“But why the oil rig? Why the party?”
“Well, Jeff Fischer admitted his ex-wife was the one who had encouraged him to look into the company Michael eventually purchased, the one that owned the rig. So there’s that.” He glanced down at the pot. “Is it supposed to be getting that gray filmy thing over the surface like that?”
“What?” She looked back down and took to stirring more vigorously and he had half a mind not to bother her with the puzzle, at least until he’d eaten. But even as she stirred, she seemed to be turning the matter over in her mind. “What about the guy who talked to Tiffany? I take it there was nothing there.”
“Not according to Carter. He thinks maybe the real perpetrator left the purse for Tiffany to find and this guy just stumbled on it.”
“Hmm. Who was he again?”
“Some electronics mogul. From Texas, actually.”
“Really? Well, that’s a connection. Was there anybody else from Texas there?”
“I don’t know. I can ask. But what would this guy have against your family?”
“Maybe it’s not that. What was the Texas guy’s name again?”
“Kohler.” Vik turned the name over in his mind. Kohler. Kohler. Kolchinsky. That was it. The old Russian mobster who sometimes went by Kohler when he was traveling. He thought for some reason it made him sound American, although one word out of his mouth and that was blown. But surely he was dead by now. The guy was like a million years old.
Vik risked leaving Samantha alone at the stove to grab his cell and tap out a text to Carter. Maybe there was something there. “Your family doesn’t do any electronics, does it?” he asked as he typed his message.
“Not much. Some. Michael’s really the one who’s into that.”
“What do you mean? He invests in it?” What else would a CEO do?
“Michael was at Cal Tech a long time ago. When I was a baby. He came into the business because Daddy wanted him to, not that he’s ever looked back.” Vik glanced over at her and saw she was holding the spoon up again in thought.
“Stir,” he called out and she pursed her lips at him but did.
“Anyway, he fiddles around with electronics. Very good at it. Even has some patents.”
Kolchinsky. Electronics. Texas.
Vik was starting to get a funny feeling here.
He added an addendum to the text to Carter.
* * * * *
“You incredible incompetent.”
It sounded even worse in Russian. “English,” Heinrich Kohler muttered over the phone. If he spoke in his native tongue, a slight accent crept back into his English and he had worked too hard to eradicate it to slip back now.
The party on the other line helpfully repeated the insult in English.
“I have everything under control,” Kohler assured his boss. “There are no links back to me.”
“They questioned you, didn’t they?”
“As an innocent bystander. An observer. I never left the party as far as they know and the bitch is dead.”
“The Texan gambler?”
Kohler paused. “They have him, but again, no link to me.”
“This was supposed to go a good deal more smoothly. I don’t have to tell you that.”
It was unfortunate the FBI were involved now. He had counted on Damien Reynolds trying to hush the whole thing up and handle things privately. As indeed, Michael Reynolds had originally hushed up the Treasure Driller incident, even though that fucking gambler had leaked the story to the media. The point was to have them spooked, particularly Michael, and eventually turning to his firm for help. Why not? His firm was the biggest in Texas on the commercial security front. Or else they were supposed to be. What they really were was a glorified smuggling operation. But the whole of Texas thought otherwise. So when Michael Reynolds had security problems, who else would he turn to?
With the Treasure Driller right there, it was only natural. And Transcoastal had been the perfect patsy. He knew its decadent and lazy management would be a tempting target for Reynolds. Just the type of company he liked to turn around.
In addition to luring Reynolds into buying Transcoastal, he’d even finagled an invitation to the old man’s party so he would be there when something went kaboom. To offer his advice of course.
He would casually mention a type of bomb-detection technology he was developing that Reynolds might want to install on all their rigs, in all their homes, a revolutionary technology that could sense an explosive device in a mile radius. He’d say his firm was working on it, but just happened to be missing one little circuit, a circuit that Michael Reynolds was developing as a matter of fact. Reynolds intended to patent it and then sell it to companies manufacturing prosthetics, its real potential unseen, the idiots.
A joint development agreement later and Kohler’s dummy company would have the patent to the circuit and could begin manufacturing for its real purpose, military, and shipping the circuits out for an exorbitant price on the Russian black market. The cover of Reynolds Industries would help him bypass a lot of those pesky American export laws. Who would possibly question a company like Reynolds Industries, headed by one of the most powerful, politically connected families in the country?
There was no bomb detection device of course. But since there weren’t going to be any more bombs to detect, he didn’t see that as a problem. It had all been about luring Michael Reynolds to Texas in the same business sphere and getting that circuitry as well as the protection of the Reynolds family through a joint venture for his exports of it. With a family as rich and prominent as the Reynolds, this obfuscation had seemed to be the desirable route.
How had it all gone so wrong?
“I’ll fix this. Don’t worry,” Heinrich said.
“You’ve been in America too long. All these fancy plots and complicated shit. And look what happens.”
