Judith McNaught - Remember When

"No, not really."

"Good. Then 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."

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 sixp.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?"