The Power Broker

by Stephen Frey

  “What? That’s impossible. We run things squeaky clean at all our portfolio companies.”

  “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” Nigel complained. “I’m just telling you what Galloway told me.”

  Christian closed his eyes. There were a lot of strange things going on lately. Too many.

  THE THREE MEN hustled Alan Agee out of a limousine and into a freight elevator of the Stratosphere Hotel. Agee’s hands were bound behind his back, his mouth was gagged with a greasy rag, and a gray hood was drawn tightly over his head. As the elevator doors closed, the men picked Agee up and tossed him roughly into a garbage cart, then slammed the lid shut. His muffled screams were barely audible now.

  When the men reached the lobby, they wheeled Agee across it, straight past reception and a sleepy-eyed concierge. It was before seven and the lobby was still quiet, so only a few people saw them push the garbage cart into the tower elevator. Normally this elevator wouldn’t have been running until later, but today was different. Things had been arranged.

  Moments later the elevator doors opened and they were eleven hundred feet up, looking out over a crystal-clear Las Vegas morning. The wind was stiff, and the men had to lean into it to keep their balance. They hauled Agee from the cart, cut off the hood and removed the gag, then untied his hands. He wouldn’t try to run. There was nowhere to go.

  Agee squinted against the bright sun as the hood came off, then glanced toward the railing, terrified. “What do you want?” he asked the man standing closest to him, the leader of the crew.

  “I want you to call Christian Gillette and tell him you won’t meet with him. Not today, anyway. From now on, you’re mine. You do what I say. Exactly what I say.”

  Agee shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “You’re not gonna scare me like that. This is America.”

  The men chuckled callously. They’d heard that one before.

  The leader nodded and the other two men grabbed Agee. They dragged him to the edge of the deck kicking and shouting, then picked him up and dangled him over the railing by his ankles.

  “Please don’t drop me!” Agee screamed back up at them bug-eyed, his arms flailing wildly. “I’ll do anything you want! Anything!”

  PATTY ROTH knelt behind the base of a pine tree as the chopper landed, whipping needles, twigs, and dirt into a tornadic frenzy. She was a hundred feet from the helipad, well hidden in the underbrush, protected from the flying debris. Through the telephoto lens she watched the passenger shake the pilot’s hand, then hop out and run toward the lodge, bent over at the waist, an arm in front of his face. She hated these men for what they were doing to her husband. Treating him like he was nothing because he’d taken the fall for someone else.

  She had to help him. He wasn’t going to help himself.

  CHRISTIAN AND LANCASTER had been talking strategy. An intense investor, Christian was active in all of Everest’s portfolio companies, even the ones he wasn’t chairman of. And he loved football. He and his father had watched football and golf together on television when he was young. His father had been away a lot, so Christian had precious little time with him, and he’d coveted those Sunday afternoons in the big study watching a big game or a final round. But memories were all he had now. His father had died in a plane crash nearly twenty years ago.

  “Let me ask you something,” Ray Lancaster spoke up.

  “Shoot.”

  “I read on the Web site that you guys at Everest Capital own thirty companies. You’re chairman of Everest, chairman of eighteen of those thirty companies, including the one you created to buy the football team and build the casino, and you’re chairman of some public company in Chicago named, um, Central Satellite Telecom or something like that.”

  “Central States Telecom and Satellite,” Christian corrected, instantly reminded of the SEC’s sudden interest in the company. God, it irritated him to have to deal with the SEC. He was constantly on people’s asses to get them to go the extra mile to make sure something like this never happened. “We call it CST.” Christian had been wondering if there was something he’d missed, something he should have seen. Wondering if he should have been more personally involved in the IPO instead of letting Nigel handle everything. Wondering if he hadn’t gotten as involved in the IPO as he normally would have because the truth was he couldn’t take dealing with the minutiae anymore. If, after ten years of constant pressure, he was burning out. “I’m chairman of that company because we owned it before we took it public, and the public shareholders voted to keep me on.”

