by Mike Cooper
But there was only one main road. St. Joseph’s Hospital was in a rural county, a small town around it, and when the Russian made his departure, he really had only two choices of direction.
If it was me, I’d head west, back toward Pittsburgh. That’s where his colleagues were, that’s where all this started, that’s probably where he was more comfortable. I’d pointed my truck in that direction on the same reasoning.
So I slipped into the cab, using the passenger door and thankful for the broken dome light, and sat to wait.
Plenty of traffic continued toward the hospital. Not so much in the other direction. Two news vans appeared, going about ninety miles an hour, and I thought I heard a helicopter, too. Some local TV anchor just got the résumé opportunity of his or her career.
A few minutes went by. I checked my phone—still powered, no messages. On the off chance, I dialed Zeke’s number.
“What?”
Faint and weak, but it was him.
“Hey,” I said. “You okay?”
A raspy noise came over the wire, which I realized was Zeke laughing. “Shit, that hurts. What the fuck did you do in here?”
“Self-defense. You saw the guy come in, right? I had to drop half the building on him to make him stop.”
“Guess I appreciate it.”
“Where are you?”
“Cafeteria. They moved out the chairs and shoved us all in. About twenty-five patients in here, beds all every which way.”
He really didn’t sound good now. “I hope this didn’t set you back too far.”
“Just glad to be alive.”
“Yeah.” I watched a pair of motorcycle officers go by, sirens loud and lights flashing fore and aft. “Me too.”
“You waiting for him?”
Shot up, half dead and full of painkillers, Zeke was still sharper than anyone. “A quarter mile away. Kind of a long shot.”
“Luck.”
“You sure you’re safe?”
“Way too many people around. Have to knock past ten crash carts to get close. Don’t worry—he’s gone.”
I thought so, too. Coming into the hospital in the first place was an aggressive move, but assuming Zeke was right, the Russian had been on surveillance outside, waiting for me. When I walked up, he must have worried he might not see me on the way out—a person on foot would have far more options on leaving than a driver. So he’d risked a quick entry.
But same as after he’d shot the lawman near the mill, he was too careful to stick around once things went pear-shaped. Far, far too many people were involved at the hospital now, including probably every law enforcement official in a fifty-mile radius. He had to be on his way out.
And son of a bitch, there he was.
“Got to go,” I said and hung up.
How many white contractor’s vans could there be in Allegheny County? I saw it coming down the road, waited just long enough to confirm and ducked below the window level. It passed without slowing, ten feet away, the sound of its wheels and engine loud. A few seconds later I sat up and saw the taillights following the curve of the road ahead.
I started the truck—first try, amazingly, maybe it was getting used to me—left the headlights off and pulled onto the road.
And lost him in about one minute.
He wasn’t even trying. My truck was just too slow. The road away from the hospital entered the hills, made some turns, bumped over a decaying concrete bridge. By the time I reached a more open space, dashed line again and some clear vision, the taillights were gone.
I stopped.
With the window rolled down, cooling night air drifted through the cab. A small mobile home park sat off the road ahead, maybe five older trailers in a flat, mowed field. Three were occupied—the usual blue glow—and one still had Christmas decorations up, four months late. Icicle lights dangled from its roof edge.
I was mad as hell at the Russian, by the absurd madhouse at the hospital, by the lousy vehicle I’d been reduced to. I wanted to get out of this stupid backward countryside and go home. How had such a simple job gone so far off the rails?
Not to mention I was hungry. I checked my pockets, hoping for an overlooked granola bar. No luck.
But I did find Nabors’s phone. I’d forgotten all about it, ever since taking it from him after our little interview.
Hmm.
A smartphone of some kind. I turned it on, and didn’t recognize the icon set—Christ, was he using Windows Mobile? My estimation of Nabors, already scraping the bottom of the mine shaft, dropped further.
