by Rick Acker
“I do indeed,” replied Ben, his smile broadening. “This should be a high-profile trade-secrets case, plus we may be able to swing a trip to Norway.”
“But you said no, right?” Noelle’s voice was urgent. “You told him you couldn’t take the case.”
Ben looked at her dumbfounded. “No, I told him I’d be happy to take the case. Why would I turn it down?”
“Because I’m on a committee with Karl’s wife! Because I just finished working with Karl on that Viking art exhibit!” She hurled her empty coffee cup at the opening of a nearby trash can. “Because you should know better than to get into the middle of a fight between two such important people. This will only cause trouble for us. You’ve got to get rid of this case. Can’t you refer him to somebody else?”
“No, I can’t,” replied Ben. “What is it with you? You’ve been bugging me to take more important, high-profile cases. Now that I’ve taken one, you’re bugging me to get rid of it.”
“I didn’t mean that you should take cases involving people I know!”
Ben spread his arms wide in helplessness. “Well, high-profile cases generally involve high-profile people, and you’ve gotten to know quite a few of those. Besides, there’s not much I can do about it. Gunnar and I signed a retention agreement about an hour ago.”
Noelle thought quickly. If Ben wasn’t going to pull out of the case, she would need to do some damage control. Should she try to distance herself from the litigation by explaining the situation and telling people she had no control over what Ben was doing? No, people would interpret that as an announcement that she and her husband had disagreed about this and she had lost the argument. Also, Ben’s lawsuits sometimes got ugly, and the more involved she was, the more likely that she’d be able to head off a nasty incident that could have repercussions for their lives. “If you’re going to take the case, can I at least work with you on it?”
“So you can keep an eye on me, right?” replied Ben. “I thought you were overwhelmed by your accounting practice.”
“I can make the time now that tax season is almost over.”
He eyed her with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. “Oh, all right. I’ll probably need accounting help on this case anyway.”
“I thought it was a case about trade secrets.”
“It is, but Gunnar wants me to countersue. He thinks there are fishy items in the company’s financials. He’ll send over documents tomorrow.”
“What kind of fishy items?” Noelle asked apprehensively.
“Basically, he thinks Karl has been booking operating expenses as capital expenses.”
“So he can amortize them and show higher profits.”
“Exactly,” said Ben. “It sounds like garden-variety accounting fraud.”
“Which gets people put in garden-variety prisons,” replied Noelle. This was one area of the law that Noelle, like many other accountants, had studied in some depth over the past few years.
“That’s what Gunnar has in mind,” acknowledged Ben. “Karl can’t very well run the company from jail, so Gunnar will come back as president.”
“I see,” said Noelle unhappily. And she did, all too clearly.
The phone rang on Karl Bjornsen’s broad walnut desk. It was his private line. He looked at the number on the caller ID and frowned, but picked up the phone. “Hello. Karl Bjornsen.”
“Hello, Karl. It’s George from Cleverlad. The products you sent are selling extremely well, especially the sedatives. We’d like to order another shipment.”
Ordinarily, product orders would be handled by the company’s sales staff, but Cleverlad.ru was not an ordinary account. “Great, I’m glad to hear it. We can send you another shipment in three weeks,” replied Karl.
“Actually, we’ll need it in two weeks. We’ll also need to increase the shipment size by fifty percent.”
“Fifty percent? For all products?”
“Yes and yes. Like I said, your products are popular.”
Karl made some mental calculations. “I can send you a shipment in two weeks, but it can’t be any larger than the last one. We simply don’t have sufficient availability of certain products you want, particularly the sedatives.”
The line was silent for nearly half a minute. “We can accept that for now, but future shipments will need to be bigger.” He placed a slight but unmistakable emphasis on the word need.
“Thanks for your order,” Karl replied and hung up.
George Kulish frowned and drummed his fingers spasmodically on his desk. His slender, pale hand looked like an albino spider having a convulsion. It bothered him that Karl Bjornsen had not been willing to increase the size of his order.
Business was growing fast, and George needed to find a way to make sure his suppliers kept pace, particularly established suppliers with quality products. Suppliers like Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals. There was a huge market for prescription drugs sold without prescriptions, and George intended to dominate as much of it as possible. The easiest way to do that was to buy his products from legitimate suppliers, who made consistently high-quality drugs and sold them at a fraction of the prices charged by fly-by-night underground labs. Most legit companies wouldn’t deal with people like George, of course, which was why it was vital to keep Bjornsen in line.
If Karl decided that doing business with Cleverlad.ru was no longer worth the risk, George would have a serious problem. Cleverlad.ru paid a premium over Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals’ list prices, but what if someday that ceased to be enough to ensure that the Bjornsen drug pipeline stayed open? He would need to find or create a sufficiently powerful nonmonetary motivator.
George pulled up the to-do list on his computer and added an item: “Bad Thing for Bjornsen.”
Ben got back to the office and found a message waiting for him from Sergei Spassky. The two of them had worked closely together on the Chechen bioterrorism case, and they were now good friends. Sergei was also dating Elena Kamenev, a college friend of Noelle’s, and the Corbins had been speculating for some time on whether they would get married. They had seemed very serious for a while, but recently Elena had started complaining to Noelle that Sergei wasn’t willing to commit.
