Shadow Account (29 page)

“Wait a minute.” Conner shook his head. “A couple of banks loaned Fargo all that money to buy Global’s assets?”

“Yup,” Rusty answered, pulling into an all-night parking garage just down the block from Baker Mahaffey. “Like I said, with Global’s guarantee.”

“But what about year-end consolidation? Intercompany transactions are always netted out on the financial statements. That parent guarantee would reverse everything you structured for them, wouldn’t it?”

“First of all, there are twenty-six subsidiaries between Global and Fargo. No one’s going to figure out that there’s any ownership relationship between the two entities. No one but us, because we structured it. And we’re not going to tell anybody. And the banks didn’t tell anybody about the guarantee.” Rusty snagged a ticket from the electronic dispenser and headed down into the garage. “Remember, almost anything is possible if your accountants comply,” he said, swinging into a parking spot. “You know?”

“You’re the accountant. I’ll take your word for it.”

Rusty turned off the car. “Fargo is Global’s shadow account.”

Conner had been about to reach for the door handle, but he turned in his seat to listen.

“Fargo operates in the dark,” Rusty continued. “That can happen because only a few people know about it. It has to be that way,” he murmured. “That’s the rule.” He shook his head. “The other rule is that, ultimately, the light moves and so does the shadow. If you don’t move with it, you get caught.”

“Well, the light moved, Rusty,” Conner said, pointing at Rusty’s hand. “Give me that parking ticket.”

Rusty forced a wry smile. “You don’t miss much, do you?”

Conner kept Rusty ahead of him as they walked out of the garage and into the lobby of the Baker Mahaffey building. He was looking around constantly, watching for anything suspicious, even as they stepped into the elevator Rusty activated with a magnetic card. Conner hadn’t been more than five feet from Rusty since knocking on the guy’s door thirty minutes ago, but Rusty might have still somehow gotten a message to somebody.

“This way,” Rusty called over his shoulder as he stepped out of the elevator onto the fourteenth floor. “I’m going to make this easy for you.”

Conner followed Rusty through the floor’s familiar lobby. He’d waited out here for Vic Hammond a few days ago. At eleven in the morning, it had been a beehive of activity. Now, after midnight, it was eerily silent.

Rusty headed down a long corridor, then turned into a small office, pulled a set of keys from his pocket and inserted one into the lock of a file cabinet behind his desk. He hesitated and looked back at Conner, who had stayed near the door. “If I give you this, are you really going to let me have a twenty-four-hour head start?”

Conner nodded. “Yes.”

“I want to see my baby grow up,” Rusty said, his voice cracking.

It had suddenly become real for him, Conner realized. The consequences of his actions were setting in. But he should have thought of those consequences before agreeing to help Vic Hammond. “I understand.”

“I have relatives in another country. I might actually be able to make this work.”

“I told you,” Conner said firmly. “Twenty-four hours. I can’t promise you any more than that. Now,
give me what you have.
”

The file cabinet lock clicked open, and Rusty removed a large three-ring binder. For the next ten minutes he went through the file that detailed the fraud at Fargo Management and Global Components. There were original communications back and forth between Vic Hammond and Jim Hatcher, and handwritten notes from Hammond to Rusty. Even memos from several bankers who’d agreed to fund Fargo and keep it quiet—in return for millions of dollars of fees.

“Is this the only file?” Conner asked.

“Yes.” Rusty had moved to the office window and was staring out into the night.

Probably wishing he could rewind the tape a few years, Conner thought to himself. “Why did you do this?” Rusty seemed like a capable enough guy. Not someone who needed to cheat to get ahead. Now he was going to be looking over his shoulder until the FBI inevitably tracked him down, even if he did make it to that foreign country.

Rusty was silent for a few moments. “My wife was about to give birth to our first child. I had fifty thousand dollars of school loans and nothing in the bank. And my mom was sick. She didn’t have health insurance. Vic Hammond gave me a hundred thousand bucks out of his own pocket, and suddenly I was okay. Except that I was in his debt,” Rusty said softly. “I made a deal, and I had to live with it.” He took a deep breath. “Down deep I suppose I knew this day would come.”

