The Insider (34 page)

There was a long pause. “Yeah, sure. Hell, I remember what it's like. I was laid off myself when I was a young attorney.”

“You're working late,” Claire offered. She was stalling, trying to figure out a way to get Sam out of the office.

“Yeah, we've got a closing. Grogan and Spencer are here, too. I'm too old for this shit.”

“What's the problem? Are you short of associates?”

Sam gave a tentative chuckle. “Glad to see you haven't lost your sense of humor. These things always sort themselves out. You'll see. Well, I'm afraid I've got to—”

“I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed working with you.” Claire wasn't going to be able to stall Sam much longer. He wanted to get back to work.

“Same here, Claire. Same here. Are you going to be able to get all of your things out tonight?”

“Yes. There's not that much stuff left.”

“Good. I hope you'll take this in the spirit in which it's offered, but you probably shouldn't come back up here after hours while you're in your severance period. Don't want anybody getting the wrong idea.”

“No problem,” Claire said, with a slight edge. “I'm done here.”

“Well . . .” Sam said, trying again to break off the conversation.

“Hey, Claire!” It was Jay Spencer.

Sam stepped away from the desk and walked over to the doorway.

“Claire's just packing up the last of her things,” Sam said. “I don't think she expected to find so many of us working tonight.”

“I sure didn't,” Claire said. “Hello, Jay. Richard.”

Richard Grogan answered. “Claire. I hope all is well with you.”

“Thanks, Richard. I'm fine,” Claire said coolly. “And you?”

“Fine as well.”

Will pictured Claire standing there, refusing to allow them an easy exit from the conversation, while Sam, Richard, and Jay grew impatient.

Finally, Jay broke the silence. “Sam, Richard and I were wondering if you could come take a look at the new indemnity language. If it looks okay to you, then I think it's ready to go. Excuse us, Claire, but we're kind of under the gun here.”

“I understand,” Claire said, sounding relieved.

From his vantage point under the desk, Will watched Sam's loafers exit the office as he followed Richard and Jay down the hall.

Will emerged from beneath the desk. Peering from the doorway, he saw that the hallway was now empty. He hurried to meet Claire in her office so they could make their escape. Roaming the office's hushed corridors after hours had always made him feel vaguely conspiratorial, but never more so than that night.

A bank of fog rolled across the city like a rising tide, lapping at the office towers of the financial district, pooling in the hollows around Russian Hill, flowing languidly through the warrenlike streets of Chinatown. Seen from Nob Hill down the corridor of California Street, the Bay Bridge was a connect-the-dots abstraction of support pillars and spires, with nothing in between. Will felt almost as if he were intruding on something intimate as he steered his car down an empty Geary Street at three thirty A.M. on a Thursday, watching the fog and the city nestle against one another in the night like an old married couple.

He drove past Dacha Restaurant three times until he was satisfied no one was there. Then he circled twice more, trying to spot any law enforcement surveillance. He decided that if the FBI, the DOJ, or the San Francisco cops were staking out the restaurant, he probably wouldn't be able to spot them, anyway. He was willing to take that risk.

Will pulled into the alleyway behind the restaurant. There was the rusted iron door that Yuri and Nikolai had shoved him through on the night that they introduced him to Valter.

He parked beside a Dumpster and reread the message that he had printed on his home computer:

He placed the sheet of paper inside an envelope bearing the Reynolds Fincher logo and sealed it. Will slipped the envelope beneath the restaurant's back door.

On Thursday afternoon at five P.M., Will drove into the parking garage beneath Four Embarcadero Center. He started on the first parking level and worked his way down, until he found Sam's blue Mercedes SLK parked on the third level in a corner far from the elevators. He parked his BMW in a nearby spot.

Sam should appear sometime in the next couple of hours. Even if a transaction was on the brink of closing, he was likely to leave the final preparations, and the attendant all-nighter, to his associates.

Will searched for video surveillance cameras and spotted several, but they did not appear to be trained on the corner of the garage where Sam's car was parked. He knew that he would attract the attention of patrolling security guards if he loitered near Sam's car, so he took the elevator up to the street-level shops. Sam would have to pass this way to take the elevator down to the garage. Will bought a cup of coffee, took a seat on a concrete bench twenty yards from the elevators, and waited. The shadows grew long, the night fell, and a cold wind whipped through the walkways of the shopping center. The shops closed, and the pedestrians dwindled to a few office workers hurrying home, late for dinner.

He ran his fingers over the stippled plastic grip of the pistol that was cradled in the pocket of his leather jacket. Like a new dental filling, he just couldn't get used to the feel of it. Claire kept the gun for security and had allowed him to take it only after an argument.

Will's attention drifted for a moment as he watched a security guard pass. When he looked again, he almost failed to notice Sam, who was already standing before the bank of elevators. Will checked his watch: It was eight fifteen P.M.

Sam was carrying a briefcase and wearing a brown suede jacket and white khakis. He looked anxiously over his shoulder once or twice as he waited for the elevator to arrive.

Will approached while Sam was facing the closed elevator doors, his back turned. He reached him just as the doors slid open with a pneumatic gasp. Sam stepped inside, and Will followed.

Sam jumped when he turned around and saw Will. “Will! You scared the shit out of me! What are you doing here?”

“I'm here to see you.”

“Well, it's good to see you, buddy. I was just thinkin' about you today. How's that job search going?”

“I haven't really gotten around to it yet. I've been kinda busy.”

“Don't wait too long,” Sam said, slipping effortlessly into a tone of avuncular concern. “You don't want too big a gap in your résumé.”

The doors shut, and the elevator slowly descended.

“Sam, I'm under investigation by the SEC, the DOJ, and the SFPD, so it's not the best time for me to be going out on interviews.”

