Naked Ambition

by Rick Pullen

  Geneva told Harv about Bayard and how Beck had tied the massive payments to the senator directly to Lamurr Technologies through its Venezuelan subsidiary.

  “Do you think it could disrupt the campaign?” she asked.

  “It could. But Mr. Rikki needs to be very careful. Tell him to double-check his facts. Bayard is a real bastard. He will stop at nothing. He will take Rikki down with him if he has to. It’s personal with that guy. Bayard does not have a thick skin.”

  “Harv, he’s a pro. Mr. Rikki’s done this before. I think he will do all right.” Mr. Rikki. That sounded awkward, she thought. But calling him “Beck” in front of Harv seemed too personal.

  “Just the same, I’ll ask around with some of my friends at the FBI and Justice and see what I can find out,” Harv said. “It would be such a shame for Patten to lose the election because of Bayard. Patten is a good man.”

  “Who sold his soul to Bayard for a chance at the brass ring.” “Strange bedfellows, dear.”

  “Safe sex, dear.” She took a gulp of her martini and smiled. She now understood exactly where she was going to go with all of this.

  35

  Amtrak’s Acela Express arrived in New York’s Penn Station exactly on time, one of the few Amtrak trains to ever do so. Geneva took the escalator to the street level and stood in the long taxi line for a ride to her favorite hotel.

  The Algonquin was a boutique hotel on Forty-Fourth Street, famous for the Algonquin Round Table, a meeting place for writers during the 1920s and the Depression. Writer Dorothy Parker, whom Geneva admired, was one of the group’s most famous wits and for a while a resident of the hotel. Rooms at the Algonquin were small, so when Geneva came to town, she always reserved Dorothy’s larger suite.

  About a half hour after she unpacked, Keith knocked on the door with his laptop in tow.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “I think I’ve got all of the accounts disguised,” he said. “So far, so good. This worked like a charm. I can move the portfolio assets very soon.”

  “Not yet. Let it ride.”

  “I still think that’s a dangerous idea. We could lose it all even if we aren’t discovered.”

  “We can make ten times what we’ve already made.”

  He sat at the small writing desk, and she leaned over his shoulder looking at the numbers on his laptop. They had done well. She could begin to see her future, but she wasn’t there yet. She wanted to make enough money so she would never be beholden to a man like Harv. She

  never again wanted to suck up to anyone in power whose relationship was based solely on how big a political campaign check she could write.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we should cut and run,” Keith said. “We have been successful enough. We don’t need any more.”

  “Ten times this amount,” she said. “Think about it. Now that will give you freedom to live the life you crave.” Geneva knew he was right in one sense. This whole thing could still backfire. After all, they were dealing with risky stock options. They could be left with nothing—or worse, millions in debt. That would mean slaving in the Washington trenches for another twenty-five years—the rest of her life—squeezing out a buck to pay off a huge debt and make ends meet while living with a man she no longer admired or loved.

  Fortunately, she was confident in the bets she had placed on Beck’s cunning as a reporter. She needed only one winning number, she told herself, and she believed the odds were in her favor.

  Keith showed her how he divided their cash into dozens of phony accounts to hide it from his firm’s partners. They painstakingly went through each one to assure it was well disguised. The results were always the same—astonishing financial returns owned by plain vanilla investors, which was exactly what they intended.

  “Enough,” Geneva said. “Let’s grab a bite to eat.”

  OVER MARYLAND CRAB CAKES in a nearby seafood restaurant, Keith again talked of pulling out.

  “I’ve got a couple of million dollars to call my own. That’s all I need.”

  “You need more. Unless you truly want to live in a shack on an island, a few mil at your age won’t last forever. You’d better be a damned successful writer.”

  He didn’t say anything, but his pleading expression reflected his reluctance to risk his windfall. Would he pull out of the deal? The money was good, but it wouldn’t last her a lifetime. She couldn’t take a chance Keith would get cold feet and defect. Not at this stage. This would not work without him. She felt desperate, but what could she do?

