Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

Event Risk by Mike Wiecek

© 2008 by Mike Wiecek

A winner of the PWA’s Shamus Award for best short story, in 2006, and a two-time winner of the Derringer Award for best short story, Mike Wiecek makes a first appearance in EQMM here with a tale of the murderous side of a high-rolling businessman. He is the author of the 2005 novel Exit Strategy (Jove), which received a nomination from the International Thriller Writers for their best-novel award.

I admit, I thought hard before agreeing to meet Tarnbeck where he want-ed. Generally, my clients are keen to conduct our business in private — they need to see me in person, but they’re more than skittish about potential blowback. Tarnbeck, evidently marching to a different drummer, suggested the shooting range at his club.

“What?” I wasn’t sure I heard him right on the cell phone.

“I try to fire a few hundred rounds a week. You have to practice too, right? We’ll make it a working meeting.”

I do keep up my training, in fact, but that’s part of my job. Tarnbeck was CEO of a six-billion-dollar manufacturing company. Did I have any lunatic enemies devious enough to arrange a hit in Connecticut’s third-priciest country club?

But I needed the work, so I said yes. Life is too short to worry whether ninjas had infiltrated the blue-blazer set.

So there we were, two guys on the outdoor range in perfect weather: cool, overcast, and no wind whatsoever. October in Fairfield County can go either way, what with global warming and all, but we’d lucked out. A few gold and red leaves had escaped the grounds crew, lying on the greensward between asphalted shooting strips. Before we started, I couldn’t see a single gleam of brass anywhere, even in the berm behind the target row, which meant the groundskeepers were spending hours picking over the lawn every night.

When did golfing and squash give way to semiautomatic weapons? I tell you, New Money has too much time on its hands.

“Nice handgun,” Tarnbeck had said when I pulled out the Sig P226 I normally use. He had an unmodified Model 1911 himself, and from fifty yards was plinking the headplates steadily, six at a time. I’ll say this for him, he looked good: about sixty, with a runner’s rangy build, a silver brush cut, and a nice, easy stance while he popped away. I used the big Mickey Mouse ears — I value my hearing — but Tarnbeck stayed with the small foam plugs favored by those with an image to protect.

Of course, that meant we could barely hear each other, and I wasn’t about to go hollering out our business. So the conversation proceeded fitfully during reloads, when I could loosen the earmuffs.

“Here’s the problem,” he said as we refilled our magazines. “This blowhard died in my boardroom the other day.”

“I heard.” It was in the papers. Tarnbeck’s company was “exploring strategic alternatives,” as they say, and one of the suitors, some private-equity partner, had keeled over during a private negotiation. “Heart attack. You have a liability issue?”

“Of course not.” Tarnbeck glanced at me impatiently. “He should have cut back on the steaks and whiskey a long time ago.”

“How fast did EMS get there?” Call it professional curiosity — 911 response time sometimes matters to me, for all kinds of reasons.

“A few minutes.” He shrugged, finished with his last magazine, and snapped it back into the pistol. “Long enough for everyone else in the room to speed-dial his broker.”

That was a nice image: The guy on the floor gasping and clutching at his chest while all around him his pals were busy shorting his debt. Tarnbeck grinned and stepped back to the line, raising his pistol.

Five minutes later we started up again.

“Someone’s trying to horn in on my buyout,” Tarnbeck said. “Buying our stock on the sly, raising money in the unregulated markets. It’s got the bankers all jumpy about event risk, so they’re jacking up our short-term rates. Lots of rumors, and I have no idea who’s behind it all.”

“Nothing in the 13-D’s?” The SEC requires investors to fess up once they’ve acquired more than five percent of a public company, for just this reason.

“Not for another week. It’s too recent.”

“So you’ve got another bidder.” Tarnbeck nodded shortly, and started shooting again.

