And it hit him.
Certainly he’d pumped Willi for information—subtly, of course. Let me be your sounding board, cookie. You look so stressed, lover. Why don’t you tell me all about it while I give you a back rub?
He’d gotten enough bits and pieces to be useful—and more yet by accessing her files on her comp. Enough to tell his money man to keep an eye on Quantum. Enough to sound in-the-know should the conversation turn to business at a gathering.
Enough, he remembered now, to make a little loose change—always handy—for a little inside information.
But that was months ago, he thought. And only a bit of I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine. But when he thought it through, when he added in the visit from the bitch and the Irish bastard, it played out.
Who would have thought!
To his credit, Banks had a moment of distress. Mild and soon over. After all, he wasn’t at all responsible for the regrettable violence. In fact, he was a victim.
Finding the softest route to victimhood was a particular skill he’d honed since childhood. It served him well.
He calculated it now, considered the speed, the turns.
He sat on the wide ledge of an apricot-colored jet tub big enough for four friends, fired up a joint of Erotica-laced Zoner he’d taken as a party favor, and contemplated. And seeing the convergence of profit and victimhood, he took out his ’link.
“Hi, there,” he said with a flashing smile. “We need to chat.”
* * *
When Roarke came in, Eve had two names at the top of her list.
She swiveled in her chair. “I’ve got a couple to pull in for interview,” she began. “Both male, both in their forties, and they’ve each worked for both Econo and Quantum. One has eight years in the Navy, the other has a father still active-duty USMC. No specific links to explosive training, but. One’s an IT specialist, and that’s a good way to dig out data, the other’s in accounting, and accounting knows finance. So.”
When she poured more coffee, Roarke twirled a finger for her to fill a second cup.
“Where do they work now?”
“Former Navy and IT is still Quantum. He moved from Econo two years ago. The other started with Quantum, shifted to Econo—about five years in both companies. Now he’s at a nonprofit called Resource of Animals Rights—or ROAR.”
“Well.” He sat on the edge of her desk. “Criminal.”
“ROAR dude has some bumps, all related to protests. Major one at the Bronx Zoo, another for defacing a fur warehouse. That got him canned. Navy has a couple of minor scrapes—a Drunk and Disorderly and a pushy-shovy.”
She picked up her coffee. “What have you got?”
“Jordan Banks is quite the scamp.”
“Scamp.”
“His art gallery is a colossal failure from which he draws a tidy salary for doing nothing much at all. He pays the staff a pathetic wage, offsetting that, from what I can, see by allowing them to display their own art. If said art manages to sell, the gallery takes seventy percent. He also rents the space for private parties.
“A colossal failure,” Roarke repeated. “On paper. But I’d deem it a reasonable success as a vehicle for laundering money. You’ll want to pass on what I sent you from my little exploration to whoever handles that sort of thing at the NYPSD.”
“Whose money is he laundering?”
“I can’t tell you unless you give me the go on crossing certain lines. But I can guess much of it comes from those high-stake games. He enjoys them occasionally. Nothing out of the ordinary, but he does have connections there.”
“I knew it.”
“Some might come from art. However poorly he manages his own gallery, he does have connections and contacts in the art world. Cash sales aren’t unheard of, and cash is easily washed. Still more may come from other areas, but washing cash he is. And even with that, he’s a complete git.”
Eve shook her head. “It bothers you more that he’s a git than that he’s a criminal.”
“Well, of course. He’s a git, and money slides through his fingers. He has a couple of accounts reasonably well cloaked. A few million here, a few more there. He pays no rent for the gallery as his family owns the building, but he lists rent on his expenses, and merely juggles it from one pocket to the other.
“I want a biscuit,” he said, pushing up to go into the kitchen.
“I don’t have any biscuits in there. What about investments?”
“He’s with Buckley and Schultz,” Roarke said from the kitchen. “It appears Buckley himself handled his portfolio until about eight years ago, when he passed it down the chain. Banks doesn’t have enough personal wealth for Buckley to handle personally.”
He came back in with a plate holding two big cookies chunky with chips.
“Those aren’t biscuits. Those are cookies.”
“I don’t suppose you want one then.”
“Give me a damn biscuit.”
She took one, bit in. “Warm. Good.”
