Blood Brothers (7 page)

“Good morning, Mr. Bjornsen.” They shook hands and Karl motioned Geist over to his guest table.

“That was quick,” Karl said as they sat down. “So, what did you find? What can you tell me about Ben Corbin?”

Geist reached into his briefcase and produced a one-inch-thick Velo-bound report titled
Full Background: Benjamin S. Corbin
. It had tabs marked “Executive Summary,” “Personal,” “Professional,” “Assets,” “Criminal/Regulatory,” and “Other.” He handed it to Karl. “There aren’t a lot of pressure points. Corbin has no civil or criminal convictions and no record of professional discipline. He and his wife collectively have investments with a total market value of roughly one and a half million dollars, which probably generate an annual income of around forty thousand. They also receive roughly one hundred thousand dollars a year from a large structured settlement in which Corbin shares under a contingent-fee agreement. They have no debt aside from credit-card balances, which they pay off monthly.”

“No debt at all?” interjected Karl. “That’s unusual.”

“It is,” agreed Geist. “That settlement I mentioned also paid Corbin a two-million-dollar lump sum six months ago. He and his wife paid off their mortgage and all their other loans and invested the rest.”

“That’s also around the time he won that case involving the Chechens, right?”

Geist nodded.

“Were those flukes?” Karl continued. “What’s his reputation as a lawyer?”

“Corbin practices law alone. He shares offices with his wife, and the two of them use a single secretary. He has a good reputation, but he has handled mostly nickel-and-dime cases. One partner at a large firm said that Corbin didn’t have the resources to handle a major case.”

“That’s useful to know,” replied Karl. He jotted down a note to pass this information along to his lawyers. “What about his personal background?”

“He’s the third child of a Chicago banker and grew up moderately well-off. He played football in high school and made good grades there and in college. He got mostly Bs and Cs in law school, but he got straight As in courses like trial advocacy and moot court.

“He met his wife, Noelle, in college, and they married after his second year in law school, while he was a summer associate at the law firm of Beale & Ripley. They offered him a job when he came back from his honeymoon, and he took it.

“After seven years at Beale & Ripley, he went out on his own last year. Shortly after that, he took on a case involving biological weapons. It received extensive media coverage and led to the breakup of a large terrorist cell.”

“I’m familiar with it,” replied Karl, who had run a Google News search on Corbin. “Anything else I should know about Mr. Corbin?”

“If there is, our searches didn’t uncover it.”

“All right, what about his wife?”

“As you already know, she’s an accountant, who shares offices with her husband. She may have chosen her profession because she comes from a financially troubled family. Her father went through bankruptcy twice, and the family moved frequently because of money problems. Her mother worked two jobs, and both Noelle and her brother went to work when they reached sixteen, probably to help support the family.”

“How was she able to afford college?” Karl said.

“She was valedictorian of her high school class and received a partial scholarship. She also worked part time all four years.”

“I’m impressed. Say, Alex, how much would it cost to have you say no if someone ever asked you to investigate me?”

Geist smiled. “I get that question a lot. I’ll send you my standard fee chart.”

Half an hour later, Sergei’s phone rang.

“Hello, Sergei,” said a man’s voice—familiar, but Sergei couldn’t quite place it. “It’s Alex Geist.”

“Hello, Alex,” Sergei replied in surprise. “What can I do for you?” He hadn’t spoken to Alex the Ghost for several years. Geist was an international intelligence and counterintelligence specialist who had worked for the CIA and military intelligence for decades before retiring and entering the half-life of consultancy. He had advised several foreign governments and a number of multinational corporations, including two that Sergei had investigated while he was at the Bureau. The Ghost’s advice must have been good, because the FBI had come up dry in both investigations, despite the strong suspicions of the investigating team. Sergei had dealt with Geist regularly at the time, and the two had shared a cordial respect despite Sergei’s certainty that Geist’s clients were crooks.

“Are you doing any work involving Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals?” Geist asked.

“You know I can’t tell you that. Why do you ask?”

“And I can’t tell you that. All I can say is that if you’re working on something related to that company, I suggest you be careful.”

Sergei sat in stunned silence for a moment. “Alex, are you threatening me?”

“Of course not. In fact, I don’t think your investigation—if you’re conducting one—will bring you into contact with anyone who will threaten you. However, you may meet people who don’t bother to threaten.”

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

S
PLIT THE
B
ABY

“This is Bjornsen,” Gunnar’s voice announced from Ben’s speakerphone.

Ben picked up the receiver. “Hello, Gunnar. It’s Ben Corbin. I just got an interesting call from Karl’s lawyers.”

“What did they have to say?”