I could see the problem. Tarnbeck wanted to take the company private himself. As CEO, he knew exactly where he could slash and burn, to cash out asset value hidden from current shareholders. If some other buyout group outbid him, not only would Tarnbeck lose the deal and its hundreds of millions of easy money, he’d also surely lose his job. He wanted the LBO, and he wanted it cheap, and some jackal had shown up to contest the carcass.

Of course, the shareholders — whose interests Tarnbeck was supposed to represent — would benefit from a higher price. Can you say, conflict of interest?

We moved back to 75 yards and switched to silhouette targets. Long range for handguns, though Tarnbeck kept his groupings impressively tight. You could tell that everything he did he made into a competition, and he was obviously paying attention to my own results. So I let my shots drift around, mostly on the paper but randomly spaced. Hey, I needed the job.

“I guess I know why you looked me up,” I said, while we waited for the rangemaster to trot out more boxes of ammo.

Tarnbeck nodded, looking straight at me. “Lots of investigators could find out who it is,” he said. “Probably quicker than you, too. But then what, they’re gonna write me a report? I need this problem settled for good.”

“For good,” I repeated.

“You know what I mean. Do I have to spell it out?”

The dead guy in his boardroom must have been an inspiration. I sounded him out on fees, and he was sensible enough not to nickel-and-dime the bonus calculation, so we got to a handshake quick enough.

Tarnbeck didn’t turn back to the targets, though. He stood watching me, thoughtful, keeping his pistol pointed correctly downrange.

“I wonder,” he said. “This amounts to inside knowledge. A man in your position could arrange to profit on any number of side trades ahead of the, ah, precipitating event.”

The smarter ones figure this out. “That’s right.”

Tarnbeck thought about it some more. “But... you don’t have the capital to make it worthwhile, do you?”

Like, twenty percent of nothing is still nothing. Maybe it’s a cliché, but it’s still true: You got to have money to make money.

“I’m not living off investments,” I said. “I earn my pay.”

“Got it.” Tarnbeck seemed satisfied. “Sure you don’t want to shoot some more?”

“No.” I had already put the Sig away. “My hand hurts.”

Normal accountants complete their assignments with an audit report and a stack of spreadsheets. My jobs might start out the same way, but they generally end up requiring, say, unlicensed firearms, or lengths of piano wire. Sure, Tarnbeck could have gotten a straight financial investigator cheaper than me. But he wasn’t interested in the numbers, he was buying an outcome. All the letters you might have after your name — C.P.A., M.B.A., CFE, whatever — just aren’t going to handle that last bit.

It’s a good niche. Keeps the fees high.

I started the search for Tarnbeck’s anonymous raider the usual way: calling around to see if anyone would simply tell me the answer. Poring over endless pages of proprietary financials, which seem always to be printed in seven-point type, is a last resort. Tarnbeck was right; the traders were full of gossip, none of it particularly helpful. The stock’s volume had more than doubled over the last month, with sharp peaks at odd times of day — 11:15 A.M., 1:30 P.M., like that. Someone was out there, taking bites. But the big purchases were being routed through the all-electronic ECNs, impossible to backtrack.

“Everyone on the east coast of North America knows they’re in play,” said Johnny, generously giving me about a third of his conscious attention. His eyes stayed on the five monitors — no, six, he’d added another flat-panel since I last visited — that were streaming market data, news, and blogosphere rants. “And half of them are ready to make an offer. Tarnbeck’s roadkill.”

Johnny and I were both finance majors in college, but afterwards, while I was learning how to jump out of airplanes and field-strip a .50 Cal, Johnny was clawing his way from entry-level I-banking to, eventually, running his own hedge fund. Who made the better choice is a topic for another day.

I’d come down to his Beaver Street offices, where he oversaw a roomful of twenty-something traders, a floor-to-ceiling panorama of the Hudson River skyline, and 900 million dollars of smart money. The traders all seemed to have ADHD. Johnny’s style was incremental; he could go in and out of positions in less than thirty seconds. Breakfast and lunch were catered every day, but the food mostly sat around getting cold, and the only consistent nourishment seemed to be cans of Red Bull and Jolt. In these days of algorithmic technical strategies, it was all quaintly retro.

