The Patriots Club (32 page)

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know or you won’t tell?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated.

“Bullshit!” Bolden slammed a hand on her pillow, just missing the injured eye. “Tell me!”

“It’s for them. His friends.”

“What friends?” Bolden leaned over her, his face inches from hers. “You will tell me, Diana. I promise you that. You’ll tell me, or I’ll go get that gun and shoot you like I shot Mickey.”

“You didn’t?”

Gently, he pressed the tip of his index finger to the center of her forehead. “Right there,” he whispered. “One shot. You won’t feel a thing. It sure as hell won’t hurt as much as that black eye he gave you. Or did someone else do the honors? A guy named Wolf? Tall, bad attitude, built like a block of cement?”

Diana shook her head, anguish stiffening her body.

“Go take a look,” said Bolden.

She started to get up from the bed, then fell back again. She stared at Bolden, then slapped him across the face. He grabbed her hands and locked them to her sides. “Who are his friends?” he asked, shaking her. “Names! I want names!”

“No!”

“Tell me, dammit.” Bolden fought to keep her on the bed. She was possessed of a fear, a hatred, that he could not comprehend. Finally, she calmed, but her face remained a mask of revulsion.

“The club,” she said. “In Washington. They make things happen. Big things. The power behind the throne . . . you know how it goes.”

“I don’t actually,” said Bolden. “What are their names?”

“Mickey’s Mr. Morris. I don’t know the others, except that he calls them Mr. Washington, and Mr. Hamilton . . .” She looked away. “It’s for the country, that’s all I needed to know. Mickey told me it was my chance to serve. After all, he’d put in his twenty years in uniform. Why shouldn’t I take a couple of bruises for Uncle Sam?”

“And it was fine by you if they knocked me off in the process.”

“You’re dangerous. You’re trying to harm the club. You and Bobby Stillman. She’s been after them for years. She’s crazy, you know, just in case you think you’re really doing something good. You’re both crazy. You’ll never win, you know. They’ll stop you.”

“Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. We’ll see.”

Bolden found duct tape in the pantry and socks in Schiff’s dresser. Returning to the guest room, he taped her ankles together. When she cried out, he stuffed a pair of silk dress socks into her mouth and taped that, too. Finally, he taped her wrists together and dragged her into the bathroom. He locked the door before pulling it closed.

It took him five more minutes to give Schiff the same treatment.

Somewhere in the house a phone rang.
Security,
he thought. Then he recognized the ring as belonging to a cell phone. He looked around and identified the noise as coming from the kitchen. He found the compact phone, next to Schiff’s wallet and keys. “Yes.”

“Mr. Morris. We’ll be meeting in the Long Room following the dinner this evening. Twelve o’clock. I trust you’re coming despite the weather.”

“Yes,” said Bolden. “I’ll be there.”

56

John Franciscus pulled his police cruiser to the curb in the center of the “No Parking Zone” fronting the Delta Shuttle Terminal at LaGuardia Airport. Grabbing his “Police Business” card off the passenger seat, he slid it onto the dashboard and climbed out of the car. He left the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked. Let someone else move the car. He had a plane to catch.

The terminal was bedlam. Commuters rushed to gates, many of them hurriedly buying coffee and newspapers on the way. Those just arriving made a beeline to baggage claim. Everyone had someplace to go, and from the look of it, they were all late. New York City, he thought. It was a place you couldn’t wait to get to, and couldn’t wait to leave.

Franciscus showed his badge to the security supervisor, who guided him around the metal detectors. He jogged up the incline to the ticketing area. The line of passengers waiting for a boarding card stretched to fifty feet. He walked directly to the counter.

“Police business,” he said, laying out his badge and identification for inspection. “I need to be on the seven-thirty flight to D.C.”

“Yes, um, let me check.”

“It’s urgent, ma’am.”

“Of course, Detective. That will be two hundred dollars.”

Franciscus paid by credit card. Without further ado, she issued him a boarding pass.

He did not see the fit, dark-haired man who had followed him to the desk and demanded a seat on the same flight to the nation’s capital.

The black BMW 760Li slowed at the corner of Forty-sixth and Broadway. A window rolled down. “Hey . . . get in.”

Bolden opened the door and slid into the backseat. The car accelerated into traffic. A young African American male sat behind the driver. He was dressed in a navy business suit that Bolden knew was the work of Alan Flusser. He wore a high white collar and an oversize pink Italian necktie—or a “cravat,” as Bolden had been told it was called on more than one occasion. His shoes looked like they’d never touched the pavement. Only the sparkling diamond watch gave any indication that he might not work in the same office as Tom Bolden.

Darius Fell kept his eyes straight ahead, his face a mask of indignation. “Mr. T.,” he said after a moment. “Howzit?”

“Not real good.”

“Respect,” he said. “Now you know I’m right. Can’t trust no one. Never.”

“I didn’t come to argue.”

“You lookin’ all business. Saw you on the TV. You look like a Russian or something, one of them guys from Little Odessa, know what I’m sayin’? You one scary motherfucker.”