  “Do you trust me?” she asked.

  “It’s not that, Geneva. It’s that I never dreamed I’d be in this position so soon. I just wonder if it’s worth the risk. I can’t afford to lose this.”

  It was worse than she thought. She needed to do something to keep Keith in the fold. She reminded herself he was a nice guy and rather handsome. And she had repeatedly tracked his gaze as his eyes surreptitiously wandered down her chest during many of their conversations. She had what he wanted, and it was more than money. That may not have been part of the original deal, but this was business, she told herself.

  When they finished their meal, she made an excuse about needing to go back to the hotel to look over more figures. She needed his full cooperation, and she decided she would do what she needed to secure it.

  But as they walked down the hall to her hotel suite, she had second thoughts. She thought about Beck. She had to admit she liked Keith and this was necessary. She was too close to winning it all.

  As soon as Keith closed the door to her suite behind him, Geneva took off her jacket, turned to him, and kissed him squarely on the lips. He stood, motionless, and then he held her tightly and kissed her.

  She slid her fingers through his hair and caressed the back of his neck. His hands wandered to her chest. She let him fondle her, and she rubbed his crotch. He unbuttoned her blouse and quickly reached around, unhooking her bra. He bent over to kiss her breasts. Her nerves tingled, and she closed her eyes, enjoying the sensation. She then looked down on his full head of wavy hair as he feverishly devoured her. She moaned and began to call his name, but stopped herself. She realized she was about to call out Beck’s name instead.

  She lifted Keith’s chin and kissed him passionately. But then she pushed back, taking his hands in hers.

  “There will be time for this later,” she said. She again kissed him, this time lightly on the lips. “We need to make some decisions first. We still have the rest of our plan to execute.”

  “And what is our plan?”

  “Hmm. Well, it certainly has something to do with business,” she said, gazing into his big brown eyes. “But I’d say we’ve entered a whole new realm of possibilities.”

  “I’d love to enter that realm,” he said.

  She felt his hardening body next to hers as she pulled him closer. “Right now you and I have a lot of work to do.” Their mouths met in a long, aggressive kiss. Then she pushed him back and pulled her blouse closed. She sat down on the desk chair and turned to Keith, now sitting on the bed.

  “We need to talk about our financial future,” she said. “The stock options we bought to bet on the decline in Serodynne shares have made us rich. Now I want to do just the opposite with our money. I want us to bet on Lamurr’s stock tanking.”

  “What?” Keith wrinkled his brow in confusion.

  “We bet it’s stock drops through the floor. If we take everything we have made so far and bet it against Lamurr, we will make more money than god. We will never have another financial worry again in our lives. You in?”

  “But how do you know this?” “I can’t say. I just do. You’ve got to trust me.”

  “I don’t know. Why risk it all when we have a sure thing already?” “I’ve been right so far.” She looked into his eyes. At least for once, she could tell he agreed.

  She had not planned on seducing Keith, but she was desperate. She still needed the help of two men—one to make her financial play, and
the other to pull the trigger. She felt comfortable Beck would publish his story, which would set events in motion. There was no doubt about his motivation. She was not so confident about Keith. She needed to reel him in carefully to keep him on the line. If that involved some foreplay, then so be it, she told herself. She smiled at the thought that she’d actually kept her clothes on to seduce a man.

  36

  Beck sat in a large glass-walled conference room off the newsroom with two newspaper lawyers and his editor Nancy Moore. This was the part of writing a big story he hated. They were going over the final draft—line by line—looking for any potential legal problems. He spent half of last night pacing his living room talking to Red and polishing this version. He was exhausted, and he didn’t want to justify himself to a couple of legal nitpickers.

  Beck looked at the big gun, Charles Curtiss, a rotund former law professor with a bald white fringe and walrus mustache. He was like all lawyers, Beck felt. He arrogantly hurled his legal knowledge in public to command attention with civilians who weren’t members of the jurisprudence brotherhood. Beck conceded Curtiss knew his First Amendment stuff, but in his mind that still didn’t warrant the fat man’s smugness.