“Are you in?” I asked.

“Nah.”

“You don’t like the company?”

“Oh, it’s good enough. All those factories in the Midwest, so Old Economy. Nice pickings.”

“So, what? You think the field’s too crowded?”

Johnny shrugged and tapped his keyboard. Some day trader probably just got wiped out. “It feels funny, that’s all.”

“Funny?”

“I dunno. You know. Funny.”

Well, he was worth about a hundred million dollars, and I wasn’t. I guess I’d trust his intuition. We talked about other matters — as a favor, Johnny runs some of my money in a beneficial account — but I left soon enough. Ten minutes is about all you can get out of him during exchange hours.

Tarnbeck probably thought I’d be chasing his bugbear all by myself, down the mean streets of Greenwich with nothing but attitude and an equalizer. Truth is, I’d have preferred that myself — nobody likes to split a fee — but sometimes these jobs are just too much trouble. If Johnny didn’t know whose door to knock on, I was in for a real plod. I needed help.

I didn’t have to think about who to ask. This kid named Leeson had been hanging around, buying me drinks and listening to stories. He was young, smart, and hungry — a little too eager to make a name for himself, maybe, but so were we all, once. He jumped at the chance to sign on, not even complaining about the hod-carrier’s wage I offered.

We met at the docks — not the working waterfront, but a glitzy marina on Stamford Harbor, filled with gleaming power cruisers and sailboats with computer-controlled ropes. I mean, sheets. Leeson, though he had some good points, was some kind of yachting fanatic. He loved sitting on the dock, squinting and grinning and explaining all that pointless seafaring jargon.

At least it was close to Tarnbeck’s corporate headquarters.

“So what’s the job?” Leeson finally got around to asking. A steady breeze blew off the ocean, cold and damp under the cloudy sky. Leeson, with that casual invincibility to inclement weather you have in your twenties, sat comfortably on the freezing bench. I pulled my jacket zipper all the way up and tried not to huddle into it too obviously.

“I have a client with a business rival,” I said. “He’d like the rival to go away.”

“That’s what we do.” Leeson nodded crisply, and I thought, we? Look, I’ve been in this game for years, but Leeson was just a snot-nose C.P.A. Yeah, I know, he was in the Marines and Iraq and all that, before he went back to college, but that’s the problem — anyone lucky enough to survive a year in Anbar thinks he’s seen it all.

“Whatever. Here’s the problem — nobody knows who the rival is.” I explained the situation, how Tarnbeck needed to find out exactly which vulture fund was trying to kick the blocks out from his LBO.

Leeson’s reaction was unexpected. He lost all interest in the boats, even when a trio of women crew walked past, young and blonde and openly checking him out. He just whistled out a long breath and said, slowly, “I’ll be... Tarnbeck? Tarnbeck. Wow.”

I frowned. “What about him?”

“Gerald A. Tarnbeck.” Like he was reading a cue card. “Sixty-three, five-foot-ten, left-handed, married twice but not for long, no children, residences in New Canaan, the Upper East Side, and Nassau, drives a silver Range Rover.”

A long pause. “I don’t know about the car,” I said.

“And as of last Tuesday, ATF transaction records showed him in possession of twenty-one handguns, eight long guns, ten semiautomatic rifles, and three shotguns.”

I stared at Leeson, and he gave it back without blinking. Sea-gulls cawed, water slapped at the dock pilings, and halyards banged on their spars. I was learning all sorts of useful information today, not just nautical vocabulary.

“I don’t suppose he hired you, too,” I said. We were edging away from each other on the bench, looking for fighting room, like a pair of cats who just decided they’re deathly enemies. “How’d you get into ATF?”

“On the Internet. Data brokers can get whatever you want.”

“Really? I should look into that.”

