The Warning Page 4

Thirty-Nine Days . . .

  The limousine turned up Broadway and halted once more in midtown Manhattan traffic. Nathan Jones Turner fumed to his assistant, “The mayor has one. So does the governor. I’m more powerful than either one. If they don’t think so, I’ll be happy to put on a little demonstration.”

  “Sir, I’ve spoken to both their personal aides. There’s some city ordinance that outlaws police motorcades for anyone except visiting politicians and dignitaries.”

  “They don’t think I’m a dignitary? They think somebody from the other side of the Atlantic’s got more clout than me? I’ll show them just how much clout I’ve got if they keep me sitting here.” He leaned forward and shouted through the half-open portal, “Get the lead out! You think I pay you to keep me sitting still?”

  “I’m doing the best I can, Mr. Turner.”

  “It’s not good enough!” He pounded on the armrest hard enough to make his assistant wince. “If you can’t find a way to get me there faster, I’ll find someone who can!”

  To the driver’s immense relief, an ambulance chose that moment to sweep around the corner, turning on both lights and siren. The driver eased over just far enough to permit the ambulance passage, then swept back inches from the rear bumper, cutting off a taxi trying for the coveted spot. He sailed down the block, the ambulance now forging a path for them both.

  Nathan Jones Turner settled back. “That’s better. Nothing I hate worse than sitting still.”

  “Yes, sir,” the assistant agreed, pushing forward the file he held in his hands. “If you’ll take a look at this—”

  “Sitting still is for peons. You call the governor and you tell him that right to his face. Tell him if he’s going to try to make Nathan Jones Turner sit still, he’ll find somebody else sitting in his chair. You tell him that.”

  “Yes, Mr. Turner. Sir, you said you wanted to study the closing positions in Tokyo.”

  “I’ve read them already. Put that thing away.” He drummed his fingers on the window. “You say they both refused me a police escort?”

  “Point-blank, sir.”

  “Put them down for my box at the next Jets game. I’ll have a word with them personally.”

  “Yes, sir. That’ll be the season opener next week.” To sit in the private box of Nathan Jones Turner, especially when the Jets finally had a chance to return to the Super Bowl, was one of the most coveted invitations in all New York. Turner was the team’s largest shareholder, and he treated it like a personal fiefdom.

  Nathan Jones Turner, the son of a middling Hollywood movie producer, had taken an inheritance of some ten million dollars and turned it into one of the largest privately held fortunes in America’s history. Forbes magazine was consistently wrong in judging his wealth, but last year had accurately placed his stock and bond holdings alone at over a billion dollars. Besides that, he owned a hotel chain, a Wall Street brokerage firm, some Manhattan real estate. And the Valenti Bank.

  His only two hobbies were his father’s old movie production company and the New York Jets. He had been married five times to four different women and had fathered seven children, all of whom he had long since disowned. He was seventy-one years old and worked an eighteen-hour day.

  He was pompous, rude, and tremendously overbearing. He could be courtly, however, when it suited him. He also possessed the ability to focus on a person with a force that people claimed was physically palpable. When he liked an idea he adopted it as an original thought. He managed to hold on to talent because he paid better than anyone else, but in return he expected his staff to demonstrate slavelike devotion. Dissent was an unforgivable error. The only person allowed to have a temper around Nathan Jones Turner was Nathan Jones Turner.

  Most of his time he spent working from the Turner farm in Connecticut. Located just forty miles from Manhattan, the farm was a six-hundred-eighty-acre spread with almost a mile of coveted private beach.

  But today’s meeting required his personal presence. Nobody tried to transport the senior staff of a brokerage house away from Wall Street while the market was in session. Not even Nathan Jones Turner.

  The Turner Building anchored the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. It had been built in the twenties, redolent of art-deco foppery, and was the second highest building in that part of town. Only the Chrysler Building was higher. Turner would have preferred to buy the Chrysler Building, but it wasn’t for sale, and it didn’t stand on Wall Street. He responded by pretending the Chrysler Building did not exist.

