Swimming with Sharks (53 page)

“We’ll never get this door open,” Mark said despondently. Oliver rummaged around in the drawers of the bathroom cabinet for any object he could use to unscrew the door’s hinges. He didn’t care if he broke something. He needed to warn Alex. Immediately.

Zack sat dead in the chair behind his desk. This was without a doubt the worst sight Alex had ever seen. Half his face was missing, and his remaining eye was wide open and seemed to look at her reproachfully. The blood running from his mouth had already congealed, and he held a gun in his left hand that hung down limply. Both the wall behind him and the light-colored carpet were splattered with blood.

Alex’s knees were as soft as butter, and her stomach lurched. She had triggered a catastrophe by tipping off Ringwood. She had just wanted to pull one over on Zack, Levy, and Sergio, but now she was responsible for Zack’s death! Sure the deal was as good as sealed, he had bought Whithers stock. When he heard that the deal was off, it seemed he saw no way out besides suicide. Alex fought her rising panic, overcame her disgust and horror, and looked around his desk—which, to her surprise, had been cleared out. The glass tabletop, which was usually covered in yellow post-it notes, was spick-and-span. Zack hadn’t left a suicide note, and
Alex noticed that the briefcase he always carried around with him was nowhere to be found.

Then her gaze fell on the computer. There was a yellow light blinking, indicating that something was downloading. She forced herself not to look at the corpse, leaning over him to move the mouse. The computer started to rumble, and the cloudy sky desktop wallpaper appeared seconds later. Alex held her breath. A rotating
E
at the upper right corner of the screen indicated that there were unread e-mails on the server. She clicked on the icon to have a look.

The computer showed four unread messages. She quickly opened the e-mails and read through them. One was from a broker in San Francisco, one from a lawyer’s office in Los Angeles, and two from travel agencies in New York. Alex printed all of the messages so that she could read them later. Then she checked his outbox and sent folders.

“Bingo,” she murmured. Zack had written three e-mails tonight, but he only sent one of them. She opened the first e-mail, which was addressed to Ken Matsumo at the California Savings & Loan Bank in Los Angeles. Her eyes grew ever larger when she read what Zack had written.

Hello Ken,
I just wired the amount of $50 million to my account at your bank. Please transfer these funds first thing in the morning to account number A/CH/334677810 at Bankhaus Ruetli & Hartmann in Zurich, Switzerland. I must leave the city tonight.
Thanks for your help.
Zack

“Unbelievable,” Alex whispered in amazement. That certainly didn’t sound like Zack had any plans of putting a bullet through his head. Did he suspect what Levy and Sergio were up to, and therefore embezzled fifty million dollars into his account at California Savings & Loan? He was
certainly trying to make a run for it with this money. Clever boy! Sergio and Levy had clearly overestimated Zack’s loyalty.

The second e-mail was in French, addressed to Cécile d’Aubray in Geneva.

Cécile,
This is our last night apart. We’ll leave for Geneva at midday tomorrow and we will be immensely rich.
With love,
ZStJ

Zack wanted to leave the country and go to Geneva—with fifty million dollars in his luggage. Not too shabby. A third e-mail was addressed to a lawyer named John Sturgess in LA, asking him to forward a drafted document immediately to the US Attorney’s Office in New York, as discussed. Alex printed all the e-mails. Swissair had confirmed two flights for Mr. John Fallino and Ms. Cécile d’Aubray to Geneva, and there was also confirmation of an Air Canada flight to Vancouver for Zachary St. John.

Zack’s third unread message was by far the most interesting. The lawyer, John Sturgess, had sent him a three-page document in which Zack confessed to all of the illegal deals that he administered on behalf of Levy and Vitali, including the dates and amounts of transfers. This document directly threatened those who wanted to sacrifice him.

Alex slowly put two and two together and it all became clear as day. A chill ran down her spine when she realized what it meant. There was no way that Zack had committed suicide. Someone making such elaborate plans for his future wouldn’t put a .38 to his head and pull the trigger. Zack was planning to disappear in a few hours with fifty million dollars. Leaving behind a hundred million dollar debt and a ruined investment firm and wreaking havoc by sending his written confession to the US attorney.

But someone had spoiled his plan—someone with no interest in the value of a human life. Alex didn’t doubt for a second that Sergio had gotten rid of this dangerous accomplice, disguising the act as a suicide. It was a clever ploy; it seemed quite reasonable that someone in Zack’s situation would prefer death over prison.

