The Capitol Game Read online

  The real action took place in the conference rooms anyway.

  The system was a necessary precaution, the senior leaders of CG felt. At first, anyway. Over the years some of the LBO boys had been caught wheeling-dealing, cutting side deals, or committing CG to things that weren’t technically or even mildly legal.

  More than perhaps any other firm in the world, the Capitol Group had a reputation that needed to be protected, whatever the costs.

  Over time, the taping system acquired wonderful new purposes. The CEO and a few select directors frequently listened in to decide which of their aspiring LBO cutthroats had the right stuff and which needed to be booted out the door. Truth was, they enjoyed listening to the kids bicker and quarrel, raise the pressure, and go for blood. They loved having ringside seats at the most profitable game in town.

  The full-time tenders worked out of a cluttered room in the basement, a small nook fitted with security cameras and a highly sophisticated taping console. They came and went through the service entrance at the rear of the building. They wore grease-stained coveralls, carried pails and brooms, and were coldly ignored by the snooty executives on the upper floors.

  Mitch Walters, the CEO, had his big feet planted on his desk. His two big hands gripped the armrests as he craned forward and strained to hear every word, every nuance. The instant they heard Wiley’s farewell threat and the door close behind him, Walters punched a button.

  The noise stopped. “Idiots. They underestimated him. He’s smarter than they are. Much smarter,” he announced for the benefit of the older man in the room.

  Daniel Bellweather produced a weary nod. “You have to admire it.”

  “You’re right, a perfect ambush. Didn’t let on till the very end.”

  “Just let them act stupid, play like loudmouthed braggarts, then handed them their balls on a plate.”

  Daniel Bellweather, or Mr. Secretary, as everybody in the firm still called him—without the slightest trace of affection—was a former three-term congressman and, for four years, secretary of defense under a mildly unpopular former Republican president. His tenure in the Pentagon had been somewhat rocky. There had been runaway spending on a few multibillion-dollar hardware programs that produced useless belly flops the military hated. Two martial misadventures that went horribly wrong and resulted in lots of corpses and hasty retreats. Then came the quiet revolt by a bunch of Army generals that had to be brutally quelled.

  The former president he had served was now in the grave; dead, he became far more popular than when he was breathing. An average president on his best day, compared with the sorry losers who followed in his stead, he had been lionized as one of the greats, an afterglow that trickled down to his retainers and aides.

  They were the sage architects, the wise elder statesmen of an administration notable for one unforgettable achievement: it produced no great disasters. Two full terms. Eight years without a single market meltdown, no big wars, and, in a modern record, slightly less than half his cabinet ended up under indictment or in prison.

  No successive administration had even come close.

  Mid-seventies, craggy-faced, tall, thick white hair, portly, but not too much, Daniel Bellweather had weathered nicely into the picture of an eminent Washington mandarin. For eight years before Walters, he had been the CEO. He steered the ship and attended to the details. He roared into the office screaming at six every morning and didn’t mellow out until six in the evening. He stoked the ranks with as much greed, fear, and insecurity as he could manage, and kept the immense profits flowing.

  His tantrums were legendary. Firm lore had it that after one of Bellweather’s calmer tongue-lashings, a senior VP fled down to the parking lot, withdrew a pistol from the glove compartment, and reupholstered the interior of his Mercedes with his brains.

  That myth was a wild fabrication. The man had flung himself from an upper-floor window and painted the car’s exterior.

  But after eight years at the helm, eight years of steadily increasing profits, and after getting richer than he ever believed possible, Bellweather suffered his first stroke. A mild one. Little more than a bad headache, really; his first scary glimpse, however, that all good things come to an end. In shock, he stepped back from the unrelenting pressure and retreated into the fringe role of director.

  Time to kick back and relax, he told himself; enjoy the fruits of thirty years of juking and jiving around Washington, of draining the swamp of as much cash as he could stuff into his pockets. It had been a terrific run; flee now, enjoy the good life, go on an epic spending spree, escape before it killed him.

