Silent Partner

by Stephen Frey

  “When can you get it?” Liv pressed.

  “I’ve got a lot going on right now. And what I need in terms of your information involves getting on a plane. I just don’t know when I’ll be able to get away.”

  “I know you hate flying, Angela, but you’vegot to do this for me. Please. I can’t let theHerald break this story first. I just can’t.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll call you back later from a land line.” Angela cut the connection without waiting for Liv’s response. She’d call her back from a private office at ESP.

  “Where do you have to go?” Tucker asked.

  Angela looked up from the cell phone. She’d been dialing her office number to pick up her voice mails. “What do you mean?”

  “I couldn’t help overhearing you tell whoever it was you were talking to that you’d have to take a flight somewhere to get what they needed. Where do you need to go?”

  Angela hesitated. “New York,” she lied, a thought racing through her mind. The only reason Jake Lawrence would have had John Tucker anonymously contact Liv and have him provide damaging information on Bob Dudley was to put Dudley on the defensive—just as Lawrence announced to the world his intention to buy Sumter Bank. When the shareholders heard the damaging information regarding Dudley, they would run like lemmings to Lawrence’s tender offer. A tender offer he had sworn several times to Angela he would not make. Suddenly, she didn’t feel like she could believe anyone.

  She turned in her seat toward Tucker. “You sure you’ve never heard of Liv Jefferson?”

  “Only from you.”

  “She’s a good friend.”

  “That’s nice—”

  “I’d like you to meet her.”

  He hesitated. “Okay.”

  “Maybe tonight for dinner.”

  Tucker smiled back thinly. “Maybe.”

  “Take a seat, Carter.” Bob Dudley was in his large chair by the window overlooking the James River. He had moved the other wing chair to the opposite side of the window so they could face one another for this discussion. He motioned for Hill to sit in it. “Please.”

  Hill obeyed, not taking his eyes from Dudley. Dudley had called the meeting fifteen minutes ago, but hadn’t explained what it was about.

  “Carter, I have no shortage of enemies.”

  “Any man who’s been as successful as you makes enemies. It’s unavoidable.”

  “Cut the bullshit,” blurted Dudley.

  Hill looked down and cleared his throat, trying to control his resentment.

  “I have friends too,” Dudley said. “People who are intensely loyal to me. Thanks to one of them, I’ve become aware of some disturbing news.”

  Hill shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Ah, what news?”

  “Reporters are investigating rumors that I’ve been illegally funneling money out of Sumter Bank for myself.” Dudley paused. “Do you know anything about this?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You sure you want to stick to that story?”

  Hill hesitated. “Yes.”

  Dudley glanced out the window at the building Albemarle Capital used as its headquarters. At the two windows that looked into Chuck Reese’s office. “I know how you feel about me, Carter. And I know what you want.”

  “Bob, I’m not—”

  “Shut the hell up!” Dudley thundered. “I’ve known for a long time that you want to run this organization. That you feel I’m past my prime. That I’m more of a liability now than an asset. I’m also aware that one of the bank’s board members conveyed to you my belief that you are not chairman material.”

  Hill gritted his teeth. He could feel himself about to explode, but he needed to maintain control. Dudley was still in charge. “I don’t listen to idle talk, and as far as you being past your prime, just the other day I pointed out to someone that you have created a vast amount of wealth for the shareholders of this institution. That you arestill creating wealth. That this bank is more secure under your leadership than Jake Lawrence’s.”

  Dudley chuckled. “I should fire you right now, Carter, and be done with you.”

  Hill held his breath.

  “But then you’d probably leak to the press the fact that for the last six months I’ve been having an affair with a hot little number half my age. I’m sure you know all about that.”

  Hill looked down into his lap.

  “Of course,” Dudley continued, “then I’d tell my contacts at theTrib and theHerald about that blonde you have stashed in an apartment complex over on the South Side.”

  Hill’s eyes flashed to Dudley’s. “That’s a lie! You have no proof of any—”

  “My people have plenty of proof.” Dudley pursed his lips. “But what good would it do me to tell the papers that? Besides, if I fire you now in the face of the lies they’re going to print about me, it wouldn’t look good.”

  “So why did you call me here?” Hill asked.

  “First, to ask you a question, then to give you some advice.”

  “What’s the question?” Hill snapped.

  “Are you working with Jake Lawrence?”

  “I just told you that I think Sumter is more secure under you than Lawrence. What the hell would make you think that?”

  “The comment Ms. Day made the last time we met with her. The one about Jake Lawrence asking her if you would make a good chairman.”

  “That’s absurd. If Lawrence took over, he’d probably fire the both of us.”

  Dudley nodded, pointing a gnarled finger. “You anticipated my advice. He will fire you if he takes over this place. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. Even if he’s telling you all the right things now.”

  Hill rose from his chair and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Dudley demanded. “I didn’t dismiss you.”

  Angela leaned back in the chair and stretched, thinking about how she might need another cup of coffee to stay awake. Thinking about how she was supposed to be on a plane to Birmingham at 8:00 tomorrow morning. And here it was 10:00 at night and she was still immersed in piles of ESP due diligence in a conference room thirty miles west of Washington, D.C., and a hundred miles from Richmond. At this rate Tucker wouldn’t have her back to her apartment in the Fan until three or four in the morning.

