James Grippando - Money to Burn

I switched to a local news station, where the breaking-news coverage was all about the emergency-room shooting in North Bergen. I was happy to hear that “miraculously, no one was injured,” but I was suddenly wondering if I would ever see Ivy again. Was she gone for good this time, another disappearing act? The reporter’s closing words jarred me loose from my thoughts.

“The suspect escaped before police arrived,” she said into the camera, speaking from the parking lot outside the hospital, “and he remains at large. Anyone with information about this crime is encouraged to notify the police.”

She signed off, and I nearly choked on my sandwich. “I told the nine-one-one operator who did it,” I said. “Why the hell don’t they have Ian Burn’s name and photograph all over the airwaves?”

“Don’t take this personally,” said Olivia, “but maybe they’re waiting for a credible source before they send everyone looking for a Mumbai hit man with a french-fried ear.”

Olivia excused herself for a bathroom break, leaving Eric and me alone in the dining room. He switched the station to FNN, where experts were saying that the ripple effects from Saxton Silvers and the subprime crisis could push the Dow as low as 10,000-a prediction “as lunatic as gas going up to four dollars a gallon,” shouted Chuck Bell’s replacement.

I wrapped up the last few bites of my sandwich and opened a bottled water.

“So what’s going to happen next?” I asked. “To Olivia and me, I mean.”

Eric lowered the television volume. “We drive out to the hangar. The helicopter will get you into Martha’s Vineyard before midnight. My yacht’s ready to go as soon as you land. You should be on your way to Bermuda in a few hours. If it’s still not safe by the time you dock there, we’ll refuel and keep you moving.”

“How long can that go on?”

“As long as it takes.”

I drank my water. “Is that what you told Ivy four years ago?”

We exchanged glances. I hadn’t intended it as a barb exactly, but he did seem to take my meaning. I grabbed the remote and clicked off the television, making it clear that I needed to get to the root of it.

“When we were in the emergency room,” I said, “Ivy told me about the corporate espionage she was doing for WhiteSands. She started to tell me why McVee wanted her dead, but the shooting started before she could finish.”

Eric showed little reaction, his tone matter-of-fact. “She did a good job. That’s why McVee wants her dead.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ivy didn’t just figure out what Ploutus was doing to manipulate the market for WhiteSands’ stock. She caught the mastermind himself red-handed. If we had gone to the D.A., the things she’d uncovered could have put Kyle McVee’s son in jail for a very long time.”

“Why didn’t you go to the D.A.?”

“We would have. Except that…”

“He killed himself.”

“Yes,” said Eric. “No one saw it coming. But he took his own life.”

“McVee blames Ivy for that?”

Eric gave me a sobering look. “He sure as hell doesn’t blame himself.”

I was well aware that Marcus McVee had committed suicide. I’d seen the newspaper photographs of his Maserati parked on the waterfront in the Hamptons. I’d read the story of his body slumped over in the front seat, an empty liter of tequila on the floor and a half-empty bottle of Vicodin on the seat beside him. The autopsy confirmed that he’d washed down at least two dozen 500 milligram pills with the tequila. I was also aware-firsthand-of how the loss of his only son had changed the old man, turning Kyle McVee from simply aggressive to outright ruthless on Wall Street. But I’d had no idea how ruthless.

“So long as Ivy was alive,” said Eric, “no one she loved was safe. We spoke on the phone on your wedding day. She told me about the SUV that ran you off the road. And the hired thug who roughed you up at the FTAA riot in Miami.”

“I don’t understand. Usually when the mob or someone like that goes after your family, isn’t it because they want you to pay them money, or because they want you to forget that you were a witness to a crime? They want you to do something. What is it that McVee wanted Ivy to do?”

“Suffer,” said Eric. “McVee was in agony over the death of his son. He wanted Ivy to agonize with the fear of something terrible happening to someone she loved-namely, you or her mother. So his thugs played with you. Ran you off the road with an SUV. Roughed you up in Miami. She knew eventually McVee would get bored with the game and step things up.”

“Or maybe not,” I said. “The flaming envelope was more of the same, four years later.”

“But he will tire of it-this we knew four years ago. Then he would kill Ivy. Or maybe he would kill you or her mother, let Ivy live with the sense of loss that she had forced him to live with. The SUV running you off the road could have killed you. That envelope could have killed you. The bottom line was clear: So long as Ivy was alive, someone was going to end up dead-either her, you, or her mother. Ivy knew it. And so did I. That was when I helped her disappear.”

It was starting to make sense. But not entirely.

“You’re the guy who hired Ivy,” I said. “Why would McVee want her blood but not yours?”

“I guess he decided to wait for the right time and hit me where it really hurt. He brought down Saxton Silvers-assassinated it, in plain English, with his short selling.”

“But he hasn’t put you in the poorhouse. You still have WhiteSands. There has to be more to this.”

Our eyes locked-but not in an adversarial way. It was more like two men coming to an understanding that something needed to be said-probably should have been said a long time ago-and that things would never be the same between them once it was out there.

Eric crossed the dining room to the doorway and checked the hallway, making sure that Olivia was not on her way back from the restroom. Then he closed the door, and the expression on his face was about as serious as I’d ever seen.

“I never wanted to be the one to tell you this, Michael. But it’s time you knew the God’s honest truth about that woman you married.”

IVY HEARD IT ALL-EVERYTHING ERIC VOLKE TOLD MICHAEL IN THE seeming privacy of the WhiteSands’ corporate dining room.

Ian Burn heard it, too.

He dimmed the LCD on Ivy’s cell to conserve the battery. Her speakerphone function was still activated, however, relaying every word that was uttered within range of the cell that Ivy had given Michael outside the emergency room in North Bergen. Ivy hadn’t morphed into one of those smartphone-aholics who carried both a BlackBerry and an iPhone in her purse. It was simply a matter of survival. When you spent every day of your life on the run, the thought of being trapped in a church or other hiding place with a cell that said No service was enough to make you carry two devices-each with a different provider.

“Very impressive,” said Burn, admiring the technology. “A master smart phone programmed for remote activation of the speakerphone on a slave cell that goes everywhere Michael goes. And they have no idea that as long as the phone has a battery in it, we can hear every word they’re saying, even though it’s just sitting there. I have to confess,” said Burn, “your spyware is every bit as good as mine.”

The white commercial van was parked less than a mile from WhiteSands’ headquarters, and Ivy was alone with Burn in the rear cargo compartment.

“It’s really pretty basic,” said Ivy.

And it wasn’t just about eavesdropping. Ivy’s spyware also had GPS tracking capability, enabling the master to follow the slave wherever the slave took his cell. Tracking Michael all the way from North Bergen to Somerset County had been a snap. It was so reliable that Burn had even felt comfortable stopping on the way for food. He was finishing off the last of the hand-stretched naan, a round flatbread that was a staple in northern India, but in the United States was mainly for rich folks who shopped in trendy grocery stores in places like Somerset County.