Stone Cold (8 page)

“But you don't believe that?” Joe said.

“I don't know what to believe,” Rulon said. “I just know I don't think the best way to find out about Templeton or what's going on up there is to walk around with a state DCI badge, asking questions.”

Joe said, “Ah, now I get it.”

“Thought you would. Do you know the game warden up there?”

Joe said, “Jim Latta. I don't know him well.”

Said Rulon, “No one in Medicine Wheel County will suspect anything if Jim Latta gets some help from a fellow game warden. Happens all the time, as you know. That way, you can get access to that county in a way no one else could.”

“Do we let Latta know what's going on?” Joe asked.

“Your call. I'd suggest you wait to see if you can trust him. I'll let Lisa know that you're being sent up there to give a hand to Jim Latta, and she can let him know to expect you.”

Joe was taken aback. Was Latta under suspicion as well?

Rulon said, “I've asked our man at the FBI to fill you in on all the details of what they've got, and he's supposed to be here any minute.”

“Your man?” Joe prompted.

“Special Agent Chuck Coon. I believe you know him.”

Joe smiled. He'd worked for years with Coon.

“He thinks you can be a loose cannon,” Rulon said. “I couldn't disabuse him of that notion with a straight face.”

“He's a good man,” Joe said, and meant it.

“Too damned tightly wrapped, if you ask me. But a lot of those lifers are like that. Anyway, he said he'd brief you on what they know
and establish some kind of line of communication and support if you need it.”

Joe nodded, then asked, “If the FBI has these suspicions, why don't they send one of their own?”

Rulon snorted. “If those cranky hill people up there identified my undercover DCI guy, how long do you think a Fed in sheep's clothing would last? Those guys might as well have
FBI
tattooed on their foreheads.”

“I see your point,” Joe said, slightly overwhelmed with the implications of his assignment.

But this was Rulon's way: he was to work
for
the governor but
through
the FBI, with his own agency director providing bureaucratic cover without even knowing it. Thus, several layers of deniability were established if the situation went sour.

Rulon said, “For damn sure don't clue in the sheriff up there. That might have been the DCI agent's first mistake.”

Joe nodded and gulped.

Rulon again shot out his sleeve. “And we're out of time.” He stood and shrugged on his suit jacket. He said, “Thanks, Joe.”

“Hold it,” Joe said, standing. “I have a hundred questions.”

“I'm not surprised. Maybe somebody can answer them for you.”

“Governor . . .”

Rulon turned as he reached for the door handle. He said, “Joe, you know how this works. I smoothed the way for you to come back and even goosed your salary. And I left you completely alone. Now I need your help.”

He narrowed his eyes and said, “I'm not asking you to get involved in anything up there, and I damned sure don't want you risking your life. I can't have any more casualties on my conscience. But
find out what the deal is with Templeton, and let us know. Stay in the shadows, or the sagebrush, in your case. Just report back. Don't let things get western, okay?”

With that Rulon left Joe in his office, clutching the brim of his Stetson. He could hear the governor booming welcomes and homilies to a group of visitors in his larger office.

As he turned to exit, Lois Fornstrom stuck her head in the doorway and said, “Mr. Coon of the FBI is waiting for you.”

•   •   •

J
OE CLAMPED
ON HIS HAT
and shook Coon's hand in the anteroom, careful not to make eye contact with the citizens and lobbyists still waiting for a session with the governor.

Coon had aged since Joe last saw him. His chest and neck were thicker and his boyish face was cobwebbed with stress lines. He wore a dark blue suit, a red tie, and loafers.

He said, “Long time, Joe.”

“Yup.”

“Even longer would have been better.”

“Good to see you, too, Chuck.”

“Follow me. I have a feeling you're not going to like what I'm about to show you.”

Who is Wolfgang Templeton?

Joe and Special Agent Coon spent the ten minutes it took to drive from the capitol to the Federal Building updating each other on their families. Although he was the same age as Joe, Coon had started his family later in life and was going through situations Joe found strangely nostalgic. Coon's oldest daughter was in her second year of high school and had turned sullen, spending all of her time with her friends or texting with them in her room. Joe laughed, saying it sounded familiar. Coon's son was in the eighth grade and was a struggling point guard for the McCormick Warriors.

“He assumes he'll get bigger, faster, and quicker,” Coon said. “How do I tell him it may not happen?”

Joe shrugged. “Just go to the games and cheer him on. Believe me, he'll be the first to know.”

Joe outlined what was happening with Sheridan, Lucy, and April. As he did, Coon shook his head.

“Three teenage girls,” he said. “And I thought
I
had trouble.”

“They're not trouble,” Joe said. “But they're weighing on my mind right now.”

•   •   •

I
NSIDE THE
UGLY
F
EDERAL
B
UILDING
in central Cheyenne, Joe surrendered his weapon, cell phone, badge, cuffs, and bear spray, and argued with the officer to keep his hat. Coon intervened and told the security officer it was all right. Joe traded his possessions for a
VISITOR
laminate that he clipped on the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. They rode the elevator together—Joe's normal life was without elevators—and he followed Coon through a large room filled with cubicles and out-of-date computers to the supervisor's corner office.