“The tape’s a fake,” said Bolden.

Darius Fell laughed and for the first time turned to look at Bolden. He extended an open hand. “Ain’t it always?”

The two shook hands. “White Man’s Handshake,” Fell called it. Nothing fancy. No changing grips, snapping of fingers, or pointing at the other guy. In the four years he’d known Darius, Bolden often felt that the only thing he’d taught him was the meaning of a formal handshake and where to buy a decent suit.

“My sister help you out?”

“She did. Tell her thanks again. I owe you.”

“Nah. You just keep doing what you doing. We even, then.”

Video screens mounted in the back of the headrests played a pornographic movie. Tucked in a custom holster near the driver’s left leg was an Uzi submachine gun. Fell did nothing to camouflage the rise under his left arm.

“Tell your partners, we’re going downtown,” said Bolden.

“Where to?”

“Wall Street.”

The concourse of the executive parking lot beneath the Harrington Weiss building was reserved for senior partners and visiting big shots. Located on the first underground level, it was not so much a parking lot as a very large automobile showroom. At any time, one could expect to find a selection of late-model Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs, and Mercedeses. Tonight, however, the parking lot was deserted. HW’s senior partners had flown the coop by seven-thirty. At least half were en route to Washington, to attend Jacklin’s Ten Billion Dollar Dinner. A lone car remained. Sol Weiss’s ten-year-old Mercedes.

The BMW slowed. Bolden jumped out.

“Chill for three minutes, then get movin’,” said Darius Fell.

Bolden nodded and slammed the door.

His name was Caleb Short and he was the officer in charge of security for 55 Wall Street. Short sat at a console of video monitors, a paper bag on the desk holding his evening’s dinner and snack. His wife had prepared a liverwurst sandwich, peanut butter and celery sticks, carrots, and a tin of organic apple sauce. He had stuck in the Clark bar himself. He couldn’t make a twelve-hour shift without a little candy. A man had his limits.

“You believe what went down here?” Short asked his shift partner, Lemon Wilkie, a scrappy kid from Bensonhurst who liked to wear his side arm low on his hip.

“Some bad shit,” said Wilkie. “Just goes to show, you never really can tell about some people.”

“You know him? Bolden?”

“Seen him around. He’s a suit. You?”

“Yeah. He works late. Real friendly. Wouldn’t figure him to be the type.”

“Yeah,” laughed Wilkie, into his hand. “What do you know?”

Short sat up, wanting to tear into him, then thought the better of it. Short knew plenty . . . certainly more than a twenty-two-year-old army reservist like Lemon Wilkie. Short had put in his twenty as an MP with the army’s 10th Mountain Division and got out a master sergeant. Three chevrons on top. Three rockers on the bottom. In the five years since he’d gotten out, he’d put on a solid fifty pounds. Being a little overweight didn’t mean he wasn’t on top of his game.

Short checked the bank of monitors. There were twenty in all. The four positioned directly in front of him were permanent feeds from the lobby, the garage, and the forty-third floor, where Harrington Weiss’s top executives worked. The others rotated among the cameras on the different floors. He looked at a few, then took out his sandwich. In three years on the job, the most exciting thing that had happened on his watch was one of HW’s partners having a heart attack while waiting for an elevator to take him to his radio car. Short had spotted him on one of the monitors, lying there wriggling around like a landed fish. His call to 911 had saved the man’s life. Every year the man invited Caleb Short and his wife to his home for Thanksgiving dinner and slipped him an envelope with an even grand inside it, along with a bottle of French wine.

“You want first rotation or me?” he asked Lemon.

Each night, Short and Wilkie were required to make a minimum of six tours through the building, meaning a stop at each floor to have a look around. A tour took a little more than an hour.

“Sure, I’ll go,” said Wilkie.

A skeleton staff was on duty. Besides the two Somalis working the reception desk, there was just Short and Wilkie.

Caleb Short handed him the keys, but Lemon Wilkie wasn’t looking his way.

“Ah, shit,” said Wilkie. “Check out camera three.”

Short looked at the monitor providing a wide-angle view of the lobby. Three African American males were approaching the reception desk. It appeared that two of them were brandishing pistols and the third an Uzi. “Holy shit,” he muttered.

“You want it . . . or me?” asked Wilkie.

Regulations called for one man to remain in the security control room.

“I’ll take it,” said Short.

“Yes sir.”

Short glanced at Wilkie. That was more like it.

It was then that he heard the shots go off like a string of firecrackers. Holes appeared in the floor and the ceiling. The security room was situated directly above the reception desk. Short stared at the monitor. The three men were spraying the lobby with bullets. “Come on, Wilkie. Get your piece out. We’re going down there together.”

“I’m calling the cops. I ain’t going anywhere.”

Caleb Short shook his head. “The hell you aren’t. This is our building and we don’t let no one mess it up.”

Wilkie stood and fumbled with his pistol. His face had gone whiter than a ghost.

The two men were out the door a few seconds later.

Neither saw Thomas Bolden emerge from the elevator on the forty-third floor.