  Greed might have lost much of its eighties allure elsewhere, but not on Wall Street. In today’s financial markets, an investor could win or lose more quickly than a bettor at any racetrack or casino—and lose far more. This was the mad world of modern money, where billions changed hands every hour, and where gambling had become the norm.

  This was the real reason Turner came here at all—to feel close to the action, to drink the energy, to get a sense of the market’s pulse. It was as close as Nathan Jones Turner ever came to taking any drug. He neither smoked nor drank and seldom took anything stronger than an aspirin. When he felt the need for a fix, something to push him to a higher limit, he wallowed in the thrill of chasing money. And the power of controlling its course.

  Before the limo pulled to a halt, three senior executives scurried out to welcome Turner. He ignored their greetings and marched straight to the elevators.

  Nathan Jones Turner hated elevators. He managed to ride in silence by gritting his teeth and clenching his fists. His staff had long since learned that anything said during an elevator ride was not heard. So the ride was made in absolute silence. The one nice thing about riding with Nathan Jones Turner was that the elevator halted for nobody. The security guard responsible for the bank of elevators was on notice that if an elevator carrying Nathan Jones Turner stopped on any floor except the one where he was getting off, the guard was out of a job.

  They finally stopped on the sixtieth floor and headed for the double doors at the foyer’s far end. The secretary stationed there merely stood and smiled a nervous welcome as Turner and his entourage entered the lair of Larry Fleiss.

  Larry Fleiss was one of the world’s most successful traders. Which was why Nathan Jones Turner willingly paid him almost six million dollars in annual salary and double that in bonus. He was certainly nothing much to look at, and his personality was hardly any better.

  He looked like a bespectacled slug, clad in a wrinkled white shirt and beltless trousers. He remained safely ensconced behind his huge U-shaped desk, not even rising for Nathan Jones Turner himself. Instead he glanced over, waved the entourage in, then turned back to his monitors. Someone on the speakerphone was shouting, “It hasn’t changed positions since I was in your office.”

  “Yeah, well.” Fleiss gave a laconic shrug. “You had the chance to say no before we got started.”

  Fleiss hit the switch and set down the coffee mug, his eyes tracking the group as they seated themselves. “How’s it going, Mr. T.?”

  “You tell me.” Nathan Jones Turner tolerated such ill manners from no one but Fleiss. It was one of the prices he paid to keep the man behind the powerboard. That was Fleiss’s name for his desk. The powerboard controlled the flow of the bank’s and Turner’s own money every day. Fleiss was rumored to spend more time at his desk than even Turner himself.

  “Market’s nervous this morning. Needs a tweak.” Fleiss had the hoarse voice of an adrenaline junkie. His gaze constantly shifted back and forth, from Turner’s face to the scrolling blue screen set in his side panel. The front of the blond-wood desk was bare save for a coffeemaker, two mugs, a pitcher of fresh cream, and an empty leather blotter. The desk’s two long extensions, however, looked like imports from a flight control tower. They contained seventeen television screens, six phones with multiple lines, two computers, and a constantly scrolling news service. “Given a strong kick it could go either way.”

  “That’s the same thing you told me last week.”

  �
��Nothing’s changed, Mr. T. Everybody seems to be waiting for someone to tell them which way to jump.”

  Instead of waiting respectfully for Turner to respond, Fleiss punched a speed-dial number and demanded, “Anything happening post ten o’clock with your stuff?”

  “No, looks like people have been kicked around too much.” The voice on the other end shared Larry Fleiss’s dislike for small talk. “The only sure bet is yen. It keeps falling like a stone.”

  Nathan Jones Turner kept his inscrutable mask intact. But inwardly he tasted bile.

  Hastily Fleiss clicked off and tried to cover. “Problematic. Real problematic. People are just waiting for somebody to point out a direction.”

  “Is that—” Turner started but changed his mind. He turned to the others encircling him. “Leave us.”

  When the pair were alone, Turner went on. “Is that what’s behind our own problems?”

