by Trust Fund
“Yes.”
“But there are so many people around,” Whitacre protested. It was well past sundown, but the thoroughfare remained crowded with pedestrians.
“Don’t worry about them. They’ll be fine.”
“Why not do it back at the hotel?”
“It has to look as if you were both targets.”
Whitacre put the cigarette to his lips again and drew on it deeply to calm his nerves. “I suppose,” he agreed.
“In a few minutes everything will be fine,” Scully assured him. “It will all be over and you’ll be the new chief executive officer of the largest information technology company in the world.”
Whitacre watched Scully slink away. “James Whitacre, CEO of Global Media,” he said to himself quietly. He liked the sound of it.
A few minutes later Whitacre spotted Richard Randolph, Global’s CEO, lumbering up the street toward the café lugging a bag filled with gifts for his wife and children back in the United States. Randolph was a bear of a man—six and a half feet tall—with a grand vision for Global Media and the determination and courage to make the vision become reality. In three years he had assembled the company with an adept string of mergers and a hard-nosed attitude. Randolph believed he had done the public a favor by bringing such an incredible array of technology together in one package. Randolph had no idea what he had really done, Whitacre thought to himself as he rose from his chair and shook Randolph’s hand.
The instant their hands met, Whitacre heard the first crack of the rifle, felt Randolph’s grip loosen, and watched the huge man topple to the pavement before him with a muted groan, presents tumbling from the bags as he collapsed. Then Whitacre felt a searing pain and he too crumpled to the street.
Bo sat in a wicker chair on the playhouse veranda, smoking a cigarette as he watched darkness yield to dawn over the lake. He’d spent the night out here, staring into the darkness, attempting to understand how flesh and blood could be so cruel. He had tried to talk to Jimmy Lee one-on-one several times since the confrontation in the study yesterday morning, but had been unable to gain an audience. The decision had been made. Paul was the victor. That was the reality. So was Montana.
“Bo.”
He turned slowly in the direction of the voice, suddenly aware of how tired he was.
Bruce Laird nodded as he sat down in the chair beside Bo’s. “Morning.”
Bruce Laird was Jimmy Lee’s personal attorney. A man who knew more about Jimmy Lee’s dealings, both business and personal, than anyone else. Jimmy Lee had lured Laird away from the white-shoe firm of Davis Polk seven years ago to be his point man. Bo and Teddy were privy to all issues concerning Warfield Capital; Paul had been introduced to all of Jimmy Lee’s many political contacts; and certain nonfamily insiders ran or had access to other specific areas of information within the Hancock empire. But Laird had access to everything.
Laird was only five six and a hundred forty pounds, but he made up for his lack of physical stature with a steel-trap mind that never forgot a name, a face, a place, or a document. He had a take-no-prisoners attitude when it came to negotiation, whether that negotiation had to do with a piece of beachfront property Jimmy Lee wanted to purchase or the price of a cup of coffee from a street vendor. Price tags and suggested legal language were starting points to Laird, and with the Hancock name behind him, he rarely caved to anyone on the other side of the table concerning either issue.
As Laird sat down it occurred to Bo that he knew very little about the man even though he was an integral part of the family team. All Bo knew was that Laird was a workaholic who rarely had time for his wife and two small children who lived with him in a sprawling Park Avenue penthouse; that Laird had little respect for Teddy or Paul; and that he was brusque with everyone, even the formidable Jimmy Lee.
“How are you, Counselor?” Bo asked. Jimmy Lee had addressed Laird as such from the beginning and now everyone inside the family called him by that title. And in return only Laird dared to call Jimmy Lee by the nickname J. L.
“Oh, I’m fine.” Laird frowned at Bo’s cigarette. He was a health nut who ran five miles a day and didn’t drink or smoke. “You’re the one in the hot seat, Bo. When are you leaving?”
News traveled fast. “Why do you ask, Counselor? What part of my life has my father promised you?”
