The Inner Sanctum

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The Inner Sanctum Page 32

by Stephen Frey


  Jesse realized Webb was going to fire. That this was it. She lunged at him and watched in horror as his finger depressed the trigger and the hammer released. But there was only a click. No blast from the barrel. The gun was empty.

  And then she was on him, adrenaline coursing through her body like floodwater through a dam. She knocked him to the ground, smashed the gun from his hand and fell on top of him, pinning his face to the leaves. But he was a large man, still in good shape despite his age, and he tossed Jesse away like a rag doll. He struggled to his feet and staggered toward the jeep.

  Jesse stuck her leg in Webb’s path and tripped him. And she was on him again, just trying to keep him pinned to the ground. Suddenly she heard the dogs on scent, barking and baying as they tore through the tunnel leading the agents to Webb.

  Webb heard the pack too. He moaned as he threw Jesse off one more time, but she grabbed at his legs as he tried to stand and pulled him to the ground once more. Now he was breathing hard, laboring against fatigue. He kicked her in the cheek and crawled over the leaves to the jeep, pulling himself up, struggling with the door handle.

  The German shepherds poured out of the tunnel entrance like lava erupting from a volcano. The agents screamed commands as they too emerged from the blackness and in no time the dogs were on Webb, pulling him from behind the jeep’s steering wheel, ripping and tearing at his arms and legs. He screamed for mercy. And then it was over.

  Epilogue

  David placed both hands on the banister and watched the turquoise water roll gently up to meet the white sand time after time beneath the late afternoon sun. The view from his tenth floor room overlooking the Caribbean was breathtaking. “Carter Webb won’t be awarding black-budget contracts anytime soon.”

  “I guess not,” Jesse said softly as she gazed out over the placid sea.

  Webb, Coleman, Rhodes and Pierce had all received long prison sentences for their roles in the conspiracy. Ted Cowen had hanged himself in his cell before the government had a chance to try him. And Finnerty had died in the tunnel—as had Elizabeth.

  Jesse shook her head. “You really threw me for a loop at Finnerty’s house.”

  “What do you mean?” David asked.

  “When Webb mentioned how you had called him about leaving the file in the trunk of the BMW.”

  “Oh.”

  “I swear, David, for a second I thought—”

  “I just wanted to make sure Webb thought I was working for him.”

  “It scared me to death.”

  They stared at the ocean in silence for a few moments.

  “How’s your mother?” David put his hand on Jesse’s, caressing her fingers lightly.

  Jesse’s face brightened. “Great. Senator Walker found a very nice assisted-care living facility for her in Baltimore County. She moved in last week.”

  “That was fast. The admissions process to get into those places can be pretty drawn out sometimes.”

  Jesse tried to hide a smile. “I think maybe he used his influence a little.”

  “Aha,” David said, forcing a solemn look to his face. “The truth will out.” He broke into a smile. “The senator probably used his influence to find a government program to pay for it all too.”

  “No comment.”

  David shook his head and laughed out loud. “Well, after all, Walker owes you his political career so it makes sense that he would help you as much as he could. He certainly wouldn’t have won reelection without you.”

  “I guess that’s true.” She took David’s hand in hers. “Not without you either.”

  “I helped. You did the hard part.”

  Jesse squeezed David’s hand and laughed.

  “What?” A puzzled expression crossed David’s face. “What is it?”

  “I was on the phone with Senator Walker before I came to your room.”

  “And?”

  “He wants me to think about running for state senator from Maryland in the next election. He said he would support me one hundred percent. Help me with the campaign and all. He thinks I have a future in politics. Someone at a political consulting firm told him I came across well on television during the hearings and the trials.” She laughed. “Can you imagine? Me in politics?”

  “Yes I can. You’d be great. You’d be a breath of fresh air.”

  She turned toward him. “I don’t know.” She saw he was serious and was suddenly embarrassed. “Senator Walker told me that GEA wil be delivering the first fifty A-100s to the Navy this week.” She changed the subject. “He was disappointed.”

