The Successor (26 page)

Not promising, Dorsey thought. But he gave them a minute to soften up.

“That’s right,” the one who had been interrogating the officer finally confirmed. “You heard the man in there,” he said, gesturing toward the glass. “The president’s been careful on this, as he should be after signing an assassination order. He set up D-ring with his own people. They’re the planners, and they’re insulated from us.”

The older men shared a triumphant laugh.

“At least, they’re supposed to be insulated from us,” the one who’d been speaking continued, holding up a copy of the assassination order. “They coordinated with intel on the ground in Cuba and with the people who met with Dr. Padilla when he came to the States.” He rolled his eyes. “And the president put Dex Kelly in charge over at the White House. Kelly has authority to change any part of the plan right up until the meeting with Padilla in Miami is done. Then
we
take over. Then it’s our show. Then we coordinate with the Rangers and the SEALs. That’s when it’ll get fun.”

Dorsey’s eyes narrowed. “You guys aren’t really retired.”

They shared another loud laugh.

“Gee, Lloyd,” the man who’d sat next to him during the interrogation said. “Guess that’s why you’re going to be the next president. You’re sharp as a fucking tack, aren’t you?”

“Hey,” Dorsey snapped angrily, “I don’t need to—”

“Easy, Senator, easy,” the other one said smoothly. “Officially, we are retired. Unofficially, we’re as active as we ever were at the Company.” He smiled again. “This arrangement just makes it a little easier to set things up. The only problem is, it makes things harder to control, too.” He pointed at Dorsey. “Which means you’re exactly right. We need as many moles as possible. As many people as possible helping us get Gillette to Miami. Telling us what he’s doing all the time, watching him to make sure the Cubans or anyone else aren’t planning something. Once we take over,” he said calmly, holding up the assassination order, “everything’s jake. But we have to make absolutely certain it gets to that point. We have to take any step necessary. Because if we don’t, if somehow things get fucked up, everything’s lost. Including you becoming president.”

Dorsey set his jaw firmly. He’d call Victoria tonight when he got home and promise her anything to get the information from her—whom she had working on Gillette. Even tell her that he’d asked his wife for a divorce. This was a chance to realize his greatest dream. Nothing was going to stop him.

CHRISTIAN HAD ALWAYS LIKED
the 21 Club. It was cozy, like being in someone’s living room with its big upholstered chairs and long, thick drapes dangling next to the windows. And people gave you your space here, no matter who you were. It was nice that way.

He was sitting at a small table in front of one of the tall windows. It was pouring rain and windy outside—a late-May deluge brought on by a cold front roaring in from the west. Which was probably why Allison was fifteen minutes late. People were hurrying along the sidewalk, hunched down beneath umbrellas, bundled up in trench coats. It had gotten chilly today when the cold front reached the city.

He turned away from the window and sipped his orange juice, watching people talk—mostly business types—at the crowded, dark wood bar in front of the far wall. There’d probably been a lot of megadeals put together at that bar over the years, he realized. Mapped out in principle on paper napkins after a six-pack of Scotches or martinis. He was becoming so much more attuned to history as he was getting older. He could almost see the Manhattan deal-making titans of the past and present—Rohatyn, Gleacher, Peterson, Wasserstein, Trump, Kravis, and Schwarzman—standing at that bar bartering billions.

He glanced down and took a deep breath. God, he felt awful about Jim Marshall. He’d never seen it coming, never even considered the possibility that the man might commit suicide. It was just that the idea was so foreign to him—a human being taking his own life. How could things get that desperate? But Marshall had done it, and now Christian was feeling wave after wave of guilt crash onto his shores.

“Hi, there.”

Christian looked up. “Hi, Ally.” He stood up as she propped her wet umbrella against the wall. “Let me get that.” He helped her off with her raincoat and draped it over the back of the third chair around the table. “Bad night, huh?”

“Terrible,” she agreed, sitting down after Christian pulled the chair out for her. “But the rain’s supposed to be gone by tomorrow morning. Tomorrow’s supposed to be beautiful.” She waved to a waiter. “Grey Goose martini, straight up, please.”

“Working late?” Christian asked, settling back into his chair.

“Yup.”

“With Sherry?”

“Yup.”

Allison still seemed uptight, still not herself. It was as if they just couldn’t get past this wall that had suddenly risen up between them. And it seemed to be getting higher and wider all the time. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Still pretty shook up about Jim’s suicide. I keep thinking about him taking that leap off the balcony, actually being so unhappy he could do that.”

“Me, too.” Christian’s eyes dropped to the tabletop. “It’s awful,” he said, his voice barely audible over the background music and the dull hum of conversation. “I feel sick about it. I misjudged him, I thought he was stronger.”

“Yeah, well…”

“I know you were close to him, I know you cared about him.”

“I felt bad for him,” Allison said. “He was going through a lot.”

Christian glanced up, still wondering exactly how close she’d been to Jim Marshall. But her expression wasn’t giving him any answers, and, even though he wanted to, he couldn’t ask her if they’d ever been intimate.

They were quiet until the server delivered Allison’s martini.

Christian waited for her to take a sip, then spoke up. “You know, people are—”

“What’s your—”

They’d started talking at almost the same instant. Christian motioned for her to keep going.

“No, no,” she said. “You go ahead.”

“I was just going to say that I think people are excited about you becoming vice chairman.” Most of the e-mails he’d gotten about her promotion had been very positive. But a couple of the big investors—older men—had questioned the decision. They’d asked in their replies to the announcement if a woman in her early thirties was really ready to run Everest Capital when Christian wasn’t around. He’d replied that she was
absolutely
ready, italics and all. “A lot of people at Everest have come up to me and told me they think it’s great. I didn’t know if I would before I made the announcement, but now I kind of like having an official successor.”

