The Devil's Analyst (27 page)

“What’s that?” Oliver attempted to appear nonchalant, but Josh could see he was shaken. His hands were no longer trembling with anger, but beads of sweat were breaking out on his forehead.

“I wouldn’t want to say aloud why you should be concerned, but you know Big Stick is what it is. A big stick. And whoever controls the big stick can beat the one who doesn’t yet have it.“ Josh allowed himself a smirk.

Josh enjoyed going on. “Let’s just say that I have reason to believe the government doesn’t know about every witness that it should call for this trial. Maybe it doesn’t know about all the friends and acquaintances that Ressam has in the United States. Maybe it doesn’t know how the money reaches those people. Or its strange projects here in Los Angeles and Arizona. Don’t you think the Feds would like to know all of that?”

Oliver stood still, his gaze pointed, a slight flush now entering his cheek. “Are you seriously trying to threaten us?”

“I’m just showing some of the cards in my hand.” Josh wasn’t concerned with body language. The small lizards in the park might be eager to puff their bodies up and do grandiose pushups in the sun, attempting to prove to the world that they were in control, but they shouldn’t be so cocky. Any hawk could come down and snatch them up for lunch.

“Don’t forget your card deck also contains Danny.”

The little vermin. Did Oliver really think he could win with a ploy like that?

Oliver continued, “I know what he means to you. I’ve known your lover a long time. What good is winning your little game if you don’t have him?”

“He’s not part of this round.”

“Isn’t he? Didn’t you tell me once that all’s fair in love and war? This is it, isn’t it? Both love and war, I mean, all wrapped together. What could be fairer?” Oliver’s face was clearing. He thought he was ahead, but Josh knew he wasn’t.

Josh handed the newspaper to Oliver. “Take that story to your bosses. And don’t try threatening me. I’m the one who calls the shots.

“Tell your guys it’s over. What I’m offering is not a bad deal. At the moment, we hold each other in check, because we can both destroy the other. Take the deal. I get to go on with my life and my business. You get to go on to foster new plots. I don’t care what you and your friends do, and you needn’t care what I do. Really, it’s simple. We both know too many secrets about each other. If either side goes down, both sides go down.

“But consider your role, Oliver. You’re only incidental to your friends, and remember I share at least one thing with your masters. Neither of us cares if you live. So be a good puppy. Do what you’re told.”

Arnold Twin Feathers
was impatient, and Cynthia took an immediate dislike to the man. She didn’t like his Tringush casino either. Standing fifteen stories high, alone in the middle of an empty desert, its structure pointed skyward as an insult to the heavens. The cars in its parking lot mostly sported license plate holders from dealerships in southern California, but the din inside was an echo of Las Vegas.

Perhaps her judgment was unduly harsh. After all, the Lattigo Nation operated a similarly large casino, and it was just as filled with slot machines, poker tables, roulette wheels, and the like. In Lattigo, there was the same sense of smoke in the air and stale booze in the carpets. But in Cynthia’s mind, the American Seasons Resort and Casino glistened with a fairyland touch as the kingdom her husband created. It attracted families with its northwoods-themed attractions and its glass-enclosed water slides. Plus she always knew that Chip truly sought to do the best for his tribe. She doubted if Twin Feathers was so noble.

“I don’t have much time,” he said. He didn’t offer them any refreshments. “I’ve got to meet with my auditors in fifteen minutes. Besides I don’t know what I could tell you. Of course, I’m sorry to hear of your loss. Your husband was well regarded in our community.”

Cynthia didn’t believe a word of it. His words were just social tripe. She could tell that Danny didn’t care for him either. But they were here, and she would ask her questions.

Twin Feathers didn’t bother to feign interest in what was asked. “Yeah, your husband called me one night back in January. I didn’t realize it was just before he disappeared. Didn’t really see anything in the local papers, just heard the gossip that he had taken off with the tribe’s funds. Didn’t seem like that kind of guy, but then you never know.”

Cynthia forced herself to stay calm. “Do you remember why he called or what you talked about?” she asked.

“It wasn’t special. We occasionally conferred in the past. Bunch of us rely on each other to vet people we encounter. There’s a lot of mob money trying to sneak into our casinos. I guess they think we’re a bunch of idiots who won’t mind being taken over by gangsters. They discover soon enough that’s not the case.”

“Did he ask about anyone specifically in this call?”

“Yeah.”

Cynthia was irritated. Didn’t her husband and this guy share some common blood as Native Americans? Why was he so unhelpful? “Who was that?”

“He asked about this firm called Endicott-Meyers.” Twin Feathers noticed how Danny and Cynthia exchanged looks, “but I’m guessing you already knew about them.”