Ben tossed his empty Mud Hole cup in the trash and was about to hit the speed-dial button for Sergei, but the phone rang as he was reaching for it. The caller ID showed Sergei’s number.
Ben picked up the phone. “Hey, Sergei. What’s up? I was just about to call you with a new job.”
“Let me guess: it has something to do with a guy named Karl Bjornsen.” Sergei’s voice had the telltale hollow sound of a speakerphone.
“Uh, yeah. How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess. Bjornsen called me about half an hour ago. He wanted to hire me to investigate you. I told him I had a conflict, of course.”
The muscles of Ben’s stomach tightened. “Why’s he investigating me?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
CHAPTER THREE
SERGEI SPASSKY
Spring in Chicago comes last along the lakeshore. Lake Michigan’s wide, gray waters hold the winter cold like a cherished grudge, which they give up only reluctantly as summer approaches. The influence of the lake, which is large enough to be accurately called a freshwater sea, extends inland over much of Chicago. The trendy residential neighborhoods that cluster along the shoreline north of the Loop feel Michigan’s moods particularly strongly, enjoying its cool breezes in summer, but enduring its damp chill and clinging fogs in spring.
Sergei stepped out of his apartment building and into a morning that seemed to have been borrowed from mid-March. The temperature was somewhere south of fifty degrees, and a thin mist blurred the edges of the buildings. He crossed the alley and walked to his parking spot, slipping his hand into his jacket and resting it on the butt of his Beretta pistol as he inspected his new black Mustang, dubbed “the Black Russian” by his friends, looking for signs that someone had tampered with it. He didn’t really e
xpect to find any, but he would rather be safe than sorry. He had been sorry once, and he still had nightmares about it.
Satisfied that the car hadn’t been sabotaged, he got in and drove downtown to meet with Ben Corbin. He hummed happily as he drove, looking forward to the meeting. He liked working with Ben, and not just because they had become good friends. Ben was a truly gifted litigator, and Sergei enjoyed sitting on the bench at the back of a courtroom and watching his friend in action, particularly if he was using evidence that Sergei had helped gather. Another nice thing about Ben was that he ran his cases clean and lean; unlike many other lawyers, he did not send Sergei out to turn over every stone when there were realistically only one or two that might have useful information under them. This Bjornsen deal was going to be fun.
As Sergei was leaving his apartment in Chicago, Kim Young was returning to hers in Los Angeles. She had spent the night celebrating the news that she had landed her first-choice internship for the summer—doing drug-development research for Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals. They weren’t the biggest or best-known company, but they were actually willing to let her be in the lab, running experiments on rhesus monkeys. And these were experiments that really mattered; she would be participating in preclinical trials for a major new product that was nearly ready to begin the FDA approval process. Even her boyfriend, David, was a little jealous—and he was in his first year of med school.
Kim brushed her teeth and flopped down on her bed, feeling happy, tired, and excited all at once. She took out her cell phone and clicked through the night’s snapshots. She paused at a good one of her and David. He had his right arm around her, and their heads were leaning together. Laughter and intelligence sparkled in his dark, almond eyes, and he smiled the wide, happy smile that had first caught her attention eight months ago. She looked more critically at her own image. A friend had recently commented that she looked more Japanese than Korean, and she wasn’t quite sure what that meant or whether it was a compliment.
After spending several minutes examining other pictures of herself, she gave up, and her thoughts turned back to the upcoming summer. She gave her Hello Kitty pillow an excited hug. Then she shoved it under her head and closed her eyes. Only one thing bothered her as sleep began to fog her mind—an image of a cute, big-eyed baby monkey that floated up to her out of some National Geographic program she had seen years ago. She didn’t like the idea of sticking a syringe into one of those poor little animals and shooting it full of some dangerous drug. Then she remembered that the pictures of the labs she had seen during her interviews had shown adult animals that were significantly larger and less cute. Reassured, she slipped into a deep and satisfied sleep.
Later that morning, Ben, Noelle, and Sergei sat around the table in the Corbins’ conference room. “So you want my help to run down the facts behind Gunnar’s theory, right?” asked Sergei when Ben finished describing the case.
“Right,” replied Ben. “You did a lot of financial-fraud work at the FBI, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but that’s part of the reason I left the FBI. Financial-fraud cases aren’t much fun. Lots of documents and not a lot of excitement. I’m happy to do this one for you, though.”
“Lucky for you, Noelle has volunteered to do most of the document review and number crunching,” returned Ben.
“Volunteered? Really?” He looked at her in surprise. “Thanks, Noelle. I don’t know how Ben talked you into this, but I’ll appreciate the help.”
Noelle smiled wanly. “Don’t mention it.”
“What we’re really looking for from you,” continued Ben, “is some help figuring out where the smoking-gun documents are likely to be and then getting them.”
