The Aspen Account (21 page)

Swinging dangerously close to the wall of trees, Michael felt her grip tighten around his waist as she screamed in jubilation over the roaring engine. Discovering that she liked it only encouraged him, and he didn’t let off the throttle until they had shot out into an open field where a dozen other snowmobiles were zooming about.

He spun it in tight circles before turning toward the nearest stand of trees, then brought the vehicle to a crawl as they entered a white forest.

“Turn the engine off!” she screamed into his left ear after they had gone some distance from the field. His right hand came down to cut the engine. She immediately heaved sideways with surprising strength, pulling them both off the seat into a cushion of snow. He curled into a ball and began laughing as she moved to straddle him. She pulled the edge of his ski cap over his eyes and held it there as she began kissing him. 

Releasing him, she flipped onto her back and nestled under his armpit until they were both looking up at the vanishing point beyond the pale black-spotted trees that rose above them. 

“Aspens are my favorite trees,” she said.

“Why are they your favorite? Tell me.” He felt her thigh pushing again his.

“They just are,” she answered, giving him a soft elbow in the ribs.

“
Ouf!
” he grunted.

She dug her face deeper into his side. “Let’s just lie here for the rest of the day.”

“We’re paying for the snowmobile by the hour,” he replied. “
Ouf!
”—another elbow jab.

“Don’t be such an accountant.”

“Hey, watch it, missy. I can handle being called a lot of things, but a bean counter has his limits.”

She laughed. “Seriously, what made you want to be an accountant, anyway?”

Michael was silent for a moment as he looked into his past. “My father,” he said. “Also, my grandfather.”

“They were
both
accountants?”

“My father’s an accounting professor at Kansas State. He’s actually one of the best in the country. My grandfather, on the other hand, understood almost nothing about accounting, but he really encouraged me to be like my father when I was growing up. I got started on that path at an early age, and I was decent at it, too. So here I am.”

“Lying in the snow in the mountains with your future ex-wife,” she said with a big grin. “Didn’t turn out so bad for you, did it?”

“No, I guess I got pretty lucky. What about you? Any luck with your paintings?”

“No luck,” she said. “I checked all the places again last week, but still nothing. I graduated with an MFA from Berkeley two years ago and have been painting ever since. But I’ve only sold a few. It’s really hard to sell art these days—not quite as stable a career choice as doing accounting.”

“At least you’re doing something you enjoy. Accounting’s not always that great; trust me. My current job is killing me. I’m locked away in an office building all day long, straining my eyes and constantly stressing over issues with the client, juggling heavy workloads with short deadlines.”

“If you hate it so much, why don’t you just quit?”

“Can’t,” he groaned. “I’ve made commitments I can’t break.” He watched as a clump of snow fell from a branch high above them and broke into a cloud of powder as it fell through the branches, showering them in a light haze of crystals. “My dream is to someday become a chief financial officer for a company. I want to be the head of the overall financial aspects of a nice small company, so I can help it grow, so I can feel like I’ve accomplished something worthwhile in the business world. And to get a job like that, I need to get a lot of experience in one of the big international accounting firms. So that’s where I’m at now: just doing my time in the trenches so that someday I can be a general.”

“So we’re both chasing dreams,” she said, rolling onto her side and wrapping her arm over his chest.

“The only problem with dreams,” he said sullenly, “is that they always feel so far away.” He had been referring more to himself than to her and hoped she hadn’t been offended. But his concerns vanished as she leaned in and began kissing him again. She always had the ability to make him forget all the problems on his mind, as if taking him into another world where everything was perfect. And at that moment, he realized that he had more in common with Alaska than with anyone else in his life.

32

THE LEARJET 60 XR dipped down out of the clouds and glided toward the festive night lights of Austin, Texas. Don Seaton looked out the window at the illuminated State Capitol Building. After circling the city, the jet approached an outer airport from the south and landed on a black runway lined with emerald lights. Seaton and Marcus descended the stairs and slid into a bulletproof limousine waiting for them.

