something of a strain.”
Jack said, “Go ahead. You can sit down, too — on the other side of the desk. I don’t know what kind of gimmicks you might have built into it but I don’t intend to find out the hard way.”
Wright smiled with seeming affability. “My, my. Paranoia must be the prime attribute of a government snoop and spy.” He went around to the front of the desk and made a show of seating himself comfortably in one of the plush visitors’ armchairs.
He tapped a forefinger against the side of his forehead. “My weapons are all in here.”
Jack said, “Your checkbook is your weapon, and with it you damned near took over the U.S.”
“By the way, am I under arrest? And if so, what are the charges?”
“Yes — Cabot Huntington Wright, you’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit treason and terroristic acts against the United States of America.”
Marion Clary entered at that moment. Her hair was in disarray, she was without makeup, and her attire showed signs of having been thrown on at a moment’s notice. Her demeanor varied between confusion and great distress. “Mr. — Mr. Wright? What’s going on here?”
Wright rose when she entered, favoring her with a courtly little bow. “Ah Marion, right on time as always. In case you hadn’t heard, I’m being arrested for crimes against the state.”
Her dominant motif turned to one of outrage. White circles showed around her eyes, and her face suddenly looked strained and haggard. “Is this some kind of a grotesque joke?”
Wright said, “Grotesque it may be, but it’s no joke, I fear.”
Marion Clary swayed, looking as if she might faint. Don Bass rushed to her to steady her, said, “Marion, please sit down.”
She turned on him, tearing her arm free of his supportive grasp. “Keep your filthy hands off of me!”
He said, “Please sit down.”
She stared at him, rigid with indignation. Wright indicated the armchair beside his, said, “Marion, yes, please do.”
She staggered like a sleepwalker to the chair and plopped down in it. Sandoval crossed to the office door, closed and locked it. He said, “We don’t need any more interruptions.”
Wright said, “Now that I’ve been arrested, will you read me my rights and allow me to speak to my lawyer? One of my many lawyers?”
Jack smiled tightly. “Nice try, Mr. Wright, but in cases involving acts of terrorism the normal rules are suspended and don’t apply.”
Wright’s smile could have passed for one of genuine pleasure. “Ahhhh… so that’s how you work it.”
“That’s how the system works. But never mind about that. Let’s talk about how you worked it.”
“You have the floor, Agent Bauer. I’m all ears.”
Jack moved around to the front of the desk, resting his hip on the corner of it. He began, “I suppose in the long run it’ll all come down to the question of sanity. Speaking for myself and not as a mental health professional, I believe that you are sane.”
Wright looked more pleased than ever. “Thank you, sir!”
“You’re an amoral sociopath but that doesn’t read as insanity in my book.”
Wright’s mouth downturned in a little moue of displeasure. “Now now, no name calling. Surely we don’t have to descend to that.”
“Call it what you like. You’re not the first person to see something he wants and do whatever it takes to get it no matter who gets hurt or what the consequences. You just do it on a more grandiose scale. Otherwise you’re no different from the thief who knocks an old lady on the head for her social security money.”
Wright nodded, putting his hands together and making a steeple out of them. “I see. At least I’ve graduated from amoral sociopath to mugger. That’s progress, I suppose. And what is the object of my heart’s desire?”
Jack took the question seriously. “The United States of America. For starters. Beyond that, who knows? Tomorrow — the world?”
“You’re telling it. Please continue.”
“My pleasure. In the last twenty- four hours I’ve had a crash course in the theory and practice of Cabot Huntington Wright as applied to the deadly arts of conspiracy, subornment, corruption, violence, terrorism, and mass murder. You might say I’ve had a total immersion in the dark side of Wright, the side nobody is supposed to see.”
“I daresay that qualifies you as an expert, Agent Bauer.”
“I daresay,” Jack said dryly. “Let’s get back to basics. Crime is a matter of means, motive, and opportunity. Start with motive first. You saw a way to make yourself master of the United States. By that I mean you hatched out a scheme to destabilize the economy, bring it to its knees, and take over the nation’s leading corporations at fire-sale prices.”
Wright nodded encouragingly, a schoolmaster listening to a prize pupil recite his lessons. “And how was I going to achieve that ambitious goal?”
“The old-fashioned way: murder. Murder and money. It all stemmed from your unique position as chairman of the board of the Masterman Trust. That and your role as director of the yearly Round Tables, a gathering of the richest and most powerful of the land under one roof. Your roof.”
“Ah yes, the illustrious Round Table. My arrest will come as a great shock to them, all those dynasts and heirs and movers and shakers who’ve known me as a trusted friend and confidant over these too many years.”
Jack quirked a smile. “They’ll get over it, especially once they learn what you had planned for them— death by hallucinogenic gas and inferno.”
Marion Clary leaned forward in her seat, her hands balled into fists that perched on her upper thighs. “You’re insane, positively stark staring mad!”
Jack let it pass, speaking directly to Wright. “I once read that the emperor Caligula expressed the wish that all Rome had but a single head that he might strike it off with one blow.”
Wright said definitively, “Caligula was a piker. Strictly small potatoes.”
Jack took note of that remark. Perhaps the smooth facade was starting to crack and the real Cabot Huntington Wright emerge. “You went Caligula one better. You gathered up the people who collectively own a majority share of the real wealth in this country — stocks, bonds, real estate, the corporations that keep the wheels turning — and planned to murder them all in their beds and loot their assets at the same time.
“Stealing what isn’t yours is the motive. The means were two-fold, financial and homicidal. The financial aspect is your territory, and I’ll outline it quickly for the record. You’ve been betting a hundred million dollars on the swift, sudden downfall of the national economy. You’re the spider at the center of a global web of misdirection and deceit. Using an arsenal of financial gimmickry such as dummy and shell corporations, third- party transactions, and the like, you’ve been short selling an astronomical amount of stock. I’m no financial wizard but I know what that means. My boss Ryan Chappelle is a wizard with the numbers and he explained it to me.
“You bet a fortune that the bottom will fall out of the U.S. economy. If you win, your short selling of stocks will reap you many fortunes. The economy is already so shaky, all it needs is one good push to send the house of cards tumbling down. You decided to supply that push.”
Wright harrumphed. “In all fairness, you’ll have to admit that the economy is doing an outstanding job of bringing itself down.”
“Yeah, but you wanted to take a chainsaw to it. Mass murder is the push. That’s where the Round Table comes in. All the heads and majority stockholders of the biggest corporations gathered in one place. Their sudden, violent deaths would deal the economy a body blow, triggering a financial panic that would make the Crash of 1929 look like a one-day selloff in the market. Stocks would plunge to a fraction of their worth. Universal bankruptcy, mass insolvency. And there you’d be with a mountain of money reaped from your short-selling gamble that the economy would suffer such a catastrophic loss— no gamble, but a sure thing.
“With all that cash in hand you could acquire a controlling interest in every corporation in every sector of the economy worth owning: utilities, insurance, energy, health care providers, software, manufacturing, you name it. The whole enchilada. And you’d have it all. Overnight you’d become the uncrowned king of the United States — king by fact if not by law or title. Master of a financial empire that no king, emperor, or mogul even dreamed of.”
Wright was unflappable. “A not unworthy ambition, if I say so myself. In all due modesty.”
Jack challenged, “Why be modest? Caligula was a piker — so you said. He would have given his eyeteeth to
