The words struck panic: The pilot’s cell!
Burn dived toward the body and snatched the phone from the pilot’s pocket. It made a slight chirp—the ring was just beginning—before he managed to remove the battery and kill the noise. He quickly went to the window and checked to see if Cantella and the others had heard the ring from inside the helicopter. He wasn’t sure. But it was time to make a move.
He removed the earbuds and switched off Ivy’s cell. Then he pressed the gun firmly to the side of Ivy’s head and, with the other hand, unfastened her seat belt.
“Stand up slowly,” he said, “and if you do exactly as you’re told, maybe the others will live.”
63
THE NOISE FROM INSIDE THE SIKORSKY MADE ME DO A DOUBLE TAKE. It sounded like a half ring from a cell phone after Eric dialed the pilot’s number. Eric and Olivia had heard it, too. The tinted glass was virtually opaque beneath the hangar lighting, making it impossible to see inside. Suddenly, the tinted glass door flew open. The sight of Ivy standing in the opening with a gun to her head—and Ian Burn behind her—sent chills down my spine.
“Nobody move,” said Burn.
The three of us froze.
Burn looked almost exactly the way I remembered him from our very first meeting at Sal’s Place. To hide the scar on his neck, he wore a black turtleneck beneath a black leather jacket with the collar turned up. A knit beanie covered the deformed right ear. The expression on his face was all business, no sign of panic. He nudged Ivy forward, and they stepped down from the helicopter to the concrete floor. I noticed that Ivy’s hands were fastened behind her back. More than that, I noticed the look in her eyes—a desperate need to tell me something.
I looked away, still wrestling with what Eric had told me back in the WhiteSands dining room—away from Olivia—about the woman I had married.
“You,” said Burn, speaking to Eric. “Step away from the others.”
As Eric moved closer to the hangar door, my phone rang—the cell that Ivy had given to me. It startled me, but I didn’t move. It was that funny double ring—the kind that announced a new voice-mail message. Somewhere between North Bergen and Somerset County a call had come through while my phone was either roaming or completely out of signal.
“Reach into your pocket slowly,” said Burn, “and take out the phone.”
I did as he told me.
“Who’s the voice mail from?”
I checked the display. The number was familiar, and it only took a moment for it to register in my mind. I’d seen it a dozen times just a few hours earlier at the Tonnelle Avenue motel, when scrolling through the call history on Mallory’s cell. The number was her friend Andrea.
And thanks to Ivy, I now knew that Andrea was FBI.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Apparently I was a lousy liar around loaded weapons; Burn clearly didn’t believe me.
“Put it on speaker and play the message,” he told me.
I retrieved the message and hit the speaker button. The message was almost ninety minutes old:
“Ivy, it’s Agent Henning. I tried your other cell and couldn’t reach you there either. I’m calling with a heads-up. After we talked, I checked all of my contacts to find out if Eric Volke had, in fact, told the FBI that Kyle McVee was behind the bear raid on Saxton Silvers and the murder of Chuck Bell. I know he claims to have informed everyone, but it turns out that he hasn’t said anything of the sort to anyone. He lied to you. So just be careful, and call me when you get this message.”
The message ended.
“That’s not true!” said Eric. “I did tell the FBI!”
Something was starting to smell rotten, and I was nowhere near Denmark.
“Quiet!” Burn shouted. “Put the phone on the floor and slide it over here. Slowly.”
Again, I obeyed.
“Now everybody hold still,” Burn said as he reached for his cell. “We have some distinguished guests to invite.”
64
KYLE MCVEE WAS BEHIND THE WHEEL OF A BLACK SUV, DRIVING toward WhiteSands. His nephew had arranged for transportation to be waiting for them at the private heliport a few miles away when they landed. He was in the passenger seat, too busy fussing with his new toy.
“I’m liking it,” said Wald.
