The Power Broker

by Stephen Frey

“I never would have known Champagne Island even existed if the old guy hadn’t sat down next to me at the bar that night and started blathering.”

  “So?”

  “So there wasn’t anyone else sitting at the bar. Everybody else in the place was sitting at tables. All the other stools at the bar were empty, but he sat down on the one right next to me and started talking. No intro, no nothing. He just started going on, like he couldn’t wait to spill his guts.”

  “So?”

  Harrison rolled his eyes, frustrated. “So after he finishes his story, he tells me I gotta go check out the island. That he’s heard something strange is going on out there. He’s pretty drunk at this point, and he keeps slurring to me over and over to take up the cause. Which is why I went looking for records the next day. I chartered a helicopter a week later and flew out there, too. Saw the lodge and the helipad, but I haven’t been able to find out anything else. Which is why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “How did you know I lived on the island?” Roth wanted to know.

  “I asked around at the local stores. Figured whoever lived at the lodge would have to come to the mainland for supplies, and this was the closest town to the island. A clerk at the hardware store up the block called me on my cell when you came in there three weeks ago, and I rushed right over. I’d given him fifty bucks to let me know when he spotted you. Had the same deal with one of the checkout girls at the grocery store over on Stafford Street.” They were quiet for a few moments, then Harrison spoke up again. “Nobody at the bar had ever seen that old man before. In fact, nobody in the whole town had ever seen him before.”

  Roth made a face. “How could you know that?”

  “I showed just about everybody in town the old man’s picture,” Harrison claimed, “and nobody recognized him.”

  Roth looked up from his bran muffin. He’d been picking at it again. “You took his picture?”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t know it. I was coming back from taking a leak, and I snapped his mug from across the room. I’m kind of a camera nut.”

  Some kind of a nut anyway, Roth thought. “And you showed people in town the picture, but they didn’t recognize him?”

  “Neither did anybody in any of the towns where I went looking for records of the island, including Blue Hill Falls.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Come on, you know what I’m saying. You’re an ex-cop.”

  Roth’s eyes shot to Harrison’s. “How’d you know that?”

  Harrison put his hands on the table and pretended to be typing on a keyboard. “The Internet, man. There were a bunch of stories about you on there. You retired from the Dade County force a few years ago under a lot of pressure. The rumor was you were involved in protection for a big Cuban drug gang operating in Miami.”

  “That was bullshit!” Roth shouted, slamming his big fist on the tabletop. He looked out the window, away from the stares of the other customers who’d stopped eating to see what the noise was. “I was framed,” he whispered.

  “By who?”

  “I don’t know.” Roth let out a long breath. It had been the worst time of his life. The only good thing that had happened was meeting Patty, who had always believed he was innocent—still did. He hated lying to her like that, but it was the only way. She never would have come north with him to Maine if she’d known the truth. “You think the old man found you, right? You don’t think it was just a coincidence that he walked in there that night.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You think he followed you to the bar,” Roth continued, his words spilling out faster and faster. “Sat down next to you, told you the story, and pumped you up so you’d try to find out about the island.”

  “Now you’re getting it,” Harrison said.

  “Nobody knew him because he’s not from around here. He’s part of some group trying to figure out what’s really going on out at Champagne Island, and he wants you to do the dirty work for him. It’s a fair trade. He finds out what’s going on, and you get your big career break. If you unlock the secret of Champagne Island, you figure you’ll be the next Mike Wallace, Geraldo Rivera, whatever.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Roth slid out of the bench seat. “I can’t help. There’s nothing strange going on out there, Harrison. It’s just a fishing club. I know you want it to be more than that, but it isn’t.”

  Harrison’s chin dropped to his chest. “But, I—”

  “There’s no fire here, Harrison.” Roth could see he’d taken the guy down a peg—or ten. “Not even any smoke.”

  “Well, there’s one thing you could do.”

  Roth pulled out his wallet and dropped a five on the table. “What?”

  “Let me look around out there a little.”

