family, and they will do it again and again unless someone stops them. I know the pain this behavior causes, and there isn’t anything else that matters to me anymore, so if you want to put me down in one of your categories, call it idealism.”

There was silence for a few seconds.

“Point taken,” Smith said, “I would like to apologize for making that assumption, and for any part I might have had in the death of your wife and son. It sometimes isn’t easy to balance one’s own objectives with the consequences that are imposed on other people. I haven’t always made the right choices.”

He looked at me. I nodded for him to continue. He leaned forward, and stared at me intently.

“Two years ago I learned I have inoperable brain cancer. I’m supposed to be dead already. I’m alive on willpower alone. I sleep two hours a night and I barely eat any more. The cancer, the death sentence, it has changed my way of thinking, made me reassess what is important,” he said.

He stopped again, expecting me to say something. I stayed silent.

“Not long after my diagnosis, I learned of another anomaly. It is more than anomaly, it is a problem. Something someone needs to mitigate. And I’ve been working on that, putting my resources, my attention, and what time I have left to mitigating that problem in the small way that I can. So I understand your idealism,” he said.

The conversation had taken a very unexpected turn.

“So what do you want from me?” I asked, “To help you in your cause?”

“No. Frankly, I doubt I could convince you to switch from your cause to mine. But I understand your motivation. The world is better off without the people you killed,” he said, “So keep doing what you’re doing. As long as I know what you’re doing, I can profit from it, and that will help me in my cause by giving me more resources I can put to work on the problem.”

“You will profit?” I asked, “How? Sooner or later someone else, maybe a reporter, will connect the dots too. And then the shares you own of M & O will tank.”

“I no longer own shares in M & O,” Smith said, smiling, “Or rather, won’t in another few days. I own too many shares to unload my position all at once. But once I’ve sold it all, I’m going to start actively betting the shares will drop in price. Or I will, if you accept my offer.”

“Offer?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said, “Let me be candid. You may think you know what you’re doing, but you’re local talent, an amateur. A very good amateur, but an amateur nevertheless. If you had some of the training Frank has, for instance, you could be world class. You could get to more people in less time. And just as it is for me, time is running out for you. As you said, sooner or later someone else will connect the dots.”

“So you want Frank to train me?” I asked.

“Not Frank. I have someone else in mind,” Smith replied, “But he will teach you what you need to know.”

I thought about it. Why not? I had nothing to lose.

“OK,” I said, “I’ll take you up on that.”

Smith smiled broadly.

“Excellent,” he said to me.

Smith nodded at the man standing next to the door of the plane. The man walked over.

“This is Marco,” Smith said, “He’ll be taking care of you from here.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it,” Smith said. He extended his hand.

I reached out to shake his hand, but then stopped.

“How do you know I won’t come after you when I am, as you put it, world class?” I asked.

He looked me straight in the eye.

“When time is short, you have to pick your targets carefully,” he replied, “There isn’t much gain to killing me. I’m too hard to reach, I’m too useful to you and very soon I will be dead anyway.”

Then he gripped my hand before I could consider pulling my hand away.

“Good-bye, John, and good hunting,” he said.

Then Marco took my elbow and led me off the plane.

As we walked toward the second jet, the plane carrying Smith and Frank started taxiing down the runway and took off.

Chapter 7. Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina

Marco didn’t say anything until we were aboard and settled. He was slim, dark haired, and completely ordinary. None of his features stood out. He was entirely forgettable. But his feet barely touched the floor as walked. And there was about him the wisp of a hint of a suggestion, and a small one at that, of coiled violence that could be unleashed without warning. I suspect the only reason I saw that tell-tale sign was because I was looking for it, and had I run into Marco on the street six months ago, I wouldn’t have noticed him at all. Had I run into him on the street six months ago, I’d probably already be dead.

He pulled my phone out of his pocket, replaced the battery, and wordlessly handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” he replied. His voice was soft, perfectly calm.

