Sleight of Hand (27 page)

I called David and left a short message on his voice mail. Maybe I’d have to slap him around a bit at our next sparring session to teach him that when I said leave the phone on, I meant it.

Jen sauntered out.

“Are you aiming to sleep in your new car, honey, or would you like a drink?”

I kissed her cheek and followed her in. “I’m sorry to treat this like a hotel, Jen, but dinner would be very welcome.”

“I’ll get it started.” She pointed me to the living room. “Butt on the chair, feet on the stool, rum in the glass, I’ll be back to catch up in a moment.”

In less than ten minutes, Carmen had cooked me up an omelette with some delicious little tapas dishes on the side—nuts, mushrooms with garlic and tiny, salty potatoes. Between that and the rum, it felt as if the world was slowing down to a more reasonable pace at last.

Jen sat with her legs tucked underneath her and watched me eat, smiling.

“What are you laughing at?” I asked.

“I’m just enjoying watching the way you throw yourself at everything, even eating dinner,” she said. “I have some news,” she went on casually, “but it’ll wait till I hear yours.”

“That’s evil, Jen.” I put my empty plate on the table and slumped back in the chair. “Okay. I met with Geoff Hansen this afternoon, formerly of your finance department.”

“I bet that was exciting,” said Jen, and I grinned.

“Couldn’t get away.”

I sat back and took her through my findings. Geoff’s description of the financial processes confirmed my suspicion that there was a problem, and that it was internal to the Kingslund Group. Geoff confirmed some of the issues that David had raised when he’d seen the accounts.

A company like Jen’s that was purchasing a rival should have been moving long term investments into short term. The money needed to be accessible quickly and without penalty more than it needed to be getting a good return by being bound up for a long period. The reverse was happening; money was being moved into long term investments. None of this showed in the balance sheets because the investment types were no longer being broken out. The bottom line was that she wasn’t in a good position to buy Tucker Beacon. And in the current climate, the banks would assess Tucker Beacon as too big a risk to get involved.

The second anomaly was that the investment documentation provided to me was false. The return on any particular investment was difficult to extract and the total amount looked good, but I had managed to find references to a specific investment that was returning a fifth of the level it should. If all the recent investments were doing the same, the total position was only being obscured by the number of new investments that were being added.

This sleight of hand was about as stable as a Ponzi scheme. At some point, the money available from new investments wouldn’t be enough to mask the fact the previous investments weren’t returning the right amounts. This was a short term tactic to hobble the company. Whoever was doing this would be discovered at the next general audit. So it stood to reason that whatever plan there was had to be triggered by the end of the year at the latest, probably much earlier.

I had a feeling Geoff had been getting close to finding this out when he had fallen foul of what he thought was office politics. My concern for Jen was that the person he’d fallen foul of was Jen’s financial director and second-in-command, Bernard Verdoon.

Jen’s eyes were hooded as I talked it through. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Bernard’s been with me for ten years. He has signing rights for the company, for God’s sake.” Her hand slapped down on her thigh.

“He’s the only one with enough authority to run this.”

“I’ll string the bastard up if it’s him. I’ve totally trusted him.” She grabbed her phone and I lifted my hand. “What?” she said angrily, looking up at me.

“Two things, Jen. I can’t be absolutely sure it’s him, and I think the best course of action is to find answers. Who, how and why may tell us a great deal, while firing him may not. We need to know what’s going on to stop it or at least make a suitable defense.”

She put the phone down. “What are you suggesting?”

“You have a meeting with him on something else. Matt and I will look at his computer and desk files while he’s busy. You should also set up an agreement with your banks that any large transfers have to be passed by you—secretly. We won’t be able to keep that hidden for more than a week or so, but that should be enough.”

Jen thought it through and then nodded. She calmed down.

“So much for the financials,” I said. “Next, I haven’t forgotten the trouble on your land. If it’s linked to everything else, it gets straightened out with everything else. If not, I’ll deal with it in the next week, or explain to you why I can’t.”