  Curtiss had been the newspaper’s attorney for thirty-five years. He sauntered among the elite in the command structure at the Post-Examiner and shared his box seats at Redskins games with Publisher Kather-ine Cunningham, Baker, and other members of the newspaper’s executive team. There was a definite pecking order at the paper, and despite the fame and awards he had brought the Post-Examiner, Beck realized he would never upgrade to platinum status. He was just unwilling to play the suck-up game. He thought his work would speak for itself. But the Post-Examiner, he realized, was no different than the rest of Washington.

  Beck glanced over at Roby Hedelt, who sat next to Curtiss. Usually, story read-throughs were left to Roby, an openly gay, forty-something

  attorney employed full time by the paper. She not only handled any day-to-day legal issues, but some libel work as well. Beck liked her, and often felt disappointed that such a taunt, striking woman was gay. God, if she weren’t, he’d have asked her out years ago. But with his win-loss record in relationships, maybe it was just as well.

  He would have preferred to deal with Roby, but the political impact of his story seemed so high Cunningham had asked Curtiss to sit in on the story meeting, and Roby deferred to him.

  “You did good work,” Curtiss said. “No malice that I can see. There’s not a chance in hell they can sue us for libel and win. But I’m disturbed none of your targets would comment. All I see is ‘no comment’ throughout this piece. Not Lamurr, not Senator Bayard, not even Jackson Oliver. You couldn’t get any of them on the record?”

  “Would you comment to a reporter when you were about to be hung out to dry?” Beck answered.

  “Now we’ll have none of that kind of talk outside of this room. Not even to your colleagues in the office here. Understood?”

  “I get it,” Beck said, angry at himself for being too candid in front of the newspaper’s judicial nanny.

  “I can vouch for Beck,” Nancy said. “He’s played the game before. A little frankness behind closed doors among friends to assure we all know where we stand is not inappropriate in my book.”

  Curtiss looked like he was about to say something to Nancy and then thought better of it. “Then I’m satisfied,” he said. “I think with these minimal changes you should be good to go.” He handed Beck a paper copy of the story that Roby had clearly marked up. He noticed Curtiss made a couple of unnecessary edits to justify his legal retainer. Roby was kind in her edits. There were few red marks on the page.

  Nancy grabbed the story out of Beck’s hands, donned her reading glasses, and gave the edits a quick once-over. “Beck, whatcha think?”

  “I can live with this.” He felt relieved. The damage was minimal.

  Beck wondered why he went through this charade every time he had a big story. Anyone suing the paper for libel had to prove the newspaper knew it was publishing erroneous information and recklessly went along with it anyway with the intent of harming the person who was the target of the story. So why did he need to sit here for all of this? He’d been threatened dozens of times with lawsuits, and no one had ever actually wasted money hiring expensive lawyers to take him and the Post-Examiner to court. What a waste of his time, he thought.

  THE CONFERENCE ROOM DOOR swung open, and Cunningham entered. A few years younger than Beck, with long, flowing blonde hair, she wore four-inch spike heels and a dress short enough to show off her well-toned elliptical-machined legs. She was damned attractive. Beck would give her that. But the recent divorcee tried too hard to look younger and sexy.

  “We’ve got a situation,” she said. “The Patten-Bayard campaign wants to meet with us next week to discuss the story. They can’t do it until then, and they say their input is vital before we publish.”

  “It’s an obvious delaying tactic,” Nancy said. “We’ve got them by the gonads, and they know it.”

  “They want to kill it,” Beck said. Was Cunningham really falling for this?

  “Legally, it’s sound.” Curtiss laid his pen on the pages of his copy of the manuscript and leaned back in his chair.

