somebody on the Hill and demanded an update.
Jack leaned against a wall, arms crossed, and said little. Though he had brought them this breakthrough product, he was obviously an outsider, and even more obviously, he was now seen as the guest who had stayed at the party long past his welcome.
The call didn’t come until seven. Though Jack couldn’t hear the voice on the other end, he was sure it was Earl himself calling to take credit.
Walters held the receiver to his ear. Very gradually, acquiring velocity with each word he heard, he broke into a huge grin. “Uh, okay,” he muttered. Another pause, then, “Listen, we can’t thank you enough.”
Another brief pause to listen, then, “No, that doesn’t mean we intend to offer you a bonus.”
He closed his eyes and, without looking, hung up. A table was positioned in the corner of his office. Six ice buckets sat there holding enough chilled bottles of Dom Perignon to inebriate a herd of horses. All eyes were on his face.
Finally, ever so slowly, the eyes cracked open and Walters whispered, “Break out the champagne.”
The loud cheer was followed by a mad dash to the corner table. The sound of corks being popped occupied the next thirty seconds. After fifteen minutes of loudly toasting and congratulating one another, the meeting began to break up. The LBO boys needed to rush back downstairs. Time to get back to their unending hunt for more targets, more takeovers, more ways to increase the ballooning wealth of the behemoth known as the Capitol Group.
Jack and Bellweather ended up alone with Walters. Mitch had his feet up on the desk, guzzling champagne straight from the bottle, like it came out of a firehose. His shirtfront was drenched, he was gulping it down so fast. Walters pulled the bottle away from his lips just long enough to ask Bellweather, “Ever seen a deal come together so beautifully?”
“Never, not once. From concept to legislation in two months. I’m sure it’s a record. How much did Earl say they authorized?” he asked.
“You’re gonna love this.”
“Spill it.”
“We asked for sixteen billion spread over two years.”
“I know. I did the asking.”
“On his own, Earl added another four billion.”
“Twenty billion,” Bellweather said, almost unable to believe it himself. Twenty! CG had produced some sweet deals in its run, but nothing remotely comparable to this.
Jack was still sipping from his first glass of bubbly and he broke up their mutual congratulations, saying in a tone of clear admiration, “I have to admit I never imagined this could happen so fast.”
“You came to the right place,” Walters boasted. “Didn’t we tell you that at the beginning?”
“I never doubted you for a minute. I just thought…” Jack shrugged and let that thought trail off.
Walters was uncorking another bottle with his big hands. “You thought what?”
“I thought there’d be more testing, for one thing.”
“Already done.” The cork popped out and a big gusher flowed over the sides of the bottle into Walters’s lap. “Remember? You gave us the results.”
“Yeah, but those were done by private contractors, not Defense people.”
“So what?” Walters bent forward and splashed champagne into his goblet. Half of it spilled onto his desk. Between the victory and the bubbly he was giddy. “The tests were done in Iraq, in real-life, authentic conditions. We’re in a war and time is a definite consideration. The Pentagon chief of research, development, testing, and evaluation was also at that big demonstration we threw out at Belvoir. He saw the results firsthand.”
“And that was enough?”
“Apparently so.”
“What about production and quality control reviews?”
“What about ’em?”
“Look, I’m no expert in defense contracting,” Jack said, almost apologetically. “I read some of the regulations, though. There are a lot of hoops, multiple stages, a regular maze. An evaluation stage, cost analysis, production control restraints, establishing oversight systems.”
“We
“I know you are. I’m just asking how it works.”
“They were willing to cut a few corners for us, okay? Why not? We’re a certified contractor with a long record. Besides, we’re leapfrogging this program on our contract for uparmoring Humvees. It’s a long-established program, already in country. The same crews and facilities will be used to apply the polymer.”
“I want to be sure you’re not getting me into any trouble. Tell me you’re not.”
Walters just stared back. After learning about Jack and the dirty games he had played at Primo, the decision had been made to cut him out of the loop as much as possible. For starters, they now had a few serious trust issues; Jack, after all, might be a killer, a swindler, and a blackmailer.
For another, as soon as TFAC came back with the goods, Jack was history. The partnership contract was going into the trash. His ass was going to be out on the street.
At this point, the less he knew, the better.
“Don’t worry about it,” Walters snapped, as though Jack were an ingrate. They’d just turned him into a potential billionaire, after all, and here he was, yapping about the details. “Just be damned glad this happened so fast.”
“I’m so happy I can barely express myself. But as your partner, I thought I had a right to know.” Jack leaned on his desk and looked him in the eye. “I am still your partner, aren’t I?”
“Oh, sure.” Walters and Bellweather locked eyes in a way that Jack wasn’t meant to catch. “We always honor our contracts,” Bellweather said very solemnly.
“Glad to hear it.” Jack put down his champagne flute and backed off.
“You have nothing to worry about,” Walters lied. “We’ll definitely take care of you,” he promised with a rubbery smile.
Andrew Morgan had begun to feel he was chasing ghosts. He easily got his hands on a complete personnel roster for Primo Investments, circa 1998, the year Jack departed the firm for calmer waters.
The CEO that year was one Terrence Kyle II, graduate of Yale and the highly esteemed Wharton School of Business. His CFO was Gordon Sullivan, Harvard undergrad, Harvard Business. They were the two who caught Jack, the same two who tried to enlist him in another scheme, and then, eventually, the two who cooked up the questionable deal to pay him a million bucks to go away.
A quick search through Nexis revealed that Terrence and Gordon died in a tragic plane crash less than a year later. A little more digging revealed the circumstances.
In December of that year, six months after they parted ways with Jack, they rented a small private jet and flew to a glitzy investors’ conference in Vail. After three days of mingling with their fellow financial pirates, of partying and boozing and hitting the slopes, they took off in a snowstorm and promptly flew into a mountainside. The jet was instantly obliterated. All aboard were lost. The bodies were atomized by the collision and/or the ensuing fire. The National Transportation Safety Board conducted the investigation.
The private jet had been leased from a small firm that catered to the rich and famous. That firm had an excellent safety record. The pilot and copilot were both former military-both in good health, both had extensive flying careers, both had flawless records. The controllers in the tower testified that the storm had let up enough to allow a safe takeoff, and in their view weather wasn’t a factor. The cause of the crash was listed as pilot error, a conclusion based on nothing particularly definitive. It was the catchall phrase the NTSB often used when no specific cause could be found.
Nothing strange about this. An aviation expert Morgan tracked down informed him that NTSB investigations involving private aircraft sometimes weren’t all that thorough or extensive. In a typical year, the NTSB investigated several hundred accidents. It was a small agency, overworked, bouncing from one disaster to another. Unless an accident involved a commercial airline, a high-profile celebrity death, an excessive death toll, or there was cause for unusual suspicion, the investigators tended not to probe too deeply.
But factored in with Charles’s tale about Edith Warbinger, Morgan couldn’t avoid feeling that the timely deaths of Kyle and Sullivan were terribly convenient for Jack. A mysterious airplane crash that wiped out the two men who
