It was surrounded by 250 acres, which included a large natural forest. We passed the tennis courts and a pool and pool house and manicured gardens, as we approached the house. On the other side of the house were gardens and acres of pristine forestland.
“Welcome to Kimball Hall,” she said with a twist of a smile.
Of course it had a name.
12
In a sitting room that looked and smelled like it was rarely used—oil paintings on the wall, uncomfortable Edwardian furniture, the cool tang of lemon-oil furniture polish—I changed into a suit that I liked for occasions like this because it had a number of well-concealed pockets.
I looked around for visible security cameras, didn’t see any, but I hadn’t expected to. I pulled out the architectural plans and scanned them again, familiarizing myself with the layout. Then I refolded them and slipped them into an inner pocket on the suit coat. I put my street clothes in the garment bag, left it on a chair, and went out to find Sukie. If I was going to pretend to be her date for the evening, I had to stay pretty much by her side. I’d be an outsider in this family gathering and would thus be scrutinized especially closely. I had to be ready for that.
When I emerged, I could see that the guests had started arriving in the spacious entry foyer. Maybe a dozen people were gathered at the foot of the mighty stone staircase, the sort of grand feature that was probably used for weddings and other ceremonial occasions when you wanted to make a dramatic entrance.
I glanced at the small crowd. They were all members of the Kimball family, whether by birth or by marriage. Heirs to the Kimball Pharma fortune. Gathered here at the estate of Dr. Conrad Kimball, the patriarch, the doctor turned pharmaceutical tycoon, to celebrate his eightieth birthday.
And I was here—I reminded myself—as Sukie Kimball’s date. I was not Nick Heller. I was a guy she met at a party in TriBeCa. I worked for McKinsey and Company in Boston. I was a consultant named Nick Brown.
It was a light cover. I had a counterfeit Massachusetts driver’s license in the name of Nicholas Brown and a fictional address on Beacon Hill. If someone checked with McKinsey, my cover would probably be blown. Unless someone actually named Nick Brown worked for them, which was totally possible. But I had no reason, at that point, to expect anyone to challenge me. This was a family birthday party I was invited to. I wasn’t infiltrating a meeting of the politburo.
I also had more on my mind than just getting by. I’d been given a rare opportunity to penetrate the Kimball family, to interact among them as an equal. A temporary insider. So I needed to do some social engineering.
Because if for some reason I failed at getting to the old man’s secret files, I might have to come back again, to some other family function at the estate. And the more comfortable the siblings were with me, the more they’d share. In my experience, people like to talk if you know how to listen. There were more secrets to be found, I was sure. And the secret you think you’re looking for may not be the one you really need to know.
As I approached, I thought I recognized a few of the arrivals, but at that distance I couldn’t be sure. A couple of small blond boys in blue blazers, making a ruckus. They had to be the sons of Megan Kimball, forty-five, the second-oldest child of Conrad Kimball. I thought of her as the corporate one. She was the only family member in the family business, a vice president. There were also a couple of awkward teenage boys in blue blazers, hers, who looked like they’d much rather be playing Fortnite.
Then there were the servants bustling in and out, carrying silver trays. They all looked tense. From what I’d read, Dr. Conrad Kimball, that self-made man, wasn’t good with staff. He went through people at a fast clip.
Looking up, I noticed a few discreet CCTV cameras hidden in the carved walnut ceiling molding. It was important to remember that Dr. Kimball was a highly suspicious man. He had reason to be. His family was under assault.
I heard a laugh that sounded like Sukie’s and turned to see her—shaggy brown hair, brown eyes, sharp nose—smiling at a tall woman a few years younger with a short boyish haircut and that same prominent blade of a nose. Her younger sister. Hayden Kimball, the Broadway impresario, was wearing a neatly pressed denim shirt and black jeans and boots.
Sukie broke off to say to me, “Nick, sweetie, meet my sister Hayden.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Nick Brown.”
She nodded, smiled remotely, didn’t extend a hand.
“You’ve produced some terrific plays,” I said.
