The Protégé (5 page)

“What do you mean?”

“Preoccupied. Subdued. Not himself.”

Faraday hesitated, thinking. “No, I haven’t noticed anything.”

“I hope he’s all right. I always worry that our top people are being wooed away.”

Faraday’s expression soured.

“What is it?” Gillette asked. He could tell that Faraday had started to say something but stopped.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Nigel.”

Faraday fiddled with his tie for a moment, then dropped it on his shirt. “David Wright,” he mumbled. “Are you grooming him to take over Everest when you leave?”

Gillette looked at Faraday hard for a few moments. “Every organization needs a succession plan.”

“Why not me?” Faraday asked quietly. “You know I’m committed, and after all, I am second in command.”

Gillette hesitated, thinking about whether or not to get into it. He needed Faraday to stay committed, and you had to be careful about how people would react if you were candid with them. Faraday might check out mentally if he thought he’d hit a ceiling. At the same time, you couldn’t string someone along. Not someone as loyal as Nigel. Gillette took a deep breath. There were always so many major issues swirling around. So many split-second decisions he had to make.

“You’re a hell of a money raiser, Nigel, and you’ve really come through for me over the last ten months as far as the admin side of the firm goes. But you don’t have any deal experience,” Gillette said gently. “You don’t know how to find companies for us to buy, how to structure deals, or how to run the companies after we buy them.”

“I can learn.”

“That’s a lot to learn.”

“Listen, I’m—”

“Let’s talk about Apex,” Gillette interrupted.

Faraday hung his head, as though Apex were the last thing he wanted to talk about. “Not again.”

“Yes,” Gillette said strongly, “again.”

“But we already have
twenty-two billion
to put to work now that you’ve got the Wallace Family in the corral. Do you really want more?”

“I always want more.”

“And,” Faraday kept going, “with Apex, we’d be inheriting more fucking problems. Why would you want to do that?”

Apex Capital was another large Manhattan-based private equity firm that owned twenty-two companies and had another five billion of dry powder—equity commitments from investors to buy more companies. Until last year, Apex had been run by a self-made moneyman named Paul Strazzi. But Strazzi had become the second casualty of Miles Whitman’s war of desperation. Strazzi’s fatal error: making a play for Everest, too.

Since Strazzi’s murder, Apex had been run by a man named Russell Hughes, who couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag. Hughes looked the part—tall and dark, with sharp facial features, like Gillette—so he made a good first impression. But he couldn’t make a decision to save his life. He put off everything, and the lack of leadership was severely affecting Apex. The firm had made only one investment under Hughes, and several of the portfolio companies had run into trouble over the last six months because he’d hesitated to replace incompetent executives. Apex was vulnerable, and Gillette knew it.

“We can pick Apex off cheap,” Gillette said. “All we have to do is pay the general partners par, what they originally put in. Then we’ve got five billion more of dry powder and twenty-two more companies, several of which we could combine with our portfolio companies. By doing that, we’ll pick up big savings axing back office jobs and getting more purchasing power with suppliers. I think I can clean up their dogs fast, too. I’ve looked at them, and I don’t think they’re beyond repair. If we fire a few of the execs and replace them with people we know, we can save them. But the most important thing is to get that five billion of unused equity. At that point, we’d have twenty-seven billion dollars of equity. Then we’ll lever that twenty-seven with debt from the banks and insurance companies that are all over us to partner with them. I’d say we could get at least four times, wouldn’t you?”

Faraday considered Gillette’s guess. “That’s probably right.”

“Four times would be almost a hundred and ten billion dollars. Combined with the twenty-seven of equity, we’d control over a hundred and thirty-five billion of capital.”

“How do you know we’d be able to get Apex so cheap?” Faraday asked.

“I spoke to Apex’s controlling general partner. They hate Russell Hughes. They’d sell to us in a heartbeat if we offer par because they figure if he stays at the top, the family’s money isn’t going to be worth
anything.
”

“Why don’t they just replace Russell?”

“That would confirm to everyone in the financial world that Apex is in chaos. It would be impossible for them to raise any more funds, and who wants to be bought by a private equity firm in chaos?”

“I see what you’re saying.”

“So they’re stuck with Russell,” Gillette continued, “unless I show up. And I think I can get them to approve this thing fast.”

“I bet you could,” Faraday agreed. “How much would it cost?”

“A billion. It would have been a lot more a year ago, but Hughes has driven the thing into the ground.”

“Would you collapse Apex into Everest after we bought it?”

