Gabe had wired that half million to Schwab and bought what were called “put” options on the stock of a big telecom company that had been in the news a lot recently because of some accounting scandal. Apparently Victor had given Gabe a lesson on how to do this. Gabe is a quick study. When the public announcement came that the big telecom company’s earnings were going to fall short, the stock dropped and Gabe Heller had netted $4.6 million.
I didn’t have to ask Gabe where Victor got his inside information. I remembered reading that one of the white-collar criminals just confined to the same prison as Victor Heller was the CFO of that same telecom company.
I had no doubt that the two quickly became friends.
“I don’t get what you’re so upset about,” Gabe said.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “That’s insider trading.”
“But . . . I’m not an insider!”
“You’re a secondhand tippee, and the Supreme Court says that counts as insider trading. You could get caught, and you’re old enough to go to prison like your dad.”
“Grandpa said there was nothing illegal about it!”
“Victor has, shall we say, a loose understanding of the law. Do you know what insider trading is?”
“Not really.”
I explained to him that buying stocks or even options on stocks with inside information was cheating and it was wrong. Also illegal. I told him about how the SEC watched for sneaky transactions like this. He could go to prison for twenty years. Victor was already there. To him, it would make no difference.
“But . . . But I’m going to buy Nana a house. She’s always saying her condo is too small. And how about if I donate some of it to a nonprofit that fights opioid addiction? I’m sure there’s a bunch of those.”
“Don’t spend any of it,” I said. “We have to figure out what to do about this. I don’t want you going to prison like your father and your grandfather.”
Gabe was silent for a long time. “You’re scaring me, Uncle Nick.”
“Maybe you should be a little scared,” I said.
* * *
• • •
Three hours passed quickly, and we landed in Anguilla. As soon as we had landed, the flight attendant gathered our passports.
I did not have a US passport in the name of Nicholas Brown, so I gave her my real one. I had no choice. This was an international flight, and passports were required. I hadn’t planned on traveling overseas under this identity, and I didn’t have time to acquire a forged passport.
Would the Anguillan authorities compare the flight manifest with the passports they were given? Possibly; I didn’t know how closely they looked. It’s an island paradise; they’re not trying to keep people out.
But would the flight attendant notice the discrepancy? For sure. Would she tell anyone? That I didn’t know.
It worried me.
As it turned out, I was right to worry.
65
While we were waiting to disembark, I asked the flight attendant to come over.
“I’m working for Mr. Kimball,” I said. “Doing some investigation on his behalf within the company. Mr. Kimball and I would appreciate it if you would keep my real name confidential.”
“Of course, sir,” the flight attendant said.
“What’s your name?”
“Zoe Garcia.”
“Zoe, I’m Nick. Very nice to meet you.”
It was in the high eighties but dry when we emerged from the plane. We stepped right into a black SUV whose interior was air-conditioned to frigid. The driver had greeted Sukie by name, as “Ms. Kimball.” Our bags were transferred from the plane to the back of the SUV without our having to retrieve them.
It was a short drive to the resort, which was ridiculously beautiful. The water was turquoise, the sand was white, the air was clear. There was steel-pan music playing. It was like being in a TV commercial.
The resort was modern and newly renovated, after the big hurricane of a few years ago, with bleached blond-wood floors and large glass windows. The check-in desk had been carved from knotty pieces of petrified wood. Outside was blond stone and white umbrellas and perfectly straight rows of palm trees.
Sukie checked us in and requested a king-size bed. I was her guest. I didn’t want to check in, in case they insisted on my passport and I’d have to give them the wrong name. A pretty young woman who was probably Anguillan—hair back in neat dreadlocks, a bright smile, an orange-sherbet blouse—greeted us and handed us a couple of key cards.
The bellboy escorted us to a suite on the third floor of the main resort building. All of the Kimball Pharma group was staying in the main hotel building, not in the separate bungalows some guests stayed in.
Awaiting us was a bottle of champagne on ice and a fruit basket. It was an endless suite, with great views of the ocean, which sparkled before us. From the windows, you could see no other part of the hotel, just beach and sea. The four-poster bed, with white linens and coverlet, looked out on the ocean through a huge floor-to-ceiling window.
Sukie had opened the champagne and offered me a flute. I decided to pass. I didn’t have a lot of time, and I wasn’t feeling relaxed. Plus I’d had that Scotch on the plane.
“You Kimballs live well,” I said. “I guess you get used to it. Not sure I would.”
“Yeah, well, it’s blood money,” she said. She poured herself a flute but didn’t pick it up to drink. “I remember when I was filming in Haiti once, not long after that terrible earthquake, and this dreadful cholera epidemic had broken out? This one little girl—I had filmed her with her mother a week earlier, and her mother had died and the girl was in the hospital, terribly weak. And I went to visit her and she looked awful, her lips cracked and her eyes sunken, and she whispered to me, ‘Can I have some water?’ And of course I ran to the bathroom and filled up several glasses of water and gave them to her, and she gulped them all down, she was so thirsty.
