THE CAB PULLS off the West Side Highway at Thirtieth Street into the West Side Heliport parking lot, and we get out. Sitting on the westernmost edge of Manhattan, New Jersey is clearly within eyeshot just across the water.
“You handling Albert?” I yell to Jake above the rotor of the waiting Bell 206L4 we’re walking toward.
“I was waiting for him to call me back when you pulled me out of the office,” Jake screams back.
We settle into the chopper. Behind the pilot and copilot seats are four seats that face each other, two and two. Perry and Jake are sitting in the two seats backed up to the pilot and copilot. I’m facing them, able to see the backs of our navigating hosts’ heads behind them. We each put on our microphone-equipped headset, designed to keep noise out while we speak to one another as if we’re in a conference room. As we liftoff, none of us say a word. We each just stare out the window as the world drops away. The cars of the West Side Highway are quickly reduced to orderly insects. The buildings beneath us instantly become a distant grid of rooftops as we head east.
“I believe I have Minnie where I want her,” I say.
Perry and Jake look at me.
“She’s going to sell,” I go on. “She’s essentially there.”
“Strong work,” Jake says, nodding. “Although not exactly your most impressive sell to date, my friend. She loves you. You could sell her dog shit as the newest phenomenon in face cream if you wanted to.”
“Nice,” Perry says.
“Just saying,” Jake shrugs.
“How about you, Per?” I say. “What are you thinking about Sturner?”
“I’m thinking—we both saw in his millionth he wants to sell that building. So why then want to hold onto a minority, passive interest in it if it’s actually something you’re comfortable unloading?”
“There could be an issue with the property he’s been able to bury,” I respond. “Why not pass that on to someone else, and participate in the inherent upside we all know he’s right about with that building?”
Perry and Jake look at one another, then back to me.
“I’ll call Gordon.” Perry says.
Gordon Kadanoff is one of our insiders at the DOB.
“And start digging,” she goes on.
* * *
2:50 p.m.
The gates at 318 Meadow Lane, in Southampton, New York, slowly swing open with the touch of a button on my iPhone. The driver carefully makes his way down the straight, pebbly driveway to the construction site. The Deal House, a sprawling, white, twenty-three-thousand-square-foot behemoth of a beach house combining Old World elegance with modern convenience on just over six beachfront acres, is almost officially a home after fourteen months of construction.
“Holy shit!” Jake exclaims. “I imagine we’ll be doing some serious partying here!”
Truth be told, I’ve only seen the house a handful of times. This has been Perry’s pet project. Another way to keep her mind continuously occupied. Which means another way I can try to give her what she needs, and doesn’t just want. It would be an understatement to say no detail has been spared with this place. Ten bedrooms, all with breathtaking views of the Atlantic Ocean. Twelve bathrooms. Eight fireplaces with early nineteenth-century mantels. Coffered ceilings. There’s an infinity-edge pool, Jacuzzi, tennis court, squash court, and wine cellar. There’s a world-class kitchen, a gym, a theatre, and a sauna. Behind the house, on the water, there’s a dock for our still undecided-upon yacht. There’s even a koi pond on the property. When finished, the place will be no joke. My guess is the day we receive the certificate of occupancy, we could sell it for between sixty-five and seventy million and make a handsome profit.
The closer we get to the structure, the more we can see there’s still some work to be done. A portion of the roof’s shingles are not yet in place. Some painting still needs to be completed. Around the southern end of the house there’s still scaffolding. The car stops. The three of us get out. Again, with the touch of a sequence on my iPhone, I unlock the front door. As we walk toward our new beach home, Perry and Jake walk a few paces ahead of me, Jake asking Perry questions about the place so fast she can barely answer one before the next is flying from his lips.
There’s a text from Cass. Where am I meeting you later?
I look at the back of Perry, just a few paces ahead of me, then back at my phone.
This isn’t right.
I need to retreat.
But I can’t resist the urge to move forward.
Red Cat. 227 10th Ave, between 23rd and 24th. 8 pm. I write. Proper business attire preferred.