  “How the hell do you have time to be chairman of all of those companies?”

  “I’ve got good people working for me who run the businesses day to day. People like you.”

  “I hope you’re still saying that in a couple of years,” Lancaster muttered. “Is it all yours and Nigel’s money?”

  Christian grinned. “I wish. No, the way it works is that big investors front us the money. Insurance companies, banks, pension funds, wealthy individuals. We buy the companies with the money the investors commit to us, operate them for a few years, then sell them, hopefully for a lot more than we paid.”

  Lancaster looked puzzled. “But I read in Forbes magazine that you’re worth like five hundred million bucks. If it’s not your money, how can you be worth so much? Do they pay you that much in salary?” He hesitated. “Or did you inherit it?”

  Christian hadn’t inherited a cent. After his father’s death—right after Christian had graduated from Princeton—his stepmother had cut him off from the family. From the money, from everything. For a while he’d been forced to beg, borrow, and steal—sometimes literally. “Neither,” he answered. “When we sell companies, we keep twenty percent of the profits. When we sold CST to the public we made four hundred million dollars more than we put in. Our investors got their investment back and three hundred twenty million of the profit. We kept eighty of the profit. One of my jobs as chairman is to spread that eighty around the firm.”

  Lancaster shook his head. “Jesus, no wonder you’re worth so much.”

  “It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Selling a company for more than you paid takes a lot of work, and almost as much luck.”

  Lancaster was looking off at the Stratosphere tower again, a strange expression spreading across his face. Like he had another important question on his mind, but he really didn’t want to ask it.

  “What’s wrong?” Christian pushed.

  “What happened a couple of years ago?”

  “What do you mean?” But Christian was pretty sure he knew what Lancaster was getting at.

  “There were all these articles on the Internet about you killing the mayor of some little town in Maryland,” Lancaster answered, “and being hunted by the cops. The feds even got into it. You were public enemy number one for a few days. Then, bam, you go from desperado to hero. The later articles didn’t really explain why you were suddenly a hero, but a bunch of senior government people were singing your praises.”

  “I didn’t kill that woman,” Christian said sharply. “The mayor of that town, I mean.”

  “What did you do?”

  “It’s a long story. Some people were trying to frame me for her murder, but, in the end, the truth came out. They were the ones that killed her.”

  Lancaster nodded. “I know, I read all that. I was just wondering what it was all about.”

  Christian took a breath. “Here’s the thing, I—” His cell phone went off. It was a Las Vegas number he vaguely recognized. “Hello.”

  “Christian Gillette?” The voice at the other end of the line was faint.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Alan Agee. I’m chairman of the—”

  “The Nevada Gaming Commission,” Christian interrupted. “Of course.” The guy sounded awful, like he was about to puke. “I’ll see you at two o’clock, right?”

  “Can’t do it,” Agee said. “Got to put it off. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll call you back.”

  The line went dead b
efore Christian could say anything, and he closed the phone slowly. Things were going from strange to bad. And he got the awful sensation that worse was lurking just around the corner.

  2

  CHAMPAGNE ISLAND lies southeast of Acadia National Park in the frigid North Atlantic, nine miles off Maine’s rocky coast. The island is far enough offshore to discourage unwanted intrusions from weekend pleasure boaters but close enough to make helicopter flights from the mainland convenient.

  Champagne is small—seven hundred yards long, three hundred wide—and densely covered by towering pines. There are only two structures on the island: a lighthouse built atop a windswept rocky ridge on the northern tip and a large, rustic lodge. The lodge, made of logs cut from trees growing on the island, was built in 1901 in a natural depression near the middle of the island so it would be hidden from the ocean by berms and thick foliage. There’s a helipad beside the lodge, but it doesn’t bear the brightly colored X most helipads do.