  A year rolling through the coastal enclaves of enormous wealth followed. Then six months bouncing around the Caribbean on his mammoth yacht—a full year and a half of lovely tranquillity, eighteen months removed from the mad hustle-bustle of D.C.—before he decided he had made a horrible mistake. He became bored and miserable. Always a pathetic golfer, if anything, he became more terrible.

  And hanging around with a bunch of rich has-beens only reminded him of his own sorry diminished status. The perks, the sense of self-importance, and the action were calling him back. Plus, with all that time together, his rather young third wife suddenly discovered what her predecessors had learned: she loathed him. She took to sleeping in another bedroom, which was fine by him because the sex had turned dull and he was tired of her snoring anyway.

  Also he learned about the yardman, Juan, a handsome young Latin hunk who trimmed a little more than the hedges.

  Bellweather promptly sold the yacht, fired the gardener, dumped the wife, and had himself installed as managing director, a vague title that required very little work, yet gave him carte blanche to nose into any nook or cranny that interested him. The position of institutional magpie suited his tastes immensely, the exquisite privilege of looking over his successor’s shoulder and second-guessing him at every turn.

  “Think it’s real?” Walters asked, sounding deeply depressed.

  “Maybe. Who knows?”

  “Good question. Who knows?”

  “Well, Wiley—I guess he knows.”

  “Yeah, and he didn’t sound like a guy who’s shooting blanks.”

  “The Holy Grail project,” Bellweather repeated, letting the sound roll off his tongue. “If Wiley’s even half on the mark, that’s exactly what this polymer is. Do you know how much the military would pay for this miracle coating?”

  Walters rolled forward in his chair and pinched his eyebrows together. He had a pretty good idea, and that depressed him all the more. “Who’s this company he’s talking about?”

  “Could be anybody, really. He was very cagey.”

  They had both listened to the tape, three times, replaying certain key sections until they thought they’d be sick; Wiley had never once slipped. Not once, not a clue, not a breadcrumb. Walters quickly summed up the little they knew: “The CEO of this mysterious company is a chemical engineer. Two years ago, his firm pushed sales of about four hundred million. It’s a penny stock.” He rubbed his shiny forehead in frustration and said, “Any of ten thousand companies fit that bill, Dan. Could be Hostess Twinkies, for all we know.”

  “Who do you think he’s meeting with now?” Bellweather asked after a long moment of staring at the walls.

  “No idea. But they probably look a lot like us. He mentioned New York and Pennsylvania. Could be corporate, say, GE or United Technologies. I hope it’s not another big takeover outfit.”

  The names of a dozen fierce competitors rattled through their brains and for a long ugly moment they shared the same depressing thought. In the small, intensely competitive world of big-league equity firms, word would spread like a flash fire that CG had let the biggest catch of the year slip out of its grasp. Worse, CG, for a variety of reasons, specialized in defense work. It dabbled in countless other areas, diversifying to protect itself against the eventuality of an outbreak of world peace, unwelcome and unlikely as that might be. War, however, was its mainstay. Gougi
ng a large chunk of defense pork remained its bread and butter.

  Oh yes, the story of how CG clumsily let Wiley and the most remarkable defense product of the decade walk out the door would roar around town.

  It would be more than Walters could bear. He could almost hear the snickers from his buddies at the Congressional Club. Could almost picture the insufferable smirks. “Yo, Mitch, what does fifteen billion slamming the door sound like?”—he could make up the sorry insults himself. Maybe he’d give up golf for a month or two.

  Actually, a decade or two might be more like it, he sadly admitted to himself.

  “We need to find our boy Jack,” Bellweather announced very firmly, an idea that got a quick nod from Walters. “Tonight. Before he has time to settle on somebody else.”

  “He’s going to make us eat dirt,” Walters prophesied with a mournful scowl.

  “We deserve it. Let him rub it in till he gets tired of it. Who do you want to handle it?”

