The First Billion

by Christopher Reich

  “That would be Mercury Broadband, would it not?”

  “That’s correct.” Gavallan added, “I take it you’re acquainted with Mr. Kirov.”

  “Not as well as I’d like to be. Perhaps you could introduce us someday.”

  “I would enjoy meeting you, though, Mr. Gavallan. A little sit-down, just the two of us. How ’bout in an hour’s time at your hotel? You’re staying at the Ritz-Carlton, I believe. I’m sure you’re not too far away.”

  About a hundred yards if you really want to know, answered Gavallan silently.

  Cate had turned the Explorer down a narrow lane leading to the hotel. A pink pastel palace beckoned at the end of a manicured drive. Emerald lawns as smooth as velvet rolled from either side of the road. An imposing portico welcomed guests. Two police cars were parked beneath it, their front doors open. A few uniformed officers mingled with some stiff types whose short haircuts and inviolate posture identified them as members of the law enforcement community.

  “Keep driving,” Gavallan said coolly, one hand covering the phone. “We’re a couple of tourists having a look around. Whatever you do, don’t stop. And if they come after us, floor it.”

  “You’re scaring me. What did Dodson say?”

  “Just keep driving.”

  Gavallan froze in his seat, eyes to the fore, phone at his ear. But Cate handled herself as if born to a life of crime. Passing the quartet of police officers, she waved a hand and offered a cool smile, circling the portico at the same steady speed. The officers looked from Cate to Jett to Cate again, somber in their khaki rayon uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats. Tourists didn’t rate a second glance, and in a moment the four were talking amongst themselves. There was a fifth man nearby, standing at once among and apart from the police officers. He was a tall, professorial man with neat brown hair and a pair of half-moon bifocals. He was wearing Clarence Darrow’s seersucker suit and suede bucks, and he held a phone to his ear.

  Howell Dodson. Had to be.

  A moment later, Cate and Gavallan were through. Gavallan didn’t dare look behind him for fear of what he might see. “We clear?” he asked.

  Cate’s eyes jumped to the rearview mirror and back, and he could see now that her smile was superglued to her teeth and that she was frightened. “We’re clear,” she said.

  “Mr. Gavallan, you still with me?” Dodson was saying.

  “I’ll take a rain check, if you don’t mind,” said Gavallan. “For now, why don’t you just call off the hounds. Sending your storm troopers into my offices really is a little much.”

  “I’d say it made the appropriate point. Come now, Mr. Gavallan, let’s sit down like a couple of good ole boys and have ourselves a little chat. I’m sure that in no time, we’ll have everything all cleared up.”

  Gavallan chewed on the idea. Dodson was a charming son of a bitch who sounded like he’d be at home as Robert E. Lee’s aide-de-camp. The question remained, however, as to whether he would listen to good sense. Gavallan rejected the idea as too risky. Once inside a cell, there would be no way out until Monday morning. Grafton Byrnes could not wait that long.

  “Let’s just say I know more than I can divulge at the moment,” he said. “We can call it a gentlemen’s agreement. I’ll tell you just as soon as I’m able. Tuesday latest.”

  Dodson’s voice tightened. “You can do better than that. I’ve got ten bodies that deserve an answer, Mr. Gavallan. Now. Not Tuesday.”

  Cate patted Gavallan’s arm. “Jett!”

  “Just a second,” Gavallan whispered. Then, “I’m sorry, Mr. Dodson, but that’s the best I can do.”

  “I am trying to be civilized about this. Make no mistake, I have a nasty side. If you choose not to cooperate, I’ll slap a warrant on your behind faster than you can say Strom Thurmond and we can conduct our powwow from a federal detention facility instead of a beautiful hotel.”

  “Believe me, I am sorry. If there were any way I could share with you what I know, I would, sir. For now, I can only say I had nothing to do with Ray Luca’s murder. I saw what happened on the news and I’m as shocked by the events as you.”

  “Two hours, Gavallan. That’s what you got to come into our Miami offices. Then we come looking for you. And I mean all of us. The United States government.”

  “Don’t waste your time, Howell. We both know you’re looking in the wrong direction. Turn ninety degrees until you’re facing due east. Right out over the ocean. That’s where you want to go. Catch my drift?”

