The Insider (14 page)

CHAPTER 12

Oliver lay on the couch—the same couch on which he and Abby had shared a gram of cocaine only a few days earlier. A cool wet washcloth was draped across his forehead, the top button of his pinstriped shirt was undone, he had pulled the knot of his tie almost halfway down his chest, and his tasseled loafers lay on the floor. Oliver rolled onto his side, causing the washcloth to fall to the floor. He stretched to pick it up and groaned.

“What’s wrong, Oliver?” Kevin O’Shea sat in a wing-back chair a few feet from the couch, sipping iced tea. Despite the air-conditioning, the room still seemed muggy in the midst of the heat wave throttling New York.

“Nothing,” Oliver answered glumly.

“Come on,” O’Shea urged. “Tell me what’s bugging you.” The situation notwithstanding, he had come to like Oliver Mason.

O’Shea had dark red hair, green eyes, and fair skin. He was over six feet tall with a broad chest, not quite so toned now that he was two years past his fortieth birthday and had no time to work out. His stomach was starting to bulge as well, thanks to his affection for McDonald’s cheeseburgers—his way of combating the stress of his new job responsibilities. He pinched his midsection between his thumb and forefinger to see if the crash diet his wife had forced on him the past few days had done any good. His expression turned grim. The belt seemed tighter around his waist than ever, and the fleshy roll above it seemed larger.

“Stop kidding yourself, Kevin,” Oliver said from the couch, rolling onto his back and replacing the washcloth on his forehead. “It’s a losing battle for a guy like you. That belly is there to stay. It’s only going to become a bigger friend the older you get. But at least it’s a friend you’ll never lose, which is more than you or I can say about most of our acquaintances,” he said bitterly.

“Thanks, Oliver,” O’Shea said, sipping his iced tea. He made a mental note not to touch his stomach in public again. People noticed what you were doing, even when you thought they didn’t. “I appreciate those uplifting words.”

“My pleasure.” Oliver heaved a long sigh.

“So what’s the matter?” O’Shea asked. “You seem down in the dumps tonight, not your usual chipper self.”

Oliver grimaced. “Just the normal domestic crap.”

“Wife problems again?”

“Maybe. Hey, I want to know something.” Oliver’s voice changed pitch as he switched gears.

“What’s that?”

“Is that a little bit of an Irish accent I hear?”

“Aye, laddie,” he answered, exaggerating the Belfast accent. “My father was second generation in this country. When I was growing up you could barely understand him if you weren’t accustomed to the way he spoke,” O’Shea explained, his voice returning to normal, just a faint trace of his father’s influence still audible. “You don’t really hear it, do you?”

“Sometimes,” Oliver said absentmindedly.

O’Shea finished his iced tea and placed the glass on a table beside the chair. “Enough small talk, Oliver. Bring me up to date on the latest developments.”

Oliver tossed the washcloth toward the bathroom door and wiped moisture from his forehead. “Jay West made the share purchases this morning. He bought large amounts of Simons and Bell Chemical, as well as something called TurboTec.”

“What’s TurboTec?” O’Shea asked suspiciously. “That doesn’t sound familiar. That isn’t one of the stocks your pals gave you a tip on, is it?”

“No.” Oliver shook his head. “Jay came up with TurboTec all on his own. He has some college buddy who works at the company.”

“I suppose that’s okay,” O’Shea said, repeating the name to himself several times. He was afraid to write anything down at this point. “I’ll check it out. If it turns out Jay did anything illegal there, it’ll make the whole thing even easier.” He paused. “Did we get what we needed?”

“Yup.” Oliver pulled himself to a sitting position on the couch, then reached beneath it and produced an envelope. “Here.” He tossed it to O’Shea. “The disk is inside.”

O’Shea caught the envelope, checked inside, and placed it in his suit-coat pocket. “How about the other thing? How is that going?”

“Fine.”

“Good.” O’Shea relaxed. Things were falling into place.

“So the trap is set,” Oliver said dramatically. “The lamb has been led to the altar, and all we have to do is wait for the takeovers to be announced. Right?”

“That’s right,” O’Shea agreed. “Speaking of which, when do you think that will happen?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”

“Have your contacts ever been wrong?” O’Shea asked. “Have they ever given you tips, but then the deals never happened?”