I step into the sprawling front foyer just behind Perry and Jake. While the outside of the house is not yet complete, the interior basically is. The entrance space is massive. It’s a circular atrium with exquisite beige marble underfoot, white walls, and equally interspersed doors that lead off in different directions to different portions of the house. Between each door is a beautiful, white-framed mirror with traditional, shaded wall sconces on each side. In the center of the rotunda is a circular, pink-cushioned, antique French bench with ornate gold trim. Just past the bench, in the center of the room, a staircase begins ascending toward the rear of the house to the second floor. The ceiling above us is only half closed; the perimeter of the entry foyer is covered overhead, but the center is left open, so you can see where the staircase branches off to both sides at the top and comes back around. It gives off the understanding that the same type of central area, with doors leading in all different directions, exists on the second floor as well.
Jake starts clapping slowly.
“Wow, guys. Seriously. Bravo. Bra—fucking—vo.”
We make our way down one of the hallways leading east, and eventually come to the kitchen, which is a chef’s wet dream. The rear of the light and airy, stark-white room faces the ocean. Between the perimeter of space and the huge central island, all topped with white and gray-swirled Italian marble, there’s more than expansive counter space. There’s a farmhouse sink also custom-cut from the same marble, and the world’s highest end appliances from a La Cornue Grand Palais Stove Range to a Mugnaini Wood-Fired Pizza Oven to a Wolf Warming Drawer. There’s even a $2,300 Blendtec Stealth Blender. Yup, you heard right—a $2,300 blender.
Jake heads for the fridge.
“I’m starving.”
“Don’t think you’re going to find much in there,” Perry says, “considering, you know, no one’s lived here yet.”
Jake checks anyway. He opens the door, and upon sight of seeing not one item inside, closes it dejectedly.
“I need to sit down for this, then. I have no energy.”
He takes a seat around the massive white, wooden table. I toss the iPad onto the island, take my suit jacket off which I toss over another of the chairs around the table, and remain standing. Perry remains standing too, resting on her elbows on the island.
“So—let’s have it,” she says.
“I figured out how Cobus has been watching me. Watching us.”
I take them through everything. The spill. The “zzzt.” The cutting of the belt. The GPS device. The voice transmitter/recorder. My visit to Peter Vitoli. All of it.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Jake says, his head in his hand as he’s now leaning forward on the table. “How is something like this even fucking real? It’s like we’re living in a Robert Ludlum novel! Seriously, who does this shit?”
“That’s why you put the belt in the car,” Perry says quietly to no one in particular. “So he can’t listen to us right now.”
“This isn’t a normal man,” I remind them. “His connections go as wide as they go deep. Governments. Municipalities. God knows what crime syndicates. Politicians. Something like this, I imagine, is easy for a man like Cobus. And, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s genius in its simplicity in terms of how wide a net he’s able to cast.”
“Goddamn Pirro. I want to kill that motherfucker,” Perry seethes through gritted teeth.
“We’ll get to him. For now, we need Pirro to keep thinking everything is fine because we need Cobus thinking we still have no idea we’re being listened to. The second we let Pirro know we’re onto all of this is the second Cobus gets wind of it. Besides—that’s if Pirro even knows. I’m guessing this shit came from way over his head. Assiagi is an Italy-based company. My guess is someone owed Cobus something; he’s friends with someone at the top there who’s just as shady as he is—who knows. Either way, it’s irrelevant at this point. We leave Pirro as is.”
“So why are we discussing it out here? Why the trip out east?”
“Because I need to confirm that the belts are the only means of surveillance. I’ve gone over everything in my mind in terms of what he knows and when we may have spoken about it or I may have spoken about it, and while I think it’s all about his being able to hear me, there are a couple things I just can’t be sure of. We’re out here because I wanted to lure Cobus somewhere he’d want to see what’s going on—not just hear about it—the way he wanted to see my iPad this morning that he knows I’ve been researching him on.”
“So, again, why here?” Jake asks.
“Because the city is too dense. Out here I can lure him somewhere and easily see if he’s taken the bait. I put the belt in the back of the car and the same way I communicated with the two of you earlier—writing on the iPad—I communicated to Dante to drive it to Silver Rock and put it upstairs in my closet. If Cobus was listening to me earlier, he thinks I’m home resting right now which would mean, A—I wouldn’t be speaking, and, B—the GPS wouldn’t be moving. But, if he is actually also monitoring my, or all of our emails, and digital correspondence, he’d have picked up on my email to Perry when we were leaving and sensed something was going awry, bringing his ass out here. Something, unlike if we’re in Manhattan, it wouldn’t be hard to see. Per—read the email I sent you aloud.”