  “Partly. It’s gotten worse since last week.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” Turner snapped.

  A tic surfaced under one eye. “Worse even since yesterday. The currency market’s moving directly against us.”

  “Then get out.”

  “I’ve covered us as best I can. But the fact is, we’re exposed.”

  “How much?”

  “Down another eighty mil.”

  “What?” Turner half rose from his seat. “Since yesterday?”

  “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Fleiss said. “Not much, but some.”

  “I thought you said we were covered.”

  “I’ve done all I can. If we got out now, we’d have to drop another thirty, maybe forty, before we could walk away. Any sale of that size would catch the market’s attention. So what I did, I matched our sells with buys. Our floor is now set at twenty mil below where we are now.”

  “But if you’ve set a floor,” Turner said, hating the sense of not having an adversary he could face and destroy, “that means we’ve set a ceiling as well, doesn’t it?”

  Fleiss’s flabby shoulders shrugged once. “Best I could do. To stay uncovered is too risky. To cover means to cut off our upward chances, unless you want me to start all over and buy—”

  “No.” Turner resisted the urge to rise and throw his chair through the window, watch it fall upon unsuspecting heads sixty floors below. “What about the analyst who pushed us into this rotten mess?”

  “It was an honest mistake. She’s my best trader.”

  “Not anymore.” Snarling the words, wishing he could destroy this worm as well, knowing he couldn’t afford it. Especially not now. But he knew this analyst-trader was Fleiss’s protégé. The one good thing to come from all this was finally having a reason to get rid of that woman. She had remained a barrier between Turner’s spies and Fleiss. Turner hated the fact that he could not observe Fleiss’s every move, observe and learn. Fleiss was a lone wolf, operating in solitary secrecy. The woman had been Fleiss’s fire wall, keeping everyone else at arm’s length. At least now Turner had a chance to move in someone who would report on Fleiss’s tactics. “She’s history.”

  A flicker of defiance, then a shrug of acceptance. “No problem.”

  “There better not be. I don’t just want her fired. I want her destroyed.” Good. Fleiss understood how close he was to the dagger himself. “I want you to make sure she can’t get a job as dogcatcher in this town.”

  “You got it.”

  Turner took a breath, glad he had ordered the others to leave the room. “So what is our total exposure?”

  “From this trade or overall?”

  He gritted his teeth. The question burned like acid. “Overall.”

  It was Fleiss’s turn to hesitate. A trace of fear appeared in those dead eyes, then, “Almost a quarter.”

  Two hundred fifty million dollars. A year’s profit from all his nonfinancial operations lost in the space of one week. Turner rose and walked to the window. An unacceptable loss at an impossible time.

  Until this present deal, Turner had never invested his own money into the futures markets. He was content to act as go-between, hiring the traders and taking a rake-off from every transaction. Turner saw himself as the shopkeeper who had followed the miners to the gold rush of the last century. He was the one who accepted their claims when the cash ran low. He was the man who stood on the front porch and watched them whoop and scream as they tumbled off the boat, staking money that burned holes in their pockets. He was the one who sold them everything they needed and turned a handsome profit at the same time. Then he watched them stumble back in after the money was gone, the claim had paid out, and they were down to their claim papers and their tools. He bought those as well, stowing them away for the next fool to take off his hands, taking his share coming and going, staying safely out of the fray.

  Until now.

  Turner rapped his knuckles on the glass, staring out at a fog-shrouded morning. The problem was the market, not him. He had stood by and watched traders turn fifty thousand into a million dollars, a half million into twenty, a million into serious money. The market was skyrocketing and people were making money hand over fist. Suddenly his own safe percentage had seemed too small.

  Five weeks earlier, a luxury hotel chain had come up for grabs. He had always wanted to own a nationwide chain of first-class hotels. But the hotel market was booming like everything else, and it was a seller’s market. The owners had stated that all bids would be cash only. No stock trades, no options, no bank paper. Cash.

  The problem was, all of Turner’s money was tied up in the other acquisitions. The only cash he had on the books was property of the Valenti Bank. And because it was a bank, its cash reserves were capped by federal law. He couldn’t just dip into them.

