by Mike Brogan
“You murdered him.”
“I put him on a diet.”
This caused Nigel to laugh so hard that mucus shot from his nostrils.
Madison checked the beach again, then the bluff and the hills beyond. Still no one. She looked at Kevin, who slowly turned his back to her, revealing the handle of a knife sticking from his trunks. He was obviously waiting for the right moment to attack ... which would get him shot, maybe killed.
Because of her! She’d pushed Kevin to go to the beach. If he died here, she’d be responsible.
Tall Man dripped more liquid into each snorkel tube and mask.
She heard the distant cry of a seagull. Looking around, she didn’t see the bird. Again she heard the shrill sound, but now it sounded a bit different.
Could that be a siren?
“Let’s go snorkeling!” Tall Man said, handing Madison and Kevin each a snorkel and mask.
Nigel forced them out into the water up to mid-thigh. The water was cold and she began to shake.
“Snorkels and masks on now!”
She and Kevin stalled, pretending to adjust the straps on their masks.
“If you’re thinking of swimming away, think again....” He pointed over their shoulders.
She turned and saw large black fins slicing through the water only one hundred yards away. She couldn’t tell if they were sharks or dolphins.
“Reef sharks,” Tall Man said. “Vicious bastards. If I shoot you, your blood will draw them fast. So, you decide: snorkels or sharks? Either accident works for me.”
Shivering, Madison looked at Kevin who nodded toward the snorkels.
Slowly, she raised her snorkel toward her face. As she did, she heard the high-pitched cry again.
Not a gull – a siren!
But ... heading AWAY...
Kevin blinked that he’d also heard it.
Suddenly, a commercial jet roared overhead, drowning out all sound.
“Masks on now!” Tall Man shouted, angry, raising his gun.
They stalled a moment, then inched the masks up toward their faces. Madison pretended to stumble when a wave hit her.
Nigel moved through the water toward her.
Kevin’s hand inched behind his back toward his knife.
The roar of the jet faded. Then the cry – a siren – was back, loud and unmistakable and closer!
Tall Man and Nigel spun toward the siren.
Madison looked and couldn’t believe her eyes. Two police cars, lights flashing, sirens blaring, a mile down the beach, raced toward them.
Tall Man glared at her, clearly enraged that she’d somehow contacted the police.
“You will pay for this,” he said, as he and Nigel sprinted away.
Kevin ran from the water and threw his knife at them. The handle bounced off Nigel’s thigh. The two men disappeared behind a nearby hill. Seconds later, she heard a car start and speed away.
Madison and Kevin ran toward the approaching police cars. One car veered toward the two escaping men. The other stopped near Kevin and her.
Two officers jumped out. A short man with sunglasses hurried over to them. “You folks okay?”
“Yes. But how’d you know -?”
“Our new 911 system automatically triangulates all call locations. We knew exactly where you were.”
Madison explained that Benny was injured up on the bluff and pointed where he was. A policeman ran up over the bluff, and seconds later appeared with Benny standing, rubbing his head.
Madison and Kevin gave the policemen a detailed description of the Tall Man and Nigel. He immediately phoned in the descriptions.
“We’ll drive you back,” the officer said.
“Thanks,” Madison said.
Kevin looked at her. “How does the airport sound to you?”
“Like a day at the beach?”
Forty Three
What the hell is MensaPlan? Linda Langstrom kept asking herself as she sat in her apartment, trying to make sense of the puzzling consultant’s fee on her laptop screen.
All she knew was that her company, National Media, had paid the fee for many years to a consulting company named MensaPlan. She’d never heard of MensaPlan, and when she researched it on line in the RedBook, in Bacon’s and other media manuals, she found no evidence the company had ever existed.
Even more suspicious was how the MensaPlan annual fee, which appeared to be a tiny fraction of one percent of Turner Advertising’s total network media expenditures, was hidden within the Turner Advertising’s Incidental Network Expenses. Over the last decade of financial records she’d been able to access, the fee appeared to have added up to several million dollars.