“No. Not at first, anyway. I wouldn’t give those people the opportunity to benefit from all the money you’ve raised. That wouldn’t be fair.”

“Good.”

“Down the road, I might. Once you and I figure out who the keepers are over there.”

“How are you going to do this? Who are you going to approach first?”

“Next week I’m meeting with Russell’s largest limited partners, the institutional investors. I’m going to explain what I want, get their buy-in, and ask them to contact Russell and urge him not to fight us. Then I’m going back to the general partner, the Strazzi estate, to make a formal offer. After that I’ll get a couple of the Apex managing partners in a room and make them an offer, too. Obviously Hughes won’t want to sell his stake, but if I have everyone else in my corner, he won’t have any choice.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you. Hughes is a dead man and he doesn’t even know it.”

“That’s the way it has to be.”

“You get what you fucking want, don’t you, Christian.”

“Usually. And one thing I want is you to watch your mouth.”

Faraday raised both eyebrows. “Huh?”

“You don’t even know you’re doing it, do you.”

“Well, I . . .” Faraday’s voice trailed off.

“Like I told you before, I don’t care if ‘fuck’ is every other word when you and I are one-on-one like this, but I don’t want you saying it in front of others in the office, especially the women.”

“When did I—”

“This morning, okay?”

Faraday groaned. “Well, excuse me for getting excited.”

“I don’t care if you get excited. I don’t even care if you do that silly dance you did in the hall this morning, which by the way has to be one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever had the misfortune of witnessing. Just don’t drop the F-bomb in public anymore.”

“All right, all right.” Faraday started to get up, then dropped his pudgy form back into the seat. “Is Allison Wallace qualified to be a managing partner at Everest Capital? Did you check her out?” he pushed. “I mean, it’s great to add another five double-large to the new fund, but I don’t want deadwood walking around here. Especially deadwood as pretty as her. She’ll be a big distraction.”

Gillette sighed. It seemed he was always pushing things uphill. “When did you see her?”

“When she was walking out this morning, after you met with her. How could I miss her? The whole office stopped to look.”

“Give me a break.”

“Legs up to her neck and a short little skirt to show them off,” Faraday said smugly, holding one hand below his chin.

“Her skirt wasn’t short. She was dressed very conservatively.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Faraday chuckled. “But the important question is, does she have game or is she where she is just because of all the money? Even more important, are you letting her in here to get into her piggy bank or her panties?”

“Maybe both.”

“At least you’re honest.”

“Oh, come on, Nigel. You know me better than that.” Gillette’s tone turned serious. “I’d never do something like that.”

“I know.”

“Hey, she’s on the board of the family trust with her uncle and her grandfather. There’s plenty of others in that generation of the Wallace Family they could have put on the board. She’s qualified.”

“Did you call Craig West?”

“As soon as Allison was out the door this morning,” Gillette confirmed. “Craig called me back before we went into this afternoon’s meeting. Allison went to Yale undergrad and Chicago’s business school. You don’t get much better than that.”

“But what fucking university isn’t going to accept her? Think about what she probably donates to those schools every year.”

“She was top of her class both places.”

“Really?” Faraday hesitated. “Did she go right to the family trust after business school?”

“No, Goldman Sachs after Chicago. Same department I was in before I came to Everest. There’s still a couple of guys over there I know. They said she was good. Said she didn’t try to shirk anything because of who she was.”

Faraday held up his hands. “Okay, okay. You convinced me. But she will be a temptation.”

“I’m still with Faith. You know that.”

“Ah, yes, the lovely Miss Cassidy. Do I hear wedding bells?”

Gillette glanced out the window into the fading late afternoon light of midtown Manhattan.

Faraday let it ride for a few moments, then gave up, rising from his chair with a groan and heading toward the door. “I’m going downstairs to get some mint chocolate chip,” he announced. “Nothing like a little instant fucking gratification.”

“You better start watching your weight,” Gillette called after him, grabbing his computer mouse.

“What are you, my father? First I have to watch my mouth, now I’ve got to watch my weight.
Oh, Jesus.
” Faraday snapped his fingers and turned around as he reached the door. “I meant to tell you, Christian.”

Gillette was focused on the computer. “What?”

“I had the strangest experience this morning.”

Gillette grinned. “Don’t tell me, you actually ate something healthy for breakfast.”

“I thought I saw Tom McGuire on Park Avenue.”

