MONDAY, OCTOBER 19
Chapter 45
At six in the morning, faint light from neighboring skyscrapers, just detectable through the south-facing window, cast an eerie glow over the Mellow Partners reception area. Stacy Young stood just inside his office, dressed for the day in a conservative blue suit, her hair neatly pulled back in a discreet ponytail. Only the dark circles under her eyes indicated that this was not the start of an ordinary workday, which for her typically began at eight o’clock.
“How far back do we keep phone logs?” he asked her.
She took a deep, disappointed breath at his failure to acknowledge her early arrival. “Five years, sometimes longer, depending on the deal.”
As he’d expected. Every bit of paperwork connected with an acquisition was retained in the event of a shareholder suit or SEC investigation, which were rare but unpleasant potential side effects of any transaction in the current environment. Typically, the paperwork, including phone messages, was kept several years after a company had been divested, just in case. Emails were stored on remote servers.
“Good. Get the phone records for the Alden deal, all of them.” Alden Industries was one of the world’s largest manufacturers of office furniture. Mellow Partners had acquired it after a very intense, three-way struggle five years earlier. It had been Zach Springer’s last deal before the Finnegan fiasco, and he’d performed magnificently, crafting and recrafting strategies for outmaneuvering the other two bidders, working round the clock. Then, hours after the other two players conceded defeat, he’d charged into Julian’s office to announce that he was leaving for vacation, his first since joining the firm. “What if I need you?” Julian had asked. “You won’t, it’s a done deal.” He’d reminded Zach that no deal was ever “done” until all the paperwork was finalized. “It could still fall apart,” he said. “It won’t,” Zach had insisted. Even Julian had to concede that Zach looked exhausted, his handsome face wan and drawn, his frame more spindly than lean. And though he’d never been a toady, a quality that had made him unique within the Mellow organization and especially valuable to Julian, his willful, almost insubordinate insistence on a vacation indicated that he had reached the end of his rope. “Okay, then. Leave a phone number with Stacy in case there’s no cell service,” he’d said as Zach headed for the door. “No, Julian, I need to go somewhere where you can’t find me,” Zach had said as he left.
I need to go somewhere where you can’t find me. He’d refused to leave a number, so while Julian had suspected he might return to wherever he’d gone, he had no idea where that might be. Then last night, a memory.
“This is everything,” Stacy said, entering his office with a pile of folders.
“I want phone messages, phone bills…”
She plunked the pile on his desk and selected two files. “These are the incoming messages, and this file—”
He grabbed the first file. Inside was a wire-bound notebook, each of its hundred or so pages containing three carbon-copied phone messages, the originals having been placed by Stacy on his desk and then discarded by him. He had no voicemail, insisting that callers leave word with Stacy, who more often than not could redirect their calls to someone else in the organization. He flipped quickly through the notebook: messages from investment bankers, from the CEO of Alden, from attorneys at the three firms he’d retained to advise him, from the head of the investor relations firm that had handled the media. You could read the entire history of the contentious transaction from those messages, some marked “urgent,” some containing bits of information (Suggests increase in cash portion of offer; please advise ASAP). And then, just two pages before the end, the message he’d been waiting for.
Zach called for status of Alden deal.
Yes, Zach had needed to get away, but he couldn’t resist calling in to see if the deal had closed. Why had it taken him so many months to recall this single fact? You couldn’t turn your back on three months of grueling work and more than three and a half billion dollars, no matter how exhausted you were. If Zach needed to escape again, and in a hurry, it made sense that he’d return to a place he’d already been, a place he didn’t think anyone else knew about.
“Stacy!”
She hurried back into his office. He read her the phone number on the message. It looked like an American exchange.
“Find out where this call came from,” he said. She left and returned a few minutes later.
“It’s in the US Virgin Islands,” said the ever resourceful Stacy. “As best I can tell, it’s a tiny island off Saint Thomas called Saint Sebastian.”
“Shut the door on the way out,” he said. As soon as she was gone he picked up the phone and dialed Billy Sandifer.
Chapter 46
Sophie DuVal woke up with the sun, as she always did, and after a quick cup of coffee she spent thirty minutes exercising in the living room of her tiny house near the center of Villeneuve. There were no health clubs in Kamalia, just a handful of dingy, poorly equipped gyms, none of which welcomed female members. After stretching she went through her usual routine: a variety of sit-ups, then pushups, and then, using heavy books, she improvised a few resistance moves: lunges, squats, curls, raises. Midway through her regimen there was a knock at her front door. She opened it a crack and then almost fell backward when someone pushed it in. A moment later Claude DuMarier was standing inside her living room.
“Who the hell do you think you are, shoving your way in here?”
“I am head of the secret police of the Republic of Kamalia,” he said without smiling. His eyes appraised the tube top and spandex shorts she had on, relics from her membership in a posh gym in New York.
“I cannot be seen standing outside the front door of the house of a known insurgent,” he said as she went to her bedroom and put on a sweatshirt, though it was hardly chilly. “It was necessary to enter as soon as possible.”