“They are. Now Banks’s portfolio is managed by Schultz’s grandson, and competently enough, who appears aboveboard. Though my impression is he’s passed it to another in the firm. But to confirm that, I’d cross the line you cling to.
“Just keep going.”
“All right. Our boy bought a small chunk of Quantum stock in November, fifty thousand, in the margin. He put in an order to sell this morning, just after the bombing.”
“Panicked.”
“He did—but perhaps just tiptoeing along that line—I stumbled over some correspondence. His broker advised him, strongly, to hold on to the stock, by rightfully telling him he had little more to lose, and ascertaining the stock would level at least.”
“Did he listen?”
“In his way. His response? Fuck it, Tad. Whatever. My take is he bores very easily. But his initial reaction leads me to believe he wasn’t in on the scheme.”
“Maybe not. Maybe Tad was. Maybe he didn’t know he was in on the scheme. Maybe being a scamp, a wanker, and a git, he was also a dupe. Whatever else, he’s dirty. Money laundering’s frowned upon.”
“A pity, as it comes out so crisp and clean.” He polished off the cookie. “Willimina Karson paid his gallery thirty thousand and change—for art. Econo paid his gallery nearly a hundred thousand.”
“Interesting. And he’d get seventy percent of that. I’m going to talk to her in the morning, push out what I can about what she told Banks on the deal. I’ll go another round with him, and interview the two I culled out. Both of them would have had some access to Rogan, have means to study him.”
She pushed up, walked to the board. “You’d have to have inside info. Sure, there’s buzz about the merger, but they kept the lid on the details until they had it set. And this scheme took weeks, if not months, to refine. So they had to know more than the average onlooker, even money people. Speculation, sure, but enough to plot this out means solid data.”
She turned back. “Am I wrong?”
“If you knew what to ask, how to ask, who to ask, you could find out more. Then there’s the politics and bureaucrats. So you’d have information there, as the deal rolled through the red tape. You’d have some leaks.”
“So some assistant to some assistant with the right clearance could brag to his buddies over a brew about drone work on a big deal.”
“Possibly.”
“Yeah, I figured.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Okay. It’s a heist.” She dropped her hands again. “You know about heists, and you know about money, about business, about deals. You know how to cheat and steal.”
Thoughtfully, Roarke eased a hip onto her desk. “I’m taking all of that as a compliment.”
“It’s a heist,” she repeated, “but at the base it’s a con. You know about those, too. It’s not what you did, using innocent people, killing them, but you know how to set up heists, grifts, cons, thefts.”
“Still taking the compliment.”
“How would you do it? If you were a sociopath, didn’t care about leaving a trail of bodies. How would you set this up? How long would it take? How much would you need?”
He blew out a breath. “Well now, let’s sit by the fire.”
“I want—”
“A brandy’s what I want,” he decided, and strolled over to get one. “And we might as well be comfortable while I’m planning out a job without worrying about the death toll.” He grabbed her hand as he walked, tugged her over to the sofa.
The cat slid off the sleep chair, bounded over and up to stretch out across both their laps.
“Cozy,” Roarke decided. “The start could be from a variety of points—and there’s where you’ll have your issues. You might be inside one of the companies, or know someone who is. You might catch the word in the media, or on the street. You might be in finance, or again, the politics of it. But from there you have to know enough to have vision.”
“Crash the companies at the optimum time, buy, wait, sell.”
“In shorthand, yes. And if you’re that sociopath, you’d think the optimum way at that optimum time to bring about that crash is blood and fear.”
“Explosion, loss of life, confusion. Nobody knows what the fuck for the first couple of hours.”
“Exactly. The world being what the world is, people rush toward terrorism at such moments, foreign or domestic. The market reacts. So if this is my plan, I’d want times, dates, names. I’d want the companies to rebound or it’s not profitable, is it?”
He sipped brandy, calculated. “I don’t have to know, absolutely, the Monday meeting is the big marketing reveal and the finalizing of the merger.”
“I can’t buy that. It’s no coincidence.”
“Not at all,” he agreed. “But I only have to know there’s a major meeting. I already know about the merger, already know it’s about to cross the finish line. But I need a time and place. I could make friends with an assistant or junior exec from either company,” he supposed. “Meet them in a bar, a gym, strike up a conversation. Run into them a few times, have a drink, talk shop.”