  “Keep it low-key, for now. He’s got us on the ropes and he knows it. But we can’t afford to cede leverage.” Walters folded his arms, recovered his composure, and calmly said, “Bill Feist. He has a real gift for this sort of thing.”

  “Yep, a born ass-kisser. Send him up on the jet. Not the small one, the big one. Tell him to forget the normal wine-and-dine, and forget the half-measured approach. Think fifteen billion dollars.”

  “Bill’s good at that, as you know.”

  “This time, it’s worth every penny.” Bellweather pushed off from the wall and over his shoulder said, “And find out whatever we can about this Jack Wiley.”

  Locating Jack turned out to be loaded with more complications than anybody expected. This task was handled by a private security firm located in Crystal City, a midsize, discreet outfit loaded with washed-up former Feds and spooks who often did work for CG.

  TFAC, it was called, a cluster of initials that stood for absolutely nothing but seemed to have a nice ring to it. TFAC was among a growing number of private outfits in D.C., fueled by the explosion of clandestine services and operations after 9/11 that slid easily in the shadows between government and private-sector work. The Capitol Group was their second largest client, right behind Uncle Sam. The U.S. government could wait; the snoops dropped everything and promised instant results.

  Locating Jack was kid’s play, or so they thought initially. They focused first on New York City, especially Manhattan, the normal habitat of single young millionaires. Just to be on the safe side, they also weeded through the other boroughs as well. Eleven Jack Wileys turned up. After two hours of running down the prospects, ten of the eleven fell out: six married; two tucked away in retirement homes; one ensconced in jail; one in the hospital coughing out his lungs and dying of AIDS, of all things.

  Jack Wiley number eleven lived in Queens.

  Queens!—no way could this be the right Jack. No self-respecting young bachelor millionaire would be caught dead living there, and he was quickly dropped before anybody wasted further time on tracking him down.

  More troops were thrown into the breach and the search widened to northern Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester County, the usual burbs for well-to-do New Yorkers.

  Dead ends piled on top of more dead ends. Then, voilà: a likely prospect popped up with his phone number listed, along with his address.

  It looked right and it smelled right. The area code hinted at big money. They needed to be sure, though.

  A female researcher claiming to be the dispatcher for a national delivery service called Jack’s assistant at the main Cauldron office, two blocks off Wall Street. “It’s a package marked urgent we’ve tried twice, unsuccessfully, to deliver,” she explained, sounding very distressed—the white foam container probably had some of those mail-order steaks that cost a fortune and turn rotten and stinky in the blink of an eye. “The address must be off,” she complained, loudly playing up her frustration. “Just thank the Lord Mr. Wiley had thought to include his work number with his order.”

  The TFAC researcher rattled off the address, deliberately mixing up two numbers; the assistant promptly and sharply corrected the mistake.

  It was him!

  The address was punched into a computer, then, via the wonders of Google and its satellite service, they found themselves ogling a top-down satellite shot of the neighborhood. A technician adroitly expanded, shifted, and manipulated the picture until they were staring at a grainy, blown-up image of the roof of one Jack Wiley.

  Jack, it turned out, lived in a large, roomy brick two-story in the town of Rumson, a leafy, very well-to-do northern Jersey suburb, one block from the Navesink River, and a ferry shot from the Big Apple.

  One of the former Fibbies knew the police chief of a nearby borough. A friendly phone call and a nosy local cop was immediately dispatched for a quick look-see. He snapped pictures of the front, then left his cruiser and snuck around to get wide-angle shots of the sides and rear.

  Georgian in style, red brick all around, about seventy years old, three chimneys, perhaps eight thousand square feet, with a large walk-out basement. One entrance in the front. One in the rear. Twelve ground-level windows.

  A sticker on the lower corner of a front window declared that Jack had devices and security provided by Vector, a national outfit that happened, by happy coincidence, to belong to the Capitol Group.

  A different group of snoops in a large room two floors below was laboring to unearth everything that could be learned about Jack Wiley.

  The order was vague and nonspecific. Information of any nature or form on Wiley would be appreciated. They knew their client, though: dirt, as much as could be found, would be even more richly appreciated.

