The Prince of Risk (24 page)

“I
f McVeigh asks where I am, just say I’m not feeling well. Make up something about the incident hitting me harder than I’d thought. You know the drill.”

Alex sat inside Barry Mintz’s Ford at the highway rest stop 5 miles from Teterboro Airport, where Bobby kept the jet.

“I know the drill,” said Mintz. “The question is if Jan will buy it.”

“Let’s hope so, or else it may not be such a happy homecoming.” Alex looked over at Mintz, who was retrieving a black mesh bag from the back seat. “You got everything I asked for?”

“I want to live, don’t I?” Mintz unzipped the bag and took out the items one by one for her examination. “One zinc-powered microtransmitter, one in-ear receiver, one extra battery.”

“And the other thing?” asked Alex after she’d handed each back.

“And the other thing,” said Mintz.

It was wiser not to discuss the “other thing,” a next-generation information gathering apparatus. Suffice it to say that possession of said device constituted an infraction of the legal code for both civilians and law enforcement professionals. Alex called it “the vacuum.”

She zipped up the bag and opened the door. “I’ll let you know what gives as soon as I learn something. I should be back late tomorrow night or early Thursday morning.”

Mintz tried on an encouraging smile. “You’re hanging it out there pretty far on this one—I mean, even for you.”

“Yeah, well, you know what they say. Act first, apologize later.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Just keep an eye on Bill Barnes for me. If you learn anything, I want to know it before he does.”

Alex climbed into the Charger with renewed purpose. She had the plane. She had her toys. Now she just needed to find her source. Someone in London knew who had hired Luc Lambert. She wasn’t coming home until she knew as well.

She covered the 5 miles to Teterboro in three minutes flat. She dropped the speed from 110 to 85 (to be safe) when she turned into the airport entrance and found a convenient space in the parking lot adjacent to the Jet Source fixed-base operation, or FBO. Before leaving the car, she tucked Mintz’s bag of goodies into her overnight bag.

Alerted to her arrival, a steward in livery waited at the curb. “May I take your bag, ma’am?”

Alex continued past him directly into the modern terminal. “Just get me to the plane.”

The protocol for flying internationally on private jets was similar to that for commercial air travel, she noted, but without the lines, bad attitudes, fussy children, and, most important, the chance of a tardy departure. Five minutes after checking in, she was crossing the tarmac to the G4. The sleek black aircraft was gassed up and ready to go.

The copilot stood alongside the stairs and offered a hand as she mounted the first step. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Astor,” he said.

Alex stopped cold, staring at the man. She started to dress him down, but her anger deserted her. “Good afternoon.”

“Watch your head.”

Alex ducked to enter the cabin, but once inside, she found she could stand to her full height. The aircraft was designed to accommodate twelve passengers comfortably. There were six oversized leather chairs facing each other on either side of the cabin, a desk to the right, and a couch running along the back left wall.

Alex collapsed into a chair and went to work. Unzipping her bag, she removed her notebooks and set them on a folding table. The notebooks contained everything she’d downloaded concerning Executive Outcomes, the private military company that had recruited Luc Lambert for the ill-fated coup in West Africa, and the company’s successor, Global Research Analysis and Intelligence, or GRAIL.

The steward offered her a warm towel and set a bowl of roasted almonds in front of her. He informed her that the dinner en route would be roast duck à l’orange with wild rice and braised Brussels sprouts. Should madam wish a hot lava cake for dessert, she should say so now so that it could follow her meal promptly and allow madam time to enjoy a restful night’s sleep. Madam declined the dessert and an offer of champagne, asking instead for an espresso and some peace and quiet, thank you very much.

At 5:12 the aircraft’s wheels left the runway. Alex was airborne. Flying time was six hours and ten minutes, with landing previewed at 5:22 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. If she wished to arrive earlier, she had only to ask the captain. Fuel was no object. He could shave fifteen minutes off their time. Alex said it wouldn’t be necessary. The company she planned on visiting did not open before nine-thirty. She had more than enough time to take the Underground into central London and even give herself a proper English breakfast.

She stared out the window for a few minutes, before lowering the window shade and turning her attention to work. She had surprisingly little to go on besides open-source information—newspaper and magazine articles she’d found on the Net and a Wikipedia brief. The Bureau had no information on either company. Private military companies and security consultants fell under the CIA’s purview, and she hadn’t had time to reach out to her contacts at Langley. She had tried to reach a colleague at MI5 en route to the airport, but it was late in the U.K. and he hadn’t responded. She settled for leaving a message.

