The Secret Agent (3 page)

“And his grandson wants … what? Financial compensation? Or the collection returned?”

“Our Max wants everything, ducks. That’s his opening bid. Everything that belonged to his grandfather returned with interest. Max claims, you see, to have found Jack’s second will. Quite recently. The will leaves the estate to the Roderick heirs, and the lawyers are calling it good.”

She expelled a deep breath. “Hence the Thai prostitute in Max’s Geneva hotel room. A warning from your precious clients: Back off, Golden Boy, or you’ll be mauled.”

“If we believe Max’s version of events,” Oliver rejoined gently. “Which I’m not sure we do.”

“Why should a bunch of American lawyers strike fear in the hearts of the Thai government, thirty-five years after Jack Roderick’s disappearance?”

“Dunno. That’s not my end of the deal, heart—it’s
yours.”
He was studying his chopsticks.

Stefani tossed back the last of her wine. “You talk about these clients as though they were a corporate entity. Whom do you really mean?”

“That,” Oliver returned, “I cannot tell you. Compartmentalization is the first rule of warfare. Less said, the better for all of us.”

“So you’ve arranged for me to work
against
Krane &
Associates, on the basis of no investigative experience and partial information?”

“You’re not the
enemy,
Stefani. You’re just tackling one end of this naughty little problem while I manipulate the other. Experience is overrated, you know.” “I’d have to be mad to accept such an offer.” “You already did.” A fingertip grazed her cheek, fleeting as a wasp’s sting.

K
rane Associates engineered her downfall. That was part of her cover story—the complete disintegration of her public life, the end of Stefani Fogg as Wall Street knew her.

“I promised Max you’d arrive in Courchevel in a week,” Oliver Krane mused. “That gives us very little time. It shall have to be Monday, I’m afraid.”

Stefani arrived for work rather late that Monday and paid scant attention to the multibillion-dollar fund she was allegedly managing. She spent considerable time chatting up old friends on the phone and took a very long lunch. Then she pled an afternoon meeting with clients and went shopping at Bergdorf’s. Oliver had mentioned Scotland. She figured she’d need some boots.

Two hours later she arrived back at her office with a Persian lamb coat, four pairs of shoes, and a hatbox dangling from her wrist. Sterling Hayes, the chairman of FundMarket International, was waiting for her.

“Stefani.”

She had always despised Hayes—not simply for his expression, which was cadaverous, but for the caution that compelled him to wear braces embroidered with foxes and hounds.

“Sterling!” she cried gaily. “It’s been
ages!
What can I do for you?”

He did not shut her office door, but stood uneasily before her desk like a paid mourner. “I’ve been talking to Oliver Krane.”

She frowned. Set down the boxes and bags. “That awful pseudo-Brit with the security service? He went public last year, right? How’s his stock doing these days?”

“I retained Oliver Krane thirty months ago when I took over the chairmanship,” Hayes informed her dryly. “Krane designed the architecture of FundMarket’s security system. It’s highly sophisticated. We track electronic trades. Screen employee e-mail. Record phone conversations.”

Stefani kicked off her shoes, opened one of the boxes and pulled out a pair of brown suede boots. “Yeah? So?”

“Stefani—” He hesitated, his eyes on her feet. She was wearing houndstooth stockings, expensive and transparent, a checkerboard haze over instep and ankle. “We record every phone call. Every trade. We analyze the tapes for patterns on a daily basis. It’s the best defense we’ve got. You understand, don’t you?”

She glanced up at him. “What are you trying to say, Sterling?”

“This morning, Krane showed me his computerized records. He made the case that you’ve been trading on inside information, Stefani. For at least three weeks. You’ve been trying to beat the system.”

An appalled silence.

“I understand the pressure—your reputation, the
Galileo
slide—”

“There must be some mistake,” she cut in.

“Krane doesn’t make mistakes. I’ve seen his data. I can’t turn a blind eye, even for you. I can’t risk the SEC breathing down my neck. You know that, Stefani. You have to go.”

She sat motionless, one boot on, the other dangling. “Over my dead body. Who the hell is this bastard Krane, that he can suddenly fire a major player at FundMarket International?”

“He’s the bastard we pay to keep us clean.”

“To do your shit work, you mean,” she slashed. “You can’t just throw me out like a used condom, Sterling. Fuck Oliver Krane!”

Hayes glanced apprehensively at the trading room beyond Stefani’s door. Heads had swiveled in their direction. “Please. For the good of the firm …”

“… You want me to roll over? Not a chance in hell, buddy.” Stefani tossed the suede boot to the floor and stood. “What’s really going on? Did Krane lose too much money in
Galileo
and scream for my head?”

