The Protégé (16 page)

“Okay,” Gillette agreed, his blood pressure ticking up with each passing moment. “What about my father?”

“What I’ve been able to find out, what my sources have uncovered, is that sixteen years ago your father may have stumbled onto a plot to assassinate the president. This is still sketchy, and I should know more in the next few days, but it appears that he uncovered a left-wing conspiracy to kill George Bush. Obviously, it didn’t go anywhere, but your father was killed so he couldn’t tell anyone.”

The room blurred in front of Gillette. “What?” he whispered hoarsely.

“I know it sounds incredible, but we think that’s what happened. Like I said, we should have more information in the next few days.”

“So, you gonna help us?” Boyd growled.

Gillette looked across the desk.

“Well?” Boyd demanded.

Gillette glanced from Boyd to Ganze several times. He’d made a career out of taking risks. But never one like this.

THE FLIGHT TO
the Eastern Shore would take no more than a few minutes. As the jet powered up and began accelerating down the runway, Gillette put his head back and tried to relax. But it was hard. So many things were running through his mind. Apparently, his father had been murdered after all. He’d felt that in his gut for so long, but now he was close to proving it. And he was finally going to meet his blood mother.

He desperately wished Faith would call him back. He couldn’t tell her much about what had happened, but he wanted to share with her the part about meeting his real mother.

“What’s wrong?”

Gillette swiveled toward Stiles. He stared at the other man for a few moments but said nothing.

“Come on, Chris,” Stiles urged. “What happened in the meeting?”

Gillette ran both hands through his hair. “I made a deal.”

“So? You make deals every day.”

“Not like this.” He looked out the window as the plane lifted off. It was a crystal clear day, and suddenly he had a beautiful view of Washington, D.C. “I agreed to let them use one of our companies in return for information that’s only important to me.” He thought about how he could justify the deal in the name of national security, but that wasn’t why he’d done it. “That’s a first for me, and it doesn’t feel good. But I’ve
got
to know what happened to my dad,” he said under his breath.

“Who are these guys?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

Stiles would never tell anyone anything Gillette didn’t want him to, but it wasn’t about that. Men like Boyd didn’t make vague threats. If Boyd thought Stiles knew what he and Ganze were about, Stiles would be in danger. As long as Stiles really didn’t know, he’d have a chance if things got sticky. “It’s for your own good.”

“Oh, come—”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Did they tell you anything good?”

Gillette nodded. “Yeah. They know who my real mother is. At least they say they do,” he muttered.

“When do you talk to her?”

“Tomorrow. They’re going to give me her number then.”

“What about your father’s plane crash?” Stiles asked. “Anything about that?”

“They gave me a little information on that. They said they’d know more in the next few days.”

“So they’re for real?”

“I’ll let you know after I talk to this woman they claim is my mother.” Gillette exhaled heavily. “Quentin, I need you to do me a favor, and this has to stay very quiet.”

“What?”

“I need you to check out Allison for me.”

“I thought Craig West already did.”

“You’ve got to check on something he didn’t. If she’s into drugs. Cocaine.”

“What makes you think she might be?”

Gillette shrugged. He felt bad even bringing this up, but he had no choice. He had to protect the investors. “She was sniffing up a hurricane at dinner, especially after she came back from the restroom. She said it was allergies, but I’m not so sure.”

Stiles grimaced. “You always think the worst,” he said quietly.

“I have to.”

“Sure,” Stiles agreed, his voice intensifying, “I’ll check it out. But why do you care so much? You’ve got her family’s money. She gets caught with the white powder, you let her go, but you keep the money.” He paused. “Is there something else going on here?”

Gillette knew what that meant. “No.”

“Come on, Chris. Are you interested in her? You can tell me.”

“It’s not that, Quentin. I’m serious. What I’m thinking is, she’s good.
Very
good. And she’s connected as hell.” Gillette paused. “She’d make a great permanent addition to Everest. Might even be capable of running the show at some point.” He shook his head. “But not if she’s into coke.”

“
Running the show
? Where are
you
going?”

“Nowhere. Not anytime soon. At least, I hope I’m not. ’Course, as long as Tom McGuire’s out there, you never know.”

“I thought you were grooming David Wright. I thought he was your guy.”

“Never hurts to have another option.”

“Isn’t it a little early to start thinking about Allison being the next chairman?” Stiles asked. “Jesus, you just met her.”

“I trust my gut. You know that. My gut tells me she might be the one.”

“Remember, Chris,” Stiles warned, “blood’s thicker than water. She’s going home someday, back to Chicago.” He cocked his head to one side. “You do like her, don’t you? Come on. A little, right?”

Gillette fought to hide a grin but couldn’t. “She’s a piece of work, I’ll tell you that.”

“What about Faith?”