“Is there any reason we can’t leave now?” he asked.

“Nothing that won’t wait,” I replied.

He nodded at the pilot, who turned around and walked into the cockpit and closed the door behind him. Behind us, the stewardess closed the door to the plane.

“Where to?” I asked.

“You’ll feel right at home. The Salta province, in Northwest Argentina. It is big, it is empty, and a company Mr. Smith ultimately owns has a large farm there. The farm is precisely twice the size of Miami,” he said, “We can train undisturbed there.”

“I didn’t bring my passport,” I said.

“You won’t need it. We’re landing at the farm. It’s a hundred kilometers from the nearest immigration official,” he said, “Argentine authorities will be given a fictional passenger manifest.”

“Well, that’s one thing about Argentina. No rules,” I said.

“It isn’t just Argentina,” Marco said, “Customs and Border Protection here in the US has no record that either of us is on the plane. And they won’t have any record of us on our return either.”

Over the next few hours, I learned a lot about how money and power bought exemptions from rules. I learned a lot less about Marco. He had worked for one of the US intelligence agencies; he wouldn’t tell me which, except to say he was trained in “wet work.” Officially, he had been a contractor. It was a way that the agency could maintain plausible deniability, but they had trained him, equipped him, and provided him with complete support while he was “in the field.”

Marco had been disillusioned to find who America’s enemies were, or at least who the people he was sent to kill were. Sometimes it was a person who got in the way, sometimes it was someone whose death would send a message, but it was rarely an obvious enemy who would and could cause harm to the United States. There was the small-time farm labor leader in Panama, a third-rate politician in Burkina Faso, a moderate cleric in Oman, and so many others. There was even an American, a guy on vacation in Costa Rica whose only sin Marco had been able to discover was a basement full of marijuana plants back in a Chicago suburb.

“The more well-known a prospective target, the less likely a hit is to be approved,” Marco said, “Kill a connected Russian crime boss and three weeks later the mayor of Omaha is found dead of natural causes in his mistress’ apartment, courtesy of the Russian FSB. We don’t want a war and neither do the Russians or the Chinese. The result is that we all end up spending our time and effort killing a lot of people who are unimportant. People we
should
kill get left alone.”

He was clearly still bitter about it.

“What about for Mr. Smith? Who do you kill for him?” I asked.

“Nobody,” he replied. “It’s still intelligence work, but no killing. No killing yet, anyway.”

He paused, as if deciding whether or not to say more.

Then he continued, “I think I’m doing more good now than I was when I worked for the government. That mission Smith mentioned. He and Frank are really worried about something, and have been since I was hired about two years ago. They talk about it like they’re trying to save the world. It worries me, because in the government, the people who had that attitude were the cowboys. But Smith and Frank aren’t cowboys. They’re as level-headed as it gets. If they’re scared, I’m scared.”

I was genuinely curious. I had a feeling that without Smith’s cause, I wouldn’t be here. But Marco wouldn’t have told me what that cause was, even if he knew.

“Do you miss it?” I asked.

“What, killing people?” he asked, “As opposed to the other things I do? No, no I don’t miss it. I prefer knowing that I make a difference. Even if I don’t quite know how, I think I am helping accomplish something important. Smith and Frank think so, and I trust their judgment.”

We spent the next few hours discussing my projects: the Prince, Frangulyan, Zhou, and Field. Marco also asked me about Jacob Feingold, the falling tree guy. I told him I had nothing to do with that. He looked skeptical, but said “OK” and we moved on.

Marco critiqued my approach to the jobs I did do. He thought I was creative and imaginative, which could be a positive when dealing with a tough target. But he also thought I was too quick to use convoluted schemes, that I didn’t get to the point so-to-speak. And when we got to the Field job, Marco said I was an idiot who had gotten careless. I hadn’t tested the napalm bomb sufficiently to know how powerful it would be. I hadn’t found alternatives to checking into the RV park under my own name, and having made that mistake, I should have made myself scarce at least a day before Field was blown to bits if not called the whole thing off entirely.

