Remember When

  The name of the most expensive and most influential law firm in Washington made John smile a little. “I’ve already got them working on your behalf. Maybe they can persuade the SEC in advance that they’re acting recklessly.”

  Cole instructed his secretary to cancel the call. Satisfied that a combination of expensive legal talent and lack of proof would cause the SEC to drop the whole thing, he leaned back in his chair again and subjected Nederly to a thoughtful scrutiny.

  “Anything else you want to talk about?” the lawyer asked.

  “Your tie,” Cole said blandly.

  Nederly seemed to be as alarmed by the potential slur on his perfect appearance as he’d been by the various threats to Cole and Unified that they’d just discussed. “What’s wrong with my tie?”

  “It’s very conservative.”

  “You always wear conservative ties, too.”

  “Not anymore,” Cole said, amused by the discovery that the immaculately groomed lawyer had apparently been imitating him.

  Chapter 42

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS NEARLY SEVEN-THIRTY, several of unified’s executives were working late, and Cole could hear them moving around outside his office door. He still had another hour’s work, and he wanted to call Diana, but from his house, where he could talk to her at leisure. He’d left her less than eight hours ago and he was already looking forward to talking to her again. The fact that he reminded himself of an infatuated teenager was amusing to him, rather than disturbing.

  Cal had called early that afternoon, when he heard about Cole’s marriage on the news, and demanded that Cole’s secretary get him out of a meeting to talk to him. Instead of being thrilled, Cal had been furious that Cole had “actually gone right out and married just anybody” so he could get Cal’s signature on the stock transfer. To Cole’s amused astonishment, the elderly man had announced that such an act was a violation of their agreement, since the intent of it—in his mind—was to see Cole settle down with a mate. It had taken several minutes to calm him down and make him understand who Diana actually was.

  On the coming Wednesday morning, Cal had an appointment with his heart specialist in Austin, and Cole intended to fly him there and hear what the doctor had to say himself. He’d hoped to be able to pick Diana up in Houston after the appointment, but she had an impossible schedule that day and couldn’t leave until Thursday, which meant he had to wait another day to see her—another day before they could be together. In bed. Thinking of taking her to bed—sober and willing—was enough to make him rigid, and he forced his attention back to the contract he was reading.

  He’d just signed his name on the bottom line when Travis walked into his office wearing a polo shirt and a pair of casual pants. “You’re here!” Travis burst out, closing Cole’s door. “Thank God!”

  In his early forties, Travis had a face that was pleasant when he didn’t look worried—which was not often—and the athletic body of a man who exorcised his anxieties by running six miles every morning before dawn. He was a hard worker, and although he wasn’t the intellectual giant that many of the scientists who reported to him were, he was a good choice for head of research and development. He had common sense and a tight fist, usually at appropriate times, when it came to spending the corporation’s assets, and he was extremely loyal. For that reason, Cole trusted him more than anyone else who worked at Unified.

  “I’m here,” Cole agreed with a wry smile and watched Travis walk restlessly over to the bar. “But if you have to thank something for that fact, then thank the preparer of this contract, because it’s taken me nearly an hour to wade through it.”

  Travis stared blankly at him as he splashed bourbon into a glass. “Oh, that’s a joke, right?”

  “Evidently not a good one,” Cole replied dryly, tossing his pen aside. “Now, what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why I’m having a drink.”

  Even for Travis, this degree of uneasiness was unusual. “I thought maybe you were celebrating my marriage.”

  Travis turned with the glass in his hand and walked over to Cole’s desk looking like he’d been punched. “You got married and you didn’t even tell Elaine and me? You didn’t even invite us?”

  Touched that Travis was actually hurt by that, Cole shook his head. “It was completely unplanned. We decided to do it on Saturday evening, and we flew to Las Vegas—before she could change her mind,” he added truthfully. “Now, what has driven you to drink?”

  He took two deep swallows of the bourbon. “I’m being followed.”

  Even though logic told Cole that was extremely unlikely, he couldn’t suppress the vague feeling of disquiet that trickled through him. “What makes you think such a thing?”

  “I don’t think it, I know it. I noticed the guy yesterday when I left the house. He was parked down the street in a black Chevrolet, and he followed me all the way here. When I left tonight to go home for dinner, I spotted the car parked on the side of the highway outside our main gates. He followed me home. So I changed clothes tonight and ran over here on foot, cross-country, so he couldn’t follow me. He tried, though. I saw him.”

  Cole studied him closely. “You aren’t, by any wild chance, having an affair, are you?”

  “I don’t have the time or inclination for one, and besides, Elaine would kill me.”

  The last part of that was essentially true, so Cole accepted it. “Is it possible thieves are planning to break into your house and trying to learn your habits first?”

  Travis finished his drink in two more gulps. “Not unless they’re looking for a challenge instead of loot. We have two guard dogs, a state-of-the-art security system with cameras watching the place, electric gates—the works.”

  “Then why else would anyone be following you?”

  Travis sank into a chair. “Could it have anything to do with the investigation by the NYSE?”

  The feeling of dread Cole had felt earlier solidified into anger. “If that’s the case, they’re wasting their time.”

