Then she stepped out into the hot and humid New Orleans night. Out and safe. For tonight, at least.
Chapter Sixteen
Pacing again, Darrin stepped to the window to look out at the glaring brilliance of a Phoenix morning. Already he could feel the heat radiate from the glass, a familiar sensation. These last few years he’d found himself wishing more and more often that he was out there in that heat, the sweat rolling down his back as he rode fence on the ranch he and Julianna had bought after she had deeded Matt’s father’s land back to her son. It had held bad memories for her but it was the only legacy she had left for her son.
The memory of her sent a sharp pang through him.
Matt was his mother’s son, no two ways about it. He had her golden hair, green eyes and sometimes Darrin was embarrassingly grateful for having some part of her still around to remind him of her. Matt might not have been his son by blood but in all the ways that mattered, Matt was his. His and Julianna’s.
He wished Matt would call. Why hadn’t he?
Visions of Bill in his coffin haunted him.
Once more, Darrin stepped back to his desk to flip back the top cover on a very thin file to look at the picture within it.
All it had taken was a look at the man’s eyes and instinct had told him the rest of the story as he remembered the fading bruises on Matt’s face and body. It wasn’t hard to connect it together.
This was when it was tough, waiting for the call. And, despite the blessing of cell phones, he had to wait. A phone ringing or even vibrating at the wrong time could be disastrous. If anyone got their hands on Matt’s phone and traced the number that might be almost as bad.
Matt would call when he got the chance but the need to get a warning to him churned in Darrin’s gut every time he looked at the face in that picture. He willed the phone to ring but when it didn’t he forced himself to sit down and work on the dozens of other files he needed to consider.
A thread of worry wormed through his mind.
Matt was the closest thing he had to a son.
A cold chill crawled up Matt’s back as he scrolled through the pages of documents they’d ‘borrowed’ from Marathon, both blessing and cursing the miracle of modern computing as he went. Blessing the technology for the instant access to information he once would have had to spend hours crawling through spreadsheets for but also giving him time to adjust to the growing sense of outrage. Cursing it for the restless agitation, the helplessness, the slow-burning anger that built inside him, the worry…and the growing fear that curdled in his belly. If what he suspected was correct then Marathon and Genesis had a great deal to be concerned about. Billions, in fact, for the upper tier if this was happening nationwide. Millions for the lower echelons. Money enough to kill for or over.
He blessed the machines, though, for that same access, that same ability to reach out as he did now and remembering Ariel’s grin as she’d flipped open the lid to her laptop.
“Are you sure you won’t need this?” he’d asked her.
With an absent shake of her head she’d replied, as she’d dressed, “Not today, today is mostly training, with some troubleshooting, but I took the precaution of copying most of the files I might need up to the server. Just habit. Don’t forget to bring it with you later, though. I might need it then.”
“They,” she continued, “have Wi-Fi access here, so the network is there and ready to go, easy.”
He’d grumbled, “Easy for you maybe.”
That’s when she’d given him the grin. “It’s all set up for you.”
“Showoff,” he’d accuse gently, smiling. “You better watch out, you’re getting cocky.”
“Better believe it,” she’d said, as she’d breezed out the door of the coffee shop across from Marathon’s offices with a swing of her hips.
Matt wouldn’t be far away from her.
She had her Bluetooth headset on and both he and Darrin on voice recognition. If something went wrong, she would call.
Finally, he could e-mail. He shot the information he had to his step-father.
Hitting speed-dial on his cell he called him, repressing the twinge of guilt he felt. It was a call he should have made days ago. Admittedly, he’d been busy…but not all of it had been business. He should have taken the time to call – Darrin would be worried.
“Matthew,” Darrin said and the relief in his voice, the use of his full name and the slow drawl was enough to raise the hair on the back of Matt’s neck and alarm curling in his belly. It took a lot to get Darrin worried.
“What is it?”
“Truth is,” Darrin said, hating to admit it, “it’s not much. Just gut instinct.”
Matt would have taken Darrin’s instincts over almost anything.
“So?”
“We didn’t find much on Genesis you don’t already know or haven’t guessed. They’re privately owned, with a select clientele. A very select clientele. Even Harry, with all his contacts, hasn’t been able to find out much more.”
That was disturbing.
Darrin paused but there was more, Matt knew it. So he stayed silent and waited.
“We looked at some of the players, Matt,” Darrin said evenly, his tone quiet but concerned. And deadly.
When Darrin went quiet something was seriously amiss.
“I sent you an e-mail,” Darrin said, “with everything we’ve found.”
Matt pulled it up.
“There’s a man named Lovell, he’s head of security for Genesis – and if nothing else convinced me something was wrong there, he did,” Darrin continued. “I know the man, Matt. Not personally but the type. Hard ass, hard core. Mean as a snake. Ex-military. A Marine but even they didn’t like him. Ex-cop. He retired early but no one will say why. There’s hints he became a mercenary for a while, then worked for some of the private security in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of the stuff I heard, he worked for some of the units in Iraq, the ones no one wants to talk about… I heard he might have been co-opted for some of the renditions, to question the prisoners. The people I talked to wouldn’t say so specifically but I got the feeling from what they didn’t say that he enjoyed it. Enough that it bothered them.”
