The Key (4 page)

T
he mouse suddenly felt like a burning coal, and I grabbed my hand away. I had the sinister sensation there was someone else in the room, a presence at my shoulder.

There was nobody there, obviously, and the dark night outside meant I could see nothing through the window but my own reflection, yet I still had the eerie feeling I was being watched. I yanked the shade down.

Then I read the e-mail again.

Perry’s dirty and so is this deal.

And they’ve done it before.

The questions started flowing into my brain, but it took a couple of minutes before I could get over how creeped out I was to even articulate them, let alone begin to address them.

First, who was [email protected]? And why was he e-mailing me? Here, at home, on my personal e-mail account? How had he even found my personal account?

Second, how was the deal dirty? I wasn’t surprised to hear somebody else thought so, too, but Man of the People had been a little stingy with the details.

Third, what, exactly, had they done before? And who were “they” supposed to be?

And fourth—well, I was back to Question One, Part Two—why was Man of the People e-mailing
me?

“Rach?”

I shrieked. The entire concept of jumping out of one’s skin made sense in a way it never had before.

“Sorry—I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that dinner’s served.”

I gaped at Peter.

“You remember dinner? The logical outcome of what I was working on in the kitchen? I know the entire dining-in thing is a bit novel and usually involves the delivery guy being buzzed up, but I promise there’s food on the table.”

“You need to see this,” I told him.

“Can it wait? I don’t want everything to get cold.”

“I don’t think so.”

He came around to my side of the desk and leaned over my shoulder to look at the screen.

“You just got this?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“On your personal account?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t know who this Man of the People guy is or why he’s e-mailing you, much less how he got your e-mail?”

“No.”

“That’s sort of creepy.”

“It’s very creepy.”

Peter convinced me it would be unwise to discuss matters any further on an empty stomach. I plopped myself down at the table and allowed him to cut me a large slice of lasagna and top off my wine.

The food was delicious—much better than anything that came out of a box—but it was hard to give it the attention it deserved. Under Peter’s careful questioning, I fleshed out the details of the Thunderbolt deal. We weren’t supposed to discuss work with people external to the firm, but it was common knowledge that nobody obeyed that rule with spouses and significant others.

“I knew there was something wrong with this whole thing,” I told him. “The company’s practically in the toilet but meanwhile Nicholas Perry wants to do a buyout and Gallagher can’t wait to help make it happen. I bet Gallagher’s part of the ‘they’ somehow.”

“At the very least, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out what Perry’s done before, or even if Gallagher was involved, too.”

We left the dishes on the table and returned to the study. My desk chair wasn’t really big enough for two, but we squished onto it together. It was probably a good thing I’d passed on the third helping of lasagna.

A page on Thunderbolt’s own Web site providing biographies of its management team quickly yielded the answer to our first question. Several years ago, Perry had been CEO of another company, this one, like Thunderbolt, a major defense contractor. I recognized its name—Tiger Defense Enterprises—immediately. One of the Lucite deal mementos lining Gallagher’s credenza bore its logo.

“What do tigers have to do with tanks or body armor or whatever this company makes?” asked Peter.

“Nothing. But a tiger is the Princeton mascot. That’s where Gallagher and Perry met.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“It’s better than Thunderbolt.”

“Not by much.”

Apparently the Tiger buyout, under Perry’s leadership, had been very successful. Perry had not only added the Tiger to the company name, he’d implemented an impressive turnaround. The company then sold shares to the public at a price considerably higher than the buyout price. Perry’s investor group more than tripled their money in a comparatively short timeframe. And Ryan Brothers, Gallagher’s old firm, had handled both the original buyout and the offering when the company went public again. Perry was lauded as a management guru and left Tiger shortly after to join Thunderbolt as CEO.

“So they have done it before,” Peter said.

“Yes. But I don’t know what’s dirty about it. If anything, it’s a textbook LBO. Take a failing company, buy it out, improve operations, and then sell it at a nice fat profit.”

“Why don’t we just ask him?”

“Who? Perry? Or Gallagher? I don’t think either of them is going to be too receptive to my asking how their last joint venture was corrupt. They didn’t seem too forthcoming when I tried to figure out what’s going on with the deal they’ve got on the table now.”

“No—not them. I meant your new friend. Man of the People.”

I thought about this. It was one thing to talk things over with Peter, but it was quite another to engage in any sort of discussion with an anonymous correspondent. “If anything, I should probably be reporting him somehow. Communicating about a deal underway with somebody whose real name I don’t even know is the sort of thing that falls into the strictly
verboten
category.”

“Give me a few minutes to play around a bit with the e-mail address. Maybe I can find out more about who this guy is.”