  * * *

  Cole watched the rearview mirror when he left the office that night. A dark blue, late-model Ford followed him almost to the gates of his estate; then it disappeared around a curve.

  Cole’s phone was ringing when he walked into the house. The voice on the other end was a trembling whisper, scarcely recognizable as Travis’s. “We’ve got trouble, Cole. Something’s going on.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cole said, frowning. “Where are you? Why are you whispering?”

  “I’m in my office, but I’m not sure I’m alone up here.”

  Frustrated, Cole shrugged out of his suit coat. “What do you mean, you aren’t sure?” Travis’s office was in the research and development building, on the same floor as the main laboratory, and he had a clear view of the area.

  On the other end of the line, Travis drew a long, audible breath, and his voice sounded a little more normal, though still panicky. “After I left you, I was too keyed up to go home, so I decided to come over here and do some paperwork. I turned on the main ceiling lights in the lab, and while they were coming on, I thought I saw a shadow moving around the corner; then it disappeared. I ran to my office and out into the hall behind it, but I didn’t see anyone. He must have gone down the exit stairs on the south end of the building.”

  Cole paused in the act of loosening the tie Diana had given him. “Are you sure you actually saw someone?”

  “No.”

  Relieved, Cole started to reach for the messages his housekeeper had left for him beside the telephone.

  “—But I’m damned sure I locked my file cabinets, and one of them is open.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Cole said shortly. Corporate espionage was always a possibility, but Unified had considerable security precautions in place as a safeguard. “Was there anything in the cabinet that a competitor would find especially enlightening?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Good. Th
en go on home. I’ll handle it.”

  When Travis hung up, Cole called Unified’s chief of security, Joe Murray, and waited impatiently while Murray’s wife called him away from the ball game on television. In his mid-fifties, Murray was a balding ex-marine and built like a halfback, with a deep gravelly voice that suited his physical image perfectly. He chewed gum and guffawed over his own jokes while he ambled around peering over everyone’s shoulder, managing to give the impression of being an ordinary ex-security guard who’d somehow been promoted to a desk job that was way beyond his capabilities.

  In truth, he was a former FBI undercover agent with a list of major criminal arrests that were owed to his ability to look innocuous and not too bright while he insinuated himself into the inner circles of his prey. His salary was $225,000 a year, plus stock options and a benefits package.

  When he answered Cole’s call, the deceptive jocularity was absent from his manner. “Do we have a problem?”

  “A little over a half hour ago, we had an intruder on the sixth floor of R and D,” Cole told him. “Travis had left for the day and decided to go back to his office to do some work. He found a file cabinet that was unlocked. Nothing in it was vital to us, even if it was taken.”

  “Did he see anyone?”

  “He thought he saw a shadow move around the corner before the lights came on all the way.”

  “Could he have forgotten to lock the cabinet before he left?”

  “Travis is unlikely to forget something like that.”

  “You’re right. I’ll go over there right away and check it out. If the security guard at the desk on the main floor saw anything, or if I find out anything, I’ll get back to you right away.”

  “Do that,” Cole said. “And starting tomorrow, I want a regular security guard posted at the main entrance around the clock.”

  “I told you we should have put electric gates up there, instead of that cutesy little gatehouse.”

  During the day the gatehouse was manned by an elderly man wearing a blazer with the company insignia on the pocket. He was there primarily to give directions to visitors. The actual security was handled by men in similar blazers who sat at reception desks on the ground floor of each of the buildings on campus. The executive office building was the exception. In keeping with the illusion of elegance and luxury, the receptionist in Cole’s building was a woman, but there was always a man in a blazer unobtrusively present in the area.

  Cole reconsidered the philosophy behind all that and overruled Murray again. “I spent a fortune to make Unified’s property one of the most beautiful in the world. I’m not going to gate it off, put uniformed guards with guns down there, and make it look like a minimum-security prison instead.”

  “It’s your call, Cole,” he said, but he was already distracted, eager to get going while the trail of the intruder was still fresh. “Anything else?”

  “Yes—Travis and I are both being tailed. A black Chevrolet is on him. Mine’s a dark blue Ford.”

  “Any idea why or who?”

  “None,” Cole said, because it didn’t make sense that the SEC would resort to that. Abduction for ransom was a possibility, but too far-fetched to take seriously. That left only one other possibility, and Cole wasn’t willing to discuss that, even with Murray. “They’re wasting their time, whoever they are. They won’t find out anything useful or incriminating by tailing me.”

  “Do you know how to shake them if you need to?”

  “I watch the movies,” Cole said sardonically. “I can figure it out.”

  After he hung up, Cole fixed himself a drink and carried it into the living room, where glass walls overlooked a gigantic free-form swimming pool with a gazebo and arched bridge that spanned it in the center. At the far end, a rock waterfall was created by two thousand strands of colored fiber-optic lights that were inserted into long tubes the diameter of plastic straws. Water flowed through the tubes and tumbled over the rocks like colorful fireworks tumbling down to earth.

  Cole propped his feet up on the coffee table and dialed Diana’s number. She answered on the second ring, her soft, musical voice soothing and cheering him. “How was your day?” he asked her.