The memory caught Darrin up.
It was something about the man’s eyes, even in the picture, that reminded him of the lean, gray wolf Darrin had come nearly nose to nose with up in the mountains one winter. He’d been leading his horse through the snow, his gun on the saddle too damn far away. That wolf had looked at him evenly, his amber eyes flat and calculating, certain in its ability to kill. Although Darrin knew it was unlikely it would come after prey as big as he was unless it was pretty damn hungry, that look in its eyes remained with him.
Jonathan Lovell reminded him of that wolf.
“I got you, Darrin,” Matt said, understanding the mental shorthand, already pulling up the e-mail.
His tone level, Darrin said, “Watch your back, son.”
It was that last word that told Matt just how concerned Darrin was. The thought both warmed and chilled him.
“Did you get my e-mail?” Matt asked.
“Looking at it now, Matt,” Darrin said, and then went suddenly silent. Uncharacteristically he uttered an epithet he rarely used.
Matt shared the sentiment.
By the time he picked Ariel up that night he’d been wading through figures and papers for so long he was getting a headache.
Absently, he rubbed his face then the back of his neck, rolling his head on his shoulders to work the kinks out.
The figures weren’t the only thing that worried him. He’d done some checking of his own and called in a few markers but for all that they’d learned surprisingly little. People didn’t want to talk about either Marathon or Genesis and that was more than a little scary, considering who some of these people were.
“How did it go?” he asked as Ariel slid into the car.
Her skirt rode up a little, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of thigh.
Ariel saw wher
e he looked and smiled but didn’t pull it down. The grin he gave her back was appreciative but she could also tell how tired and tense he was. She was beginning to learn the signs. Rubbing his face was one.
“Nothing. Not a twitch. I told you. A thoroughly uneventful day. If anyone was suspicious or concerned they didn’t show it. You?”
Taking a breath, he said, “There was nothing in Bill’s files that I found that would have alarmed him, unless there’s something I’m missing.”
“If he was like a lot of other computer users,” Ariel said, “you said he was only semi-literate, he might have stumbled over it by accident by opening the wrong document. If he tried to save it, it would have automatically saved it back to where it came from, with a different date. From that moment on he would only have to go to his recent documents list but if he clicked on it, it would ask if he wanted to save it. With the new date. It would have left a footprint.”
Frowning a little, Matt said, “That’s possible. Bill didn’t trust computers. The truth is, he hated them.”
Ariel looked at him. “If Bill wasn’t good with computers that might have been how they discovered him. If he opened the wrong files, altered them in any way, even slightly, the time and date would have changed. Someone would have noticed.”
It made sense, if you knew Bill. Matt closed his eyes for a second at the thought that something so simple, so trivial, might have caused Bill’s death.
“I could try to track it down but if they’ve changed it or deleted it, it’s a long shot,” Ariel offered.
Reluctantly, Matt shook his head. “No, what we really need is a confession, someone to talk, a note or an e-mail maybe where someone instructs someone else to shut Bill up. Something…”
Taking a slow deep breath, he continued, “But if what I’m discovering is true, getting someone to confess might be a problem. Giving someone up in trade would be quite a deal.”
Ariel couldn’t miss the heaviness, the concern and worry in his voice. A small trickle of dread curled around her heart as he tightened his arm around her as he drove.
“As far as Marathon and Genesis, I’m getting hints of the bigger picture. I need to compare more of the numbers.”
Ariel eyed him, there was a tension in him she hadn’t seen before. “There’s something, though…”
Slowly drawing in a breath, Matt nodded. “The other files were something else entirely. I did some checking on the Internet and the library archives…”
He’d pulled old newspapers, the financial sections, to confirm what he suspected. The picture that was forming was alarming.
“If what I’ve been discovering is true, there was more than enough motive to kill Bill.”
Ariel gave him a look. Everything he said only confirmed what she’d already found.
“I’ll show you in the hotel room. It’ll be easier to understand if you can see it,” Matt said.
In their hotel room, sitting on the edge of the bed, he drew her down beside him as he flipped open the laptop. He snaked an arm around her leg as she settled next to him and curled an arm over his shoulders.
“If I’m right,” he said, calling the figures up on the screen, “it’s a huge Ponzi scheme, like Madoff and Stanford, mixed with a little of what Enron was doing – manipulating prices – but of amazing proportions. It’s nationwide. They’re just moving money around, using some from one to pay out apparent dividends to another. Once a certain amount of trust is established everything else is on paper. It’s all virtual but it looks real with Genesis backing Marathon up surreptitiously in the background. And vice versa. Joe Investor comes in, they use part of his money to pay Paul, part to pay Peter. The remainder they skim. Both Paul and Peter get what appears to be a nice return on their investment from Joe. When the next investor comes along, the money goes around again but this time Joe gets a nice little check, too – a little more return than he would’ve gotten elsewhere – and feels lucky. On the other side, since they’re so savvy when Marathon suggests for example that the price of gas should go up and Genesis reluctantly seems to agree, the price goes up. Investors sell on the high and the price drops. The only one who gets hurt is the consumer.”