  Perhaps she ought to just get a hotel room at Dulles Airport and change her plane ticket. But she hadn’t brought another set of clothes. And she still had a lot more work to do here. Perhaps she should cancel Birmingham. She put her hand to her mouth to cover a yawn. Liv would be disappointed.

  “You okay, champ?” Tucker sat at the end of the conference room, his boots up on the table as he read a copy ofSports Illustrated . “It’s getting late.”

  “Too late to introduce you to Liv Jefferson tonight, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, I’d say.”

  “We’ll do it another night.”

  “Fine.” He smiled politely. “Want me to get you another cup of coffee?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve had three cups since dinner. I couldn’t handle any more caffeine. I’ll be bouncing off the walls.”

  Tucker had spent the afternoon at a nearby mall, then brought Chinese food back for dinner around six. He’d stayed with her in the conference room after they’d finished eating, quietly reading the stack of magazines he’d purchased this afternoon. Most of the ESP employees had left the offices for the night, and she felt safer with him around.

  “What exactly are you doing over there in between those paper mountains?” he asked, tossing the magazine onto the table.

  Stacks of files and large, legal-sized envelopes surrounded Angela, piled high on the table and the floor around her chair. They’d been brought to her on request by a small group of ESP employees who Walter Fogel had ordered to help. “Due diligence.”

  “What does that mean,due diligence? ”

  “It means I’m studying everything I can about this company to figure out what it’s worth. And to make certain there isn
’t something buried here that could cause big problems later on.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a lawsuit that the inside attorneys aren’t telling anybody but senior management about. Sexual harassment or product liability. Or maybe inconsistencies in the numbers. Or the fact that a big customer is about to pull their account. The kind of stuff you might find in a stray memo or report.”

  “Smoking guns.”

  “And skeletons.”

  “That’s a lot to try to go through.”

  “Especially when certain people at the company wouldn’t want you to find what you’re looking for if it were there. The chief financial officer certainly doesn’t want me to uncover the fact that he’s cooking the books, so sometimes I have to look very hard. You know, turn over all the rocks. No matter how small.”

  “How do you know where to find everything? How do you know where to look?”

  “Experience.”

  Tucker glanced around, then pointed to a thick folder at one end of the table. “What’s that?”

  Angela squinted, trying to focus her tired eyes. “Customer reports, I think.”

  “Why do you have to go through those?”

  “By checking out what ESP is billing individual customers, it helps me independently confirm what the accountants are reporting as ESP’s consolidated revenue.” She eyed the folder gloomily. Just another item on a long list. “I’m only interested in the bigger customers. I’ll end up calling their accountants to confirm that they are actually paying ESP what ESP claims to be billing them.”

  “It’s like herding cattle,” Tucker observed. “You come at the figures from all different angles and head them where you want them to go so they can’t slip anything by you. By actually calling the clients to confirm what they’re paying ESP, you find out if ESP is telling you the truth about how much business they claim to be doing.”

  “Exactly.” Angela glanced down at the detailed financial statement she had been reviewing.

  “Let me help,” Tucker volunteered.

  Angela smiled despite the ache that was starting to throb in the corners of her eyes. “I don’t know how you could.”

  Tucker thought for a moment. “How about if I go through those customer reports and flag the big ones? The file looks pretty thick. At least I could weed out the ones that you don’t care about. The ones that are too small.”

  She hesitated. “Okay. Start by pulling the ones that ESP claims to be billing for more than fifty thousand dollars a year.”

  Tucker stood up and moved to the far end of the conference room table, happy to have something to do.

  Angela watched him for a moment, then refocused on the numbers.

  A few minutes later Tucker let out a low whistle.

  Angela rubbed her eyes. “What is it?” she asked, checking out a small stack of papers he had pulled from the file. She assumed those papers represented customers doing over fifty thousand a year.

  Tucker looked up from the sheet of paper he had been studying. “I think you might want to check this out,” he said, sliding it down the length of the table.

  “What did you find?” she demanded, scanning the small type.

  “Look near the bottom.”

  Angela’s eyes flashed down and her heart skipped a beat. “Sumter,” she whispered. In a faint, handwritten scrawl in the left margin was a note to remember to include the Sumter “cloak account” in the “gross numbers.” Beneath the words was a string of numbers. A code or perhaps the cloak account number buried somewhere in ESP’s operating system.

  “Cloak account?”Tucker asked. “What do you think that means?”

  “Probably nothing,” Angela replied quickly, gazing at the string of numbers, conscious of a strong sense of déjà vu. “Just an internal record-keeping code. Keep going through the file,” she urged. “You’ll probably find the Sumter account page.”

  Tucker shook his head. “I’m done. I’ve been through the entire file. There’s no mention of Sumter other than what you see there,” he explained, nodding at the paper in her hand.

  Angela checked the paper again. “Did you find an account page in the file for a company called Cubbies?” she asked, still bothered by the eerie echo reverberating through her mind.