He was inspecting his new weapon for the tenth time, an older but nicely refurbished Italian-made Beretta 92FS Compact. From a technical standpoint, it was everything he needed—thirteen rounds of 9 mm ammunition in a quick-release magazine, a smaller and more easily concealed version of its big bad-ass cousin, the M–9 pistol used by the U.S. military.
“I can see why Tony liked it so much,” he said, weighing it in his shooting hand.
“You kept Girelli’s gun?”
“My trophy.”
McVee flung his fist at him, hitting his nephew square in the chest.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“Dump that damn gun the minute we’re done here,” McVee said. “Now put it away before you shoot yourself.”
Wald double-checked the safety and tucked his trophy back into his shoulder holster. “Like I’m the only one taking unnecessary chances,” he said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” said McVee.
“The way we’ve played this so far, it would be difficult for anyone to place you in the same zip code as Ian Burn, let alone in the same helicopter hangar.”
“Fine. Your concern is noted.”
“I understand that they all have to go,” said Wald. “But there’s no need for you to be there when it happens.”
McVee gripped the steering wheel even tighter. “You know nothing about my needs,” he snapped.
“I’m just saying, we can handle this.”
They rode in silence for another minute, but McVee’s emotions were beginning to roil.
“You don’t know me,” said McVee, “and you certainly didn’t know your cousin.”
“Marcus?” said Wald. “Of course I knew—”
“You didn’t,” said McVee.
He paused, struggling to get control of himself. There was nothing to be gained by unloading on Jason at this point, but the kid seemed to think that this was all part of Kyle McVee’s business plan and personal vision, that he was proud of the way his nephew was comfortable in dealing with the darkest elements of organized crime. The boy couldn’t have been more wrong.
“You think this is what I wanted Ploutus to become?” he said. “You think I like being the Wall Street thief who manipulates the market? The go-to hedge fund for mob money?”
He glanced at his nephew, and from the look at his face, the younger man had never really reduced it to such vile terms.
“You pay a price,” said McVee, “when you reach a point in your life when everything you’ve worked for is bullshit. When it doesn’t matter anymore. When you need a man like Ian Burn to make it right.”
Wald was about to speak, then stopped, seeming to sense that silence was the wiser course.
“Do you have any idea what it feels like to see lightweights like Eric Volke rise to the top? To see a know-nothing like Michael Cantella named in Forbes magazine as Saxton Silvers’ youngest-ever investment advisor of the year? It would be hard enough to stomach that shit in any case, but in a world with my son dead and buried, it’s unbearable. Marcus was a dynamo,” he said, his voice quaking, “and we had plans. Big plans. If he were alive today, he’d be the CEO of Ploutus—a thirty-six-year-old king of the world. I’d probably be president of the NASDAQ. All that ended when that bitch came along. I was happy when she was lost at sea and the sharks got her—and just enraged when I found out four years later that it was all a lie. That Girelli didn’t really get the job done.”
“He was a punk,” said Wald.
“So are you,” said McVee, disdain in his voice. “How my sister popped you into the world I’ll never understand.”
Jason looked out the passenger’s-side window, toward the passing darkness. It wasn’t t
he first time he’d heard the insult.
“But I can tell you this,” said McVee. “Marcus was no punk. And for him, I’m going to spit in that woman’s eye before she burns alive in a WhiteSands helicopter with her conniving mother and the biggest punk of all—Michael Cantella.”
Wald’s phone rang. He answered. It was Burn. The conversation lasted just five seconds. He ended the call and looked at his uncle.
“Show time,” he said.
The engine revved as McVee accelerated down the last half mile of the WhiteSands access road.
65
THE MAIN HANGAR DOOR WAS CLOSED, AND I HEARD A CAR PULL up outside. The narrow row of polycarbonate windows that stretched across the big sliding door from end to end was above eye level, but Burn was standing on the boarding step to the helicopter, high enough to see out. He did not seem alarmed. A moment later, the smaller entrance door opened to the darkness of night. Jason Wald entered first, followed by his uncle.