  Local lore goes that Champagne Island was a Native American burial ground before whites settled the Northeast, and that it’s owned by some state or federal agency now. But local lore has it wrong. The island is owned by a private entity called the Molay Trust. A trust that hasn’t made any of the standard state and federal declaratory filings trusts usually file since 1900. Local lore also goes that the island is haunted by the Native Americans buried in its rocky soil and by the pirates who used it as a haven from nor’easters and the law between raids on clipper ships in the late eighteenth century. Lore the Molay trustee does nothing to dispel.

  In the great room of the lodge, eight men sat around a long table as the brilliant rays of a late spring sunset shimmered on the western horizon. Normally, they were nine, but one of the men hadn’t made it. The blinds and curtains of the room were drawn and the room was lighted only by candles. The small flames cast a feeble glow about the place.

  The men had flown in from Portland and Augusta that morning and had just finished a late lunch prepared by Champagne’s caretakers—a married couple in their late thirties. The couple had been told when they were hired that the group was a charitable organization of senior executives who maintained the island as a retreat from cell phones, e-mail, and pushy executive assistants. There was excellent fishing off the island and they regularly took advantage of it during their visits.

  The men around the table had a great deal in common. They were all white, wealthy, socially prominent, Protestant, senior leaders or ex-senior leaders of their organizations, long married with children—in most cases, grandchildren—graduates of Harvard or Princeton. And all of them were guilty of extramarital affairs—which was critically important.

  Before a man could be initiated into the group, his affairs had to be videoed. The sexual trysts were recorded with the man’s permission but without the woman’s knowledge. The men were required to have at least two affairs with different women videoed prior to initiation; had to have a tryst videoed every three years to maintain membership; and regularly had to admit to recent sexual thoughts and fantasies in front of the others. Called “confessions,” these admissions were audiotaped. The video- and audiotapes were the group’s bond, insurance against a member conveying the intimate secrets of their society to anyone outside the circle.

  Down through the years the “infidelity requirement” had scared off several promising candidates. Which was something that inspired pride in the members. It was a huge leap of faith for men like these to allow such damning evidence to exist, but it worked. Not once in the history of the Order had anyone disclosed anything about the group to an outsider.

  Samuel Prescott Hewitt, master of the Order for the last seven years, sat at the head of the table, his trademark black Stetson lying in front of him. Chairman of U.S. Oil, the largest industrial company in the world, Hewitt was a tough Texan from a long line of wildcatters. He was a man who always played to win. Whether it was the world energy markets or a game of poker with acquaintances at his sprawling ranch outside Dallas, he was as competitive as they came. He called most people acquaintances because he didn’t feel he had friends, not as other men defined the term. Which was fine with him. He’d always been a loner, and he’d always liked working that way because then it was easier to lead—there weren’t any emotions holding you back. He wasn’t even that close to his wife and children. In fact, the only person in the world who really mattered to Hewitt was his fourteen-year-old grandson, Samuel Prescott Hewitt III—Three Sticks, as Hewitt affectionately called the boy. If Hewitt’s confession tapes ever got out, it would destroy the boy—and him.

  “The Order will now come into session,” announced Hewitt in a voice that silenced the room, a sharp edge wrapped in a Texas drawl. A natural tone that silenced an auditorium full of ten thousand shareholders as effortlessly as it did a small group of important men. “Proceed.”

  The men bowed their heads and in unison recited a brief prayer in Latin, then picked up their glasses of port.

  Hewitt stared each man straight in the eyes, thinking of how similar they all were, how they even looked alike. White, male, tall, silver haired, strong chinned, handsome. Like most of the United States Senate, he thought to himself—at least, as long as the Order maintained its influence. He leaned forward and thrust his glass higher into the air. “To Hugues de Payens,” he said fiercely.

  “Hugues de Payens,” the other seven echoed solemnly, then drank.

  When Hewitt finished his glass, he pointed at Mace Kohler, then at Franklin Laird. Kohler was CEO of Networks Systems International, a large telecom company, and Laird was an ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve. “Please, Mr. Kohler.” The men addressed each other formally once meetings began. “If you would.”

