Cash Burn (35 page)

“Yeah. It’s like a car wreck, man. Just watching to see what happens. That’s all.” He backed up a step toward the door. “Hey, one thing. Like I said, I like you. You ever need a wingman, look me up. This is my neighborhood. Ask anybody for Luis.”

The spider crept out.

55

Brenda slid the passports out of the cardboard envelope and spread them before Jason. Three for him, three for her. Each cover was embossed with the emblem of a different country. They would be Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders. He flipped one open. He would have to memorize his new names.

“How did you do this?”

“I told you—I know some people who know some people. That whole six-degrees-of-separation thing.” She still wore her work clothes, and Jason hadn’t removed his jacket yet. They’d been in her apartment for only five minutes, but everything was changing. The whole world was changing.

His face stared back at him from inside the passport, the picture embossed into the page. He held it under a lamp to try to see how they had inserted it, angled it under the light, but he saw no imperfections in the surface of the page.

When he held this document out to the customs official, that face would be the face of a fugitive.

The other two were equally well done. If there were any flaws in the documents, they were beyond his ability to see.

“They look good. Really good.” They were the last piece of the puzzle. With these, he could establish the overseas accounts. And the two of them could travel without leaving a trail.

Underneath his starched shirt, a drop of sweat trickled down from his chest and lodged near his belt.

He ran a finger over his brow and it came away wet.

“What’s the matter?”

He slipped his new identities into the inside pocket of his jacket. The credit memo covering the $30-million loan to Northfield was nearly finished. A loan the company had never applied for. A loan the management of Northfield knew nothing about.

Sweat was breaking out from every crease of his body. It was the passports that were doing it to him. Even the credit memo as he’d drafted it had the taint of fantasy to it. It was still a game, and at any point he could fold up the board, box up the pieces, put it on a shelf, and walk away. But now he and Brenda had passports, and good ones at that.

Too good.

“How exactly did you get these?”

She smiled. “A lady never reveals her secrets.” She stepped to him and slid her arms around him, her hands moving up to his shoulders, his neck, the back of his head. In an instant, her lips would be on his and he would be finished.

He pulled away. “No, really. I want to know how you got these.”

Her hands moved back to his shoulders. She let her eyes roam over his face, his chest, back to his eyes. “I told you. I know this girl from college whose daddy has connections.”

“Who’s the girl and who’s her daddy?”

“Darlin’, what’s the matter with you? You wanted me to get the passports, and I got them. They’re good. Real. I don’t know how they got them, but they did. They swapped out the pictures or something. She said they should be good for at least a few weeks. That’ll get us wherever we want to go.”

“And what makes you think you can trust her?”

“She was my best friend in college. I know I can trust her. You’re just going to have to take my word for it.” She stared at him a moment, her head turning, eyes at an angle toward him, and that smile crept back onto her face. “Come on over to the sofa, darlin’.”

She pulled at him, and he obeyed. They sank into the cushions together, and her hands began to move over him again. “I love it that you’re so taken up in the details, Jason. It’s what’s going to make this work. You’ll get that loan approved tomorrow, you’ll get the accounts opened and funded. It’s happening, Jason. We’re going away together. You and me, forever.”

Her hands coasted over his arms and chest; her face was close enough for him to feel its warmth. She pressed against him, her breath a caress on his neck. He wanted to tell her to stop, but with every sensation he weakened.

Instead, he said, “So how many people know about this? There’s your friend, her father, the passport guy. Who else?”

She didn’t stop the movement of her hands. “Nobody knows, Jason. Not really.” She brought her lips to his neck, his ear, his cheek, her hands pulling him to her. “All they know is they did a favor for my friend. They saw those photos—that’s all. Nobody knows our names. Don’t worry, darlin’. We’re going away together.”

She pulled him toward her, but he resisted. It was maddening. It had gotten out of his control. Others were in on it now. It had gone beyond a game with a pretty girl. Beyond revenge for Serena’s affair, beyond getting even with Vince and Mark and the whole bank system that had brought him to this place of desperation and fury. And yet, Brenda . . .