The computer screen blurred. Tom McGuire. The former CEO of McGuire & Company who had teamed with Miles Whitman to kill Bill Donovan—and tried to kill Gillette. McGuire was still out there somewhere—filled with hatred of Gillette for uncovering the plot and costing him hundreds of millions in the process. “That’s not funny, Nigel.”

“I know it’s not, but that’s what I saw. At least I think I did. I was walking up Park Avenue from the subway, and I was almost to our building. I happened to look up, and he was coming the other way. I’m pretty sure it was McGuire, anyway. I mean, he’d put on some weight and his hair was longer, but I wouldn’t forget that face. It was weird, too. I was going to start yelling for the cops, but when I turned around he was gone. It was like he’d evaporated into thin air.” Faraday shrugged. “Hey, maybe I’m wrong, maybe it wasn’t him.”

Gillette glanced back at the screen. He had a bad feeling Faraday wasn’t wrong.

3

NORMAN BOYD
studied Gillette’s head shot. Black hair parted on the left side as he faced you, combed neatly back over the ears. Sharp facial features—a thin nose, strong jaw, prominent chin, defined cheekbones, and intense gray eyes that caught you right away, even from a photograph. It was the fourth time today Boyd had looked at Gillette’s picture, trying to glean anything he could from the image. So much depended on his ability to manipulate this man. Based upon what he knew so far, that wasn’t going to be easy. Not like many others he’d dealt with.

“How did it go?” Boyd asked, setting the photograph on the desk of the sparsely furnished office.

“Fine,” Ganze answered. “He left Everest right away to come to my hotel room when he found out I hadn’t shown up.”

“He’s interested.”

“Very.”

“You mentioned his father’s plane crash, right?” Boyd asked.

“Yes. He wants to know more.”

“Good.”

“Much more,” Ganze continued. “You should have seen his reaction when I mention Clayton. Gillette’s thought about that crash every day for the last sixteen years. It’s haunted him.”

“
Haunted
him, Daniel?”

“A father’s death haunts every son.”

Boyd hesitated, thinking about his own father’s death last year. Hadn’t haunted him. “Tell me about Gillette.”

Ganze reviewed his notes. “Went to Princeton under—”

“Yeah, yeah. Princeton undergrad, Stanford business school, Goldman Sachs M and A, then Everest. I read the short file. Tell me about the
man.
”

“He’s got a half-brother and a half-sister.”

Boyd’s eyebrows rose.
“Half?”

“Thirty-eight years ago, Clayton Gillette had an affair with a nineteen-year-old Hollywood wannabe. The affair was short but important. That woman is Christian’s blood mother.”

“Does Gillette have a relationship with her?”

“He doesn’t even know who she is.” Ganze grimaced and shook his head. “It’s got to be tough, you know?”

Boyd sneered. “It isn’t
that
tough. Most of the planet would trade places with him in a heartbeat.” Ganze came across as a cold fish when you first met him, Boyd knew, but beneath that plywood exterior was a compassionate heart. Which bothered Boyd. You couldn’t be sentimental in this business. If Ganze wasn’t such a tremendous sleuth, Boyd would never have kept him around all these years. “Does he know that Clayton’s wife is his stepmother? Does he know he was born out of wedlock?”

“He found out when he was a teenager.”

“I assume we know who Gillette’s blood mother is.”

“We do.”

“Excellent.”

“Christian’s stepmother agreed to raise him,” Ganze continued, “but she always hated him.”

“What’s her name?”

“Lana, after the actress. Lana’s father was a Hollywood producer back in the fifties and sixties,” Ganze explained. “He had a couple of boys, too. Named them Wayne and Kirk.”

“How do you know Lana hated Gillette?”

“She carved Christian out of the fortune as soon as Clayton was dead. The will, monthly allowance, credit cards, bank accounts. Everything. She didn’t even send him cash to get home.”

“Wow.”

“Christian had just graduated from Princeton and was motorcycling back across the country to California. He’d stopped in a small town in western Pennsylvania to visit his grandfather. The second day he was there was the day of the crash. Lana called an hour after the plane went down to tell Christian he was cut off completely. The motorcycle was in the shop, and he had to sell it to the owner because he didn’t have cash on him for the repairs. He had to ride freight trains back to the West Coast, had to take out big loans to pay for business school, had to get Goldman Sachs to advance him two months’ salary so he could put down a security deposit on an apartment in a crappy section of Brooklyn. The irony is that he comes from a ton of money, but he’s completely self-made. Everything he has he’s earned himself.”

“Tough?”

“As tungsten. And careful and calculating. But he’s got a big heart.”

