Illicit Intent, page 2
“Yes, sir. He was dead when the EMTs arrived.”
“Saves me the trouble.”
“Should I retrieve the package?”
“This man with my property? You know who he is?”
“He passed out business cards when he walked in the room.”
“Send me the information.”
Reynard ended the call and immediately entered a number he knew by heart. This situation required competence and intelligence, but more importantly, it required finesse.
He needed Caleb Cain.
New York City
April 16
Come on, come on, come on. Calliope Garland willed the indicator bar on the monitor displaying the percentage of download completion to move faster. Fourteen percent, twenty-seven percent. Then it seemed to stop at thirty-two percent as if it were deciding whether to continue. She rubbed the side of the CPU, encouraging the beast to comply. She checked the time on her phone: 10:17 p.m. The slick, suited brokers and analysts had abandoned their laptops and balance sheets for dirty martinis—and other pastimes with “dirty” as the descriptor—at a chic nearby nightspot Stock around the corner. The offices of Gentrify Capital Partners that occupied the top two floors of the Financial District tower were all but abandoned. The low hum of a vacuum cleaner down the hall and the faint voice of a newbie client-retention specialist trying to earn his stripes were all that remained. No one should interrupt her.
Her little undercover assignment was proceeding seamlessly. Farrell Whitaker, her boss at the news site where she worked, The Harlem Sentry, smelled a rat at this prosperous asset management firm, so he sent her in to investigate. She arranged to be hired as a part-time receptionist through a temp agency and had worked at the front desk for two weeks when she caught her target’s eye. Calliope’s editor had then arranged for the target’s personal assistant to get wind of a massive federal investigation in the offing, and the woman had quit without notice. Badda bing, badda boom, Calliope was in.
Gentrify Capital Partners was housed in a soaring monolith at the bottom of Manhattan. The office was a shrine to eighties’ financial corruption. From the sky-lighted two-story reception area to the interchangeable super-model receptionists to the boys club of Ivy League analysts, the place was a throwback. It was as if the man who created it, Philip “Phipps” Van Gent, had developed his fantasy business model during the era of Ivan Boesky and Michael Miliken, and had duplicated that world without update.
Calliope had worked at The Sentry for nearly two years, longer than any of the other dilettante jobs she’d had over the past six years. She actually liked it, but it would soon be time to move on. Where would she go next? Maybe a nanny in London or an aid worker in Khartoum. She shook herself out of her revelry. First, she needed to make sure she didn’t end her career as an investigative reporter with a literal bang.
At the moment, she was sitting at Phipps Van Gent’s desk—nothing out of the ordinary. He often called her from the road to retrieve some piece of information or update a spreadsheet. Other than the late hour, there was nothing suspicious about her presence. Furthermore, the minions seldom popped in to see the boisterous CEO, on the rare occasion he was in the office. Despite the fact that half of this floor was a private apartment, and his office alone was bigger than most Manhattan studios, the eccentric man spent most of his time at his estate in Greenwich or on his yacht, currently anchored in Palm Beach. No subtle, hidden-gem locations for Phipps Van Gent; he chose the most obvious ways to display his wealth.
Fifty-eight percent. Calliope glanced around Van Gent’s inner sanctum. Other than the desktop computer she was currently breaking into and his rarely-used personal laptop sitting open on the desk—a pin-dot of light at the top of the screen—one would hardly suspect this was a place of business. She wouldn’t describe the office as gaudy, more like an elite hodgepodge. It was as if the decorator, or more likely Van Gent himself, had selected the most expensive item in any given category and put it in the room. Calliope guessed his tactic: if a potential client knew art, he or she would be impressed by the Rothko over the fireplace or the Hopper behind his desk. If they knew antiques, the imposing Goddard and Townsend desk would elicit a response. It was the same with the Persian rug, Tiffany lamps, and the ego wall filled with photos of Phipps with Oscar winners, heads of state, professional athletes, and so on and so on. It was the very definition of conspicuous consumption.