First the device was discovered and he had to kill Tiffany-Cissy-Lou. So he hadn’t found himself offering advice in the house in the Hamptons after all, but being questioned by the authorities. He wasn’t even supposed to know about the bomb. Lying low seemed like the only option.
“There’ll be repercussions if you’re not able to follow through on this, Gregor.”
“Heinrich,” he said automatically. It had been his own little amusing idea when he had first set up this alias. Giving oneself a name like John Smith might be open to question, but who would invent a name like Heinrich Kohler? Interpol had long stopped tracking his father, who had done the same, with the Kohler part anyway, once they’d convinced themselves he couldn’t blend in with his heavy Russian accent.
But with that new Reynolds brother-in-law—the snoop—being from Interpol, Heinrich wondered if he had been so wise to keep the Kohler name. But no need to mention that to his superiors in Russia.
“I still have this in hand,” he lied through his teeth.
And he would. He swore he would.
Even if at this point he had to get the circuitry the old-fashioned way and forget about all those cumbersome export regulations, hiding behind a joint venture. He’d figure some other way around getting them out of the country.
And he’d figure a way around Michael Reynolds too.
Stealing cars wasn’t the only thing he hadn’t forgotten how to do.
* * * * *
New York was every bit as rainy and dismal as Texas had been, but not as hot at least. It was a cool rain. The kind that made a person want to sit before a fire and drink cocoa. Which was exactly what Vanny had said she was going to do when he had the car drop her off at the Central Park West apartment before he went on to Reynolds Industries headquarters downtown.
“Michael.” His father looked up in surprise. “I thought you went back to Houston.”
“I did. With Vanny. But we flew here this morning. I wanted to talk to you.”
His father leaned back in his throne-like desk chair. “Well?”
Michael loved his father. He didn’t think about it o
ften and it wasn’t the easy affection Vanny seemed to share with her “Pops”, but he loved him and he knew his father loved him back, as he loved all his children. As much as his siblings thought their father favored the heir, Michael knew that wasn’t true. Damien’s children were equal in his affections, whatever they thought.
But their mothers were different. Michael knew, they all knew, that Damien had only loved Michael’s own mother. Damien made no secret of it.
He paced in front of the mammoth desk his father had used since Michael was a little boy and had come to the office to see “what would all be his someday”.
“What is it? You’re making me nervous, son. Is it more bad news about whatever’s going on? I’ve been working overtime keeping this out of the papers.”
He shook his head. “No. It’s not that.”
“Well?” his father barked.
“You claimed you loved my mother.”
Damien reared back, not expecting that apparently. “I did love your mother.”
“You know, I never believed you. Believed that.”
“What’s this all about, Michael?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m…confused.”
“About what? Why all this talk about your mother? I could never seem to interest you in that subject before.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t that.” He was having trouble articulating this. “It’s just, you made her sound so perfect.”
“She wasn’t. She was just perfect for me.”
“See, like that kind of thing. You were always saying that kind of thing,” he snapped testily.
“What kind of thing?”
“The kind of thing that belonged on a greeting card. The truth was she was a girl half your age and you had the hots for her. Period. The only reason you think you loved her now is because she died before you could get tired of her.”
He half thought his father, who’d never laid a hand on him, would react to that outright heresy by springing up from behind his desk and giving him a good punch in the nose. But the old man didn’t. He looked fucking calm. Almost amused.
“What?” Michael finally said, annoyed.
“You’re in love with your Vanny, aren’t you, son?”
“I am not. That’s not what this is all about.”
“Why not? Because you don’t believe in love?”
“Because I’ve known her less than a month! Because she’s half my age.”
“I doubt that. Two thirds maybe.”
“Never mind.” He didn’t know what he was doing going to the old man. For what? Advice on his love life? What a joke.
He headed to the door. Moving faster than he would have thought an eighty-year-old could, no matter how spry, his father came around from behind the desk and blocked his exit.
“Wait. Sit down, Michael.” He held a hand out to the sofa by the window.
Because he didn’t know what the hell else to do, he sat. Surprising him, yet again, his father sat right down next to him.
“Do you know how long I knew your mother before I knew I wanted to marry her?”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. A month.”
“I knew right away.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous.”
“I did. I swear. She was outside our headquarters, they were in Stamford back then, waving this picket sign—”
“I thought she worked for you.”
“I never said that. I said we met at work. And we did. She was protesting for ‘woman’s lib’, as they called it back then. Groups of women were targeting businesses with all-male executive ranks, which of course at the time was every business, and they were picketing and doing things like burning their bras. Right in front of our lobby.” He chuckled at the memory. “It didn’t bother me one bit. Back in those days, I barely stopped thinking about business for a single second. So I was ignoring them, going to my limousine, which took up half the length of the curb, and she planted her cute little behind—”
“Dad!”
“Right in front of me. Oh I was full of myself back then.”
“What’s changed?”