The money was going into someone’s pocket. Consultants were common in advertising. They made agencies smart on subjects fast. If an agency needed to understand the airline business, the auto market, health care, or the baba ganoush eating habits of pregnant Shiite Muslims, they hired a consultant.
Clearly, the hidden nature of the MensaPlan fee, plus the total lack of information about the company, raised the ugly specter of concealment or fraud. Someone at National Media was skimming money for personal gain, or kicking money back to an individual at Turner Advertising – perhaps in return for Turner Advertising buying large chunks of media time from National Media.
Either way, it broke the law. She feared she’d uncovered the tip of a financial scandal, one that might implicate some of her company’s top executives. And if they were implicated, they could be terminated – but probably not before they terminated her. She remembered what happened to whistleblowers at Enron and Worldcom: fired, demoted, or banished to a corner in the smelly basement.
So now what? She had to inform her boss, Darryl Stenson. Darryl had been at National Media over twenty-three years. He might have heard of MensaPlan. But if he hadn’t, he would know how best to proceed. She dialed his number.
“Hello....”
“Hi, Darryl, it’s Linda.”
“That’s odd....”
“What is?”
“I tried to phone you earlier, but my cell phone kept crashing.”
“What’d you phone about?” she asked.
“The new ESPN rates for Monday Night Football. Considine-Schiff Advertising wants to buy fifteen spots.”
“Great! For which client?”
“LubTech’s new motor oil called ZOOOOM.”
“Makes sense.”
“Yeah, but you called me, Linda. What’s up?”
“Something that disturbs me.”
“Global warming? Hanging chads?”
“Funny you should mention ‘hanging.’”
“Why?”
“Because someone at our company might get hanged soon.”
Darryl paused. “You have my attention.”
“Log onto our company’s Intranet and I’ll show you what I’ve found.”
“My laptop’s at the office.”
She paused and looked around her living room. “Well, if you don’t mind a messy apartment, I could show you here.”
“What’s this all about?”
“A consulting company fee that National Media has paid out for sixteen years.”
“Who’s the consulting company?”
“MensaPlan.”
Darryl paused. “Don’t recall it.”
“Nor do I. In fact, I don’t think it exists. And the fee’s kind of hidden in Turner Advertising’s Incidental Network Expenses. It only shows up when you click on the Ancillary Media Services. This consulting fee makes no sense at all.”
“Frankly, a lot of consultants don’t make sense. Bunch of flimflam artists. They take our thoughts, repackage them as theirs, hand them back in a fancy binder, then roll their big fat fee out in wheelbarrows.”
“But some are legit.”
“Yeah, I guess so. You still on West Ninety-Third?”
“Yes.”
“See you in ten minutes.”
She hung up, glanced around her flat and re
alized that she’d become a housekeeping slut thanks to focusing on the mysterious fee and her normal workload. Her clothes and stuff were lying everywhere. Now, Darryl was coming over. And later, so was her sister, Pam, who could spot dust from the Space Shuttle.
Linda rushed through the apartment picking up and vacuuming for the next few minutes.
What if Darryl’s hungry? she wondered. She opened the refrigerator and saw an old slab of lasagna that had mutated into something like lung disease. Two shelves down, she saw a fresh wedge of Stilton cheese. She could serve it with some Carr’s Crackers.
She changed into her new pink velour sweatsuit, brushed her teeth, and started to fix her hair when the doorbell rang.
She hurried over to the door and peered through the peephole. Darryl’s smiling face stared back at her. She opened the door and he handed her a bunch of white daisies.
“Who’s a nice boss?”
He smiled.
“They’re lovely. Thanks, Darryl.”
She led him into the kitchen, arranged the daisies in a vase, then placed them on the coffee table in the living room.
“So, what’s with this strange fee?”
