The Insider (27 page)

“But I bought the stocks for my firm, not my personal account,” Jay pointed out. “It seems to me that this fact, in and of itself, would keep any prosecution in the civil realm.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Vivian replied. “You have a substantial bonus as an incentive to perform well.”

Jay felt a burst of panic.

“Look, you’re probably just imagining things,” Vivian offered, sensing his fear. “There’s probably no need to worry.”

Jay knew better. “What can I do to help myself?”

Vivian finished the second cigarette and snuffed it out in the ashtray. “It sounds bad, but most of the time the feds want to go after the most senior people they can find. Career reasons, you know. They want to pursue the alpha dogs. No offense, Jay, but in most cases they’d rather take down a senior managing director who has engaged in a pattern of insider trading over five years than a vice president who traded in two stocks. If you have information that implicates someone higher up, or you can get hold of it, I’d advise you to do so, because these cases become like the Salem witch trials. People start pointing fingers at anyone the feds want them to in the name of cutting a deal. And if you have hard evidence, it will enable you to negotiate from a much stronger position.”

Jay gazed down at the manila envelope. “Do you have someone here at Baker and Watts who specializes in insider-trading cases?”

“Yes. Bill Travers. He’s very good.”

For a moment Jay thought about the pub in South Boston and the photograph of the Donegall Volunteers. “I’d appreciate it if you would talk to Mr. Travers first thing Monday morning.”

CHAPTER 25

Despite a breeze kicking up off the harbor, the city air was muggy and unpleasant. Beyond the Statue of Liberty and the petroleum tank farms of northern New Jersey, lightning crackled in the night sky as a line of thunderstorms bore down from the west. Jay leaned over the railing of the Staten Island ferry, raincoat slung over his shoulder, and stared into the black water sliding by.

“What’s wrong, Jay?” Sally stroked the back of his neck and leaned against him lightly. “You’ve been so distant tonight.”

Sally had requested that they repeat the events of last Saturday night—dinner at the River Cafe and a walk along the promenade. But Jay wanted no part of that. He needed to remain in the shadows so the boys in the blue sedan couldn’t find him. Toward that end he had checked into a no-amenities hotel in Brooklyn on Friday night after Barbara’s visit, using a sizeable cash payment to avoid the use of his credit card. He was going to hole up there until Monday morning, when he could sit down with Vivian’s partner, Bill Travers, at Baker & Watts. There they would figure out the best legal strategy for dealing with his crisis.

He had met Sally at Castle Clinton, a colonial fort constructed at the southern tip of Manhattan, where they had talked for a few minutes. But he was nervous about remaining too long in one place, so they had walked to the ferry terminal and headed for Staten Island. He realized it was probably just an active imagination playing with his mind, but he could have sworn he had seen someone following him as he left the subway station in Brooklyn on his way to meet Sally.

The time with her had seemed surreal. They both knew there were many things to say, yet neither of them had said anything of substance so far. Jay glanced past her down the deck but saw nothing suspicious. He had watched each of the few passengers board the craft, and none of them had seemed particularly interested in him. But if necessary, he was prepared to go into the water.

“Talk to me,” Sally insisted.

“There’s nothing wrong,” he answered curtly, slowly moving his hand along the railing so she could no longer reach it. He wanted to relax and be himself, but he kept reminding himself that the woman standing next to him had a secret, that she wasn’t really Sally Lane. “I’m fine.”

“I know that isn’t true. You haven’t been yourself at all tonight.” She pulled away and turned her back. “I can’t believe you won’t tell me where you were for the last few days. I know you weren’t in New Hampshire. I called TurboTec and you never showed up. I was worried sick. What’s the big secret, anyway?”

“Why are you so eager to find out where I was?”

Sally sighed. “Here we go again with the third degree. Why are you suspicious of me?” she asked. “What have I ever done to make you question my motives?”

Let’s start with a phone call made from my apartment to the treasurer of Bell Chemical,
Jay thought.
Then we could move to a missing computer disk. To top things off, you could tell me your real name.

Sally turned around and took his hands in hers. She caressed his fingers for a few moments, then gazed up at him. “I really care about you, Jay,” she said softly. “You have to believe that.”

He stared into her eyes without responding. She looked so beautiful in the dim light. Slowly his gaze moved down to her chin. Even in the low light he could see that there was no scar. “Who are you?” he asked.