One thing was clear. GRAIL had grown and prospered in the years since its founding. Articles mentioned contracts with the United States and British governments totaling tens of millions of dollars. A download from the company’s website offered its mission statement:

To provide a highly professional and confidential military advisory service to legitimate governments.

To provide sound military and strategic advice.

To provide the most professional military training packages currently available to armed forces, covering aspects related to sea, air, and land warfare.

To provide advice to armed forces on weapon and weapon platform selection.

To provide a totally apolitical service based on confidentiality, professionalism, and dedication.

Alex put down the paper. GRAIL could call itself an international security consultant all it wanted, but as far as she was concerned, it was still a private military company, or as they used to say in the Old West, a gun for hire.

She leafed through the remaining newspaper articles discussing the firm, but the reports failed to hold her interest. Instead she found herself thinking about Bobby. The burst of sentimentality she’d been witness to at Cherry Hill wasn’t like him. Was it because his life had been threatened, or had he really changed? She chastised herself for considering the possibility. Maybe she was the sappy one. In her experience, people rarely changed. If anything, their dominant personality traits grew stronger, and more dominant, as they aged. In Bobby’s case, those traits counted as arrogance, stubbornness, overconfidence, and, she had to admit, generosity.

Alex forced Bobby from her mind. Sitting straighter, she tried once again to read the documents. Air travel made her tired, and the words quickly grew fuzzy. A dozen espressos couldn’t stop her eyelids from drooping. Bobby came to her thoughts again. She imagined his touch on her skin, the texture of his cheek against hers…

With an effort, Alex fought off sleep. Her memories frightened her. Every relationship had its good times. Why were they always so much easier to remember than the bad times? The plane banked and flew due east. Darkness enveloped the aircraft. Her last thought as she drifted off to sleep was not about work but about him.

Bobby.

Did he really mean it about giving things another go?

“D
id you find him?”

Astor slammed the door closed and slid across the back seat.

“He’s waiting now.”

“And you didn’t use your phone?”

“I found the last pay phone in the city and said exactly what you told me.”

“All right. Floor it. I have to be at Central Park West at seven.”

Sullivan put the Audi into gear and started the drive uptown.

Astor leaned his face against the window, watching the city go by. He was thinking about Septimus Reventlow and wondering what kind of game he was playing. It was understandable that he might want to put more money into the fund yesterday…but today? Shank had been right when he’d called Astor a crazy man. And what to make of Reventlow’s tepid attempt to purchase a share of the firm? Maybe the man had better contacts in China than he did. Time would tell. Anyhow, Astor wasn’t planning on waiting until tomorrow at three to line up the funds he needed.

The Audi hit a pothole, jolting Astor and sending a twinge of pain through his arm. The anesthetic had worn off an hour ago and the wound ached intensely. He felt for the bottle of pain relievers in his pocket. Vicodin. Strong stuff. He dropped it back into his pocket. Instead, he used the pain to focus his attention on his current predicament.

Astor was not one for deep thought. He did not hold with Frost and the “life unexamined” nonsense. Or was it Socrates? Another fault of his truncated education. He preferred to read military histories and biographies of generals and decorated soldiers. He knew that a good general leads from the front. He liked to think that he lived from the front, with his eyes locked on the horizon. Yet if there was ever a time to stop the tanks, to take a long look back and ask how he had gotten here, this was it.

It seemed like yesterday that he was turning the keys in the door of his first office, at 21st and Madison, in some leftover space he leased from First Boston, and taking his first step up the ladder. He had no lofty goals, either monetary or social. He never once said, “I want to make a million dollars a year” or “ten million,” or “I want to be worth one hundred million by the time I’m forty.” He simply went to work each day at the appointed hour and dedicated himself to his job, which meant analyzing annual reports, watching the market, and picking stocks better than the next guy. The secret came in the repetition of this cycle, day in, day out, year in and year out, without fail. Was he ever the best at picking stocks? Of course not. But on some days he was better than average, and when you added those days together they were enough to enable him to rise to the top of his profession.

It had been so much simpler in the beginning. No possessions. No family. No money. There was just the job. But as the years passed, all that changed. He married. He had a child. He hired employees. He earned money. He hired more employees. He earned more money. He bought a home. His name appeared in the paper. He began to have status and he enjoyed it.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Until
voilà!
One day, here he was. He was the same Bobby Astor who’d started his business on a wing and a prayer and the fifty grand he’d made at poker tables around the city. Yet there was no denying he’d grown into someone different. Someone bigger. Someone more substantial. It was as if success, responsibility, fatherhood, and philanthropy had fused to create a new Bobby Astor, and that Bobby Astor demanded a larger physical portion of the world. He’d started out a gecko and grown into Godzilla. And goddammit, he liked it. He liked it a lot. No apology necessary.