Going through downtown, Seaton noticed that winter was almost nonexistent here. Along Fifth Street, people dined in chic ethnic restaurants surrounded by some of the best live music venues in the country, while, only a block away, college students from the University of Texas seemed to treat every night as if it were spring break.

The limousine turned up a narrow neighborhood road that wound up a small hill covered in stately cottonwoods and live oaks. Pulling in front of a spacious white house, the car stopped next to a stone staircase that rose up a low hill to a wraparound porch.

As they got out, Marcus scanned the area for any movement among the shadows. They were in one of Austin’s most prestigious neighborhoods, with century-old mansions fronted by iron gates. The only movement Marcus could see was a plump silhouette at a second-floor window. Nodding his approval, he followed his employer up the stone steps.

The heavy door opened just as they stepped onto the porch, and out stepped the same plump body that Marcus had seen watching them from the window.

“Mr. Seaton, I still can’t believe you insisted on coming all this way,” the man said. “Luckily, I could work you into my schedule. As you know, I’m very busy these days.”

“Busy trying to take over my company,” Seaton said to Fredrick Kavanaugh.

“Among other things,” Kavanaugh replied.

“Fred, you need to withdraw your bid from X-Tronic.”

A wide grin crossed Kavanaugh’s face, turning into hearty laughter. “Don, your tactics are remarkable,” he said. “You come to me with a request like that when you know I have no intention of turning away from X-Tronic. This is a desperate ploy, even for a man who has lost the faith of his own board.”

“How did you hear about that?” Seaton demanded.

“We all have our sources, Don. You of all people should understand that.”

“Fred,” he said, stepping closer to his adversary, “I came to you tonight not to ask you for a favor, but to warn you of the consequences if you continue to pursue this folly. I will not let you take control of my company. X-Tronic is in the middle of something right now that I’ve been planning for years, and I won’t let you ruin things. You know my history. You know what I do to companies and people that challenge me. You know what I’m capable of.”

“Things aren’t what they used to be, Don. Times change. X-Tronic is falling apart from the inside out. Your house is no longer in order. Your precious company isn’t as strong as it once was, and neither are you.”

Seaton motioned with his eyes for Marcus to return to the car. As his bodyguard retreated down the steps, he turned back to Kavanaugh. “Fred, you don’t have any idea what you’re getting into on this one. I came here to warn you. What you do with that warning is up to you.”

“You didn’t come all this way to do me any favors, Don. You took the time to come here because you’re searching for a miracle. It just shows me how desperate you really are. Now, I don’t know exactly what kind of trouble you guys are having up there in Denver, but whatever it is, I can promise you one thing: once I take over X-Tronic, I’m going to find out everything that’s been going on. And here’s a little warning for you, Mr. Seaton: you’ll be the first piece of business I take care of. You were great in your day, but that day is over. I hope you haven’t done anything too desperate to try to hold on to your company. I used to have a lot of respect for you, and I’d hate to have to be the one to make you pay for your mistakes.”

Then, without another word, Kavanaugh stepped back inside his palatial house and shut the thick wooden door.

Seaton stood there on the porch for a moment, trying to calculate just how desperate his situation was rapidly turning. It was sobering to think that Kavanaugh’s informants gave him such a clear view inside X-Tronic. But Seaton wasn’t giving up hope. His investigation into the events surrounding Jack Ross’s demise had turned up the name of a man working in Portland who had once worked for Ross—a man who, Seaton hoped, held the secret behind everything that had gone wrong with Ross’s business. When he turned around, he heard Marcus starting the car engine on the street below. Moving away from the great, brooding mansion, Seaton hurried down the stairs.

33

THREE HOURS AFTER leaving Austin, Don Seaton’s Learjet rocketed past the snow-covered mass of Mount Hood, descending toward Portland. A steady, chilling winter rain drenched the world outside.

After learning from Darryl Mitchell about Jack Ross’s bankrupted company, Seaton had come to follow up personally on the new information. According to Mitchell, Dr. Winston Sharpe, the head researcher for Jack’s company, who had later testified against Jack, had taken a job with an X-Tronic subsidiary in Portland. Sharpe must surely hold the missing piece to the puzzle surrounding the fall of Jack’s company.