The phone screeched like an ambulance siren. Oliver opened one eye, groaned, and reached through the darkness. “Hello.”

“Oliver?”

“Yes.” He turned on a lamp and rubbed his eyes.

“It’s O’Shea.”

His head was killing him. “What time is it?”

“Three o’clock. Sorry if I woke up your wife.”

Oliver grimaced. He and Barbara hadn’t slept in the same room in months. “Barbara’s a sound sleeper.” He had often wondered over the past few months if O’Shea had bugged the mansion, but during his paranoid and typically drunken searches he’d never found wires or microphones. “She always has been.”

“Good.” O’Shea smiled grimly. Oliver had no idea that the walls of the house were indeed filled with needle-like microphones and that O’Shea knew all about their sleeping arrangements.

Oliver rose on one elbow, the taste of lime and tonic still in his mouth. “Why are you calling me so late?”

Despite Oliver’s groggy state, O’Shea could hear the despondency in his voice. “I had to make certain I got hold of you. For all I know you’ll be out on your sailboat tomorrow and I won’t be able to reach you.”

“I’m not going anywhere—”

“We move on Monday morning,” O’Shea interrupted. “I wanted you to know that as soon as possible.”

“Okay,” Oliver said slowly.

“But we won’t do it at McCarthy and Lloyd.”

“Oh?”

“No. There’s been a change of plans.”

“Why?”

“That’s all I can tell you.” O’Shea hesitated. “If Jay contacts you, let me know immediately.”

“I will,” he said obediently.

“Good-bye, Oliver.”

The phone clicked in Oliver’s ear. As he put the receiver down, he thought about Abby and the fact that this would be his last week at McCarthy & Lloyd. He glanced at the revolver lying on the nightstand. He’d had the courage to pull the trigger just once that evening.

McCarthy stretched in the front doorway of his small clapboard lodge, raising his hands far above his head. He moved slowly down the short wooden walkway to the dock, holding a cup of steaming coffee. To the east the sun was just beginning to lighten the sky. It hadn’t yet reached the horizon, but it was already turning the low-hanging clouds beautiful shades of red, orange, and yellow.

McCarthy took a deep breath of the Louisiana morning air. He loved Bayou Lafourche. The property had been in his family for years, and he went there whenever he could get away from New York. It was Sunday morning, but it might as well have been the middle of the week. Out there, days of the week were irrelevant.

He loved everything about the bayou, from its rugged beauty, briny smell, and prehistoric-seeming predators to the sound the water made lapping against the hull of his Boston Whaler, moored to the dock. But more than anything he enjoyed the sense of absolute isolation— there were no other houses within ten miles. At least none that were occupied. What was left of Neville LeGaul’s home lay in shambles two miles away on the next canal over, rotting from disrepair and the war the elements constantly waged against homes on the Gulf Coast. Neville had killed himself one night five years previously with a bullet to the brain.

McCarthy shook his head. Experienced in moderation, total isolation was a positive thing. It allowed a man to come to terms with a major decision in his life or clear his mind before a battle. But in large doses, isolation could wreak horrible consequences—as it had in Neville’s case.

Poor Neville, McCarthy thought. A simple man eking out a break-even existence living off the bayou. They had been acquaintances for thirty years, checking in on each other’s places every once in a while. McCarthy’s eyes narrowed. It was strange how Neville’s suicide had so closely coincided with Bullock’s trip to the bayou to feed Graham Lloyd’s body to the alligators. McCarthy had always wondered if the two events had been more than coincidence, but Bullock had sworn that he’d had nothing to do with the Cajun’s death.

McCarthy searched the calm water in front of the dock for a few moments and finally found what he was looking for—a pair of sinister eyes rising a few inches above the surface, staring back at him from across the canal. Dawn was breaking, but the thermometer hanging in a corner of the lodge indicated that the temperature had already climbed past eighty degrees. He would have enjoyed a swim—the lodge had no running water, and a bayou bath would have been just the ticket. He knew, however, that the canal was infested with alligators, and he wanted no part of a large male eager for a human breakfast.

“Good morning, Mr. McCarthy.”

McCarthy recognized the voice and turned around slowly, not at all surprised. Victor Savoy stood before him, smiling. “When did you get here, Victor?”

“About an hour ago.” Savoy motioned toward the canal. “My boat is tied up around the bend. I didn’t want to awaken you.”