Danny spoke first, “What did you tell him?”

“As far as I knew the firm was clean. That’s all I told him. The name had never come up with any of my contacts.”

Like a balloon slowly deflating, Cynthia shrank. She didn’t know what she had expected or wanted to hear, but it wasn’t this.

Twin Feathers stood. He looked at both of them slowly. “I got this meeting to go to, like I said, but I told Chip I thought the firm was clean. But I also told him I had heard things about one of the investors, the one named Oliver Meyers. Word on the street is that he’s in bed with all sorts of unsavory types, like the kind of guys willing to fuck with anybody that shows a wad of cash. Foreign types is what I hear. Crazy types.

“I wouldn’t let a guy with friends like that near my tribe with a ten-foot pole. Take a word of advice. Neither should you.”

INTERLUDE

Session Twelve

I have this theory about life
. It’s not what you do; it’s who you know.

Come on, doc, why didn’t you laugh? You don’t really think that’s how I view the world, do you? I don’t give a damn who you know. Ultimately it’s only what you do that matters. Every person controls his own destiny.

All of this stuff about God and the devil that people like to talk about. It doesn’t mean a thing. There’s no God playing roulette with your life, just like He’s not out there pre-arranging your destiny.

And there’s no devil either—making you do things you didn’t want to do.

So if it’s not worth knowing God or the devil, because ultimately they hold no power over you, then who would be worth knowing?

That’s a trick question. You just got to know one person. Who’s that you ask? Yourself. And don’t think it’s possible to be whatever you want to be. At some point you are simply who you are. And you got to know what that is.

If that wasn’t the case, why would people need a doc like you? You help people discover themselves right?

So tell people to look into themselves. That’s what I say. See yourself for what you truly are. You can’t let it scare you. You can’t fall in love with what you think you see, or what you want to see. And you certainly can’t change what’s really there.

But if you know who you really are, then the sky’s the limit. Anything is possible, because you’re a super hero, able to do what you need to do to get where you want to be.

Which brings me to my central question. If you really love someone, if you really want them to be able to do whatever they want to do, then could you possibly do anything greater for them than to force themselves to look honestly in the mirror and determine what kind of person they really are?

Sometimes you try to make me think I’m the devil tempting Danny with evil. And if it’s not that, then you want me to think I’m playing God and trying to control Danny’s life.

You know that it’s not either of those things.

The fact is that I just love Danny and I need him to face his personal reality, no matter what it takes.

It’s just so damn hard making him choose a side.

But I will.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Lair

Back in New York
, Josh mentally prepared to walk on stage for Barbara Linsky’s spring session. Within the hotel atop Grand Central Station, some six hundred nerds and technocrats crowded the ballroom at the Grand Hyatt. They were just the tip of the crowd that followed Barbara Linsky with slavish attention. Barbara viewed this morning’s speech as the dry run for her planned inclusion of Josh at the September BLINK conference in Boston. He couldn’t afford to let her down.

But he couldn’t focus on the speech ahead. Too much was going on related to his need to wrestle Premios away from Endicott-Meyers. Although the jailed terrorist in Los Angeles was key to his approach, Josh was afraid that Ressam might seek a plea bargain, which could weaken his negotiating leverage with Oliver and his friends. On the other hand, he reminded himself that his hand was strong and the planned trial showed how serious the US government took Islamic terrorism.

The real problem was Barbara. So far she had failed to lure a suitable buyer to the table. Even though his real goal was to cut out Endicott-Meyers with a private sale, he also had to keep the IPO option open. Balancing it all was driving him crazy, especially given the gyrations on the exchanges. Already this week the NASDAQ had dropped hundreds of points as though determined to follow the same selloff that haunted the overall Dow.

Everywhere things were falling apart.

But first things first. It was Friday, the fourteenth of April and he was scheduled to preview the wondrous ideas of Premios to the New York investment elite. Barbara expected him to wow her followers with his innovative thoughts on how the network could become one’s personal advisor.

“You ready?” Barbara asked. Smartly dressed, she appeared calm and relaxed. She allotted Josh the opening Friday spot, and he knew that was a huge honor. But for a moment he doubted himself. Maybe he wasn’t a visionary.

“Of course,” he replied.

She gave the cue to her assistant and the floor director. The show was ready to start. From behind the stage set, Josh could see only the back of the giant screens. Behind him, the rear-screen equipment began projecting the opening video. Even from backstage, he could feel the swell of music pounding in the room. On the other side of the screen, floor lights dimmed. Spotlights swirled the room in time to the staccato bump of the music. An unseen person standing somewhere behind him in the production space used his voice of god to project over the ballroom’s speakers, “Please welcome to the stage America’s most forward thinker and visionary, Miss Barbara Linsky . . . and her special guest for this morning’s session . . . the CEO and founder of Premios.com, Mr. Josh Gunderson.”