“I knew the only way to fight cholera was to get as many people as possible clean, filtered drinking water. They needed cholera treatment centers. A two-hundred-bed center cost a million dollars for just three months. I donated three centers and enough money to keep them going for a couple of years. And when I went back to Haiti a couple weeks later, to see what was going on, I asked to see that little girl.” Sukie looked at the ocean for a long time, then she turned back to me. “And she’d died, of course.
“And I realized that even if I had all the money in the world, there’s only so much you can do. The need is so immense. And that was only one small part of one country at one particular moment in time.”
Our doorbell rang. I assumed it was another gift from the hotel, but through the peephole I saw it was Megan Kimball.
I opened the door.
“Hello,” she said to me hastily as she came into the suite, uninvited. “Sukie?” she called out.
Sukie emerged from the bedroom. “Right here,” she said.
“I had no idea you were coming. I was only just told.”
“I didn’t need an engraved invitation, did I?” Sukie said. “I am an equal stakeholder, after all.”
“Any reason you didn’t tell me?”
“Last-minute decision,” Sukie said. “Nick’s never been to Anguilla.”
“Oh, so you’re here on vacation, right? Well, just to be clear, you don’t have a role here.”
“Nick may go to a few presentations.”
Megan shook her head. “I heard from Stephanie that you’ve been requesting in-depth financial statements on the subsidiaries. Now you’re at sales conference for the first time in your life. Why are you suddenly taking an interest in the company?”
“Because we’re losing money,” Sukie said. She’d clearly prepared an answer. “Maybe I don’t have confidence in the leadership.”
“This is my terrain, and yo
u know it. I have worked my ass off trying to keep this company on track. Bring it into the twenty-first century. And protect against all the lawsuits at the same time. Meanwhile, you’re making your silly documentaries.”
“Have you ever seen a documentary I’ve made?”
“Sukie, grow up. Some of us have been pretty damned busy over the last decade. For me, Kimball Pharma is a challenge. It’s hard work. For you it’s . . . a piggybank, for your little projects.”
Sukie flushed, looking like she’d just been slapped. “I’m here for support,” she said.
“Bullshit,” Megan said. “You’re here to carve out a bigger share. You think you can suddenly helicopter yourself into the C-suite—well, baby, that ain’t happening. What do you even know about this company? Do you actually care about it? While you’re off making your nature documentaries?”
“White-collar crime isn’t nature,” Sukie snapped.
“Sorry, but I haven’t had large swatches of free time to watch your little stories. I’m too concerned with saving what Dad built. We’re facing the biggest crisis we’ve ever gone through, and the last thing we need is someone like you swanning in from your flower-child fields of heather. You’re suddenly taking an interest?” She shook her head. “Sorry, but I’m not buying it. You think you can parachute in and Dad’s going to make you executive chairman of the company? That’s not going to happen.”
Then she looked at me as if she’d forgotten I was standing there, and she stormed out of the suite.
Sukie stared with wide eyes and a nervous grin.
“Excuse me,” I said. I followed Megan out and caught up with her by the elevator bank.
“I’m sorry,” she said huffily, “but I’m on my way to a drink.”
“I could use one myself. Mind if I join you?”
She gave me a hard look, and finally she shrugged.
66
I had an instinct about Megan. Everyone else thought she was this hard-shelled corporate storm trooper. But I knew better. All the vilification and all the threats had to take a toll, even on her.
At the tiki-themed bar she ordered a Cosmo and I ordered a Buffalo Trace. The bar was empty—it was early—and the drinks arrived quickly.
I took a sip of the bourbon and said, “So I’m just a management consultant, but the way you restructured the Czech operation? Hats off.”
She turned to me, surprised, pleased. “I got a hell of a lot of pushback on that,” she said, and swigged some more of her Cosmo.
I said, “It’s like, you grab the wheel, you re-steer the boat, and everyone’s howling, You’re off course, you’re off course, you’re off course! And all you can say is, Did you notice I just steered us around a goddamned iceberg? You’re welcome.”
Megan snorted delightedly. “You’re welcome, assholes,” she added, setting down her drink a little harder than she probably meant to. “How long have you and Sukie been seeing each other?”
“Just a few weeks.”
“Are you the reason she’s been taking a sudden interest in the company?”
“Not at all.”
“Because you McKinsey types—you have a tendency to go from the hired hand to the boss. One day you’re a consultant, the next day you’re hiring consultants.”
“Nah, I’m here strictly for support. You heard about how she was attacked at her house in the city, right?”
“Of course. We all heard.”
“After what happened in Katonah, you have to take all these threats seriously. Margret Benson was a private investigator, I understand.” She knew I knew.
“She was.”
“And you hired her?”
She looked at me sharply, nodded.
“Where’d you find her?”
“She did some work for a friend. She came highly recommended.”
“Did she get what you wanted her to get?”