“This isn’t about Oliver Krane,” Hayes told her quietly. “It’s entirely about
you.”

“Right,” she retorted with a harsh laugh. “Me, and Sterling Hayes. The Board almost handed me your job last year—remember? The Board
loves
me. One phone call to the right desk, Sterling, and we’ll see who’s walking out the door—”

“Don’t make that call,” he said abruptly. “Not if you want to retain a shred of self-respect. I shared Krane’s report with the Board an hour ago. I’ve received full support for your resignation.”

She stared at him, aghast.

“And that’s what I’m
demanding,
Stefani.” His voice was suddenly clipped, the skin taut across the planes of his narrow face. “You’ve played the princess too long. You flaunt your money, you talk a crock of sunshine, but you’re not worth the desk space we give you, little girl. Resign within the hour or I fire your ass tonight.”

He turned on his heel. The entire group of traders— twenty-three people in all—had risen from their seats and were gawking at Stefani’s face. She had gone pale with rage. She picked up a glass paperweight—a Steuben rock with a silver sword thrust through its middle—and hurled it at Hayes’s retreating form. Somebody in the outer room ducked.

She collected the scattered Bergdorf’s bags, stepped over the paperweight lying like so much crushed ice on the industrial carpet, and went.

It was inevitable
that one of the traders would talk. Traders live for the few moments of high drama in each boredom-riven day; they snort gleefully over the bones and flesh scattered across the corporate field. By the time she had dumped her clothes at the co-op, squeezed in a workout, changed for the evening and swished some Scotch around her mouth, the buzz had hit the street.

The party she planned to attend that night—a celebratory launch at the Plaza for some dot-com’s IPO—was filled with guys in business suits who’d done well at school and risen fast, the safe models patterned on Sterling Hayes. There were a few visionaries, too, in charcoal turtlenecks and wide pleated pants, flown in from the Pacific Northwest. A scattering of women correctly suited in jackets and skirts to the knee. Stefani wore a sleeveless sheath the color of paprika. It outlined every vertebra and muscle of her body.

Half the heads turned as she appeared in the doorway; most eyes lingered. The hum of conversation faltered, then resurged more firmly than before. She scooped a drink from a passing tray and wove her way into the room.

Some of them were polite and approached by the back door:
How is FundMarket, Stefani? Tired of
Galileo?
Any thought of a change?
She laughed uproariously and told them lies. She threw her arms around mere acquaintances, stepped on too many feet, spilled a drink down a currency trader’s blouse, slid her hand into a distinguished banker’s pocket. She swayed and guffawed and called Sterling Hayes every kind of insult, to anyone who would listen; and when enough time had passed and the room had cleared an arc around her tidal wake, she found herself face to face with the man himself.

He was standing next to Oliver Krane.

“Ah, Stefani,” Hayes said. “Enjoying your newfound freedom? Perhaps you should thank Mr. Krane.”

Stefani tossed the last of her Scotch into Oliver’s face.

She had no friend to take her by the arm and haul her into a bathroom. No man to carry her home in his polished black Audi. No one in the entire room who cared about her enough to protect her from herself, or from the
Wall Street Journal
reporter covering the event. By the time the management called a taxi and ladled her into the backseat, Stefani Fogg had committed suicide in public several times over. No one waved as the car pulled away.

On her doorstep twelve minutes later, she found a pint of her favorite Italian gelato—hazelnut—misting gently in dry ice.

Bravo, ducks,
applauded Oliver’s note.

He’d tucked it into a first-class ticket for Heathrow on Virgin Atlantic, with a connecting flight to Inverness. She glanced at her watch. She had barely fourteen hours before takeoff.

And then, because she had paid a fortune for the coop and all the privileges that went with it—because she was free of Sterling Hayes and FundMarket and
Galileo—she
threw the terrace door wide open and screamed good riddance to Manhattan from the balcony’s ledge, forty-three stories above the street.

She settled down in front of the VCR with a videotape Oliver had sent her—old Olympic footage of Max Roderick—and the pint of gelato. She felt like she was back in grad school; but homework had never been this much fun.

“… the determination to
succeed is a constant spur to this young man who has survived the worst that life can deliver: the loss of his Navy pilot father to the Vietnam War when he was barely eight years old, and then the death of his mother, Anne, two years later—a victim of alcohol and drug abuse. If the young Max Roderick was scarred by loneliness, he hid it well—driving himself relentlessly down the toughest courses in the United States and Europe at an age when other boys are busy learning to drive …”

The image was seductive: a slow-motion arc of body and steel gliding effortlessly along the fall line of a crystalline slope at Albertville. The 1992 Olympics. On this practice run staged for the American viewing audience, Max wore no helmet. His golden head glinted in the sunlight, and as he vaulted through the starting gate he seemed transported, as though this precipitous flight was all he needed of heaven and earth. The sonorous voice of the background narration struck just the right note: Max Roderick was noble, Max Roderick had survived unimaginable pain—Max Roderick was the supreme gift his generation could offer the world.