“Sure. Costs, though. There’s a guy in Colorado I like.” He was almost on his feet now, every muscle tense.

Time to stop stalling. “At least I don’t have to keep looking for Tarnbeck’s nemesis,” I said. “Want to tell me who it is?”

Leeson shrugged, a fractional lift of one shoulder. “Why would I do that?”

Well, it was worth asking. A few moments passed.

“This is stupid,” I said finally. “He hired you to whack Tarnbeck, right? He must think that’ll make the acquisition easier, since Tarnbeck would probably rather see the whole place go bankrupt before handing it over.”

Leeson wasn’t ready to concede anything, and he just grunted.

“So instead of, you know, working it out in a meeting or something, they take contracts out on each other.” I shook my head. “Good thing they’re introducing those mandatory ethics seminars in the business schools.”

“It’s been nice talking to you.” Leeson stood up, ready to back away.

“Oh, sit down. I promise I won’t try to shoot you. What’s the point? I don’t get paid unless your guy’s six feet under, and Tarnbeck’s sure not worth dying over. Let’s try to figure this out.”

He might have left anyway, but the three boat bunnies walked past again, giggling, and Leeson, unable to hold too many thoughts at once, was flustered enough to rejoin me on the bench.

“You’re thinking, all you have to do is land Tarnbeck first,” I said. “Pop him and you win. But if I get to your guy, you lose anyway, since you won’t get paid.”

Leeson relaxed, obviously feeling he had the advantage. “You have no idea who he is.”

“It won’t take as long as I thought — not now that I know he hired you. It’s not a needle in a haystack anymore.” Leeson wasn’t getting it, so I had to explain. “You met him in person. I’m sure of that. They always need to see us themselves, right? So all I have to do is walk you back. And that’s a lot easier.”

It started to drizzle. How nice. Leeson, Boy Scout, pulled a ball cap out of the pocket of his windbreaker. I sighed and frowned and got wet.

“It’s a race, then,” said Leeson, cheering up after he thought about it. “Want to synchronize watches?”

“Use your head. Once you’re on your way, first thing I’m going to do is call Tarnbeck and warn him. He’ll be locked down so tight you’d have a better chance at the Pope.”

“Oh.” Leeson’s good mood evaporated. “But I’ll do the same thing.”

“Of course. So, stalemate.”

We watched rain fall onto the boats. My pants and jacket gradually soaked through, but I had to ignore it, since Leeson didn’t seem to notice.

“Wait, I got an idea,” he said suddenly. “We can work together. It’s perfect.”

“How so?”

“You set Tarnbeck up, I shoot him, we split my fee.”

I admit, I thought about it. But in the end I decided that, as limited as my chosen vocation’s ethics might be, killing my own client for the sake of an easier buck just wasn’t on. Word might leak out, after all, and then no one would ever hire me again.

“Still, you might be on to something,” I said. “How about, we only pretend to zap Tarnbeck?”

“Huh?”

“Hollywood-style, fake bullets and everything. Make it a real show.”

“But...”

I played the scenario out in my mind. “Look. It’ll make the news, so you get paid. Better yet, once everyone thinks Tarnbeck is gone, there’s no more reason for secrecy, so your Green Hornet can take his mask off. And that’ll give Tarnbeck what he wants.”

Leeson wasn’t keeping up. “But...” he said again. “Okay, I see how I earn my fee. But how do you make anything out of it?”

“After you ride off into the sunset, what do you care? I’ll finish my assignment for Tarnbeck, bye-bye Green Hornet, and there we go, everyone’s happy. I’d call that a win-win-win.” I paused. “Well, except for the dead guy.”

That bothered Leeson, oh, about as much as you’d imagine, but he thought up another objection. “We’d both be taking the same risk,” he said slowly. “How do I know we’re, you know, getting an equal reward?”

“I get paid, you get paid. What’s the problem?”

“Yeah, but... how much are you making on this?”

We looked at each other.