  He made a fist, wishing he could grind those bureaucrats into dust. Federal regulations on banking practices hung like a noose around his neck. “How are the pension funds?”

  Larry Fleiss cleared his throat. “I’m not sure we should go that route again.”

  “Don’t tell me the obvious.” Turner kept his tone casual. “I want to know their status.”

  “Stable. No alarms raised.”

  “Good.” Those pension funds were why he had acquired the Valenti Bank in the first place. Valenti was repository for seven of the largest corporate pension funds in the east. Like the big insurance groups, pension funds tended to spread their capital among a select group of investors. They were restricted to blue-chip investments and were left more or less alone. Pension funds sought security, not explosive growth. As long as the quarterly balance report showed steady returns, expectations were satisfied.

  He had milked the pension funds for the cash required to buy the hotels. Strictly illegal, but that only mattered if he was caught. It was a temporary switch, or should have been.

  Fleiss had come up with the plan of actually taking out twice what had been required. Half to pay the 50 percent down payment for the hotels. The other half for what should have been a surefire investment in futures options. Japanese yen, Fleiss’s pro-tégé had urged, it was time for a major upswing. A quick in and out, 100 percent profit in ten days was the prediction. Enough to slip the entire amount back into the pension fund and have the hotels added to his real estate portfolio. Everybody wins. Or they should have.

  Turner walked back over and seated himself. He could not keep the sigh from escaping. “Whoever would have thought that the yen would do such a nosedive.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Fleiss offered, “you’ve got the best of company. Word is that people took a bath up and down the Street.”

  “I didn’t get where I am today being part of the herd,” he snapped. “All right. Here’s what I want you to do. Take out the same again.”

  Fleiss could not hide his astonishment. “Another three hundred million?”

  “You hid it once, you can do it again.” Masking his nervousness with customary harshness. “Only this time, you’re going to find me a sure thing.”r />
  “Right.” Fleiss resumed his customary stillness, watching and listening. “Whatever you say.”

  “What I say is this,” Turner snarled, leaning across the desk. “You had better not let me down a second time. Do I make myself perfectly clear on that point?”

  –|| SEVEN ||–

  Thirty-Eight Days . . .

  Saturday morning, when Buddy told Molly that he wanted to spend his day in prayer and fasting, she did not object. Even so, he felt a need to explain. “I feel that the Lord has been close by. I know that may sound strange, what with the strain of the past couple of weeks. But that’s how it feels. Now, anyway.”

  “I don’t think it sounds strange.” She was going to Bible study, dressed in her navy blouse with the high, frilly collar and her grandmother’s cameo fastened at the neck. A light dusting of powder covered the worst of her scar not hidden beneath the blouse. “I’m glad you’re doing it.”

  “You are?”

  “It is a good thing to draw near to the Lord in confusing times. I’m glad to hear you say you feel like he’s been close by. You need him right now.”

  He nodded agreement. “It’s more than a feeling, Molly.”

  She did not ask what he meant; she did not pry. It was not her way. She simply said, “I’m glad.”

  When she was off and the house was quiet, he shut himself in the den. There was no need to ask to be left undisturbed. A closed door to the den meant he was to be left alone.

  The den was a long room that ran the length of the house next to the garage. Elm wainscoting ran around three walls, a Christmas gift from his father. There was a big picture window looking out over the backyard. Buddy’s desk was situated so that he could sit and watch birds flit from the feeder to the birdbath. It was where he did his morning Bible readings.

  But today, when he sat down and picked up his Bible, the chair did not seem right, not fitting, in a strange sort of way, as though it had grown uncomfortable.

  Buddy thought he understood. He slid down to his knees, and instantly the discomfort vanished. He pulled over the Bible, propped it on the seat of the chair, and read whatever caught his attention. He shut his eyes, prayed a little, but there was no sense of having much to say. He did not feel that he was there to talk to God. Rather, he felt that he was there to listen.