Max Roderick, just possibly, was a killer.

Stefani fast-forwarded to a section of the tape that
showed Max at rest—munching on an apple in his coach’s kitchen, joking with the man the network called his surrogate father. He must then have been thirty years old; he looked like a fresh-faced kid, the eyes clear and light, the profile predatory as a hawk’s. Taut, honed, purposeful, ingenuous, in his fleece sweatshirt and jeans. Everybody’s All-American.

“… Joe DiGuardia practically raised Max Roderick from the time the young ski phenomenon entered his Lake Tahoe program in 1966. DiGuardia, who took bronze at Lake Placid in the Men’s Downhill, is a tough and uncompromising master—but he loves Roderick like a son.”

Cut to Joe DiGuardia swearing viciously at a figure half obscured by dense snowfall and a starting gate. DiGuardia carefully waxing a pair of skis. DiGuardia hugging Max at the Innsbruck finish.

And then, replayed for all time on the eternal screen, the Men’s Downhill: Sarajevo.

His frame was whipcord taut, powerfully muscled, bent into a punishing crouch as he hurtled over the ice-covered course in the red, white and blue Lycra racing suit. He caught air at the summit of one slope, took the most punishing curve at top speed, nearly lost an edge. The commentators gasped. Stefani gasped with them. She knew the end of this story—she knew the end of all Max’s famous races—but still, the pure drama held her. The single man plummeting down the sheet of ice as though intent on suicide. The precision. The control. The ruthlessness in every line of his body.

“And that,” she breathed, as Roderick crossed the finish line and raised his arms in triumph, “is all that really matters. That’s what your body reveals. You’ll stop at nothing to get what you need.”

* * *

“It’s a minor
problem in the scale of things,” Oliver Krane said thirty-six hours later, as he stood staring out at the rain sheeting down over Loch Lochy. “Max Roderick’s, I mean. A disputed inheritance. New will, old story; and the claim’s unlikelihood of success, given the Thai property laws.”

He was studying the mist roiling off the lake. The brooding expression on his face was unexpected and thus unsettling. He was neat and compact in a cashmere polo and baggy flannel trousers, his hands thrust into the pockets. Heavy clouds had thrown a gloom over four o’clock tea; what Stefani hadn’t expected was the sudden blaze of sunlight that forked periodically through the leaden sky, firing the gorse and broom on the hills rising above the lake’s far shore. In those moments of illumination, every drop of water suspended in the molten air gleamed like an astral body.

Oliver had met her at the airport that morning in the predictable Rover, a black one equipped with global positioning, a laptop with wireless e-mail and a sherry decanter. He had driven south to Inverlaggan House, fed her smoked salmon and oat cakes, ordered her to rest for at least an hour and then had met her in the library. Her small frame was curled into a chesterfield, the brown suede boots discarded. She was suffused with well-being, exultant to the core; Oliver was still brooding.

“Unless you’re born and bred a Thai, you can never really
own
anything in that country,” he told her. “Fixed assets, I mean. You only
think
you do. Just try carrying them across the border.”

“So why did you take this matter on?”

He shrugged.

“Not good enough, ducks,” she mocked. “Put out or get out.”

“Quoting the master already?” He glanced over his
shoulder with the swift calculation she had come to think of as essentially Krane. “I should probably have passed, if you must know. But for the one thing.”

“You wanted Roderick’s autograph?”

Oliver snorted and moved away from the window. He fell into a chair drawn up near the fire, its leather worn to a temperate softness. Unlike the town house where they had eaten dinner or the corporate offices in the urban aerie, these rooms actually felt like they belonged to Oliver.

“I’ve had a spot of trouble in Asia recently,” he replied. “An accidental death. Or perhaps I should call it
unexplained.”

“Someone you knew?” Stefani asked. A spate of rain dashed against the narrow windows.

“A rogue, a deceiver, a friend and a silent partner. Harry Leeds. We were at school together, Harry and I. I won’t tell you which. We started Krane’s together: my brains—Harry’s bucks. There was a rough patch in the early days, when Harry was too much of a barrister and I, too much a beggar man thief; but by the time we were both thirty-five we’d settled our differences and pooled our winnings. Harry played godfather to my Hong Kong office, kept a string of polo ponies, clamped most of Asia under a network of spies and electronic surveillance for which he was exceedingly well paid, and asked nothing further from life. I stalked the rest of the world by turns, hired proxies in places I couldn’t be.”