“Oh, yeah?” Her face colored. “Thank you.” She seemed to be loosening up a bit. I obviously knew who she was. She was president and majority owner of the Kimball Theater Group, which owned five Broadway theaters and produced some successful Broadway plays and musicals. She was famous, in a small world.
“You said you’re Nick Browne, with an e?”
“No e.” Last I looked, Nick Browne yielded nineteen million search results on Google; drop the e and you’re up to seven hundred million. Far more anonymous.
“And you, uh—how do you know my sister?”
“We met at a party in TriBeCa,” Sukie said.
I waited for Hayden to ask, “Whose party?” but instead she said, “Are you in the arts?”
“Just the dark arts of McKinsey and Company.”
“McKinsey,” she said. “The consulting firm.”
I nodded.
“Huh.”
She looked like she was mulling a follow-up question. Maybe she knew somebody who worked there. So I quickly changed the subject. “I’m looking forward to your all-Asian version of Suddenly Last Summer,” I said. I’d read in a profile in the New York Times that she was partial to Tennessee Williams.
She seemed to loosen up even more. With a tilt of her head, she said, “Yes, that’s shaping up to be a powerful piece.”
At that moment, a waitress appeared with a tray of miniature hamburgers. I took a slider. Sukie drew close to me for a moment and muttered under her breath, “Uh-oh. Danger, Will Robinson.”
13
Another woman was approaching: a tall, broad-shouldered woman. Megan, the second-oldest, was blond, her hair parted at the center and going down to her shoulders, cool gray eyes like her father’s. And the sharp Kimball nose, a family emblem.
A graduate of Princeton and Stanford Business School, Megan had started at Kimball Pharma as an assistant in the marketing department. Therefore she was most likely to succeed her father as CEO. She was divorced and had four sons, who were clearly the ones in the blazers. She was wearing a gray pantsuit and a white blouse and could not have looked more corporate-generic. Not fashionable at all. Everything I’d read painted her as ferociously ambitious, intimidatingly smart, and a cold fish.
She extended her hand toward me and offered a controlled smile. She shook firmly, almost bone-crushingly, and said, “You’re the only one here I don’t recognize. Megan Kimball.” Her voice was surprisingly deep.
“Nick Brown,” I said. I noticed Megan hadn’t greeted her sister Hayden and was standing at a distance from her.
“Did I hear you say something about McKinsey? I have ears like a bat.”
“I work there.”
“McKinsey New York?”
“Boston.”
“Oh, you must know Chuck Neely!”
Chuck who? My brain raced.
I paused for a long moment and then said, “Plugs or rugs? What’s your money on?”
She arched her brow, smiled genuinely this time, said, “I’m sorry?”
“C’mon. The only guy I know whose hairline advances as he ages.”
She laughed. “To be honest, I haven’t seen him in, like, ten years. But I know what you mean.”
I let out a silent breath. It had taken a moment to call Chuck Neely’s photo and details to mind. “Anyway, Chuck’s no longer in charge of the Boston office.” That was true. I�
��d done my homework. “It’s now Jim French.”
“I don’t know him.”
Neither did I, and I sighed relief inwardly. The two moppet-headed child terrorists began tugging on Megan’s arms and nagging, “When do we get to eat? When do we get to eat?” and “I don’t like those sliders. Those are yucky.” These kids could have starred in a social media campaign for vasectomies. Their older brothers, the teenage boys, were off to one side laughing raucously, looking at something on one of the kids’ phones.
“Grandpa’s coming down right now, and as soon as he gets here, we’ll sit down to dinner,” Megan said to her boys. “That’s how it always works. There he is.” She pointed. An ancient elevator off the foyer, which I hadn’t noticed before, opened, and Conrad Kimball emerged, with a much younger woman in a white suit on his arm. He walked slowly but erect and with assurance. In his photographs he looked frail. In person, in motion, he looked far more powerful.