She knew better: petty displays of pointless power were a mainstay of the Boymond regime, which felt puny and impotent on the global scene, even in comparison to its African neighbors, and so lost no opportunity to flex its near-atrophied muscles before its powerless citizens.
She nodded to the sofa, the best she could do in the way of hospitality. After a moment’s hesitation he sat down.
“To what do I owe the honor of a visit from such a distinguished member of our government?”
He patted the sofa next to him. She took a chair across the room. Frowning, he began to speak. “One week from Saturday, at noon exactly, there will be a small ceremony at the presidential palace. His Excellency has called the entire cabinet and all the generals together.”
“The three-year anniversary…”
“Of our glorious revolution, yes.”
She had to glance away. The glorious revolution had taken Matthew and transformed her from a complex person with interests in many things—art, music, politics, sex—into a one-dimensional radical.
“There will be no public celebrations, like last year.” A year earlier, a ragtag group of protesters had tried to disrupt the anniversary ceremony, a pathetic little pageant held in front of the palace and attended by high-ranking government officials. Security forces had turned on the unarmed protesters with semiautomatic weapons, killing three young men and arresting dozens more. Sophie had not been among those arrested, but the debacle had been a turning point for her, convincing her that organized, armed conflict would be the only way to bring down the Le Père regime.
“Wise decision,” she said.
He acknowledged her sarcasm with a small nod. “At twelve fifteen I will arrange to have the palace guard assemble on the west lawn for a training exercise. There will be no men at the south gate, which will be unlocked. Even so, I trust you could handle a small contingent of guards, given the contents of your armory.”
She felt a shiver of vulnerability—how much did he know about the group’s weapons?
“Once you are inside the walls,” he continued, “you will proc
eed across the courtyard to the bronze doors. These doors are six inches thick and quite impenetrable. Inexcusably, someone will have left them unbolted. You will open these doors and proceed up the staircase, which you will see directly in front. This will take you to the long second-floor hallway. The first door on your right—”
“Is the presidential reception room. I have been there many times.” She and Matthew had been invited to numerous official events under the old regime.
“There you will find the entire power structure of Kamalia. Perhaps one or two personal bodyguards, but nothing substantial. I trust you will be merciful.”
“We do not plan to kill anyone unless we have to. They will be arrested and afforded all the rights they have denied to the people.”
“That is very noble of you. Personally, I would kill them all.”
“How much is he paying you?”
“Paying?”
“Julian Mellow.”
“Enough to start a new life in France. An apartment in the huitième arrondissement, perhaps the seizième, something small but comfortable in the south, perhaps the Riviera, perhaps Provence. I am accustomed to a warm climate. And of course there is the pride in knowing that I have helped to restore democracy in my country.” He pronounced democracy with a slight upturn of one side of his mouth, as if it were a quaint custom he was helping to bring back.
“You are certain that things will unfold as you have said?”
“Completely. You only have to show up at twelve fifteen exactly. How many men—excuse me, people will you have?”
“We will be at least a hundred,” she said, though in fact she suspected that no more than seventy-five would heed the call to arms.
“That should be sufficient. Once you have the generals in custody, the soldiers will head home. Many of them have not been paid in months, they stay only out of fear. And of course you will have no problems with the palace guard. If something does go wrong—and it won’t—I have arranged to have the service gate of the US embassy left unlocked, as we already discussed. You and your comrades will be safe there.”
He stood up and she did the same.
“I will be assured passage out of this hellhole at the earliest possible time,” he said.
“I cannot offer you that assurance,” she said. “Once we have control, we—”
“No, no,” he said with a patronizing smile. “Arrangements will already have been made.”
“No doubt that was part of the agreement.”
“Perhaps you will join me?”
“You have a wife,” she said, although his having a wife was the least of his detractions.
He sighed heavily. “Matthew Mellow was a lucky man.”
“Hardly.”
“Oh, yes, I see,” he said with a chuckle. “Lucky in love, though.” He extended his hand and, forcing herself to concentrate on all that DuMarier was doing for the movement, never mind his motives, she took it.
“Until next week,” he said, then let himself out.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23
Chapter 47
Mellow Partners occupied the fifty-ninth and sixtieth floors at 14 West 57th Street, a small amount of space considering the large swath of the world economy the firm controlled. Maintaining a lean operation had always been important to Julian Mellow. He acquired companies that were undervalued, which more often than not meant that their management teams were bloated and incompetent. Once he had control he cleaned house, employing legions of lawyers to unravel the employment contracts that rewarded second-rate performance, and installed his own team of executives, incentivizing them with employment contracts that, if they achieved the ambitious financial goals he imposed on them, and only if they achieved them, would make them fantastically wealthy. They almost always got fantastically wealthy. He believed in hiring the best and then leaving them alone—thus, the small scale of the home office.