“They’re offering you a deal. If you will tell them how to make the Neurostim product, they’ll drop the lawsuit and pay you a two-percent royalty on all gross sales. You would also have to drop your countersuit. If not, they start a full-court press—reams of discovery requests, motions, and so on. Basically, anything they can think of to drive up your legal bills and pressure you to settle.”

“I’m not interested,” replied Gunnar without hesitation. “I want my company back. I’m not interested in anything less.”

“That’s what I figured,” said Ben. “Do you want to make a counteroffer?”

Gunnar thought for a moment. “Tell them . . . tell them that if Karl resigns as president and agrees never to be active in Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals again, I’ll make as much of the drug as the company needs. I’ll also drop my countersuit. I’ll even give
him
a two-percent royalty on the drug to keep him comfortable in his retirement.”

“That’s actually more generous than I expected you to be.”

A low chuckle rumbled across the phone line. “If I thought there was any chance he’d accept, I’d take a harder line.”

“Since the negotiations are likely to be short, I’d like to wait a few days before delivering your response. There are some things I’ll need to do first.”

The courtrooms at the Daley Center courthouse are strictly functional. They have none of the marble and polished brass of the federal courts, nor the ornate dark-wood elegance of old county-seat courthouses. They are windowless boxes decorated in various shades of easy-to-maintain brown and gray. Low-pile, durable carpet covers the floors, and utilitarian wood benches stand in rows behind the bar, a metal railing that separates the spectator gallery from the rest of the courtroom. In front of the bar sit two benches for witnesses and support personnel, and in front of those are two plain oak counsel tables, one for the plaintiff’s attorneys and one for the defendant’s. The jury box is along one of the sidewalls. The judge’s bench, at the far end of the courtroom, is a massive and complex wood structure that contains a raised desk for the judge, slightly lower workstations for the court reporter and the clerk, and the witness stand, which is on the side of the bench nearest the jury box. The bailiff sits off to one side, though the task of keeping order is usually less demanding in civil courtrooms than in their criminal counterparts.

Ben sat at the back of the gallery in one such courtroom, watching the emergency-motion call of the Honorable Anthony J. Reilly, the judge who had been assigned
Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Bjornsen
. Judge Reilly was in the Chancery Division, the section of the Cook County Circuit Court that handled all requests for “equitable relief,” including Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals’ request for an injunction that would force Gunnar to turn over the Neurostim formula.

The judge had been on the bench for less than two years and had only been in Chancery for a few months. Ben had never had a case before him and wanted to get a sense for how he ran his courtroom before he had to appear in front of him.

At thirty-six, Judge Reilly was the youngest judge in the Daley Center courthouse. He was a tall, athletic man who had played basketball in college—albeit at a Division III school. He had bright-red hair and a fair complexion that flushed easily if he got annoyed or embarrassed, both of which happened while Ben watched. At one point, the judge, whose background was in criminal law, blushed noticeably when he stumbled over a point of civil procedure and had to be corrected by one of the lawyers. Ten minutes later, he turned crimson when a lawyer ignored his instruction to avoid repeating arguments that had already been made in writing in the briefs.

Judge Reilly’s rulings were a mixed bag. There weren’t many that were clearly wrong, but a lot of them were questionable. The judge seemed to always search for a middle ground between the parties, regardless of what the law required. That worried Ben. He was pretty sure that the blitz of motions that Karl’s lawyers had promised would be mostly meritless, but Judge Reilly wasn’t completely denying many motions, regardless of their merit. What if the judge decided to compromise by granting only some of the other side’s unreasonable requests?

Ben slipped out of the courtroom near the end of the hearing and headed back to his office. He stopped in at a deli and picked up a grilled prosciutto-and-avocado sandwich to eat at his desk while he worked. He was going to be very busy over the next few days.

He went straight to Noelle’s office and found her leafing through a fat accordion file of documents festooned with annotated Post-its. He admired her delicate, pretty profile for a moment before interrupting her. “Hi, honey. Those the documents from Gunnar?”

She nodded. “Mm-hmm.”

“Anything interesting?”

She nodded again. “It’s not what I was expecting, though. You said you thought there was WorldCom-type stuff going on at Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals. There isn’t. Or, at least, if there is, these documents don’t show it.”

Ben settled himself into one of the office chairs and took out his sandwich. “So what is going on?”

Her eyes latched onto the sandwich. “Prosciutto and avocado?”

“Yep. From the Washington Street Deli. Want some?”

She hesitated. “I probably shouldn’t.”

“I’m sure it’ll go straight to the baby.”

“Or somewhere nearby. No, thanks.” She pulled her eyes away from the sandwich and selected a document from the accordion file. “WorldCom got into trouble for trying to make their books look better than they were. They would create fake revenue and hide their expenses to boost the profits they reported. Enron used different tricks, but achieved the same basic result. That’s what virtually all public companies do when they commit accounting fraud.”

