The Aspen Account (15 page)

“There must be over three hundred people out here!” he yelled back at her. Even though the music had come to a stop, the yells and whistles from the crowd were all but demanding an encore from the departed band.

A hand grasped his shoulder. “Michael, you sneaky bastard! I’ve been looking for you all night. And only now, at the end of the show, do I find you.”

He turned to find Lance, grinning, in a black wool cap and a ski coat.

“Lance! I just saw your brother a half hour ago.”

“Well, you’re doing better than me. I haven’t seen him half the night.” Lance peered at Sarah. “And who’s this?” he asked.

“My friend Sarah,” Michael replied. After the way she had challenged Lucas, he didn’t want to tempt her to take another shot, and he suspected that she wasn’t up for it, either.

“Have we met before?” Lance asked her. “You look familiar—I’m sure I’ve seen you before.”

Sarah forced a grin and latched on to Michael’s arm. “See honey, I told you all the boys use that line.”

Lance chuckled uncomfortably. “Funny girl,” he said to Michael.

Michael grinned. “I didn’t think they had night skiing at Aspen,” he said. “Looks like you’re getting ready to hit the slopes.”

Lance smiled. “Actually, I was skiing with some people all day on the mountain. We drank so much at the lodge afterwards, we thought it would be fun just to tough it out all night in our ski clothes. Tell you the truth, I don’t think I’m gonna last.”

“I’m sure of that,” Sarah muttered under her breath.

“You’re gonna have trouble getting back into the house through this crowd,” Michael joked, hoping Lance had missed her words.

“Actually, I’ll probably use the servants’ entrance. I can get into it from the kitchen,” Lance said, pointing to the back corner of the patio. “There are hidden staircases and hallways for the servants to move around the place without being seen. Designed so that my father’s well-to-do guests wouldn’t have to notice the staff, but it ended up being a great playground for Lucas and me when we were kids.”

As Lance talked of hide-and-seek in hidden passageways, Michael noticed two large tags sticking out from the front of his coat. “You’ve got a couple ski passes there?”

“Yeah,” Lance said, looking down; his fingers plucked absently at the tags. “This one’s the season pass for Aspen, and this is the Colorado pass. You ski? We’ll have to go sometime if you do!” he said, slurring his words.

“Oh, yeah, definitely, I’d love to ski,
anytime,
” Michael replied, bending over to take a closer look at the tags. “I see they changed the design on the Colorado pass this year,” he concluded after looking at it for a few seconds. “I actually didn’t buy one myself, not this year anyway—busy season and all. But I have to go up at least a half-dozen times this season so I can still feel like I’m living in Colorado.”

“Sure, absolutely! We’ll go sometime, I promise,” Lance said. “Even if we have to drag you away from work. You can tell your boss you’re ‘meeting with a client.’” He laughed loudly.

Just then the floodlights from the mansion cast a long shadow across the crowd as the band returned to the stage. Lance slapped him on the back and smiled wryly. And Michael, watching the band take the stage again, also wore a smile, because he had just memorized the fifteen-digit bar code on Lance’s ski pass.

As the band started up, Michael turned to say something to Sarah, when his eyes settled on a familiar image amid the throng. His heart skipped as he caught a profile view of what looked like Alaska’s face. But before he could move forward to catch a better look, the lights from the mansion dimmed, and he lost her.

24

JERRY DIAMOND LEANED his considerable bulk back in his chair, sipping his bourbon and gazing out at the Portland skyline. Setting his drink down on the table, he turned back to look at the man sitting across from him in the top-floor bar of the luxurious Continental Hotel. An aging lounge singer in a purple dress stood next to the baby grand piano, singing a slow jazz number.

“So everything’s finished,” Diamond said to the man.

“No, it’s far from finished,” the man said in the tone of a professor lecturing a student. “We still have a lot of work to do—you saw so yourself.”

