Clawback (35 page)

“Sounds like you have a piece of it.”

“Not much.”

Right. Johnny wasn’t much of a poker player.

He went back to his computer. “MarineRegistryOnline-dot-com. That looks good.”

“Well?”

“They’re asking for a credit card number.”

“Yeah, that’s how it works. Who the hell does your shopping for you?”

“The help.” Maybe he was serious. “Give me a half hour.”

“An address, too, if you can get it.”

“Right.”

I tucked the phone away as I came to the edge of the park. A forlorn ice-cream vendor was packing it in, shuttering his cart and folding the umbrella. When the light turned I squished across Fifth Avenue.

I needed dry clothes, but I still couldn’t go home—even more so now, with Hayden under the bright lights, Rondo getting all kinds of questions and probably every cop in the city looking for me. This neighborhood had nothing but high-end women’s boutiques and bespoke tailors. Finally, in a sandwich-and-gelato multimart, I found a display of tourist gimcrack, including some souvenir clothing. For seventy bucks I got an FDNY hoodie, a T-shirt with the notorious FML subway sign and a huge Yankees umbrella.

“You want a bag for all that?” The girl behind the counter looked dubiously at the damp bills I handed over.

“No, I’m changing into them right now.”

Down the street I bought an oversize, overheated coffee with extra whipped cream. The shop was bright and noisy, one of those places that costs four times as much as McDonald’s but has the same cheap plastic furniture. I sat in a corner, nipping at the scorching caffeine, and examined my half-dozen cellphones. Remarkably, they all still worked. I was about to turn them all off again when the blue-taped one rang. I looked at the number but drew a blank.

Of course I’d forgotten who I’d assigned blue to.

“Hello?”

“Don’t you ever answer your phone? I thought you gave me this number so I could always reach you! I’ve been calling for two hours.”

Ganderson, sounding just like Clara. Was I really so out of sync with the pace of modern life?

“I turned it off while I went for a run,” I said.

“What?”

“Friday’s my long day. Fifteen miles.”

“Oh. Listen, I’ve got your meeting with Plank set up. Where are you?”

Meeting? “I have to take a shower.”

“Make it quick.”

“But—” I frowned. “I thought Terry was safe. Now that the police seem to have caught the terrorist.”

“So they
say
.”

“You don’t believe them?”

“I stopped believing the government the same time I stopped believing in the tooth fairy.”

“Well—”

“More important, Terry himself doesn’t think he’s out of danger yet. He wants you on board, PDQ.”

I had no idea what those initials meant. Old folks are always giving the new generation shit for textspeak, but they have plenty of their own inscrutable jargon, IMAO.

“Fine. I’ll see him. But let’s agree on a minimum, okay?—if I get there and he’s changed his mind, I still get a day’s pay.”

“No problem. Sure.”

I looked at the phone. No
problem
? No nickel-and-dime outrage? Ganderson might actually be worried.

“So where is he? Some private estate, surrounded by militia? An underground bunker? Iowa?”

“No, no. He never left Manhattan.”

Ah. Not bad. Whoever was running Terry’s security had some smarts. The most dangerous times are when you’re moving, not when you’re hunkered down, so it made sense for Terry to have gone to ground in place.

“He’s going to make a public statement,” Ganderson continued. “Later this evening. He wants you around to double-check, keep an eye out, like that.”

I started to see why Ganderson was concerned. “Public statement? Why bother?”

“Too much speculation around his company. He wants Plank Industrials out of the news, for good. Standing up in front of a crowd, and nothing happening, makes the point that he’s safe and the hyenas should hump off elsewhere.”

Hyenas? Oh, the press.

“And I’ll be there to make sure nothing does happen,” I said.

“Exactly.
Absolutely
sure. You and a few dozen other guys.”

“I need an hour.” I could have headed straight over, wherever Plank was, but it might be a good idea to clean up first.

“The news conference is going to be at the Grand Plaza. You can meet us there. Call when you arrive and I’ll tell you where we are.”

Nice. The Grand Plaza was a vast, ornately luxurious hotel-slash-conference-center on Broadway. Anesthesiologist conventions, celebrity weddings, Russian oligarchs visiting the Big Apple—an apotheosis of twenty-first-century public culture. I’d heard they maintained a green room just for A-list paparazzi. “Is Plank staying at the hotel?”