  “Jett!” This time Gavallan could not ignore Cate’s plea. “What?” he asked, peeved.

  Cate gave her head a slight nudge, behind them. Gavallan eyes fell to the side-view mirror, where a white and blue Palm Beach police cruiser had taken up position on his tail. Behind the car, he could make out a lanky figure beneath the portico charging up the stairs into the hotel.

  “Just drive,” he said, ending the call.

  34

  Five minutes later, the police car was still riding their tail.

  They were doing the tourist trail, thirty miles an hour along Ocean Boulevard, past Mar-a-Lago, the old Meriwether Post estate Donald Trump purchased in 1990 and renovated to its jazz age glory, past Bethesda-by-the-Sea, the Kennedys’ chapel of choice during long-ago winter visits, past the Flagler estate, Worth Avenue, and Green’s Pharmacy and Luncheonette. A few billowy clouds hovered low over the ocean—“puffy white fuckers,” they’d called them when he was flying.

  “Jett, what do I do?” Cate’s voice was pitched high, her features frozen in a brittle mask.

  “Just keep going,” Gavallan advised. “If he hasn’t pulled us over yet, he isn’t going to.”

  “I’m not very good at this.”

  “At what?”

  “Running.”

  “We’re not running. Once you see a siren and I tell you to floor it, then we’ll be running.”

  “The police only want to talk with you,” she said. “We’ll give them the evidence we’ve gathered about Mercury and tell them the truth.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “But you’re innocent.”

  Gavallan gave a quick, bitter laugh. “You know that and I know that. But right now, Howell Dodson isn’t looking for the truth. He’s looking for a suspect . . . any suspect.” He turned in his seat, wanting to engage her fully. “By eight o’clock tonight, pictures of Cornerstone and the horror of what happened there will be burned into the memories of every man, woman, and child in this country. This is the biggest case the FBI has going. They’re not looking for the murderer, they’re looking for meat. They need to utter the magic words, ‘Suspect in custody.’ ”

  “Dodson said he just wanted to talk,” Cate persisted. “You can help them.”

  “Are you listening to me?” Gavallan retorted. “Haven’t you heard a single word that’s been said? Dodson threatened to put out an arrest warrant on me. Frankly, I can’t say I blame him. You don’t need to be Perry Mason to see that I’ve got ‘prime suspect’ written all over me.” He counted on his fingers. “One: Seventy million dollars in fees that hinge on the successful completion of the Mercury IPO. Absent that, the fifty-million-dollar bridge loan we’ll lose if the deal goes south. That’s a hundred-twenty-million-dollar swing. Two: Back there in Ray Luca’s house, I put my hands all over a snazzy Glock nine-millimeter that for all I know was the murder weapon. And three: I’m here, aren’t I? You don’t need any more than that for a conviction.”

  Cutting his gaze to the side-view mirror, he noted that the police car had edged closer, sniffing at their rear like a horny dog. A brown Chrysler hung behind it, and Gavallan wondered for a moment whether he had two cops on his tail. He looked at Cate. She was sitting too straight in her seat. The color had left her cheeks and a sheen of sweat clung to her forehead.

  “Just cancel the deal,” she said. “Tell the FBI you’re pulling Mercury from the market. What more proof do they need than that? Why would you kill Luca if you were going to shutter the IP
O?”

  “And Graf? What about him? You may not give a good goddamn about what happens to other people, but I do.”

  Cate started in her seat, turning her head, raising a hand in protest. She stopped halfway there. Mouthing a silent obsenity, she sank back in her seat and locked her gaze straight ahead of them.

  “It’s like this,” Gavallan explained in an even tone, knowing he’d gone too far. “I can’t turn myself in, and I can’t inform the FBI—or for that matter the SEC, the New York Stock Exchange, or anyone else—that Black Jet is going to cancel the Mercury offering. Kirov has to believe I’m playing ball. He has to think I want the deal to go through as badly as he does. That’s why I told Tony to call him and tell him I was standing behind the IPO a hundred percent. That’s why I said that stuff about Mercury being a gem and Ray Luca’s death a bad coincidence. I’m sending Kirov a message we’re on the same team. Maybe it’ll keep Graf alive until I can figure out a way to get him home.”