“You first,” I said.

After some fruitless sparring, we tabled the question of compensation. At least Leeson was excited by the whole special-effects aspect — it’s true, everyone really does want to be in the movies.

As we finished up, the rain now a steady downpour, sheets of water coursing across the dock, Leeson thought of one last question.

“How are you going to convince Tarnbeck to go along?” he asked. “I mean, why would he?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s eating out of my hand. He’ll do whatever I suggest.”

“You’re out of your mind.” Tarnbeck glared at me like I’d just asked to marry his daughter. “Bobby Jakes told me you were okay, but he must have been off his meds. That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”

We were in his car — a Range Rover, yes, but shiny white, not silver. So much for Leeson’s backgrounding. Tarnbeck was driving, and he’d picked me up not far from his house at six A.M., on the way to the office. No driver, which was unusual for a major-league CEO. I suppose he wanted to keep our conversation private.

Horns blared on both sides, and Tarnbeck snapped his attention back to the road, just in time to slam on the brakes. Tires screeched as a Lexus missed us by inches, and a motorcycle roared past on the right. I glanced back and saw another vehicle slew out of control, skidding to the side of the street but not running into us. Tarnbeck growled and yanked the wheel, back into traffic.

“You want me to find him the usual way, fine,” I said. “But it’s going to take time — longer than I think you have. Once another offer’s on the table, your board is obligated to consider it.”

“I pay those freeloading morons a hundred grand to play golf together four times a year. They’ll do what I tell them.” Tarnbeck seemed comfortable with nineteenth-century notions of corporate governance. “I’ll get a unanimous vote, don’t worry about that.”

“Maybe.” If the board was that venal, they’d no doubt jump ship for an extra ten percent, but I didn’t want to get into it with Tarnbeck. They were probably his friends. “I know Congress is pulling back the reins on Sarbanes-Oxley, but there’ve been too many lawsuits against directors lately. Unlimited personal liability can encourage some inconvenient backbone.”

“Bah.”

“Anyway, you might be looking at this through too narrow a lens.”

“What?” Tarnbeck glanced at me, but only briefly. These backroads were surprisingly crowded for dawn — all the exurb-to-suburb commuters trying to beat rush hour, I guess. Cars filled the drive-through lanes of the bagel and coffee shops we kept passing, and we had to sit through at least two cycles at every stoplight. Give me downtown Manhattan any day, thanks.

“You’ve been CEO for, what, eleven years?” I said. An eternity, for a public company in 2008. “Let me ask you something. Do you really know who your friends are?”

Tarnbeck grunted. He was smart enough to understand what I meant, and not be offended by it. Executives at the very top live in a bubble, a cocoon of sycophancy and fawning agreement. Even the sharpest, most cynical tyrants can lose perspective.

“When the world thinks you’re dead,” I continued, “we won’t just flush out your anonymous rival for the LBO. There’ll be a window of uncertainty when everyone’s true colors will be visible. You’ll learn more about your staff than you would in six months of team-building retreats.”

I don’t know if it was that possibility that convinced him, or his own secret desire to star in a movie, or maybe just despair at getting anything more useful out of me. But by the time we rolled into the VIP lot of his corporate headquarters, Tarnbeck had signed on.

“Where do we do it?” he asked, pulling into a large, marked space with its own immaculate patch of lawn and a sidewalk gleaming in the first golden rays of sunrise.

“Good question.” We stayed in the Rover to finish talking. “It needs to be public, more or less, so people will be around to see it. But it can’t be too public, because we need to set it all up beforehand and, ah, control for eventualities.”

“How about in front of my house?”

“Hmm, no, I don’t think so. It’s too private, with that ten-foot spiked fence and the guardhouse and the dobermans in the yard.” Like everyone lived that way. “And the shooting range isn’t so hot either, not with all that live ammunition around.”

“So?”