Ninety-one percent. She rolled her eyes. She could afford any or all of these items in her own right but preferred the sparse interior of her Brooklyn brownstone, decorated with thrift store furniture, quirky accents, and street art. The photos she displayed were of people and places that mattered to her: Calliope with her mother playing in the sand on a beach in Corsica, her dog, Coco, looking at the camera lens as if it were edible, her mother and stepfather looking at each other as if no one else existed.
She had conducted dozens of these surreptitious fact-finding missions. Most were as simple as watching who came and went or copying shipping records or a calendar. Computer piracy was a little out of her league, but Farrell had a bee in his bonnet about this particular story. Based on the proudly displayed photos of her publisher Occupying Wall Street years ago she could guess why. Nevertheless, her role had always been observer, not filcher. She should simply be telling Farrell that the files existed, not duplicating them. She shuddered at the implications of this little theft. Some people in some very high places were going to be livid.
Download complete. Just as she sighed her relief and reached to snatch the little flash drive from the port, she noticed another document on Van Gent’s desktop. It was titled “Golf Scores,” but the “S” in “Scores” was a dollar sign: “Golf $cores.” She clicked on it, and a password prompt appeared. She checked under the keyboard—where Phipps had told her his login information was kept—and sure enough, there, on another Post-It, was a second password. She entered it and voila. The document consisted of a single-page spreadsheet listing a series of numbered codes Calliope couldn’t interpret.
Her computer genius friend immediately came to mind. Twitch will know what this is. Then, as if Calliope had conjured her, the disposable cell phone in her pocket buzzed.
“How did you get this number?”
“Please.” Calliope could hear the mischief in her friend’s voice. “How goes the wet work?”
“Nerve-racking.”
“Oh, take a picture of his desk photos. Be interesting to see who’s in Van Gent’s inner circle. It’ll take the Feds forever to get a warrant for that office.”
Calliope turned back to the monitor and extended her hand to snap a picture of the cluster of framed photos on Van Gent’s desk when a device mounted on the side of the screen started beeping.
“Shit. I’m setting off the cell phone detector on the monitor. I gotta go.”
Calliope cut Twitch off mid-protest, pushed back in the chair to stay out of range of the device, and snapped the picture. Then she tossed the disposable phone into her purse and returned to the mysterious “Golf $cores” document.
When she tried to drag the document to her flash drive folder an ugly noise sounded and an additional password prompt appeared. She re-entered the second password, and the evil wonk sounded again. Double-checking the letters and numbers, she retried it and was denied a second time. In a final attempt, she entered the original login password. At the third failed attempt, a box appeared in the center of the monitor: initiating security protocol.
Now she was sweating. A countdown clock in the corner of the monitor was ticking down from five. Four... Three… At zero the screen went momentarily blank. Was that the distant bing of the elevator’s arrival? No way was this going unnoticed. She imagined a tiny room with an IT tech sitting at a desk filled with monitors and drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup while alarms clanged and red lights flashed, signaling the breach. Who knew? Phipps was a strange guy. At this very moment, his wall safe sat open above the credenza. She could see stacks of cash and documents. Honestly, if she took several thousand dollars and left a note on the safe door, she didn’t think Phipps would care. It wasn’t that money didn’t matter to him, it was more like money wasn’t real.
Calliope shook away the thought and returned to her task. Something bad was happening, something very, very bad. A progress bar appeared in the middle of the screen. Below it, commands flashed: removing files, wiping backup server, clearing logs. With each notification, a new progress bar would start and run up to 100%. Calliope didn’t know much about computers, and she certainly didn’t know if touching something would improve or exacerbate the situation, so she sat there and watched until the screen went dark and an ominous message appeared in the center of the monitor: security protocol complete. All the more reason to skedaddle. Just as she was reaching down to extract the flash drive, the imposing double doors to Phipps’s office flew open with such force the knobs put a dent in the drywall.
