CHAPTER 7

A FEW MINUTES LATER DARIAN STRODE INTO THE ROOM. She was a petite woman with short dark hair that was stiffly gelled to stick straight up, as if to remind everyone that as the branch’s regulatory compliance manager, she was as tough to get around as a razor fence. About Annie’s age, she had an excellent figure that showed even in her conservative gray suit and pink silk blouse. She was the kind of woman whose lipstick was never on crooked, never smeared on her teeth or faded inside the lines like everybody else’s. Her nail polish was always perfect, and she’d never been known to have a run in her panty hose or a food stain on her blouse. Annie, who was often a mess, envied her.

“What’s going on?” Darian demanded.

Annie sucked in her stomach to prepare for an attack.

Before she could answer, Sean Frisk swaggered in. “Hey, Annie, what’s up?”

“New account,” she murmured.

“Great.”

Like Brian, Frisk was a wholesome-looking guy in a Brooks Brothers suit. He had a straight-up kind of face, a brush haircut that had gone white in a single day, and a Brooklyn-boy sense of black humor. Frisk had been at the Hall Stale office in the Trade Center before it went down, and he was the first one to go back into the vault in the threatened building next door, where several billion dollars’ worth of street name securities had to be recovered and locked down before that building, too, succumbed to its terrible fate. He’d done his job without blinking and was in a recovery site at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel before noon. After that, nobody called him Sean anymore.

“Well, we have a mess.” Brian indicated the piles of certificates he’d begun stacking on his desk. “Annie picked this up from a client this afternoon. We have bearer bonds, too.”

Oh boy. Darian and Frisk both looked at the ceiling.

“That was wrong,” Brian said.

The rule was that no one was ever left alone with a bearer bond. They all knew that, so no one commented.

“Now we have to get this locked down for the night.” Brian glanced at his watch.

“What do we have?” Darian made a face that said she wasn’t leaving the office for a second, not to mention the whole night, with a potential problem on their hands. They’d have to deal now.

“Just about everything, all jumbled together. This is a real rat’s nest going in.”

“I have signed powers for every block of stock,” Annie said defensively. “I have a list of everything I took. It’s completely manageable.”

“Why don’t you let me decide that?” Darian’s dander was up.

“Okay, calm down. Let’s just not screw this up,” Frisk said.

Brian shuffled some papers, ignoring them both. “What we have here are certificates in all amounts. There have been stock splits several times over on some of these. Some companies are defunct, and others have merged a couple of times with other companies. We’ve got stuff that goes back sixty years.” He threw up his hands. “Let’s lock it in the vault for the night. We can’t begin to untangle it now.”

“Uh-uh,” Darian protested. “We’ve got to check it and accurately record what we’re putting into our vault. We can’t just dump it in there.”

“Yeah, and if you’ve got bearer bonds, security is a problem,” Frisk added. “Let’s do it now.”

“Well. We have to gear up for a huge project. And I don’t want anyone with this alone,” Brian said, casting a dirty look at Annie. “This could take all night, even with several of us working it.”

“Doesn’t matter. Whatever it takes. I don’t want problems down the road.” Darian was gearing up to be a bulldog.

Frisk nodded. The operations manager and the compliance officer were one on this.

“Okay.” Brian capitulated for the moment. “Fine. Let’s just see what we’ve got. We can check it against Annie’s list, then lock it in the vault for the night.”

“Compliance is going to be a nightmare on this,” Darian muttered to herself.

“Annie, go copy the list,” Brian ordered.

Annie thought of calling Petra to do it, but quickly changed her mind. Since Petra came in promptly at seven thirty, she liked to leave at four. She didn’t want to make her stay. Anyway, she had to pee. She grabbed the list and left the room.

Only a few minutes later, when she had returned feeling better and armed with several copies of her list, the three of them were deep in it, stacking papers everywhere. Annie’s heart spiked with dismay. It seemed to her that the pile of bearer bonds looked a little thinner than it had when she’d put them in the bag. She frowned. How could that be?

Her three colleagues looked completely innocent as she handed out her list and they began making little checks on their copies. She frowned. They wouldn’t . . . not even to prank her . . . would they?

No one looked up. They were busy checking. IBM, all present. GE, all present. Southern Bell . . . and so forth. About half an hour later Brian locked eyes with Annie. Then, after a few seconds’ scrutiny, he threw up his hands and ordered Frisk to bring in his staff from the cage to lock down what they had.

“This is a massive project. We’ll have to finish in the morning,” he said, checking his watch again.

Annie stared at him. What?

He didn’t respond.

“You know better than this,” Darian scolded. “We should finish it now.” But she knew she couldn’t argue with Brian. He was the boss. The buck stopped with him.

When the stacks of certificates were taken away, and Annie and Brian were alone in the office, he gave her a hard look.

“Are you sure your count was right?”

She gulped and nodded. “There was an accountant with me. We did it together—more than once because some of the stock splits didn’t come out right. What’s the problem?”

“Does he have a list?”

“The accountant?” She shook her head. “He was a young guy. He didn’t know about anything. He just asked for a copy when we were done.”

“Did you leave a receipt of any kind with the customer?”

The customer? Her heart pounded. “No, I said I’d send it when it was properly recorded and the account was open. Tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”

“We have a problem,” he said quietly.

“You’re teasing, right?” Annie wasn’t certain she’d heard him correctly.

Brian blinked. “I do not tease. Does anyone else—other than the four of us—have this list you made?”

She shook her head. If Dean Teath had made a list of his certificates, he hadn’t shared it with them. Suddenly she knew where Brian was going with this. He was thinking they could cover it up if they had to.

Her heart throbbed in her throat. She couldn’t cover up a loss if she wanted to, certainly not a loss to her best friend. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not accusing you.” He looked out the window.

“Please, Brian.”

“I said I’m not accusing you. We’ll figure something out. I’ll see you in my office first thing tomorrow,” he said, speaking to her sharply for the first time ever.

“Brian, I didn’t take anything,” she said wildly.

“I trust you. So if you don’t want to go to the game, just go home,” he said angrily.

What was going on? Annie left the office in a daze. She was so upset by Brian’s implication that she was a thief and a liar, and by his hostile tone, that she forgot to ask him what was missing.