  “No way.”

  “Why not? Especially if there’s nothing going on.”

  “No.”

  “But it’s just a fishing club. What’s the big deal?”

  Roth hesitated, then sat back down and picked up a toothpick that had been impaled in the bran muffin. “You still have the picture of that old man who told you the story?” he asked, sliding the toothpick into his mouth.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “I don’t have it with me.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In a safe place, along with a copy of that old property ID form I found.”

  “Anybody else know about this stuff?”

  “Yup. I scanned the guy’s picture and the form and e-mailed it to a friend of mine.”

  Roth winced.

  “Why?”

  Roth took a deep breath and checked the boat again. It seemed fine. His eyes flickered around the restaurant.

  “Come on,” Harrison pushed, “what is it?”

  Roth leaned forward. “You might be onto something,” he admitted quietly.

  “I knew it,” Harrison exclaimed, pumping his fists.

  “Shut the hell up, you idiot!” Roth hissed. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  Roth’s eyes shot to the door as two older men dressed in preppy clothes moved into the place. He could have sworn they’d both glanced in his direction longer than they should have. “Look,” he said, leaning farther across the table, watching the two men sit down at a table on the other side of the restaurant, “my wife says she’s seen some strange things out there, and she’s not the type to say something like that unless she really did. She was a cop, a damn good one, too.” He hesitated. “And…well…when the guys out there hired me they knew about what had happened in Miami. They knew about the rumors. Actually, they knew a lot about them, and they didn’t care. In fact, I got the feeling they liked that I’d had a problem.”

  “So they could use it against you if they needed to,” Harrison said. “So you’d stay quiet if you ever found something.” He picked up a pen and began scribbling on his pad again. “What kind of strange things has your wife seen?”

  Roth was still watching the two men—and they seemed to be watching him. “Not now, not here.”

  “When?”

  “You got a number where I can reach you?”

  AS THE PLANE swung around and taxied toward the runway, Christian’s cell phone went off. “Nigel.”

  “Hey, Chris, how are you?”

  Christian glanced over his shoulder toward the back of the plane. Allison and Quentin were further back, playing gin rummy. Allison loved games, any kind, as long as she could bet. She was always trying to get him to play real-money Monopoly with a group of her friends. “Been better,” he admitted.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Long story.” He had to decide if he was going to pay some greasy guy he’d met once for five minutes a million bucks to get a casino license so he could justify laying out over a billion dollars. Nothing was ever easy. “We’ll talk about it when I get back.”

  “What about Ray Lancaster?” Nigel asked. “He find you a quarterback yet?”

&n
bsp; “Yeah, some guy on the Bills, but they want our whole team in return.”

  “What?”

  “They want a lot, Nigel. The placekicker and one of our linebackers to start with.”

  “The all-pro?”

  “Of course.”

  “Which one of the Bills’ quarterbacks does Lancaster want?”

  “I don’t know.” Christian could see that they were nearing the runway, almost ready to take off. “I’m going to have to turn off the phone in a second, Nigel. Did you have something specific you wanted to talk about?”

  Nigel took a deep breath. “The SEC wants to meet with you about CST. Just you.”

  Christian set his jaw tightly. They were ramping up the pressure. Time to call the lawyers.

  PATTY ROTH climbed the wide staircase to the lodge’s third floor, right hand resting on the handle of her revolver, left hand gliding along the polished banister. She glanced back over her shoulder time after time as she moved up the stairs. An ex–highway patrol cop, she’d seen and dealt with a lot of bad things, so she didn’t scare easily. But this place gave her the creeps when Don wasn’t around—sometimes even when he was. It irritated her that he’d left her out here alone when it didn’t seem like he really needed to go to Southport. She’d checked and there were still four spare bulbs for the lighthouse in the toolshed. And the hole in the shed’s roof he’d griped about had to be pretty small, because she couldn’t find it.