“Ah, so kind of you,” McCarthy said sarcastically. “Did you have any trouble finding the place?”

Savoy shook his head. “No, your directions were quite good.”

“Wonderful.”

“When will the prime minister arrive in New York City?”

McCarthy spat. “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” That was what his Washington contacts had told him.

“And you have been given the seating arrangements for the Wednesday ceremony at City Hall?”

“Yes,” he said, gazing at a white heron flying majestically overhead.

The day after next would be McCarthy’s last on Bayou Lafourche for quite some time, and he was already sad at the prospect of leaving. Tuesday afternoon he would head back to New Orleans, then fly to New York to face the press and answer questions about Jay West’s insider-trading charge, as well as cohost a dinner for the British prime minister and attend a ceremony for the man the next morning at City Hall. A ceremony that would end in a chaotic hail of bullets, leaving the prime minister dead, and within hours reigniting the horrible bloodshed in Northern Ireland when the Donegall Volunteers—a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army’s provisional wing—claimed responsibility for the assassination.

CHAPTER 26

Something didn’t feel right, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was. He’d seen nothing suspicious while he was with Sally Saturday evening or all day Sunday, but now as he moved through the lobby of the shabby Brooklyn hotel he was overcome by a strange sense of foreboding. Maybe he was feeling this way because Vivian had sounded glum over the phone when she instructed him to be at the Baker & Watts offices at eleven sharp. Normally she was so upbeat.

Jay looked up as he moved outside into daylight. The front that had passed through the day before hadn’t brought cooler air with it. In fact, it seemed hotter and more humid than ever. And the clouds on the horizon were ominous, even at this early hour.

“Jay West.”

Jay turned quickly in the direction of the voice. Standing twenty feet away was a man with dark red hair wearing a charcoal-gray suit. The man was holding up a large gold badge affixed to a black wallet. Behind the redhead were several other men wearing suits, as well as three New York City policemen, one of whom was holding handcuffs.

“Mr. West, my name is Kevin O’Shea,” the man said loudly, snapping the wallet shut as he moved forward. “I am with the U.S. attorney’s office, and I’m here to arrest you on two counts of insider trading. The names Bell Chemical and Simons should ring a bell.”

Jay’s mouth fell open as he heard the charges.

“Mr. West, you have the right to…”

O’Shea’s voice turned to a hum of indecipherable babble as adrenaline began tearing through Jay. The officer holding the handcuffs was moving past O’Shea, and suddenly Jay’s reflexes took over. He clasped his briefcase tightly—inside were the papers and the photograph he had taken from Maggie’s Place in South Boston—and raced in the opposite direction.

“Stop! You’re under arrest.”

Jay paid no attention to the order. He tore down the sidewalk, barely avoiding an elderly lady and her grocery-laden shopping cart.

The policemen bolted after him.

Jay sprinted out into traffic, dodging two cars that skidded sideways to miss him, and headed into the subway station, descending the steps three at a time. He could hear the policemen ordering him to stop as they gave chase. He leaped onto the landing in front of the token booth just as the double doors of the train in the station were closing. He hurdled the turnstile and jammed his fingers between the doors, frantically trying to pull them apart, vaguely aware of the horrified expressions of the passengers on the other side of the glass. But it was no use. The train began to move. He heard the officers clambering down the stairs.

He darted back to where that car joined the next one, pulled the protective railing between them aside, and stepped onto the narrow platform above the coupler. He’d learned this trick to boarding a subway on days when he was late for work and the cars were too full to enter through the doors. The Transit Authority discouraged riders from using this method because it was dangerous as hell—one wrong move and you were down beneath the cars, and dead. But it was effective.

The train picked up speed quickly, and Jay watched with satisfaction as one of the officers slammed the side of the moving train in anger, unable to follow him as it glided out of the station.

Jay didn’t see one of the officers remove his walkie-talkie and request assistance at the next stop. Nor did he realize that the officers could contact the next station and have the train held.

Even so, the officers at the next station would come up empty-handed. Several hundred yards into the tunnel Jay pulled the emergency brake—a small cord dangling at one end of each car—then jumped from the train after it had come screeching to a halt, and headed back the way the train had come. The officers who had chased him down into the first station had already gone.

