The estate was invisible from the main road, obscured by a border of thirty-foot butternut and black birch, trees indigenous to the central Virginia area. Numerous flower and shrub beds ran parallel to the highway asphalt and offered a warm touch, almost inviting. But the wrought-iron gate and eight-foot fence told a different story. So did the guard dog signs posted every hundred feet on the fence. Bruce Andrews took the issue of home security very seriously.
Inside the gates was a true country estate. The drive was long and winding, through groves of trees, trimmed grass fields punctuated with equestrian hurdles and numerous ponds, some complete with ducks and geese lazing on the still, summer waters. The main house was set almost in the center of the forty-six-acre package. Its facade was two-story, Southern plantation style, with Ionic pillars on volutes. A wide second-floor balcony ran the length of the house with four separate sets of French doors opening to it. The mixture of Grecian columnar architecture and Palladian-style house worked beautifully, and off-white shutters framed all the windows.
Bruce Andrews was perusing a copy of the Financial Times on the rear deck. He often wondered if the land he viewed from where he sat was that which Grant and Beauregard had fought over during the siege of Petersburg in 1864. Many a brave man on both sides of the skirmish had died on this quiet tract of land south of the Appomattox. Occasionally, he wished that time would slip and he could see the historic battle firsthand: trench warfare in its infancy, breastworks shielding the soldiers as they reloaded their Springfield muskets. But the field remained quiet, and it appeared that he was destined to replay the siege in theory only.
He sipped on freshly squeezed Florida orange juice and scanned the article the Financial Times had written on his company. When he finished, he set the magazine on the table and smiled. They had taken the bait and swallowed it whole. And that was all he needed. With such a glowing review by one of the premier financial publications, it would be months before anyone took another serious look at Veritas’s books. And by that time, the danger of his house of cards collapsing would be history. The smile just didn’t want to leave his face. He had done it. He had taken a huge risk and succeeded.
Haldion, the FDA recall that had threatened to empty the company’s coffers, was behind them. The lawsuits were finished, the cash flow stemmed. Triaxcion, Veritas’s antibalding drug, could hurt them, but with the new projections, they could now weather a full-blown tort suit. That had yet to materialize, but the possibility was ever-present and real. The most active legal challenge they had to date on Triaxcion was from some irritating ambulance chaser in Butte, Montana. Christine Stevens kept threatening a substantial tort action unless Veritas admitted Triaxcion was responsible for altering blood chemistry in A-positive men and women. They hadn’t mentioned anything financial yet, and when pushed to name a figure that would see them disappear quietly, she had insisted that this issue was not financial. Her client simply wanted them to admit that their drug was dangerous.
“Yeah,” Andrews said to himself as he finished his morning coffee. “Like you’d just let the whole thing go if we admit fault.
You bastards would be on us like hyenas on a rotting carcass if we publicly said we made a mistake.” Not a chance in hell that was happening.
He glanced again at the Financial Times. What a coup. He had manipulated the interviewer in such a way that she had seen exactly what he wanted her to see, and arrived at precisely the conclusions he had wanted arrived at. With the Enron scandal still a glaring reminder of where creative accounting can lead, he had chosen his words carefully. Veritas did not have the wide array of offshore subsidiaries Enron had when falsifying its economic performance, but they had other, more discreet methods of reporting higher-than-truth incomes for the year. There was nothing as simple as shifting day-to-day expenses into the investment column. Andrews had different methods that used government tax credits, very difficult to discern even with a forensic audit.
But he had an up-and-coming problem: Evan Ziegler. The man was going to discover that Veritas was shutting down its brain chip operations. The future of spinal cord injuries was now moving in a new direction, courtesy of the researchers at Duke University Medical Center. Fat cells, harvested through liposuction, were now being transformed into stem cells that could be used to repair spinal injuries. That cut through a lot of red tape-no ethical issues with using embryonic stem cells. And there were lots of available fat cells, which eliminated the painful procedure of cutting into bone to harvest them. This ability to create neurons from fat cells had essentially doomed the future of brain chips, which looked to generate new electrical synapses in the spinal cord.
