The Aspen Account (12 page)

“So it’s
his
fault?” Lucas asked, as if looking for confirmation that they were doing the right thing.

“It’s his fault,” Lance confirmed. “Everything that’s about to happen is his fault. Don’t ever forget that.”

Hearing this surprised Lucas. Seeing how easily Lance waited for the denouement to all they had worked toward over the years, it occurred to Lucas—perhaps for the first time—that he and his brother were not so alike as they had once been. The idea of a weakening bond with his brother made him suddenly uneasy, and a certain lightheadedness enveloped him. Perhaps they were about to make a horrible mistake. For the first time, he wondered if there might be another way, another option to consider. But he knew better than to mention any such thought to Lance.

“And the guys’ll be there tonight?” Lucas asked after refocusing. He needed to be sure the plan hadn’t changed.

“Yes,” Lance replied, “but not till real late—almost dawn.” He took the last sip of his beer and tried to flag the waiter down from across the room.

“And Michael Chapman?” Lucas asked. His survival instinct kicked in at the very thought of the new auditor at X-Tronic. He knew a threat when he saw one. “He’ll be there tonight.”

“Has he left Denver yet?”

“No, but he’s being watched. We’ll get a call once he hits the road. What do we do when he gets here?”

Lance smiled as if amused by the slight challenge they both sensed from Michael’s mysterious actions. “We let him come and have fun. We get to know him socially. And then we see what happens.”

“I think he’s trouble.”

“Maybe, but we don’t know for sure. Falcon says he won’t cause any problems.”

“I don’t trust Falcon anymore.” Lucas’s expression had turned hard, and he held eye contact to make sure his brother saw how serious he was.

“Well you’d better
pretend
to trust him,” Lance said in a tone that came a little too close to sounding like an order. “We don’t have a choice. He knows too much, so we’re all in this together now.”

Yeah, all in this together,
Lucas thought. He had never liked having so many people involved in their plans—that was a big part of why things felt so out of control. This, more than anything else, frustrated him. But then again, it would be unwise to let his brother know he was beginning to lose faith in what they were about to do.

Marcus Graham followed Don Seaton down the marble staircase toward the grand entrance of the New York Stock Exchange building. He watched as his employer caught the attention of the old suits of Wall Street, whose careworn faces, engraved by a lifetime of maneuvering amid the battle dust of high finance, showed their jealousy of the spry old billionaire with the shiny blue eyes and skier’s athleticism. 

Marcus couldn’t help admiring his employer’s stature in the business world. He wondered, what was it that made the man so intriguing to the media? Was it his billions of dollars in net worth, his groundbreaking software company that had outlived so many competitors, or his legendary heli-skiing and mountain climbing adventures? In the business community, Seaton seemed to have acquired the stature of a retired general, a man who had found inner peace at the end of a lifetime of war.

Cameras flashed as they moved down the stairs. Reporters threw a barrage of questions.

Don Seaton turned to Marcus and said, “Last time I enjoyed talking to the press was in the eighties, back when they were interested because I was building a new type of corporation. But that was a long time ago. These days it feels like they’re just out for blood . . . or dirt.”

Marcus smiled at the remark, though never taking his alert eyes from the crowd as he scanned each face for signs of tension.

“Mr. Seaton, what did the commission discuss during your meeting?” one journalist asked. “Has Cygnus changed its offer?” another queried. “Why were you the only representative from X-Tronic at the meeting?” “Mr. Seaton, what sort of transformation do you anticipate if the merger goes through?” “Mr. Seaton . . .” “Mr. Seaton . . .” “Mr. Seaton . . .” A symphony of camera flashes threw strobelike shadows on the wall behind them.

“Everyone, please!” Seaton said at last. “You need to slow down. I’m an old man, so I’m afraid I can handle only three or four questions at a time.” The press corps laughed. Don took a step forward, and with a smile that charmed even the hardboiled veterans, he pointed to the first journalist he made eye contact with. “Go ahead, please.”