  This team was led by Martie O’Neal, a former FBI agent who once ran the background investigations unit for the Bureau. Martie was a legendary snoop with a legion of helpful contacts in government and the private sector. Digging up dirt was his specialty and his passion. Given two weeks, he could tell you the name of Jack’s first childhood crush, whether he was a Jockey or boxer man, his preferences in extracurricular drugs, who he diddled in his spare time, any medical issues, his net worth, and how he voted.

  He was given only five hours. Five fast and furious hours to unearth as much detail and dirt as could be found. He cherished a challenge and dug in with both fists. His squad of assistants gathered around and Martie began barking orders. The phones and faxes were kicked into gear and information began flowing in.

  By one o’clock, Martie had Jack’s report cards from college down to elementary level; as advertised, he was a very smart boy. Twenty minutes later, Jack’s home mortgage was splayed across Martie’s desk: a fifteen-year jumbo at five and a half percent. The home had cost four million; Jack plunked down three mil, and now owed $700K. Never missed or even been late with a payment.

  Jack was not only smart and rich, O’Neal decided, he was also tidy and diligent, and a savvy investor with a good eye for the deal. The most recent assessment listed the home as worth nine million.

  By two, after calling in a big favor, Martie had his rather large and crooked nose stuffed inside Jack’s Army record, as well as his father’s. Jack’s ratings from his Army bosses were uniformly exceptional. The common emphasis was his coolness under fire, his exceptional leadership qualities, and his care and concern for his men.

  His father served thirty-three years, a mustang who battled his way up from private to colonel and retired after twice being passed over for brigadier general. Nothing to be ashamed of there; the old man’s record was quite impressive. The old man was dead, after a long, spirited battle with cancer, buried in Arlington National right beside Jack’s mother, who had passed away five years before of a stroke that left her debilitated and nearly comatose for three horrible years as her husband and son cared for her. Army medical insurance had paid her bills until Jack and his father decided to go outside the system; Jack covered the rather hefty expenses after that. O’Neal even had the grave numbers in the e
vent anybody cared to check, unlikely as that seemed.

  By three, Jack’s love life was being peeled back. This was accomplished the usual way. From the report cards, O’Neal’s snoops began speed-dialing Jack’s old teachers, a path that led directly to childhood chums, and from there to his present acquaintances. They identified themselves as FBI agents. A routine background check for a security clearance Jack had applied for, they explained ever so casually with a heavy splash of boredom as though they cared less about Jack, and didn’t really care to nose through the old closets of his life. From prior experience, four out of five people typically accepted this at face value. The usual odds held and they hung up on anybody questioning their legitimacy.

  Gullibility and the call of patriotic duty nearly always got the tongues wagging. How nice it felt to smear and spread rumors, to tarnish and trash reputations—anonymously, of course, and all in the name of Old Glory.

  The names of Jack’s classmates began pouring in, more phone calls that yielded more names. Old friends begat newer friends, and the stampede was on.

  A large board on a wall was created: the “Put-Jack-in-the-Box” profile, some wag named it, and that drew a big chuckle from the overworked searchers. The room quickly became wallpapered in yellow Post-it notes and a large spiderweb that linked together the widening network of Jack’s friends and business associates. By five, the researchers had more information than they could handle, with hundreds of leads that needed to be followed up.

  A cursory profile had taken shape, though. Handsome, Catholic, no glitches in his career. No drugs, no medical problems, no arrests. Jack had never been sued, nor had he ever sued. He drank—fine imported scotch seemed to be his beverage of choice—but rarely to excess. There were a few college tales about Jack tying one on and whooping it up, all harmless fun, but nothing since then. He enjoyed the ladies, they enjoyed him.

  He voted Republican, with one exception, a college roommate who made a hard run for a New Jersey Senate seat. Jack contributed the legal limit, and even did a little volunteer work in the campaign office. The roommate proved too radical even for New Jersey’s champagne liberals and got shellacked anyway.