Banksters 41: Adversaries

So many adversaries, so little time.

Alice was a strange choice for the coup. Looking into the board members, only one of them had been aggressively buying up company stocks: Rob Kierkegaard.

Rob was the reason Alice was CAO. At the time, she was the highest ranking woman in the company, which still meant she fell squarely into middle management. But she was good at what she did. Which was why she was invited to the Christmas Party, to hob knob with the executives. And it was there that Rob raped her in the copy room. He was a player, even then, and owned nearly 30 percent of the company, still slightly less than the Morgans’ combined forty, but at the time equal to the rest of the outstanding shares. His share count had increased since then, though his ownership percentage had fallen. But you don’t let a guy who owns a third of your company get prosecuted- at least, not if you’ve got Allistair Neville working for you.

And to Alice’s credit, she was a hell of a negotiator. The legend had it that, still bloody from the attack, she stared him down over a conference table. The Morgans wanted to buy her off with a pittance of an offer, barely what an equitable severance would have been. Instead, she got it in writing that she was on trajectory for the executive floor, and made damn sure it was written in enforceable language. 

She’d had to enforce it a half dozen times to get where she was. As head of Admin she did more day to day in the company than anyone. But it also meant she seemed to blend into the background.

But why was she working with Kierkegaard? Her experience with him turned her into a de facto lesbian; not so much because she enjoyed the company of women, but because she couldn’t enjoy the company of men. She always arrived at board meetings after him, so she could sit as far as possible away from him. I knew she was ambitious- but this was a whole other level.

But it also gave me an idea. I texted Julee, told her to stop in whenever she could. She texted back to tell me she was in a meeting. Now that Joel was, temporarily, running the department, they were having more and more. Joel really loved his meetings. He brought donuts, and made Power Point presentations, with goofy little animations he downloaded off the internet.

Waiting for her gave me an opportunity to continue my research. Slogging through some old contracts, I found something. But I wanted to be sure that it was what I thought it was. So I called Janet Simmes, our friendly neighborhood US Attorney.

“This is Mark Dane. You’re going to want to request some documents from me.”

“Okay, I’ll bite: why?”

“What’s it take to prosecute an employee for on the job actions?”

“The difficult thing about prosecuting corporate crime is that responsibility is always diffuse; no one is really in charge of any one decision, so tracing culpability is almost impossible. What I need is a smoking gun.”

“Well I think I have one for you. A stack of them, really.”

“Can you give me more of a hint than that?”

“The Repo 105 agreements we have. All originated and signed by a single man.”

“Not technically illegal, but there’s even odds I could make a fraud case out of it- since that’s what those accounting tricks really are when you step out from behind all the legalese.”

“Yep. But remember: you need to ask for them. Officially. And I’ll make sure that pristine copies still exist when that request gets here.”

“You got it.”  

Ed had never been a bright guy. But he’d been signing the Repo agreements himself. Maybe at the time he’d figured what could it possibly do to harm his stagnant career. Or maybe he’d thought putting himself out on a limb for the company might force them to take notice of him. Either way, he’d signed his career away- which was something he’d been trying to do for years with his conduct anyway.

But what amused me more, was Neville’s name was also on the documents. He’d signed off on the legality of the Repo measures- some of them after Cuomo started prosecuting Repos as fraud. But I couldn’t bring that to her. That would look suspicious. What I needed to do was dangle that idea in front of York, and see if he bit on it.

Which was a simple enough thing to do, now that he was acting counsel.

I bundled up the papers and walked to Neville’s office. “That prosecutor you were cooperating with earlier, she requested some documents about Repo 105. I wanted legal to comb through them, make sure I wasn’t giving her something we should be lawyering up over.”

He flipped through a few pages, and noticed the obvious one quickly. “Ed’s name’s all over these,” he said.

“That it is.”

“Might as well push him out a window,” he said.

“I contemplated it. But it lacked panache. That, and hubris. Ed signed every one of those pages, back when he was an AVP. This isn’t a set-up. This is what he did. And a US Attorney is requesting this information. Maybe something sensitive we could claim as a company secret we could keep from her, but Ed did this. There’s no question.”

“At the behest of the Morgans.”