And then came the descent.

The estrangement from his father.

The separation from Alex, and then the divorce.

And now the bet on the yuan.

From the heights of Olympus to the edge of the abyss. What had taken twenty years to create, he stood to lose within twenty-four hours.

Astor looked in the mirror. Fighting eyes glared back.

A
stor spotted Grillo seated at the end of the bar.

“This public enough?” asked the investigator.

It was six, and the Oak Bar in the Plaza Hotel was packed. Tourists with red faces and sweat-moistened shirts mingled with executives in pressed suits and polished shoes. Drawn blinds shaded the dark, wood-paneled room in permanent air-conditioned gloom. It was a place for making deals and plotting takeovers and planning divorces.

“It should do,” said Astor, though he was by no means certain.

Grillo smiled his gambler’s smile, then took a sip of his drink. Astor looked at the rivulets of water sliding down the highball glass. He could smell the sour-mash whiskey, the happy hint of sweet vermouth. A manhattan, then.

“Drink?”

Astor could feel the cooled blend coating the inside of his mouth, soothing his throat, soothing his life. “Sure.”

Grillo signaled the bartender.

Astor swallowed, waiting, deciding. The bartender arrived.

“Pellegrino with lime. Highball glass. Big lime.” He saw Grillo give him the look. He waited for the drink, and when it came he drank half of it straightaway.

“I talked to him,” said Astor.

“Who?”

“Palantir.”

Grillo lost the smile. “How’s that?”

“Skype. At my dad’s place in Oyster Bay. My father was in touch with him online. Palantir was helping with the investigation. In fact, he said he was the one who had contacted my father in the first place.”

“About?”

“He didn’t get that far.”

“Slow down.”

“All I know is that they’re listening. That’s why I had Sully call you on the pay phone.”

“Not to me, they’re not. I take precautions.” Grillo had taken his Zippo lighter from his pocket and was flipping the cover open and closed with his thumb. “Give it to me slow. Start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out. I’m a good listener.”

Astor relayed the events of the past thirty-six hours just as he had to Alex, beginning with his visit to Penelope Evans’s house in Greenwich and continuing through the trip to Cherry Hill. Grillo didn’t ask why he hadn’t been more forthcoming when they’d met the day before. Astor knew he’d been right not to tell. He pulled back the sleeve of his jacket and revealed the bandage. “The guy stuck me and took off,” he said in conclusion. “So here we are.”

“Did you get a good look at him?” asked Grillo.

“He was as close to me as you are.”

“A description might help. Tell me after. Once more about the companies.”

Astor went back over the annual reports he’d found at Evans’s house and his belief that the key could be found in the companies’ common tie to private equity firms.

“But different sponsors invested in each,” said Grillo.

“Five of them. Two sponsors invested in more than one of the companies.”

“And the companies themselves aren’t in any way related.”

“No, but still…” Astor’s argument slipped away like sand through his fingers.

“Tell me more about the company your father visited.”

“Might have visited.” Astor handed him the article he’d found and pointed out the mention of Britium. “Mean anything?”

“Not to me, but I’ll ask around.” Grillo slid his lighter back into his pocket. “One last thing. Did you get the web address of the man who said he was Palantir?”

“Cassandra99.donetsk.ru.”

“Russia. Figures.”

“Can you find him?”

“With a Skype handle? Not likely. But it’ll help. Every little bit gets us a little closer.”

“And you?” asked Astor. “Find anything?”

“Palantir’s the real thing. I can tell you that. Did some work for the Pentagon. Very hush-hush stuff. Didn’t earn many friends along the way. We can assume that’s why he didn’t want to bring in the FBI on this.”

“Did his work have anything to do with Britium or something that tied in with the companies my father was looking into?”

“Wouldn’t know.” Grillo leaned closer, so Astor could smell his cologne and see how his wrinkles carved canyons around his eyes. “All I can say is that whatever it was he and your father were investigating, some very powerful people don’t want them—or anyone else—to find out.”

“The man who tried to kill me was Asian, but he had these strange blue eyes.”

“Asian, eh?”

Astor provided a detailed description of his dress.

“Speak English?”

“We didn’t get a chance to talk.”

Grillo entered Palantir’s Skype address into his smartphone, then stood. “Do you need protection?”

“I have Sully.”

“Don’t go home. Stay where people can see you. You still got that apartment in your office? That might be okay.” Grillo squinted and shook his head. “Actually, scratch that. Go to a friend’s. Maybe a hotel.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Good. You never know where these guys are going to turn up.”