Boof. Ten blocks north of Gentrify Capital, Miller “Tox” Buchanan was in the basement security room of a Chinatown office building. He was being held by two men and beaten by a third. The punch was nothing, but Tox needed to make this look good. A series of jabs and he stifled a yawn. Qi was maybe five-five, a full foot shorter than Tox, but he was well-built. Nevertheless, the blows were about the same force his buddies nailed him with when he told a bad joke. He just needed to keep these guys busy until his partner, Steady, got the cameras and bugs planted.
Their client’s son had been abducted two days earlier by her estranged husband. She came directly to Bishop Security for help. The security company was an offshoot of defense contractor Knightsgrove-Bishop. Heir apparent, Nathan Bishop, had eschewed the CEO position in favor of running this humble branch. Bishop Security took a variety of national and international jobs—bodyguard to black ops—but the team’s pride was The Perseus Project. Born of ghosts haunting Nathan Bishop after his childhood friend, now wife, Emily Webster Bishop, had been abducted, The Perseus Project worked to rescue victims of kidnapping. They rarely charged money, and they never received recognition.
This was exactly the type of case for which Perseus was created. The missing boy’s father was a powerful man with connections to organized crime and enough money to buy silence. The good guys needed to break into his Manhattan offices, plant the cameras and bugs, put a trace on his technology, and have a quick look around; some damning evidence would be a useful deterrent to repeat attempts to abduct the child in the future.
Tox had the easy job: distract the security guys with a little poker—and a little cheating—until exactly 11 pm. To be fair, Tox didn’t have to get caught cheating, but this beating was far less painful than listening to these jackasses’ incessant chatter.
“You think this is funny, you fucking giant?” Qi’s face was red with exertion.
Tox shrugged. He must not have been as good an actor as he thought. Qi shouted something over his shoulder in clipped Mandarin. A moment later Tox thought he felt the floor rumble. He was pretty sure he was imagining the Jaws theme. Then a man appeared in the doorway. The mammoth was nearly as wide as he was tall. This beating was about to take a bad turn.
“Hey, Qi, do you have the time?” Tox asked.
“Ten-forty-three. Why? You in a hurry?” The men holding Tox chuckled.
Shit. He had to kill seventeen minutes. Well, he knew he couldn’t survive seventeen minutes of being beaten by this rhino. He could, however, survive seventeen minutes of being chased by him. In a vintage Three Stooges move, Tox engaged his massive biceps and pulled together the two guys holding his arms, then pushed them into Shamu. Qi pulled a Glock, but Tox quickly nailed him with a combat-booted foot to the chest, sending Qi flying back into the surveillance equipment, disrupting the feed. At least his partner could finish up undetected. You’re welcome, Steady. A gunshot rent the air. Apparently, Gigantor realized he wouldn’t be able to catch Tox if he ran. At six-five and two-thirty, Tox was by no means nimble, but his opponent had to weigh in at over four bills. The Ruger semi-automatic acted as an ersatz starter’s pistol, and Tox bolted for the street.
The shout was even louder than the bang of the door, and the last vestiges of Calliope’s composure dissolved. She flew to her feet, a flimsy excuse on her lips.
“Who’s the luckiest bastard on the fucking planet?!!!”
Calliope didn’t think Phipps Van Gent was expecting a response, and when she didn’t reply, he continued.
“I am, Cathy.” He hadn’t bothered to learn her name. Cathy was the name of his former assistant. “I just won two hundred thousand dollars on one hand of poker.” When her eyes widened, Phipps smiled with glib satisfaction. “Wanna know how?”
Calliope glanced briefly at the flash drive still sticking out of the computer and nodded.
Phipps stumbled and expelled an alcohol-tinged huff of air. He righted himself and, with the deliberate care of a drunk, tried to make the hand he used for support on the desk look casual rather than essential. “Because everyone fucking bluffs.” He seemed to contemplate propping one hip on the desk, then reconsidered and flopped down on the taupe suede couch. He continued with his head on the butter-soft arm and his Gucci loafers propped up.
“I’m in a penthouse at the Wynn courting this whale. He’s supposedly some totally infamous mobster, but he’s worth a quarter of a billion, and he’s looking for an asset manager. Money’s money. It’s all dirty, so what the fuck?”