“Why did you put this book together?” Conner asked.

“There’s a lot of evidence in there
proving
that I was coerced,” Rusty said, bitterness in his voice for the first time. “I wanted to make certain if things ever got nasty that it was all in one place. I thought it might give me a better chance to negotiate.”

Conner gazed at Rusty for a few moments, then glanced back down at the notebook. “What is this?” he asked. There was a section at the back of the binder set off from the rest of the pages by a bright red divider.

Rusty laughed harshly. “This is the smoking gun, my friend. The ultimate smoking gun. Those pages at the back detail how a man named Alan Bryson, a member of Global Components’s board of directors and the chairman of the board’s audit committee, forced Global to grant him five hundred and fifty thousand in-the-money call options to look the other way when they hired Baker Mahaffey and structured the Fargo Management transaction. As chairman of the audit committee he should have stopped that transaction, and the hiring of Baker Mahaffey. Instead, he made money on it.”

Conner’s brain began to pound. He’d just stepped into some very bad shit. Paul Stone was one thing. Alan Bryson was quite another. “How much money did the treasury secretary make?”

“The options were worth about twenty million dollars at the time of the grant. I think they’re worth almost twice that now.”

“Oh, Christ.”

Rusty nodded. “Yeah, if you intend to use this binder for personal gain, you better think very carefully. Before you tell anybody about what’s in that binder, you may want to get out of this country, too.”

They both heard the front door open far down the corridor.

Conner hustled to the office doorway and peered out. Three men stood in the lobby. A tiny, balding man and two bigger men in dark suits. Conner signaled for Rusty to take a look. “You know them? Are they Baker Mahaffey people?”

“No,” Rusty said, shaking his head. “I’ve never seen any of them before.”

“We better get out of here,” Conner said, bolting to the desk and snatching the binder. “Where’s the nearest stairway?”

“Back down the corridor. About halfway to the lobby.”

Conner stopped at the office doorway, then leaned slowly out and peered down the corridor again. The men had disappeared. “All right, let’s go,” he ordered, bolting from the office. “Where’s the door?” he called over his shoulder as they ran.

“Another fifty feet,” Rusty answered, trying to keep up. “On the right.”

As they headed for the stairway, the little bald man emerged from an office down the corridor.

“Stop!” Lucas shouted, spotting Conner and Rusty. The two other men appeared behind him. “Don’t let them out of here!” he yelled. They dashed past him, racing toward Conner and Rusty.

Conner glanced over his shoulder. Rusty had fallen way behind. “Come on!” he yelled. “Run!”

Hootie Wilson settled into the back of his limousine as the driver closed the door. He was exhausted. He was sixty-two years old and the pressure of running one of Washington’s most prominent law firms was wearing on him. He should have retired by now with millions in the bank, but the divorce from his wife of forty years had set him back.
Way back.
And all because of that one night of indiscretion.

Wilson sank into the leather seat, thinking about the marble notebook safely stowed in his briefcase. Franklin Bennett was going to be very happy about that. In return, Wilson would have unlimited use of all of those assets the party controlled. Assets his ex-wife’s divorce attorney would never know about.

Lucas stood a few feet away as the two men went to work on the accountant. He cringed as the one wearing leather gloves delivered a wicked right to the accountant’s stomach, while the other one held him up. Then there was another awful thud as the accountant’s internal organs bore the brunt of a second, swift punch.

“Oh, God!” Rusty clutched his stomach and dropped to the cement floor of the deserted Metro station in a tight ball.

“Try now,” the man wearing the gloves said.

Lucas walked to where the accountant lay, and knelt down. He couldn’t imagine what this man was going through. In his entire life, the only real pain Lucas could ever remember enduring was a twisted ankle. “You work for Victor Hammond, correct, Mr. Reeves?” he asked, his voice low.

“Yes,” Rusty gasped, blood trickling from one side of his mouth.

“Who was the other man with you tonight?” The other one had barely eluded them, scaling a tall fence like a big cat going straight up a tree—even as he clasped a huge binder—just as they were closing in on him.