Jen stared at me with a slight smile. “It
is
weird, then. Okay.” She waved it off.

I got us refills for our glasses and took my plate back to the kitchen to thank Carmen and to give Jen a little time to think everything through. I hadn’t had anything to report on Troy, but Victor was emailing her directly now.

She was sitting in the same position when I returned, but had clearly put my news aside to be dealt with in the morning. I wished I could do that sort of thing.

“So,” I said, “what’s your news that you teased me about?”

Jen smiled lazily. “I assume you know which asshole I’m talking about when I say Lieutenant Krantz?”

Chapter 34

“Dammit, Amber, I’m sorry.” Jen had her arms around me, trying to physically stop me from venting my anger on the furniture. “I didn’t realize he’d gotten under your skin so badly. I’d never have joked about it if I thought you’d react like this.”

I felt the anger ebbing away slowly and I let Jen steer me back to the sofa and sit me down. Carmen’s head popped around the door to see what the noise was and Jen waved her away. Embarrassment took over from the anger as Jen picked up the table I had kicked over.

“Sorry,” I said. “That was childish, way over the top.”

Jen slid in beside me and grabbed my hand between hers.

“Tell me about it,” she ordered.

I sighed. Not telling people was like pushing water uphill. If I was going to end up disappearing into the Athanate community in a couple of months, maybe it didn’t matter anymore. Thinking that depressed me. I wasn’t that far gone yet and I wasn’t giving up the fight.

I decided to tiptoe around the edges of the agreement I had signed with the army.

“Krantz thinks he’s onto a major fraud involving vets’ money. I don’t know. If he is, more power to him.” I sighed again and ran my free hand over my face in frustration. “Because of what I did in the army, my records aren’t available to him. It looks to him like I’m being paid a vet’s disability compensation without ever having been in the army. That’s what he accused me of, and called on my sense of patriotism. As if he had any idea.”

“What are you being paid for?” Jen’s business mind cut right to the heart of it.

“Think of it as a retainer. Stupid damn decision to hide it like that, but not my decision. Anyway, I don’t care. I don’t want the money. It’s nothing. It’s Krantz telling me—”

“Okay. Okay. I get that part of it, honey. He was ‘officially’ telling me that you had been cleared, but that he was just tying up loose ends. Trying to tell me that you were actually guilty but he wasn’t allowed to prove it.”

I managed to remain seated this time. “What did you say?”

“Hell, I kicked him out, of course. I think I said something along the lines of you were so patriotic you had the flag sewn into your panties, and you would never, ever be involved in anything like that. As for my contract with you, none of his damn business. I may have used some short words, and I may have shouted a bit.”

“Thanks, Jen.” I looked down at my lap.

“You’re blushing.” She laughed. “You actually do have a flag sewn into your panties?”

That made the blush worse of course, but it was sort of true, I did have a pair with a flag printed under the words ‘Property of the US Army.’ A joke gift from my team about four years ago, in what I was now thinking of as very long ago. Time to change the subject.

“Matt came by this morning. Thanks for loaning him to me. He’s a nice looking kid. I think Tullah may have noticed.”

Jen grinned, but she let me change topics. “Did he do a good job?”

“Very good. It’ll save an enormous amount of time. From a glance, it looks like there will be enough leads to get the police involved in closing down ZK.”

“That’ll be welcome news.” Jen spared a hand to reach for her brandy and took a sip.

“Do you know why Matt might be—well, scared of me?” I asked.

Jen put her glass down and went back to holding my hand with both of hers. It was all right, really, I wasn’t going to get up and break her furniture again, but I didn’t mind.

“Yes,” she said, and a prickle of unease went through me at her expression.

“Amber,” she began finally, “I’m in a very vulnerable position. In all sorts of ways.” Her hands squeezed mine and I remembered doing exactly that to David in the coffee shop. I steeled myself. Whatever she had to say, I was going to face it as calmly as David had and find the good in it.

“I had Matt run full background checks on you.”

I let that sink in. It wasn’t so bad. If I were in her position, wouldn’t I do the same thing? I put my free hand on the others and squeezed her back.