She would not relent. Her hands, her lips. Every inch of his flesh cried out to her with an urgent reach. The longer he endured her touch, the weaker he became. Stories filtered through his mind—of a man strapped to the mast of a ship to prevent him from yielding to a siren song, of a man shorn of his hair and blinded by his enemies, abandoned by his God. Where were the mast ties now? Where was God when he needed him?

Here. Here in her arms, her hands, the movement of her body against his, a cascade of motion and desire, Brenda, her eyes the green of a sea in sunshine, her skin milky, tender and hot, her flesh—here was his god.

56

Across the boardroom table, Scotty Inverness scooted in and perched his reading glasses on the tip of his nose. “Somebody get the door,” he said.

Behind Jason, the doors drew to a close with the finality of a vault door sealing. Or a tomb. The sound of it made Jason’s stomach wrench.

He had the bitter taste of bile in his mouth. Air seemed to swirl around inside his head. His heart hammered at his rib cage as if looking for an escape route. His empty stomach was a pestle grinding against the bowl of his abdomen.

He clenched a handkerchief—the only one he owned. It was damp already, and the meeting hadn’t even begun. With Scotty’s eyes averted, Jason lifted the palmed handkerchief and swept it across his brow.

Scotty tilted his head back to read through his glasses. He spoke a name, and a lender to Jason’s left began a recital he’d no doubt practiced in front of a mirror all morning.

Vince had a question about the credit. Mark listened and gave his spin on what he knew about the applicants. Hanson and Granger monitored the tide of opinion before weighing in. Scotty listened quietly as he always did. Soon he would bring this one to a head, and they would be on to the next one.

For the hundredth time, Jason reviewed the agenda. His Northfield deal was fifth. He would have to endure three more discussions after this one. Then it would be his turn.

He flipped through his memo. Each committee member had a copy. It contained information he’d cut from other write-ups about Northfield—background needed in every presentation. But what was igniting the butterflies in his stomach was not what was true in the memo. He’d falsified so much in this report that even he as its author was beginning to question what was real and what wasn’t. He’d chosen a European competitor as the acquisitions target Northfield was supposed to buy. Drusseaux Industries. Northfield had battled against them for decades. It was better than using a fictional company. Occasionally some of these committee members got the wild notion to do a little research of their own for a deal, especially a deal of this size.

He wiped his forehead again. Beneath his jacket, beneath his oxford shirt, beneath the tie that threatened to choke the breath out of him, his T-shirt was as wet as the rags they used at the car wash.

Every butterfly he’d ever felt before a committee presentation was back—with friends. They fluttered against his stomach wall, a whole flock of them tumbling against one another.

Swallowing did nothing to remove the bitterness in his mouth. His tongue was dry. A pitcher of ice water beaded into a plastic tray before him. He wanted a drink, but the thought of pouring water into one of the glasses standing around the pitcher—the ice cascading down into the glass and splashing the table, the attention it would draw to him, the freezing water inching painfully down his gullet—was enough to keep his hands in his lap. He clenched the handkerchief.

In the back of his mouth, his tongue began to cramp. It was the first sign of a threat that he might throw up.

He had an image of himself vomiting all over the table. That would be a first in committee. He tried to amuse himself with it, but it only made things worse. His throat opened, his stomach knotted.

He had to get out.

His cell phone. That was his excuse. He quickly pulled it out of his pocket, pretended to check an e-mail, and turned to the lender seated next to him.

“I’ll be right back.”

The lender looked at him with an expression of complete bewilderment as Jason rose from his chair.

He tapped the phone’s screen as if entering letters as he approached the door like an escape hatch, and then held the phone to his ear as if an urgent call couldn’t wait for the end of the meeting.