14
Time had not bent Conrad Kimball. He had a bristly white mustache and sparse white hair, but he was mostly bald on top. A dark, heavy brow. A long, sharp nose. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt and, over it, a navy cardigan sweater, unbuttoned. He looked like he’d just gotten up from his afternoon nap. Tufts of stray white hairs stuck out on either side of his head like wires.
Back in the day, Kimball was known for his plainspoken manner, I’d read, but as he aged, he grew more intimidating. Now he was short with business associates, always blunt.
The woman on his arm was wasp-waisted and elegant and blond and looked to be about forty. At a distance she could have been Grace Kelly. An Hermès scarf was tied around her neck. That had to be Natalya, the fiancée. She looked like she was arriving at an awards ceremony where she was the featured nominee. She also looked like she’d recently had her lips filled.
“Happy birthday, Daddy!” Megan called out, and the rest of the crowd responded in kind, wishing him happy birthday in a ragged torrent of voices.
“Where the hell are my sons?” Conrad said. “I see my sweet girls are here, but what the hell happened to Paul and Cameron, those lousy bums?”
Sukie said, “Paul’s on his way, and Cameron—Cameron is Cameron.”
A couple of people chuckled knowingly. Someone’s cell phone rang. One of the moppet-headed kids said, “Can we eat?” and Conrad said, “Hell yeah, we can eat!”
He put out his arms as he walked toward the younger kids and then enfolded both of them at once. I wondered if they were fraternal twins. One was taller and thinner than the other, but they looked otherwise alike. Meanwhile, the teenage boys appeared to be tussling over ownership of a phone.
Alone, at the edge of the crowd, stood Natalya, smiling cryptically. No one was greeting her. She was the proverbial skunk at the garden party. A frightened-looking waitress came by with a glass of red wine on a tray, and as she stepped forward to hand it to Natalya, the waitress must have tripped on the carpet, because she lost her balance and upended the wineglass. The spill missed Natalya, but dark red wine splashed onto the arm of the pale yellow sofa, staining it at once.
The waitress’s face crumpled, and she began to weep as she righted the wineglass. Natalya swiftly untied her scarf from her neck and let it flutter over the wine stain on the arm of the sofa. The scarf covered the stain entirely.
She smiled at the waitress and winked. “Conrad does not have to know,” she murmured.
Meanwhile, Conrad, busy with the kids, was braying, “Someday that kid is going to get himself killed.” I assumed he was talking about his youngest, Cameron, twenty-two, who was known to be a hard-core party dude.
His daughters were lining up to hug him. None of them currently had a husband, I noted. Conrad probably wasn’t a good male role model. Megan had an ex who didn’t seem to be here. There was a big gap in age between her teenage sons and the moppet-headed terrorists, who looked to be around eight.
After she hugged her father, Sukie introduced me as her friend Nick.
Conrad turned to me with squinty, suspicious eyes. He gave me his hand, which was as cool and dry as an old broken-in leather baseball mitt. With his left hand he was holding on to the edge of a table. He was probably in need of a walker or at least a cane, but he was too vain to use one. Didn’t want to appear infirm.
“Nick Brown,” I said.
“You an artist too, Mr. Brown?” he said pleasantly. “A filmmaker, like Sukie?”
“No, sorry, I’m boring. Just a businessman. A consultant for McKinsey.”
“Oh, is that right?” Conrad said with a slight tilt of his head and a glinting smile. His teeth were either bad veneers or dentures. “I was expecting another one of those strange weedy anarchists. You don’t seem Sukie’s type.”
“You’d be surprised,” Sukie cut in flatly.
He looked at his daughter. His eyes twinkled, became playful for an instant. “So you’re no longer with . . . Gregg?” he said. You could see he was toying with her and taking pleasure in her annoyance.
“That’s been over for months.”
He turned back to me. “So is there any consulting wisdom you can give me, Mr. Brown? How’s the world looking to you?”
“I don’t know about wisdom,” I said, “but if I were running Kimball Pharma, I’d shut down my Budapest operation immediately, before that Hungarian autocrat seizes it on behalf of the government. Which he’s about to do. Any day now.” I’d come prepared.
His genial smile faded. “That right?”
