his words, grab Perry’s balls and force a quick, nonnegotiable sell.”
“You’re saying it was extortion?”
“Yes, and I strongly advised him not to do it. I wore a wire, incidentally, and have that conversation on tape. He invited me to a private meeting with Perry where he dropped the hammer. He gave Perry no choice-prison or sell-and Perry caved in to every demand immediately. He sold the company and the polymer for a hundred million.”
“Then he fled,” Harper mentioned to anybody in the room not in the loop on this story, which frankly was nobody. “He took the money, rented a big boat, and went into hiding in the Caribbean.”
Jack immediately corrected her. “That’s not exactly right.”
“Then where is he?”
“Nowhere near the Caribbean. Never was. Try New Mexico with his wife, in a beautiful rented lodge in Taos. Perry’s wife gets seasick. He hates the sun, loves the mountains. He’s living under a false identity until this gets cleared up.”
“Oh, spare me. An innocent man has nothing to fear,” Harper insisted, shooting Jack another condemning expression. All these evasions and double-talk, she wasn’t buying a word of it. Jack and his coconspirator, Perry Arvan, had committed serious crimes and were now trying to squirm out of it. “And innocent men don’t hide behind false names,” she threw in, lowering her bifocals and looking down her nose at Jack.
Jack looked amused. “Something I failed to mention. A few weeks before that meeting my house was broken into. While I was down in D.C. being wined and dined and courted by CG, a group of hired thugs picked the locks, entered, spent three hours searching, and left a few gifts in their wake. All this is on film. They left bugs in my phones and hid about five pounds of marijuana they could use to blackmail me in the event I didn’t hand CG the sale.”
The faces across the table showed their surprise. Suddenly this was more than a simple case of graft. It was burglary and blackmail, and Lord knew what else.
Jack shrugged and continued, “My private security firm discovered all of this, thank goodness. You can imagine my surprise, so of course I contacted my client and warned him there was a chance his phone and home might also be bugged.”
The Fibbies at the end of the table broke into loud chortles of laughter. Jack gave them an innocent look and the laughter grew louder. The sound bounced around the room a moment. They already knew the broad outline of the story. The details, though, were priceless. It was impossible to keep a straight face.
“You’re saying Arvan never called any private investors?” Harper asked when the laughter died down.
“I’m saying Perry might’ve discussed a vague intention to do so, but he never had the slightest intention to follow through.”
“But-”
“Forget the buts. If someone was illegally eavesdropping on his private phone calls and was misled, then committed an illegal act based on this information, where is Perry’s crime?”
Mia, ever the helpful lawyer, noted, “I’ve researched the statutes, so I’ll save you the trouble. No laws were violated, none.”
“Arvan still committed fraud.”
“How?” Jack asked, still with that pleasant smile.
“He withheld the final report. He deliberately misled CG about the polymer.”
“He was never asked about the final report. Nor was he ever given the opportunity to provide it. Once CG forced him to sell, he was goose-stepped off the premises and barred from ever returning.”
It was dawning on everyone in the room what an amazing tale they were listening to. It further dawned on them that Jack here was a very clever boy. So far, he had confessed to no wrongdoing, but he had certainly shadow-danced right up to the line.
“You see,” Jack continued, “CG jumped into the sale more or less without looking.” He held up his arms and shook his head from side to side as if it had been painful for him to witness. “They were so greedy and arrogant, no serious due diligence was done. They fired most of the workers, booted out the executives, and immediately kicked the polymer into production.”
Mia helpfully added, “Perry set aside thirty million of his cut to pay bonuses to the fired workers after the Capitol Group promised them severance but reneged.”
“And what did you get out of it?” Harper asked, looking at Jack.
“I was a limited partner. I got twenty million in cash as a finder’s fee, and twenty-five percent ownership of the company that produced the polymer.” He proudly waved a paper in the air they all assumed was the contract he had signed with the Capitol Group.
“Whose idea was the twenty-five percent?” the IG asked.
“Mine,” Jack confessed without embarrassment. “I insisted on a big piece of the action. I fought damned hard for it.”
Nobody asked why. The answer was obnoxiously obvious. The role of a confidence man is just to do that-to build confidence in the sucker. By battling hard for a big stake of ownership, Jack was conveying that the polymer was a sure thing. The idea that he had outsmarted the best brains in the Capitol Group was immensely entertaining, though nobody smiled.
“How did you get the tapes?” Rutherford II asked, almost incredulously.
“Well, by then I had… let’s call them serious trust issues with my new partners. They had burgled my home and obviously weren’t above blackmail and extortion, and God knows what else. As part of the contract, I had an office in CG’s headquarters-a small, out-of-the-way cubbyhole on the second floor. It afforded me a building pass and an opportunity. These people showed no compunction about breaking laws; I decided to protect myself. I wore a wire almost every time I talked to them. I recorded all phone conversations.”
“And that’s the source of all these tapes?”
“A handful of them,” Jack admitted.
“And the rest?”
“Almost every time I made my rounds around the headquarters I sprinkled listening devices around. I placed four in Mitch Walters’s office. Another three in each of the firm’s conference rooms, including the one on the top floor where the senior executive and board meetings are held. Believe me, those are some of the more captivating tapes.”
“And how did you monitor those bugs?” asked one of the FBI agents, making no effort to disguise his admiration. An irrelevant technical question, and the Feds at the end of the table already knew the answer, but they wanted the Defense people to share their amazement at Jack’s scheme.
Jack turned to him and said, “I had rented an apartment across the street. The devices have a range of one mile. My apartment was only a hundred yards away. I’d built a console with five noise-activated taping machines, and hired a crew to monitor the action around the clock.”
For the first time it really began to dawn on everybody what a truly remarkable find Jack Wiley was.
Harper bent forward. “How many tapes did you make?”
“A lot. Too many thousands of hours to be worth listening to. I didn’t want to overburden you, so my crew and I sifted through them. We disposed of anything too mundane or irrelevant, and preserved only those conversations that show legal culpability.”
“Give us an example.”
“Okay. For example, you won’t hear Dan Bellweather ordering five whores from a D.C. call girl service, but you will hear him arranging payments to senators and congressmen to shove the authorization for the polymer through with two speedy votes. You’ll also hear how he paid a certain House member to assassinate the GT 400, the only real competition. Mia incidentally got a taped copy of that hearing. It’s very entertaining in a rather vulgar way.”
Jack paused and searched their faces. “If I’m boring you, stop me,” he said facetiously. “Or to take another example, you will hear Mitch Walters illegally offering post-administration jobs to several top assistant secretaries, and you will very clearly hear him arranging the cover-up on the polymer.”
Nobody looked the least bit bored.
“Anything else?” the IG asked, clearly rattled.
“Yes, plenty,” Jack assured him, no longer smiling, now looking quite grim. “Understand, I didn’t go into this
