Mahogany's Dream Page 4

  It was Norma’s turn for white knuckles.

  Thankfully, Blake was turning the car onto Spring Garden Street, where Norma’s school was located.

  Some of the nonresident students were disembarking from a city bus about the same time. When they spotted Blake’s BMW turning the corner, they became visibly excited and gathered at the curb. The sight of that expectant little group lifted Norma’s spirits somewhat.

  As Blake pulled the car to a stop in front of the school, he said, “If my staff were ever that happy to see me, I would have someone check the last payroll for an error.”

  “Now you see why I can’t go to Phoenix,” she said.

  “Actually, I don’t” he replied.

  She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, then wiped her lipstick off with her thumb. “Have a good day, Blake. I’ll see you at six.”

  “I’m going over to the site today,” he announced.

  “Oh,” she said, mildly surprised. “Did you bring your trunks?”

  “That’s neither original nor funny,” he said.

  She opened the car door to an uncoordinated serenade of “Dr. Hawthorn! Dr. Hawthorn!” The children invariably mispronounced the name with a silent second H, which got under Blake’s skin every time.

  As Norma swung her legs out over the door well, Blake touched her forearm. “This conversation is not over.”

  “Is it ever?” she said under her breath. She stepped out of the car. Two small boys tussled for the right to carry her briefcase. She leaned back into the car and said, “Just remember, I’m not going.” Then she quickly shut the door before he could respond.

  The children pranced about her like she was the Pied Piper.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Philadelphia Field Office

  Federal Bureau of Investigation

  In the middle of Brian’s staff meeting, Special Agent Jill Lessor sent this instant message to Shelly Chang-Randolph:

  Does James Bond go to staff meetings?

  Shelly, sitting on the opposite side of the conference table, tilted her tablet PC away from the agents sitting on either side of her. She smiled impishly and then wrote back:

  Only when he’s not banging the Queen.

  Jill covered her mouth to stifle an audible laugh. She replied:

  Is that why they call it her Majesty’s Secret Service?

  After she tapped the send icon with her stylus, she glanced at Shelly for a reaction. But Shelly was frowning at her screen. She looked over at Jill and pointed her pen towards the head of the table. Jill turned that way to find Brian staring daggers at her.

  Shit, she thought.

  Brian jabbed his stylus toward the screen of his PDA, gesturing Jill to look down at her own. On her screen was an IM from Brian in a bolded red font that said: Cut the crap!

  Shit, she thought again.

  When the agent standing at the front of the room finished his presentation, Brian said, “Let’s switch up the rotation for a change.” He twirled his chair towards the back of the room. “Jill, you’re up next.”

  Everyone turned to look at her. She wasn’t scheduled for a presentation until next month’s meeting. She smirked at Brian, the new Special Agent-In-Charge, then picked up her PDA and stalked toward the front of the room.

  Jill was short and homely, with close cropped dirty blond hair and broad shoulders. Foul-mouthed and blunt, she had a decidedly unfeminine manner, which had given rise to a rumor that she was gay. As she ungracefully lumbered across the room, more than one person wondered if the rumor were true.

  Up in front, Jill pressed her PDA into a docking cradle fixed to the top of the projector. The overhead lights immediately dimmed. The projector whirled and clicked before beaming a blue screen onto the entire front wall. A second later the screen displayed high resolution headshots of seven different individuals. A name and number appeared under each photo.

  Jill said, “This is from RCO database 10-17. This is target group 02-4. Each of these individuals arrived at an airport in Region 3 sometime during 2002 via one-way tickets from foreign countries on our watch list.” She used a laser pointer to click the first photo, causing it to enlarge and fill a quarter of the screen. The other seven photos disappeared and detailed information about the first individual’s background and activities appeared in their place.

  She cycled through her presentation on the first six individuals in a spiritless, mechanical drone. Her target group included the usual boring lineup of regular folks with legitimate reasons to buy one-way tickets from foreign countries. There were four young people with student visas and an elderly American couple moving back to the States. There was nary a terrorist among them. In fact, in the two years she had been conducting these so-called Travel Checks, she hadn’t come across a single suspicious person. Or even an interesting one. Not to mention the fact that the Bureau was hopelessly behind. Back in 2002, in the wake of 9/11, some genius in Washington decided that the FBI should check out everyone who had entered the country with a one-way ticket within the last five years. She was just now getting to the 2002 flights. The people on her current list had been in the United States for at least seven years already. It was grunt work and she barely disguised her disdain for it.

  Then she called up her last subject.

  “This is Dyson Conwell,” she said. On the screen was the driver’s license photograph of a smiling young African-American man. He was caramel colored and handsome, with near perfect teeth. “U.S. citizen, thirty-three years old today, twenty-six at the time of this trip. Arrived at Philadelphia International on February 7, 2002 via a one-way ticket from Xiamen, China.”