  David nodded. “I’m sure.”

  They lapsed into silence again, lost in their own thoughts.

  “So what about you, David?” Jesse finally spoke up. “What are you going to do now that it’s all over?”

  “I don’t know.” David glanced at the horizon. “I won freedom in return for my testimony, but I doubt too many places will hire me now. Of course, I did get to keep my two million.” He looked at her slyly.

  “What?” She let his hand go.

  David nodded. “I told you Sagamore paid me two million dollars immediately after my little initiation. I got to keep that as part of the deal. Of course, it only comes to about a million after taxes.”

  Jesse brought both hands to her mouth, then poked him playfully in the ribs. “You jerk. And I was worried about you. And you made me pay for my own room down here.” She went to jab him again.

  But he intercepted her wrist and pulled her arms around him, then put a finger beneath her chin as he pulled her close. “Well, you’d have a million too if you hadn’t been so honest and turned over your Sagamore money to the Feds.”

  “I couldn’t keep it. It wouldn’t have been right.”

  David gazed at her. He had asked her to stay with him, but she’d refused, opting for her own room instead. The two days they had spent in the island paradise so far had been very romantic, but he was still saying goodnight to her outside her room. “I was always intending to pay for your room, anyway.”

  “I see.” She gazed back at him for a few moments, then brought her hands to his cheeks and kissed him deeply. Finally, she pulled back. “Tell you what. Take me to a nice dinner tonight. Then maybe we’ll stop by the front desk afterward. And I’ll check out.” She smiled provocatively. “That is, as long as you know of another place I can stay.”

  * * *

  Enjoy an excerpt from

  Stephen Frey’s

  newest thriller

  The Legacy

  coming in Electronic edition

  in December 2003

  * * *

  Prologue

  November, 1963

  Her real name was Mary Thomas, which she knew wasn’t a tag likely to attract the eye of a fast-track Hollywood producer with only time in his day for a cursory scan of a casting sheet. So now she went by Andrea Sage.

  A Manhattan native, Andrea fled New York City after completing her studies at Columbia University, intent upon escaping a tyrannical father obsessed with the idea of her following his footsteps onto Wall Street. She had no desire to commit herself to a lifetime of dealing stocks and bonds just days after finishing college. So the morning after graduation, she slipped out of her parents’ Upper East Side penthouse, emptied the trust account her grandparents had set up for her on her tenth birthday, caught a taxi to La Guardia Airport, and flew to Los Angeles in search of stardom on the silver screen. Andrea was young, beautiful, and at the tender age of twenty-one, ready to conquer the world.

  Six months had elapsed since her freedom ride to the West Coast aboard the Pan Am jet and things hadn’t progressed as quickly as she had anticipated. Because of her beauty, she’d landed a few bit parts in several low-budget films; however, the roles were nothing to write home about—and she still hadn’t. Her mother had no idea where her only child had gone and Andrea was beginning to feel guilty about not at least calling to say she was safe.

  An unusually cool and rainy autumn quickly tran
sformed Los Angeles from sunny sanctuary to a depressing land of exile. So on a whim, to try to forget about the looming inevitability of crawling back to Manhattan to face her triumphant father, Andrea took a few days’ vacation from her waitressing job at the Beverly Hills Bistro and bought a plane ticket to Texas. The trip would serve as a much needed respite from her cramped studio apartment overlooking the back of a Chinese restaurant, a chance to explore another area of the country, and an opportunity to see this man who had so captivated the public’s attention.

  Andrea squinted through the lens of the Bell & Howell movie camera she had purchased yesterday, practicing with it before the event began. She stood near a small tree, a few feet away from a reflecting pool retaining wall, and aimed to the right of the crowd milling about in front of the tall building on the other side of the intersection. Then she panned to the left and followed the pavement as it snaked away toward the triple underpass at the far end of the plaza. This would be the motorcade’s route.

