by Bryan Devore
Lucas Seaton smiled and stepped back for her to enter the room. Walking past him, she saw Lance standing by a large window with a panoramic view of downtown Denver. Setting the heavy briefcase on a center table, she turned and waited for one of the twins to speak.
Lance glanced at the briefcase. “That’s it?” he asked.
“That’s everything related to your company,” she said, stone-faced. “Those are copies of everything he had in his apartment. I also think he has a second copy of everything, which he keeps somewhere else.”
“What makes you think that?” Lucas asked.
“You told me your network showed over two thousand photocopies during the late-night hours when only Michael was in your building. The number of pages in the case was closer to a thousand.”
“Well, even if he has another copy somewhere, at least we now know exactly what he does have,” Lucas said to his brother.
“The problem could be more complicated than that,” Lance reminded him. “I think we need to have a little chat with him.” He turned from the window and looked at Alaska for the first time since she had entered the room. “You’ve gotten to know him pretty well over the past three weeks, haven’t you?”
She held his stare with gleaming eyes, showing a strength and independence that would not back down.
“Yes,” Lance said, seeming to read her expression. “You got to know him well. So tell me, what kind of man is Michael Chapman? What’s he really like outside of work? We need to understand how he thinks.”
Alaska turned and stared out the window at the bright moon that had climbed over the sea of lights below them. “No one really knows Michael,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t even think he knows who he is. He’s very smart, but you already know that. One moment he’s laughing and chatting away like he’s the life of the party, and then the next moment he’ll get quiet, and suddenly you realize that he’s studying you. It’s when he gets like that you realize he’s hiding something—something from his past, maybe, or some plan he has for the future—I don’t know. But you know that no matter how much he studies you, he’ll never really let you inside his mind.” Alaska closed her eyes as she fought off a pang of guilt. “Michael’s a good man, but I don’t think he trusts anyone. He’s alone and sometimes he’s lonely, but he still won’t let himself trust anyone. I don’t know what made him like that.”
Lance smiled as if secretly admiring Michael’s traits. “Thank you, Alaska. That’s what we needed to know. You’ve done a good job.”
“So it’s over?” she asked. “I’m finished with the job?”
“Yes,” Lance replied. “You’re finished. I want you to avoid Michael from now on. Don’t ever call him again. If he calls, don’t answer. No communication whatsoever. If he should somehow get in touch with you, if for some reason it can’t be avoided, call me at this number and let me know.” He handed her a piece of paper. “We may need to bring you back into things if our other plans don’t work out.”
“What ‘other plans’?” she asked. “You said you just wanted to know what he was looking at. What are you going to do to him?”
Lance acted surprised at the trace of concern in her voice. “Do you really care?” he asked. His voice seemed to warn her against answering incorrectly.
“No,” she replied, realizing it was the only response they would accept. She had to be careful. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. I was just curious.”
“Well, don’t be. You’ve done your job; it’s better if we just leave it at that.”
“I understand,” she said.
Lucas walked toward the door. “The rest of the money will be wired to your account tomorrow. You may go now.”
Alaska told herself not to feel any regrets as she stepped into the hallway and heard the door close behind her. She had been forced to make a choice, and she had made it, and now, she told herself, she could live with it. She had liked Michael a lot, but that was nothing compared to how much she loved her dad. Her life had been going nowhere for too long, and her father desperately needed her help. She couldn’t have passed up this opportunity to try to take control of their lives again. She still felt like an outsider, and now, perhaps, even a little lost because she had betrayed Michael, but she had done the thing she needed to do most: empowered herself to help her father.
Walking down the hallway, then waiting for the elevator, she let the memories wash over her. She saw Michael, approaching her in the strobe light of the nightclub basement when they first met, but she pushed away this image with the memory of her father, spending hours teaching her to play the electric guitar when she was thirteen. Then she remembered birds singing in the trees in the Capitol Hill neighborhood below Michael’s apartment the morning after they first made love, and finding him waiting for her on his high-rise balcony after she woke in his bed. Again she abandoned the image for one of her father, bailing her out of the Aspen County Jail her senior year in high school after she got arrested with some friends for vandalizing the principal’s station wagon. Then she remembered how close she had felt to Michael as they lay together talking in the snowy woods after snowmobiling, but she replaced the feeling with the memory of her father’s proud face the day she graduated with a BA in fine arts.
The elevator doors opened, and the nice-looking older couple inside paused their conversation as she entered the car. She felt out of place in this elegant hotel. The doors closed, and the car began descending, and Alaska swore she would have no regrets. But as the couple behind her resumed their soft conversation, she thought about Michael again and wondered if there might have been another way to handle things.
After Alaska left, Lucas came over to the table. Lance had already opened the briefcase and was flipping through the documentation.
“That son of a bitch,” Lucas said as Lance turned over page after page documenting the fraudulently reported software revenue contracts. “How much does he have?”
“A lot more than we thought,” Lance replied.