“Don’t be emotional, Bo.” Laird was only a year older than Bo, but he dispensed paternal advice to all three Hancock brothers with regularity. “There is no place for emotion in business.”
Bo counted to ten quietly, refraining from his first-instinct response. Laird was a powerful man within the empire and Bo needed every ally he could get. “I like numbers, but I can’t be purely analytical like you. I can’t accept what my father did to me yesterday.”
“You’ll be back,” Laird said quietly.
Bo looked up at this small but encouraging comment. “You think so?”
“You’re too valuable. J. L. knows that.”
“Thanks for saying so.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Jesus, Counselor, I—”
“J. L. has asked me to make certain arrangements to facilitate your transition away from Connecticut. I simply want to know how long I have.”
Bo exhaled heavily. “I thought at first that it was going to be today,” he answered, watching the sun’s first rays glaze the lake’s surface. “But I’ve been given a one–day reprieve. Meg and I have until tomorrow to leave.”
As Laird rose to go he dropped a copy of the Daily News on Bo’s lap. “You’ll be interested to read about your exploits of the other night in the Society section on page fifty-two.”
Bo pushed the newspaper off his lap onto the ground. “So nice of you to stop by, Counselor.”
Laird stopped when he reached the veranda door. “For what it’s worth, Bo, I told J. L. I thought it was a bad idea to turn Warfield over to Frank Ramsey.” Laird sidestepped Dale Stephenson, who was coming out onto the veranda, then ducked inside.
“Hi, Bo.” Dale Stephenson ran Warfield Capital’s private equity operation and reported directly to Bo. The private equity group negotiated the purchase of significant stakes in large nonpublic companies and bought divisions of Fortune 1000 companies usually in partnership with those divisions’ management teams. Over the last five years the private equity group had been one of Warfield’s most successful entities, consistently selling its investments at five to ten times the initial purchase price.
Bo gestured for Stephenson to take the seat Laird had just vacated. “Thanks for coming out on such short notice.” Bo had awakened Stephenson at his Short Hills, New Jersey, home with a 4:00 A.M. telephone call. “Sorry for waking you up at such an ungodly hour.”
“No problem.” Stephenson was accustomed to Bo’s relentless work ethic. He assumed that Bo had identified another attractive investment opportunity for the private equity group. Bo’s referral network was immense and he was constantly sourcing opportunities before other investment groups did. In the private equity world you had to move quickly because the other groups had their networks as well and would ultimately find what you had found. The trick to the business was striking a deal with the management team or the young Internet entrepreneur before the other people arrived. “Got another deal for us?”
Bo kicked at the early edition of the Daily News. “I wish.”
Stephenson heard Bo’s dejection. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m going away for a while, Dale.”
“Away?”
Bo shut his eyes. “I’m ‘taking a vacation,’ as Jimmy Lee so eloquently put it. He and Paul have decided that I’ve become a liability to Paul’s campaign.”
Stephenson had heard rumors to this effect since last week—Ramsey had been dropping hints—but he hadn’t believed that they could be true. Bo was a hard drinker, there was no denying that, but he was the mastermind and without him Warfield would be rudderless. “I can’t believe it.”
�
�It’s true.” Bo dropped his cigarette to the granite, then glanced at Stephenson, a pasty-faced man who could structure a massive leveraged buyout on the back of a napkin. “Meg and I leave tomorrow for a ranch Jimmy Lee bought in Montana. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Who will—”
“Frank Ramsey,” Bo cut in, anticipating the question.
“That’s ridiculous. We can’t trust that—”
“What’s done is done.” Bo checked the veranda door to make certain no one was listening. “I need your help, Dale,” he said, lowering his voice.
Stephenson nodded. Bo had made him a multimillionaire over the last few years. More important, he liked the man. “What do you need?”
“Jimmy Lee has forbidden me to have contact with anyone at Warfield. I told him I needed to close the loop with you this morning on the transactions that are currently in process and he agreed to let me see you, but after this meeting I am officially exiled.”
“Bastard.”