“How about right here?” I gestured at the parking lot. “Lots of witnesses will look out those windows and swear they saw you assassinated in broad daylight. Including the FedEx guy and maybe some visitors, if we time it right. But it’s all your property, so we’ll be able to manage the environment.”

He didn’t take much convincing. It’s one of the few admirable traits I’ve noticed among the C-level executives I deal with — once they make a decision, they never look back.

We brainstormed some ideas, worked through the logistics, considered the best way to handle the immediate response. By the time we wrapped up, Tarnbeck was chuffed, happier than I’d seen him yet.

“Just one question,” he said, as we shook hands. I was about to go call a taxi, and he had underlings headed his way from the building’s grand entrance. “You’ve done this before, right?”

“Of course,” I said. “Many, many times.”

“Good.”

“It’s all in the planning — we do a good job ahead of time, and it’ll run like clockwork.”

“All right, then.” He nodded and abruptly turned away, off to shape the lives of fifty thousand employees.

I’ve never failed to fulfill a contract yet. Clockwork.

The first thing that went wrong was the weather: more rain, cold and steady and depressing. The action itself wouldn’t be affected — assassins, even fake ones, work in all conditions, and the FX gimmickry under Tarnbeck’s shirt was durable enough — but our audience would be much reduced. I wasn’t about to reschedule, though. Tarnbeck’s worst micro-managing instincts had emerged over the last five days, as we scripted the play. No detail was too minute for him to offer a contrary opinion. Shouldn’t we be using.233-caliber rounds, like in The Unit? Maybe he should fall backward onto the Range Rover’s hood, roll over, and crawl a little? Could we leave some red herrings on the grassy knoll, like a donut bag and some hand-rolled cigarette butts? He was calling me at three A.M. with ideas like that, for Christ’s sake.

Like I said, everyone wants to be a movie star.

To maximize viewer share, Tarnbeck contrived some excuse to show up at work a few hours later than his customary pre-dawn arrival. The security guards were in on it, too, so we wouldn’t have any unfortunate live-ammunition heroics. Or so I hoped — Tarnbeck was supposed to arrange all that, since I didn’t want anyone to see my face but him. We’d practiced the whole scenario in a big empty lot at one of the manufacturing plants Tarnbeck had shuttered last year, after outsourcing production to China. It had come out just right.

At eight-thirty I parked a borrowed utility truck outside the discreet wire fence that surrounded the headquarters campus. Across two hundred yards of lawn, down a slight slope, I had a nice open view of the main building and its parking lot. Of course, anyone looking the other way had an equally nice view of me, but that was the whole point. I was going to stand up on top of the truck, out in front of God and everyone, holding a Dragunov rifle with Leupold glass and, just for show, a mounted bayonet. How video game is that? I’d even gotten a Lone Ranger mask from a party store at the mall. Not exactly Day of the Jackal, but we were keeping the plot line simple.

An hour later, the lot was half filled, a couple of package-delivery trucks idled near the entrance, and people were occasionally dashing from their cars to the building, holding umbrellas or laptop cases over their heads against the downpour. At the front gate I saw the white Range Rover roll in, just as my cell phone rang.

“Ready?” Tarnbeck must have forgotten he wasn’t supposed to call.

“All set.” I looked at the rain coursing down the windshield and wished I’d brought full waterproofs. “It’ll be just like the run-through.”

“See you in the morgue.”

During the half-minute it took Tarnbeck to reach his spot, I clambered out and onto the roof, slipping and swearing. The Jackal would have been inside the vehicle, of course, warm and dry and holding his rifle on a tripod. I lifted the Dragunov “standing unsupported” — that is, Rambo style — and found the Range Rover in the scope.

And here’s where you ask, why the hell did I load real ammunition? I didn’t need to fire any rounds at all, even blanks — all the visuals were set up at Tarnbeck’s end. But for whatever reason, habit or caution or, who knows, maybe I’m just a psychopath, the magazine held a full ten rounds. Nothing fancy, just out-of-the-box hollowpoints, but hey, I was only two hundred yards away.