“But it works, Winston,” the X-Tronic CFO said. “It works, damn it. That’s the important thing. If it works, then everything else is just a matter of implementation.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” the man replied, smiling. “The prototype works. That’s really what matters. The hardest part is finished…but that brings me to my latest concern.”

“What’s that?” Diamond said, looking back down at his drink. He had long ago developed the skill of looking casually away from a person just as they were about to ask the impossible of him.

“The financing. It’s time to start running the production facilities. When does my team get final funding?”

Diamond grimaced. He knew that his associate would not like the answer. “We can’t give it to you just yet. It might take another month or two.”

Winston choked on his whiskey and started coughing. He looked back at Diamond with watering eyes. “You’re kidding, right? A month or two?”

“Maybe longer,” Diamond said with a deadpan face, then took a drink of bourbon.

“Why?” the man asked, leaning forward with both arms on the white tablecloth, palms up. “That could be too long. It’s hard to keep things like this a secret, you know. The longer we sit on it, the more likely something will leak.”

“That’s a risk we’ll just have to take. The funding can’t be completed until after the merger.”

The man’s face sank. In a mournful voice, he said, “That’s corporate politics—it has nothing to do with me or my work.”

Though Diamond was not generally a sympathetic man when it came to funding allocations of X-Tronic’s annual budget, he could understand the man’s disappointment. They both wanted this project to be finished without any unpleasant surprises.

Reminding himself that the man in front of him was about to make him one of the most powerful and respected CFOs in America, Diamond leaned forward. Now he was the lecturer. He spoke in a calm, reassuring voice. “Look, we can’t spend or announce anything until after X-Tronic resolves this situation with the Cygnus bid. A merger would essentially reset all our accounting records with new valuations. The timing’s critical; we have to be very careful about how we do this. And we’ve done everything possible to safeguard access to the project. Only a handful of people outside your team even know it exists. Nothing will leak.”

“Seems like an unnecessary risk to me. I hope you guys in Denver know what you’re doing.”

“We do,” Diamond said, grinning. “Besides, I know your team still has a few small glitches to work out in the software. I could see that much during my tour of the facilities today. This’ll give you enough time to make sure the final design is flawless long before we get into mass distribution.”

The piano player struck the last chords of the song, and the singer gave a quick bow to light applause. Winston took the final sip from his whiskey and stood up from the table. “I’ve waited five years for this moment,” he said. “I guess I can wait a little longer before it’s announced. Just don’t let Denver get distracted from what we’re trying to do. Merger or not, we’re about to change the software industry forever.”

“Good night, Winston,” he said as his guest walked away from the table. Despite their strained conversation, he had been very excited by what he saw at the Portland facility today. He couldn’t wait to return to Denver and let everyone know that their plans were right on schedule. Now it was up to the twins to see that the merger went through without any problems.

25

MICHAEL FINISHED DRESSING in the darkened room in the east wing of the Seaton estate. Flipping his nylon travel bag over on the empty bed, he pulled a green fleece from the side pocket. Dawn was breaking over eastern Kansas and wouldn’t gray the skies over Aspen for another hour, though songbirds already were stirring in the trees lining the back of the estate.

Keeping the lights off in his room so that no one would see him stirring at this early hour, he zipped up the collar on his fleece and moved toward the door.

The hallway outside his room was quiet, and the room next to his showed no light under the door—Sarah was still asleep. He moved quietly through the gray shadows to the softly glimmering banister that curved down the grand staircase to the front corridor on the ground floor. At the bottom he tiptoed past the display cases of costly artifacts that Don Seaton had collected during a lifetime of travels. He felt like a cat burglar skulking about such unguarded wealth in someone else’s home.

Moving to the kitchen, at the opposite side of the mansion, he stopped at a back door to the outside. Pushing it open as slowly as possible, he peeked out into the cold air. Fifty yards across a field of snow stood a stone building. Lance had told him it was originally a horse stable before his father converted it into a garage big enough to house forty cars.