“How?”

“Rachel,” he reminded me, “I’m sort of a geek.”

“So that’s why there are suddenly all of those
Star Trek
episodes on the TiVo.”

“Worried that I’ll record over your
Dawson’s Creek
reruns?”

“I still get a rush every time Joey chooses Pacey over Dawson.” I went to clear the table.

I rinsed the dishes and added them to the dirty pots and pans already in the dishwasher, another rarely used appliance. I rummaged under the sink, located a box of detergent that bore the logo of a long-since bankrupt grocery chain, poured some powder in, and selected the Power Scrub function.

The casserole was still half-full of lasagna, so I covered it with tinfoil and slid it into the refrigerator, noting with yet more astonishment that I actually had to rearrange one of the shelves to find room. Peter had bought more than the ingredients for lasagna. It was peculiar to see my fridge, which usually held only a limited selection of life’s basic necessities—Diet Coke, white wine, and hot sauce—harboring a more usual assortment of groceries. There was actually butter in the butter compartment and eggs in the little indentations on the shelf alongside.

Peter was hunched over the computer when I returned. “Any luck?” I asked.

He sounded frustrated. “I’m not as much of a geek as I thought.”

“That’s probably not a bad thing,” I said, perching on the arm of the chair beside him.

“All I could figure out is that he’s using an e-mail resend service. It’s pretty sophisticated, too. It’s not a commercial service but a program that some hard-core techies set up for themselves.”

“So you think he’s a hard-core techie?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he’s just friends with one. Either way, I can’t get to any information about where the e-mail may have originated. Usually you can track down the various stops a message makes as it goes over the Internet, but the service he used erased all that. I’m afraid that the only way we’re going to find out more is if you e-mail him back.”

“I’m tempted to. But it’s a bit of a quandary, in terms of professional ethics.”

“If the deal is dirty, don’t you have an obligation to find out how?”

“I think I’d be supposed to report it to Winslow, Brown’s legal department or the Securities and Exchange Commission or something. But I don’t even know it’s dirty, and if I make a stink at the office without any proof, Gallagher will probably try to have me fired. He’s already gunning for me.”

“Maybe this guy can give you some proof. Would it be such a big deal to e-mail him and ask for more detail? You wouldn’t be sharing any privileged information.”

I was torn. The easiest thing to do would be to delete the e-mail as if it was another piece of spam, but I was too curious to do that. The by-the-book thing to do would be to show the e-mail to the firm’s legal department, but I had no desire to incur further Gallagher wrath. And the tempting thing to do was to e-mail Man of the People back.

“You know, there are ways to cover your tracks,” said Peter.

“You’re like the little devil guy standing on my shoulder, trying to lead me astray.”

“But I cook like an angel.”

I had an idea. “Maybe I should call Jake and tell him about this. Get his opinion.” Peter was used to the more rough-and-tumble startup world, without the bureaucracy and lawyers and regulatory oversight. Jake had a better sense of the context than Peter, and he would also have an appreciation for my concerns about things like Gallagher and the SEC.

“Jake? Jake from work?”

“Maybe he’ll know what to do.” I checked my Black-Berry for his cell phone number.

“Are you sure you can trust him?”

“Of course I can trust him.” Jake and I had been friends even before we’d started working on this deal; several grueling days spent under Gallagher’s command had further cemented that bond. Besides, I would never have told him about Gallagher’s pass if I didn’t trust him, and Jake had been kind and supportive, eager to rush to my defense while also being discreet.

But I couldn’t explain all of that to Peter without opening up a whole can of worms I’d prefer to keep closed. “One mysterious e-mail and suddenly you’re suspicious of everyone,” I said instead.

“You barely know him.”

“I know him well enough. He’s a really good guy.”

It didn’t matter anyway. Jake’s phone went straight into voice mail. I hesitated but didn’t leave a message. It was late—he was probably asleep.

When I disconnected, Peter was looking at me, his fingers poised over the keyboard. And I was still torn.

“When you said there are ways to cover my tracks, what did you mean, precisely?”

I
found myself back in Gallagher’s office first thing Tuesday with a strange sense of déjà vu. Yet again, it was way too early for a meeting, and yet again, I hadn’t gotten anywhere near enough sleep.

It had been close to one by the time Peter had set up a new e-mail account for me at a free service and we’d e-mailed Man of the People via the same resend provider he’d used. The e-mail—a simple and noncommittal request for more information—had been the easy part. It was the tracks-covering part that had taken so long. Peter had run a number of different programs he promised would erase all traces of Man of the People and our response from my computer. I’d never realized that paranoia could be so time-consuming.

“I feel like a criminal,” I’d said.