“Over here.” She led him to her laptop where he pulled a chair up beside her.
She logged into National Media’s Intranet. Within seconds she entered the company’s financial records and moved the cursor down to the MensaPlan consulting fee.
“Look,” she said. “Annually, a fraction of one percent of the total Turner network media buys has been trickling into MensaPlan.”
Darryl’s eyes grew serious. “But you found no info on this MensaPlan?
“No.”
His brow furrowed. “How’d you discover the fee?”
“By accident. My friend at Turner Advertising asked me to check out some media rates. The rates were OK, but when I dug a little deeper, I noticed this fee buried in Turner’s records.”
Linda felt a sudden breeze and wondered if she’d left a window open. “I think someone here is skimming money, or passing it along to someone at Turner Advertising.”
“Makes sense,” he whispered, dabbing sweat from his face. “Who else knows about this?” Darryl looked very concerned.
“Just my friend, you and me.”
“And ME!” said a man behind her, as his shadow crept onto her screen.
She spun around and stared into the eyes of a muscular man standing a few feet away, pointing a gun at Darryl and her. The hair on the back of her neck stood up.
“Hands over your head!” the man said.
Her heart pounding, Linda put her hands up.
But Darryl refused to.
Then, to her amazement, Darryl stood up and walked toward the door without looking back at her or the man.
My God ... Darryl’s in on this, she realized. He left my door unlocked for this man....
At the door, Darryl paused, but still didn’t look back at her. “I’m so sorry, Linda. I begged her to offer you two hundred thousand dollars to forget the MensaPlan fee. But she didn’t trust you. I tried, really....”
Darryl walked out and shut the door.
A sickening feeling welled up in her stomach and she thought she would be ill.
The intruder, whose gun had a silencer, took out a CD, loaded it into her computer, then tapped in a series of commands. Her computer began to click and make weird whirring sounds.
“Whoops, I hit the wrong key. All your files and your hard drive are being fried – as in permanently destroyed!”
He grabbed all the CDs on her desk and stuffed them into a bag.
“You should leave now,” she said.
“Why?”
“There’s a tiny spy cam outside my door. It videotaped you entering my apartment.”
“Yeah, right....” Big grin. “I checked and didn’t see any cameras.”
“It’s only one inch wide. The police installed it after a burglary a month ago. It’s live, 24/7 to the precinct. Police interns watch it nonstop. The police have you on video entering my apartment.”
He blinked as though trying to remember her hall.
All she needed was a few seconds. She’d run to her bedroom, deadbolt the door and race down the fire escape.
Keeping his gun on her, he slowly backed over to the apartment door and pushed it open. Then he leaned into the hall and glanced above the door.
She ran....
One second later, she heard a muffled thump, like a gunshot.
Something hit her in the back.
She froze. The room started to spin.
She felt herself falling, felt her head hit the corner of the coffee table, felt warm blood spill onto her face and mouth, saw the white daisies scatter across her arm.
Then the daisies faded to black.
Forty Four
At 35,000 feet Madison looked out her window as the Air France Airbus 300 began its descent into the New York area. Her life was also descending, into a deadly world from which she couldn’t seem to escape. Her father’s frantic phone call, his death, the attempts on her life and Kevin’s, the death of Bradford Tipleton, the mugging of Alison Whitaker in an alley ... when would it all end?
Not in Manhattan, she knew.
She looked over at Kevin dozing peacefully beside her.
Ironic, she thought, that losing her father, a man she loved deeply, had somehow brought her to Kevin, a man she might grow to love ... if she could find the courage to love again.
From the seat pocket, she pulled out a Time magazine and thumbed through it. She paused at an ad for MedPharms, whose rates she’d discussed yesterday with Linda Langstrom. That reminded her to try phoning Linda again. Calls to her from the St. Kitts airport had gone unanswered.