Kyle McVee was dressed casually in a navy blue sailing jacket, linen slacks, and deck shoes, as if he were on his way to a weekend getaway at his waterfront estate in the Hamptons. His demeanor, however, was anything but relaxed. He walked toward Ivy and stopped in front of her, his glare like lasers.
“I’ve waited for this day,” he said.
“So have I,” she said.
McVee wasn’t the only one confused by her response.
Ivy said, “I’ve always wanted to know why you held me—and me alone—responsible for Marcus’ suicide.”
“You can’t seriously mean that,” he said.
“It was Eric who hired me for the assignment. But you never blamed him.”
She was clearly pushing buttons, taking her cue from the voice-mail message I’d played from Agent Henning. But McVee seemed to find something humorous about the exchange, and he was looking at me while talking to Ivy.
“Still playing the good wife to Michael Cantella, I see.”
“The only role I ever played was the one Eric hired me to play. But in the end, he wasn’t the one you came after.”
Eric spoke up for himself. “A little corporate espionage is what any reasonable businessman would do to protect his own company.”
“I’ll handle this,” said McVee, silencing him. “But Eric is right: He was doing something that anyone would do. You, on the other hand—you were different.” He stepped closer, his stare tightening. “There was no need for you to do the things you did to Marcus.”
“What things?”
“I’m sure you researched matters before starting your undercover role. You knew the family history was there—that his mother had taken her own life. You saw Marcus’ highs, and you knew how low his lows could be. And still you did whatever it took to get the information you needed out of him. You flirted. You slept with him. And you even pretended to be in love with him.”
“That’s not true!” she said.
“When you had the information you needed to report back to Eric, you crushed Marcus—told him to his face that he’d been played for a fool. My son didn’t kill himself because of anything Eric did. He killed himself because of you—the way you destroyed him.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” said Ivy.
“You used my son the same way you used Michael Cantella. Hell, you were even willing to marry Michael, if that was what it took to pull off your disappearing act.”
I exchanged glances with Eric—McVee had just repeated the story that Eric had told me in the WhiteSands dining room—and then I looked at Ivy.
Her eyes pleaded with me. “Don’t believe any of this, Michael. I married you because I loved you. I never slept with Marcus. Okay, I may have flirted—that’s part of the game—but it was never intimate. Never. And definitely not while I was with you.”
I didn’t know what to think, but an idea came to me on how to get to the bottom of it. I looked at McVee and asked, “How do you know Ivy was sleeping with your son?”
“Eric told me,” he said.
“Just like Eric told you in the dining room!” said Ivy. “It’s a lie, Michael.”
I wasn’t sure how she knew about that conversation, but it didn’t matter.
“That’s not exactly what Eric told me,” I said. “He said it was Kyle who told him that Ivy was sleeping with Marcus.”
McVee glanced at Eric, and I could see from the expression on his face that I’d raised his suspicions. “That’s not true,” said McVee. “Eric was the one who told me.”
Again, Eric was under the microscope. He wasn’t holding up well.
“Look,” he said, his voice shaking. It was as if he had finally realized that he was in way over his head. “I’m not trying to get anyone hurt or…killed. I’m just—”
“Shut up!” said McVee.
His words startled Eric—and everyone else as well. The tension in the air may have made it the worst conceivable moment for me to speak up, but it felt like now or never. I spoke straight to McVee, as if it were just the two of us in the hangar.
“Eric is lying,” I said. “And the reason he’s lying is because your son didn’t commit suicide.”
Thankfully McVee wasn’t holding a gun, because he would have shot me dead right then and there.
“No, I don’t mean he disappeared like Ivy,” I said, clarifying. “I mean his death wasn’t suicide.”