The jet’s tires compressed on the wet asphalt, and the engines roared in reverse thrust, shaking the cabin and pulling Seaton forward in his seat. The world passing by outside the window began to slow. After coming to a stop, Captain Steiner opened the cockpit door and entered the cabin.

“Bit of a rough landing, Captain,” Seaton said.

“Yes, sir. But I saved you twenty minutes by cutting along the river. The tower recommended circling up around the west end of the city because Mt. Saint Helens had been showing some activity in the past few days, and they’re concerned she just may go up again. I told them I could bank the jet above the river gorge and slide in at a safer altitude from the east. The tower was fine with that as long as I was—most pilots wouldn’t have tried it.”

Seaton smiled. “That’s why you’re my guy, Captain Steiner—you’re a hell of a pilot, and you know what you can and can’t get away with in the air.”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Steiner said with a grin. “Just trying to prepare myself for the day you ask me to do something really crazy.”

“I appreciate that,” Seaton replied. “Let’s just hope I never have to ask. At my age, you start to get concerned about the odds finally catching up,” he said with a grin. “Now, Marcus,” he said, switching gears and turning to his bodyguard, “let’s go see this Dr. Sharpe. It’s time for me to find out the truth about Jack’s company.”

The Range Rover climbed through the hilly streets of Portland. It was late enough on this rainy night that hardly a soul could be seen.

“We’re almost there,” the driver said, pulling into the underground garage of a massive twenty-story building. 

“This is a residential building?” Seaton asked. Something didn’t feel right. The absence of other vehicles in the parking tunnel made the place feel more like an abandoned factory than a luxury condominium complex.

“No, sir. This building houses the research labs for Acheron Technology. Acheron is a partially owned subsidiary created by RSA after X-Tronic acquired RSA last year. This place is strictly for R and D activity. The scout team tried to contact Dr. Sharpe at his home, but we were told that he’s working at Acheron tonight. Apparently, he’s heading a research project that needs to perform some upgrades to the corporate servers overnight. I don’t know any of the details about the upgrades.”

Seaton thought for a moment. Two weeks ago, he had never heard of Acheron Technology; now he was looking for its head researcher of a software development program that had been kept under wraps for more than a year. The more he learned about the numerous side businesses his sons had started, the more it unsettled him. He could feel his plans for X-Tronic slipping away. And now it may well be too late to undo his mistakes, to fix the instability that had developed in the company over the past few years.

“And you’re sure Dr. Sharpe is here?” Seaton asked the driver.

“That’s the information I have, sir.”

The Range Rover stopped in front of three elevator doors at the far side of the tunnel. As Seaton and Marcus got out, the bell dinged and a big man in a business suit stepped from an open elevator. He waved at Seaton.

“Mr. Seaton,” he said, “I’m Hayden Sorenson, head of security. Dr. Sharpe is waiting in the executive conference room on level eighteen. I’ll take you to him.”

Seaton felt a little alarmed to be inside a $400 million research division of his own company, which he had not even known about.

“This way, sir,” Sorenson said as they stopped on the eighteenth floor. 

Clearly, they were in no ordinary office. The inside of the building had been gutted to make room for the large research apparatus and equipment sealed inside glass rooms. Seaton was surprised to see that the hallway split into a large circle, which left an open rotunda looking down onto a lower floor. He realized that the space had been designed to operate factory-style research equipment—something he had seen only in some of China’s top research institutions when he toured Hong Kong last year with a group of U.S. technology executives. He had no idea that X-Tronic had developed the same advanced system of laboratory work in a downtown corporate setting—indeed, he had thought the technology still two or three years away for his company.

“What is this place?” Marcus asked.

Seaton stopped by the rotunda’s opening and leaned on the banister to look down at the research floor. Two young women were hunched over computer terminals, while an older man ran through a data checklist on the inside panel of a giant server sitting in the center of the room. Next to the server was a glass room, where a bundle of network cables snaked into a device that looked like a large copier-printer. Another research programmer fed a bin of paper into the device before returning to the two women to look at the computer monitors.