I poked around, trying to find recent calls and messages. Nothing interesting. He didn’t text, he didn’t seem to use the browser, and a skim through the contact list seemed to be all business numbers.
There might be more useful data lurking in the cache. I didn’t feel like excavating it now. But just before turning it off again—he might have reported it stolen, and for all I knew wireless triangulation was flashing my location—I paused.
Then I dialed 911.
“Hey, police?” I pitched my voice high, put in some tremolo. “Some crazy driver just about drove me off the road! You got to stop this guy, he’s gonna cause a huge accident.”
“Your name and location, sir?”
“I’m on Tuppers Road right outside town. Minding the speed limit, right about thirty-five—and suddenly this van is in my rear- view, flashing his high beams, tailgating. Then he actually bumps me! Jams his bumper right into mine! About drove me straight off the road. And he’s honking his horn the whole time.”
“Any injuries?”
“No, no, thank goodness, I kind of skidded and turned all the way totally around, but still on the road somehow. He roared past without even stopping!”
“What’s your name, sir?”
“It was a white panel van,” I said. “Had ladders or something on the roof. I got a good look.”
“Is this your phone number?” She read off ten digits, presumably Nabors’s. Even if he’d blocked Caller ID, E911 services have automatic overrides.
“I don’t want any trouble. Just catch that jerk. He’s probably drunk, and he’s headed for Leechburg. The way he’s driving, you’ll have all sorts of reasons to pull him over.”
I hung up and powered down the phone.
Now I felt a little better.
—
I slept in the truck that night.
Cash was running low, I didn’t feel like driving all the way back to Pittsburgh, and I’d started to worry about what other methods the Russians could have for tracking me down. That I’d missed the rental-fleet LoJack was bad enough. What else might I have overlooked?
I used to be able to sleep wrapped in a poncho on snow-dusted hard rock with nothing but cold MREs and eighty pounds of kit for company. Maybe I’d gone a little soft since those happy days, but one night of car camping was hardly roughing it.
Especially after I stopped at a Walmart for supplies. The superstore was unexpected, vast and windowless and brightly lit, the parking lot half filled even this late at night. I guess we were near I-76. Even so it had the same feel as one of the U.S. military’s prefab bases, a fully functioning community airlifted into the wilderness. At the edge of the lot three RVs were parked for the night, awnings unrolled and lawn chairs out, folks drinking beer and eating from a huge box of pretzels they’d probably bought inside.
A camo sleeping bag, a change of socks and shirt and a loaf of bread plus cheese cost less than one night at the Clabbton Motor Inn. Maybe those RVers knew what they were doing.
Not that I wanted to stay there. I drove on, the megastore’s bright lights fading in the rearview like I was driving away from Vegas into the desert.
Eventually I found a deserted state road-maintenance facility. A plastic awning, open at both ends, covered a twenty-foot pile of sand—for the winter plows—and two hard-used dump trucks were parked next to a small brick building. The asphalt lot was otherwise empty, and though the whole thing was fenced in
with chain-link and a roll of razor wire, a dirt path led around the perimeter to a pair of dumpsters.
I killed the headlights and bumped to a stop.
Silence. The sand pile stood between me and the road, blocking casual notice, and the dumpsters were empty. No bad smells, just light wind in the trees. After I’d pissed against the fence, I noticed a faint sound of running water, and followed a footpath down to a creek. I had to use my phone’s display as a flashlight in the woods.
The stream descended from a fold in the hill, burbled through some rounded stones, and disappeared into a culvert under the road. I sat on a rock by the rill—not the first to do so, judging by the soda cans and cigarette butts I saw now that I was closer to the ground. Probably where the maintenance guys took their breaks.
After a while I went back to the truck for the bread and cheese. I’d hardly started when the phone rang, startlingly loud in the night’s stillness.
“Silas, it’s Johnny.”
“Hey.”
“Where are you—still in Philly?”
“Pittsburgh.”