He rattled the door to a close behind him. The chairman’s sphinx of a secretary lifted her goggled eyes to inspect this escapee. He nodded to her and tried a smile with the phone plastered to his ear, ducked his head, and exited the suite. Gulping, trying to forestall the inevitable, he pocketed the device and made for the bathroom like a man on fire. He burst in. The first stall was empty. He had no time to lock the stall door, just leaned over the porcelain and tried to keep his tie out of the way.

No butterflies came out. Just the remnants of the dry toast and coffee he’d choked down this morning over the protests of a throat and belly wanting nothing inside.

He spun a handful of toilet paper off the roll and wadded it against his mouth. One hand against the wall, his head ached and swam.

There was no way he could go back in there. It was hard enough to get a real loan approved. This would be impossible. The questions would turn him into a blathering idiot. He would break down and sob in front of every key decision maker in the bank. The truth would come out. They would escort him out of the building and onto the street. Or worse, they might prosecute him. He could spend years in prison for trying this. What was he thinking?

The door to the men’s room pounded open.

“Dunn!” Vince’s voice.

Jason lifted his head. “Yeah.”

“What are you doing? You’re up.”

The sound of that voice stirred the fibers in Jason’s back, and he straightened. “Sorry. I’ll be right there.”

“Well, hurry up. It’s costing the bank a fortune with all this talent sitting around waiting for you.”

The door sighed to a close, and Jason was alone again.

Any butterflies in Jason’s stomach lay dormant now. Good old Vince.
Count on him to remind you why you hate this place more than you dread prison.
Jason wiped the back of his hand across his lips and flushed. At the sink, the water he swirled in his mouth did little to remove the sour taste, but splashing a bit on his face helped his vacant appearance.

He stood straight and looked in the mirror. For an instant, he saw the battered face of his brother Philip staring back.

He shook his head “I’m not him. Let’s do this.”

He returned to the boardroom.

Mark jumped right on him. “Nice of you to join us.”

“Sorry. Mother Nature.” He managed to get into his chair without tumbling over it and onto the floor. “Do you want a presentation? You all know Northfield.”

Scotty looked at him with one eyebrow perked. “I’m sure everyone would like to know what you’re thinking here.”

So Jason launched into it. Like a junior lender, he’d rehearsed this one in his mind for days. A brief nod to the Northfield relationship, their repayment of all debt a month ago after their stock offering brought sixty million onto their balance sheet, the profitability of the accounts over the past year. He even had a figure for how much the bank had made from the relationship since he’d brought it in six years ago. It was a generous estimate, but no one questioned the number.

Once he was into the monologue, his nervousness settled into a simmering boil. He guided them to page thirteen of the memo, where he’d summarized the cost savings Northfield could expect to achieve by eliminating management of Drusseaux and other redundant overhead. On page fourteen he’d laid out the effect of the acquisition on Northfield’s income statement. He floated the expected words,
accretive
and
cash flow impact
and
ROI
, and called the committee’s attention to the detailed pro forma balance sheet in the addendum.

It was Granger of all people who piped up first. “Can’t we sell down some of this? Thirty million’s a big bite for us.”

Jason stared at him. Paper-white hair layered over a scalp darkened by hours on golf courses around town, this pencil pusher was usually the last one to speak up. How did he expect to make points with this kind of a question? BTB needed every dollar of loan outstandings after all the payoffs of the past six months.

“We can try to do that on the back end. We don’t have time to bring another bank up to speed. Northfield wants to close this thing before the news of it leaks out. They’re already seeing some increased volume in their stock.” This much was true, but it had nothing to do with Jason’s false acquisition.

Granger flipped through the memo. “We can move fast.”

With a start, Jason remembered that Granger now ran the syndications group. The income from selling half of this credit to another bank would be a shot in the arm for his group with year-end approaching. But getting another bank involved would expose the whole thing. They would want to meet with management, conduct their own due diligence.

“No,” Jason said. “This is moving too fast. There’s no time. Besides, we’ve had more out to Northfield than this. They’d think we didn’t have the stomach for it. It would risk losing the whole relationship.”