Fortunately, the Airbus was equipped with a new on-board cellular phone system that permitted passengers to use cell phones above 10,000 feet. She dialed Linda. After four rings, she prepared to leave another voice message when she heard....
“Langstrom residence.” A man’s voice. Deep. Serious.
“Is Linda there?”
The man paused. “Are you related to Ms. Langstrom?”
His voice sounded icy, official. Something had happened. Something bad. “Yes, I’m her half-sister, Madison,” she lied. “May I please speak to Linda?”
He paused a moment, then breathed out slowly. “Ma’am, I’m Detective Rashid with the NYPD. I’m sorry to inform you, but Ms. Lindstrom appears to have been the victim of a breaking and entering this afternoon.”
Madison winced at “victim.”
“She’s in the ER at St. Anthony’s.”
“Is she –?”
“It’s bad, ma’am. But her sister, a Pam McCarthy, found her shortly after the incident.”
Madison felt like she’d been punched in the stomach.
Her mind spinning, Madison managed to mumble goodbye and hung up. Her eyes filled as she turned toward Kevin and told him what the detective said.
Kevin placed his hand on hers.
“They got her,” she said. “She’s in the hospital because of me!”
“No....”
“Yes, I involved her in this consulting fee.”
“No, Linda discovered the fee, remember? Not you.”
“Yeah, but I agreed that she should check into it further.”
He shook his head. “Linda wanted to check into it further for her company’s sake. Don’t blame yourself.”
Kevin made sense, she knew. But there was only one thing that would ease her growing sense of guilt: Linda’s full and complete recovery. And based on what the detective said, she may not recover at all. Madison closed her eyes and prayed for her best friend.
Thirty minutes later, the Airbus touched down at JFK and taxied to a gate. As Madison and Kevin started to exit the plane, a young blonde female flight attendant stopped Madison. “Are you Madison McKean?”
“Yes.”
“A passenger said this fell from your purse. He asked me to give it to you.” She ha
nded Madison a postcard.
Madison glanced at the card with a picture of Sand Bank Bay. Walking ahead, she flipped the card over and felt blood drain from her face.
“What’s wrong?” Kevin asked.
She read the card aloud.
“Madison, Kevin,
My esteemed colleague, Nigel, and I apologize for leaving you two so abruptly on the beach this morning while we were all having so much fun. Please keep this card as a friendly reminder.
See you ... real soon.
Your tall, handsome admirer”
Quickly, she scanned the passengers swarming around her in the terminal. There were several tall men, but none resembled her attacker.
But she knew he was there.
Watching her....
Forty Five
After clearing customs, Madison and Kevin took a taxi for her apartment. En route, she called St. Anthony’s Hospital and again claimed to be Linda Langstrom’s half-sister. She was told that Linda had slipped into a coma. No visitors allowed. As Madison hung up, her eyes again filled with tears.
Minutes later, their cab driver, a blue-turbaned Sikh, stopped in front of her apartment. Looking up at her windows, she felt the cold, silent darkness behind them. Kevin asked the driver to wait, took her suitcase and escorted her toward the entrance. Then he stopped cold.
What’s wrong?” she asked.
“This.”
He held up the postcard.
Chills shot down her spine.
“He might have followed us from JFK,” Kevin said.
She nodded and checked the night shadows and nearby cars for any sign of her tall attacker. She didn’t see him, but knew he could be watching her even now.
“Two days ago, they changed my apartment locks and upgraded building security. I’ll be fine, Kevin.”
“If the security system couldn’t stop him a few nights ago, the new system probably can’t stop him tonight.”
Deep down, she feared the same thing.
“I have a suggestion,” he said.
“What?”
“Chez Jordan.”
“Running water?”
“Indoor toilets even.”
“Wow! Offer accepted, but I need some clothes upstairs.”
Kevin put her suitcase back in the taxi and asked the driver to wait a few minutes. The driver nodded and went back to humming a Ravi Shankar melody on his CD player.