Marco was somewhat fascinated by the characters I often used – Fernandez, the Caipira, his cousin Pedro, Muller and the two Dusty Kleins. I viewed it as a way to achieve my goals and add some fun to the job. He viewed it as tradecraft, and on a deeper level, a way to get some detachment.

“That’s not a bad thing,” he said, “But be careful you don’t start treating it like a game. What you got into, what you chose to get into. Make the wrong mistake and you’re finished. Jail or death.”

He had a point. I wasn’t afraid of dying though I really didn’t want to end up in prison. But either one would prevent me from finishing my mission. We were silent for a moment.

The silence stretched. Marco had given me a lot to chew on. I sat back and started to think. He pulled out his laptop and started doing some work.

Later, I was pleased to find the plane was equipped with a couple of foldout treadmills. I ran for about thirty minutes, and Marco for an hour and change. His pace was much faster than mine. The plane even carried a shower, though I was admonished to keep mine to less than two minutes. By then it was getting late in the day. The stewardess came over and asked us if we wanted dinner. The galley was surprisingly well stocked, and had a real (albeit very small) oven and stove. I had a grilled salmon with capers and asparagus that was very good. This was certainly not like the food I was used to eating in steerage on a commercial plane. Later, our seats folded out into almost-full length beds.

I dreamed of H and Jeremy. Jeremy was a little older, a little taller, a little more of a little boy and less of a toddler than when I had last seen him. He also had a more impressive repertoire of words than when I had last seen him. He wasn’t even wearing diapers any more. H had changed her hairstyle. It was shorter and more modern and it looked very nice. Not surprisingly, her outfit was new and she had on a pair of boots I hadn’t seen before. In my dream, they were on the plane with me, going to Argentina. It was an odd dream, not the least of which because, when I woke up, I realized that recently I hadn’t dreamed of them that often.

In the morning, over a breakfast of eggs Benedict, Marco asked me to articulate why I was doing what I was doing. I told Marco about my family. I showed Marco photos I had stored on my phone. I also unfolded the sketch of the three of us that H had drawn on Jeremy’s birthday.

Then I told Marco how wonderful they were. I told him about H, about how important doing the right thing had been for her. I told him about Jeremy, and how important it was for me to set an example for my son. And then I explained my mission, and why my cause was just. I told him the people who made the decisions that had killed my wife and son, who profited from it and showed no remorse, should not be allowed to affect anyone else’s life.

“Why do you keep calling your wife H?” Marco asked.

“Her given name was Hepzibah, I kid you not,” I said, “Her mother was a dear lady, but she marched to the beat of her own drummer. A very different drummer. H hated the name Hepzibah and from the age of 5 she refused to let her mother call her that.”

I paused for a second. Something didn’t add up.

“But I would think you know that. Don’t you have a dossier or something on me?” I asked.

“No, I don’t,” Marco replied, “I’ve studied the jobs you did, but that is all. Mr. Smith wants my unbiased opinion. He wants to know how much to bet on you.”

I was silent. I didn’t much like being someone’s prized racehorse, but being the nag that gets sold to the glue factory didn’t appeal to me either.

“Now I have another question for you,” Marco said, interrupting my thoughts, “How big is your list of targets? When will you be done?”

“There are eighteen names on my short list,” I said, “And a few more maybes.”

“That’s a lot of people you want to kill,” he said, quietly, “Sooner or later your targets are going to figure out they are targets, making them harder to get.”

After a moment, he continued, “And what happens when you’re done? You aren’t going to go back to a nine to five. And by then you’ll be a hunted man.”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” I said, “I have a job to do and I’m going to see it through. That’s all I know.”

I could see Marco deciding whether to press the conversation, but by then we were on our descent. I looked out the window – it was big country, with lots of valleys, streams and enormous hills in the distance, much like parts of Wyoming.