House Odds (4 page)

By Mahoney’s “numbers,” Wallace meant Mahoney’s standing in the polls, polls that Wallace conducted on every major decision Mahoney made to see how popular or unpopular it might be.

“Okay,” DeMarco said, “but what if somebody came to Mahoney and said, ‘I have evidence that will get Molly off, but I’ll only give it to her lawyers if you’ll push the Democrats my way on a particular issue?’ Don’t you think Mahoney might change his vote to keep his daughter out of jail?”

“Maybe,” Wallace said.

“Maybe!” DeMarco echoed. “Definitely. He’d never let his daughter go to jail for a crime she didn’t commit.”

Or for a crime she did commit
.

“Okay, so maybe he wouldn’t. So what?” Wallace said.

“So is there some bill out there that’s going to make somebody tons of money, so much money that using half a million bucks to frame Molly for a crime would be worth it?”

Wallace laughed. “DeMarco, there’s always some bill out there that’s going to make somebody a lot of money—or cost somebody a lot of money. You really oughta pay some attention to what those guys do in that big room downstairs every day.”

“Yeah, but can you think of something specific?”

“I can think of twenty specific things. The number of bills that involve big bucks is large, but more importantly, the number of people behind those bills is almost infinite. It could be any CEO in America; any millionaire who wants to be a billionaire; any one of a thousand special interest groups.”

“Come on, Perry, help me out here. Who’s rich enough and hates Mahoney enough to do something like this? Who hates him so much that they’d use his daughter to get to him?”

“Who hates him so much that . . .” Perry Wallace’s small eyes suddenly grew wide and a look of shock spread across his broad face.

“My God, Joe, I think I know who it is!”

“You do?”

“Yeah. But it’s not a single person. It’s a large group, a gang actually.”

“A gang? What gang? What are they called?”

“They’re called
Republicans,
you moron.”

* * *

“Pat, it’s Ted Allen.”

“What do you want?” McGruder said, his voice all tight.

“I want to apologize for the way I spoke to you the other day when you came to the casino. I know you were just doing your job.”

McGruder didn’t respond—he just sat there wheezing into the phone. How long, Ted wondered, could a guy in his condition possibly live? “Anyway,” Ted said, “that’s not the main reason I called. You remember when you were here, Greg telling you how we lost money on a load of fish?”

“Yeah, almost fifty grand,” McGruder said.

“That’s right. Marco Donatelli ripped off a truckload of fish, most of it lobster and crab, and we bought it from him. We’ve dealt with him lots of times, and we’ve never had a problem in the past, but this time the truck’s refrigeration system went out between here and Maine and we lost the shipment. Donatelli gave us back our money, of course, but I had to pay retail for fish to stock the restaurants that week. So, like we told you the other day, it affected the bottom line by almost fifty K.”

“Why are you telling me this again, Ted? Are you changing your story now?”

“I’m telling you because I just found out that the driver Donatelli used bought himself a new truck. It looks like this clown lied about the fish spoiling and then sold the load to someone else and kept the money. I’m just letting you know because I’m gonna have Gus take care of the guy.”

Once again all Ted heard was McGruder breathing into the phone, sounding like those steam irons they use in Chinese laundries. Finally, he said, “I want Delray to go with Gus.”

“Aw, that’s okay. Gus is already up in Portsmouth and he doesn’t need any help with this guy.”

“I wasn’t asking you, Ted. I was telling you. Delray’s going with your boy.”

Ted was smiling when he hung up the phone.

4

“Kay Kiser is possessed,” Sawyer said.

Randy Sawyer worked for the SEC and DeMarco knew that for him to talk about an ongoing investigation, particularly one this politically charged, meant that Mahoney had either called in a huge favor or had leaned on someone very hard. Or maybe not. Maybe Sawyer had volunteered to help because he was one of those ambitious civil servants who wanted to go from anonymous bureaucrat to presidential appointee. This was Washington: motives were endless—and almost always self-serving.

Sawyer told DeMarco that he was a deputy commissioner in the enforcement division at the SEC, which meant he outranked Kay Kiser. He was a short, chubby-cheeked guy in his forties with a prominent overbite and nervous brown eyes—eyes that kept darting about to see if anybody was paying any attention to him and DeMarco. With his buckteeth, he reminded DeMarco of a paranoid squirrel.

They were at Arlington National Cemetery, walking between two of the seemingly endless rows of white markers. They were there because Sawyer took the metro from D.C. to his home in Falls Church, Virginia, and he’d told DeMarco to meet him at the cemetery metro stop. He said he didn’t want to meet in the District—like he was an instantly recognizable celebrity instead of a government pencil pusher.

So they walked between the graves. PFC Harlan Johnson 1899–1918; Corporal Elgin Montgomery 1948–1971; Sergeant Marlon O’Malley 1924–1944. O’Malley, DeMarco noticed, had died on June 6, 1944. A D-day casualty? The headstone didn’t say. The headstone just said that O’Malley had lived only twenty years. DeMarco had always thought the cemetery was beautiful and poignant—and a vast, stark reminder of the cost of freedom.

“What do you mean, she’s possessed?” DeMarco asked.

“I mean she works about eighteen hours a day. She’s not married and, as near as anyone can tell, doesn’t have a social life. Or a sex life. All she does is work. It’s like she wants to hang every white collar criminal on the planet before she dies. Molly Mahoney is in big trouble if Kiser has her in her sights. She’s smart, she’s tough, she never quits, and she’s hardly ever wrong. In fact, I can’t remember her ever being wrong.”

Great. It sounded like Molly had pissed off Supergirl.

“What made her investigate Molly in the first place?” DeMarco said. “I don’t buy that she just happened to spot Molly buying ten thousand shares of stock out of the trillion shares being traded every day.”