“Mr. Seaton,” the man said formally, as if he were an attorney cross-examining a witness, “Some say you are less concerned about your company’s shareholders than about the welfare of your customers and employees. Are you ignoring your responsibilities to the X-Tronic shareholders? If the merger goes through, who do you think will be the victims?”

Seaton nodded as if he had thought long and hard on the question. “As we all know,” he said, “a business can be broken down into terms like ‘profitability’ and ‘operational efficiencies.’ But the responsibilities of corporations are changing. There is also a new school of business that emphasizes the relationships a business has with
all
its stakeholders: customers, employees, citizens in the surrounding community . . .”

Marcus’s thoughts drifted away from his boss’s words as he found what his eyes had never stopped looking for: something suspicious in the crowd. Among the dense throng of journalists and onlookers, he found a face that was not dazzled or intrigued. Instead, it was a face like his own: so serious and focused, it was oblivious to the outside world. Focused like the face of a predator about to spring.

Just as Marcus had singled him out in the crowd, the heavyset man began to move, pushing his way through the crowd, getting closer to the steps. Marcus stood loosely on the balls of his feet, watching, waiting, playing a dozen scenarios in his mind. He even glanced around the crowd for a half second in case this was a decoy, making sure that this one man was the only immediate threat and not part of a team.
Nothing.
His eyes shot back toward the man. He was alone. Then Marcus saw the final warning as the man’s right hand lowered to his side, resting, fumbling with something out of sight. 

“Get down!” Marcus shouted as he moved forward, drawing his gun.

Heeding his bodyguard’s command, the older man dropped to the ground. As the crowd stood baffled and stunned, Marcus leaped in front of Seaton and squatted in a low triangle position, partly to shield the billionaire and partly to steady his firing stance amid the crowd. A woman screamed, and journalists milled and collided in panic as the assailant came barreling through the crowd, yelling, his gun half raised. He looked like an amateur, unsure of his aim. The gun waved about as it fired two shots. The first ricocheted with a whine off the thick marble of the stairs; the second grazed Marcus’s shoulder. Without flinching from the pain, the bodyguard returned three steady shots to the man’s chest. The assailant fell like a poleaxed bull at the base of the stairs. The journalists, shaken but recognizing the opportunity, rushed back to snap their cameras at the unknown corpse. Marcus maintained a strong hold, keeping Seaton flat on the staircase, and yelled at the crowd to stand back from the body. Eyes watering from the pain in his shoulder, he kept his gun trained on the prostrate, unmoving form in its growing pool of blood.

20

MARCUS SAT IN the back of an ambulance in front of the New York Stock Exchange building. The street was obstructed by three police cruisers and another ambulance. The entryway was blocked off with yellow police tape that brightened with each flash from the police photographer’s camera. And as if the earlier horde of journalists hadn’t been enough, all the news networks had now sent reinforcements for their coverage of what the media had dubbed “the Wall Street shooting.”

Don Seaton sat in a daze among the bustling investigators outside the trading floor. As he watched the NYPD officers moving throughout the corridor, he reminisced on the life he had enjoyed when starting X-Tronic. The addicting passion of being a new entrepreneur, putting his all into an idea—not just a company, but the possibility of developing a product that would change the marketplace forever. It had never been about the money—the money was only a way of keeping score. He would never admit it, but at first he had been terrified by the rapid growth of the company that would eventually make him billions. He was nostalgic for the excitement he had experienced with his original business partners when they were starting X-Tronic thirty years ago. But life had taken some tragic turns since those days. Even Seaton’s legendary life was turning toward disaster. He had just survived an assassination attempt; his own bodyguard had been wounded in the attack. But the most horrifying thing for him to accept was that he had known the man who tried to kill him. Once, long ago, they had been good friends.

Thirty years ago, Seaton was beginning to build X-Tronic and had recruited two childhood friends: Nick Kemper and Jack Ross. All three men were bursting with ideas and the energy to pursue them. But as they developed X-Tronic in San Francisco, in the wake of the software boom of the early 1980s, the company had produced only flat earnings.