“Sure,” Oliver admitted. For a moment he thought about Tony Vogel and the three other insiders, all employees of prominent Wall Street brokerage firms. They had been passing him illegal information on pending takeovers for the last five years in return for a very special arrangement. “Deals crater all the time. You should know that, Mr. Assistant U.S. Attorney.”

O’Shea rolled his eyes. “Great. That would really screw this thing up if one of those deals isn’t announced. Bell Chemical or Simons, I mean. Then we’d be right back to square one. And Jay West might be suspicious at that point. He might not execute trades again just because you tell him to.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Oliver said reassuringly. Tony and the other men were rarely wrong. In the past five years only a handful of tips hadn’t panned out. “Everything will be fine.” Oliver put his feet up on the coffee table. “Why did you become a lawyer for the government, Kevin? What the hell possessed you to do that?”

O’Shea suppressed a smile. As a law enforcement officer, he should have despised Oliver. The guy was no better than a common street thief. Worse, in fact, because he had cheated so many people out of so much money. But Oliver had a fascinating way of looking at life, and an uncanny ability to make you like him even though you knew he was always looking out for himself and no one else. “My father was a cop, and his six brothers were all either cops or construction workers,” O’Shea explained. “The ones who were construction workers were always complaining of back pain. That didn’t seem like much of a way to earn a living to me. The justice system always appealed to me, but I had no desire to be shot at like my father. Plus cops and construction workers didn’t make much money. So I went to law school.”

“But that’s what I don’t get,” Oliver said. “I understand wanting to be a lawyer, even though lawyers are still basically hourly laborers,” he pointed out. “What I don’t understand is why you’d want to be a government lawyer. You work your ass off to get the same degree as the big corporate boys at Davis Polk or Skadden Arps, but you get paid dog shit in comparison.”

“My family taught me when I was very young how important it is to do the right thing and not make everything about money. They stressed balance. They said there was nothing wrong with making money as long as you made a contribution to society at the same time.” Over the last few years O’Shea had been pondering more and more often the question Oliver had just posed. After a long and grueling career, O’Shea had finally struggled his way up the ladder to the position of a senior-level assistant U.S. attorney in the Manhattan office. He was a respected member of the office and earned ninety-two thousand dollars a year working for the Justice Department. But with four children, he still couldn’t seem to get ahead. “I guess I get enough of a charge out of stopping guys like you from ripping off the American people not to care about the financial sacrifice,” he said defiantly.

“Enough of a charge not to be jealous of some of your Fordham classmates who are probably earning millions of dollars a year?”

And living in huge houses in Rye and Greenwich,
O’Shea thought. “My only regret is that I won’t be able to put you away on this one,” O’Shea said with a smile. “You’ll still be free to trade. But I’ll be watching.”

“I’m sure you will,” Oliver said dryly. “But I can assure you that once this is over, I’ll never be guilty of insider trading again. I’ve learned my lesson.”

O’Shea laughed sarcastically. “No, you haven’t. You’re just like a common street junkie. Addicted. You don’t get insider trading out of your system overnight. I’ve seen it before. You’ll be setting up another ring within a year.” O’Shea pointed a finger at Oliver. “And when you do, I’ll be there.” His eyes narrowed. “At that point you’ll be facing jail time yourself, not setting up someone else to take your fall. Maybe then you’ll give us McCarthy.”

“There’s nothing to give,” Oliver answered quickly. “Bill didn’t know anything about what I had arranged before your people approached him. He’s clean.”

“Uh-huh.” O’Shea didn’t believe that for a second. Bill McCarthy was a Wall Street veteran. He must have known that Oliver couldn’t turn the kind of huge profits he’d been consistently earning for the firm without insider information. You just didn’t pick the right pony as many times as Oliver had over the last five years without somebody in the stable telling you whom to bet on. But it wasn’t his place to rock the boat. The decision concerning the situation at McCarthy & Lloyd had been made many levels above him, probably in a limousine on the Beltway or in an out-of-the-way alcove buried deep in the Capitol. He was simply a foot soldier carrying out the general’s orders. “Are you certain Carter Bullock knows nothing about what’s going on?”

“Positive,” Oliver said firmly. “Bullock is completely in the dark about what’s going on. Believe me.”