He was talking to the ceiling now, and Calliope wondered if he realized she was still in the room. “I chased him around for two straight days. I finally landed him and got an invite to this high-limit poker game in his suite. The guy provided everything: coke, whores, cards, booze. Everything but sleep,” he chuckled. “So the last hand, every asshole in the room wants to show how big his dick is, but I know I’ve got it. Not the dick stuff cause mine’s nothing to write home about, but my hand of cards is something for the record books.”
Calliope thought that her editor really might be onto something when he voiced his suspicion that Phipps Van Gent was a con artist running a Ponzi scheme. Phipps sounded more like a street thug than American ex-pat and the product of Cambridge and the London School of Economics that he claimed to be.
“It’s hold ‘em. I get dealt two fours down. The flop is a four, a four, and a nine. Right off the fucking bat, I’ve got four of a kind. Four of a kind, Cathy. Do you even get how rare that is? The odds of it…well, it’s insanely rare, like Powerball rare.”
He seemed satisfied he had made his point and continued the story. “The turn is a jack. I don’t even remember the river because who the fuck cares? So I’m guessing someone at the table has a full boat, maybe a flush. Or they’re all fucking bluffing. Doesn’t matter. Lil’ ol’ me is sitting back and watching with four of a kind. Oh, it gets better. This other fucker, high as a kite, is out of cash, claims his credit card has some kind of travel block so he can’t transfer funds, so he sends a guy to his room and comes back with this little tube and tosses it onto the table.”
Phipps felt around in his carry-on bag to retrieve it, but it slipped from his grip and rolled across the rug out of reach. Calliope watched it roll. It was white and capped and only about twice as large, in both diameter and length, as the center tube in a roll of paper towels. Phipps extended his hand in a grabbing motion like a toddler asking for an out-of-reach toy, then abandoned his effort and continued. “Says what’s in the tube will cover the bet.”
He half-gestured toward the bar. “Pour me a scotch, Cath.” Apparently, now they were on a wrong nickname basis rather than a wrong first-name basis. Calliope pushed back to stand and quickly snatched the flash drive, dropping it into her messenger bag that sat open on the floor. She fetched his drink, so nervous she didn’t realize Phipps was still talking...“So I flip my hand and the guy, he shoots up from the table like a bull ready to charge. Then he drops dead.
“One of the hired goons starts doing CPR, and that’s it for me. Anyway, glad I got cash from the other saps because the painting in that tube isn’t worth shit.”
With great effort, he sat upright, retrieved the tube with his foot, and popped off the cap. He upended it, and a small rolled canvas slid out. He unrolled it on the coffee table and weighted the edges with magazines. “It’s a reproduction of a Titian called The Thief’s Redemption. It’s the schmuck on the cross next to Jesus. The original is in Barcelona. I Googled it. This isn’t even the right size.”
He reclined again, yawned, and closed his eyes. “Certainly a fitting title, because I got robbed.” He chortled. “The Thief’s Redemption.” The scotch, perched precariously on the ridge of his gut, splashed in the glass. “Have my gal look at it on Monday. Could be it’s something else, but I doubt it. Maybe I’ll frame it and hang it at home. A memento of the one time Phipps Van Gent got taken.”
He tossed the plastic tube that held the painting in the direction of the small trash can and yawned. “I don’t mind losing money, but I do mind losing,” he grumbled. She started to ask if he even wanted her to have the painting examined, but he was already snoring softly.
Calliope plucked the tube off the floor. With the intention of putting it in the recycling bin, she shoved it into her bag and headed for the door. She glanced over her shoulder at Phipps passed out on the couch—one hand in his pants, one still holding his scotch—and bolted for the elevator. She almost laughed at the fact that she hadn’t uttered one word the entire time Phipps was there.
The ding of the elevator’s arrival before she had summoned it surprised her. She thought about ducking around the corner into a vacant conference room but decided against it. She had every reason to be here and nothing to hide—well, stolen files aside. When the doors parted, Calliope studied the occupant. A late-night client meeting was par for the course at Gentrify; Phipps would meet a prospective client any time, anywhere—as evidenced by his recent junket.
