About Face (37 page)

“I'm sure, Cobus. You'll have to trust me on this.”

Cobus collects himself and leans back in his chair.

“Okay, Ivan, let's be clear about exactly where we are, and exactly what is going to happen. There's been a lot of time and money spent here.”

“Not nearly as much as we're talking about should this deal go through,” I cut him off.

“Let's assume I'm fine to learn what
more
means later on. Which I am. You mentioned Berlin is the better deal. I'm assuming
you've been spending some of your time seeing if that deal is still alive for us.”

“It is. I can make it happen. I can land it.”

Cobus, surprising me, stands up. He grabs his chair, slides it around closer to me, and sits back down. He puts his arm around me. He moves in close and quietly speaks into my ear.

“I trust you, Ivan. I trust that you believed the deal here in Manhattan was the right one—for the right reasons—and now you don't. I believe we can still land the Berlin target because you're telling me we can. I trust you, Ivan, because you've never given me a reason not to. So tell me—”

“Tell you what?”

“This is about much more than just real estate, isn't it?”

I can't hide myself swallowing.

I can feel perspiration forming under my collar.

Shit, I'm tired.

I want more caffeine.

“Excuse me!” I say to the first waiter who passes us. “May I have an iced coffee?”

My eyes meet Cobus's again. He's waiting for an answer.

I don't give him one.

With the quickness and subtle grace, precision, of a panther, Cobus surprises me and grabs my wrist so hard it feels like he can break it if he wants to.

“Everyone has secrets, Ivan. Everyone. But you'd better look me in the eye and promise you have not put yourself or me—my family, my firm—any of us in harm's way. Can you do that?”

I'm Cobus de Bont's right-hand man.

I'm a warrior on a silent mission. A warrior with unfinished business.

I'm loyal.

To many.

To whom?

Careful, Cobus.

“Of course,” I respond.

Wearing an aura I've not seen him in before, he eases up. In posture, in expression, he eases up.

“I need a few more hours,” I continue. “This deal is wrong. Berlin is right. But I want to finish the job of undercutting Gruden and getting a signed Term Sheet in place before we notify GlassWell we'll be walking away. I would hate to lose focus and lose both deals. But you need to let me handle this my way. All I need is a few more hours. I need until this evening.”

Cobus, surveying me in a way he never has before, stands up, moves his chair to its original spot, and sits back down.

“Once we're on that plane tonight, and we're headed out of New York, I'll tell you exactly what happened, why GlassWell is not the firm we thought they were. But to do so now would simply be wasting time.”

“Call the office,” Cobus says. “Tell them we need to push back liftoff until this evening.”

Check.

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY
2013

Back in Murray Hill, I ring the doorbell of Scott Green's townhouse. Nothing. Just as I'm about to ring again or knock, or both, the door opens. It's Anne Green.

“Good morning, Anne. May I come in?”

“Of course. I was wondering when I was going to hear from you again.”

I step inside and she closes the door behind me.

“Did you ever hear of a man named Enzo Alessi?” I ask her.

“Of course. The restaurateur family. I know they just signed a new lease in one of the GlassWell properties. The building that is in the process of being sold.”

“That's right. Ryan Brand, who heads up acquisitions for GlassWell, is the one who put that deal together. The flash drive I took from your husband's office upstairs? It contained recordings of conversations between Ryan Brand and Enzo Alessi. Conversations that revealed the two were working together for all the wrong reasons.”

“I don't understand.”

“The details of those dealings are not what's important. I have a
feeling your husband taped these conversations by tapping Brand's phone because he was being threatened. Because he knew what they were up to and was not going to allow the deal to happen. Because he was a good man. And they are both pieces of shit.”

“How do—why?”

“Anne, can I have another look at Scott's study?”