“I don’t know.”

“Answer me!”

“I swear I don’t know.”

Lucas hesitated. “What was in the binder he was carrying?”

Rusty said nothing.

“Mr. Reeves, do I need to have my associates come back over here?” Lucas asked. “I don’t want to, believe me. But if you don’t start giving me answers soon, I will. Now, what was in the binder?”

“Information about a company named Global Components.”

Now they were making progress. “What kind of information?” Lucas asked.

“Information about fraud Global has been committing over the past several years.” Rusty could barely speak his stomach hurt so badly.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Information about Alan Bryson.”

Lucas leaned down very close to the accountant’s ear. “From now on, I want you to answer so only I can hear. Speak only after I squeeze your right hand. Do you understand?” He put his ear next to Rusty’s mouth and squeezed the man’s hand.

“Yes,” came the faint reply.

Lucas put his lips back to the accountant’s ear. “What information was in that binder concerning Secretary Bryson?” He moved his ear to the other man’s lips and squeezed.

Thirty minutes later they tossed the accountant onto the Metro tracks, a blindfolded, moaning heap. The man wearing the black gloves had delivered one last howitzer to the stomach, then they’d sprinted away. There was no reason to do anything else to him. The accountant had no idea who they were, and he’d have enough problems when the Global Components scandal broke. If he was able to get himself off the tracks before a train came through the station.

Lucas glanced back through the car’s rear window at the Capitol. The brightly lit dome was disappearing behind them. Next stop, New York.

An hour ago, the “Paul Stone Cell” had reported in to Franklin Bennett. Now Bennett wanted Lucas and the two other men to get to Queens as quickly as possible. Bennett had given that order to Lucas after Lucas had called to report that he had come within a hair of obtaining the binder. It was then that Bennett had explained in detail what was going on with the other cell.

Lucas smiled to himself as he turned his back on the Capitol. Threatening Bennett with the marble notebook had been pure genius. Suddenly he was on the inside. Suddenly he and Bennett were pals. Which would last only as long as Bennett was scared. But he had a plan in place to keep Bennett away from the important things he’d recorded. Brenda was phase one of that plan.

The Paul Stone Cell had begun as a legitimate insider trading investigation, Bennett had explained. The Justice Department had Stone dead to rights for buying put options on two thousand shares of a small publicly traded biotech company just ahead of very bad news about a product liability lawsuit that was about to be filed against it. News that Stone had released himself onto the company’s chat board. As the share price dropped when the bad news was released, Stone had made thirty bucks on each share he controlled, pocketing sixty grand in an afternoon. But he’d been sloppy about how he’d released the bad news. And the Justice Department had tracked him down.

When investigators had questioned Stone under the bare bulb, he’d broken. And, in an attempt to cut a deal, had admitted he was planning another insider trading scam. But this time the stakes were bigger. And he claimed to have a partner. A man named Gavin Smith. Somebody in the room had gone ballistic at the mention of Smith’s name. Seems a few years before, Smith had fired the guy from an investment bank named Harper Manning for no reason at all. And the guy had vowed revenge.

But the guy never had a chance to exact that revenge. Through his senior-level contacts at the Justice Department, Bennett had heard about
why
Paul Stone was targeting Global Components for his insider trading scam. Stone suspected that the senior executives at Global were committing fraud, and Bennett knew that Secretary Bryson had been on the board of directors of Global Components. That this was one of those forty-three combinations he’d originally instructed Lucas to investigate. So Bennett had taken control of the Paul Stone insider trading investigation himself. The lower-level people who’d been in the room when Stone was trying to cut his deal and had mentioned Gavin Smith, had been removed from the investigation completely and been replaced by Bennett’s men.

Control of the Stone investigation provided Bennett with critical information. And when Lucas called to tell Bennett that he and the two associates had come within a hair of getting a binder that would have given Bennett proof of exactly what they were looking for—incriminating information on one of the jewels—Bennett had ordered Lucas to get to New York because that was where the binder was headed. Paul Stone had reported to his contact at the Justice Department, and that contact had reported to Bennett, through Sam Macarthur. It was all coming together.