At three minutes after nine o’clock the British prime minister’s jet touched down on the JFK runway. When it came to a stop on the tarmac and the staircase was in position, he was greeted by the U.S. secretary of state in front of a large contingent of the international press corps. He read a prepared statement describing his appreciation for America’s contribution to the continuing peace in Northern Ireland, then answered a few questions and posed for photographs with the secretary of state. Then the two world leaders were whisked into a waiting limousine and escorted onto the Belt Parkway and into Manhattan by twelve black sedans crammed with members of British intelligence and the Secret Service, as well as fifty New York City police officers riding motorcycles. The convoy wreaked havoc with the city’s late-morning traffic, but the prime minister reached the British consulate without incident.

Jay sprinted through the woods, dodging and ducking pine branches. He’d parked his beat-up Ford Taurus down the road because he didn’t want to alert anyone that he was coming. Up ahead he saw a break in the trees and hesitated as he reached the edge of the woods. The estate lay before him across fifty yards of perfectly manicured lawns and gardens.

He put his briefcase down and for several minutes hunched over with his hands resting on his knees, his lungs sucking in much-needed fresh air. He’d been on the run for three hours, fueled by adrenaline and reacting by reflex. Now the significance of what he’d done began to sink in. Guilty of insider trading or not, he’d resisted arrest by losing himself in the subway system and melting into the crowded streets of New York City. He exhaled heavily, picked up the briefcase, eyed the mansion once more, and broke out of the trees.

He sprinted across the lawn and in seconds reached the side of the huge house, near the kitchen door he’d entered the day he had gone sailing. He hugged the stone wall of the mansion and made his way around to the back of the house. A man dressed in blue overalls was working in a rose garden toward the edge of the trees, but Jay managed to slip into a basement stairwell without attracting attention. The door at the bottom of the stairwell was unlocked, and he quickly moved into a large workroom filled with tools and stacks of lumber. He moved through it, taking several wrong turns before finally locating the stairs. He climbed them rapidly, hesitating at the door to listen. He heard nothing, so he opened it and slipped into the mansion’s main hallway.

Instantly he ducked into the formal dining room. Twenty-five feet away a maid was about to vacuum the rug that ran the length of the long hallway.

For several minutes he stood in the dining room, listening to the hum of the vacuum cleaner. Then the sound faded and he heard footsteps moving down the hall toward the dining room. He pressed himself flat against the wall and watched wide-eyed as the maid passed by, heading toward the kitchen. When she had disappeared, he moved out of the dining room and stole down the hall. It turned left and right several times, and he checked each room as he passed. Finally it ended at the open doorway to Oliver’s massive study, off which was a small porch overlooking the lawn.

Vivian had compared insider-trading cases to the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century and advised him to gather as much evidence as he could against senior people involved in the ring. This would be his bargaining chip, with which he could cut a deal with the feds by implicating others whose necks would be more prized by prosecutors. He was certain that, given the opportunity, he could find something in Oliver’s personal papers that would exonerate him completely. Here was the opportunity. The variable was time.

He moved to a tall black file cabinet beside Oliver’s rolltop desk and pulled out the top drawer. Oliver had maintained a computer file concerning his informants and the deals they had provided him, so there was every reason to believe that he’d have more backup data stored somewhere. Jay rifled through files in the top drawer but found nothing except old tax returns. He had to find something to corroborate what Barbara had given him Friday night outside his apartment. Her testimony would certainly help him, but he needed more than that possibility because there was no reason to be sure she would testify. She had admitted that the reason she was giving Jay the envelope was that she couldn’t be the one to put Oliver away, and no one could force a wife to provide testimony against her husband. The list of insiders and deals was of no use to Jay without Barbara. In fact, it might serve to strengthen the prosecutor’s case against him. The prosecutor would argue that Jay couldn’t know about the insiders and their deals without being intimately involved in the ring. If Barbara denied giving him the lists, he’d be as good as locked up.

Jay heard voices coming from the hallway. His eyes darted around the study frantically. The voices—one of which he recognized instantly as Oliver’s—were quickly growing louder, and now he could hear their footsteps. He closed the file cabinet drawer, knelt down and slid his briefcase underneath Oliver’s desk, then stood back up and desperately searched for a place to hide.

“Right in here.” Oliver moved to the side of the study door so the other men could go ahead of him. David Torcelli and Tony Vogel entered the large room. “Have a seat,” Oliver said, following. Torcelli and Vogel sat next to each other on a large couch. Oliver sat across from them in a Chippendale chair. “Would either of you care for something to drink?”