  “I get it,” Cate said. “I’m not sure I like it, but I get it.”

  “Good,” said Gavallan. “Glad to hear you’re with the program.”

  Cate crossed her arms, shooting him a stern glance. “I was always with the program. Now, instead of riding me so hard, why don’t you figure out a way to get us off this island.”

  “I’m working on it. I’m working on it.”

  Gavallan looked to his left and right, exhaling loudly. He was doing his best to think clearly, to come up with a plan that would get him out from under the FBI’s thumb. Sometime during the last two days, his world had been turned upside down, and he was still trying to right it. Graf Byrnes’s midnight call, Ray Luca’s murder, Cate’s miraculous last-second appearance, and a couple of sucker punches to boot—it had all left him feeling as beat-up as a secondhand catcher’s mit.

  At two o’clock on a Friday afternoon, eyes glued to the rearview mirror, his stomach in knots that at any moment the police car on his tail would hit the siren and pull him over, Jett Gavallan’s emotional reserves had run dry. Grief, hope, worry—all were tapped out, and the only thing he was capable of feeling now was dread. For Graf. For himself and his company. For the whole damned world.

  Inclining his head out the window, he caught a glance of himself in the mirror. He looked tired, a lined veteran of too many corporate campaigns. Thirty-eight going on sixty. Yet it wasn’t the fatigue that surprised him, but the hunted look in his eyes. He appeared weak. Defeated. Once a warrior, he had been softened by a decade behind a desk, where nerve was a cocktail of figures and formulas, and risk measured in dollars, not lives.

  And Graf? a fighting voice asked him. How’s he faring right about now? He wouldn’t be too thrilled to learn you’re feeling a little long in the tooth. Get this through your head: You don’t have a choice whether you’re tired or not, whether you think you’re up to it. Someone else is depending on you. You have an obligation. A duty.

  The word galvanized him as no other could have, and he remembered a saying that Graf Byrnes had taught him at the Academy, words rich with sacrifice and the blood of history.

  “A man can never do more than his duty. He should never wish to do less.”

  They had left the commercial center of Palm Beach and ventured into the northern residential district, where homes lay hidden behind twenty-foot stands of eugenias and gardeners needed cherry pickers to prune the trees. Parked along the curb, battered pickups loaded with lawn mowers and leaf blowers kept company with polished Rolls-Royces whose signature winged hood ornaments had been removed lest they inspire thieving minds. Gavallan wanted to make a U-turn and head for one of the bridges that led to the mainland, but he was fearful any move might be viewed as flight and make the cop want to pull him over.

  “Jett!”

  The police cruiser had turned on its strobes and hit them twice with its high beams. A moment later, the siren’s shrill attack pierced the air.

  Gavallan laid a hand on Cate’s arm, swiveling in his seat to look over his shoulder. The police officer was waving them to the side. Running was out of the question. Palm Beach was an island. Three bridges linked it to the mainland and there would be a roadblock on every one before they could make it halfway across.

  “Pull over,” he said. “Up ahead by those hedges.”

  Cate edged the car to the side of the road, but a few seconds later she still hadn’t slowed. He saw her looking at him uncertainly, her lips half moving; then suddenly, she spat out, “Jett, I have a gun in the car.”

  “What?”

  “In the glove compartment. It was for protection. I was afraid of Kirov.”

  Opening the glove box, he lifted the pistol—a snub-nosed .38 police special—and took out the rental papers. “My God,” he said, swallowing hard. “You mean business, don’t you.” Once the police found the gun, no amount of smooth talking would set them free. “Same goes as before. Pull over. We cooperate. ‘Yes sir. No sir.’ Whatever you do, don’t tell them who I am. There’s no way they can have a picture of me by now. We’re tourists from California and we’ll wing the rest. Somehow, we’ll talk our way out of this.”

  He didn’t believe it for a second.

  Cate steered the Explorer off the road, braking gently as she brought the car to a halt beneath a cluster of coconut palms. But as her tires sunk into the sandy shoulder, a strange and wonderful thing happened. Instead of following them onto the embankment, the police car pulled into the center of the road and shot past, its V-8 engine growling magnificently. In a moment all that was visible was a pair of taillights flashing back and forth like the blinking eyes of a railroad crossing guard back home in the Rio Grande Valley.