Gillette let out a long breath. “Yeah, Faith.” He reached for the phone, trying to forget about how many times he’d called her last night.

Stiles leaned forward and held out a section of the newspaper he’d folded into a rectangle the size of a piece of paper. “Put the phone away, Chris. Work on this instead.”

“What is it?”

“A crossword puzzle. It’ll take your mind off things.”

MILES WHITMAN
moved onto the flowery veranda of his spacious three-bedroom villa and gazed out over the Mediterranean Sea in the fading light of another beautiful evening on the French Riviera.

Whitman had been nervous as hell on the flight from Kennedy to Milan last November. But once he’d gotten off the 747 and slipped into the airport crowd, he’d felt better. Even more relieved when he was out of the airport and in the cab headed downtown. He’d spent two weeks in Milan, two weeks in Rome, a month in Athens, and three months in Lisbon before settling in the south of France. He’d been here now for five months. Unless he did something incredibly stupid, he was safe. His cutout people, the ones who’d helped him hide the forty million dollars in return for allowing them to use North America Guaranty as their own little spy machine for the last nine years, would never roll over on him.

He took another sniff of the flowers, thinking about how Monique would be here soon. Thinking about how her heavenly twenty-four-year-old body would soon be draped all over him. Monique could do things his wife back in Connecticut would have a heart attack just thinking about. The little French kitten made for exquisite company—as long as she got to shop at the most expensive boutiques every day. C’est la vie, he thought. Everything had its price.

Whitman turned and walked back into the living room. A man he’d never seen before was waiting there, hands clasped behind his back.

Whitman took one look at him and spun around, ready to take his chances with the two-story leap from the veranda. But his path was blocked by two more large men who closed the double doors, cutting off any chance of escape. His head snapped left when another, smaller man ambled out of the bathroom, casually smoking a cigar. This man Whitman knew.

“Hello, Miles,” the man said smoothly, moving directly in front of Whitman. “I’m afraid this is going to have a bad ending for you. But it can be easy, so you don’t feel pain. Or it can be hard.
Very hard.
Your choice. All you have to do is answer a few questions and I promise the end will be quick and clean.” He eased down into a wicker chair. “Now, let’s talk.”

9

“
I DON’T LIKE YOU.
At all.
”

Tell me how you really feel, Gillette thought. “We
just
met. You don’t even know me.”

“I know your
kind.
”

Becky Rouse was tall and thin, in her early forties, with shoulder-length dirty blond hair, hazel eyes, and a naturally determined expression. She was the mayor of Chatham, Maryland, a picturesque three-hundred-year-old fishing village set on the north bank of the wide Chester River a few miles upstream from where it met the Chesapeake Bay.

Becky had first been elected mayor five years ago—she was in the middle of her second four-year term. She’d moved to Chatham from Washington after a messy divorce from her lawyer husband, picking the town literally by tacking up a map of Maryland on her kitchen wall and throwing a dart. Originally from Georgia, she had no desire to go back. Her family had disowned her for marrying a Yankee.

Soon after moving to Chatham, she’d become friends with several female members of the town council who’d persuaded her to run against the incumbent, Jimmy Wilcox. Wilcox was a crotchety blue-crab captain who drank a case of Budweiser every day—winter or summer, rain or shine, healthy or sick. Thanks to the beer, he wasn’t much fun to be around by the time the sun dipped low in the western sky, whether the crab pots were full that day or not.

As part of her campaign, Becky advertised that during his tenure, Jimmy had missed more than sixty percent of all town council meetings; accused him of buying a new pickup with treasury funds; and made it clear to everyone that tourist revenues were down twenty-five percent. She’d won the first election by fewer than three hundred votes, the second by a landslide.

Chatham’s population was just under twenty thousand people, many of whom had never graduated from high school. Like most places, it was divided into the haves and the have-nots. The haves included families who’d owned huge tracts of land from way back; wealthy retirees who’d moved to the area from Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington; yuppies and dinks who’d bought riverfront weekend homes; and proprietors who owned the waterfront shops. The have-nots were the fishermen, crabbers, and farmers whose families had been working the Chesapeake Bay and the land around it for years but had little to show for it.

The haves had tepidly supported Becky in the first election, not sure what to expect. But they’d become smitten with her when, soon after taking office, she attracted free state money for waterfront restoration, had the harbor dredged so large pleasure boats could tie up at the marinas and restaurants, moved the unsightly and smelly fish market to the other end of town, and advertised Chatham’s new weekend festivals—her creations—in
The Washington Post
and the Baltimore
Sun.
Suddenly tourists were flocking to town. Just as suddenly, shop owners were making a killing and property values were skyrocketing.

“What
kind
do you think I am?” Gillette asked as they walked slowly along Main Street in the warm afternoon sunshine. He was wearing sunglasses, and his suit coat was slung over his shoulder.

