Magdalene (3 page)

“Oh, I get it. Like my Aunt Trudy. She
could’ve gaslighted a frog.”

“Yes, exactly. Gaslight. That’s it. I
couldn’t think of the word.”

“So what naïf called him to be Young Men’s
president?”

“Uh...that would be me,” Mitch muttered.
“He’s useful. Does everything he’s asked and does it well. He’s
heavy into Scouting, does all the high adventures in grand style. I
wasn’t going to let that go to waste just because he and I have
history.”

“And you can’t stand him.”

“It’s not that... It’s—” Mitch sighed. “I
never knew him. Never thought about him enough to care. I’ve never
looked past his act because it doesn’t affect me one way or
another, and I was too busy with my life. Mina tried to explain it
to me for years, but apparently I wasn’t listening.”

More guilt.

“And you’re worried about what he could do
to you.”

Mitch paused. “Not...
professionally
,
no.”

Sebastian laughed then, a booming laugh that
made Mitch crack a reluctant grin. “Aw, c’mon, Elder. Have a little
faith. This isn’t Paris, and we’re not twenty, getting dressed down
by a mission president with the IQ of a crêpe. This guy has no
power, no connections, and nowhere near the money you have. What’s
the worst he can do?”

* * * * *

Lady
Marmalade

November 30, 2010

My email dinged and the sender’s name
shocked me.

TO:
[email protected]
FROM:
SA Taight
REPLY-TO:
[email protected]
SUBJECT:
[no subject]
DATE:
11/30/10 2:11 PM EST

Cassie,
Even though you neither called me to rescue you from your cockeyed
theories about my Fix-or-Raid Protocol nor presented yourself for
my anointing as my ideological successor, I want you to reorganize
the Hollander Steelworks/Jep Industries operation. Need it fast and
I hear you specialize in fast. Please give me date and time we can
get this done. Pref next week. Pref Mon. Pref 10am. Pref @
Hollander’s office.
SbnT

[email protected]

What an ego that man possessed. But I
laughed, delighted that
he
had come to
me
, albeit
with the infamous arrogance that he could snap his fingers and the
financial world would jump.

I hit
REPLY
.

TO:
[email protected]
CC:
[email protected]
FROM:
Cassandra J. St. James
SUBJECT:
How high? Re: [no subject]

I would prefer Monday next, 10 a.m.,
Hollander’s office. Please make the appropriate arrangements.
St. James

It took me the rest of the day to clear my
calendar, and it took my assistant that long to get the file
storage service to promise a rush delivery. When they had stacked
at least a dozen banker’s boxes in my corner office suite the next
morning, Susan and I looked at each other in dismay.

“Uh...” The head of the corporate bond
department stood in the door of my office staring at the
carnage.

“New project,” I said when I realized
Melinda had arrived to whisk Susan away so they could watch their
favorite cooking show—
Vittles: Gourmet Roadkill and
Weeds
—together. “I need her right now, so DVR it.”

“
What
project?”

“It appears that Hollander Steelworks can no
longer support the old Jep Industries operation by itself and needs
to be cut loose.”

“Oh,” Melinda said, blinking.
“That’s...interesting.”

“Want to help?”

“No,” she said flatly. “I have about as much
interest in restructuring as you have in bonds. Plus, I have plans
for the weekend and they do not include—” She waved a hand.
“That.”

“Okay, then,” I said pointedly. “Bye.”

Melinda left in a huff, and Susan and I set
to work sorting and sifting, finding all the documents I
needed.

I’d been through most of them in the last
four years, but my assistant hadn’t, and she needed to know the
whole story so she could help me. Finally, we had the boxes
organized enough that we could plant ourselves on the floor and
start digging. Susan settled in as if I were going to spin a
magical financial yarn for her pleasure.

“Once upon a time,” I said, flashing her a
smile. She grinned back at me in appreciation. I wondered what it
would be like for one of my daughters to happily listen to a story
I wanted to tell while we worked on a project together.

“You know who Senator Roger Oth is, right?”
I said.

She nodded. “He’s an imbecile.”