“I have to stay in touch with someone about what’s going on at Warfield, Dale. I can’t just walk away from what we’ve built and trust that Ramsey will take care of it while I’m gone.”
“I agree,” Stephenson said hesitantly. He knew what was coming and it scared him. You didn’t disobey a direct order from Jimmy Lee without considerable deliberation, because you knew that the punishment upon discovery would be swift and severe, and he’d become accustomed to earning his millions from Warfield Capital.
“You and I will maintain contact, Dale.”
Stephenson grimaced.
“We’ll keep it very quiet,” Bo assured the other man, taking note of the reluctance in his eyes. “We’ll work out a system of communication that doesn’t make you vulnerable.”
Stephenson took a deep breath. “You’re a good friend, Bo, and you’ve made me a wealthy man. My family and I owe you a great deal. Jimmy Lee scares me, I’ll be honest.” He paused. “But of course I’ll do what you want.”
CHAPTER 4
April 2000
“Been drinking tonight, Bo?”
Bo reclined against the side of the Jeep, massive forearms folded over his barrel chest. “No more than usual, Sheriff Blackburn.”
John Blackburn aimed his flashlight into the Jeep. “There’s no need to be so formal.”
Emergency lights blazed across Bo’s three-day stubble. “Just the same, Sheriff.”
“Where’s your wife?” Blackburn asked, concerned. “Where’s Meg?”
Blackburn was a wiry man of medium height with curly red hair and a bushy mustache that looked too big for his angular face. He never carried his service revolver on his hip, but kept it back in the patrol car. He was a commonsense lawman who was more concerned with taking care of his townspeople than intimidating them.
“Where’s your wife?” Bo retorted. “Where’s Katie?” Meg and Katie had become good friends over the last year, during the Hancocks’ exile in Montana.
“At home,” Blackburn said calmly, keeping his annoyance in check, recognizing that Bo wasn’t himself. “Now where’s—”
“Meg’s back East seeing her family,” Bo answered.
“Who’s that in the passenger seat?”
Blackburn’s only problem was that he asked too many questions. “A friend.”
“I don’t recognize her.”
Bo knew better than to engage a police officer in conversation during a traffic stop, even an officer as good-natured as Blackburn, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to start something. As a child he’d always been the one to stir up trouble. Always the one to hurl a rock at a hornets’ nest or commandeer a canoe out onto the lake without adult supervision. “Do you have to know everyone, Sheriff?” he asked.
“Libby, Montana, is a small town,” Blackburn said evenly. He was aware of what Bo was trying to do. They’d played enough poker last winter to understand each other very well. “I like to know everyone.”
“Even visitors?”
Blackburn aimed the flashlight at the woman. “Especially visitors.” He turned the flashlight beam into Bo’s bloodshot eyes, inspecting the crimson road maps leading to sapphire irises. “What’s her name?”
Bo shielded his face. “Tiffany.”
“Where’s she from?”
“Missoula.”
“What’s she doing in Libby?”
“Participating in the local service economy.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s working.”
“Doing what?”
“Guiding on the Kootenai River,” Bo replied, getting annoyed at the third degree.
Blackburn snickered. “I doubt she even knows what a fly rod is.” He aimed the light into the Jeep again. “Judging from those red high heels, that skirt, or more accurately the lack of it, and that pallid skin, I’d say she’s active in another sector of the service economy.”
“What’s your point?”
“Are you and the boys at it again in the back room of Little Lolo’s?” Blackburn asked, chewing on a toothpick.
“Now, Sheriff,” Bo answered cordially, “you shut us down for the fishing season, remember?”
“Uh-huh.” Blackburn gestured at his patrol car. “Why don’t you take a quick walk with me?”
“Am I under arrest?” Tonight was the third time Blackburn had pulled Bo over in the last month. Bo had avoided arrest on each occasion.
“You must be drinking vodka, Bo, because I can’t smell a thing on your breath.”
“Am I under arrest?” Bo repeated.
“And if I say yes, what then?”
