The Chairman (33 page)

“Why?”

“I thought you told me that Troy Mason went to work for Paul Strazzi at Apex after you fired him.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Then
Strazzi
must have paid Kathy Hays off. He wanted Mason out of Everest so he could get information on the portfolio companies, so he could scare the widow. A woman he made a widow with Tom McGuire’s help. So, like you said before, Strazzi had to be McGuire’s backer.” Stiles paused. “But Strazzi’s dead and McGuire still called you to talk about buying the company. Makes no sense.”

“Ben Cohen knows,” Gillette said quietly. The little bastard. Cohen never could have been chairman—even for thirty days—without an angel. So he’d sold himself out. Playing the part of the puppet in exchange for a chance to run Everest. In exchange for selling Laurel Energy for billions less than what it was really worth. The fraudulent tapes had indicated that there was no oil in the option fields when there really was. Gillette was certain now that the new seismic tests would show vast reserves beneath the surface of the properties.

McGuire was the muscle, Cohen the brains. But who was the dark angel? Maybe it was someone else at Apex. Maybe Strazzi had been double-crossed by Stockman, and Stockman was working with someone else there. Or maybe it was Cohen
and
Faraday working with another group. Faraday had uncountable connections to the insurance companies and the pension funds. Maybe he and Cohen were working together and had agreed to sell Laurel to someone for a rock-bottom price in exchange for having their own fund. Gillette glanced ahead into the gloom. The answer had to be at the other end of this driveway.

He motioned to Stiles. “Let’s go,” he urged, opening the car door.

Stiles shook his head and closed the door again. “We go on foot,” he said quietly. “We don’t want anyone up at the house to see us coming.”

As they moved cautiously up the driveway a light rain began to fall, rustling the leaves. The thick clouds made the night very dark, and they were forced to move slowly, picking their way carefully along the rutted dirt road as they headed toward the house.

“I hope there aren’t any damn snakes lying on the road,” Stiles muttered. “You know, they come out at night.”

Gillette stopped abruptly and pulled the pistol from his belt. “What kind of snakes do they have down here?” he asked, pointing the gun down and ahead.

“All kinds.”

“The
poisonous
ones, Quentin,” Gillette said, starting to move forward again slowly. “What kind of poisonous snakes do they have down here?”

“Copperheads and some rattlers. But the ones you have to worry about are the cottonmouths. I’ve got buddies from down here who tell me stories about cottonmouths actually coming into boats after people.”

“Great.”

A quarter of a mile farther on they reached the house—a quaint cabin set in the middle of a clearing. Tall trees soared a hundred feet above it. The cabin was completely dark except for a porch light. There was a compact car parked in the circle in front of the raised porch.

“Now what?” Gillette asked.

“We go in.”

“What if the door’s locked?”

“I can take care of that,” Stiles said, patting his shirt pocket. “I brought a set of picks. I can get into anything.”

“That’s breaking and entering.”

“This from a kidnapper?”

Gillette wiped moisture from his forehead. The rain was coming down harder. “Are we going right through the front door?” For all they knew, there were people in the cabin guarding Kathy Hays. People who probably had guns, too.

“Not if we can avoid it. Let’s check around back and see if there’s another door. I don’t like how open that porch is. We’d be sitting ducks up there, especially with the light on.” Stiles waved. “Follow me.”

Gillette trailed Stiles as he moved across the lawn and around the back, shading his eyes from the chilling rain. “This thing still work if it gets wet?” he asked warily as they pulled up by a large oak tree.

“The gun?”

“Yeah.”

“It’ll work. Don’t worry. By the way, if you aim at somebody, aim to kill, not to wound. Do you understand?”

“Absolutely.” He’d be more than happy to put whoever he was shooting at down for good.

Stiles pointed at the cabin through the dim light. “There’s the back door. Probably leads into a mud room or the kitchen or something. I say we try to get into the house that way.”

Gillette nodded. “Let’s do it.” He sprinted to the door, following Stiles across the lawn. They leaned their backs against the house when they reached it. Stiles tried the door—it was locked—then pulled a small case from his shirt pocket, opened it, selected a pick, and went to work.

“Bingo,” Stiles whispered, stowing the case back in his pocket when the lock popped. “Ready?”