Boyd scoffed. “Sure he does.”

“No, no. I’m serious. He gives a lot to charity, personally and through the firm. He had Everest donate ten million dollars to a hospital in New York so it could build a new wing for kids with cancer.”

“It’s called publicity,” Boyd observed. “You said he was calculating.”

“People he’s close to are very loyal to him,” Ganze argued.

“He probably pays them a lot more than they could make anywhere else.”

“Yeah, he does,” Ganze agreed grudgingly.

Boyd bit his lower lip, thinking. “Lana Gillette sounds like a cold one. Do you think she was involved?”

Ganze’s expression turned curious. “Involved, sir?”

“In Clayton’s plane crash.”

“Nothing I’ve turned up indicates that.”

Music to Boyd’s ears. “How did Lana and Clayton meet?”

“Lana’s father sent her east for college, to the University of Virginia. His family was originally from Virginia. Richmond, I believe. Clayton was at UVA on a football scholarship. He was a star quarterback in high school, but his college career wasn’t anything to write home about. He and Lana married a month after graduation and moved to Los Angeles, actually lived with her parents for a year. Clayton went to work for a local brokerage house that was owned by a friend of Lana’s father. He got the hang of selling stocks and bonds fast and opened his own shop a few years later.”

“Let me guess,” Boyd spoke up. “He took all the guy’s clients with him.”

“Yup. He was smooth, could sell anything. That was his talent. After a few years, he got the firm into investment banking, too. Sold it for a hundred million dollars before he went into politics.”

“So Lana’s set financially.”

“I haven’t nailed that down yet,” Ganze said after a few moments, “but I have to think so. She still lives in the same mansion in Bel Air.”

“Does Gillette talk to Lana?”

“No.”

Boyd hesitated. “Where is he politically?”

“Registered Republican, but he voted Democrat in the last presidential election. He doesn’t vote with his bank account anymore. It’s so full at this point, it doesn’t matter.”

“How much money does he control?”

“They just closed a new fifteen-billion-dollar fund, and there’s still money left over from the one before that. Plus Everest owns thirty companies. Some big-name ones.” Ganze paused. “And get this. My information is that Christian’s going to try to take over Apex Capital, too.”

Boyd looked up. A potential pothole—and a big one. “That’s interesting.”

“You think it’s a problem?”

“I don’t know,” Boyd replied calmly. “But we’ll have to keep an eye on it. How about protection?”

“Protection, sir?”

“Bodyguards. Does Gillette use them?”

“All the time.”

“Who does he use?”

“A firm called QS Security.”

“Are they good?”

“Very. The firm’s owned and run by a guy named Quentin Stiles, who’s one of Gillette’s inner circle. I’ve asked around, and he’s as good as they get. Army Rangers and Secret Service before founding QS. But he’s been out of commission for a while.”

“Why?”

“He took a bullet to the chest last year. Finally about to get out of the hospital.”

“Did he take the bullet for Gillette?”

Ganze nodded.

“Are there QS agents with Gillette all the time?” Boyd asked.

“Twenty-four/seven. Apparently, Christian and Stiles are worried about a guy named Tom McGuire.”

Boyd’s ears perked up. “Who’s Tom McGuire?”

“The muscle for Miles Whitman when Whitman tried to kill Christian last year. McGuire arranged the murder attempts.” Ganze had researched everything he could find about Christian Gillette—as Boyd had instructed. “McGuire was never caught. Just like Miles Whitman wasn’t.”

Boyd snorted.
“Miles Whitman,”
he repeated, disgusted. “What an asshole. Is he still getting help from the inside?”

“Definitely.”

“How much has he gotten so far?”

“About forty million dollars’ worth.”

“
Jesus fucking Christ.
Where is Whitman now, do you know?”

“Southern Europe, I think. I don’t know exactly.”

“What about Justice?” Boyd asked, still annoyed. “They must be pissed.”

“It’s definitely an embarrassment for them,” Ganze agreed. “It’s been ten months and they haven’t been able to find either of those guys. The higher-ups are putting a lot of heat on people in the trenches, but it’s not doing much good.”

“Do you think they suspect that there’s help from the inside?”

“My friend says they haven’t asked yet. Too much pride.”

Boyd chuckled. “Idiots.” His smile faded. “Well, they’ll get over their pride at some point.” He thought for a moment. “Why are Gillette and Stiles so worried about this McGuire guy?”