  A chill ran up her spine as she reached the third-floor hallway. It seemed cold up here, and this floor had a different smell to it. Like mildew, which made more sense now that she thought about it. She groaned quietly. Three years here and it was just dawning on her. Maybe that was why she’d never made detective down in Miami. That or the fact that everyone knew she and Don were having an affair.

  Patty walked the length of the hallway to the room Don had told her never to enter—without any explanation. He’d be furious at her for doing this, but too bad. She’d sacrificed a lot to come here, basically exiling herself on this island for him because she was petrified of boats. But she loved him more than she hated the ocean.

  She pulled out her master key, slipped it in the lock, turned, and pushed. The door creaked slowly back on its hinges revealing a room stacked with boxes. There was a large steel door on the far wall with two combination locks hanging from latches near the top and bottom.

  Patty took a deep breath. The smell of mildew was even stronger in here than in the hallway, and she could feel her heart beating hard as she gazed at the door, suddenly clear on why the smell was stronger here. She walked slowly toward it, her sneakers making no sound as she moved across the hardwood floor.

  Halfway across the room she thought she heard something outside. A snap and a thud.

  There were no windows in the room, so she raced to the window at the end of the hall. She froze, paralyzed by what she thought she’d seen far below her—a figure running into the woods outside the lodge. She pressed her face to the glass, eyes darting around the grounds below. She was breathing hard and the vapor fogged the glass. She wiped it quickly away with her sleeve and looked out again, holding her face slightly back from the pane this time, but there was nothing. Nothing except the trees swaying back and forth in the strong breeze coming off the ocean.

  Her imagination, she thought to herself, squeezing the handle of the gun. Had to be. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought she’d seen something strange out here. And she had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last.

  7

  ELIJAH FORTE was born poor in Oakland, California, in 1949. His father made a few dollars a day shining shoes on a busy corner of the business district, and his mother made only a little more than that as a maid for a white family in San Francisco. Forte had five brothers, and they all lived in one bedroom of their tiny tenement, narrow bunks stacked three high. His parents had come west from Alabama in 1945, fled really, after his father’s brother had been lynched for necking with a white girl in the backseat of a Chrysler. They’d been looking for a better way, settling in Oakland after short, unhappy stints in Dallas and Los Angeles.

  But the better way hadn’t happened. Things had gone the other way, backward. They’d grown poorer and poorer, eating only two meager meals a day and wearing clothes until they disintegrated. Finally his father couldn’t take it anymore and tried robbing a bank in a rich neighborhood. But he didn’t know what he was doing, and the cops surrounded the branch before he could make it out of the building. So he’d hustled several people inside the vault and holed up, trying to negotiate his way out. He’d been killed in there after finally falling asleep. Shot four times in the back—which Oakland police officials had never bothered to explain.

  At that point, the task of caring for the family had fallen solely on the slender shoulders of Elijah’s mother, a caramel-skinned West Indian woman whose great-grandmother had been white. One of Forte’s most vivid childhood memories was of realizing how she made ends meet after his father was murdered.

  When Forte was little, his mother often took him with her to the white family’s house—a sprawling place on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean—and he played in a room in the basement while she cleaned and washed clothes. Bored nearly to tears one day, he’d gone looking for her—and found her naked in the man’s bedroom. They hadn’t noticed him for a few moments, and he’d watched her do as she was ordered. Terrible things he couldn’t understand.

  When his mother finally saw him standing by the door, she’d screamed at him to leave. He’d raced back to the basement and hidden in a dark corner. She’d never taken him with her again, never spoken of the incident, though she kept working for the family another seven years.

  In 1966, Forte had killed the man he’d seen with his mother. Killed the man with his bare hands, their faces just inches apart as the man gasped his last pitiful breath. Then Forte had dumped the body in San Francisco Bay and no one had ever figured out what had happened. Maybe it was just that the man’s wife had known all along what a scumbag he was and she’d been glad when he went missing. Maybe she hadn’t helped the cops at all, only too glad to collect the insurance after the required waiting period.