“Saves me the trouble.”
“Should I retrieve the package?”
“This man with my property? You know who he is?”
“He passed out business cards when he walked in the room.”
“Send me the information.”
Reynard ended the call and immediately entered a number he knew by heart. This situation required competence and intelligence, but more importantly, it required finesse.
He needed Caleb Cain.
New York City
April 16
Come on, come on, come on. Calliope Garland willed the indicator bar on the monitor displaying the percentage of download completion to move faster. Fourteen percent, twenty-seven percent. Then it seemed to stop at thirty-two percent as if it were deciding whether to continue. She rubbed the side of the CPU, encouraging the beast to comply. She checked the time on her phone: 10:17 p.m. The slick, suited brokers and analysts had abandoned their laptops and balance sheets for dirty martinis—and other pastimes with “dirty” as the descriptor—at a chic nearby nightspot Stock around the corner. The offices of Gentrify Capital Partners that occupied the top two floors of the Financial District tower were all but abandoned. The low hum of a vacuum cleaner down the hall and the faint voice of a newbie client-retention specialist trying to earn his stripes were all that remained. No one should interrupt her.
Her little undercover assignment was proceeding seamlessly. Farrell Whitaker, her boss at the news site where she worked, The Harlem Sentry, smelled a rat at this prosperous asset management firm, so he sent her in to investigate. She arranged to be hired as a part-time receptionist through a temp agency and had worked at the front desk for two weeks when she caught her target’s eye. Calliope’s editor had then arranged for the target’s personal assistant to get wind of a massive federal investigation in the offing, and the woman had quit without notice. Badda bing, badda boom, Calliope was in.
Gentrify Capital Partners was housed in a soaring monolith at the bottom of Manhattan. The office was a shrine to eighties’ financial corruption. From the sky-lighted two-story reception area to the interchangeable super-model receptionists to the boys club of Ivy League analysts, the place was a throwback. It was as if the man who created it, Philip “Phipps” Van Gent, had developed his fantasy business model during the era of Ivan Boesky and Michael Miliken, and had duplicated that world without update.
Calliope had worked at The Sentry for nearly two years, longer than any of the other dilettante jobs she’d had over the past six years. She actually liked it, but it would soon be time to move on. Where would she go next? Maybe a nanny in London or an aid worker in Khartoum. She shook herself out of her revelry. First, she needed to make sure she didn’t end her career as an investigative reporter with a literal bang.
At the moment, she was sitting at Phipps Van Gent’s desk—nothing out of the ordinary. He often called her from the road to retrieve some piece of information or update a spreadsheet. Other than the late hour, there was nothing suspicious about her presence. Furthermore, the minions seldom popped in to see the boisterous CEO, on the rare occasion he was in the office. Despite the fact that half of this floor was a private apartment, and his office alone was bigger than most Manhattan studios, the eccentric man spent most of his time at his estate in Greenwich or on his yacht, currently anchored in Palm Beach. No subtle, hidden-gem locations for Phipps Van Gent; he chose the most obvious ways to display his wealth.
Fifty-eight percent. Calliope glanced around Van Gent’s inner sanctum. Other than the desktop computer she was currently breaking into and his rarely-used personal laptop sitting open on the desk—a pin-dot of light at the top of the screen—one would hardly suspect this was a place of business. She wouldn’t describe the office as gaudy, more like an elite hodgepodge. It was as if the decorator, or more likely Van Gent himself, had selected the most expensive item in any given category and put it in the room. Calliope guessed his tactic: if a potential client knew art, he or she would be impressed by the Rothko over the fireplace or the Hopper behind his desk. If they knew antiques, the imposing Goddard and Townsend desk would elicit a response. It was the same with the Persian rug, Tiffany lamps, and the ego wall filled with photos of Phipps with Oscar winners, heads of state, professional athletes, and so on and so on. It was the very definition of conspicuous consumption.