Ben swallowed a bite of his sandwich. “Except for Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals, right?”

“Right.” She gestured to the document in her hand. “It looks like they’ve actually fudged their numbers to
reduce
profits by three or four million dollars each of the last two years.”

Ben raised his eyebrows. “That’s weird. Are you sure?”

“No. Like I said, it looks that way. But these documents are incomplete; it seems like Gunnar just saved copies of random financial statements and wire transfers that caught his attention. Also, some of the key documents are in Norwegian. Gunnar translated them for me, but he’s not an accountant. What I’ve just told you is a guess, but it’s an educated guess.”

“So why would Karl be trying to keep profits
down
?” Ben asked before taking another bite of his sandwich.

“Good question. I’ve heard of executives doing that to drive down the company’s stock price, but only when they’re planning a buyout and want the company’s market value as low as possible. But that wasn’t Karl’s strategy. He’s been trying to push the stock price up to convince the shareholders that he would do a good job running the company without Gunnar. Besides, reducing or increasing their profits by this much wouldn’t move their stock price at all. Three or four million per year isn’t a lot of money to a company like Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals.”

“But it certainly could be a lot of money to a person like Karl Bjornsen, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” conceded Noelle, “though he and Gwen seem pretty well-off already. Are you thinking of—well, what are you thinking of doing?”

“Sounds like Karl has had his hand in the company till. That should go in Gunnar’s cross-claim.”

“Don’t you think you should have Sergei look into it first?”

“Not a bad idea.”

“How long do you think that will take?”

Ben grinned. “How long would you like it to take?”

“I’ve got a meeting of the special-exhibits support committee next Monday, and Gwen will be there. It would be great if you didn’t accuse her husband of embezzlement before then.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Kim was enjoying her summer job. She arrived at Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals every morning at eight and put on a lab coat with “Kim L. Young, Medical Intern” embroidered on the left breast pocket. For some reason, the lab coat did more to make her feel like a real researcher than the actual work she was doing. She went to the bathroom at every opportunity during her first few days so she would have an excuse to look in the mirror and see a scientist looking back at her. She had dyed her hair back to its original glossy black and pulled it into a serious-looking ponytail. That, combined with the crisp new lab coat, made her look nothing like the fun-loving sorority girl she had been just a few weeks ago. She could see the future Dr. Young in her reflection, and she liked it.

She spent most of her days in a big room lined from ceiling to floor with animal cages. On one wall were large cages that held two or three monkeys each. The cages on the other side of the room were smaller and held only one monkey each. A lab table with various instruments and documents ran down the middle of the room.

Half of the monkeys were receiving a new drug the company was developing, and the other half were the control group. The control-group monkeys were in the multi-animal cages, while the monkeys receiving the drug were in the single cages. Ideally, all of the monkeys would have had their own cages, but doubling up the control-group animals saved money. Besides, the monkeys seemed to like it.

Each morning, Kim and one of the researchers visited the primate room to feed the animals, clean their cages, collect urine and feces samples, give them their morning dose of the drug, check whether any of them was showing adverse effects, and so on. From the hallway, Kim could hear the monkeys chattering to each other, but when she opened the door they would invariably turn up the volume, breaking into a chorus of hoots and screeches and rattling their cages. This had unnerved her at first, but soon she discovered that they were trying to get the attention of her companion, a friendly, talkative young woman appropriately named Dr. Kathy Chatterton. Dr. Chatterton was a pretty blonde in her early thirties. Like Kim, she had grown up in Southern California and had gone to a big SoCal university—graduating from USC, the crosstown rival of Kim’s UCLA. The two women immediately liked each other, and Kim thought happily that she had found her mentor for the summer.

In her pockets Dr. Chatterton carried mini marshmallows, which she distributed as rewards to animals that behaved themselves while she checked their cages. She’d confided to Kim that Dr. Gene Kleinbaum—head of animal studies at Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals—would probably blow a gasket if he knew the monkeys were getting marshmallows every day, even though the amount of sugar was minimal and wouldn’t affect the drug trial. Kim had promised to keep her secret.

The part of her work that Kim enjoyed most was when she and Dr. Chatterton took a few of their charges to the exercise room, a spare storage room that had been converted into a makeshift monkey gym, complete with balls, tree branches, and a slide and climbing bars donated by a scientist whose children had outgrown them. Visits to the exercise room were treats for both the monkeys and their keepers. The monkeys got to run free and play, and the keepers got to relax and talk while nominally watching the monkeys through a Plexiglas observation window.

When the daily exercise was done, Dr. Chatterton and Kim put some fruit or marshmallows in the cages to coax the monkeys back and then closed the gates once the animals were inside. After a few weeks, Dr. Chatterton let Kim handle this job on her own. It was a simple and safe task, perfect for an intern.