She drew herself up. “I’m sorry, that’s confidential.” She poked her index finger in the air so the waitress would know she wanted another round.
I thought of Maggie’s handwritten notes. The kind of information Megan had hired her to look for. “You must know your father well enough to know what he’s about to do, right?”
“At the family meeting, you mean?”
I nodded. “He’s going to declare bankruptcy, isn’t he? Isn’t the company in terrible financial shape?”
“Ha! Are you kidding?”
“Huh? Kimball Pharma has been losing money for years, hasn’t it?”
She chortled silently. She looked at me, then at her empty Cosmo glass, resentfully. Her next Cosmo, her third, came quickly. She took a big sip and then confided, “My father has been expecting a catastrophe for quite some time. The one thing you can say for him, he’s always a step ahead of everyone else.”
“A catastrophe?”
“All these lawsuits over Oxydone. He knew the day of reckoning was bound to come sooner or later.” She lowered her voice, stared at her glass. She sounded almost proud. “So he’s been sweeping cash aside. Squirreling it away. Into shell companies offshore. And categorizing all that cash as investments in research. So Kimball Pharma has been investing all of its profits into what we’re calling research. He started doing this eleven years ago.”
“Clever,” I said. “So when Kimball is forced to make huge legal settlements, it’ll have no assets to pay out. That actually works?”
“It’s not ethical, but it works. Not that ethics have ever stopped my father before. It’s a clever scam.”
I tried to probe further, but she got quiet. Gloomy, it seemed.
“What do you think happened to Maggie?” I said softly.
She tipped the nearly empty Cosmo glass to her lips and drained it. “Happened to her?” she murmured. “Got too close to the family. Too close to something she wasn’t s’pposed to know.”
“So you think she was murdered?”
She looked at me for a long time, then looked away. “Don’t you think so?” she said.
67
When I got back to our suite, I found Sukie on her computer doing edits on her film remotely, exchanging text messages with her editor. She looked up and said, “Did she confess?”
She was being arch, but I decided to take her seriously. “So do you think she did it?”
“What do you think?”
I’d considered it. I answered her evasive question with my own question. “Would Maggie have had a reason to meet with Megan outside the house that night?”
“If Megan asked her to, sure. To discuss the job she’d hired her to do. They might not want to talk about it inside the house.”
“And let’s say Megan caught her by surprise back there—a sudden shove from behind at the right place in the woods is all it would take. She’s a strong woman.”
“But why would she do it?”
“I don’t know. Unless Maggie turned up something she shouldn’t have and told her about it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t see it.”
I nodded slowly. When a private investigator works for an attorney, he or she is bound by confidentiality to the client. It’s like an extension of attorney-client privilege. Under some state laws, there are penalties for divulging information. She’d have every reason to observe confidentiality.
But say Maggie found the Tallinn file, full of evidence that the company knew how dangerous its flagship drug was and buried the warnings. I could see her refusing to observe client secrecy like she was supposed to. You keep your client’s secrets, yes—but she’d be outraged. Especially if Megan planned to keep the truth hidden. She’d do what she felt was the right thing, even if it caused her to lose a client and a payment. That was just who she was.
Sukie interrupted my thoughts. “You know, talking about the woods behind the house reminds me of something. I remembe
r when I was maybe eleven or twelve, and there was a huge herd of deer, somewhere toward the back of the paddocks in Katonah. I ran at them, and of course, they scattered. As I knew they would. But there you had a couple thousand pounds of muscle, hoofs, and horns. And I was this shrimpy little thing. They could have charged me and trampled me to death.”
“Good point.”
“Well, my point is, there was some unwritten rule of nature saying which one of us was a danger to which. As long as everyone obeyed the rule, things would go on the way they always did. It’s like with my father. He’s a danger to us. He says what goes. He charges, we scatter. But maybe one day the script changes. We never know how much power we have until we use it. Who’s the dangerous one? Who’s the one in danger? It’s like a belief system. And beliefs can change.”
I nodded, smiled.
“What do you say we head out to the sales conference?” I said. “Establish our cover?”
She closed her laptop and got up to change. Since I didn’t have to change, I worked on locating Dr. Zubiri.
According to the program we’d been given at check-in, we’d missed his presentation. That had been the day before. But I was certain he hadn’t left. He’d want to enjoy a few days of ultra-luxury in the Caribbean. Anyone would.
* * *
• • •
The pre-dinner session was being held in an outdoor theater, open to the elements. It had squarish pillars and a swooping stone roof. This was not a thatched-roof kind of place. The theater’s sunken rows of seats were nearly filled, the theater dark. We found a couple of seats at the back.
A rap video was playing on a giant movie screen, and I’d never seen anything like it. A giant Oxydone inhaler with purple arms and legs was dancing with a pair of white guys in black hoodies and gold chains and dark sunglasses who were making elaborate gang signs. The giant inhaler was rapping about how he “got a lotta doctors on speed dial” and something about “the last mile” and “clinical trial.” We watched the screen, mesmerized.
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