“She wasn’t investigating Molly. What she was doing was watching Reston Technologies. We—the SEC—have been watching them for years, before Kay Kiser was even hired.”

“Why?”

“Because there have been three previous insider trading scams involving Reston—three that we know of—and one goes back to twenty years ago and we never caught the people involved.”

“Really!” DeMarco said. This was good news. “What were the other cases?”

“First of all, do you understand what Reston Tech does?”

“Not really. All I know is that Molly’s an engineer who works for Reston, and Reston worked with another company called Hubbard to design some super battery the Navy likes. I didn’t even know submarines used batteries. I thought they were nuclear powered.”

“They are nuclear powered, but they use the ship’s battery when they have to shut the reactor down. And reducing the size is a big deal. When you think of a battery, you’re probably thinking of the twelve volt battery you got in your car. Well, a submarine battery contains over a hundred cells all wired together and each
cell
weighs over a thousand pounds, and the battery takes up a big compartment in the sub. And on any boat, size and weight are at a premium and if you can reduce the size of the battery you can cram more stuff into the sub: weapons, slick gadgets, whatever. So the Navy is willing to pay a shitload to gain the extra space.”

“I get it,” DeMarco said.

Sawyer bent over and straightened a little flag that was next to one of the headstones, and DeMarco noticed the name on the grave was Murphy, his mother’s maiden name. He doubted he was related to the guy, who’d died during the Korean War, but he found the coincidence spooky.

“And the batteries are just the latest thing that Reston’s done,” Sawyer said. “Reston Tech was started by a genius named Byron Reston. He was an inventor, kind of a latter-day Thomas Edison, and he’s got about a thousand patents on stuff he designed. What he’d do is find some manufacturing company that needed a major improvement in whatever they were making, and he’d come up with the improvement and then he’d partner with the company and share in the profits. The guy was a wizard. He’s dead now but the company is run by his son and they still do what Byron Reston used to do but on a larger scale, and they hire the best eggheads they can find.

“Anyway, twenty years ago Reston Tech partnered with a company that made some kind of gizmo for water treatment systems. This was huge because every big city in the country has a water treatment plant and whatever this gizmo was, a filter or some fuckin’ thing, was going to make the process a whole lot cheaper, and the company that came up with it a whole lot richer. Well, two months before the company goes public with this new product, an investor buys a million bucks’ worth of their stock, when the stock’s at an all time low. In fact, it looked like the company was going bankrupt and nobody was buying their stock. Anyway, when the company announced they had a product they could sell to every water district in the country, the stock shot through the roof and the investor made almost five million bucks—and the whole thing just smacked of insider trading. I mean, why would a guy buy so much stock in this failing company unless he knew they were on the edge of a major breakthrough? But in the end, we could never prove anyone was guilty of insider trading and the investor walked away with his five million.”

Sawyer stopped and straightened another little flag at another grave, and DeMarco wondered if he had some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“Six years go by, and this time Reston is working with a company that makes body armor and they come up with a compound that would make the armor lighter but with just as much stopping power as the armor being used at the time. But, just like with the water treatment gizmo, three months before the armor company goes public with a product they can sell to the Pentagon by the boatload, somebody buys a ton of stock, the stock price skyrockets, and the investor makes almost twelve million. But this time we can’t even figure out who the investor is.”

“What do you mean you couldn’t figure out who it was?”

“Just what I said. Whoever did this set up a dummy investment company composed of half a dozen people who didn’t exist. The company filed all the right papers with all the right agencies and the people in the company all had Social Security numbers and tax IDs and everything else. On paper, everything looked legit—except the people didn’t exist.”

“You couldn’t follow the money trail?”

“Sure, we could follow it. We followed it from one offshore bank to another to another until it finally disappeared into thin air. Remember, this was fourteen years ago, DeMarco, and it may surprise you to learn that banks in places like Belarus and Nigeria don’t follow the same record-keeping practices we have over here, particularly if you tip the banker.”

“Earlier, you said
he
. Do you know the investor’s a he?”

“No. It could be a she or a they. But the thing is, we now knew the insider had to be at Reston Tech. I mean, when it happened with the water treatment gizmo it could have been somebody at either the water treatment place or at Reston. But when it happened a second time, and with a different company, we knew there had to be a bad guy at Reston.”

“But you don’t have any idea who he is?”

“Not a clue—and believe me, Kiser’s dug hard for him. Anyway, five years ago it happened again. This time it was for a company who was designing an electric motor you connect to the wheels of a jet.”

“What?” DeMarco said.

“You know when an airplane is sitting at the gate and they use that little truck to push the plane back? And after the jet is on the runway, it taxis for twenty minutes, using up a bunch of fuel. Well, this electric motor, which operates off a rechargeable battery, hooks up to the airplane’s wheels and you can use it to move the plane and taxi. You not only save on fuel, but you can also fire all the guys who drive the little trucks that push the planes around. The thing never got approved by the FAA, but just the idea of it was enough to drive the stock up.”

“So what happened?” DeMarco asked.

“What happened is the same thing that happened with the body armor. Right before the company announces their super-duper new electric airplane motor, somebody buys a ton of their stock and makes a mint. This time the investor was a European hedge fund and, once again, the hedge fund was just an empty shell and because it was set up in Liechtenstein or Switzerland or wherever the hell it was, it was even harder for us to figure out who was involved.”

“So what I’m telling you is, Reston Tech is a perfect company for insider trading. At any one time, Reston is working with thirty or forty different industries on new technologies and if you can figure out what the next big thing is going to be, the place is a gold mine. And this has happened three times in the past that we’re aware of.