For a moment, neither brother said another word. They both understood the situation. They had been here before, and they knew what they needed to do if they wanted to survive.
“We need to tell everyone about this,” Lance said, as if the shock of what he was seeing had finally receded enough that he could collect his thoughts. He cut a glance at the briefcase. “This is a hell of a lot worse than Falcon thought. As if we didn’t already have enough to do in the next few weeks . . .”
Lucas slapped both hands against his head and made an animal growl. “That motherfucker! What the fuck is he doing? Who the fuck does he think he is, getting involved in our affairs? Does he think he’s some kind of hero? Are you kidding me? What is it with this guy!”
“We can control this,” Lance said as calmly as he could manage. “We’ve known he was a potential problem for a while now. We’ve been prepared for this. We can handle it. This just means we’re going to have to do some things we didn’t want to do, that’s all. But we can handle this. We will handle this.”
“I’ll handle it right fucking now!” Lucas said, almost shouting.
Lance had seen this rage too often in his brother lately. “No,” he said, putting his hand out. “Not like that. Don’t be stupid. Right now we still have options.”
“Yeah? What options are those?”
Lance pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and slid it across the table. “Call Falcon,” he said.
Lucas picked up the phone. “And tell him what?”
“Tell him we need to meet.”
“That’s it?”
Lance nodded. “Tell him it’s about Michael.”
“He’ll want to know more,” Lucas said as he began scrolling down for Falcon’s number.
Lance walked toward the television and grabbed the bottle of Grey Goose vodka standing next to the ice bucket. “Tell him to come here,” he said. “Give him the room number and everything. And tell him to bring his laptop so we can access Cooley and White’
s network.” He pointed with his chin at the briefcase full of documents. “We’re going to be here a while.”
As his brother selected the number and waited for an answer, Lance poured vodka into the two tumblers he had filled with ice, making sure to give his brother less vodka and more ice than he gave himself. Then he set Lucas’s glass on the table, near where he stood talking to Falcon on the phone. Ignoring the city lights that stretched out below him, he watched his brother pacing behind him in the window’s reflection. Michael Chapman had now become more dangerous to them than they ever could have imagined, and for that, Lance would never forgive Falcon. But there was good news in all this, for now the bond he had felt with his brother through all the strenuous, scary events of their life—a bond that he had begun to question recently because of his brother’s compassionate weakness toward their father—had been fully renewed and rejuvenated by the threat Michael now posed to them both. For everything that had gone wrong with the plans during the past two months, for all the obstacles and perils that had come their way, he had never felt more powerfully connected with his brother than at this moment. Their motivations and intent were once again united. And together they were unstoppable by anyone who got in their way.
* * *
When Falcon phoned Thursday night to say the twins needed to change the Friday meeting, Michael knew something had happened.
“It looks like they have another appointment, so we’ll meet at the Adolphus downtown Saturday,” Falcon said.
“Anything specific we need to discuss?” Michael asked, hanging on to every minute sound. Had they finally figured out that he was up to something? The black Mustang that kept showing up—someone was watching him. He had been careful, but maybe they saw something. If they had, they would have scrambled immediately, evaluating their exposure and deciding just how much of a threat he was. But what would be their next move? Stay calm, he said to himself. You still have one advantage: they have no idea who you really are. They don’t know your past or what you’re capable of.
“There’s nothing specific they want from the meeting,” Falcon said. “Just an overall update on everything we still need to wrap up before concluding the audit in the next two weeks. Oh, also . . .” He hesitated a moment, as if distracted by something on his end of the line. “Also, we should probably go over our discussion related to the Cygnus acquisition bid.”
As Michael flipped his cell phone shut, he turned to look out the dark window of the café, watching the slivers of light from auto headlights shooting by.
“Would you like another latte?” a voice asked.
In the window, he saw the reflection of the server standing behind him. Without looking, he nodded. Then he watched as the reflection pulled farther back into the kitchen, and the server’s image appeared to be standing in the middle of the street, where a car ran over it.
He turned back to the spy novel he was reading. Desperate to take his mind off his problems for a few hours, he had taken the paperback to a hideaway café to escape his grim reality. But now his own life was beginning to adopt the same characteristics of the solitary hero of the story. The hero in the novel had swum halfway from a boat to shore, but now he was exhausted, and the idea of drowning was beginning to seem like a reasonable solution to his woes. Michael understood the character’s feelings only too well.
The server set the latte on the corner of his table, slid the ticket next to it, and left without a word. Michael picked up the novel, put money on the table, and left the drink untouched. He walked out to his car and started the engine. Then, without putting it in gear or releasing the hand brake, he sat and listened to the soothing purr of the motor while looking up through the moonroof at the few stars that had broken through the city’s shield. He sat unmoving in the car for nearly ten minutes, gathering the strength to continue his swim to shore.
36
MICHAEL WALKED INTO the Adolphus Hotel and across the immaculate white tiles that stretched the length of the lobby. To satisfy the dress code of the private lounge room, he wore a charcoal suit over a smoke-gray shirt. The escalator carried him to a gathering room with Flemish tapestries, furniture reminiscent of the Gilded Age, and a Victorian Steinway piano.
