His cell rang as he passed a guitar-pickin’ cowboy wearing only a Stetson, snakeskin boots, and Calvin Klein underwear. Bell pulled the spent chewing gum from his mouth and dropped it into the singing cowboy’s open guitar case on the sidewalk.
“Chuck Bell,” he said into his phone.
“I want to meet,” the man on the line said.
Bell stopped and pressed a finger to his left ear to drown out the sounds of the city. “What?”
“Listen to me,” the man said. “I’m telling you that I want to meet.”
The strange voice was distorted by an electronic device, sounding like one of those anonymous informants on TV who talked from behind screens that concealed their identity.
Bell’s pulse quickened. “Who is this?”
“Someone who knows the real Saxton Silvers story. Meet me outside the FNN Studio. I’ll tell you what I know as soon as you get there.”
The call ended.
Bell looked at his phone in disbelief, hardly able to comprehend his good fortune. He thrust a fist into the air, nearly airborne, he was so excited. This was getting so cool-midnight phone calls, disguised voices, the stuff of big-screen movies.
He was sure it was Cantella. Leaving him a business card with his cell number had been a smart move. Going on the air tonight and being cryptic about his source-Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t Michael Cantella-had been a stroke of genius. The clear implication to all of Wall Street was that it was Cantella, and Cantella had too much of an ego not to control a story that had his fingerprints on it.
Bell spotted a cab, pushed aside a couple of Japanese tourists who were trying to get both a picture and a video of themselves climbing into a real New York taxi, and jumped into the backseat.
“Jersey,” he said, and he gave the driver the studio address.
On the ride across town to the tunnel he checked his smart phone for e-mail. One that immediately caught his eye was from the Legal Department at FNN.
Heads up, it read. I just received word that the U.S. Attorney’s Office plans to hit you with a grand jury subpoena tomorrow morning to force you to disclose the identity of your confidential source. Not sure what the basis for this is. But don’t be alarmed when a federal marshal shows up at the studio.
Bell sat back, closed his eyes, and smiled. Tomorrow was already playing out in his head. First, he would bump Money Honey again at nine A.M. to announce his refusal to comply with the subpoena. Maybe his publicist could book him on The View, where he could take the journalistic high road and proclaim his determination to do whatever it takes to protect his source and the First Amendment. Then, to cap it off, on tomorrow evening’s edition of Bell Ringer he would put on his boxing gloves, literally wrap himself in the American flag like Sylvester Stalone in Rocky, and pulverize two bears dressed in lawyerly pinstripes. No, not bears. Kangaroos-as in a kangaroo court. And he’d name them “Legal” and “Evil.” With any luck, a federal judge would hold him in contempt of court for failure to comply with the subpoena, maybe even throw him in jail overnight. Only then-“under relentless government pressure”-would he capitulate and reveal his source on Larry King Live. If he played this right, he’d be on all the top morning shows and every nightly news broadcast, speeding down the fast track toward the mainstream media and life beyond FNN.
And that didn’t even account for what Cantella was about to tell him.
Looking good, baby.
“Fifty-two-fifty,” the cabdriver said. They were already at the studio. Bell typed out a quick response to the lawyer’s e-mail. “Got it,” he wrote. “At studio now to meet higher source.”
“Now it’s fifty-three-fifty, buddy.”
Bell hit Send, gave the driver sixty bucks, and watched the taxi pull away. He was behind the studio in the empty parking lot. The lighting wasn’t what it should have been. He’d complained to maintenance many times, mainly because he had to park his Maserati at the far end of the lot to avoid door dings from losers in ten-year-old junks.
He didn’t see anyone, and it was too cold and too damn dark to wait outside. He started across the lot and headed toward the light at the rear entrance of the building.
“Hey, Bell,” a voice called out from the shadows.
As he turned he heard a muffled crack that-even though the parking lot was empty-sounded like a car door slamming. A hammerlike jolt to his forehead sent his head snapping back, and his body collapsed to the pavement.
His limbs were frozen, and he couldn’t move. The right side of his face was flat on the asphalt, and it was impossible even to turn his mouth and nose away from the expanding pool of hot blood that encircled his head. He heard approaching footsteps, but his vision was gone, and he couldn’t force himself to speak.
“Yup,” he heard a man say, “that’s a Bell Ringer.”
Then he heard that sound again-like a car door slamming-and his world fell silent.
25
IT WAS ONE A.M., AND IT OCCURRED TO ME THAT I HADN’T SLEPT since I was thirty-four years old. Papa had warned me about the insomnia. Getting old sucks.
Getting screwed double-sucks.
Convincing the night manager of Hotel Mildew to return my last two hundred bucks wasn’t going to happen. Nor would he budge on the $500 room rate. We cut a deal that allowed me to stay the night for the cost of my deposit-as long as I was out of the room by six A.M. instead of the usual checkout time of eleven A.M.
I wasted my first precious hour on the telephone with my credit card company, the first thirty minutes of which was spent trying to get through the phone menu to talk to an actual human being. Finally Anoop Gupta from New Delhi assured me that by morning I would have a working card. I could only hope that he meant my morning, not his. I desperately needed rest, but at 2:35 A.M. I was still wide awake, staring at the ceiling in the dark.
I can’t believe she’s divorcing me.
According to Mallory, I should have seen it coming, but I could recall only one major blowup in the last year. We had our favorite charities, but when Papa told me about the volunteer work he was doing for a south Florida organization called “Charlee,” I immediately wrote a ten-thousand-dollar check. Mallory went ballistic-not because of the amount of the donation, and definitely not because she questioned the merits of an organization that helped abused children. She just wished I had made the donation anonymously. She didn’t explain why, and she shut me down the moment I even hinted at anything personal in her past. But it was as if she didn’t want anyone asking questions about her own childhood.
I was beginning to wonder how well I had really known Mallory in high school-if there was a reason our friendship had never evolved to the next level, if something far more oppressive than twenty-plus hours a week in a dance studio had prevented such a pretty girl from seriously dating anyone, as far as I could remember.
My mind refused to shut off, but I had major problems to solve, and I needed to focus. The fact that the draining of my portfolio was part of a bigger setup to bring down Saxton Silvers made no difference to Mallory, but Papa’s question was racing through my brain: Who were my enemies? Kent Frost was no fan of mine, but I had battled dozens of guys like him over the years. I was more worried about the enemy I had no memory of ever having met. The more I focused on guys like Frost, the more likely it would turn out to be Colonel Mustard waiting for me in the library with the dagger and the pistol because I had somehow killed his leveraged buyout of a candlestick-holder factory.
I had officially moved from paranoid to punchy.
Go to sleep!
A banging noise emerged from somewhere in the hall, and I bolted upright in the bed. I waited, then heard it again. Someone was knocking on the door.