  Kohler rose and moved deliberately to a sideboard centered beneath the large, antlered elk head. He picked up a glass and a bottle of Chivas Regal from atop the sideboard, returned to the table, placed the glass and the Scotch down in front of Laird, then retook his seat. Since Laird had missed the last meeting he was in the hot seat tonight, the one who had to confess. Generally, when a member missed a meeting he was the confessor at the next meeting. It was a tradition that kept attendance very high.

  After staring at the honey-hued liquid for a few moments, Laird set his thin lips, poured, and swallowed, gasping as he threw back the first gulp.

  The other men remained silent while Laird continued to drink straight Scotch. The confessor wasn’t allowed ice.

  When he was satisfied that Laird had swallowed enough, Hewitt nodded. “That’s enough, Franklin.”

  “Thank you,” Laird answered hoarsely, wiping his mouth with a linen napkin as he put the glass down.

  “It’s your turn tonight, Mr. Laird. You know how it works.”

  “Yes.”

  Hewitt gestured toward Richard Dahl, an active five-star Army general who was with the Joint Chiefs. “Please, General Dahl.”

  Dahl reached for a tape recorder on the table in front of him and switched it on. “This is Mr. Laird’s confession,” he began, “as documented during meeting forty-seven of the twenty-ninth Order.”

  “Twenty-ninth” referred to this being the twenty-ninth distinct group of nine men to comprise the Order. One of the members had died four years ago, ending the twenty-eighth Order. That individual had been replaced by Kohler, marking the beginning of the twenty-ninth.

  “Proceed, Mr. Laird,” said Hewitt.

  Laird hesitated, allowing the alcohol a few more moments to sink in, trying to find his courage. “On the plane up from D.C. this morning,” he began in a low voice, “there was a very pretty flight attendant. I—I was attracted to her.”

  “Did you fly first class?” asked Trenton Fleming. Fleming was chairman of Black Brothers Allen, the last of Wall Street’s great private partnerships. An investment firm outsiders knew little about. “Well, Mr. Laird?”

  “No, I flew commercial. Middle seat, too,” he added, clearly annoyed.

  “Good,” Hewitt commende
d. He knew how much Laird hated dealing with the “great unwashed,” as he called anyone who he felt wasn’t of his ilk. But it was good for him to live in the real world once in a while. More important, by flying commercial he was less likely to be recognized on his way to Maine. “Go on. Describe the woman.”

  “She was tall with long auburn hair.”

  “Big breasts?” Fleming asked. Laird’s fixation with breasts was well documented on both the video- and audiotapes.

  “What do you think?” Laird snapped.

  The other men nodded. They knew one another so well.

  “Anyway,” Laird continued, “I fantasized about her.”

  “Details, brother.”

  “I undressed her in my mind.”

  “What did you have her do?”

  “I—I—” Laird’s voice faltered.

  “Come on,” Hewitt pushed. Laird still had a problem with the ritual—even though he’d been a member of the Order for sixteen years. Of course, Laird wasn’t the only one. They all did—when it came to being the one in the hot seat. All of them except Hewitt. He actually enjoyed it. Each time it reminded him of the ritual’s simple beauty, its incredible tradition. “We’re brothers here, blood brothers. No one will ever tell your secrets as long as you don’t tell the Order’s. You believe that, don’t you, Mr. Laird?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “So?”

  Laird took another gulp of Scotch. “I watched her have sex with the pilots.”

  Laird’s fantasies didn’t usually involve him having sex. He liked being a voyeur, confessing to the others a few years ago that he had kept an extensive collection of pornography in his office at the Federal Reserve so he could watch it whenever he wanted to. Even more startling, he’d admitted to paying an aide to have sex with a woman in a private bathroom connected to his office at the Fed—and secretly videotaped the act.

  “What was her name?” demanded Blanton McDonnell. McDonnell was CEO of Jamison & Jamison Pharmaceutical, the largest medical device manufacturer in North America.