“Look, this guy is probably a crackpot and it won’t amount to anything. But it’s not like you’re telling him anything you shouldn’t, and if you do find out there’s something corrupt about this deal, you’ll have the facts you need instead of just pissing off Gallagher.”

“He’s already pissed off.”

“Well, instead of pissing him off more.”

What Peter said made sense, but I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. The very act of track-covering was an admission that I was fully aware what I was doing was wrong on some level, even if Gallagher’s attitude left me with little choice.

By the time we got to sleep, it was after two, and it seemed as if the alarm went off only a moment later. It made me cranky that Peter got to roll over and go back to sleep, and it made me even crankier to have to take my things into the bathroom to get ready so I wouldn’t wake him again.

The bathroom was a small room to start with, and for a man without much vanity, Peter had a lot of toiletries—toiletries that were taking up a disproportionate share of space in the shower and on the countertop. It had been handy to have him around the previous night, to have his help in figuring out how to respond to mysterious e-mails and hide the traces of my potentially criminal actions, not to mention the homemade meal, but there was nothing like accidentally taking a big slug of aftershave (the bottle of which bore a sly resemblance to my mouthwash) to bring home the practical realities of sharing an apartment in New York.

Given that he’d set the meeting time, Gallagher evidently didn’t mind the hour; besides, his face was always haggard. At least he’d actually shown up on time today. Jake looked like he’d just returned from a month of lounging on a Tahitian beach, and Mark was his usual bland self, but I was all too conscious of the dark hollows under my eyes and the bitter taste of aftershave in my mouth. We were in our same seats from the previous morning, and my hands had already assumed their tight grips on the armrests of my chair in anticipation of another dose of verbal abuse. Gallagher didn’t disappoint.

“This is crap,” he announced without preamble, tossing his copy of the materials we’d spent most of the previous afternoon and evening preparing into the trash. In obscenity-laden detail, he began enumerating the changes we’d need to make before the conference call he’d scheduled with Perry for later that day.

The buzz of the intercom interrupted him. He hit a button to put the phone on speaker. “Yeah?”

“It’s your lawyer on line one,” said Dahlia.

“Got it. And brew a fresh pot of coffee. The stuff you brought me tastes like crap.” Gallagher hit another button on the phone. “Barry? How are the papers coming along?”

“We’ll be ready to file in a couple of days,” answered the disembodied voice.

“Let me know when the delivery’s confirmed. Not that I won’t hear from her the second she opens the envelope.” The lawyer said something in response, and Gallagher said something back, and I settled in for another session of listening to Gallagher charmingly air his dirty laundry.

I managed to tune out most of the conversation, but when he selected a pencil from the silver mug and rammed it into the sharpener, I couldn’t block it out. Nor did I trust myself not to laugh if I caught Jake’s eye after yesterday’s discourse on “the pencil thing.” Instead, I kept my gaze fixed stolidly ahead and tried to think about sad things, like abandoned puppies and global warming.

Sure enough, Gallagher inserted the newly sharpened end into his mouth and sucked on it, long and hard.

I dug my nails into my palms, trying to distract myself with the pain. Beside me, Jake made a weird noise that somehow combined a snort and a cough. Even Mark was pressing his lips together tightly, as if trying to ensure that no sound escaped.

Gallagher didn’t seem to notice. He hung up a moment later and resumed his critique of our work as if there’d been no interruption.

“That’s it,” he said finally, after thoroughly ripping to shreds everything we’d done thus far. “I want to see another draft of everything by noon. Capiche?”

“Capiche,” answered Jake.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Get out of here.” Hardly inspiring words, but anything that involved leaving his office sounded good to me.

We were almost out the door when he called us back. My earlier sense of déjà vu returned. At least today he wanted us all and not just me.

“There’s one other thing.”

He selected a fresh pencil from the mug, and we waited as he repeated his ritual with the sharpener. This time I had to work so hard not to react I worried that I might choke. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Jake’s shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.

Thoughtfully, Gallagher lifted the pencil to his lips, and thoughtfully, he inserted the newly sharpened tip into his mouth as we waited for his final instructions.

But when he withdrew the pencil and opened his mouth to speak, all that emerged was a tortured gasp.

His eyeballs bulged, and a gurgle escaped from his throat, flecking his lips with blood-stained foam. His body jerked with spasms that pitched him out of his chair and onto the floor. His limbs flailed on the carpet as a horrifying wheezing sound came from his mouth.

I rushed to the door, to get help or tell someone to call an ambulance, but then the room went silent behind me.

Slowly, I turned around.

Gallagher lay still on his back, his eyes wide and unseeing.

It was all over in a matter of seconds.