“Window dressing,” declared DiGenovese. He’d unbuttoned his jacket and was stalking the room like a wolf in his den. “So far he’s given two mil, and he’s a month late on this year’s pledge. Five’ll get you ten he never delivers.” Abruptly, he stopped his pacing and thrust his hands on Dodson’s desk, his peasant’s jaw jutting forward. “Mercury’s a phony, sir. Kirov’s got it dolled up to look like AOL when it’s really CompuServe. Gavallan’s in bed with him, and together they’re going to pull the wool over investors’ eyes and pocket the takings. You see what he’s pulling down on fees for this deal? Something like seventy million dollars? Seventy million!”
“My, my, Roy,” drawled Dodson appreciatively. “That would make Mr. Gavallan even more ambitious than you. Isn’t that a scary thought? One thing is for certain: Mr. Gavallan’s not in this alone. In the first place, Black Jet didn’t even do all of the due diligence on this thing. I don’t know how many lawyers and accountants and consultants he had signing off on Mercury, but believe me it was a lot. You saying they’re part of this, too?”
“Never know.”
Dodson nudged his glasses to the end of his nose. “Quite a conspiracy you’re cooking up, Roy. Seen any Kennedys flitting around out there in never-never land? Or just Peter Pan and Jett Gavallan?”
Rummaging in his ashtray for a rubber band or two, he wrapped them around his index and middle fingers and, kicking his feet up onto the desk, began to spin the bands forward and back. He liked the bent of the argument, if he wasn’t convinced of its veracity. He thought of the transfer to Mexico City, the traffic, the bad water, the horrid food—enchiladas, Heaven forbid—and came to a quick and rational decision that the American angle was just what they needed to drum some new life into the investigation.
A billion-dollar fraud involving a Russian oligarch, a former fighter pilot, and that holy of all holies, the New York Stock Exchange. It was practically treason. He caught himself thinking that the press would have a field day and the man who put Jett Gavallan behind bars would be instantly famous. He stopped himself there. All the infighting, posturing, and backbiting were getting to him. Still, for a last second he couldn’t help but imagine that the man who put Gavallan behind bars would have a south-facing office and the promotion to assistant director that came with it.
Rising from his desk, Howell Dodson strode to the window. The harsh glare showed off wrinkles near the eyes normally unseen, a determined cast to the jaw, and a nasty downturn of his pale, fleshy lips. Suddenly, he didn’t look so boyish anymore, not every inch the amiable Southern gentleman he pretended to be. Get close enough to any man, he would say, and you could glimpse his true nature. And underneath his easygoing drawl and unflappable smile, Howell Dodson was a nasty sumbitch who did not like to get beaten.
Just then, the cries of his two baby boys exploded from down the hallway. A moment later, a trim, very blond woman bustled through the door, a wailing infant in each arm. Rushing to greet his wife and sons, Dodson softened his expression into a broad smile.
“Hello, Jefferson. Hello, Davis. And how are my two little generals this mornin’?”
21
A momentary lull had descended on the trading floor at Black Jet Securities. Phones had stopped ringing—or blinking, as has become their convention—conversation had fallen to a whisper, the shuttle of chairs to and fro between desks had come to a halt. “A rest between rounds,” Gavallan liked to call it on good days. Or “the calm before the storm” on bad ones.
Incisex stock had begun trading on Nasdaq—the National Association of Securities Dealers’ Automated Quotation System—thirty minutes earlier at 6:55. Ticker symbol CSXI—pronounced “sexy”—Incisex was a pioneer in the field of nanotechnology, the branch of science concerned with building sophisticated engineering devices—engines, motors, valves—on a submicron scale. The company’s breakthrough product was a battery-powered valve no bigger than the head of a needle that when surgically implanted into a coronary artery restored proper blood flow to the heart. For men and women suffering from arteriosclerosis or any vasocirculatory problems (and for their cardiologists), it was a godsend. The IPO would net Incisex seventy-five million dollars, funds it would use to move into larger facilities and to upgrade its research and development efforts. Black Jet’s fee was the standard 7 percent of the offering.
“Seventeen bid, seventeen and a quarter ask,” announced Bruce Jay Tustin from his post behind a dozen color screens and monitors. “We’re going up, up, up!”
The issue had been priced at $14 a share and after thirty minutes of trading, demand had lifted the shares 20-odd percent to $17. Checking a screen above Tustin’s shoulder, Gavallan saw that buyers outnumbered sellers three to one. It was a far cry from the bonanza days when one new issue after another would double or triple on its first day of trading, but Gavallan wasn’t complaining. In a rational world, a first day’s gain of 20 percent qualified Incisex stock as “popping” all the same.
“I think we can open the champagne now,” he said to an assembly of four men and two women standing to one side of the room. “Mr. Kwok, would you do the honors?”
On cue, Wing Wu Kwok, a newly hatched associate who had accompanied the Incisex brain trust on their two-week road show across America, uncorked a bottle of Moët & Chandon, filled a half dozen flutes, and offered round a silver tray bearing beluga caviar, toast points, and china dishes brimming with chopped egg white and diced onion.
Gavallan accepted a glass of bubbly and raised it high. “To Incisex and that rarest of all marriages—profit and the public good. Cheers!”
There were huzzahs all around. Hugs and handshakes followed the clinking of glasses.
“May the sun be ever in your eyes,” Tustin chimed in, “and the wind at your ass.”
“Here, here.” Gavallan managed a smile, but just barely. Two hours’ sleep had left him exhausted and haggard. With Grafton Byrnes’s predicament increasingly weighing on him, it was difficult to maintain a cheerful façade. If no one had remarked upon the dark circles beneath his eyes, it was only because he was the boss.
For a few minutes, he mingled with the executives from Incisex, taking refuge from his worry in the cloak of chief executive. He slapped some backs, he partook of the caviar, he extolled his clients’ rosy future. But even as half his mind concentrated on projecting a carefree exterior, the other half remained fraught with doubt. Two words from his best friend had turned Cate Magnus’s hotly worded suspicions about Kirov and Mercury into Gavallan’s worst nightmare.
“Everything’s copacetic.”
Gavallan had to imagine the rest. Grafton Byrnes was being held against his will somewhere in Russia and would never return. He knew too much. He was sure to be killed, if he wasn’t dead already. It was all that simple. That terrible.
Pondering his conclusions, a new thought dawned on Gavallan, one that his trusting mind decided was more frightening than the rest. If Kirov felt so secure that the Mercury offering would come to market that he would risk kidnapping Byrnes, he had to have someone in place at Black Jet to push through the offering despite the chairman’s opposition, someone highly enough placed in the company that he might persuade Jett that Byrnes’s disappearance was a coincidence, nothing more.
As quickly as it had come, the lull on the trading floor abated. Lights began flashing on the checkerboard consoles that connected Black Jet to over a hundred banks, brokerages, and financial institutions around the world. Voices boomed as traders greeted their clients with news of the strong offering. Casters groaned as the bankers recommenced their daylong jitterbug.