  Diana refused to think about Doug’s visit. “It was lovely. How was yours?”

  Cole discounted annoyances like SEC investigations, the threat of subpoenas, an intruder, and being tailed by someone in a dark blue Ford. “Great. Everybody liked my new tie.”

  Chapter 43

  THE BLUE FORD WAS STILL five cars behind when Cole’s chauffeur swung the limo into Unified’s entrance the next morning. As it drove past, Cole got the license number. Whoever was following him obviously didn’t want to press his luck by following Cole onto Unified’s campus. “Be here at five o’clock, Bert,” he told his chauffeur, who also shared household tasks with his wife, Laurel. “If I’m not out by five-thirty, go directly back home.”

  “Right, Mr. Harrison.”

  Murray was already waiting outside Cole’s office, entertaining Shirley and Gloria with some sort of story about his days as a Little League baseball “hero.” He followed Cole into his office, and when the door was closed, he observed casually, “Gloria Quigley is secretly convinced you walk on water, and Shirley would testify to it, to uphold your image.”

  “Really?” Cole was mildly surprised by that since he’d never cultivated their good opinion or any sort of personal relationship, with either woman. “I wonder why.”

  “Loyalty,” Murray stated flatly. “They give it unconditionally to people they respect. Identical personality types, by the way.”

  Instead of answering, Cole scribbled something on a notepad and tore off the sheet. “This is the license number of the blue Ford.”

  “I’ll check it out right away,” Murray said, tucking it into the pocket of his nondescript charcoal gray suit jacket. “Speaking of personality types,” he continued, idly studying his fingernails, “your cousin seems unusually jumpy. Do you know any reason why that might be?”

  “I can think of several reasons,” Cole said with mild sarcasm. “The New York Stock Exchange is investigating us at the request of the SEC, he’s being followed wherever he goes, and last night, somebody was trying to go through his files.”

  “I see what you mean. By the way, as you’ve probably guessed, the security guard at R and D saw nothing unusual last night. No one entered the building after six P.M., and the people he saw leaving it after that time were all employees known to him by sight. We turn on alarms at the stairwell entrances from the inside at seven, which means no one can leave the building that way without using a security card or setting off alarms, and no one at all can get in.”

  “Then how did he get inside?”

  “He could have slipped past the guard at the reception desk when the employees were coming back from lunch and then whiled away the afternoon in the building without a visitor’s badge, which I doubt. On the other hand, he couldn’t have gotten onto Travis’s floor without a security card to open the door, which makes me think he was already on the floor.”

  Cole drew the obvious conclusion. “An employee?”

  “Possibly. It could also have been a woman, since Travis isn’t certain what he saw. Or it could have been an illusion, a trick of the lights going on, and when Travis realized a file cabinet was unlocked, he jumped to conclusions. As I said earlier, he’s jumpy. I’ve dusted the file cabinet and desk for fingerprints, and I’m running a check on them right now. I’ll follow up on this license number as soon as I get upstairs, but it may take a day or two to get a make on it.”

  He started for the door and stopped when Cole said irritably, “Why a day or two? Why not an hour or two?” Murray’s slight, uneasy hesitation had already set off warning bells in Cole’s brain before the security chief answered. “You and Travis spotted the Ford and Chevrolet without much trouble. In both cases, the cars were parked down the street from your homes, but pretty much in plain view, right?”

  “Right.??
?

  “Unfortunately,” he said with an apologetic sigh, “that sort of amazingly clumsy technique is usually limited to law enforcement officials—either state or local. They always seem to think they’re invisible.”

  Cole’s brows snapped together over eyes like shards of ice. “Are you telling me,” he enunciated in a low, incensed voice, “that the police are tailing us?”

  “That’s my hunch. I’ll confirm it as soon as I can check this out.”

  When he left, Cole made three phone calls in rapid succession. The first was to a car-rental agency, who promised to deliver a plain, four-door sedan to his office by noon.

  The second call was to a private, unlisted phone number in Fairfax, Virginia, belonging to a senior member of the United States Senate who had the ear of the president, a seat on the Appropriations Committee, and a great deal of political clout. He had also received three hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions from a fund-raiser held by Cole Harrison and was hoping for another such event before the next election.

  According to his wife, Edna, Senator Samuel Byers was attending a meeting of the Appropriations Committee that morning. Cole left word with her, but he had to wait until she finished exclaiming over how much she loved Foster’s Beautiful Living magazine and had extracted a promise from him to bring Diana to Fairfax for their annual Christmas party.

  His next call was to a number that only Cole knew existed. He drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk, and when Willard Bretling answered, Cole said simply, “I’ll be there tonight at six.”

  “Who is this, please?” Bretling asked, his voice distracted and scratchy from lack of use.

  “Who the hell do you think it is?” Cole snapped.

  “Oh, of course, I am sorry. I have been playing with our toy all night,” the seventy-year-old said in a gleeful voice.

  Senator Byers called on Cole’s direct line at four o’clock, just after Cole hung up from Diana. “I’m sorry to hear about your trouble, Cole,” Sam said, and he sounded sincere. “I’m sure it will all blow over in a week or two.”