Alex suddenly remembered that she was standing next to a dead body. With shaking hands, she collected the pages spewed out by the printer. On impulse, she deleted all the e-mails and emptied the trash. Her heart pounded frantically. If Sergio found out what she knew, she was as dead as Zack.

As Alex turned around, she knocked the swivel chair in which Zack’s corpse was dangling. The pages slipped out of her hands, and when she bent over to pick them up, her hand brushed against an object. She knelt down on the blood-splattered floor and grabbed a cell phone. She snuck it inside her jacket and left the office as quickly as possible. She’d nearly reached the fire door when she heard the elevator swoosh up. The red light next to the elevator door lit up. Someone was coming up! Alex looked around in utter panic and then opened the door to the ladies’ bathroom and slipped inside. Through a small crack in the door, she watched someone coming out of the elevator. She thought her heart would stop beating when she saw Sergio and Henry Monaghan.

“The computer’s on,” Henry Monaghan observed.

“My guys probably forgot to turn it off,” Sergio replied.

“Yes, apparently they did. But the screen is turned on and the printer is still warm.” Monaghan shook his head. “It can’t be more than fifteen minutes since someone used it. Otherwise the screensaver would have come up or the computer would have switched into sleep mode.”

With a stony expression, Sergio watched this stocky man with a bushy moustache move the mouse back and forth while staring grimly at the screen.

“This someone has deleted all of the e-mails,” he announced after a while. “There’s nothing left.”

A message on St. John’s answering machine explained why the two men would risk being surprised alongside Zack’s body at four in the morning. A lawyer by the name of John Sturgess had left a message saying that he’d recorded his statements and sent them to Zack’s office via e-mail. Maybe it was important, maybe not. The phone call from California had come in at ten thirty, right after Sergio had informed Zack that he and Alex were the new owners of MPM. Zack had died at around a quarter past eleven, and no one knew what he’d been doing in his office for these forty-five minutes. The word
statements
sounded dangerous to Monaghan, and Sergio completely agreed with him. Did Zack call the lawyer to tell him about the dilemma he was in? And now it seemed as if someone else had intercepted John Sturgess’s e-mail. Monaghan turned off the computer.

“We’ll know in a second who was here,” he said. “We just need to look at the surveillance tapes. Maybe this person is still in the building, and we can get to him before there’s even more damage.”

Alex crouched on the floor of the women’s restroom, her back against the tiles and hardly daring to breathe. Sergio and Monaghan clearly weren’t surprised by the sight of Zack. She felt sick when she realized how much danger she was in. The two of them had been in Zack’s office for about five minutes, when they went back out to the hallway. Alex heard the elevator coming up.

“Luca,” she heard Sergio say, “wait for my call. Search every room. It’s possible that the person we’re looking for is still here.”

Alex froze. How could she get out of the building without being discovered? She crawled into one of the stalls, locked the door, and cowered on the toilet seat. There was no escape. Sergio’s guys would find her, and she would be as dead as a doornail. A wave of panic rushed over her, and she wished for the thousandth time that she had never met Sergio Vitali.

The image on the screen was grainy at first, but then the thirtieth floor hallway—from the elevators to the reception desk—became clearly visible. Sergio stared at the screen. He was furious that he hadn’t heard from Nelson for more than four days. Ever since Sergio had returned from Chicago, Nelson seemed different. And now he got the impression that his wife was making excuses for him on the telephone. He knew that Nelson was seriously ill, but he realized that he could no longer trust his oldest comrade-in-arms. And that’s why he’d told Silvio to send two men to Long Island to keep an eye on him.

Furthermore, Sergio was angry that he couldn’t find Constanzia. And to make matters worse, he had to deal with this nonsense with St. John and the possibility that Alex knew about the secret accounts! Sacrificing MPM didn’t bother him. They could incorporate a new company tomorrow morning to carry on with their business. They would easily find a suitable replacement for St. John. Alex was the problem. He worried that he’d demeaned himself, invading the journalist’s apartment in the middle of the night like a jealous lover. He hated her for making him look like a fool. Sergio chewed pensively on his lower lip. Why was all of this happening now, of all times? He had an important meeting tomorrow morning, and he’d been planning to fly to Costa Rica on Friday to meet with Ortega.
His charity event at the St. Regis for the Saturday before Christmas was just three weeks away. He would have loved to call the whole thing off, but canceling the party would only result in negative publicity.