  As Jill scrolled through some grainy airport security camera shots of Dyson emerging from the terminal, Brian said, “Give me a close up on camera three.” Jill clicked and dragged the image to the center of the screen, then enlarged it by three hundred percent. “Zoom in on his briefcase,” Brian instructed. She drew a rectangle around that part of the image and then dragged one corner until the briefcase covered half of the front wall. At that magnification, everyone could see that what looked like a briefcase was actually a nylon laptop case. The case had some sort of corporate logo stitched on it. The words beneath the logo were in Chinese ideograms.

  Jill said, “Shelly, will you give us some help on this?” But before Shelly could translate, Brian said, “It says: Hon Microelectronics Corporation.”

  Everyone looked at Brian in surprise.

  Shelly said, “Alrighty then,” and sat back down.

  Brian told Jill to carry on with her report. He didn’t interrupt her again, but he sent her an IM telling her to see him after the meeting.

  When the meeting finally broke up, Shelly rushed over to Jill. “Sorry, Sorry, Sorry,” she said effusively.

  “For what?” Jill asked.

  “For playing tag while your boss was watching.”

  “It’s not your fault these meetings are dryer than the fucking desert,” she said a little too loudly. Some of the other agents glanced at her as they filed out the room.

  “Maybe,” Shelly said. “But I didn’t know he was vindictive enough to put you on the spot like that.”

  “So fucking what? I was prepared.”

  “Yes, you were. Very prepared. If Joyce did that to me in front of everyone, I would piss my panties.”

  “He wants to see me in his office.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. He sent me an IM before I sat back down. Maybe he wants to show me a new filing system to use for all the paperwork we do while we wait for real terrorists to hit us again.” She sighed. “This is not what I signed up for.”

  “If you really want to see paperwork, spend a day in our office.” Shelly worked in the local U.S. Attorney’s Office, where she was the official liaison with the FBI. “You know, he has a really great ass. Maybe he wants to show you that.”

  Jill shook her head. “Do you think about anything besides sex?”

  “Yeah,
I think about having sex on top of my paperwork.” Jill laughed and Shelly said, “Catch ya’ later, Kiddo. Good luck.”

  _________

  Janaya Parsons, Brian’s secretary, frowned when she saw Jill coming down the hall. She thoroughly disliked the agent. And it wasn’t just the fact that she viewed her as an androgynous fashion nightmare. Her main problem with Jill was the lack of respect she showed for Brian.

  Jill’s shadow loomed over Janaya’s desk for almost a full minute before Janaya peered up at her. When she did, Jill said, “Brian wants to see me.”

  “Good morning to you too, Agent Lessor. Have a seat and Agent Hassett will be with you shortly.”

  Jill didn’t move a muscle. “He said he wanted to see me right after the RCO meeting. In other words, now.”

  As pleasantly as possible, Janaya said, “I know what ‘right after the meeting’ means, but he’s on an important call.” She pointed to a lit green button on her handset as proof. “He’s expecting you and he asked me to tell you to have a seat when you arrived.”

  Jill made a big production of checking her watch. “Well, maybe if you let him know I’m here, he’ll hang up.”

  Janaya exhaled deeply. “Look Jill, he asked me not to interrupt his call and he told me to ask you to have a seat. Now if you want to do my job, you can fill out an application in the lobby. Otherwise, you can have a seat and wait.”

  “Sorry, but I finished high school,” Jill said. “I think that makes me overqualified. And besides, I don’t think I own a skirt short enough for your job.”

  “I’m surprised you own any skirts at all,” Janaya shot back.

  Just then the green light on Brian’s line blinked off. Jill said, “Whatever,” and strode past Janaya’s desk toward the closed door to his office. She stuck her head in and said, “Knock, knock.”

  Brian looked up from a document he was reading. “Oh. Come in, Jill.”

  Janaya came in right behind her. “I asked her to have a seat,” she told her boss apologetically.

  Brian smiled at her warmly. “It’s okay. Do me a favor and hold my calls a little while longer?”

  Janaya smiled back. “Of course.” She grabbed the doorknob. “Would you like this open or closed?”

  “You can close it.”

  Janaya scowled at Jill as she turned to go. Jill winked at her.

  Back at her desk, Janaya silently berated herself for allowing Jill to draw her out of character again.

  _________

  “So you read Chinese now?” Jill asked.

  “Not a word,” Brian said.

  “You could’ve fooled me. And Shelly too.”

  “I recognized the HMC logo, that’s all.”

  “From where?”

  He paused before he said, “That’s classified.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I don’t joke about national security.”

  Jill sat up. Those two little words had lit a footpath in her mind that led up and away from the darkness of travel check hell. “Then tell me what you can tell me,” she said eagerly.

  “I can’t tell you anything,” he said flatly. “You don’t have the clearance for that. Anyway, that’s not why I asked to see you.”

  Her hope deflated, she said, “Before you rip me a new asshole over that little situation during the staff meeting, let me assure you it won’t happen again.”

  Brian furrowed his brow. “That’s not why I asked to see you either, but since you brought it up, let me give you some advice: The next time you send an IM during any meeting in this office, make sure it has your resume attached to it. Understood?”

  “Understood,” she said.

  “And just so you know, I told Joyce to make sure the same thing applies to your playmate.”