Ninety-one percent. She rolled her eyes. She could afford any or all of these items in her own right but preferred the sparse interior of her Brooklyn brownstone, decorated with thrift store furniture, quirky accents, and street art. The photos she displayed were of people and places that mattered to her: Calliope with her mother playing in the sand on a beach in Corsica, her dog, Coco, looking at the camera lens as if it were edible, her mother and stepfather looking at each other as if no one else existed.
She had conducted dozens of these surreptitious fact-finding missions. Most were as simple as watching who came and went or copying shipping records or a calendar. Computer piracy was a little out of her league, but Farrell had a bee in his bonnet about this particular story. Based on the proudly displayed photos of her publisher Occupying Wall Street years ago she could guess why. Nevertheless, her role had always been observer, not filcher. She should simply be telling Farrell that the files existed, not duplicating them. She shuddered at the implications of this little theft. Some people in some very high places were going to be livid.
Download complete. Just as she sighed her relief and reached to snatch the little flash drive from the port, she noticed another document on Van Gent’s desktop. It was titled “Golf Scores,” but the “S” in “Scores” was a dollar sign: “Golf $cores.” She clicked on it, and a password prompt appeared. She checked under the keyboard—where Phipps had told her his login information was kept—and sure enough, there, on another Post-It, was a second password. She entered it and voila. The document consisted of a single-page spreadsheet listing a series of numbered codes Calliope couldn’t interpret.
Her computer genius friend immediately came to mind. Twitch will know what this is. Then, as if Calliope had conjured her, the disposable cell phone in her pocket buzzed.
“How did you get this number?”
“Please.” Calliope could hear the mischief in her friend’s voice. “How goes the wet work?”
“Nerve-racking.”
“Oh, take a picture of his desk photos. Be interesting to see who’s in Van Gent’s inner circle. It’ll take the Feds forever to get a warrant for that office.”
Calliope turned back to the monitor and extended her hand to snap a picture of the cluster of framed photos on Van Gent’s desk when a device mounted on the side of the screen started beeping.
“Shit. I’m setting off the cell phone detector on the monitor. I gotta go.”
Calliope cut Twitch off mid-protest, pushed back in the chair to stay out of range of the device, and snapped the picture. Then she tossed the disposable phone into her purse and returned to the mysterious “Golf $cores” document.
When she tried to drag the document to her flash drive folder an ugly noise sounded and an additional password prompt appeared. She re-entered the second password, and the evil wonk sounded again. Double-checking the letters and numbers, she retried it and was denied a second time. In a final attempt, she entered the original login password. At the third failed attempt, a box appeared in the center of the monitor: initiating security protocol.
Now she was sweating. A countdown clock in the corner of the monitor was ticking down from five. Four... Three… At zero the screen went momentarily blank. Was that the distant bing of the elevator’s arrival? No way was this going unnoticed. She imagined a tiny room with an IT tech sitting at a desk filled with monitors and drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup while alarms clanged and red lights flashed, signaling the breach. Who knew? Phipps was a strange guy. At this very moment, his wall safe sat open above the credenza. She could see stacks of cash and documents. Honestly, if she took several thousand dollars and left a note on the safe door, she didn’t think Phipps would care. It wasn’t that money didn’t matter to him, it was more like money wasn’t real.
Calliope shook away the thought and returned to her task. Something bad was happening, something very, very bad. A progress bar appeared in the middle of the screen. Below it, commands flashed: removing files, wiping backup server, clearing logs. With each notification, a new progress bar would start and run up to 100%. Calliope didn’t know much about computers, and she certainly didn’t know if touching something would improve or exacerbate the situation, so she sat there and watched until the screen went dark and an ominous message appeared in the center of the monitor: security protocol complete. All the more reason to skedaddle. Just as she was reaching down to extract the flash drive, the imposing double doors to Phipps’s office flew open with such force the knobs put a dent in the drywall.
Boof. Ten blocks north of Gentrify Capital, Miller “Tox” Buchanan was in the basement security room of a Chinatown office building. He was being held by two men and beaten by a third. The punch was nothing, but Tox needed to make this look good. A series of jabs and he stifled a yawn. Qi was maybe five-five, a full foot shorter than Tox, but he was well-built. Nevertheless, the blows were about the same force his buddies nailed him with when he told a bad joke. He just needed to keep these guys busy until his partner, Steady, got the cameras and bugs planted.