“Thank you,” she said, “for taking that so well.”

“Thanks for telling me,” I replied. “Find anything?”

She smiled crookedly. “As you know very well, there’s an eerie absence of information about you. Matt says the only profile he can think of that fits is some secret ninja assassin. That’s why he’s acting nervous.”

I laughed. “Too much Hollywood.” Jen grinned in agreement.

“I can connect the dots,” she said. “And I like the picture it shows. There’s no way, for example, that your friend Werner believes you were only ‘in the vicinity’ when his daughter was rescued last year, and I don’t either.”

The feeling I had from hugging Emily that morning came flooding back and lit me up from the inside. I smiled. “Werner says you’ve put in some orders for you and your friends.”

“Hell yes! I’m sick of people complaining that there’s no diversity and then shopping in national stores for expensive crap that has no individuality. I don’t want to live in a cultural wasteland. Support local artists and artisans if you want your place to have its own identity. I’ll never buy a pair of boots in a store again.”

“Message received and understood, ma’am,” I said. She would have jabbed me, but I was holding her hands.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

I floated above the exercise mats in the dark of Jen’s basement gymnasium, a shadow among shadows as I went through Master Liu’s most strenuous exercises and the puzzles of the day.

I’d told Tullah that Mykayla was in good hands and I believed it, but I would have been happier if they hadn’t been messing with my head. I found I couldn’t recall a single face from the group of Athanate at the golf course, other than Diana and Bian. I couldn’t recall the face of the man who’d accompanied them when they’d kidnapped me either. Apparently, Athanate security concerns ran deep and their powers were even spookier than I had imagined. What else might they have done while they blurred my memories?

I
could
recall the faces of the four who I’d fought in LoDo, quite clearly. Why was that different?

I spun and fought shadows until the air caressed my skin like hot silk and yet my heartbeat never reached above 120. I was quicker, faster, more Athanate with every passing day. One half of me despaired while the other gloried in the physical benefits.

I finished up the exercises and headed for a shower, a shadow passing through the silent house.

There had been a text on my cell confirming a meeting with the colonel and Captain Morales at police HQ at 9:30 Wednesday morning.

Krantz I just had to put out of my mind. Clearly, the colonel had got his leash and he was just barking as he was dragged off. He couldn’t do me any more harm.

Diana had my car with my slightly unusual GPS system—was it going to be a problem if she found that I knew where House Altau was?

What was the real price of the car she had given me? It seemed an excessive payment for an afternoon’s work. Had I done the right thing getting Altau involved?

Jen had suggested that I temporarily relocate my office to an unused study here in her house. She constantly referred to the guest suite as mine.

There’s nothing without a cost. I was collecting a pile of debts the size of which I couldn’t reliably estimate. The banks tried that with sub-prime mortgages and see where it got them.

TUESDAY

Chapter 35

I arranged for a couple of Victor’s team to stop by my office very early on their way in to relieve the guards at Manassah. I met them there and loaded them up with the office equipment and mail to take in for Tullah.

Morales called me as they drove off.

“Good morning, Farrell. Up early after a busy night, or haven’t you gone to bed yet?”

This was totally out of order; that sort of sarcasm was my line.

“Why, Captain, a girl would think that something happened while she was sleeping sweetly in Ms. Kingslund’s guest suite, protected by Mr. Gayle’s vigilant guards.”

He growled something in Spanish that I couldn’t catch, as I slipped back into my new car. Being a new car, it had made clever connections to my cell, and I was able to talk while driving without having a stupid plug in my ear.

“What’s up, Morales?” I prompted him.

“ZK membership is dropping. Another five last night in a car accident that wasn’t. A fight yesterday, near the Yale turnoff from I-25, where a lot of ZK motorcycles got trashed and a couple of people got shot, as far as we can tell.”

“They are busy boys,” I said. “Look, I may have something for you at our meeting tomorrow. Some insight on what’s going on, and some cell tracking and texts from ZK cell phones.”