Vogel began to make a request, but Torcelli interrupted. “No,” he said curtly.

“All right.” Oliver nodded deferentially. “Why are you here?” His voice was weak, and he could not meet Torcelli’s fierce gaze.

“I couldn’t get you on the phone,” Torcelli snapped. “I tried all day yesterday. I kept going out to pay phones every half an hour, but the line just rang and rang. My wife thought I was out of my mind.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Oliver held his hands up. He hadn’t the strength left to deal with anyone after the call from O’Shea, so he had ignored the phone. “What do you want?”

“You know what I want, Oliver,” Torcelli said sternly. “I need to know how to get to Bill McCarthy’s place in the Louisiana bayou.”

Oliver’s mouth ran dry. The walls were closing in on him from all sides, and there was little room left to maneuver. He’d thought he had the stomach for murder. But without the confidence the cocaine provided, he didn’t.

“We all agreed what we were going to do,” Torcelli reminded Oliver. “McCarthy needs to suffer his accident now, and the bayou is the perfect place for that accident to occur.”

“Yes, of course it is,” Oliver mumbled, trying to think of a way out. He could lie to Torcelli about the location of McCarthy’s lodge, but that would come back to haunt him quickly. There was nowhere to turn. He was out of choices.

“Oliver, you told me that McCarthy took you down to his place on the bayou two years ago to hunt alligators,” Torcelli said.

“Yes,” Oliver admitted softly. McCarthy had invited him down to the bayou as a reward for the many millions the arbitrage desk had earned, thinking Oliver would love the experience as much as he did. Oliver had reluctantly agreed to go because McCarthy was the boss and controlled the bonus-purse strings. He hadn’t enjoyed the crude lodge at all, and had breathed a happy sigh of relief when the limousine had brought him back to his estate in Greenwich after the flight from New Orleans.

“Tell me how to get to the place,” Torcelli urged. “I need to provide directions as soon as possible.”

Oliver hesitated a moment longer, then related as best he could remember how to get to the lodge, starting with the tiny shrimping town of Lafitte, fifty miles from New Orleans. “I can’t remember exactly, of course,” Oliver remarked, his voice just a low whisper.

“That’s all right,” Torcelli said, studying what he had written down on a page of his date book. “All I needed was the general location of the place. The bayous are flat as hell. Our contact can rent a plane or a helicopter to pinpoint the site of the lodge, then go in by boat and do what needs to be done.” Torcelli looked up from the page. “Oliver, I will take a drink now. Orange juice, please.”

“All right,” he said, despair overtaking him.

“I’ll have a Coke,” Tony said nervously. He wasn’t at all convinced that the killings were the only way out, but Torcelli was his leader now, and he wasn’t going to protest at this stage.

After Oliver had shuffled out, Torcelli rose from the couch and made a call using the phone on Oliver’s desk. When he had finished relating directions to McCarthy’s bayou lodge to the party at the other end of the line, he returned to the couch, sat down, and smiled triumphantly at Vogel.

“Come on, Junior,” Barbara called, reaching into the backseat of the Suburban for a grocery bag, wondering why the boy hadn’t responded. She pushed the Suburban door closed with her back and began to turn around slowly, careful not to touch the Austin Healey. She knew that if she ever scratched that damn car, Oliver would throw a fit. She shook her head. They needed to widen the parking area closest to the kitchen door. It was the area they used most for the cars, and it was too narrow to accommodate the Suburban, the Healey, and the Mercedes. One of these times she was going to ding that damn sports car. She just knew it.

As she turned, she almost ran into a hulk of a man she had never seen before. He wore blue overalls embroidered with the insignia of a landscaping company, but it wasn’t the company she paid to maintain her gardens. Instantly she knew she was in terrible trouble. She dropped the bag and tried to run, but he caught her before she could take a step and forced her to the gravel, shoving a handkerchief in her mouth, then securing her wrists behind her back and lashing them to her ankles tightly with a single length of rope. In seconds she was immobilized.

Junior lay on the other side of the car, bound and gagged as well, crying silently into the cloth stuffed into his small mouth.

Torcelli and Vogel stood up when Oliver returned with their drinks. “Thank you, Oliver,” Torcelli said politely.

Vogel only nodded as he took his glass, constantly checking the study door through which Oliver had just come.