Their client’s son had been abducted two days earlier by her estranged husband. She came directly to Bishop Security for help. The security company was an offshoot of defense contractor Knightsgrove-Bishop. Heir apparent, Nathan Bishop, had eschewed the CEO position in favor of running this humble branch. Bishop Security took a variety of national and international jobs—bodyguard to black ops—but the team’s pride was The Perseus Project. Born of ghosts haunting Nathan Bishop after his childhood friend, now wife, Emily Webster Bishop, had been abducted, The Perseus Project worked to rescue victims of kidnapping. They rarely charged money, and they never received recognition.
This was exactly the type of case for which Perseus was created. The missing boy’s father was a powerful man with connections to organized crime and enough money to buy silence. The good guys needed to break into his Manhattan offices, plant the cameras and bugs, put a trace on his technology, and have a quick look around; some damning evidence would be a useful deterrent to repeat attempts to abduct the child in the future.
Tox had the easy job: distract the security guys with a little poker—and a little cheating—until exactly 11 pm. To be fair, Tox didn’t have to get caught cheating, but this beating was far less painful than listening to these jackasses’ incessant chatter.
“You think this is funny, you fucking giant?” Qi’s face was red with exertion.
Tox shrugged. He must not have been as good an actor as he thought. Qi shouted something over his shoulder in clipped Mandarin. A moment later Tox thought he felt the floor rumble. He was pretty sure he was imagining the Jaws theme. Then a man appeared in the doorway. The mammoth was nearly as wide as he was tall. This beating was about to take a bad turn.
“Hey, Qi, do you have the time?” Tox asked.
“Ten-forty-three. Why? You in a hurry?” The men holding Tox chuckled.
Shit. He had to kill seventeen minutes. Well, he knew he couldn’t survive seventeen minutes of being beaten by this rhino. He could, however, survive seventeen minutes of being chased by him. In a vintage Three Stooges move, Tox engaged his massive biceps and pulled together the two guys holding his arms, then pushed them into Shamu. Qi pulled a Glock, but Tox quickly nailed him with a combat-booted foot to the chest, sending Qi flying back into the surveillance equipment, disrupting the feed. At least his partner could finish up undetected. You’re welcome, Steady. A gunshot rent the air. Apparently, Gigantor realized he wouldn’t be able to catch Tox if he ran. At six-five and two-thirty, Tox was by no means nimble, but his opponent had to weigh in at over four bills. The Ruger semi-automatic acted as an ersatz starter’s pistol, and Tox bolted for the street.
The shout was even louder than the bang of the door, and the last vestiges of Calliope’s composure dissolved. She flew to her feet, a flimsy excuse on her lips.
“Who’s the luckiest bastard on the fucking planet?!!!”
Calliope didn’t think Phipps Van Gent was expecting a response, and when she didn’t reply, he continued.
“I am, Cathy.” He hadn’t bothered to learn her name. Cathy was the name of his former assistant. “I just won two hundred thousand dollars on one hand of poker.” When her eyes widened, Phipps smiled with glib satisfaction. “Wanna know how?”
Calliope glanced briefly at the flash drive still sticking out of the computer and nodded.
Phipps stumbled and expelled an alcohol-tinged huff of air. He righted himself and, with the deliberate care of a drunk, tried to make the hand he used for support on the desk look casual rather than essential. “Because everyone fucking bluffs.” He seemed to contemplate propping one hip on the desk, then reconsidered and flopped down on the taupe suede couch. He continued with his head on the butter-soft arm and his Gucci loafers propped up.
“I’m in a penthouse at the Wynn courting this whale. He’s supposedly some totally infamous mobster, but he’s worth a quarter of a billion, and he’s looking for an asset manager. Money’s money. It’s all dirty, so what the fuck?”