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  That made no sense. Why would Jake Lawrence lie to her about Cubbies’ licensing software from ESP Technologies? And if he was lying, how would he know how effective the ESP product was?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Angela trotted up the jet way into the Birmingham airport, found a seat at a deserted gate, closed her eyes, folded her hands tightly in her lap, and murmured a quick prayer. The landing had been bad. The Delta Air Lines 737 jet had been battered constantly by turbulence from five thousand feet all the way to the ground, and she needed a few moments to gather herself. After a few deep breaths, she stood up and headed down the long corridor toward the rental car signs.

  She had driven all the way back to Richmond with Tucker last night—getting to her apartment just after three this morning—then caught a few hours’ sleep before driving to the Richmond Airport. Now it was a few minutes past ten. Her plan was to locate the main branch of the Birmingham library, then visit Strategy Partners—the firm Liv claimed Bob Dudley owned and was using to defraud Sumter. Then, depending on how her time at Strategy Partners went, there might have to be one more stop. After that, she’d board another Delta flight, this time headed for Dulles, where Tucker was to meet her. She had a 6:00 appointment in northern Virginia with Ted Harmon, ESP’s vice president of sales. Tucker was going to make certain she got to her meeting on time, then give her a ride back to Richmond when it was over.

  Angela hadn’t offered any specifics to the ESP vice president when she’d talked to him from the plane. At first he’d balked at her request to get together. But she’d quickly reminded him that Walter Fogel had given her free rein. She could interview anyone she wanted about anything she wanted. And he had relented. As she executed the rental car contract with initials and signatures on umpteen different lines, she wondered if the ESP executive had any idea what she wanted. If somehow he would anticipate that she wanted to know more about Sumter being an ESP client. And that she wanted to understand the “cloak account” notation scrawled in the margin of the neatly folded piece of paper in her briefcase.

  She hadn’t told Tucker where she was going today, just when and where to pick her up this afternoon. He had seemed uncomfortable about her going off on her own and pushed for more information. But she’d told him nothing more. For some reason, she wanted to make the trip to Birmingham on her own.

  Angela picked up the keys to a Ford Taurus and hurried out to the rental car lot. Fortunately, on the way back to Richmond, Tucker hadn’t asked her anything more about the “cloak account,” or about what must have been a surprised expression on her face when he replied that he hadn’t found a Cubbies account page. He hadn’t asked her anything, perhaps thinking that she would sleep. But she hadn’t slept in the car, or very much after he had dropped her off. There were too many things on her mind. Too many risks and returns to consider.

  She slid in behind the Taurus’s steering wheel, placing her briefcase down on the seat beside her. Perhaps her suspicions about Jake Lawrence lying to her were out of line. Perhaps the ESP executive would clear up the issue with Cubbies tonight. She grimaced. Perhaps there would be world peace someday, too. She’d found out that Lawrence had spent another hundred million on Sumter stock. Now he owned 12 percent of the bank. And, if she couldn’t trust Lawrence, could she trust Tucker?

  At two o’clock, after several hours of research at the Birmingham library, Angela walked briskly into the small lobby of Strategy Partners. The firm was located on the fourth and top floors of a refurbished brick building in a neighborhood bordering a run-down area of town.

  The receptionist glanced up from her computer as Angela came thr
ough the door. “May I help you?”

  Angela checked the receptionist’s screen. She was in the middle of a game of solitaire.

  “I’d like to talk to one of your professionals about a consulting job. Thatis what you do here, right?”

  Behind the receptionist were just two office doors, both closed. These weren’t the large, tastefully furnished offices she had expected a firm handling a $10 million assignment for Sumter Bank to occupy. Her friend in the funds-transfer area of Sumter had confirmed that a $10 million wire had been sent from the bank to Strategy Partners two weeks ago.

  The receptionist reached for her phone. Before she could press the intercom button, one of the doors behind her desk opened, and a bearded man in a golf shirt, khakis, and Docksides appeared. “Can I help you?”

  “I need to talk to someone about a consulting assignment.” Angela noticed that the man wasn’t wearing socks.

  He gave the receptionist a quick glance, then smiled. “Sure, come on in.” He moved quickly to his computer, flipped off the monitor, then extended his hand over the desk. “Jim Nelson.”

  “Veronica Williams.” There was no doubt in her mind that this operation was a complete sham. That no real work was going on here. The questions now were, Who was keeping the doors open and why?

  “What can I do for you, Veronica?” Nelson asked as he sat down in the spindly chair behind the old desk and gestured for her to sit as well.

  “I own a small Internet firm here in town, and I was hopeful that I could retain Strategy Partners to give me some advice.”

  “How did you hear about us?”

  “Friend of a friend.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “I don’t think she dealt with this office.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s strange.”

  “Oh?” Angela asked, trying to look puzzled. “Why?”

  “This is our only office.”

  Angela smiled warmly at the elderly lady behind the front counter of the Alabama State Corporation Commission’s administrative offices. The SCC offices were buried in the basement of Birmingham’s public records building. “Good afternoon, ma’am.”