I gazed at the old man directly. “Maybe he’ll leave Kimball Pharma alone, but I know for a fact he’s targeting Merck.”
His eyes lasered in on mine, all fierce concentration. “You know this how?”
“I travel a lot.”
He put a hand on Sukie’s right shoulder. “You got hold of an interesting one this time, Susan,” he said.
Then he turned back to me, and I saw he wasn’t smiling. His slate-gray eyes had gone hard. In a low voice, he said, “But I don’t think you’re the man you pretend to be.”
My stomach did a flip, and I saw the color drain from Sukie’s face. I held her gaze a moment, partly to compose myself before responding to Conrad. But when I turned to face him, he’d turned away.
“Not sure I understand,” I replied blandly.
He turned back. “You’re far too interesting to be one of those stamped-from-a-mold McKinsey kids.”
A butler approached the old man.
“Oh, it takes all types,” I said, relieved.
“Will you excuse me, sir,” the butler said to Kimball, “but we’re ready to serve whenever you’d like.”
“Well, hell, let’s eat now,” Kimball announced. “To be continued,” he said to me with a wag of a finger.
15
The old man, steadied by the statuesque Natalya, made his way slowly into the dining room. Most of the rest of the crowd hung back, except for the kids, who ran ahead. I noticed they had their own table, for which I was grateful.
I lingered behind with the rest of them, eavesdropping while pretending to look around at the decor.
I heard one of the smaller kids say, “Is Grandpa gonna marry that lady?”
“Yes, sweetie, he is,” Megan replied. “Her name is Natalya.”
I went back to Sukie’s side. She and her sister Hayden were conversing quietly. I feigned distraction and overheard Sukie say, “I don’t like the way that woman looks at me.”
Hayden replied, “Hey, I’ve seen Gold Diggers of 1933. I don’t need to live through it. And what’s the deal with her lips? She’s looking more and more like the Joker, don’t you think? I mean, talk about duck lips.”
The room we entered wasn’t the huge formal dining room I’d passed walking in. This one’s walls were lacquered in oxblood with marble busts in low-lit niches every few feet. A long table, covered in a pleated white
tablecloth, set for close to a dozen people. Around it, gold-painted bamboo chairs. The table was next to a huge stone fireplace, but no fire was lit; it wasn’t cold enough.
The four grandkids sat at their own table next to the far end of the main one, far from where Conrad Kimball and Natalya were seated. My place card read Susan Kimball Guest in fancy script. I was seated not far from Conrad, with Megan on my right. Which was exactly who I didn’t want to be seated next to for the entirety of dinner. Megan seemed to know too much about what “Nick Brown” did. I looked to my left and saw a card that read Paul Kimball. That was the absent eldest son. Sukie was on the other side of the table from me, fairly distant. We could wave at each other, that’s all.
Then a stoop-shouldered, gray-haired guy came into the room, apologizing noisily. I recognized him as Paul, the oldest Kimball child, mid-fifties. On his arm was a tall woman I recognized as a superstar MIT professor, a Moroccan-born artist and architect and designer. It would be sexist of me to mention that she was also fashion-model-beautiful and had pouty red lips and a wild head of curly brown hair, so I won’t. She was known to be extremely smart.
“So sorry, Dad. I was stuck in revision hell.” Paul went up to Conrad and kissed him on top of the head. Conrad responded by patting his son awkwardly on the shoulder. Paul handed him a gift-wrapped book.
“I said no gifts!” the old man barked.
But he tore off the paper anyway. I was close enough to see that it was a hardcover by someone named Yuval Noah Harari, titled Habitus. It meant nothing to me.
For some reason there was an eruption of squabbling at the kids’ table, and then the two moppet-headed terrorists ran to Megan, who turned around and said something quietly that made them race out of the room.
The two of them returned a minute later, together lugging a big set of Titleist golf clubs festooned in red ribbon with a big bow on top. They brought it to the head of the table. Conrad wagged his finger at Megan and said, “I see what you’re doing here. You’re having the kiddies do it so I won’t yell!”
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