Joe liked Coon, and they'd been involved in several situations over the years, although from different angles. Coon was professional, straight-up, and generally by-the-book. He'd chosen to stay and work in the Mountain West and not use the smallest state FBI office as a stepping-stone to a more high-profile post, unlike his predecessors. When Joe sat down, Coon outlined the agreement he'd reached with the governor's office: Joe would go to Medicine Wheel County and report directly to Coon, and he'd advise Rulon; Joe's role was not law enforcement or investigation but information gathering; Joe was
not
to represent himself as either an agent of the FBI or the governor's office; Joe was to extricate himself immediately if the situation turned dangerous.

Joe raised both of his hands shoulder height and dangled them and said, “Do I look enough like a puppet to fit the bill?”

“Very funny,” Coon said. “The idea here is Medicine Wheel County locals are used to seeing their game warden poking around.
Your presence won't stir them up. And if they get an idea to check out your credentials, they'll find out that you are indeed a Wyoming game warden of many years.”

Joe lowered his arms to his lap. “This is unusual,” he said, “you working with the governor instead of against him.”

Coon said, “I know it appears that way sometimes, and believe me, I have higher-ups who don't exactly like your governor. But I'm trying to mend some fences here. This antagonism between the national government and the states out here can't last forever. And if we can work together on this, everybody wins.”

“Gotcha.”

“So, who is Wolfgang Templeton?” Coon asked rhetorically from behind his desk. “Answer is: we're not sure.”

•   •   •

F
OR THE
NEXT HALF-HOUR,
Chuck Coon leafed through a file on his desk and hit the highlights. When Joe reached for his spiral notebook to take notes, Coon said it wasn't necessary, that the file in front of him was a redacted copy and that he'd give it to Joe to take with him to study when they were done. Joe sat back and listened, shaking his head several times.

Wolfgang Peter Templeton was born on a country estate between Porters and Pickerel lakes in eastern Pennsylvania to a father who was a college dean and a pediatrician mother. He'd been sent to private schools and appointed to West Point. Templeton had served as an officer in the army and was decorated for heroism for acts during the invasion of Grenada in 1983 when he was a commander in the army's Rapid Deployment Force, consisting of the 1st and 2nd Ranger Battalions and the 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers. His
niche was Special Ops. After twenty years in the service, Templeton had retired from the military and founded one of the first hedge fund companies in New York City and was wildly successful and an influential leader in global high finance and an annual participant in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Templeton had married Hillary (Rothschild) Swain of Sagaponack in the Hamptons, New York—she was one of two heirs to the Allegheny Group, a consortium of defense contractors. The wedding had taken place at St. Patrick's Cathedral with a massive reception at Tavern on the Green that was covered by the
New York
Times
. He was a Republican and rumored to have political ambitions and had given the green light to an exploratory committee in his home state of Pennsylvania, with his eye on the U.S. Senate.

Coon slid four eight-by-ten photographs across his desk, and Joe caught them. In the first and most dated, Templeton wore combat fatigues and cut a striking figure on a beach—probably Grenada. In the second, he wore a tuxedo and stood arm in arm with a beautiful woman—Swain, no doubt—in a flowing white wedding gown. In the third, he stared straight at the camera lens from behind a desk with the Manhattan skyline visible through the window behind him. The last photo was of Templeton at a lectern with other well-dressed men and women, obviously signaling the morning opening of the New York Stock Exchange.

Templeton was lean and angular, with an almost old-fashioned regal bearing, Joe thought. He had a strong jaw, an aquiline nose, large hands, and wide shoulders. His eyes exuded intelligence, competence, and warmth. In the most recent photographs, Templeton wore a thin mustache that gave him a rakish air, like a 1930s movie star.

In 2001, Coon read, Templeton divorced and suddenly sold his firm for millions just prior to 9/11 and seemed to vanish. There were short items noting his sudden departure in the
Wall Street Journal
and
Investor's Business Daily,
with one of the journalists speculating that Templeton, like Icarus, had perhaps “journeyed too close to the financial sun” during his meteoric rise. Joe thought perhaps that was when he'd first heard the name—while reading the
Wall Street Journal
in his dentist's office.

Coon paused and looked up at Joe and said, “I feel like I'm reading about the interworkings of an entirely different planet.”

“For the first time in my life, I feel like James Bond,” Joe said.

•   •   •

“The bureau had no interest in Templeton during his military career, his rise in business, and his decision to move on with his life,” Coon said, nodding at the materials on his desk. “In case you were wondering.”

“I was,” Joe said. “Then why the file?”

“This was all assembled later, after 2006,” Coon said, thumbing back. “The backstory was put together by staffers in Washington.”