“Youngest CEO on Wall Street, a mover and a shaker, old family, old money, new brains, but she didn’t back off one whit. She shook that sign in my face and kept me from getting in the car. I was a goner from then on.”
Michael flopped back on the couch. “Love at first sight, huh? So what’s your point? We both go for beautiful young rebels?”
His father shook his head. “No. You’re not listening to me. My point is it happens. It does. There’s a person for us, or some of us, I don’t pretend to know, but that person is it. And I wouldn’t trade one minute with your mother for anything. Even if I’ve made a fool of myself my whole life trying to re-create it.”
“I don’t recognize myself,” Michael mumbled.
His father shrugged. “Look pretty much the same to me.”
“I want to marry her!” he blurted out. “Me! A girl I just met.”
“Like that’d be a surprise to anybody who saw the two of you in a room for five minutes?”
“Not fuck her! Marry her!”
“Well, I suspect you’ve been doing quite enough of the one.” His father laughed. “Right now, you look like you want to pummel me for even speculating about that. Oh this is so amusing.”
“Ha ha ha.” He glanced at him resentfully. “You’re not playing your part very well by the way.”
“What part?”
“Billionaire patriarch faced with son and heir consorting with a penniless, mouthy girl. You should be having her investigated or saying she’s after me only for my money or something.”
“Oh bah! It’s plain to see that Vanessa is probably the only girl you’ve ever met who couldn’t care less about your money.”
“It’s true. It’s infuriating.”
His father had always said his mother was only impressed with one thing. Michael had never asked what, afraid the answer was some sentimental claptrap, but now he did wonder. What would it take to impress Vanny?
His father patted him on the back. “Stop fighting so hard. If you’re afraid of marrying the girl now, there’s no law against that. Wait awhile before you do anything permanent.”
He shot up. “Like hell! I’m not letting her go anywhere. I’m marrying her as soon as she’ll have me and that’s that.”
His father chuckled. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. I felt the same way about your mother, Michael. But I’ll give you a hint. You have to be careful around a girl like that. She doesn’t want to feel like you’re trying to own her.”
He grinned. “Even if you are?”
“In a good way, son. In a good way.”
* * * * *
Vanny waved at the guard at the front desk of Michael’s apartment building on her way out into the rain. There were not only all manner of card keys and security cameras and whatnot for this exclusive piece of real estate, but a twenty-four-hour guard as well, sometimes two. Looked as if there was just the one today though.
She popped her umbrella open and braved the drizzle. The man had a gazillion dollars but not one damn container of cocoa to his name? At least he had an umbrella. It was only a few minutes to run down to the corner store and back for some, but it got her thoroughly wet, umbrella or no umbrella. She inserted the card key to the front door of the building, not waiting for the guard to buzz her in, which was a good thing since when she got in she saw he wasn’t behind the desk. Unusual, but she supposed the guy had to go to the can once in a while.
She put the card into the elevator that took her up to Michael’s floor and then the separate actual key-key, no card for the intricate steel lock, into the front door of the apartment. She’d left the fireplace on so it would at least be somewhat toasty when she got back. Heading straight to the bedroom to change, she contemplated taking a hot shower, but the cocoa lured her back to the kitchen in just a robe. She’d sip a little by the fire first.
On the
way back to the kitchen, a noise from one of the bedrooms in the back startled her. “Michael?”
It wasn’t Michael.
* * * * *
Michael’s cell phone rang and his new brother-in-law’s name came up on the caller ID as his driver pulled up to his apartment building. “Hey, Vik.”
“Hi. Listen, it turns out this Heinrich Kohler is not what he seemed to be.”
“Who?”
“The guy at the party. The guy you saw talking to Tiffany. He has some connections to the Russian mob. Grew up in Moscow, son of a thug there named Kolchinsky.”
“Russian? He had absolutely no accent.”
“Good with languages apparently, not something he got from his father. Criminal tendencies, though, he did.”
“So what would he want with Reynolds Industries?”
“Not sure. Carter has an APB out on him, but they haven’t picked him up as yet.”
“Okay. Thanks.” He hung up, glad he had gotten Vanny out of Houston while they found this guy. Curiouser and curiouser.
There was an awning in front of his building, so he didn’t get very wet in the two feet from the curb to the entrance. He pulled on the door, expecting the guard to buzz him in and was vaguely annoyed when he didn’t. He chuckled at what Vanny would have thought of that. “Open the door your damn self” came to mind. When he finally found his card key, he let himself in and saw the guard wasn’t at his station at all.
Before he’d met Vanny, he might have sought the guard out wherever he was, probably having a cigarette in the back, and remonstrated him. But now, he didn’t bother. She wouldn’t have liked it, he found himself thinking, even though he immediately chided himself for it. Pussy.
The fire was on when he let himself in to the apartment, but no Vanny in front of it. Maybe she was in the shower. With that hopeful thought, he dropped his keys in the bowl by the door and headed to the bedroom, calling her name.
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