Nick, fearing that the company wouldn’t succeed, had exercised his stock options and left for another promising start-up in Silicon Valley. But Don and Jack had planned to stay at X-Tronic for the long haul. He remembered working eighteen-hour days for two years with his friend as they prepared for the company to go public. Eventually, they had developed an array of business software applications that dazzled corporations across the globe.

Seaton could still remember the night he and Jack rented a yacht for the company party after the initial stock offering. Drifting under the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset, they had led the toast to all the employees, for everyone’s hard work and for the future. It was the pinnacle of their friendship. 

Returning to the present, Seaton turned away from the trading door as more investigators pushed into the side room. Looking at them was too painful. He was lost in his memories. The terrible things that happened between Jack and him after X-Tronic went public were too painful to think about. His chest hurt. He needed fresh air.

Seaton took a last swig from his bottled water and looked briefly around the room. The meeting with the committee had gone exactly as he expected, but the assassination attempt had changed everything. He had planned to travel to Denver this afternoon; now it wasn’t possible. There was a new agenda. New York had been a childhood playground in his youth, and a place of learning during college. Now he knew that the city still had one final lesson to teach him: betrayal. He pushed open the door to the outside and walked out under the line of American flags hanging low on the six Corinthian columns of the building’s facade.

This time Seaton managed to avoid the journalists. He moved through the crowd until he found Marcus sitting in the back of an ambulance. A heavyset young paramedic was washing the flesh wound with  saline solution.

“How is it?” Seaton asked his bodyguard.

“Oh, just a little scrape,” Marcus replied, wincing as the paramedic wrapped a bandage around his shoulder. “But they still need to take me to the hospital to get it disinfected. It won’t take long; we’ll still be able to fly out in a couple hours as planned.”

Seaton’s eyes followed the paramedic as he rose from the padded bench inside the ambulance and, hunched under the low ceiling, lumbered his way forward to the radio by the driver’s seat. In a quiet voice, Seaton leaned in and said, “We can’t leave the city yet—there are some things I need to clear up first. I’ve told the pilot we’re not planning to leave until Sunday.”

“Have the police any leads on the man?” Marcus asked, studying his employer carefully.

Seaton shook his head. “No, they don’t know anything. But his name was Jack Ross.”

“You
knew
him?”

“He was a business partner of mine more than twenty-five years ago.”

Marcus gave his employer a piercing look. “Why would he want to kill you?” he asked.

Seaton looked back at the columns that, in that moment anyway, made the Stock Exchange building look like an ancient Greek tomb. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

21

THE DRIVER PULLED up next to a red brick apartment building in the East Village. Seaton and Marcus emerged from the limousine and walked along the cold sidewalk. Bare trees in protective iron grates lined the neighborhood street. Aspiring artists and students relaxed in corner cafés, rotating their lattes and brochettes as they discussed their passions. It was a time in their young lives, Seaton realized, when they had the luxury of leisure time and abundant hope for the future. While they were busy thinking of their futures, he had returned to the neighborhood in search of his past.

“Who’s this friend we’re meeting?” Marcus asked. On high alert after the shooting, he was making it a point to walk between Seaton and the street. His eyes roved constantly: scanning around every corner, between parked cars, his imagination continuously rehearsing every potential threat.

“An old business partner,” Seaton replied.

“You seem to have a lot of those. Is he connected to the shooter, this Jack Ross?”

“He used to be. We all used to be connected before we split over twenty-five years ago. His name’s Nicholas Kemper. While Jack went into other software businesses, Nick took his wealth into the music industry after the first big tech upsurge in Silicon Valley. In the early eighties I bought Nick’s shares in X-Tronic so that Jack and I could take it public on our own terms. Afterwards, I squeezed Jack out and took over the CEO position that we had previously shared. After I pushed him out of the executive group, Jack sold his shares to me and left the company. All three of us were worth twenty to thirty million each when I took control of the company. But while Jack started a new venture, Nick experimented with some other tech companies in San Francisco before eventually leaving the industry for good, where he finally ended up using his money to pursue an old passion.”