  “I can’t take the chance,” Cunningham said. “They say we are missing important elements of the story that will make us rethink the entire piece. We’ve been accused on too many occasions of liberal bias. If we publish a story like this against a conservative Republican weeks out from the election, I will have more scars on my backside than I’m willing to nurse.” After a pause, she added, “We must get this right.”

  Get it right? More like kill it, thought Beck. I put my heart and soul into this for weeks and she’s going to believe those slimy bastards? Shit. This wouldn’t have happened if Bob Riggleman were still in charge.

  Riggleman’s niece had recently been appointed publisher. She was now responsible for the family business. Beck knew Cunningham’s focus was on the bottom line. With the newspaper’s sinking stock price, he could see how she might want to kill the story to save the paper from a potentially expensive lawsuit. What do you expect when you replace an old newspaperman with a Harvard MBA with no journalism experience?

  “Next Wednesday at two. I’d like you all to meet in my office,” Cunningham said. “Campaign officials will be there. Any questions?”

  Even Curtiss was quiet this time. The pecking order was fully exposed. Cunningham was in charge.

  She closed the door behind her.

  “I can’t believe it!” screamed Nancy. “We’ve got maybe a two-week window to publish before we are too close to the election.”

  Beck said nothing. He stood, dropped his copy of the story on the table next to Curtiss, and walked out, too angry to speak. He needed a drink and to calm down. All of his work—everything he and Nancy had spent what seemed like forever putting together for this story—was now in jeopardy. He shook his head. Now he was fighting a war on two fronts, yet he wasn’t endangered by the opposition. He was being threatened by friendly fire.

  37

  “So what the hell happened?” demanded Serodynne CEO Brian Dymon. “We’re already looking at a major implosion in the value of our stock. We’re looking at large-scale layoffs in eighteen months. We will need to begin downsizing if nothing can be done. And by the way, Ms. Kemper, nice of you to join us.”

  Geneva had just failed miserably to slip unnoticed into the Serodynne boardroom a mere five minutes late. Her flight from New York to Minneapolis had been an hour late arriving, and she had raced to corporate headquarters, bribing her cabbie with a fifty to break the speed limit and risk a ticket for reckless driving.

  She’d kicked Keith out of her hotel room around five the night before saying she had to prepare for Serodynne’s board meeting. Then she’d overslept this morning and was the last to jump on the plane before the crew closed the door, just so the plane could roll back from the gate and sit on th
e tarmac for the next hour. Stuffed like sardines in coach and bouncing for nearly three hours through turbulence, she had wondered if her day could get any worse. Now she had her answer.

  Legal counsel Sue Nijelski caught Geneva’s eye. She gestured discreetly, silently asking if she needed to step in. Geneva slowly shook her head. She would handle this. She took a deep breath and began. “Yes. We have a problem, but I don’t think this is over. I wouldn’t start calling the funeral director just yet.”

  “Why’s that, Geneva?” barked Dymon.

  “I believe Lamurr’s contract application is fraudulent. If we can prove it, we will win the contract back. We are the Pentagon’s only alternative.”

  “Fraud? You’ve got to be kidding.” Dymon stood and paced the floor, impeccably intimidating in his pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit. The sun streamed through the conference room windows, deceptively beautiful as it reflected off his shaved head and diamond tie stickpin.

  “It recently came to my attention that the FBI is investigating Lamurr. They have traced potential bribes through Venezuela to a US senator involved in the contract.” She knew she was walking a minefield. How much could she tell them? She needed to tell the board enough, but not too much that it might hint at her own involvement. “I don’t have any names yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “Well, there can’t be too many senators in that position.”

  “I have my suspicions about his identity, but I’d rather not say until I’m sure. The last thing we want to do is start rumors that may come back to bite us in the ass.”

  Geneva glanced at Nijelski, who remained silent and looked only at Dymon. Both of her hands were on the conference table, one wrapped around a pen, the other lay palm down with her index finger pointing directly at Geneva. Clearly, their earlier conversation about Lamurr and Senator Bayard remained between the two of them. Geneva felt relieved and more confident having an ally in the room.