Becky smiled sweetly at a mother and two children as they passed by, then glanced over her shoulder at the two QS agents following close behind. “You’re about money. You’ve always had it, you always will, and the only thing that drives you is your desire to make more.”

“Look, you should know that—”

“You want to put up that big discount store over on the west side of town,” she continued, “and ruin what I’ve worked hard to build, all in the name of profits. That’s what kind you are.”

“How will putting up the store ruin what you’ve built?”

“It’ll take business away from
my
waterfront.”

“What it will do,”
Gillette said, “is give the people in this area who don’t have a lot of money a nice place to shop for decent products at affordable prices. They won’t have to go all the way over to Delaware to buy home supplies and toys for their kids.”

Becky sniffed. “The citizens of this town are fine.”

“They’re not fine. I spoke to a few of them and they’re ticked off that you’re blocking this thing.” Before meeting Becky, Gillette had walked around the docks and spoken to some of the fishermen coming in from the morning catch. “They want this store.”

She pointed a bony finger at him. “Don’t try to make like you’re some champion of the poor. You want this store so you can stay ahead of Wal-Mart. Chatham is very strategic for you geographically, I’ve looked at the map. You’ll draw from everywhere. Your interest here is completely selfish. Once you get this store built, you’ll never set foot in Chatham again. You’ll go back to your homes in Manhattan, Easthampton, the south of France. But
I
have to live
here.
”

“Why do the people who matter to you even care?” he asked. “The blue-collar folks don’t shop on the waterfront. It’s the rich and the tourists who come here.”

“We’ll become known as that town with the Discount America. I can already see the write-up in the
Post,
” she said, holding her thumb and forefinger an inch apart and moving them across in front of her face. “ ‘Stay away from Chatham,’ it’ll say, ‘it’s the strip mall capital of the Eastern Shore.’ ”

“What you’ll become known as is the town that’s got a healthy treasury,” Gillette argued. “The property taxes alone will pay for fire, police, and EMT, not to mention the economic benefit from the jobs the DA store and the smaller stores that pop up around it will create.”

As they rounded a corner, Becky stopped and put her hands on her hips. “What are you willing to offer me?”

He’d been ready for this. “What do you want?”
Never
offer first.
Always
counter.

“That jackass Harry Stein said something about an elementary school. Which is fine for starters, but rest assured, I’ll want a lot more than that, Mr. Gillette.”

He’d asked her several times to call him Christian, but she’d refused so he’d stopped trying. “Like what?”

“A retirement home with at least two hundred beds, three new squad cars for the police force, a rescue boat for the fire department, and a couple of school buses.”

“How about a pool and a hot tub for every home in town?” Gillette shot back. “Free steaks for a year. A hundred thousand in cash for everyone. We’ll call this ‘Little Kuwait.’ ”

She gave him a disdainful look. “Give me a couple of days. I’ll come up with more.”

“You know I’m not going to give you everything you just asked for, Becky. It wouldn’t be worth it for me financially. No single store location is worth all that, not unless it’s on the corner of Forty-second Street and Seventh Ave.”

“You’ve got
billions,
Mr. Gillette. I checked your Web site this morning. Everest Capital just raised another huge fund. I believe it was fifteen billion dollars. And you can’t buy me a few necessities for my town?” She turned and headed into O’Malley’s Bar & Grill. “Please, Mr. Gillette,” she called over her shoulder. “Please.”

Gillette followed her into the pub, reaching for his cell phone as he went through the door. Wright was calling. “What is it, David?” he asked, tossing his coat and sunglasses on the bar.

“I got the signed letter back from Maddox,” Wright answered. “We’re done.”

“Good.” At least something was going right today.

“And Tom O’Brien wanted you to know that the city of Las Vegas called. They want you to fly out next week for a few meetings they’ve set up with the appropriate people.”

He was sure that
“appropriate people”
meant the individuals who could help him start the casino process. “Tell him to work it out with Debbie, will you?”

“Okay.”

“This is a priority, so make sure it happens. Stay on Tom and Debbie about it.”

“I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”

“Thanks.” Gillette slipped the phone back in his pocket and checked his watch. It was two-thirty; he had to get out of here soon if he was going to be in Pittsburgh by seven for dinner with Jack Mitchell.

“Here’s what we’d have to deal with, Bob,” Becky said loudly to the bartender, pointing at Gillette as he sat next to her. “A man who brings his security detail with him everywhere he goes, like he’s really that important, and thinks cell phones are more essential than people.” She took a sip from the beer she’d ordered. “Rude, too. We were in the middle of a conversation when we walked in here.”

Gillette glanced at Bob, who was cleaning a mug and shaking his head.

“So where did you send Stein?” she asked, picking up the large glass of water Bob had put down beside her beer.