“Exactly. He was the owner and CEO of Jep
Industries about, oh, seven years ago. He inherited it and really
didn’t have a clue what he was doing. One of those silver-spoon
types. Like me, only stupid.” Susan laughed. “Anyway, J.I. ended up
in a hole Roger couldn’t pull it out of and he had to call
Sebastian Taight to fix it.”

“And Mr. Taight raided it instead.”

“Well, kind of.”

It wasn’t King Midas’s usual modus operandi,
and had taken everyone by surprise. Usually when Taight was called
to restructure a company, it took a while; no one understood why he
did what he did or why it took him so long to do it, but his method
worked. When he finished with a company, he left it lean and
strong, and—more importantly—it
stayed
that way. It would
take a year or more for Wall Street to find out if he would
initiate a hostile takeover, which happened often enough that the
betting pools opened as soon as he stepped foot on a property.

“The first thing that tipped everybody off
that this wasn’t his normal process,” I said absently as I thumbed
through the files, “was that he called his family in
immediately.”

“His family?”

“Morgan Ashworth. Knox—”

“Morgan Ashworth, the writer? He’s related
to King Midas?”

“He’s not a writer. He had a few good ideas
and hired a team of ghostwriters and marketers. He’s an economist
who’s been politically disenfranchised for the last few years. He
basically—” I laughed and reached for another folder. “He
shrugged.”

Susan groaned at my bad joke, then said,
“I’ve seen him. Well, his picture. On the back of his books. He’s
hot.”

“And gay.”

She sighed and I chuckled, unable to blame
her.

“Then,” I said, and threw a file in a box,
“there’s Knox Hilliard.”

“The OKH Enterprises heir? The one who had
to fulfill all those crazy conditions to inherit the company?”

“Yes. The one who had to get married and
have a living child before he was forty, which nobody thought he’d
do after his uncle—Fen Hilliard—killed Knox’s fiancée and
tried
to kill the woman Knox would’ve married as a last
resort.”

“I can’t imagine a company being important
enough to kill people over.”

“Ah, well. Fen had built a billion-dollar
empire from a ghetto one-guy shop and he loved it. I can understand
how he felt about losing it to somebody who didn’t want it but felt
obliged to take it.”

“Enough to
kill
for it, though?
Really?”

I pursed my lips. “Of course not. But by the
time Fen decided to kill Knox, he’d already lost the company. If
Fen couldn’t have it, neither could Knox. Fen just wanted to make
sure he took Knox with him to hell—and he almost succeeded. Knox
had no pulse for a couple of hours after he was shot. In fact, he
was still in the morgue when his mother committed suicide.”

“Oh, that’s so sad.”

“It really is.”

“Does that have anything to do with Jep
Industries and Hollander Steelworks?”

“Only marginally.” Then I really started to
warm up to the tale. It was a sexy story and I wanted to tell it.
“Ashworth and Hilliard—Knox, not Fen—are Sebastian’s cousins.
Hilliard’s a specialist in prosecuting white-collar crimes and he’s
a magician with numbers. Sebastian only calls him in when he
suspects theft. He calls on Ashworth when he needs an assessment of
the greater economic impact of a company failing completely.”

“Which meant there was a chance that could
happen.”

“Right. The fact that he called them in
immediately
meant the situation was about to blow up and
devastate a huge portion of the economy.” Indeed, a Jep Industries
failure would have rocked the core of American industry. J.I.
bought at least half of Hollander Steelworks’s annual output of
steel to manufacture thousands of metal parts from the mundane
(nuts and washers) to the magnificent (tuned mass dampers). Jep
Industries was the BASF of metal-parts manufacturing: J.I. didn’t
build anything; they made the products used to build
everything.

I would have continued to talk, but my mouth
was getting dry. “Want anything?” I asked as I stood to get
something to drink.

“Cassie,” Susan pleaded, hopping to her
feet. “Let me do it.”

“Water, then,” I said, and let her go. It
embarrassed her when I got her a drink or brought her lunch, but I
knew what she liked and if I wanted to go out... I saw no reason to
cater to her sense of corporate propriety over my sense of
efficiency.

I stretched. Checked email. Made a phone
call.

