When The Devil Whistles (22 page)

Mr. Lee nodded slightly. “You are a perceptive man, Mr. Jenkins. Please go on.”

Jenkins’s grin broadened. “Maybe you’re terrorists and you’re going to try to set off a couple of nuclear bombs in San Francisco.”

Cho looked at Mr. Lee, but his face remained impassive.

“But I’m guessing you’re not,” Jenkins continued. “You don’t seem like the terrorist types. And anyway, those warheads have been underwater for years, so they’d need a lot of work before they’d go off.”

Mr. Lee smiled, and Cho could tell he was enjoying this. “So what do we plan to do with them?”

Jenkins knit his brows together for a moment. Then he snapped thick fingers. “You’re going to use them to make blueprints and sell those, like that Indian guy—what’s his name?”

“I believe you are referring to the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan.”

“That’s the one. You’ll also probably sell the plutonium from the warheads, but the real money will be in the blueprints.” He paused and spread his hands. “Am I right?”

“Bravo, Mr. Jenkins! Excellent thinking. You’ve solved the puzzle.”

Jenkins’s face took on a sly look. “There’s just one problem left.”

“What is that?”

“You’re the ones making all the money.”

“Ah, that is a problem that can be solved. You will receive a one-million-dollar bonus for your services.”

“Ten million.”

“Three.”

“Five.” He nodded to Captain Wither. “And five for the cap’n, of course.”

Mr. Lee turned to the captain. “Is that acceptable to you?”

Wither looked up at his first mate. “I… I suppose I can trust Randy’s judgment on this.”

“Excellent. Half of those amounts will be sent to you tomorrow, and the remaining half will come after our, ah, business is at an end. Please give wire instructions to Mr. Cho.”

“Of course,” replied Jenkins, who was now grinning from ear to ear.

Mr. Lee frowned. “We have not discussed Granger and Daniels. What about them?”

Jenkins made a dismissive gesture with his right hand. “Don’t worry about those two. I’ll take care of them.”

36

C
ONNOR COULDN
’
T FOCUS
. H
E HADN
’
T BEEN ABLE TO FOCUS ALL MORN
ing. The only thing he remembered from the 8:30 Doyle & Brown partner meeting was that the breakfast spread had included Nantucket Nectars juices. And he only remembered that because he still had a half-empty bottle of orange juice on his desk.

After the meeting, Tom Concannon had stopped by Connor’s office to chat about golf and firm politics. Connor had just smiled and nodded, waiting for his friend to leave.

When Tom was gone, Connor started writing a routine letter to opposing counsel in one of his cases. After forty-five minutes, all he had was “Dear Fred.”

He knew exactly what the problem was, of course. Allie. He had hardly been able to think of anything else since their evening together yesterday.

Lying awake last night, he had given free rein to his fantasies. He allowed himself to imagine showing off his favorite chalet in the French Alps. She’d be amazed at the snow and the manicured slopes. He’d ski and she’d snowboard, and they would see each other in flashes as they sped down the mountains.

Afterward, they would go to a little restaurant he knew that specialized in wild game. They’d get the table by the old stone fireplace and the owner would come out with two glasses of Beaujolais as soon as they were seated, like he did for all his regulars. Allie would sip her wine and look beautiful in the firelight. They’d have pheasant—no, venison—and Allie would make jokes about Bambi and Rudolph and they’d both laugh. Then they’d walk back to the chalet with the moonlight silvering the mountain and the narrow brick road before them. It would be cold and she would snuggle up against him and say how happy she was.

When he woke in the morning, he remembered why that was a fantasy. Doyle & Brown had a policy against lawyers dating clients, and they did not make exceptions. Five years ago, a former corporate client had sued, claiming that a D&B lawyer had seduced their general counsel in order to keep her from moving the company’s multi-million-dollar legal budget to another law firm. D&B paid six million to settle the case and lost millions more when several big clients took their business elsewhere “to avoid even the appearance of impropriety,” as they put it.

And a romance with Allie wouldn’t just mess up his career, it would ruin hers. Too many people wanted to know who was behind Devil to Pay, Inc. Even if they were discreet, it wouldn’t take long for someone to see them together. Then someone would put one and one together and guess what the two of them were up to. And then Allie would be nothing but an unemployed accountant with a string of bad references.

So what was he going to do when she called? He glanced at the clock. 11:15. Okay, fifteen minutes to figure out what he was going to say. Pretend last night never happened? No, that never worked. Besides, he didn’t want to find a way to go back to the way things were—he wanted to find a way forward where they could be together painlessly. He was good at that— always had been. There was always someone he could call or a bank account he could draw on somewhere. Things could always be fixed. He just had to find the right lever to pull.

But how was he going to fix this? He bit his lip and stared out the window, hardly seeing the fog-covered bay outside. He could switch firms—but that would only solve his problem, but not hers.

Maybe he could arrange a high-paid accounting job for her at one of the companies where Mom and Dad were directors. No, that would take her away from the fraud-fighting work she loved. Plus, it would look like he was buying her.