  Cate looked at Jett, and he looked right back at her. He was staring into her eyes, marveling at their depth, wondering, as he often had, if he would ever really know her. He continued to her nose, her lips, the swell of her neck.

  I loved you, he said to her silently.

  A cicada’s electric crescendo filled the car. It died down, and then there was only the surf rushing onto the white sand beach and the melancholy drone of a single-engine plane flying high above.

  “We’re free,” she said, in a whisper.

  “For now.” Gavallan dropped his eyes, uncomfortable with his feelings for her, wanting to trust her, to lower his guard, knowing it wasn’t possible. “Let’s not press our luck. Let’s get off this island. Better yet, let’s get out of this state.” He looked at his watch. “If Dodson makes good on his offer, the FBI will be checking outgoing flights up and down the coast within the hour; they probably already are. If they know I’m in Florida, we can count on their knowing how I got here and how I planned to go home.”

  Cate fished in the side compartment for a map. “There’s an executive airport in Boca Raton,” she said, spreading a multicolor canvas on her lap. “I flew in once with the guys from Redmond to cover one of Microsoft’s confabs. It’s got a runway long enough for business jets and a few hangars. Think we can charter a plane?”

  “ ‘We’? Where do you think you’re going?”

  “With you.”

  “But I’m not going home. And I’m not going to be responsible for you.”

  “No one’s asking you to be. I’m thirty, Jett. Last time I checked that qualified as an adult. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it you who needed looking after about an hour ago?”

  Gavallan knew it was more than a question of responsibility. It was a question of trust. Cate had become an unknown commodity. Yes, she had saved his life. Even so, her presence made him antsy, aware that he was in the middle of something bigger than himself, something gray and menacing whose borders he might never discover.

  “Look, you’ve won,” he said. “Mercury’s not going to come to market. Go home. And thanks. Thanks for saving my butt back there. I mean it. But that’s it. This is where it ends.”

  “And Graf?”

  “He’s my problem.”

  “Your problem? You think you can sit there and
call me uncaring, brand me with the responsibility of ten people’s deaths and expect me just to forget it? I know Grafton Byrnes too. Remember? I’m proud to say that I count him as a friend. You want to be responsible for him? Fine. But you didn’t know Ray Luca. And you didn’t know Alexei Kalugin. Those two are mine, whether I like it or not. No matter what might happen to Kirov, I have to live with the fact that I was responsible—at least in some way—for getting them killed. You can’t just pawn me off. You said it yourself: I’m in this even deeper than you are. Longer, anyway.” She spent a moment studying the map. A quizzical expression skirted her features. “By the way, what do you have in mind—I mean if you’re not going home, that is? Are you planning on chartering a jet to Moscow, driving up to Kirov’s house, banging on his door, and asking him to give you Graf back? Do you have any idea how well-protected a man like Kirov is? He’s an oligarch, for Christ’s sake. The man has his own private army. The second they know you’re in Moscow, they’ll whisk you off the streets and stuff you in the same hole where they’ve put Graf. If they don’t just shoot you on sight, that is. Right about now, I’d say you rank number one on Kirov’s ‘Most Wanted’ list.”

  For a moment, Gavallan didn’t answer. He knew well enough that he couldn’t just traipse up to Kirov’s door and demand his friend’s return. In truth, he had no intention of going to Moscow. Securing Graf’s return would require a none-too-subtle gambit of barter and blackmail, along with a fair dose of luck. He had only the rudiments of a plan, and they involved his visiting another city on the European continent. Geneva. He needed chips to sit at Kirov’s table. What better place was there to get bankrolled than Switzerland?

  “If your friend Skulpin’s right, Kirov couldn’t have faked the due diligence without the help of Silber, Goldi, and Grimm,” he said. “They’re the ones who visited Kirov’s operations. They hired the experts to verify that Mercury’s operating platform was up to snuff. They signed off that everything was a hundred percent as advertised. If something was amiss, they’d have to have seen it.”