Applause thundered, and he felt alive. In front of him, the assistant pulled back the stage curtains. Barbara walked out, and then Josh stepped into the bright light. The stage lights blinded him to the rows and rows of people that he knew were sitting in the room; all that was clear were the arrows marked in tape on the stage risers and beyond them the shimmering confidence monitors already displaying the opening words of his scripted remarks, poised and ready to roll. The clapping rolled down through the hall to merge with the excitement of the music and the beating of his heart. It would all be okay.

Barbara was off and running. “Welcome, everyone, to our third annual Spring BLINK, a time and place where we encounter the brightest and the newest thinkers in America. For me, it is always such a great honor and privilege to be your guide. I am the lucky one who gets to roam the entrepreneurial byways of this great country to find the first signals of innovations that will transform tomorrow. And I get to introduce it to you.

“Our speaker this morning is one of those game changers. His company will surely prove to be one of the important dot-com innovators of this first decade of the twenty-first century. But I didn’t find this person in the Silicon Valley or in Manhattan’s Digital Gulch. Josh Gunderson is proof that many of the next new things of the Internet age will be found in the most unexpected places . . . in this case, downtown Los Angeles. There among the abandoned building of last century’s commercial district, creative minds are at work.

“On the surface, Premios.com might seem nothing more than a content site for lifestyle information. In other hands, that might be the case. But as you are about to discover, this unpretentious West Coast firm is rethinking what it means to serve your customers, and what it takes to help them find what they are looking for.

“Welcome to BLINK. Josh, let’s get started.”

And Josh knew
it would be all right. Each question was planned. The demonstrations were in the can. The relevant charts and illustrations were cued. Backstage, the operator of the teleprompter was trained to follow his cadence. All that was required to be added to the mix was his light-hearted wit. Barbara tossed the first easy ball question, and he lobbed it back with all the self-deprecating charm that was planned. Light laughter rippled through the room.

It was going well. But then he noticed it. Something was off. Truthfully, Barbara realized it first. She was tuned in to the behavior of a typical BLINK talk, and he could see her shift in her chair as the audience reaction came a beat too late. Even he felt it. It was as though half the room had tuned out. As the talk went on, the sensation intensified. At times, he was convinced Barbara was no longer listening to him, but to the quiescent interest of the crowd. An earpiece allowed the event director to talk to her directly, and he wondered if a story was being whispered into Barbara’s ear that was being kept from him.

The shifting audience reaction threw Josh off his game. He felt as though his zipper was open, and no one would tell him. Although he couldn’t see the audience, his ears detected what was happening. As the forty-five minute session went on, he became obsessed with trying to track the number of people standing up and hurrying out. He attempted to peer through the blinding lights to focus on the doors in the back, pretending to connect with the audience but actually trying to monitor his suspicions. He was right. Each person who snuck out unleashed a brief flash of light as the rear doors opened and closed. The flashes grew more frequent.

His big debut and no one was paying any attention. He wanted them back. They didn’t know what they were missing. For a moment, he thought about tactics to grab them and ensure they stayed planted in their seats. Maybe if he disclosed everything that Premios was doing, they’d return to their places. Imagine Barbara’s face if he spilled the beans about Project Big Stick. What would the front row thick with reporters from
Wired
,
Red Herring
,
Business 2.0
and others write about Barbara if they learned of her protégé’s conspiracies?

He squelched that thought. He wasn’t about to commit career suicide. He had to ignore whatever was going on with the audience. Just get through what had been rehearsed. After all, he would still need Barbara after this morning. The investment houses and bankers still needed to believe in the company.

Finally, it was over. The closing applause was a weak echo of the earlier greeting. The mild clapping pissed him off. As soon as they were behind the curtains, he handed his head mike to the tech rep and he turned on Barbara.

“What the hell was going on out there?”

“NASDAQ is crashing,” she replied “Already down hundreds of points.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, but no one cared what he thought.

Barbara was already in conference with her executive assistant. “How many attendees are left? Do you think we can get them back in the room after the break?”

“I don’t know,” the woman replied. “They’re all jittery. The index just keeps dropping, and you know how much it fell already this week. It’s plummeted again this morning. People are losing their shirts. The lucky ones want to lock in whatever profits they already have. The rest . . . well, they’re dealing with margin calls. They have to come up with more cash. Today, no one is going to be interested in the trends of tomorrow. They’ve got to survive the morning.”