He picked up a model P-51 from his desk (a gift from a former secretary) and spun the propeller. He waited for inspiration to come, but the only thing he felt inspired to do was get out of the office and take the
White Knight
up for an hour or two.

He looked at the clock again. 11:30. He sighed and put the plane down. He’d just have to fudge his way through the call and think some more. There was a solution there someplace. He just had to find it.

At least Max had given them plenty to talk about. DOJ had never turned down one of their cases before. Once Max filed a “declination to intervene” as it was formally called, the case would come out from under seal and litigation would begin in earnest. And so would the bills. If Max was right that the ceiling on their recovery was only about sixty thousand, they really had no business going much further. D&B’s legal bills alone would probably cost over sixty thousand.
Per month.

Connor was entitled to his attorney fees under the California False Claims Act, even if they far exceeded the actual amount of the judgment. But he’d have to fight for them, and the judge would likely slice a big chunk off of whatever bill Connor submitted. Overall, it just wasn’t worth it. He hadn’t asked the Executive Committee for permission to continue with the case despite DOJ’s decision, but he had a pretty good idea what they’d say.

He’d recommend to Allie that they fire off a massive wave of discovery as soon as the seal lifted, then offer to settle. The discovery would be cheap to prepare, but expensive for Deep Seven to answer. Presumably, they’d be willing to pay something to make the case go away at that point. Even if they weren’t, the case would still go away. Or at least Connor would.

Allie would understand. She was a smart businesswoman, and she’d be able to see that going forward with the case would be stupid. In fact, as soon as she called, he would—

He looked at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. It showed 11:35.

Weird. She was always punctual, and they had specifically decided that she would call him because she didn’t know whether she’d be home this morning.

11:37.

Maybe they’d had a misunderstanding and she was expecting him to call after all. He dialed her cell phone. It rang three times and went to voicemail. He left a message.

11:40.

He called her apartment. The phone rang once. Then a woman’s voice said, “The number you are trying to reach is no longer in service. Please hang up, check the number, and dial again.”

Connor hung up, checked the number, and dialed again. Same message.

He hung up again and stared at the phone, mind whirling.

37

M
ITCH PEERED DOWN THE HALL
. N
O ONE THERE
. H
E WALKED UP TO
M
R
. Lee’s cabin and took a deep breath. This had seemed like a much better idea when Ed suggested it two days ago. He’d give Mitch a skeleton key he “happened to have” and distract the Koreans while Mitch did a little sleuthing. Sure, it was a little risky, but life was full of risks, right? Besides, they really needed to know more before they could decide what to do.

Another quick glance down the hall. Still clear. He pulled a pair of canvas work gloves from his pocket and slipped them on. “Okay, Mitch,” he said under his breath. “Here we go.”

He pulled out the key and walked to the door of Mr. Lee’s cabin. The key fit into the lock on the doorknob but didn’t turn. Mitch’s heart stopped and he silently raged at Ed, who had promised this would work.

He jiggled the knob and tried again. No dice. The key bent, but didn’t turn. He could feel himself sweating.

In desperation, he tried turning the knob hard. Maybe he could pop the lock. The knob turned smoothly.

So it hadn’t been locked after all. He pushed inside and shut the door behind him.

Gray half-light leaked into the cabin through two shaded windows, casting thick black shadows that seemed to reach for him. The room would be a small and Spartan hotel room on land, but it was luxurious by the standards of a working ship. The cabin had a bed, a small chest of drawers and a desk. All were bolted to the floor to prevent damage or injuries during rough seas. A half-open door led to a tiny private bathroom.

Everything was as neat as if Mr. Lee expected an inspection. Bed made, no drawers hanging open, no dirty laundry scattered on the bathroom floor or shoved in a corner. Mitch pulled open the top drawer and found crisply folded undershirts and socks.

He felt around in the drawer, careful not to disturb its contents. Nothing. He shut it and tried the next drawer. It contained only pants and a coiled belt. The third drawer held shirts. Extra bed linens filled the bottom drawer.

He turned to the rest of the room. Quick glances around the bathroom and under the bed revealed nothing unusual. Same thing for the closet.

He turned to the desk. Nothing on the desktop except a leather blotter. It had one drawer—which had a lock. He winced.
Nuts! Why didn’t we think of that?
He tried it—and to his surprise it opened.

Inside lay a stack of documents written in something that looked vaguely like Chinese or Japanese. They had an official looking letterhead that included a blue and red striped flag emblazoned with a wreathed red star in the center and “4.25” near the upper left corner.

He took the papers out and flipped through them, looking for pictures or anything that might give him a hint what he was looking at. He reached for his cell phone to take pictures for later review—and then remembered that he’d had to give it up when he boarded the ship.

He heard a noise in the hall and froze. Footsteps. He dropped the papers back into the drawer and shut it. He looked around for someplace to hide and his eyes lit on the half-open bathroom door. He tiptoed over and stood inside, holding the door almost shut and watching the hall door through a crack.