Tarnbeck stopped the Rover, and I saw its exhaust plume die away. A moment later his door opened. He stepped out, carefully, and paused before stepping away from the vehicle. He turned to close the door—

Shots. Despite the falling rain and the distance I heard the double-taps clearly. Two close together, then two more, and two more. Tarnbeck’s head exploded, his face a mess of red, even as more blood appeared on his jacket. The fake blood-packs burst through his shirt on cue, pointlessly. He stumbled and collapsed.

I’m embarrassed to say I had a moment of complete confusion: Had I pulled the trigger? Primed with a loaded sniper rifle, had I gone and killed him on autopilot?

Of course not. Rationality returned after a second, and I swung rapidly around, looking for a second shooter. It helped that I’d thoroughly mapped the terrain beforehand, when we were sketching out our little drama. Only a couple other locations offered clear sightlines and an easy exit — but it didn’t matter, I found the guy immediately. He was lying across the hood of a dull-colored sedan a hundred yards further up the hill behind me, holding his long gun in a clean Hawkins stance. Even as I brought the Dragunov up to get a closer look in the scope, he stood and brought his weapon over my way.

For a moment we stared at each other, through 10x magnification. My surprise was surely greater than his, for he must have expected me, but we fired simultaneously. What can I say? — I was lucky. His bullet cracked past my left ear. Mine struck him in his sternum, and he fell backward, dropping his weapon, to land sprawled in the mud by his car’s wheel well.

One of my maxims is that damage control, in this business, begins with lots more damage. I fired the Dragunov’s remaining nine rounds into the claim-jumper, hopped off the truck’s roof, and threw the rifle into the cab. No time to run over and stab him with the bayonet a few times, even though I really, really wanted to. I floored the pedal, the ancient GMC diesel groaning as it slowly got up to speed, and glanced back once when I crossed the entrance road.

The rain had eased, and faces were at all the windows I could see. A few brave or stupid suits had run out to crouch around Tarnbeck. Two golfcarts with security logos bumped across the lawn in the same direction. All that was missing was news ‘copters and TV vans, and they’d be along soon enough.

We’d gotten our spectacle. Too bad Leeson had upstaged me.

Considering I had to improvise the next half-hour, I think it came out pretty good. On the one hand, I’d just killed a guy. On the other hand, he had himself just assassinated a Fortune-40 °CEO in broad daylight. The police were going to need a battering ram to get through the media crews. I just had to use this attention to my favor.

Like I said earlier, I’d planned my mission with almost as much care as if it had been real, including the aftermath. So I had a few exit routes mapped out. I chose number two, since it took the backroads.

The utility truck was clean — I mean, it was filthy and greasy, but I’d worn gloves the whole time. Purple nitrile, like I was some middle-aged scrub nurse. I’ll be honest here, latex gives me a rash... anyway, I was planning to bundle up my clothes and drop them off at the incinerator later. The technicians wouldn’t get any useful forensics from the vehicle. The rifle, though, that was a problem. The damn thing was nearly five feet long, and it didn’t disassemble into some 007 briefcase either.

In the end, I found a pen and a sheet of paper in the clutter overflowing the cab, and in big letters I wrote: “I WAS DRIVIN BY AND I SAW A MURDUR, SO I SHOT THE CRIMINEL FOR YOU. DONT THANK ME, JUST A GOOD CITIZIN.” I swept all the debris off the dashboard and put the paper in plain view, with the rifle propped upright on the driver’s seat. With the door locked, of course, in case some light-fingered opportunist found it first. Then I called Channel 2 from a pay phone, told them exactly where I’d parked, and walked over to my getaway car.

You’re maybe thinking how careless I was, leaving my own handwriting out for CSI to have fun with. No worries. I used the edge of a clipboard as ruler, printing each stroke of each letter as a separate, straight line. Took awhile, but it created a dead end for the graphologists. I read about that in a novel years ago, and I always wanted to use it.