  As she gazed at the underpass, Andrea sensed a buzz ripple through the onlookers. She glanced to her right, and through the crowd, saw flashes of the motorcade approaching. Once more she aimed up Elm Street at the people standing in front of the building across the intersection. This time the movie camera shook slightly. She took a deep breath to calm an inexplicable uneasiness, then began filming as the sleek dark blue, open-top limousine made a slow sweeping turn to the left off Houston Street and cruised into her field of vision. She focused on the man in the back of the vehicle, marveling at his overpowering charisma, obvious even through the lens. As the limousine coasted past her, she began to move alongside it, able to shoot extraordinarily clear footage of the man because she was so close to him as he waved from the open vehicle. For some reason the Secret Service had been lax about security along the route that day.

  Moments later Andrea heard a loud pop, like a firecracker exploding somewhere in the plaza, followed quickly by a second one. Concurrent with the second pop, the man in the back of the limousine hunched forward, his elbows up and out and hands to his neck. Still filming, Andrea continued to half walk, half run along Elm Street. She was vaguely aware of moving past a little girl wearing a red skirt and white sweater, who had run past her only moments before. She also sensed a sudden panic in the crowd, as the understanding that something terrible was unfolding began to set in. At the sound of the third shot, people began to take cover and Andrea stopped moving.

  Then the fourth shot came. More of a blast this time, it was definitely louder and closer. Instantly the man’s head snapped back toward Andrea and a fine red mist sprayed the air, forming a crimson halo around the glossy limousine. The man’s body slumped to the left, his brain exposed and bloody.

  At once people were screaming and running in all directions, but Andrea wasn’t sucked into the flood of panic. She calmly kept filming, detached from the horrible events rapidly unfolding around her as if the lens somehow protected her. As Andrea watched, the man’s wife climbed out onto the limousine’s trunk and reached for a piece of her husband’s head, which had been torn away by the killing shot. But she was quickly pushed back into her seat by a Secret Service agent as the vehicle sped away toward Parkland Hospital. Andrea followed the limousine until it was gone, then refocused on the spot where the vehicle had been at the moment the red mist sprayed in the air. Behind that spot people were sprinting toward a grassy area and a fence beyond.

  Suddenly everything went dark. Andrea panned up, and for a moment the entire lens was consumed by an angry face. Then two large hands tore the camera from her grasp and pushed her roughly to the ground.

  A sharp pain shot up her back. “You have no right to treat me that way!” she screamed, gazing up at her attacker.

  “I have every right,” the man snarled. “Now get out of here.”

  “Give me my movie camera!” she insisted.

  “I said, get out of here!”

  Andrea jumped to her feet and made a grab for the camera, but the man easily repelled her with a thick forearm to the chest and she tumbled to the ground once more.

  “I’ll give you one last chance,” he yelled viciously. “Leave or I’ll arrest you.”

  One look directly into the man’s steely gray eyes and Andrea’s confident sense of surreal detachment evaporated, replaced by the make-your-skin-crawl, get-the-hell-out-of-here sensation that she had stumbled upon a hornets’ nest. She realized it would be pointless to protest any longer, so she turned and scrambled over the grass on her hands and knees, then staggered to her feet and sprinted wildly away through the chaos. When she finally dared look back over her shoulder, the man who had brutally confiscated her movie camera—and the film of President Kennedy’s assassination—was gone.

  Chapter 1

  November, 1998

  Trading floors at New York City’s largest and most powerful brokerage houses can be intimidating environments. The cavernous rooms are often raucous, typically devoid of warm and nurturing decor and always staffed by aggressive, impatient opportunists buying and selling massive amounts of stocks, bonds, and other financial securities with house money. These opportunists sit side by side at long narrow desks resembling lunch counters. In front of them are the two primary tools of their business—phone banks and computer screens constantly relaying market information. Traders base their split-second investment decisions on this information as well as the tips they receive over their many phone lines. Sometimes they remain within their capital limits—predetermined management-imposed dollar amounts they may commit to transactions—and sometimes they don’t. Caffeine is a trader’s only dependable ally, while ulcers and the fortieth birthday are mortal enemies. On these floors tempers flare constantly, physical confrontations occur more frequently than most would admit, stress is constant, and privacy is nonexistent. It is a godawful career, except for one thing. Traders can make more money in a year than many people can in a lifetime.