Gillette clasped the gun tightly. Beads of perspiration were seeping into his eyes, stinging like hell. “Yeah.”

“If an alarm goes off, we’re out of here,” Stiles said. “Back into the woods that way.” He pointed. “Then we wait and see what happens. Got it?”

“Yup.”

Stiles reached for the knob and turned it slowly.

Gillette braced for the scream of an alarm, but it never came. There was a gentle click and the door swung open.

Stiles glanced over his shoulder. “Come on,” he whispered.

The inside of the cabin was dominated by a musty smell and it was pitch-black. He could barely make out Stiles’s shape only a few feet ahead.

They stole through the kitchen into a large living room, then down a hallway, checking the bedrooms as they went. All empty—until they came to the last one at the end of the corridor. Stiles put a finger to his lips and pointed, then nodded, indicating that there was someone in the bed.

The two men moved stealthily through the cabin’s back door—the one Gillette and Stiles had just entered—guns drawn.

Stiles slipped into the bedroom, leaned over the bed, and pressed his huge palm to Kathy Hays’s mouth.

Her eyes flew open instantly and she tried to scream, but Stiles’s hand stifled the sound. She grabbed his wrist with both hands, trying to pry it from her face, but it was no use. He was much too powerful. She made a move to strike his face, but he pointed the gun straight down at her.

“I’m your friend,” he hissed. “Stop.”

When she saw the gun, she went still and tears welled in her eyes.

“I’m going to take my hand away, Kathy,” Stiles said softly. “We’re not going to hurt you,” he assured her as Gillette sat down on the other side of the bed. “We just need to ask you a few questions. Do you understand?”

She nodded, her eyes wide open.

“You aren’t going to scream, are you?”

She shook her head.

“Good. Here we go.” Slowly Stiles slid his hand from her mouth.

She gasped and pulled the covers to her neck. “What do you want?” she asked, her voice shaking. “Please don’t kill me,” she pleaded.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Gillette said quietly. “Like Quentin said, I just need to ask you a few questions. Okay?”

“Okay,” she answered hesitantly.

“Do you recognize me?” Gillette asked, leaning down close so that she could see his face in the faint light.

“No.”

“I’m the one who came into the room in the basement at Bill Donovan’s funeral reception. When you were in bed with Troy Mason.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, bringing her hands to her face. “You’re Christian Gillette.”

“That’s right.”

She tried to struggle away, but Stiles held her down.

“Stop it,”
he demanded. “Don’t move until I tell you to.”

“It’s all right,” Gillette said soothingly, trying to calm her down. “As soon as you’ve answered my questions, we’ll leave.”

“What do you want to know?” she asked, her voice shaking even more violently. A tear slid down one side of her face.

“Were you paid to set up Troy so I’d fire him?”

She swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes.”

Of course, Gillette thought to himself. It was an easy way for whoever was behind all this to get Troy out of Everest without having to resort to murder. Whoever was behind it wanted Cohen to be chairman so they could get the Laurel deal done with Coyote. They’d probably realized that the investors would never elect Faraday, so it came down to Mason and him. Mason could be eliminated using Kathy Hays. Then there would only have to be one murder. His. It was all becoming clear.

Now it was time for the money question. The whole reason he and Stiles had made this trip. And the key to everything. Gillette could feel his palms sweating. “Who approached you to set Mason up?”

Kathy gazed up at Gillette for several moments without answering. The sound of her breathing filled the room.

“Tell me,” Gillette demanded
“Now.”

Kathy swallowed again. “A man named Miles Whitman,” she whispered.

Everything stopped and the world disappeared for a moment.
Miles Whitman.
Miles Whitman was the one behind the murder attempts, the one behind the McGuire brothers’ bid to buy the company, the one who was trying to buy Laurel Energy so cheaply. Gillette fought to breathe. Miles Whitman was the dark angel.

Gillette’s mind reeled back to the day last week he’d met with Whitman and Cohen in his office. The day he’d found out that the widow was going to sell her stake in Everest to Strazzi. When Whitman had pushed to learn whether or not Cohen was officially the chief operating officer yet. How Cohen had reacted so oddly. The reason was apparent now. Cohen had been swimming in paranoia, worried that Gillette would somehow figure out that Whitman was the puppet master—and Cohen the puppet.