“You know the drill. I’ll request consultation with my attorney. Once I make that request you can’t do anything to me until he arrives. That is my right.”
Blackburn kicked at a pebble. “I suppose it’ll take him a few hours to get here from Kalispell.”
“At least a few.”
“You’ll be stone sober by then, won’t you?”
“Give me a little credit, Sheriff. That’s a trick question. I’m not going to incriminate myself.” Bo watched Blackburn exhale heavily. At this point Blackburn had to arrest him without administering a test, or let him go.
“It’s just a damn good thing most people aren’t as familiar with the law as you.” Blackburn patted Bo on the shoulder. “All right, you can go, but be careful and watch your speed. Slow and steady.”
“The speed limit in Montana is ‘reasonable and prudent,’ ” Bo replied, hauling himself behind the steering wheel.
“Not anymore,” Blackburn corrected, leaning into the Jeep through the open window, looking for a bottle or a gun, both of which lay concealed beneath the seat. “We changed that.”
“All right, all right. Seventy-five.”
“Sixty at night.”
Bo squinted at the sun, half hidden by mountain peaks on the west side of the valley. “It isn’t dark yet.”
“I mean it,” Blackburn said firmly. “Take it easy.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Blackburn took a deep breath. “When you first got out here to Montana a year ago, you were a model citizen. I never saw you take a drink, let alone get behind the wheel of a vehicle with alcohol in your system. Now I hear things.”
“Oh, you hear things, do you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have spies out there checking on me?”
“People talk and I can’t help but overhear them. You can throw a stone from one side of this town to the other.”
“What do you hear?” Bo asked impatiently.
Blackburn knew about the Hancock family wealth. The rest of Libby’s natives thought Bo was just an everyday Wall Streeter who had come to Montana looking for something ethereal they knew he’d never find, and who would go home after the second or third winter. They assumed, as they did about most Easterners who lived in large houses in the middle of huge tracts of land, that Bo was rich, but they had no idea how rich. Blackburn knew because he’d done his researc
h on the Internet, and because he’d been cautioned by an anonymous telephone call that the long arm of the Hancock family could easily reach Montana if Blackburn was too much of a pain in Bo’s ass. Then there’d be a new sheriff of Libby, Montana, the caller had warned. Still, Blackburn was a man of honor and he had a duty to the citizens of Libby to uphold the law, and a duty to protect a man from himself—at least one he liked.
“They say you’ve been drinking,” Blackburn said. “Drinking a lot.”
“Your spies are misinformed,” Bo countered defiantly.
Blackburn spat his toothpick to the ground. “I don’t think so,” he said confidently.
“I’m telling you so.”
The sun had almost disappeared behind the mountains now and Blackburn had accomplished his goal. Bo would be forced to obey the sixty-miles-an-hour limit or risk being pulled over again. “Bo, besides being small, this town is poor. There isn’t much of a tax base in our county, especially since the paper mill shut down last year. So when that new community center went up in the fall, I was surprised and I did some digging. I found out who donated the money for its construction. You did a good job of covering your financial tracks, but I figured out what had happened with some help from a banker friend of mine in Bozeman.”
“You’re crazy.”
“And I know what you did for the Schmidt family when their daughter was diagnosed with cancer. If that little girl hadn’t made it to the Mayo Clinic when she did, she wouldn’t be with us any longer. I know how generous you’ve been.”
“You don’t know—”
“Ease up, Bo.” It was noble that the man didn’t want any credit for his acts of kindness, but Blackburn knew with certainty about the two donations, as well as a dozen others Bo had made over the last year. “I’m trying to help.”
“Can I go?”
Blackburn was still tempted to haul Bo into town—for his own good, and the woman’s—but he was the only officer on duty tonight, and he needed to be out on patrol in case there were emergencies. And though Bo had clearly been drinking, his ability to drive didn’t appear to be impaired. “Yes,” Blackburn said. He glanced at the young woman and touched the brim of his hat. “Evening, ma’am,” he said, stepping back.