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.
Bolden sent the information to the printer. He was done with conjecture. He had his proof. The printer began to spit out pages. He checked one. Bribery wasn’t the right word, he thought. More apt was robbery. But robbing what? Integrity. Faith. Accountability. Tammany Hall had nothing on Jefferson. Jefferson had hijacked the government and stuffed it in its back pocket.
When the printer had finished, Bolden logged off the computer and left the office.
He shut the door and looked down the hall.
“Bang,” said a voice, from behind him. “You’re dead.”