“If the conspiracy had worked, McGuire and his brother, Vince, would have made hundreds of millions. But Gillette and Stiles figured out what was going on at the last minute and blew the thing wide open. Turned the feds onto McGuire. Like I said, McGuire was never caught, but he lost out on the money. And his brother,” Ganze added.

“What happened?”

“Vince helped Tom arrange the murder attempts on Gillette, and the feds got him. He died in jail.”

Boyd groaned. The last thing he needed was some psychopath out there stalking Gillette, hell-bent on revenge. “Should Gillette be worried about this guy?”

“I checked McGuire out,” Ganze replied. “He’s ex-FBI. A nasty son of a bitch.”

“We need Gillette alive, Daniel.”

“I understand, sir.”

Boyd pointed at Ganze. “Monitor that situation
very
closely. We might have to move on it quickly.”

“I will,” Ganze promised.

Boyd glanced at Gillette’s photograph once more. “When is our meeting with him?”

“Friday at eleven. I called him back this afternoon. He can do it then.”

Boyd tapped the desk. “Unfortunately, something’s come up since you spoke to him. I may have to go out of town on Friday. Would he come sooner?”

“He came right to the hotel.”

“Mmm.” Boyd took a long breath. “Think he’ll cooperate with us?”

Ganze considered the question for a few moments. “You’ll have to use what we’ve found, make him understand that we can tell him things he’s been desperate to know for a long time. Then you might be able to bend him.”

“But then we might have to tell him
how
we know all those things. He’ll ask. He won’t take us at our word. We might have to bring him inside.”

Ganze shrugged. “Which is the bigger risk? Disclosing our secrets or detection from the outside?”

“Yes,” Boyd said quietly. “That’s the question, isn’t it. Which is the bigger risk? But then, that’s always the question for us.”

GILLETTE DREW
the pool cue through the loop of his curled forefinger, aimed at a group of three tightly packed, brightly colored balls, and fired. With the crack of the cue, the seven, twelve, and fourteen split like a molecule, atoms racing and ricocheting in all directions. Then each ball slowed to a crawl and dropped neatly into different pockets. Running the table wasn’t fun anymore, so he practiced trick shots now.

He straightened up slowly and checked his watch—almost eleven. The day had started eighteen hours ago, at five this morning. It had been a long one, but as Faraday had said in the corridor, overall pretty fucking good. The new fund was closed, with an extra five billion from the Wallace Family, and they’d gotten the Vegas NFL franchise.

There’d been some challenges, too—there always were. A product liability suit had been filed by an aggressive Detroit watchdog group against Everest’s Ohio-based auto parts manufacturer, and the CEO of another portfolio company headquartered in Texas had resigned suddenly for personal reasons. Truth was, the guy was banging his executive assistant on his office desk and Gillette had given him no choice but to resign. However, the attorneys for the Ohio company—the best in the country for this type of litigation—had given him airtight guarantees that the suit had zero merit, and the Texas CEO could easily be replaced by several other high-level executives at the company whom Gillette had groomed personally in case there was ever a problem. Just as he did at all their portfolio companies.

Just as he ought to be doing at Everest, he thought ruefully, tapping the butt end of the cue stick on the floor. The conversation with Faraday this afternoon about succession had gotten him thinking. There needed to be a plan in place, especially if Tom McGuire was really lurking around out there. He owed his investors that.

Gillette snapped his fingers as he moved to rack the balls. “Damn it.” He was supposed to have called Faith this evening, but it was too late now. She was at some award dinner until eleven o’clock West Coast time.

He took a deep breath and leaned against the table. He hated to admit it, but he missed Faith. She was wonderful—beautiful, sexy, caring, unpretentious despite her fame. But he didn’t like missing someone, feeling so vulnerable. Didn’t like caring about someone that much despite how good it made him feel inside. He’d adored—no, idolized—his father, and look where that had gotten him. Left him in an emotional abyss for years. All he could do for his father now was solve the mystery of his death. Which was why he planned to be available for Daniel Ganze whenever Ganze wanted. Ganze seemed to know something. That was enough.

Gillette glanced around the ornate billiard room, connected to his office by a short hallway. The hallway was the only access to the room, so he controlled who came and went. This was the one big perk he’d allowed himself after becoming chairman last year. He loved pool—he’d funded his trip back to the West Coast after Lana had cut him off by beating small-town patsies for fifty bucks a game. And he found there were times during stressful days that a couple of quick games against David Wright were therapeutic.

Gillette shook his head and smiled. He never had beaten his father in pool. Which he was glad about now. It seemed right.