by Reece Hirsch
He ran his fingers over the stippled plastic grip of the pistol that was cradled in the pocket of his leather jacket. Like a new dental filling, he just couldn’t get used to the feel of it. Claire kept the gun for security and had allowed him to take it only after an argument.
Will’s attention drifted for a moment as he watched a security guard pass. When he looked again, he almost failed to notice Sam, who was already standing before the bank of elevators. Will checked his watch: It was eight fifteen P.M.
Sam was carrying a briefcase and wearing a brown suede jacket and white khakis. He looked anxiously over his shoulder once or twice as he waited for the elevator to arrive.
Will approached while Sam was facing the closed elevator doors, his back turned. He reached him just as the doors slid open with a pneumatic gasp. Sam stepped inside, and Will followed.
Sam jumped when he turned around and saw Will. “Will! You scared the shit out of me! What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see you.”
“Well, it’s good to see you, buddy. I was just thinkin’ about you today. How’s that job search going?”
“I haven’t really gotten around to it yet. I’ve been kinda busy.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Sam said, slipping effortlessly into a tone of avuncular concern. “You don’t want too big a gap in your résumé.”
The doors shut, and the elevator slowly descended.
“Sam, I’m under investigation by the SEC, the DOJ, and the SFPD, so it’s not the best time for me to be going out on interviews.”
“Really? That’s tough. I didn’t know the investigation was still going forward.”
“Sam, cut the bullshit, okay?”
Sam smiled disarmingly. “William, if I cut the bullshit, there wouldn’t be anything left.”
“I know that you set me up.”
Sam looked incredulous. “What did you say?”
“You told Nikolai and Yuri about my involvement in the Jupiter deal. You gave them insider information on the transaction, and then you set them on me so I would think that I was their source. I was bound to be one of the first suspects, anyway, since I was running the deal.”
Sam laughed uncomfortably. “I know this has been a rough time for you, but you can’t just go around pointing fingers. You gotta take it like a man.”
“I know that I probably wasn’t your first choice,” Will continued. “You tried to use Ben Fisher, but he wanted the two of you to turn yourselves in to the Justice Department. Yuri and Nikolai were probably the ones who shoved him off the roof. Or maybe you did it yourself. Were you in the office that morning?”
“You need to get some counseling, Will. I don’t think you realize how pathetic this sounds.” Despite his bluster, Sam was shaken. He was probably trying to figure out how Will could have known that Ben wanted them to turn themselves in to Justice.
“Look, I know about your trip to Moscow for the supermarket joint venture deal. I know about Nikolai’s connection to the deal. The only thing I don’t understand is why you did it.”
Sam was anxiously watching the floor numbers, which were turning, ever so slowly. “What are you doing here, Will? You wearing a tape recorder? Is that what this is about?”
Will opened up his jacket and patted the front of his shirt, showing Sam that there was no recording device. The gun was now tucked into his jeans against the small of his back. He didn’t want to brandish it in the elevator for fear that security cameras or someone entering the elevator would see it.
“You should go home, Will. Don’t make things any worse for yourself than they already are.”
“That’s just it. For me, how much worse can it get? But you, things could still get a lot worse for you.”
“If you start saying crazy shit to the feds, they’ll see it for exactly what it is—a poor son of a bitch trying to cut himself a deal by slinging some mud.”
The elevator doors opened. Sam stepped out and turned to face Will.
“I’m going to get in my car now. So stop following me.”
“I have a gun. And you’re going to go for a drive with me. In my car.”
“What are you going to do, shoot me? That would be the stupidest thing you’ve done yet.”
“I just want to talk. I think you owe me that much. Now that I know.”
“You don’t know shit. And I don’t owe you shit.” When Sam was belligerent, he sounded much more like someone who had grown up in north Florida.
“I don’t want to shoot you, Sam, but I will if I have to.”
“You couldn’t kill someone, and you know it.”
“Maybe, but I would have no problem putting a bullet someplace where it’s really going to hurt.”
“All right,” Sam said. “You want to talk, we’ll talk. You’re the man with the gun.”
“Get in,” Will said, pointing to his car. “On the driver’s side.”
When they were both in the car, Will handed the keys to his BMW to Sam.
“Drive us out of the garage,” he said.
Once they were on the street, Will directed Sam to head south across Market. Will removed the gun from his jacket and trained it on Sam, holding it low so that it wouldn’t be seen by other drivers.
A few minutes later, they were under the Bay Bridge in a desolate area occupied by parking lots that were nothing more than vacant, unpaved expanses of dirt demarcated by chain-link fences. If you were an office worker in the financial district who could not afford thirty-dollars-a-day parking downtown, this was where you ended up. It was a way to fight the high cost of working in the city, as long as you didn’t have to go down there after dark.
Will told Sam to stop next to one of the Bay Bridge’s massive supports. Even at night it seemed to cast a shadow, blocking out the faint glow of streetlights and deepening the darkness. He cut off the engine and the headlights.