“Really? That's tough. I didn't know the investigation was still going forward.”

“Sam, cut the bullshit, okay?”

Sam smiled disarmingly. “William, if I cut the bullshit, there wouldn't be anything left.”

“I know that you set me up.”

Sam looked incredulous. “What did you say?”

“You told Nikolai and Yuri about my involvement in the Jupiter deal. You gave them insider information on the transaction, and then you set them on me so I would think that I was their source. I was bound to be one of the first suspects, anyway, since I was running the deal.”

Sam laughed uncomfortably. “I know this has been a rough time for you, but you can't just go around pointing fingers. You gotta take it like a man.”

“I know that I probably wasn't your first choice,” Will continued. “You tried to use Ben Fisher, but he wanted the two of you to turn yourselves in to the Justice Department. Yuri and Nikolai were probably the ones who shoved him off the roof. Or maybe you did it yourself. Were you in the office that morning?”

“You need to get some counseling, Will. I don't think you realize how pathetic this sounds.” Despite his bluster, Sam was shaken. He was probably trying to figure out how Will could have known that Ben wanted them to turn themselves in to Justice.

“Look, I know about your trip to Moscow for the supermarket joint venture deal. I know about Nikolai's connection to the deal. The only thing I don't understand is why you did it.”

Sam was anxiously watching the floor numbers, which were turning, ever so slowly. “What are you doing here, Will? You wearing a tape recorder? Is that what this is about?”

Will opened up his jacket and patted the front of his shirt, showing Sam that there was no recording device. The gun was now tucked into his jeans against the small of his back. He didn't want to brandish it in the elevator for fear that security cameras or someone entering the elevator would see it.

“You should go home, Will. Don't make things any worse for yourself than they already are.”

“That's just it. For me, how much worse can it get? But you, things could still get a lot worse for you.”

“If you start saying crazy shit to the feds, they'll see it for exactly what it is—a poor son of a bitch trying to cut himself a deal by slinging some mud.”

The elevator doors opened. Sam stepped out and turned to face Will.

“I'm going to get in my car now. So stop following me.”

“I have a gun. And you're going to go for a drive with me. In my car.”

“What are you going to do, shoot me? That would be the stupidest thing you've done yet.”

“I just want to talk. I think you owe me that much. Now that I know.”

“You don't know shit. And I don't owe you shit.” When Sam was belligerent, he sounded much more like someone who had grown up in north Florida.

“I don't want to shoot you, Sam, but I will if I have to.”

“You couldn't kill someone, and you know it.”

“Maybe, but I would have no problem putting a bullet someplace where it's really going to hurt.”

“All right,” Sam said. “You want to talk, we'll talk. You're the man with the gun.”

“Get in,” Will said, pointing to his car. “On the driver's side.”

When they were both in the car, Will handed the keys to his BMW to Sam.

“Drive us out of the garage,” he said.

Once they were on the street, Will directed Sam to head south across Market. Will removed the gun from his jacket and trained it on Sam, holding it low so that it wouldn't be seen by other drivers.

A few minutes later, they were under the Bay Bridge in a desolate area occupied by parking lots that were nothing more than vacant, unpaved expanses of dirt demarcated by chain-link fences. If you were an office worker in the financial district who could not afford thirty-dollars-a-day parking downtown, this was where you ended up. It was a way to fight the high cost of working in the city, as long as you didn't have to go down there after dark.

Will told Sam to stop next to one of the Bay Bridge's massive supports. Even at night it seemed to cast a shadow, blocking out the faint glow of streetlights and deepening the darkness. He cut off the engine and the headlights.

“Am I supposed to be scared? Is that why you brought me to this place?”

“That's up to you,” Will said. “I just wanted a place to talk where no one would see us. I need to know the rest of the story.”

Sam turned in his seat to face Will. “Okay,” he said. “I'm going to be straight with you. Up to a point, anyway. I just want you to know that it wasn't personal. Those people are animals. You know what they're like.”

“Thanks to you, I do, yeah. How did you get involved with them?”

“Nikolai and a couple of his thug friends showed up at my hotel room in Moscow when I was there to negotiate the Branson deal. They said that my client's supermarket joint venture was going to put their small, local grocery stores out of business.”

“So they threatened you?”

“Sure, there was that, but it was all pretty businesslike, by and large. We reached an accommodation.”

“What kind of accommodation?”

“I got them in as investors on another transaction that I was working on over there.”

“You brought them in as investors? Are you insane?”

Sam shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. And it got them off my back. Nikolai was running a very profitable business. Even in that cut-rate currency, he was very liquid. And I thought the company was a sure thing.”

“What kind of company was it?

“Medical supplies.” He grimaced. “You have no idea how fucked up the health care delivery system is in the republics.”

“So the deal blew up, and you owed them something.”

“Right. That was when I started feeding them information on a few firm clients. The stakes rose from there. They wanted a bigger score, and I thought the Jupiter merger might be it, particularly when I learned about the company's connections to the NSA.”

“So you knew about the Clipper Chip program from the start?”

“Of course. That's why I chose that company—the insider trading was always secondary to that. But before I could give the Russians information on Jupiter, I had to give them you to cover my tracks.”

“I've always been your go-to guy, haven't I?”

“If it's any consolation, it's true that you weren't my first choice. I always liked you, Will. That was why I chose that dweeb Ben Fisher to take the fall—no pun intended. Unfortunately, he was such a straight arrow that he wouldn't play ball. Like you said, he was going to the feds, and he wanted me to go with him. He forced our hand. He was such a loner that we didn't have anyone we could use to threaten him with. With you, we had your mother and Claire. By the way, how did you know that about Ben?”