But what was Whitman’s motivation in all of this? He was already one of the most powerful people in the financial world.

Another thought struck Gillette like a hammer. Whitman had said on the phone that he and Strazzi had talked about how Strazzi loved to jog in Central Park in the mornings. Whitman would have known Strazzi’s schedule. Whitman had had Strazzi hit because if Strazzi got the widow’s stake in Everest, Whitman wouldn’t have been able to buy Laurel.

The bullet slammed into Stiles’s side, below his left arm, sending him flying onto the bed beside Kathy as the report of the pistol exploded in their ears. She screamed a bloodcurdling scream as she tore the covers back and rolled toward Gillette.

Gillette dropped to one knee and began firing at the bedroom doorway over Stiles’s prone body. Stiles was grabbing at the wound. There was a groan and a heavy thud as someone tumbled to the floor in the hallway outside the bedroom, then there was more gunfire. But the shooter’s aim was high, and both Stiles and Gillette emptied their clips at the door.

As he fired the last bullet and the sound of the explosion faded, Gillette heard footsteps moving swiftly away down the hall. “Stiles!” he yelled, reaching into his pocket for the second clip. Popping the empty one and inserting the new one holding fifteen precious rounds. “You all right?”

Stiles groaned, dropping down to the floor and crawling toward the door. “Never . . . taken one in the lung,” he said.

Gillette heard someone moaning outside the bedroom door, then the sound of voices outside the house. Three, maybe four men yelling to one another. He crawled over the bed, moved to the door, and peered into the hallway.

A man lay on his side, clutching his stomach, a pistol on the floor by his head barely visible in the darkness. Gillette burst into the hallway and grabbed the gun, then hurried back into the bedroom and knelt beside Stiles. The big man had dropped his gun and was sitting back against the wall, blood pumping from the wound in his chest, the blood making an ever-widening circle on his shirt.

“Jesus, Quentin.”

“It’s bad,” Stiles gasped. “I know . . . Chris.”

“I’m gonna get you out of here, brother. I promise.” Gillette glanced at Kathy. She was sitting on the floor in a far corner of the room, sobbing. Holding her knees tightly to her chin and rocking. He pulled out his cell phone and pushed a button at random, lighting the screen. No signal way out here in rural Mississippi. It had been that way in the driveway, too, but he’d hoped he’d get something here. “Shit.” He glanced at Stiles, then at Kathy. “Stay here. Don’t move.”

There had to be a phone in the house somewhere. He’d noticed the lines overhead as he and Stiles were coming up the driveway. The best bet was the living room, he figured. He looked down the hallway and saw that someone had turned on a light in the living room. He moved that way, holding the gun in front of him, swinging the barrel from side to side, trying to anticipate where the one who’d run away was hiding, trying to anticipate which door he’d come out from behind.

He spotted the phone on a table by the fireplace and raced toward it. As his fingers closed around the receiver, he heard glass smashing and bullets whining angrily past.

Gillette dropped to his stomach as the huge front windows disintegrated under the hail of bullets. He aimed at the lamp and pulled the trigger, shattering it with one shot, and the room plunged into darkness. But the steady stream of bullets didn’t stop.

Gillette grabbed the phone again and dialed the number he’d memorized. Tom McGuire’s cell phone number. He could barely hear it ringing over the barrage. “Pick up!” he shouted. “Pick up!”

Suddenly, there was the sound of hurried footsteps on the porch and the front door flew open. Gillette fired blindly at the door as the phone continued to ring in his ear. Someone went down heavily outside, but then a torch skittered across the living-room floor. It came to rest against a couch and the upholstery caught instantly.

“Hello.”

Finally an answer.

“Tom!” Gillette shouted above the noise of the flames, which were suddenly as loud as a freight train. “It’s Christian Gillette.”

“
What the fuck?
How are you—”

“Yeah, I’m not dead.” There was nothing but silence. “Tom!” Obviously he was stunned. “Tom!”

“What the hell do you want?”

“I know you’re outside the cabin, Tom. If you ever want to see your brother alive, call off the dogs! I’ve got Vince back in New York! If the people who have him don’t hear from me by six this morning, he’s a dead man.”