  Jill figured Shelly was in a bathroom somewhere crying her freakin’ eyes out.

  “Tell me more about the black guy with the HMC bag,” Brian said.

  “You mean Conwell?”

  “Yes. Dyson Conwell.”

  “What do you want to know about him?”

  Brian leaned back in his chair and said, “Everything.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  What a nightmare, Blake thought.

  He stood at a construction site on the outskirts of downtown Philadelphia, looking down into a gigantic crater. It was the size of an entire city block and a quarter filled with murky, muddy water.

  He sighed. This was not the way it was supposed to be. The original plans had called for the construction of two sixty-five-story skyscrapers named Franklin Towers. The towers were to be the first marquee project of Hawthorn Properties, the startup he had founded with his buyout money from the Bank.

  But all he had so far was a hole in the ground.

  _________

  When the rumors had first begun about South One Financial Corporation wanting to acquire the bank he was running, Blake thought it was good news. Great news even. Constitution Savings Bank had never been more than a regional institution, so it had only been a matter of time before a bigger bank swallowed it. He knew that even before he agreed to become its CEO. He’d actually made a higher salary as the head of Citibank’s Hong Kong office, but he’d always believed that it was his destiny to become a CEO. And he knew that he stood to make a fortune in a merger if he landed in the right place.

  That’s why he could hardly believe his luck when the CSB headhunters came sniffing around. Here was an opportunity to become the head honcho of a prime takeover target. Plus, as serendipity would have it, CSB just happened to be headquartered in his wife’s hometown. After all their years in far off places climbing Citibank’s corporate ladder, he knew she would be thrilled to go home again. And she was. When he told her the news, she leapt into his arms and cried.

  That was nine years ago. Nine good years. Or at least eight of them were. The last one had been a humdinger for him. Everything had been going swimmingly until those bastards from South One stabbed him in the back.

  He had a gentleman’s agreement with the CEO of South One: After the merger, Blake was to become Vice Chairman of the merged bank. All he had to do was cut some of CSB’s costs so the merger would be more likely to get regulatory approval. With over two million dollars in stock options at stake, Blake carried out his task with a vengeance. He fired whole departments. He canceled nearly all of the bank’s charitable giving, including the support it had provided to Rittenhouse Academy, the school for orphaned children Norma had founded when they came to Philadelphia.

  A few months before the merger was finalized, the South One people claimed that Blake had done so much cutting that no one in the region wanted to work with him anymore. At least that’s what they said. Instead of the Vice Chairmanship, they told him he could either become a “Special Assistant” to the South One CEO or take an early retirement package. He chose retirement. As part of his package, South One agreed to finance the Franklin Towers project.

  In the days leading up to the loan closing, Blake often sat in his office admiring the scale model of the project he’d had made. The inscription beneath the model read: “Franklin Towers. The tallest buildings in Pennsylvania.” He smiled every time he read it. He wondered why he’d never thought of becoming a real estate developer before then.

  The merger went through without a hitch. That was the last good thing he remembered happening.

  The first problem was the name. One day Blake got a certified letter from a lawyer in Los Angeles, who claimed that Franklin Towers was the screen name of one of his clients. Two hundred thousand dollars in legal fees later, he knew more than he ever wanted to about trademark infringement. He was forced to rename his project Franklin Commons. He hated the new moniker. What the hell is a Common? But his lawyers assured him it was the best decision.

  Then Mother Nature pissed on him, or so his enemies liked to say. It rained for thirteen consecutive days, a record for Philadelphia. The construction site flooded.

  The Labor Unions told him that
the contractors still had to be paid even though they hadn’t worked a day during the deluge. To add insult to injury, he had to hire more contractors to pump the water from the site. When he turned to his insurance provider for help, they told him that his policy didn’t cover “Acts of God”. He thought they were kidding, but they weren’t.

  The unexpected cleanup costs ate most of the construction loan that South One had given him. Even after cashing in the bulk of his stock options, there wasn’t enough money to pay everyone. So he paid the contractors he considered the most important. That was a bad move. One of the subcontractors who had not been paid sued the General Contractor, which caused a judge to order a ninety-day work stoppage. Unfortunately, the South One loan required Blake to start building within sixty days.

  On Day Sixty-Three, the Bank started calling. Not many people missed the irony of that.

  The local press showed him no mercy. Every headline seemed to employ a water metaphor. The Philadelphia Daily News wrote Ex-CEO Drowns in Debt. The Philadelphia Inquirer went with Former Banker Makes Big Splash. And then there was the Philadelphia Business Journal, a publication that had trumpeted him on its cover when he took over CSB. Now the cover read, Hawthorn’s Atlantis: Franklin Towers Project Underwater.

  What should have been the crowning achievement on a stellar career had turned into a Pandora’s box of humiliation. Blake had become a laughing stock in Philadelphia. He wanted nothing more than a fresh start somewhere else.

  CHAPTER

  7

  After Jill left, Janaya stood in the doorway to Brian’s office.

  “You know,” she said, “if you had talked on the phone one minute longer, you would’ve had to break up a cat fight out here.”