Falcon and the twins were already there, and Falcon began the meeting the moment Michael joined them. “I was just discussing the progress of the audit,” he said. “As I was saying, we obviously hit a few snags this year due to staffing, but Michael’s done a great job getting everything up to speed since he came on.” The twins nodded, and Michael gave an appropriate smile of acknowledgment. “There were some areas where we needed some reclassifications. Nothing new—nothing in the past week, anyway—so you should be up to date on those issues.”
“What about software revenue contracts?” Lucas asked. “How did they look?”
“Well,” Michael began carefully, “we looked at those. I believe there were a few carve-out adjustments, naturally. There always are during audits—nothing we haven’t expected.” Michael was doing his best to dodge their probing. The unusual meeting probably meant that all three knew he had uncovered the fraud. His only advantage was that they didn’t know how much he understood. They still thought they had surprise on their side.
“How will that affect revenue?” Lance asked with a doggedness that made him nervous. Lucas was watching him, while Falcon seemed distracted by a spot on the carpet.
“It won’t affect it much. About seven million was reclassed—not much for a company this size. I don’t think investors will see the company under a bad light as a result of that,” he said with a note of finality, as if daring them to dig deeper.
“And there’s nothing else you’ve found? No other concerns that we should know about?” The three seemed to be looking through him, and for a moment it was obvious that the unspoken fraud was the very issue that all four were now thinking of.
Realizing that he was on the ropes, Michael knew that if he answered too quickly, he would appear scared. Then he had an idea. He realized that they had not called this meeting to bully him. Scaring him into silence was just not their way. He could almost see it in their eyes: they would not trust loyalty through intimidation. They would trust the only thing they understood, which was greed.
Time to gamble. Michael had to make them believe he was not intimidated. He had to make them believe he was like them.
“No,” he finally said, displaying a confident smile. “We have conducted a very thorough audit of the financial statements. If there were any issues or concerns relating to revenue recognition, stock options, fraud, or any other disclosure items, we would have brought them to your attention by now. But I’m happy to say—for all our interests—that there have been no other findings of any kind. Over the next two weeks, our plan is merely to wrap up our final testing, finish any adjustments to the numbers, and get the financial statements issued as they are.”
He watched closely as all three reacted differently. Lance smiled, nodding his head in a springlike motion that slowly wobbled to a halt. Lucas eyed him more carefully, as if waiting for him to add to his statement. And Falcon, lacking any visible reaction, merely looked at the ground in meditation, waiting for someone else to respond.
“Well,” Lance said, “that’s what we were hoping to hear. Yes, that’s very good. Nobody wants any surprises this time of the year.”
Over the next twenty minutes, the tension slid away. Falcon rejoined the conversation as they began discussing the disclosure of necessary items in the financial statements. It all became very routine, as if they all had forgotten their unspoken fraud. And Michael, having a difficult time playing through the haphazard disclosure issues relating to the financials, might have forgotten altogether his implied agreement to remain silent with the conspirators, but for the occasional glares from Lucas in his peripheral vision.
37
MICHAEL WOKE AT ten thirty Sunday morning to the soft sound of snow falling against the window. Last night, he had turned off
his cell phone, cut himself off from the world, and gone to the Church alone. A few drinks had helped him escape the dilemmas at X-Tronic for a while. Staring up at the ceiling, he could not recall how much he had drunk or what time he had finally come home. He sat up in bed and looked at his clothes, strewn in a line from his apartment front door to his bed. He got up and took a warm shower. Continuing his Sunday morning routine, he stuck a frozen ham-and-egg muffin in the microwave, turned on his sleeping cell phone, and waited for his breakfast. But a surge of vibration from the cell phone made him forget his boredom. He dialed his voice mail, eager to see who had tried to reach him during his twelve-hour sabbatical from the world.
Five new messages. The world must have spun off its axis during the night. The first was his mother, begging him to call home immediately. Her voice shook. The second call was his mother again: “. . . very important, Michael, please call home. The third: “Michael, where are you? Please, please call.” The fourth: his brother: “Michael, where the hell are you? Don’t call Mom anymore; she’s not up to talking. Call me.” The fifth: his brother again.
All five messages were from this morning: the first at 7:30, the last just twenty minutes ago. With a feeling of dread, he dialed his brother.
“Michael, Jesus! Where’ve you been?” Cody answered.
“I just woke up.”
“You talk to Mom yet?”
“No, your message said to call you first.”
There was silence on the other end. His brother’s voice cracked. “Michael, it’s Dad. He had a heart attack this morning. We’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”
“Oh, my God. Is he . . . ?” His words sounded as if someone else had spoken them. His father, invincible, immortal, had never shown a sign of weakness for as long as Michael could remember. Michael’s grandfather had had two heart attacks before the third one killed him, but Michael had thought his father at least ten years away from being at any real risk.