“Am I supposed to be scared? Is that why you brought me to this place?”
“That’s up to you,” Will said. “I just wanted a place to talk where no one would see us. I need to know the rest of the story.”
Sam turned in his seat to face Will. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to be straight with you. Up to a point, anyway. I just want you to know that it wasn’t personal. Those people are animals. You know what they’re like.”
“Thanks to you, I do, yeah. How did you get involved with them?”
“Nikolai and a couple of his thug friends showed up at my hotel room in Moscow when I was there to negotiate the Branson deal. They said that my client’s supermarket joint venture was going to put their small, local grocery stores out of business.”
“So they threatened you?”
“Sure, there was that, but it was all pretty businesslike, by and large. We reached an accommodation.”
“What kind of accommodation?”
“I got them in as investors on another transaction that I was working on over there.”
“You brought them in as investors? Are you insane?”
Sam shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. And it got them off my back. Nikolai was running a very profitable business. Even in that cut-rate currency, he was very liquid. And I thought the company was a sure thing.”
“What kind of company was it?
“Medical supplies.” He grimaced. “You have no idea how fucked up the health care delivery system is in the republics.”
“So the deal blew up, and you owed them something.”
“Right. That was when I started feeding them information on a few firm clients. The stakes rose from there. They wanted a bigger score, and I thought the Jupiter merger might be it, particularly when I learned about the company’s connections to the NSA.”
“So you knew about the Clipper Chip program from the start?”
“Of course. That’s why I chose that company—the insider trading was always secondary to that. But before I could give the Russians information on Jupiter, I had to give them you to cover my tr
acks.”
“I’ve always been your go-to guy, haven’t I?”
“If it’s any consolation, it’s true that you weren’t my first choice. I always liked you, Will. That was why I chose that dweeb Ben Fisher to take the fall—no pun intended. Unfortunately, he was such a straight arrow that he wouldn’t play ball. Like you said, he was going to the feds, and he wanted me to go with him. He forced our hand. He was such a loner that we didn’t have anyone we could use to threaten him with. With you, we had your mother and Claire. By the way, how did you know that about Ben?”
“Lucky guess,” Will said. Will gestured with his gun for Sam to keep talking. “And then you framed me for Ben’s murder.”
“You have to admit the access card thing was a nice touch. It focused the suspicion squarely on you and away from me, but it wasn’t enough to convict you with. That way, we could continue to use you.”
“Were you the one who put Ben’s security key in my pocket?”
“Of course it was me. Yuri and Nikolai couldn’t get access to the building that early in the morning without attracting attention.”
“So that means you were also the one who pushed Ben off the roof.”
Sam’s face darkened. “I wasn’t about to go to prison. Can you see me spending the rest of my life in a federal prison?”
“Actually, I can.”
“Well, I can’t. It just came down to a choice between him or me, and I chose me.”
“So why did you pick me to replace Ben?”
“You were leading the negotiations, so you were the logical choice.”
“And when the SEC and DOJ began suspecting me, I acted convincingly guilty because I actually thought I was the source of the leak. . . .”
“Pretty clever, huh? I had to have a decoy when it came to insider trading. The SEC tracks that stuff too closely. And I sure didn’t want anyone at Homeland Security to know my name.”
“So when Nikolai and Yuri cut me with the box cutter, they weren’t really looking for information, they were—”
“Just two boys having fun.”
“I thought that Nikolai and Yuri were just petty criminals. Are you saying that they were really in with Boka the whole time?”
“No. That part was pretty much true. Nikolai was using me as his entrée into the mafiya. Yuri was just along for the ride. They were both trying to prove themselves to Boka and his organization.”
“Aren’t you worried that they’re going to blame you for the money they lost on Jupiter?”
“That’s not a problem because they never actually invested very much money in Jupiter. We made up that story about losing a half mill just to turn up the pressure on you. We needed you to be highly motivated to get us what we really wanted—the encryption keys to the Clipper Chip.”
“If the Russians just wanted money, how did this turn into a terrorism scheme?”
“The mafiya could have used the encryption keys to commit identity theft or any number of crimes, but that would have drawn the attention of Homeland Security and the NSA. That was more heat than even they were willing to deal with. But they had no problem with selling the keys to a group of interested parties from the U.K.”
“You mean Aashif Agha.”
Sam looked surprised. “How do you know that name?”
“He was at Dacha one night when Nikolai and Yuri brought me there.” Will drew a breath. “All right, I’m going to ask you again. Why did you do this?”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, Will? It was the money. Boka pays me well for what he gets. And the encryption keys are going to go for a very big price. I’m going to retire early with what I make on this one. There were actually several terrorist organizations bidding. For them, the encryption keys were perfect. They offered the opportunity to do an enormous amount of damage to U.S. industries like financial services, health care, airlines, and defense. But not only that, it would be a huge embarrassment to the federal government because the keys weren’t even supposed to exist. Who knows? A scandal like that might even be enough to bring down a president.”