“Whatever. Say hi to the flyover people.”
Maybe I’d been feeling a little sorry for myself, stranded in the middle of nowhere, guilt about Zeke pressing, assassins trying to kill me for unknown reasons. It was nice to hear a voice from home.
“What’s up?”
“I just got served.”
Huh? It was ten-thirty, late for dinner even by Johnny’s careless standards. “Why?”
“Ah, just bullshit. The U.S. attorney is looking for headlines again, so every small-fry hedge fund in Manhattan is getting subpoenaed.”
Oh. “For what?”
“Insider trading, to judge from the discovery request. We’re pure as driven snow, of course. They’re just fishing.”
“Phone calls, contacts . . . ?”
“Exactly. On specific dates. I put one of my guys on it.”
“You keep your own phone records?”
“What? No, not that. I’m having him look up the market data.”
It took me a moment, then I laughed. “Why bother? Whatever happened, it’s done and gone.”
“Yeah, but if we can identify the trades, maybe we can guess at who was involved.” Johnny’s voice lowered. “And then we can . . . hammer them.”
The USA was giving too much away. By indicating when the insider contacts might have taken place, she’d more or less told Johnny where to look for the suspicious activity. It wasn’t completely obvious—serious violators had moved away from public markets to things like debt derivatives or credit default swaps, precisely to better conceal their activity—but some twenty-five-year-old could stay up all night and figure it out.
Once Johnny knew roughly what had happened, he might be able to determine the prosecutor’s actual targets. And then he could go after them full bore: shorting their positions, getting into their deals on the other side, whatever opportunity might arise.
“The USA knows all that,” I said.
“Sure.” I could almost hear Johnny shrug. “It’s probably deliberate.”
“What? No. You think?” Even jaded as I’d become, this seemed over the line. “She’s using you?”
“Everyone who got paper today, we’re all doing exactly the same thing.” Johnny laughed. “Whoever the prosecutors are targeting, they’ve just ridden into the Valley of Death.”
“But why—?”
“To force a settlement, probably. At this point the guy’s roadkill. Even if the suspicious trades turn out to be nothing but innocent coincidence, he’s staring into the massed cannon bores of every soulless trader on the Street.”
“Soulless?” Sometimes Johnny was almost poetic. “That would be, let’s see, all of them.”
“Exactly.”
“It’s self-fulfilling.”
“A perfect trade,” Johnny said. “Can’t lose. So I have to be in.”
“And the USA—”
“Like I said, she gets the settlement. Publicity. Another inside-trading criminal goes to jail—well, probably not jail, but probation and a revoked license. Public confidence in our free-market system is restored. It’s morning in America.”
I worked on a chunk of cheese, leaning against the truck’s hood.
“Is that all she gets out of it?” I asked.
It took Johnny a half second—but that’s a half second longer than usual. “Shit. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
“I mean, she knows the target is going down. And she knows before absolutely anyone else because she’s pulling the trigger.”
“Son of a bitch. She’s in the game!”
“Yeah.” I gave him a moment. “Or maybe not. She’s an upright public official. Spotless.”
“If you read the Times. The Journal seems to have a different opinion.”
Well, that right there told you all you needed to know, but Johnny and I didn’t need to get into another argument about the Foxification of the Wall Street Journal’s coverage. “Honestly, if she was in it for the money, there are many, many easier ways of doing it. Without even breaking the law, the way the revolving door’s been spinning lately.”
I finished the bread and wrapped the remaining cheese in the plastic bag. I wished I’d gotten some fruit, too, but nothing had looked particularly fresh in the produce aisle.
“Fuck, forgot why I called,” Johnny said. “I found out something about Dagger Light.”
“Dagger . . . ? Oh.” The Montserrat holding company fronting for Clay Micro’s potential buyer. “Clara called you.”
“You haven’t been keeping me in the loop,” he admonished.
“Haven’t had time. Pittsburgh’s more exciting than you might think.”