Ten minutes ago, Michael had heard the soft purr of a car engine arriving at the estate. Unable to see any activity from his window’s limited view, he had thrown on enough clothes to sneak outside. Seeing the dim lights in the frosted windows of the old stables, he moved across the snowy field in slow, cautious steps. The snow was overrun with footprints from the party, so there was little chance of leaving a trail. Reaching the limestone wall of the stables, he moved along in the building’s shadow.

Without warning, a beam of light shot out from the darkness, just missing him standing flat against the wall. He dropped to his knees and hugged the shadow of the building as another car pulled into the front drive of the stables. He heard a car door open and close, then footsteps crunching in snow before disappearing into the building.

Inching his way toward the front of the building, Michael saw a black Mercedes parked with its front bumper pressed against a high snowbank. Tracks led from the car to a small side door, still ajar, next to the main doors, which were closed. Following the footprints, he peeked into the doorway just in time to see a tall shadow shrink and disappear up a ramp to an unseen room.

As he stepped into the old stables, his feet crunched softly on the gravel floor. He crept along, feeling his way, until he came to a makeshift board ladder that led up to a square hole in the ceiling. Realizing this was the best way to move closer to the light without the risk of being seen, he climbed hand over hand up the rungs until he found himself in a huge attic with rafters angling in sharp upside-down V’s. The attic’s board floor stretched the length of a basketball court.

Looking for joists through the slim gaps between the boards, he crawled along the planks at a snail’s pace, gently redistributing his weight with each movement to minimize the chance of creaking boards. After what felt like an eternity in the darkness, with slivers of light shooting through the spaces between the boards and striping the roof above, he had advanced far enough from the square hatch that he could now see down into the main room. A half-dozen men stood in the center of a peculiar cluster of fine automobiles, as if they were a gang of thieves admiring a heist they had just made. In the center stood Lance and Lucas Seaton, speaking in low tones. Michael could not catch a word they said.

Though he did not recognize the other men, he memorized every detail he could. Their suits, too formal and luxurious for a dawn meeting in an old stable, suggested something shady. They appeared stiff and obedient in the presence of the twins, yet their confidence was apparent in their nods of agreement with whatever the twins were discussing. Michael guessed them to be lawyers or bankers perhaps. But whoever they were, they seemed to be working
for
the twins, and clearly they were working in secret.

Realizing that he had learned all he could from his hidden lookout, Michael became acutely aware of his exposed position. Sooner or later the meeting would conclude, and if he didn’t make it back into the mansion before then, he could easily be caught out. He turned and crawled back toward the square hatch that led down from the attic. Knowing he would be blind while climbing back down the ladder feetfirst, he peeked through the hole, searching for any sign of life below—he had been forced to crawl so slowly across the attic floor that he could not be certain the meeting was still going on. Somewhere outside in the distance, a dog started barking. He feared that the other overnight guests from the party were beginning to wake. He didn’t have much time to get back.

Sensing no movement below him, he started down the ladder. He expected at any moment to hear a voice yell out at him. But no sound came, and soon enough, his feet were back on the ground. He moved to the door and left the stables. The car sat undisturbed out front, and a dim blue glow over the eastern peaks announced the approaching day.

A smile broke over his face as he felt the exhilaration of having escaped undetected, but it was wiped away as he rounded the corner of the building and found himself face-to-face with a short, stocky man standing shin-deep in the snow. He wore a thick cashmere coat so long it dragged the surface. The man’s rosy cheeks revealed that he had been in the cold air for some time, but his shiny brown eyes seemed quite focused, as though he could tolerate a great deal more discomfort without being distracted.

“Are we lost, Mr. Chapman?”

But before he could answer, he heard noises behind him. Jerking his head to look back at the stable’s side door, he could now see a glimmer of light where he had left it cracked open. The men must be walking down the ramp from the main room and would soon be outside the stables. He had to move fast. “Just stretching my legs,” Michael said to the man. “Couldn’t sleep . . . feeling better now, though.” He walked quickly, trying to move past the man and make it back to the mansion before the men inside the stable came out. But a strong hand grabbed his arm.