“Ideally, you’ll want an insider,” replied Sergei. “That’s how the Bureau and the SEC get a lot of their cases; an honest accountant inside the company, or one of their auditors, figures out that something is wrong and calls the government. The only other time this sort of thing gets caught is when the fraud gets so big that they can’t hide it anymore. But without a whistle-blower or some sort of public trouble at the company, it’s really hard to prove accounting fraud.”
“Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals is a public company,” said Noelle. “That means their financials have already been reviewed by outside auditors whose job it is to spot this sort of thing. If Karl Bjornsen is cooking the books, he’s cooked them well enough to fool the auditors. And that means he’s probably also cooked them well enough to fool us.”
“Unless we can find an insider, or they go bankrupt or have a restatement of earnings or something,” said Sergei, nodding. “We can’t sit around and wait for the company to implode, so we’ll have to go hunting for an insider. Gunnar may know somebody who’s willing to talk.”
“I’ll give him a call,” said Ben as he jotted down a note to remind himself. “Let’s switch gears for a minute. Is there any way I can tell if someone is investigating me? After Karl called you, Sergei, I’m guessing he called other people who haven’t had the courtesy to tell me.”
“Probably a good guess,” replied the detective. “If all they’re doing is background research on you—credit checks and stuff like that—you’ll never know. And if they’re good, you’ll never know you’re being investigated no matter what they do.”
“Great,” replied Ben. “I’ve never thought twice about having a detective investigate a witness or an opposing party, so I guess I can’t really complain. But it’s still a little unsettling to think of someone digging into my past and writing up a report on me.”
“Think they’ll find the Speedo-modeling shots from your junior year?” asked Noelle.
Sergei arched his eyebrows. “Speedo-modeling shots? Really?”
Ben turned red and grinned. “Hey, I was a kid. I needed the money.”
Two hours later and four blocks away, Special Agent Elena Kamenev sat at her desk, trying to concentrate and failing completely. Her desk was part of the problem; it was one of dozens crowding the large bullpen room in the FBI’s cramped offices on the ninth floor of Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Building. On most days, she could tune out the conversations and other background noise, but not today. The agent who sat across from her had a loud voice and a bad phone, which meant that everyone within ten yards of him got to share in his conversations. He had been on the phone a lot today.
She got up to stretch her legs and clear her mind. At five foot nine, she was tall enough to have a good view over the bullpen. She could see several other agents moving along the narrow corridors through the complicated network of desks, bulletin boards, and other office furniture that extended to the far wall of the room. It reminded her disconcertingly of a rat’s-eye view of a scientist’s maze.
She sat down again, pushed her shoulder-length blonde hair behind her ears, and tried to focus. Still no good. The main cause of her distraction had nothing to do with her job. Her real problem was about a mile and a half away, sitting in an office. After nearly three hours in which she accomplished nothing, she gave up and called him.
“Hello, Spassky Detective Agency.”
“Hi, Sergei, it’s me. I’m hungry; want to have lunch?”
“Sure, lunch sounds good. Where do you want to go?”
“How about Star of Siam?”
“I’ll see you there in half an hour.”
Forty-five minutes later, Elena and Sergei sat across from each other at a utilitarian wooden table, waiting for their food. He was wearing the leather jacket she had given him for his birthday. It looked good on him. It made his tall, slender physique look wiry and athletic rather than skinny. It also added a touch of maturity to his boyish face—or it would have if he’d been willing to wear his thick brown hair in something other than a flattop, which he insisted was his trademark. Despite the hair, he was subtly good-looking—the sort of man that a woman may not think is handsome in a picture, but finds attractive after talking to him for half an hour.
They weren’t in a booth, but the tables were far en
ough apart that the two of them could have a private conversation, which was the main reason Elena had suggested this restaurant. “Every time we come here, you order peanut curry, rice, and beef kebabs,” she observed. “Is that a tradition or a rut?”
“Neither,” he replied. “It’s a wise decision. I’ve found the best dishes on the menu, and I don’t come here often enough to get sick of them, so why should I order anything else?” Their waiter arrived with steaming bowls of food. “See?” Sergei continued, pointing to his lunch and taking a bite. “Edible heaven.”
Elena took a bite of her chicken stir-fry, chewed slowly, and swallowed. “Sergei, are we a wise decision?” she asked in Russian.
He stopped eating and looked at her with a startled expression. “What do you mean?”
Heart pounding, she put down her chopsticks and asked the question that had been formulating in her mind for the past two months. “You’ve seemed distant recently—sort of pulling back from me. Like you’re having second thoughts about us. Are you?”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I wouldn’t call it ‘second thoughts,’ but I have been . . . well, wondering about some things.”
“Like what?”
“Like whether I can marry someone who doesn’t share all of my values, no matter how much I love her and how terrific she is in every other way.”
Elena sat in stunned silence as long seconds ticked by. There was a roaring in her ears and she couldn’t think. “What are you talking about?” she said at last. “What values?”
“Religious values. You know how important my faith has become to me.”
Actually, she didn’t know, though maybe she should have. She knew that he had come very close to death at the hands of Chechen terrorists about six months ago, and it had affected him. He’d smiled and laughed less after that. He’d also become quieter and more thoughtful. Sometimes she found him staring at nothing and absently rubbing a jagged scar on his left arm.