  At seventeen, Forte had joined the Black Panthers, a group of young black men who followed a victory-by-any-means-necessary credo as they sought a better way for African Americans. During his time with the Panthers, Forte had learned valuable organizational skills—and that you couldn’t fight The Man. Not back then, not if you wanted to live. He’d learned that overt, chest-pounding, in-your-face protests didn’t accomplish anything except getting you killed, like Bobby Hutton in Oakland and Fred Hampton in Chicago. That black athletes standing on summer Olympic podiums with their gloved, clasped fists held high in the air and their heads bowed did nothing but scare the hell out of whites, making them even warier. Making white police officers more likely to beat you until you had so many broken bones in your body that you couldn’t move and there was so much pain that suddenly it didn’t hurt anymore because the body had shut down its ability to feel. He’d learned that if you really wanted to make a difference, you didn’t advertise your existence, you moved in the shadows. And that money—economic power—was what really made a difference. With it, you could do almost anything you wanted, whether you were black, brown, red, or yellow.

  With a brutal work ethic and guile learned on tough streets, Forte had become one of the wealthiest men in America, building an empire that controlled music labels; a cable company; television and film studios; commercial real estate properties in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo; and several technology companies. He was worth over two billion dollars but his name never appeared on the Forbes annual list of the world’s wealthiest people because his ownership was concealed behind a maze of corporations and partnerships. His time in the Black Panthers had made him very careful. He’d seen what a government could do to people it hated, and he’d taken the lesson to heart. Even the IRS would have a hard time figuring
out what he was worth. At least until they did an enema audit—or he died.

  So he’d ordered his accountants to always pay more than what he owed by not taking all the deductions he was allowed. That way, he hoped, the Treasury would never come sniffing around.

  There wasn’t much he could do about dying—except continue to be careful.

  Forte looked out over Los Angeles from his twentieth-floor Santa Monica office. He had a beautiful view of downtown and the sun sinking into the Pacific Ocean out the wide floor-to-ceiling windows that spanned the width of the room. He’d driven down here from Oakland in 1975 in a beat-up Chevy Vega with nothing but one small suitcase of belongings. From scratch, he’d built what was now one of the biggest hip-hop labels in the music industry. He’d used that company as a springboard, pouring the cash it generated into his other ventures, all of which—in musicspeak—had gone platinum, too. He’d never married or had children, never had time for those things because he’d stayed focused on building his empire, on amassing wealth, on the ultimate goal. Everything he’d done he’d done in anticipation of this time. Now it was finally here.

  There was a knock on the office door.

  “Come in,” Forte called. He knew who it was by the knock. Two loud, distinctive raps.

  The door swung back and Heath Johnson appeared. Johnson was the executive vice president of Ebony Enterprises, the holding company that sat atop all Forte’s investments. He was Forte’s best friend—and his alter ego. Johnson had a basketball player’s build—tall with long, defined muscles—and usually wore fitted clothes that accentuated his body. Today it was a maroon turtleneck and black designer jeans. He was balding on top, sported a full beard, and had a character-filled face that gave away his many moods. He was an intellectual—with an undergraduate degree from Morgan State, and a master’s in sociology from Stanford—and he spoke in a deep, thoughtful voice. In brief, he was everything Forte was not. Which was exactly what Forte wanted in his top lieutenant.

  Forte was short and hadn’t set foot in a classroom since tenth grade. He had a closet full of conservative suits and expensive ties and always wore a starched white shirt—to constantly remind himself of the color he hated. He didn’t analyze things for long, usually shot from the hip, liked making a hundred decisions an hour. So Forte had others do the project analysis—always reviewed by Johnson before they reached Forte’s desk—so he could make a final decision quickly. His face was plain, devoid of personality, which was the way it had to be. He could never let others know what he was thinking. So, in business meetings, Forte watched Johnson’s face to judge his own emotions, to judge when he should be aggressive with the other side and when he should back off. It worked perfectly, and he’d made Johnson a wealthy man as a reward.