She was smart, Gillette realized. She wasn’t going to drink more than a sip of the beer. It was a weekday afternoon, and she’d ridden her opponent about all-day drinking in her first campaign, so she couldn’t do it herself. But she wanted to put money in Bob’s pocket, too. “On an errand,” he answered. When they were introduced, he could tell she couldn’t stand Stein, so he’d sent the CEO off to talk to more watermen.

Gillette pointed at what Becky had ordered. “Same, please, Bob. A beer and a water.” He noticed an outside deck overlooking the river on the other side of the place. “Let’s go outside,” he suggested, picking up his sunglasses and the water glass. A couple of other people hanging around the bar seemed to be listening too carefully, and he didn’t want this turning into an impromptu public forum. Becky had turned out to be cagey, and he didn’t trust her motives. The move into O’Malley’s had been too convenient. “Come on,” he called when she didn’t follow right away.

He moved through the screen door and sat at a wooden table with an umbrella, putting the water down amid the remnants of bright orange smashed steamed crab shells. The glare of the afternoon sun off the river’s calm surface was brilliant, so he put his sunglasses back on, then took a deep breath, taking in the Old Bay seasoning from the crab shells, the salt water, and a trace of wood smoke from some far-off pile of burning leaves. He liked it here. Maybe he’d buy a place on the river. Someday.

A few moments later, Becky came through the door and sat on the other side of the table. “Why’d you want to come out here? It’s awfully bright.”

“I didn’t feel like negotiating in front of half the town council.” He’d recognized two of the men from pictures Craig West had included in the prep memo he’d reviewed on the short flight from D.C.

She smiled at him for the first time. “Well, aren’t you a worthy opponent.”

“That’s the rumor. Look, here’s what I’ll do,” he kept going, not giving her a chance to speak up, “I’ll buy you half your elementary school and the three police cruisers. For that, I get my store.”

She laughed loudly. “You must be joking.”

He spotted a
USA Today
lying on another table, stood up, and walked to it, leafing through the sections until he found the one containing the crossword. “I never joke about Everest business, Ms. Rouse,” he said, folding the newspaper and stashing it under his arm, then moving back to where she was and standing in front of her so the sun was behind him. That way she had to squint. “If you don’t agree to my offer, I’ll rally the people of this town against you and you’ll have the biggest shit-storm this side of the Mississippi on your hands. At my direction, they’ll call for a referendum, which they’re allowed to do under the town charter. My lawyers have checked, and I guarantee you I’ll win. I’ve got the numbers as long as I get people out to vote. And believe me, I’ll rent buses if I have to.” He took off his sunglasses. “I’ll expect your call no later than Friday at five
P.M
. If I don’t hear from you, we’ll start the referendum process.” He dropped a twenty on the table in front of her. “Beers are on me.”

TOM MCGUIRE
walked along the wide, white-sand beach of Avalon, New Jersey, a quaint seaside resort town a hundred miles south of New York City. Avalon was built on a narrow strip of land that ran between the Atlantic Ocean and an extended bay in southern New Jersey. As far as anyone else knew, a man named William Cooper was renting a house on the bay side with a month-to-month lease. So far, McGuire hadn’t run into any problems.

Avalon’s busy season ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Now, in late September, the beach was almost deserted. Just a few elderly couples who’d retired to the town combing the beach for shells in the afternoon sunshine.

McGuire pulled the brim of his Baltimore Orioles baseball cap low over his sunglasses and looked down as he passed one of the older couples walking slowly the other way. He was taking no chances on being recognized. If he looked right at them, they might remember him later if they saw his picture on television. He’d already been featured once on
America’s Most Wanted.

When he passed them, he stopped and gazed out to sea, the cool water of a dying wave running over his toes just before it hissed, hesitated for a moment, then receded against his heels and washed back into the ocean. Everything had gone exactly according to plan, thanks to the hotel operator at the Parker Meridien who had listened in on Allison Wallace’s telephone calls. The photographers had shown up at the Grill right on time and Gillette had ducked out the back, headlong into the trap. But it was as if the guy had a hundred lives. Gillette and Stiles had been outnumbered and outgunned, but Gillette had turned the tables by going on the attack—something McGuire hadn’t anticipated.

McGuire’s expression hardened into one of resolve as another wave hissed past his feet. He was going to take care of Gillette sooner or later, one way or another.

“Afternoon.”

McGuire’s eyes flashed left, toward the voice. The man standing a few feet away wore a baseball cap and sunglasses, too, but he was younger, in his mid-thirties. “Hello,” he answered gruffly.

“Nice day, huh?”

“Yeah. Nice.”

“Looking for shells?”

“Nah, just taking a walk.”

“Live here?”

“Visiting,” McGuire replied.

“Where you staying?”