So I got away clean. Those crack newshounds almost didn’t find the truck first — I should have given better directions, I guess — but they beat the police, and my little note got pride of place in all the coverage. Once the honest-justice storyline was established, no subsequent facts could budge it. The press gleefully slandered Tarnbeck, glad to have a greedy rich guy to kick around, especially one who could no longer sue for libel. Martha Stewart was only in jail for a few months; Ken Lay went to heaven before he could even be sentenced; and Kobi Alexander is still living like a billionaire king in Namibia. It was about time that some pondscum CEO finally paid for his crimes, and, unfortunately for Tarnbeck’s posthumous reputation, the Zeitgeist nominated him. Glaring logical inconsistencies in the narrative didn’t seem to matter. Anyway, it was out of the headlines after a week.

There was, however, the small matter of my pay. Leeson had obviously been trying to take advantage of my gullibility to close out his own contract, keeping all the money for himself and setting me up for the fall in the bargain. Yes, in his case justice was served, but I sure didn’t see any of that cash. And even if I’d had a signed piece of paper to wave in the faces of Tarnbeck’s successors, I couldn’t claim to have done what I was hired for, so no joy there either.

I never even found out who the Green Hornet was.

But I’ll let you in on a small trade secret. Like you might expect, about thirty seconds after Tarnbeck got the last big surprise of his life, his company’s stock plunged. Plenty of those faces in the windows must have gone and sold their shares immediately. By the end of the day the price was down eighteen percent — and another five percent before opening the next morning. Now, like I said, that’s just not enough for me to make anything on — twenty-three percent of the pocket change I have invested is so paltry I don’t want to talk about it. But a hedge fund, with a few hundred million to wager, well, that’s a different story. Remember, the original plan was for the whole world to think Tarnbeck was dead — which would have meant the exact same result. What I did was, I tipped Johnny off beforehand. When Tarnbeck suffered his myocardial infarction — you know, his arteries got all clogged, with lead, get it? — Johnny did very, very well.

In fact, I think I can take credit for about two-thirds of his aggregate returns that quarter. And he was honorable enough to make sure I saw a fair piece of it, in my own account.

“I’m not going to ask,” Johnny said a few weeks later, when I stopped in. “I’m not interested, it doesn’t bother me, I don’t want to know.”

The other traders were yelling at each other, telling rude jokes on speakerphone, gulping their liquid caffeine; sunlight reflected from window glass up and down the Hudson; and Johnny’s wall of data flashed and scrolled and updated. Just like any other day.

“I heard some rumors,” I said. “That’s all. Sometimes you get lucky.”

“Lucky.” Johnny laughed. “Not like Tarnbeck.”

“He had a very nice life, before it ended. Let’s remember him that way.”

One of the phones on Johnny’s desk buzzed. He picked up the receiver, then looked at the Caller-ID display and hung up without answering.

“I heard some rumors, too,” he said.

“Hmm.”

“In the market, but no one noticed until after. There was odd movement in the company’s options that morning.”

“No kidding?”

“Out-of-the-money puts were being snapped up — it drove the volatility crazy. Someone was betting serious money on a big drop in the share price.”

“Well, I didn’t tell anyone. But you know how hard it is to keep a secret.”

“That’s not the funny part.” Johnny glanced up with his punchline. “The puts weren’t resold, and a few days later, most of them expired without being exercised.”

I had to think about it for a moment. “I’ll be damned. Tarnbeck was betting on his own death, wasn’t he?”

“That’s what I figure.” Johnny went back to his screens. “He obviously thought he’d be around to collect.”

The noise level rose, as one of Johnny’s traders started jumping up and down and pumping his arms like he’d just caught the touchdown pass. A couple others threw wadded paper and binder clips at him. It could have been eighth grade.

“Life goes on.” Johnny seemed to be executing a trade, tapping away, back at work.

“I think I need a vacation,” I said.