Perry looks at her iPhone and with a couple taps of the screen opens the email and begins reading.
“Feeling fine—needed to get out of the office because I set up a meeting for 4 o’clock at 318 Meadow Lane to show you know what, about what’s going on, to you know who. Figured better to lay it all out for him to see there. Going home to change then heading straight off.”
“Nice,” Jake says, “you used the address instead of calling it ‘The Deal House.’”
“Exactly,” I concur. “And alluded to talking about something with someone that reeks of trying to be sly about looking for help with a certain unspoken situation, and doing so off the beaten path.”
“Smart,” Jake goes on, “But what if he actually takes the bait? What if he shows up here and we’re here with you?”
“You won’t be. Look around you—he shows up and I’m guessing you two will find a way to make yourselves scarce.”
“Good point,” Perry says. “But how will we know someone’s coming?”
“Because Dante, who should be here no later than 3:20, will be outside. When he gets here, I’m going to head outside and tell him what to be looking for. And I made it clear in that email the meeting I’ve set up here is for 4:00 p.m., so we’ve got some cushion in there.”
“Okay,” Perry goes on, “so what if he shows and we’ve made ourselves scarce? Then what? What are you going to tell him then?”
“About what?”
“About who you had to meet, and why?”
I reach under the island, open a cabinet door, take out a stack of eight fabric swatch books, and toss them on the island.
“Isn’t it obvious? I needed to meet with the decorator about the fabrics we’ve finally decided on for the couches in the living room and in our offices.”
Perry and Jake look at each other, then back to me.
“Not bad,” Perry says. “Sounds like you’ve covered all the bases. Except you forgot one thing.”
“You’re going to say my belt,” I respond, “or lack of one, and no I didn’t. I said in the email I was first going home to change. We all know he isn’t going to say anything about it anyway—that would just give him away. But let’s say he finds a clever way to inquire. Running around the way I do, it isn’t conceivable someone doing a quick change could forget their belt?”
Perry pauses as she soaks in my words then shrugs.
“Okay. Sounds like you’ve got this covered. So—it looks like we’ve got some time.”
“We do—which is good because I have some new information to fill you both in on. When I was digging deeper last night, I came across information about thefts of the kinds of precious metals I saw in Cobus’ building. Heists that took place at ports. The first one I read about happened in Belgium in 2009, but there were more recent ones—recent, like last year and 2013 recent—from a number of ports including those in Rotterdam and Hamburg. And we’re talking big fucking numbers—fifty-five hundred pounds, seventy-five hundred pounds—big fucking numbers. It’s all measured in something called troy pounds. I started learning about the difference between troy pounds and regular pounds, and the difference about the ounce component in the different numbers, so—”
I stop and catch myself from veering off track.
“—Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the math. And these were like forty-, fifty-, ninety-million-dollar scores.”
“Damn,” Jake says.
“Damn is right.”
“What could he do with it?” asks Perry. “I mean, it makes perfect sense. Between the ports we’re talking about, the cities he’s been expanding into—but what could he be looking to do with it? And what’s to say the companies mining these metals aren’t involved?”
“Meaning?” I say.
“Meaning if we play devil’s advocate, what if we’re looking at this wrong? What if the producers aren’t being taken for a ride, but are actually in on it somehow? Maybe even pulling the strings?”
“Good questions,” I reply. “And I think I know just who to ask. Someone I’ve wanted to reach out to since this all started, but have been afraid to. Come 4:01 p.m. today, I’ll no longer be afraid to make that call.”
“What if four comes and goes, and we’re in the clear?” Perry asks.
“I keep wearing my new arsenal of Assiagi belts, we go on about our business as if we’re still oblivious, and we work double time to put these deals together.”
“Is there a new game plan?” Jake asks.
“If four o’clock comes and goes and we’re clear? Hell yeah, there’s a new game plan,” I say. “And it goes like this.”
* * *
I look at my watch.
4:05 p.m.
Nothing.