“And West?”

Oliver clenched his jaw. Jay had answered that idiot Tony Vogel’s call on the cell phone the day before, and Oliver was sure he had discovered the envelope in the Healey’s glove compartment with Bell Chemical’s name inside. But Jay had still made the trades that morning. “Nothing,” Oliver said softly. “Jay knows nothing. He’s too busy doing whatever I tell him. He’s focused on the million-dollar bonus and nothing else. He’s a disciple.”

Oliver’s mind flashed back to the previous night’s terrible fight with Barbara.

“Do I detect a trace of regret?” O’Shea asked. “Do you feel a little guilty about what you’re doing?” It was important that there be no last-minute second thoughts.

“Hell, no!” Oliver snapped.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Oliver rose from the couch and shuffled to the suite window overlooking Central Park.

O’Shea stood up. “All right, Oliver. It sounds to me as if everything is under control. I’ve got to get going.” He turned and moved to the door. “If there are any developments, you call me at that number I gave you last week. Never downtown. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Oliver didn’t look away from the window.

“Okay, sweet dreams, baby doll,” O’Shea called, opening the hallway door. A moment later he was gone.

“Fuck you, asshole,” Oliver mumbled. “God, I’d love to take him down.”

For a long time Oliver stood before the window, watching tourists climb into horse-drawn carriages parked along the far side of Fifty-ninth Street five stories below him, considering Kevin O’Shea’s observation that he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from trading on the inside once things had calmed down. That once Jay West had taken the fall and been whisked away to Leavenworth for the next twenty years, Oliver wouldn’t be able to resist the lure of easy money. That McCarthy’s power and influence would all go to waste because the government couldn’t be expected to agree to such an amiable arrangement the second time around. Contacts only went so far. Even ones as influential as McCarthy’s.

Oliver gazed at the carriages a moment longer, then turned and walked slowly back to the couch. He reached into his shirt pocket and removed a piece of paper folded into a neat triangle. His fingers shook as he carefully opened the paper and placed it on the coffee table. His mouth turned dry as he stared at the pure white powder. This was stupid, but it made him feel so damn good. It provided that sense of power and invulnerability that he craved so badly—things he had been missing since he had met with McCarthy and O’Shea that March afternoon in the privacy of McCarthy’s Park Avenue apartment and had his world blown to bits in a matter of seconds.

Oliver reached beneath the couch and picked up a small framed painting he had taken from the suite’s bedroom wall. He dumped the powder onto the glass, then began chopping it with a straight razor he withdrew from his shirt pocket, slicing the cocaine crystals into finer and finer grains and beginning to arrange the powder into two lines. Last March in McCarthy’s apartment, when O’Shea had explained what was going on, Oliver had been certain he was going to be carted away to jail immediately, hands cuffed behind his back. TheU.S. attorney’s office had identified at least three cases in which the authorities felt certain that Oliver, or someone on the arbitrage desk, had traded on inside information. Out of respect for McCarthy and his White House connections, the office had approached McCarthy first, and he had appealed to his high-powered friends in Washington, who had quietly brokered a very attractive deal. For political reasons the arbitrage desk at McCarthy & Lloyd would have to offer up a sacrificial lamb to publicly take a fall, then sign a consent decree stipulating that they wouldn’t engage in the equity arbitrage business for six months. That would placate the Justice Department and leave the major players unscathed. During that six-month period Oliver would perform special projects for McCarthy, and when the cooling-off period was over, the arbitrage desk could start up again, but it would have to act legitimately. There would be no more insider trading.

Oliver stopped cutting the cocaine for a moment. He was certain he could refrain from any inside plays. Of course, he’d promised himself that he’d never take that walk through Central Park’s northern section to meet his drug connection again, either. But he had. Maybe O’Shea was right. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to go straight. Oliver took a labored breath. Fuck O’Shea. O’Shea didn’t know what making real money was all about. He had no conception of the pressures associated with bringing in that kind of bucks. O’Shea had lived a dull, protected life for the last fifteen years, never taking any real chances, sheltered by the federal government’s cocoon, being satisfied with a shithole town house in shithole Queens. O’Shea had no idea what it was like to have to eat only what you killed, no idea what it was like to try to measure up to a man like Harold Kellogg.