“So what's the front story?” Joe asked. “Why was a file on him even opened?”

Coon explained that Wolfgang Templeton's name first came up in an interview with a confidential informant seven years prior, during an investigation of a U.S. senator who was suspected of accepting bribes from Middle Eastern governments. The CI knew the senator from their mutual participation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and during the interview he brought up an unrelated event:
the still-unsolved kidnapping of a scion of a privately held brewery fortune in Saint Louis in 2004. The heir to the fortune, Jonah Lamprecht, was bad news on wheels, Coon said. Lamprecht was a forty-six-year-old playboy who'd been arrested twice for aggravated assault and forcible rape but had lawyered up and beat the charges both times.

“Lamprecht was high-profile,” Coon said, “and sort of a poster child for slipping date-rape drugs to young women and assaulting them. One victim finally came forward and three other women said, ‘Me too.' You can imagine how the Lamprecht family felt. Jonah was also supposedly involved in sex-tourism rings and excursions to Thailand and the Dominican Republic.”

Coon said Lamprecht had enough underworld connections—and enemies—that when his Lamborghini Aventador was found parked and empty on a tree-lined road at the St. Louis Country Club, no one was shocked. When a ransom letter arrived demanding $5 million for his safe return, the extended Lamprecht family had brought in the FBI. A second letter arrived three days later, saying that because the family had disobeyed instructions not to involve law enforcement, Jonah would be killed.

Coon said, referencing the file, “No suspects were ever found, and no body. The letters were analyzed and provided zero evidence of any kind—no fingerprints, DNA, nothing. They were postmarked from Saint Louis and printed on a laser printer with Microsoft Word. The case remains open. But this CI told our people that it was whispered among the big shots at Davos that members of the Lamprecht family had hired someone to disappear Jonah two years before. The name he floated was Wolfgang Templeton. According to the CI, it was understood among the hoity-toity Davos types that if any of
them needed something done in their private lives or businesses and they were willing to pay a ton of money to get it done right, Wolfgang Templeton was the man to contact.

“That's when the file was opened,” Coon said, thumbing ahead. “Now jump to 2008. Two Columbia grad students launched a computer application in their dorm room that supposedly, through some kind of voodoo algorithm, would go out and search the Internet and assemble an email list of like-minded consumers based on their social network posts and Internet searches and crap like that. They claimed they could create surefire customer lists for specific products. When the word got out, all the big Internet companies beat a path to their door because no one else had been able to figure it out yet so specifically. Everybody wanted to buy their little start-up, and the bidding began. We're talking billions of dollars here—”

Joe said, “I know the rest. I remember reading about it. Just a week or so before the auction, a third grad student named Brandon Fonnesbeck pops up and says the two guys stole the algorithm from
him
, and he claims he has emails from them to prove it. Then, before he can reveal the evidence, Fonnesbeck's boat is spotted off of Long Island and he's not on it. His body is never found.”

Coon raised his eyebrows, impressed. “And here I thought you spent all your time checking fishing licenses.”

“What do
you
know?” Joe said sarcastically. “Continue.”

Coon smiled. “So three years ago, another CI is in a bar in Silicon Valley, drinking vodka with a group of high-tech CEOs. They're railing on and on about Apple—how they hate Steve Jobs, who they say keeps stealing stuff out from under them and making billions of dollars from their work. One of these guys jokes that they ought to get together and pool funds and hire somebody to disappear Jobs.
It's a joke, and they never did anything. But when Jobs died of natural causes, our CI remembered the conversation. Guess what name came up that night?”

“Wolfgang Templeton,” Joe said.

“Correct,” Coon said. “Which says to me there is a certain name recognition of this guy among a certain level of people. The kind of people who travel on private planes and own multibillion-dollar firms. We're talking about a level where high-finance types and politicians mix together—the
elite
. They interact with one another at conferences and forums like Davos. And when they talk off the record to each other about their problems, apparently the name Wolfgang Templeton comes up.”

Joe nodded and sat back. The hook was set.

“Have you ever questioned him?” Joe asked.

“Me personally, no. I've never laid eyes on him. But after his name came up on the Lamprecht kidnapping, two agents from our New Orleans office—Templeton was living in one of those old plantation mansions at the time, I guess—went and knocked on his door. He said he had no relationship at all with the Lamprecht family and had no idea what they were talking about. They described him in the file as very courteous and helpful, but useless in their investigation. The agents had nothing to pin on him—no witnesses, no evidence—just that his name had come up. Reading it, well, it's kind of embarrassing. Templeton had alibis for the date of the kidnapping, and those agents were sent home with their tails between their legs.”

“And now he lives in Wyoming?” Joe said, shaking his head. “How'd that happen?”

“That's what we'd like to know,” Coon said. “Apparently, he sold out in New Orleans shortly after that visit by our guys and quietly
bought the place in Medicine Wheel County. He did it under the radar, through third-party firms. Nothing illegal about that, but it indicates a penchant toward secrecy.”