Barbara walked off with this assistant and didn’t even bother to say goodbye. Josh was left abandoned among the back stage crew and the banks of computer monitors—each one displaying the respective title slide of the speakers’ presentations still to come. A few staff huddled around the table with stale Danish and over-boiled coffee. They weren’t interested in him either, and he felt scared.

The day didn’t get better. By four p.m., Josh needed a drink. During the day, the Dow dropped more than six hundred points, over five percent of its value. Percentage-wise, the S&P was down even more. But the real measure of his life—the index for high tech stocks, the NASDAQ—fell over nine percent. That represented a loss of over twenty-five percent for the week, and a vaporization of billions of dollars in value since its peak just a month earlier.

In such conditions, what company could possibly go public? In a market gone crazy, who would want to risk buying Premios? Josh was fucked.

Cynthia still
remained
in Los Angeles. Each day since driving back with Danny from Phoenix the previous month, she promised herself that she would soon return to Wisconsin. But she was deluding herself. She wasn’t ready to go back. After a few days of staying again with Josh and Danny, she found living under such conditions suffocating and asked her old friend Wally to help her find a week-to-week rental near the beach in Santa Monica.

Being physically separated from Danny actually made it easier for the two of them to spend more time together. They met in neutral places, favoring the New Loon Town Café. Sometimes hanging around in Wally and Stephen’s restaurant, Cynthia felt almost as though she were a teenager again. For a few moments, she could imagine her existence before that first moment when Chip walked into the Thread café.

Everyone wanted to know why she didn’t go home. But thinking of sitting alone in a Wisconsin house in April seemed too cold and bleak. There were phones to answer the questions that came from people back there, and she had friends who could check on her home. Just that morning, she talked to the office staff at Lattigo Industries, who reported it snowed again. Why was it snowing on April 14?

As long as she remained in this city, she could cling to the hope, however slight it might be, that one day she would uncover the truth behind her husband’s murder. No one else cared. The L.A. cops pretty much closed down their case the month before, and the tribal police were ill equipped to investigate further. Wondering about Chip was solely her chore. More than once she paid a visit to the spot where Chip’s body was found. She never told Danny about those hikes into the canyon woods. He might find it too macabre.

She also never mentioned how she drove to the university to interview Professor Jesus Lopez. Even though Danny studied under the man, he bristled so at the mention of the man’s name. Cynthia didn’t care. The fact was that Lopez was one of the last people to see her husband alive. Why wouldn’t she want to talk to him? Plus he knew Oliver Meyers, and she felt certain there was something still she needed to learn about Meyers.

Her visit to the campus failed to help her better understand either her husband or his final meeting. Most of the time with Lopez was spent talking about Danny. She was surprised how warmly Lopez thought of Danny. Unexpectedly, he handed her a slim volume when she left. It was Lopez’s latest novel,
The Dumping Ground
, and when she started reading it that evening—alone in her rented condo and watching the sun set over the Santa Monica Bay—she recognized that the protagonist of the story was likely modeled after Danny. This disturbed her because she wondered how much of the plot was also taken from his life. The mere fact that Lopez knew this story, which Danny had only ever hinted to her, even more deeply bothered her. Why would Danny tell a mere acquaintance such details? By the time she finished the book, she decided she would throw it away and never let Danny know she read it.

She remained haunted by one passage, and wondered how much of it might be truly the story of Danny:

As the years passed, each of the men would think of the other and of the blissful summer afternoons when love and innocence still seemed possible, of the lingering moments when a physical brush of the lips or caress of the hands was not just a stolen pleasure but a moment for possibility. For the lost child grown into a sullen man, those fragments of the past were always tinged with a bitterness that poisoned the memory. For the older mentor who knew he had fallen into a love which frightened him with its unexpected nature that became a catalyst to committing unbearable cruelty, there was always the lingering hope that the past could be repaired, that second and third acts of even teenage love were possible, and that one horrible but foolish act wouldn’t assign two lives into the dumping ground of decay.

Thinking about that passage almost made Cynthia fear seeing Danny. Even though she knew the book was fiction, she couldn’t help but wonder if there weren’t some truth to it and that thought caused her to question so much of what she knew about her friend.

Danny asked
to meet Cynthia at the Premios offices. She balked because that wasn’t neutral ground, but eventually gave in. Now as she sat in the glassed-in conference room, she was annoyed that Danny had not arrived before her—and she had even been deliberately late. Already, she suffered through five minutes of catching up with Kenosha who eventually left Cynthia alone with her cup of coffee. Cynthia told herself she should feel more at home in these offices. After all, she owned a percentage of the company. Chip’s death didn’t change the fact he was an original investor and now that made her one.