“That’s classified.” Ganderson coughed—no, he was laughing. “Operational security, you know.”

“Got to go,” I said. “I’ll be there within the hour.”

“Good.” Ganderson clicked off.

It wasn’t just the job. If Plank was really still in the crosshairs, Saxon would be holding the rifle.

And if Saxon was ready to kill someone else tonight, despite everything he’d gone through today—well, I could be there, too.

Another ringtone. I shuffled through my collection while taking a long gulp of coffee. This time I was pretty sure whose it was.

“Johnny?”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t I supposed to call you?”

“Were you?”

“Never mind. Do you have a name?”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“How much did MarineRegistryOnline-dot-com charge you?”

“Don’t worry about it. On me.”

A long pause.

“Well?” Not that I was impatient or anything.

“Sorry.” Johnny was clearly distracted. “Some action in Plank Industrials options. Futures spreads widening…there’s some serious buying going on there.”

Options, because the exchange was closed, and shares wouldn’t be traded again, publicly, until tomorrow morning.

“He’s doing a press conference tonight,” I said.

“The market appears happy to have heard that.”

“So what’s the name?”

“Name?”

“The yacht!”

“Oh, right. It’s registered to an entity called Waterborne Inclinations, LLC.”

I waited. “And?”

“So I tried to look them up. They’re incorporated by a brass-plate law firm in Bermuda.”

“Along with five thousand other tax-avoidance vehicles, no doubt.” The tax havens were filled with such offices: one room, one attorney, and one extra large file cabinet. Their only advertising was typically a small nameplate screwed to the door.

“You’d need a big-gun lawyer to hack through the holdings trail,” Johnny said.

“And far more time than I have.”

“Right. So I googled the bugger just to see what might come up. Turns out they’re not trying to hide—or not trying hard.”

“You found the owners?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Johnny paused to set up his revelation. “But I turned up some news clippings—maritime trade press releases, that sort of thing. Waterborne Inclinations has done some other business, like renting a yacht club for a reception, chartering a party boat, and so forth. They don’t lay out an org chart, but every event was owned or headlined by Aldershot Capital Partners.”

It took me a moment.

“Aldershot—that’s Ganderson’s firm!”

“Yes.” Johnny sounded pleased with his accomplishment.

“He hired me to find
himself
?” I was arguing with myself, really, the same conversation that had been running inside my head all day.

“You don’t think someone like Ganderson could be behind the killings?”

“Actually, no, I think it would be
just
someone like Ganderson. A ruthless and amoral hedge fund, trying out unorthodox strategies to rig some trades.”

“So there you go.”

“But every fund manager is like that. The successful ones, anyway. The real problem is that Ganderson
hired
me.” Repeating myself.

“Uh-huh. To do what, exactly?”

“To find out who might be assassinating lousy fund managers.”

“Why?”

“To avoid bad publicity—”

“Or any publicity at all,” Johnny said. “The kind that might, you know, interfere with his scheme.”

“Sure,” I said. “If he was responsible, he might hire me—but not to find him out. That’s just stupid.”

“I dunno.” Johnny’s shrug was clear over the phone. “Ganderson may have written you some checks, but he also owns the boat that the number-one bad guy ran to when he was in trouble.”

Indeed. I couldn’t work it out in my head, not in any logical way.

“What are you going to do?” asked Johnny.

“Ganderson said Terry Plank wants me at his press conference, in case Carlos the Jackal shows up.”

“Still planning to go?”

I thought about it. Around me office workers drank their
end-of-day pick-me-ups, ate stale pastries from the morning delivery, talked on their own cellphones. The novel writers had gone home. The counter staff looked like they wanted their shift to end ASAP.

I knew the feeling.

“Yes,” I said.

“Even though—”

“Maybe Ganderson set it up; maybe he didn’t. Either way, he’s at the center of the whole thing. And he’s invited me to show up in the same room with him—armed.”

“I guess.”

I suddenly wished I hadn’t thrown away the SCAR.

“Armed,” I said again. “I don’t think I can pass this chance up.”