Slowly McVee’s need to hear me out prevailed. And even though I was speculating to a large extent, it wasn’t just something that had popped into my head on the spot. My suspicions had begun when Ivy told me that Andrea was FBI, and my focus had turned to Eric during our conversation in the WhiteSands’ dining room. I had to believe that everything Ivy and I had shared four years ago was real, and that Eric’s claims were false. There was no way she would have prostituted herself on a corporate espionage mission for WhiteSands. I knew she wasn’t just pretending to love me. I knew she didn’t marry me just to facilitate a plan to escape. Eric was lying. And people usually lie to protect themselves.
I had to go with my instincts on this one. It was life or death—literally.
“I knew Marcus,” I said. “Your son was a savvy businessman who did his homework. So savvy that I think he knew Ivy was a mole. He used her; she didn’t use him.”
“What are you talking about?” said Eric.
I continued my focus on McVee, ignoring Eric and everyone else. “Eric hired Ivy to work undercover and prove that Ploutus was spreading false rumors about WhiteSands to manipulate the stock price. The reality was, Marcus wasn’t spreading false rumors. The dirt he uncovered was absolutely true.”
“That’s preposterous,” said Eric.
“Maybe that information wasn’t just damaging to WhiteSands,” I said. “Maybe it was embarrassing to Eric, personally.”
“Michael, that’s enough.”
I was on to something. I could hear it in Eric’s voice. “Are you going to make me keep guessing, Eric? Or are you going to tell me what laws you broke?”
“Michael, stop right now, or you are going to take us both down.”
“Is that what you told Marcus,” I said, “when he confronted you with his discovery?”
Eric was silent, and I knew him well enough to realize what his silence meant. I almost couldn’t believe what I was saying, but everything was suddenly making sense to me.
“That’s why you killed him, isn’t it, Eric. Or maybe you had him killed. Made it look like he took his own life. Then you went to his father to tell him how sorry you were for the loss of his son. To tell him that it was all Ivy’s fault, that you never dreamed she would push him to suicide in playing her role. I’m guessing that you didn’t anticipate what Kyle McVee’s reaction would be—that he’d want Ivy dead.”
Ivy filled in the rest, with me every step. “So you helped me disappear, which worked out very nicely for you. That left no one to dispute your version of what happened between Marcus and me.”
“Once Ivy was gone,” said McVee, his train of tho
ught lining up right behind ours, “I stopped looking for the person who was really responsible for Marcus’ death.”
His glare came to rest on Eric.
There was chilling silence in the hangar as the truth settled in. Ivy, her mother, McVee, and on down the line—everyone was waiting for Eric to say something in his defense. But even Eric knew that there was no convincing anyone any longer. McVee stepped away from the helicopter. He stopped just a few feet away from me, his gaze still fixed singularly on Eric.
“Jason,” he said to his nephew, “spill the fuel.”
66
“WHOA, WHOA,” SAID BURN.
I was so spent, I’d almost forgotten that he was still standing on the boarding step at the open door to the Sikorsky, a head taller than Ivy.
Wald was approaching the helicopter and stopped suddenly, a fuel can in each hand. “What’s wrong?”
“Are you nuts?” said Burn. “You can’t just dump that much fuel inside a helicopter hangar.”
Wald lowered the cans to the floor, practically dropping them. Five gallons of jet fuel were much heavier than he had expected. “Who’s going to stop me, the EPA?”
Burn grabbed Ivy by the hair, as if reining her in. “This one’s itching to try another disappearing act. What do you think will happen if this building is filled with fumes when I have to shoot her? Each one of those cans is like eight hundred sticks of dynamite. We could all be toast.”
McVee and his nephew exchanged glances. It seemed they had finally seen eye to eye on something: the wisdom of having a guy like Burn in charge.
“What’s your plan?” asked McVee.
“I’m thinking a fuel leak from the helicopter, maybe from a bad filter seal or ruptured fuel line. An untimely spark. Tragic results. Help me get these guys aboard, then beat it. I’ll take care of the spilled fuel.”
“Good luck with that,” I said. “I count four of us, three of you, and only one gun.”
“Two guns,” said Wald as he pulled a pistol from his coat.
James Grippando Page 29