Recessed lights burned dimly, casting shadows on the reception desk, lengthening hallways, and in between, leaving pools of darkness. Bolden walked briskly, keeping an ear open for any activity. He had five minutes, ten at the most. Darius Fell promised to keep his buddies lighting up the place until NYPD showed up and not a minute longer. From somewhere distant came the whirring of an incoming fax. He turned the corner, passing Sol Weiss’s office.

Weiss, the self-made striver, the genial, charismatic leader, the staunch defender of the firm as a partnership. How many times had he turned down offers to sell the company, to boost the firm’s capital through an initial public offering, or to merge with one of the titans of the Street? He’d said it was to guard the firm’s entrepreneurial culture, to stay a specialist in chosen fields. Mostly, though, he liked to say that HW was a family company. His family. Bolden had never looked past the explanations. Was it that strange for at least one man to be satisfied with what he’d built himself?

Bolden continued past the private dining room and the executive boardroom. The door to Mickey Schiff’s office was locked. Bolden tried three keys until he found the right one. It wasn’t an office so much as the living room of an Italian palazzo. The room stretched seventy feet and was decorated in a sumptuous style the diametric opposite of his home. There was a section for guests, another for the lord of the manor to roam, and a formal work area at the far side. Somewhere hidden among the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves was a secret door to his private bathroom. Schiff had brought Bolden up on a Saturday a year ago and given him the nickel tour. It was the standard “this all could be yours someday” speech. Show the galley slaves what they’re working toward. Gold-plated faucets, Hockney prints, and an office the size of Rhode Island. That was the carrot. They didn’t have to worry about the stick. HW chose their employees carefully. The single overarching trait was a monstrous fear of failure. The employees provided their own sticks.

Bolden moved to his desk and took a place in Schiff’s low-backed captain’s chair. An identification card was required to gain access to Nightingale, the firm’s proprietary banking software. The card governed one’s clearance within the system, dictating what areas of the bank he had a right to explore. Schiff saw it all. Bolden slid the card through the scanner located on top of the keyboard. The screen powered up. After a few false starts, he accessed the portfolio management rubric. A prompt appeared asking him to enter the customer’s name or account number. He tried to remember who had mostly recently joined HW.

He typed in the name “LaWanda Makepeace.”

Six months earlier, LaWanda Makepeace had served as commissioner of the FCC when the regulatory body had inexplicably altered a holding rule allowing one of Jefferson’s telecom companies to market its service beyond its home state. Two months later, she’d left the FCC to join Jefferson Partners. It seemed a reasonable place to start.

Three account numbers appeared on the screen. Two of the numbers belonged to standard brokerage accounts. He opened each in turn. Both held a variety of blue-chip stocks, municipal bonds, and cash in the form of money-market shares. Their combined total teetered on the cusp of a million dollars. All in all, a reasonable portfolio for a fifty-year-old government professional who had counted her pennies.

The third account was labeled Omega Associates.

Bolden opened it. There at the bottom of the page, in the all-important box listing the total account value, stood the number thirty-four, followed by six zeroes. Thirty-four million dollars. Definitely not what one would expect for a woman who had spent her professional working life toiling in the government’s stables. Bolden blew a stream of air through his teeth. Thirty-four million dollars. It wasn’t a bribe. It was a dynasty.

A look at the account’s history showed that the cash had been deposited in two tranches. The first, six months earlier, and the second sixty days ago, corresponding to the time the FCC had ruled in favor of Jefferson.

Bolden recalled Marty Kravitz’s line about conjecture, and something a reasonable man could assume. Screw conjecture. It was time to dig up some proof.

By shading, then double-clicking on the deposit transaction, he was able to trace the routing of the thirty-four million dollars. The money had been wired in from a numbered account at the private bank of Milbank and Mason, domiciled in Nassau, the Bahamas. Finding the bank’s SWIFT number, the international identity code given to each licensed bank, he asked the software to locate and exhibit all transactions involving the bank and HW’s clients.

A list appeared, running to several screens. Two million here. Ten million there. There wasn’t an incoming wire from Milbank and Mason for less than seven figures. The sum added up to a fortune, but it was peanuts to a firm that year in, year out, earned its investors a staggering twenty-six percent rate of return. The names were equally staggering. Senators. Commissioners. Generals. Ambassadors. Movers and shakers, all. The men and women whose hands operated the levers of power. He counted no less than seven who currently worked for Jefferson Partners. All of them were here. All were clients of Harrington Weiss.

And then Bolden stumbled across his divining key. The transaction that tied it all together. Not an incoming wire, but an outgoing payment to said bank of Milbank and Mason, Nassau, the Bahamas. The sum: twenty-five million dollars. The recipient: a numbered account, but as was the custom, the account holder’s name was indicated for HW’s internal records. Guy de Valmont, vice chair of Jefferson Partners.

Bolden double-checked the account number. It matched the account used to pay LaWanda Makepeace and several others.

The trail was complete.

There was a last name, too. Solomon H. Weiss. The amount: fifty million dollars. No doubt a payment to ensure the long-lived partnership. A little pocket money to keep prying eyes at bay.