“Maybe. But that’s not in the paperwork. In the paperwork, there’s only Ed Noakes. I brought this to you because you’re a lawyer, and you know subpoena power a hell of a lot more intimately than I do.”

“She’ll get these, if she wants them badly enough,” he said. But he was shaking his head. I’d just made his first day in the big boy chair pretty shitty. “Do you have copies of these?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll keep them, then, fine-tooth comb them. But I really doubt there’s anything I can do to save Ed.”

“That’s unfortunate,” I said; he was actually torn up about Noakes. I guess he didn’t know him well enough to detest him. I shrugged, and walked away.   

Petra was hunched over her keyboard, typing furiously. I leaned over her shoulder, so close she could feel my breath on her cheek. “Ed Noakes is gone.” She started. “At least, he will be, in a few days.”

“Hell of an engagement present,” she said, self-consciously twirling her new ring. “But there’s a woman in your office.”

“Julee?” I asked.

“New one. Never seen her before.”

“Huh,” I said, “excuse me.” I opened my office door. Grey was leaned against my desk, looking perfectly presentable.

“I heard you got engaged. Congratulations, dick-sucker.”

“You’re mad at me? You’re screwing my boss.”

“I’m not mad. But you could have at least given me a heads up.”

“I didn’t know we were at the ‘give me a heads up if you get engaged’ stage of our relationship, and I didn’t want to jump the gun.”

“You’re mocking me?”

“A little. She’s FBI, working with the SEC. She has to be placated- and has to remain placated.”

“Why not just fire her? She’s your secretary. You ought to be able to manufacture a reason.”

“But I don’t know what she has already. On the company. On me. So long as she’s distracted with babies and bridal crap she isn’t typing up indictments.”

“And what’s your fuckbuddy think about it?”

“I imagine she’ll react like you did- internally. But she won’t admit to it. It’s too important for her to maintain control. So she’ll find a way to make it my weakness, and indicative of how much I need her.”

“That’s a little sad.”

“I know. But she’s the one who insists on having the willpower tug of war. Would it really solve anything if I just let her win?”

“She’d resent you for it- and she’d probably know it, too. Damned if you do or don’t. But I get the feeling you were never in that one for the long haul.” 

“Or is that just wishful thinking?”

“Here’s something maybe you don’t know about women: we don’t like to be toyed with. We don’t enjoy having our insecurities, whatever they may be, exposed.”

“I’m… intrigued that you care about my relationships, with Petra, with Julie.”

“But you don’t care that I care?”

“I didn’t say that. A little surprised, perhaps. But not taken aback. But what brings you here? I presume neither jealousy nor magnanimity.”

“You were right. About Teryl. She called me this morning, weeping. All but swore off men. Which, you know, would have been great for me. Only the moment I started to commiserate, she came back around the bend, arguing that it wasn’t you, maybe there was something wrong with her. Maybe she’d done something wrong.”

“Still not time, though. It’s still raw. Poking a fresh wound hurts. But waiting until it scabs over, then tearing the scar tissue away to tear at the wound anew- that’s what we’re waiting for.”

“Is it weird I’m a little turned on by that?” she asked.

“I think it’d be weirder if you weren’t. But I was going to get ahold of you. I could use your help with something. I’m sure you’re tangentially aware of Alice Mott.”

“I’ve read up on her.”

“I imagine Richard’s mentioned the takeover bid being helmed by Sam Warwick. Alice is Richard’s prospective replacement. Working with Sam, she’s also in bed with Rob Kierkegaard, a man who raped her over a decade ago. I’m fairly certain she isn’t over what happened to her; I’d like to put them back in a room together, get them to has things out. But I need to get her there quietly. And her… encounter with Rob left her uncomfortable in the company of men.”  

“So you need me to seduce a gay girl. Isn’t this the polar opposite of what you’ve been doing for me?”

“I like to think it has a kind of complementary symmetry, like a yin yang. And you have a vested interest, here. If Alice and Warwick are successful in toppling Richard, all that hard work you’ve put into burnishing his throne is for naught.”  

“Fine,” she said, a little huffy. “Sort out the details. But right now I have to go. I’m meeting Richard for lunch- and his throne isn’t going to burnish itself.”

“You should go, then.” I think we were both left with a bad taste in our mouths; on the bright side, I guess, it was no longer just me.