“What about the big investors?” she asked. “I’ve heard from a lot of people, too, which is nice. But a couple of the bigger investors haven’t called or e-mailed. Other than Victoria Graham.”

“It’s all good.” He didn’t want to tell her about the doubt, didn’t want to do anything to dampen the mood. It was the first time they’d been alone like this in a long while, and he suddenly realized how much he’d missed it. How much he’d missed her.

“Are you telling me the truth?”

Christian took a swallow of orange juice. “There will always be doubters, Ally. People doubted me when I first took over Everest Capital, when Bill Donovan was murdered. You just have to prove them wrong.” He laughed. “And damn, it’s not like I’m going anywhere anytime soon. So I wish we could get off this.” But he saw that she still needed encouragement. “Look, all that matters is that
I
think you’ll do a great job if, for whatever reason, I’m not around.”

“Thanks.” She fiddled with the paper napkin beneath her martini glass for a few moments, folding each corner over before looking up. “Hey, what’s your favorite movie?”

Christian put his head back and laughed. “You’ve been hanging around Victoria Graham too much lately.”

“I’m serious, what is it?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Come on, Chris.”

Ms. Graham asked him that question every time he saw her, but he’d never come clean. It was a game between them at this point. “What did you tell her yours was?”

“If you’re not going—”

“Maybe I will if you tell me.”

“
Out of Africa.
”

“That one with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep?”

She nodded. “Now you tell me yours.”

He grinned. “Well, I…” His voice faded.

“See,
that’s
the trouble,” she snapped. “I give but you don’t give
back.
”

“Come on, Ally, I don’t—”

“I was thinking maybe your favorite movie would have something to do with a man going through his midlife crisis.”

Christian’s eyes snapped to hers. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’ve heard about you seeing a woman half your age.”

Christian caught his breath. “Okay, I’ve had a couple of dinners with someone.” There was no reason to deny it. Obviously, she knew. He’d find out who the informant was later. “She’s a friend.”

Allison glared at him for a few seconds, then stood up and grabbed her coat. “I’ve gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow at the office.”

Christian didn’t even watch her walk away this time. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. Actually, she wouldn’t be seeing him at the office tomorrow. Early in the morning he was headed down to Maryland to meet with Dex Kelly—and to see Beth.

ALANZO GOMEZ
had no intention of keeping the business of Los Secretos Seis a secret. He had worked many years to become a first vice president of the Central Bank of Cuba.
Too
many years to get where he was to blow it on some silly idea that Cuba could be free of the Party. As everyone knew, that was an utter impossibility. And, if everything worked out as it looked like it would, he would be president of the bank soon. The current president had only one year left before retirement, and it was clear that Gomez was his successor. Everyone said so. As far as he saw it, he had every incentive to make certain Los Secretos Seis
didn’t
stay a secret. And it wasn’t that he was worried that they might actually succeed, it was that he figured he could curry favor from the highest of ranks by exposing the conspiracy.

Gomez unlocked the door of his modest villa and moved inside quietly, his wife and two beautiful teenage daughters upstairs asleep. He’d been working late tonight on a top-secret project—a loan from China. The Chinese government had approached the regime a few months ago with a proposal, a good proposal for a $20 billion ten-year loan Cuba badly needed—though only a few people inside the government really knew
how
badly the island needed the money. Basically, the infrastructure was falling apart because glue and duct tape could get you only so far. But glue and duct tape were all they’d had for decades without Big Brother—without the Soviet Union. Now they wanted Big Brother back, even if it wasn’t the same one.

China’s proposal had seemed perfect on the surface, when they were secretly negotiating the major points verbally around the table in a glistening conference room full of antiques and fine art at the last meeting in Paris. But, as always, the devil was in the details. There were several clauses buried deep in the first draft of the three-hundred-page document that Cuba couldn’t abide by—no matter how badly they needed the money. At least, that was what he had been told initially. The clauses included the pledge of all assets held in foreign banks; the pledge of certain Cuban land, actually requiring the government to subrogate its sovereign rights to China; and allowing China to influence domestic policy if the Central Bank of Cuba ever fell behind on payments or broke a major covenant.

Gomez had managed to negotiate away all but the two nastiest provisions: China’s ability to construct and maintain two huge military bases on the island—one land-based, the other naval—and their ability to secretly install offensive nuclear missiles around the island as well as man the sites without any Cuban monitoring. It wasn’t that they would do that immediately, they claimed, but they wanted permission right up front in the loan agreement. He’d tried as hard as he could to have those provisions removed, but to no avail. The Chinese had agreed to take out each of the other clauses—albeit grudgingly—but not the last two. Gomez had recognized early on that the first few clauses had been put in there as throwaways against the military base and nuclear missile provisions, but he’d hoped against hope he could be successful. Hoped he’d be able to get all of them out. He hadn’t been. And he’d found out when he’d gone back to the regime, hat in hand with his failure, that they weren’t as intransigent on the last two points as he’d originally been told they were. Money talked, bullshit walked. That was true in
every
society, especially when it was $20 billion.

Of course, it wasn’t that the Party cared about the United States—that wasn’t why they’d fought the last points so doggedly. In fact they
loathed
the United States, of course. Almost irrationally in Gomez’s view because, unlike Cuba, the people at the top of the U.S. government were constantly changing. There were constant opportunities to make inroads there. But the men at the top in Cuba never tried. So the mandate from the top to fight the nastiest clauses had nothing to do with some latent compassion for the United States. It had to do with the fact that the regime truly believed the United States would fire their own weapons at Cuba if she allowed the Chinese to set up bases on her island. Just as they had believed it in the early 1960s when it was the Russians.