We step into the office upstairs, which is exactly as I left it. The people coming by to sit shivah have all since gone. The home and office, while comfortably warm temperature-wise, feels cold, lonely. Like the walls and everything in between them feel as cheated as Scott's grieving widow. Life can be heard going on, though faintly, past the study windows. In here, death is what hangs in the air.

Knowing I have Anne's blessing to roam, I head straight for the desk. I take a seat behind it, and my eyes go straight for the pen I had replaced, the pen Scott had given me. I remember the line about pushing it straight forward, but also remember other words from that moment.

“That's why I did it to myself when all the darkness began … I know how to do it. I learned how to do it. I—for proof.”

Had he taped himself as he had the other two?

Why?

My eyes search for the phone and find it under the desk's mess. I pick up the handset. I examine it, from every side, thinking perhaps there's a recording device. I start taking it apart. Once it's in pieces, I pick up the base from the desk and do the same. I determine that I have nothing. And, more importantly, that if there was something of note here, I would have no idea as it would probably just look like one of the other parts I can't identify.

My eyes move back to the pen. The slim holder it rests in has a small ball at the end fitting into a socket attached to the base. I reach forward, and push the pen forward. The ball smoothly rotates in the socket until the
D
on the top of the pen is pointing straight ahead at the opposite wall.

At a photograph of Anne Green.

She looks at the picture I'm now staring at.

“It's from a few years ago. We were in Miami for a wedding.”

I stand up and walk over to the picture. Anne joins me for the up-close examination. I study it, remembering my past has taught me to look closer when it comes to pictures, art, anything. Convinced there's nothing I'm not seeing, I take the picture from the wall. On the back, written small toward the bottom of white backing of the photograph by the frame, I find something:
www.VivRecord.com
.

“What is that for?” asks Anne.

“Let's find out,” I respond.

I replace the photo back on the wall, head back behind the desk, and sit down. Anne settles in behind me looking over my shoulder. The PC monitor on Scott's desk hovers above the mess. Down below is the tower, or CPU. I reach down, press the “on” button and listen to the whir of it booting. In seconds the monitor comes to life.

I hit the browser and type in
www.VivRecord.com
. Within seconds, the purpose of the site becomes clear.

“It's an audio file storage site,” I explain to Anne. “One for the purpose of recording and storing telephone conversations.”

My eyes find the “login” button, which I click on. The username is already there: “DavidWendy.”

“What would your husband have used as his password?”

“Try Brewer. It's the town in Maine where he grew up. He used it as the password for everything.”

I type it in.

Done.

We're in.

“What are we looking at?” asks Anne.

“A log of all the calls your husband recorded, calls associated with the number 917-555-6676.”

“That's his cell phone number. You mean he was recording his own phone?”

“It appears that way.”

I point at the screen.

“If you look here, it gives the date and time of each call, and next to it is an indication of whether it was an incoming or outgoing call. Here,” I go on, “you can play it back or download it as an MP3 to either be archived or e-mailed.”

The calls go back about four weeks. All incoming and outgoing calls were recorded so the log is a long one. I start by playing back random calls when the recordings began.

“Hi, honey, it's me,” begins the first one. “Listen, I know we're supposed to meet Laura and Harlan tonight, but—”

“Me,” Anne says.

I move on.

“Scotty! Big Bri here—”

“His friend Brian May,” Anne fills me in. “Law school buddy.”

“Look, may be a few minutes late to the Garden so messenger my ticket to my office, and I'll meet you in the seats probably about halfway through the first quarter. Lakers coming to town—love it!”

We move on.

“Scott, it's Ryan.”

Ryan Brand.

“You need to call me back.”

He hangs up.

I take the number the call came from, Brand's cell number, and put it in the search box. The call log we're looking at has now been reduced to those coming from and going to this number. The majority of which are incoming.

“Scott, Ryan. Look, I don't think you'd be foolish enough to try and hold this deal up in any way, but in case you're thinking it may not be—uh—it may not be something the firm should see through, you may want to talk this through with me. Call me back.”

“What deal is he talking about?” asks Anne.