Wondered if I had yet come to a place in my
life where I could contemplate having an affair.

Even though you neither called me to rescue
you from your cockeyed theories about my Fix-or-Raid
Protocol...

Oh my, and had I ever needed rescuing from
my advisor—an asshole professor who didn’t think a rich Upper East
Side divorced stay-at-home mom had any business cluttering up
his
MBA program.

I hadn’t called King Midas to pull me out of
business school with a diploma because he was beautiful and I
couldn’t afford the distraction of attempting to break my long
fast—especially with a man who’d ostensibly taken himself off the
market a few years before.

He probably would’ve brought his gorgeous
wife and then I’d have had
two
people in my immediate
vicinity reminding me how long it’d been since I’d had good sex
from a man or woman—or both—and taking my attention away from
getting my reworked thesis approved.

Taight
had
managed to rescue me
in
absentia
, however, by alerting the CEO of Blackwood Securities
as to my plight. Jack Blackwood had offered me a job after one
evening with a thick dossier his investigators had compiled, my
thesis, and my résumé. That, in turn, forced my advisor to
reconsider his opinion of rich Upper East Side divorced
stay-at-home moms.

Or at least, one of them.

Susan returned with water and we returned to
our sorting.

“Where was I?”

“The part where you say you were kidding
that Morgan Ashworth’s gay.”

I laughed. “Ah, sorry, no can do.”

“Rats. Okay, so... J.I. was bleeding money
and...?”

“Right. Roger Oth’s executives were stealing
from him and they’d laid a crumb trail that would point to him as
being—oh, the wing man, I guess—once they jumped ship and headed to
Brazil. What nobody knew at the time was that Sebastian, Hilliard,
and Ashworth were working around the clock to find out how and
where that money was going and to stop it. The best they could
do—because all the executives left the country the minute Hilliard
found the crumb trail—was shut down Jep Industries.”

“I thought that was what they were trying to
avoid.”

“They were, but the employees’ 401(k)
accounts had been scheduled to drain to a Swiss bank account, and
the accounts were locked with a dead man’s switch.”

At Susan’s blank look, I had to
backtrack.

“If the accounts were accessed in
bulk
with one login by anyone other than the thieves, they
would instantly transfer. It was possible to access one account at
a time, which would allow any one employee to receive their funds
should they leave before the scheme was set in motion.”

“To keep anybody from suspecting.”

“Right. Hilliard figured this out, so as
soon as he had all the paperwork in place, Sebastian laid off all
the workers. Before any employee was allowed to leave the building,
they were directed to a computer, instructed to access their
account, and roll it over into a different account. That left the
thieves without most of the funds they were counting on.”

“Clever.”

Indeed.

“All hail King Midas. Again.”

“Oh, no,” I corrected, then took a long
drink. I hadn’t talked to anyone for this long in...oh, forever.
“Not this time. Everyone was stunned. The employees. Wall Street.
Congress
. One day J.I. lived and breathed, secure under King
Midas’s guidance for at least another year or two, and the next day
it was gone. Poof. Left a hole in the manufacturing sector and
killed twelve hundred jobs. He made a lot of enemies.”

“Why didn’t he just hold a press conference
and explain it?”

That
was a good question. The rest of
the world assumed it was because Taight never talked at all, which
would have been an entirely reasonable thing for them to assume.
King Midas’s mystique rested on his refusal to explain how he
decided whether to fix or raid a company.

But I’d spent two years studying Taight and
his methods, and I knew why he hadn’t said a word about Jep
Industries: He wanted to catch the bastards. He had never gone into
a company with an embezzlement problem and not come out without
getting a few people jailed. To the rest of Corporate America, Jep
Industries looked like a triumph. For all I had never met nor
conversed with Sebastian Taight, I
knew
he considered Jep
Industries a personal failure.

He’d never failed before or since. It had to
grate.

Finally, I said, “He’d rather just keep his
reputation for being a ruthless bastard.” Susan nodded. Yes, she
would understand because, while I might be King Midas’s heir
apparent, I certainly didn’t give companies years to figure out
their issues and learn how to be better at their jobs. I had gained
a reputation for doing it
fast
because I was
rude
.