And once Ziegler knew he had been used, he would become very dangerous very quickly. The man was a trained killer, an ex-SEAL who wouldn’t think twice about coming after whoever set him up. Andrews knew that that someone was him.
No level of security would stop Ziegler. Armed bodyguards, the walled and gated estate with patrol dogs, a pistol under his pillow-everything would be useless once Ziegler was unleashed. So the trick was to take care of Evan Ziegler before he
found out. Too bad, Andrews thought. Evan was an excellent assassin. He was organized and efficient. His downside was a stubborn streak of human kindness the army had been unable to snuff out. The same goodness he showed to his wheelchair-bound son was the one weakness that would eventually be his downfall. Andrews had some ideas for removing Ziegler, but nothing was imperative yet. No need for panic. Wait for the right moment, the right opportunity.
Patience.
It had served him well over the years, and Bruce Andrews had a feeling that it was the key to dealing with Evan Ziegler. The cordless phone rang. He plucked it off the table and punched the talk button.
“Hello,” he said, knowing who it would be. This was a private line, and only one person dialed this number.
“How are things?” the voice asked.
“Okay. Just thinking about our potential problem in Denver.”
“Yes. That’s going to be an interesting one when it arises.”
“Interesting for sure. Why did you call?”
“I’ve been monitoring a situation you have in Richmond.”
“What sort of situation?” Andrews asked. This man did not call on this secure and scrambled line unless the issue was serious.
“Kenga Bakcsi, the employee of yours who recently died while she was on vacation-someone signed onto the mainframe from her house while she was in St. Lucia.”
“When?” Andrews asked, his eyes narrowing.
“Wednesday, August twenty-fourth, just before midnight.”
“It’s Tuesday morning. Why am I just finding out about this now?”
“I needed time to react, to see what files they’d accessed. Damage control, so to speak.”
“What were they looking for?” Andrews asked.
“Kenga Bakcsi had a secure file with a chemical formula on her home computer. Triaxcion. That was the file the person opened.”
“Anything else?” Andrews asked, his mind racing. Who had been in Kenga’s house? And why?
“There was a text file with a name and address in it. Gordon Buchanan, Butte, Montana. You know him?”
“I’ve heard the name through our legal department. Buchanan’s brother died of something-or-other and he’s got a lawyer looking into a possible litigation. Nothing yet.”
“But why would Buchanan’s name be on Kenga’s computer?” the voice asked.
“I don’t know. Unless Kenga was feeding Buchanan the information she was stealing from the company computers.”
“That would explain things.”
Like why we had to kill her, Andrews thought. “This Buchanan guy-what have you got on him?”
“Not much yet. Some hick from Montana who runs a sawmill near Butte. I’ll get more on him as fast as I can without raising any eyebrows.”
“You do that,” Andrews said. “And get back to Kenga’s place and get that file off her computer.”
“Already done. The file was removed on Thursday and the computer’s hard drive adjusted, so there’s no history of that file ever existing.”
Andrews stared across the vast expanse of trimmed grass to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distant west. He loved this view, especially in summer when the trees were in full foliage and the skies were lazy blue. He loved sitting on his deck enjoying the million-dollar view from his multimillion-dollar house. And he didn’t want that to change. “What level of threat does Gordon Buchanan pose to us?”
“In my opinion, minimal to nonexistent. He’s a two-bit ambulance chaser who talked one of your employees into getting him some classified information from the mainframe. He’ll fuss around with things a bit, try to light a fire under his lawyer’s ass, then go away. Buchanan is no threat.”
“All right. But keep tabs on him from your end. I’ll have our legal department monitor things in Richmond.”
The line went dead. Bruce Andrews hit the talk button and dropped the phone on the table. Life was never simple, especially when you headed up a major firm like Veritas. It was even more complicated when you played outside the rules. Killing Kenga Bakcsi was not high on his to-do list, but it had become a necessity. They knew she was selling information to someone but were unable to ascertain who. He had begun to suspect the Justice Department or the Securities and Exchange Commission, so finding out it was some nobody from backwoods Montana was a good thing. Gordon Buchanan was a pest who would either quietly go away or quietly go missing somewhere in the woods.
The choice was his.