“The one between GlassWell and the Alessi family. Your husband was on to them. And I'm pretty sure it cost him his life.”

I hit the next one. Then the next. The calls become more
heated in nature. And more and more it becomes clear Scott Green is not only having cold feet about allowing such a deal to happen, but he's being threatened that if he fucks with it he'll pay.

“What, Ryan?” starts the next one.

“What, Ryan? That's how you want to speak to me? I left you a message in your office to come find me.”

“I was busy today top to bottom.”

“I don't care. If I say I need to speak with you, then you need to find me.”

“For what? So you can hear me tell you I'm okay with all of this? That I'm willing to be party to this?”

“Well, aren't you?”

Green doesn't answer.

“Hello?” continues Brand.

“I have to go,” Green says.

Then he hangs up.

“That's why I did it to myself when all the darkness began … I know how to do it.” I again remember Green saying to me, “One was elsewhere, the … covert, but I learned how to do it. I—for proof.”

Covert. Elsewhere. Once Green overheard them, and Brand started threatening him, he must have used some kind of spyware to tap Brand's phones. While he was able to use something like
VivRecord.com
to record himself, the other conversations must have been housed elsewhere. That's why those needed to be passed by flash drive.

Next call. Then another. Then another.

Each more contentious in nature.

Each more threatening toward Green.

I play one from a week ago.

“How we looking?” asks Brand in an even voice. “You getting all the contracts in order?”

“I don't think I can do this,” Green says after a pause. “I'm going to go and speak with Gary…”

Gary Spencer.

The Big Boy.

“I'm going to tell him everything.”

“No, you're not,” Brand counters. “You know why?'

Green says nothing.

“Because if you do anything but see this deal through and carry on as though life is just rosy, I will act on my promises. You have the pictures. Don't ever doubt me.”

“Why are you doing this?” asks Green. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Because he's a greedy lowlife who fell in way over his head.

That's why.

I hear a sniffle back over my shoulder. I look up at Anne who, trying to remain strong, is suppressing a cry that on the inside is much bigger than she's allowing me to see.

“You all right?” I ask.

“No. What kind of animal is this guy?”

“The worst kind,” I answer. “One without a soul.” “I'm doing this because GlassWell needs this deal,” Brand goes on, “and because I'm not going to let you fuck it up over something you have all wrong.”

“Something I have all wrong,” Green says, showing some fight still. “You so sure about that?”

The recorded conversations between Brand and Alessi.

“Don't fuck with me. I am a man of my word. Remember what I told you will happen if you decide to make up stories.”

“What's that?” responds Green angrily, losing patience. “That if I tell GlassWell or the cops what happened, you go away quietly because the order to kill my family if you're outed has already been put in place? Huh? Isn't that how you put it, you sick fuck?”

No doubt a last-ditch effort to get such a damning threat confirmed on tape.

A threat—perhaps more a promise—Brand made to Green offline.

In person.

Brand doesn't bite.

“Like I've already said, Scott,” Brand comes back, his voice still calm, “you need to reel in your imagination and keep the storytelling in check. It's liable to get you into trouble at some point.”

Then, he's gone.

Turns out Green wasn't scared for his own life. He was scared for his family.

Silence behind me. I turn around. All the color has rushed from Anne Green's face. She's covering her mouth.

I close the browser and open Green's e-mail. I do a search for all those from Ryan Brand, but nothing unrelated to business dealings comes up.

Pictures.

What pictures?

If something was received via e-mail, it wouldn't have come directly from the scumbag. My mind moves to anonymous e-mail services. I start scrolling back through e-mails looking for anything that seems odd. The first thing that catches my eye is an e-mail from the address [email protected]. ‘nl' is the e-mail suffix for the Netherlands; ‘GunBroker' speaks for itself. To spare Anne, I keep going without stopping or opening it. Then I see an e-mail that came in a week ago from a source called FlazMail.