“That’s okay. She brought me up to date.”
“Good. So did you track down Dagger Light’s real owners?”
“No. I don’t think so. But there’s a connection—you know how these things work, fifty-one-percent ownership by a law firm in the Caymans, which is in a joint investment with another brass plate in the Bahamas, which has nonvoting stock in an Isle of Man SIV that controls sixty percent of Dagger Light’s other primary investor, and that’s just getting started. The ownership diagram already looks like a plate of spaghetti.”
Typical money laundering—nothing complicated in concept, just layer upon layer of interlocking relationships, impossible to pull together coherently. “Okay.”
“So that Bahamas nominee company? I found the incorporation papers. There are more entities in between, but ultimately one of the beneficial owners seems to be Sweetwater Institutional Investors.”
That took a moment to sink in.
“Holy batfuck.” I couldn’t believe it.
“That’s right.”
“Sweetwater owns Clayco. Sweetwater also owns Dagger Light. Wilbur Markson is selling Clay Micro to himself. ”
“Looks that way.”
“That’s just . . . fucked up.”
“It explains one thing.” Johnny paused a moment, then came back. “Sorry, had a message there. What was I—? Clayco, right. With Markson involved on both sides, you can see why they’re desperate to clean up a mucky spot on the books.”
“By clean up, you mean obliterate.” A few reversed journal entries wouldn’t do it. The beauty of double-entry bookkeeping—properly done—is that everything is transparent, all history right out in plain sight, even after you’ve swept up. Clayco had taken more extreme measures—Ryan and me and maybe Harmony—because they wanted the dirt gone.
“They’re going after this problem with an acid bath,” I said.
“I’ve seen Sweetwater at work. They’re altar boys. No, priests. No, wait, not like that—you know what I mean.”
The Catholic Church isn’t exactly a good metaphor for moral behavior anymore, but I followed Johnny’s point. “Sweetwater can’t allow even the slightest hint of impropriety to slip out.”
“Of course, the whole deal feels improper. If
nothing else it’s self-dealing, but the way they’re trying to keep it secret—something’s wronger than that.”
I walked away from the truck, pacing along the fence.
“Unbelievable.”
“I’ve got to go, but one other thing to think about.”
“Yeah?”
“The Russians.”
Oh. Indeed, them. “How do they fit in?”
“If they’re mixed up in Dagger Light somehow . . .” Johnny’s voice trailed off. “I can’t see it. Markson wouldn’t ever get in bed with the mafiya.”
“If he’s pulling shit like this with Clayco, he might be doing anything. He could certainly be working with Russian money. It’s nice and clean and legitimate, up in the stratosphere. Hell, they own the Nets.”
“All the more reason they’ll want to sweep everything under the rug.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“Everything,” said Johnny. “Including you.”
“Good point.”
“I’ll keep my guy on the research.”
“You know, it may not matter.” I ran my hand along the chain-link, looking up at the night sky. “They’re Russian. I don’t know what they want but they’re sure as hell motivated, judging by the number of firefights they’ve started out here. I don’t think I care exactly which Russian oligarch is involved, I just want to get out.”
“Firefights?”
“Put a Google alert on ‘Pittsburgh’ plus ‘unexplained shooting.’ I don’t think it’s over.”
“I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll say it again, Johnny—stay away. I really appreciate the research, but you don’t want to be transacting anything with this crew.”
“I got it.”
We hung up. I finished my dinner, brushed my teeth at the creek and unrolled the sleeping bag in the bed of the truck.
The night was perfectly clear overhead. I looked up again, noticing how many stars there were in the sky away from the city. I could even make out the Milky Way.
It was like the sky when I was a kid.
Comforting to think about all the other worlds out there, all the distance, the impossible light-years. Some people are disquieted by the realization of earth’s ultimate insignificance, our vanishingly small place in the universe. But I’ve always liked it.