He was talking to the ceiling now, and Calliope wondered if he realized she was still in the room. “I chased him around for two straight days. I finally landed him and got an invite to this high-limit poker game in his suite. The guy provided everything: coke, whores, cards, booze. Everything but sleep,” he chuckled. “So the last hand, every asshole in the room wants to show how big his dick is, but I know I’ve got it. Not the dick stuff cause mine’s nothing to write home about, but my hand of cards is something for the record books.”
Calliope thought that her editor really might be onto something when he voiced his suspicion that Phipps Van Gent was a con artist running a Ponzi scheme. Phipps sounded more like a street thug than American ex-pat and the product of Cambridge and the London School of Economics that he claimed to be.
“It’s hold ‘em. I get dealt two fours down. The flop is a four, a four, and a nine. Right off the fucking bat, I’ve got four of a kind. Four of a kind, Cathy. Do you even get how rare that is? The odds of it…well, it’s insanely rare, like Powerball rare.”
He seemed satisfied he had made his point and continued the story. “The turn is a jack. I don’t even remember the river because who the fuck cares? So I’m guessing someone at the table has a full boat, maybe a flush. Or they’re all fucking bluffing. Doesn’t matter. Lil’ ol’ me is sitting back and watching with four of a kind. Oh, it gets better. This other fucker, high as a kite, is out of cash, claims his credit card has some kind of travel block so he can’t transfer funds, so he sends a guy to his room and comes back with this little tube and tosses it onto the table.”
Phipps felt around in his carry-on bag to retrieve it, but it slipped from his grip and rolled across the rug out of reach. Calliope watched it roll. It was white and capped and only about twice as large, in both diameter and length, as the center tube in a roll of paper towels. Phipps extended his hand in a grabbing motion like a toddler asking for an out-of-reach toy, then abandoned his effort and continued. “Says what’s in the tube will cover the bet.”
He half-gestured toward the bar. “Pour me a scotch, Cath.” Apparently, now they were on a wrong nickname basis rather than a wrong first-name basis. Calliope pushed back to stand and quickly snatched the flash drive, dropping it into her messenger bag that sat open on the floor. She fetched his drink, so nervous she didn’t realize Phipps was still talking...“So I flip my hand and the guy, he shoots up from the table like a bull ready to charge. Then he drops dead.
“One of the hired goons starts doing CPR, and that’s it for me. Anyway, glad I got cash from the other saps because the painting in that tube isn’t worth shit.”
With great effort, he sat upright, retrieved the tube with his foot, and popped off the cap. He upended it, and a small rolled canvas slid out. He unrolled it on the coffee table and weighted the edges with magazines. “It’s a reproduction of a Titian called The Thief’s Redemption. It’s the schmuck on the cross next to Jesus. The original is in Barcelona. I Googled it. This isn’t even the right size.”
He reclined again, yawned, and closed his eyes. “Certainly a fitting title, because I got robbed.” He chortled. “The Thief’s Redemption.” The scotch, perched precariously on the ridge of his gut, splashed in the glass. “Have my gal look at it on Monday. Could be it’s something else, but I doubt it. Maybe I’ll frame it and hang it at home. A memento of the one time Phipps Van Gent got taken.”
He tossed the plastic tube that held the painting in the direction of the small trash can and yawned. “I don’t mind losing money, but I do mind losing,” he grumbled. She started to ask if he even wanted her to have the painting examined, but he was already snoring softly.
Calliope plucked the tube off the floor. With the intention of putting it in the recycling bin, she shoved it into her bag and headed for the door. She glanced over her shoulder at Phipps passed out on the couch—one hand in his pants, one still holding his scotch—and bolted for the elevator. She almost laughed at the fact that she hadn’t uttered one word the entire time Phipps was there.
The ding of the elevator’s arrival before she had summoned it surprised her. She thought about ducking around the corner into a vacant conference room but decided against it. She had every reason to be here and nothing to hide—well, stolen files aside. When the doors parted, Calliope studied the occupant. A late-night client meeting was par for the course at Gentrify; Phipps would meet a prospective client any time, anywhere—as evidenced by his recent junket.