“People are going to die. They’re going to shut down the BART trains and release sarin nerve gas. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
A look of surprise crossed Sam’s face before he could disguise it. He clearly wanted to ask Will how he’d learned of the planned attack on the BART trains, but he knew he wouldn’t get an answer.
“What have you given the Russians so far?” Will asked.
“Not that much, really. A tip on a real estate development deal. Some personal information on a few clients that they could use for extortion.”
“You’re a partner. You make a good living. Why were you so desperate for money?”
“You really thought making partner was going to solve all your problems, didn’t you?” Sam asked contemptuously. “After a while, ‘making a good living’ is just not fucking good enough. You know how many deals I’ve worked on that ended up making other people rich? There’s a big difference between having a nice car and a nice house and being liquid. I got preferred shares on some of the tech deals I worked on, and I thought that was going to put me over the hump, but that’s all for shit now.”
Sam observed a brief moment of silence for his lost tech stock portfolio.
“Didn’t you ever think about the consequences of what you were doing? The attack on the trains is just the part of the plan that I know about. What if a thousand people died? Or a hundred thousand?”
“We’re living in an information age, Will,” Sam said matter-of-factly. “Information is just a commodity, like any other. I had some and I sold it. I can’t be responsible for what the next guy does with it.”
Will checked his watch again: It was nine forty P.M.
“You have to be someplace?” Sam asked.
“Just start the car,” Will said. He had heard enough.
Driving back to the financial district, Sam seemed to grow more relaxed. “Will, buddy,” he said, “I knew you weren’t going to shoot me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because everyone has a threshold they won’t cross, a thing they won’t do, even if it’s necessary to their success. Successful people just have that threshold set a bit higher than everyone else. Take you, for example. You’ve been willing to do the things that are necessary to make it at a competitive place like Reynolds, but you’ve reached your limit. This is as far as you go.”
“What self-help book have you been reading? The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Sociopaths?”
Sam laughed with a snort. “That’s funny. I’m going to use that.”
“Don’t get too comfortable over there,” Will said, growing annoyed. “I’m still pointing a gun at you.”
“You may be holding a gun, but that doesn’t mean you’re in control of the situation.”
“Explain that one to me.”
“Nothing you can do changes the fact that I’ve got Boka behind me. If you do anything except sit still for your prison sentence, you’re not going to live very long.”
“Now is not a good a time to be threatening me, Sam.”
“That’s not a threat, it’s just the reality of your situation.”
Will instructed Sam to drive north on the Embarcadero and stop in front of the Ferry Building. “Are we done here?” Sam asked, as the car came to a halt.
“Yeah. You can get out now.”
“One more thing,” Sam said, an assertive note in his voice. “I want you to give me the encryption keys.”
“I don’t have them.”
“I know you better than they do. You’re a capable guy, and Claire’s very sharp. I figure you two probably had enough connections over at Jupiter to find a way, particularly since you’re desperate.” Sam stared at Will for a long moment. “Whether you have them or not, I’m going to tell Boka that I think you do. So if you have them, you might as well hand them over. Boka is a very persuasive guy when he wants to be.”
After a long pause
, Will reached in his pocket and removed the memory stick, which was in a plastic baggie.
Sam grinned. “God, I love being right.”
Sam climbed out of the car and came around to the open passenger’s-side window to face Will. “You take care of yourself, buddy.” Sam squinted meaningfully at Will, the same look that Bill Clinton used to signify deep empathy. For Will, it was the ultimate expression of Sam’s arrogance. After everything that he had done, from murdering Ben to setting Will up to face a prison sentence, Sam still thought that he held some sway over him. Like a parent who always sees their child as a needy six-year-old, Sam would always see Will as the first-year associate who had once been so anxious to impress him.
“Good-bye, Sam,” Will said.
Sam turned and strode across the Embarcadero toward Justin Herman Plaza, crossing the broad median lined with palm trees. Will watched as Sam walked away. Will had no doubt that Sam planned to contact Boka to have him killed as soon as he was out of his sight. Sam had clearly been alarmed by the degree of knowledge that Will had displayed about Ben Fisher, Aashif Agha, and the planned attack on public transit.
There was a chill in the air, and the fog hadn’t rolled in yet. He had a clear view of the empty expanse of the plaza, which was lit by a nearly full moon. This was the place where not so long ago he had met Katya after his first encounter with Yuri and Nikolai. On the right was Vaillancourt Fountain, the enormous sculpture that resembled corroded ventilation ducts. On the left were the concrete ramps scarred by skateboard wheels.
Looming over the far end of the plaza was the white tower of Embarcadero Four. Underneath the tower was the garage where Sam’s car was parked. When Will dropped Sam off, he knew that he would walk in that direction to retrieve his car.
When Sam reached the center of the plaza, two figures wearing Puma tracksuits, one chocolate brown and one moss green, emerged to meet him. Will checked the time by the Ferry Building clock tower. Everyone was right on time for the ten P.M. meeting that Will had arranged.