Ariel looked at him, his tension contagious.
She thought of all the offices across the country where she was scheduled to visit, taking in the scale of it. Thousands of investors, both large and small. Retirement funds. Investment accounts. They would use her company’s software to conceal what they did.
“How much money are we talking about?” she asked.
Matt looked at her, seeing in her eyes an understanding of the magnitude of the plot.
“Millions certainly, for the top people, perhaps even billions,” he said.
People had killed for much less.
“And when it collapses?” Ariel asked.
It would collapse, sooner or later the amount of money going in wouldn’t be able to support the money that went out.
Matt didn’t really have to answer.
They remembered Madoff and Stanford. There had been several suicides, thousands of investors large and small had lost a great deal of money. To some of the larger investors it would be painful. To the smaller ones who lost their entire life savings it would be devastating.
Her voice a whisper, Ariel looked at him. “Matt…”
Taking a breath, he nodded.
One of Madoff’s whistleblowers had feared for himself and his family, with reason.
They were sitting on a potential time bomb.
“There’s something else,” Matt said, switching screens on the computer to bring up a picture.
What appeared on the screen was a slightly nasty surprise, like touching something benign and getting a shock.
It was a face of sharp planes and angles. There was an emotionless flatness to it, an almost snakelike blankness to the cold, impersonal black eyes. In fact, there was a lot about that face that reminded Matt of a snake, from the pale skin to the angular features and almost lipless mouth, to the man’s silver-touched hair.
Tilting his head at the image, Matt held it up so Ariel could get a good look.
“Jonathan Lovell. Vice President of Security for Genesis. Darrin did a check on him.”
Matt’s voice had gone a lot deeper and there was a thrum of something very like worry beneath it.
There was too much Matt wasn’t hearing about Lovell. People were far too cautious when talking about him.
Tightening his arm, he looked at Ariel, hoping to impress her with his seriousness. “If you see him, even just a glimpse of him, get out and call me. No questions, no delay. Make a quick excuse and leave. Call me the instant you see him. No ifs ands or buts.”
Looking at the face in the picture, Ariel wouldn’t have been surprised to see a forked tongue flicker out of that picture like something from a Steven King novel.
Nor was he the only one she had to worry about.
It was impossible to miss the concern in Matthew’s eyes or voice. For her.
No ifs ands or buts. She nodded.
“So,” she asked. “What now?”
Just the thought of raising suspicions about Ariel sent a chill through Matt. They were already looking at her. He didn’t want to give them another reason to do so. Even if she quit, if they thought she knew something, Columbus wouldn’t be far enough away. Marathon had an office there, too.
“For you,” he said, “business as usual.”
And he would stay close, he thought, pulling her tightly against him.
“We need more proof,” he said. “These are powerful people with influential friends who don’t realize they’re being shafted.”
“And they won’t like hearing it from us,” Ariel said, softly.
“No, they won’t, and very likely they wouldn’t believe us if we tried to tell them.”
Genardi’s cell phone rang. The private, disposable one. The one he should have made disappear. His stomach in knots, Genardi looked at the caller ID. U
nknown caller it said. Only one or two people with that designation had his number. Tom picked up the wireless handset rather than activating his Bluetooth headset, just as a precaution.
“Mr. Genardi,” said the voice on the phone flatly, “what is the latest on Mr. Morrison?”
Lovell.
There was an edge to Lovell’s voice.
Suddenly Tom felt like he was twelve years old again and in the Principal’s office. He’d hated that man. Or when his mother called him Thomas Allen, the way the old witch did when she’d been drinking too much and needed to put a whooping on someone or something. Usually him. He’d been an outlet for both his parents as a kid. Until he grew big enough and mean enough to put it back on them.
He went stiff as the hackles rose on the back of his neck. “There’s been nothing. No sign of him at all.”
The voice on the other end went much colder. “No, Mr. Genardi, the investigation. Some few days ago I suggested we learn a little bit more about Mr. Morrison. That was given to you to do. Have you done it?”
He had. It pissed him off to have this man ordering him around like some flunky. They had the same title, so he didn’t answer to Lovell or anybody. No one but the suits in the front office.
Except that he did.
“We talked to Parkhurst’s widow. She said he was some kind of glorified accountant, that’s what he’d gone to college for.”
A college boy.
There was silence on the other end of the line. “That’s all you did.”
“He’s an accountant, for Christ’s sake.”
“Apparently he’s a great deal more than that, Mr. Genardi. I’ve received a report from my own people. It was somewhat delayed by Mr. Morrison’s arrival.”
Now that voice was like an arctic breeze. It felt as if Genardi’s belly went cold and loose at that tone.
Genardi was wary. “Morrison was there?”
“Hmmm. Given the capabilities of Miss O’Donnell as regards the computer system and her seemingly inadvertent intrusion in the situation with Mr. Morrison in Birmingham, it was felt that perhaps some questions should be asked of her. It was Mr. Morrison who intervened. Whether they are actively working together or Mr. Morrison has become aware of your people is somewhat in question. The gentlemen in the front offices at Marathon, your company, are concerned.”
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