T
he Grand Plaza was as imposing as its name. A hundred and twenty years old, built of carved sandstone and brick, it occupied an entire block near Times Square. Ten flags drooped in a row from brass poles extending over the broad entrance. A team of bellmen, valet drivers and concierges briskly managed the traffic in and out the sweeping glass doors. Even the smokers’ area was well maintained, with its own Art Nouveau awning, a pair of bronze ash stands and a blower discreetly drawing secondhand smoke away from the sidewalk.

I stood by the entrance to an ATM machine across and down the street, pretending to talk on one of my cellphones while I studied the hotel.

A two-day conference was in progress: “Innovation and Strategic Investment in Distressed Assets, Eleventh Annual Sessions.”

Or as the finblogs shorthanded it, “VultureFest XI.” You might have expected a lower profile from this crowd, but public opprobrium means nothing to guys whose best deals generally involve mass layoffs, pension stripping and fire-sale liquidation. At six p.m.
they were probably sitting down to dinner inside. Ignoring the keynote, thinking about which strip clubs to visit later. Ganderson would be in his element, but I wasn’t sure what Plank Industrials was doing there. Decades-old midwestern factories, big-steel manufacturing—exactly the sort of “distressed assets” that investors like these live to dismember. Imagine a baby bunny, blundering into a pack of dire wolves.

On the other hand, if Terry Plank wanted to make a very public statement, it wasn’t a bad choice of venue. Reporters were on standby, hoping to catch examples of vulgar excess and plutocratic disdain, populist titillation for their readers. I even saw two television vans. It was hard to tell at a distance, but Clara’s friend Darryl might have been standing outside one of them, thumbing a smartphone.

Otherwise, no action. No police and nothing unusual in the tide of pedestrians sweeping past, mostly workers on their way home in the rainy evening. Cars sloshed along Broadway, honking now and then, but with little enthusiasm. Umbrellas jostled. The doormen whistled taxis. It all looked perfectly normal.

The decoy phone rang, right in my ear. I jumped, half deafened.

“Why aren’t you inside?” Ganderson, sounding harried.

“Inside?”

“The hotel. Plank’s waiting.”

“All right. One minute.”

“Good.” He hung up.

I gave the street one more long look. If something was screwy, I couldn’t tell. I put the decoy phone away and walked briskly over to the Grand Plaza.

As I entered, it occurred to me that Ganderson must have just
tracked me down by the cellphone’s autolocation. I had to figure out a way around that, someday.

A tall, aloof doorman swept me through the brass doors with a slight bow. Inside, the lobby was warm and welcoming, if dimly lit. A waterfall tumbled two stories down the far wall of the atrium. Recessed alcoves, full-grown trees in planter boxes, and several different levels—up two stairs, down three, and so forth—created a space filled with semiprivate areas to stand or sit and talk and wait and people-watch. As luxury hotel foyers go, it was more than pleasant.

Over near a broad, plushly carpeted stairway leading to the mezzanine, wide-screen monitors listed events and ballrooms. I headed that way.

At the top of the stairs, someone slipped up next to me and said, “Silas.”

I suppressed an automatic reaction, barely. The slightest bit more adrenaline and I’d have lit up the entire floor.

“Calm down.”

“Zeke?” I stared. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I told you, I’m on the job. The question is, what are
you
—”

“You’re working here?” I felt dumb.

“Like I said.”

“For who?”

“A blowhard named Ganderson.”

“Fuck!”

“What—” He stopped, seeing my expression. “Shit.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“We’re down to zero degrees of separation, aren’t we?”

I glanced around. “Can we get off the floor?”

We found an unused facility room down a hallway on the mezzanine. It was surprisingly large inside, dark and quiet, with blank partitions set up across half the floor. Empty desks trailed power cables. It looked like a group of trade-show exhibitors had just left, or was about to arrive.

Behind us the door closed silently.

“I’m just additional security,” Zeke said. “Exactly like I told you.”

“What did Ganderson say he’s worried about? Your rates are too high just to fend off a few overzealous photographers.”

“The deer hunter seems to have put everyone on edge. This conference, all that fucking money—these guys are worth what, hundreds of millions? I was watching them in the dining room just now, and you could tell, they’re
scared
.” Zeke allowed himself a small smile. “Of one man with a rifle. Somehow I thought it would take more than that.”