He preferred to communicate by email and phone, even with managers who worked down the hall. He wasn’t much of a “people person,” that awful phrase; in fact, he sometimes felt that his inability—or perhaps unwillingness—to relate on a personal level to business associates was what had made him successful. He could evaluate anyone with a dispassionate eye, and he never mistook greed and ambition for loyalty—the downfall of many people in business. His phone calls were always taken at the highest levels of business and government, even if he never asked about this one’s battle with cancer or that one’s daughter’s college choice.
So he wasn’t the least bit surprised to see a look of both astonishment and alarm come over the face of Grace Carr when he walked into her office. In the six years since he’d hired her to manage Mellow Partners’ technology infrastructure, he’d never once set foot in her office, with its view across 57th Street of the midtown Manhattan skyline.
“Mr. Mellow, how are you?” she said. “I mean, come in, please, have a seat.”
Given her extensive expertise in the latest networking and data storage technologies, Grace Carr was unexpectedly frumpy. At fifty-six, she had short, salt-and-pepper hair and carried an extra twenty pounds or so on her small frame. As proficient as she was with technology, she was hopeless with makeup, slathering far too much foundation and eyeliner on what would otherwise be a rather sweet, accessible face. The credenza behind her desk held framed photographs of her two sons, both in college, and her husband, who had been laid off six months ago by the insurance company he’d worked for since college. He knew all this because earlier that day he’d asked Stacy to update him on Grace’s life. A newly unemployed husband could be useful.
“I’m here about Searchlight,” Julian said as he sat across from her. “It’s come to my attention that there may be some irregularities concerning certain investments they’ve made.”
“I see,” she said, smiling faintly.
Searchlight Investments was an asset management firm that Mellow Partners had acquired several years back when the mortgage meltdown had led to the collapse of the stock market. Searchlight had made its mark with shrewd investments in bank stocks and had branched out into unrelated sectors, attracting billions in capital from pension funds and wealthy individuals who were drawn to its successful track record. But when banks fell into a slump, the firm found itself facing massive withdrawals, and had turned to Mellow Partners. Julian had played hardball, purchasing Searchlight for about twenty cents on the dollar.
“You handle the email accounts for all of our investments,” Julian said.
“That’s correct.”
“If I wanted to monitor the email activity of key Searchlight executives, you could get me into the system?”
“That would be unethical.” Her right hand began to fiddle with her mouse.
“It’s ethics I’m concerned about. There have been insinuations that some of the firm’s funds have been traded for the personal gain of the principals.”
“Then perhaps an investigation firm should be—”
“This cannot leave Mellow Partners,” he said slowly. “I won’t allow it to. You are aware that Searchlight’s investors include many prominent people.”
“Including the vice president’s blind trust.”
Evan Smith had placed roughly half of the twenty million dollars he’d made in the construction business into a blind trust managed by Searchlight. To avoid potential conflicts of interest, he was given no information about where his money was invested, and was not allowed to direct Searchlight investment managers on where to invest.
“Precisely. If there were the slightest hint of a scandal it could bring down Searchlight. I would like to monitor the email of the top two or three executives to determine for myself if there is cause for concern. Can this be done?”
“Yes, of course it can be done; it’s not a question of can but of should.”
“Actually, Grace, it’s a question of when.”
Her eyes glanced ever so briefly at the photo of her family. “Please don’t ask me to do this,” she said
quietly.
“I have no choice. Just as you have no choice about paying tuition bills.”
She waited a long moment before speaking. “What exactly are you looking for?”
“It’s best that you don’t get any more involved in this than you already are. I need to monitor several email accounts. I’ll provide you with the names. I would also like to be able to send emails under the names of these individuals.”
“But that’s completely—”
He stood up. “Please arrange for this by end of day. I’d prefer you stop by my office with the details. The less we commit to writing, the better. Email isn’t nearly as secure as it would seem, is it?” In fact, at financial institutions, every email sent or received was archived in remote servers, in case the SEC or some other regulator came calling. “I’ll see you later, then.”
Her face, already pale behind all that foundation and eyeliner, had lost every trace of color.
Chapter 48
The chartered Challenger 300—two pilots, one passenger—touched down at Saint Thomas’s Cyril E. King Airport at noon. Billy Sandifer checked his watch. His goal was to take the plane back to Teterboro, then a quick visit with Rebecca, then home. Travel always made him want to see her. As the plane taxied to the terminal, he felt trapped in an alien world in which people looked forward to swimming in warm blue water, dining by candlelight, sleeping late next to loved ones. He’d forgotten such a world existed—or had he ever known?
He deplaned, walked quickly across the airport, and jumped in a taxi, which he directed to the Red Hook marina. There, he hired a small, rundown charter boat outfitted for deep-sea fishing. He offered the captain double the usual rate for the entire vessel, on the condition that he be allowed to take the boat out on his own. When this was met with understandable resistance he offered him ten times the usual charter, which was probably not far short of what the boat was worth, and they struck a deal.
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