  Cole Egan scrutinized his three computer screens for any hint of what was going on at the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee meeting in Washington; however, the markets were dead calm. But that would change in a heartbeat and all hell would break loose if the Fed officials suddenly exited the meeting and made what—up until yesterday—Cole had considered an unexpected announcement. An announcement that could send his huge government securities portfolio plummeting into a death spiral.

  Every six weeks the chairman and district governors of the world’s most powerful central bank convened behind the tightly shut doors of an ornate Washington conference room to determine the general course of interest rates in the United States. At the conclusion of most meetings, the Fed took no action and interest rates continued to fluctuate with supply and demand as traders bought and sold bonds and money market instruments for their clients and firms. But if the Fed announced new targets, interest rates spiked or fell to those levels almost instantly. The Fed was that powerful.

  In front of Cole lay two keyboards. With them he could access Reuters, Bloomberg, and the Internet—all the real-time information services a nineties trader required. However, nothing in those databases could give him what he really needed right now, which was a listening device planted inside the Federal Reserve conference room. But as far as he knew, no one had that.

  Cole gazed out the trading floor window at the skyscraper across Fifth Avenue. He didn’t allow others to see it, but the waiting was killing him. Yesterday, lower-level Fed officials had sent subtle signals to the market that the committee might raise interest rates to head off a sudden spurt of inflation. For the last month Cole had been betting that the Fed wouldn’t raise interest rates at this meeting and had structured his portfolio accordingly. If the Fed raised rates even slightly, his portfolio could lose millions of dollars in seconds because he would be stuck holding securities earning a rate of return which was less than what the market was offering. And there was no chance to get out at this point because the market had already moved against him in anticip
ation of the Fed announcement. If he sold now, he’d be selling at a huge loss.

  Cole took a deep breath. If the announcement he was dreading came and his portfolio tanked badly, senior executives sitting in plush offices on the top floor of Gilchrist’s world headquarters building would hit the roof, right before they sprinted down to the trading floor to rip his heart out. There would be no compassion from them, only punishment. Cole shut his eyes tightly. Even with the chaos constantly swirling around him, trading could be a lonely business sometimes.

  Gilchrist & Company was a powerful brokerage house, rivaling other preeminent firms such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch in its ability to raise capital for corporations and governments around the world. It also rivaled those firms in its ability to trade stocks and bonds for its own account and earn billions of dollars each year in profits. To ensure its proprietary trading success, Gilchrist hired only the best and brightest individuals, constantly snatching top-performing people away from other Wall Street firms or cherry-picking the cream of the crop from the nation’s most revered business schools. Compensation packages for those lucky few were lucrative—millions each year if you were successful—but there was a catch. You had to consistently make money for the firm, and lots of it. One losing year was tolerable—barely. Two in a row and you consumed your morning coffee and bagel at the unemployment office.

  During his first three years on Gilchrist’s trading floor, Cole had enjoyed reasonable success buying and selling government securities with the firm’s capital. He had hit no home runs during that time, but had smacked plenty of singles and doubles—trading floors are rife with sports analogies—which was code for strong but not outstanding performances. As a result, he’d been paid solid, though not earth-shattering, year-end bonuses. Cole’s January bonus checks were made out for several hundred thousand dollars. Not close to the tens of millions the home-run hitters earned, but he was happy nonetheless. After all, six-figure checks were nothing to sneeze at. Particularly for a guy from the blue-collar side of a small, upper-Midwest town on a lake.

 

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