“Hey!” Shepard shouted. “Listen. I think I’ve got something here.”
Morgan and Bloch exchanged a heated look, and then turned to Shepard. O’Neal, who had shrunk from the conflict, seemed glad to see it defused.
“Most of the investors were shell companies, like I told you before,” said Shepard. “But look.” He turned his laptop for everyone to see. “We’ve got a few who are individuals, investing under their own names. A similar mixture of financial instruments to those dummy corporations, all made a killing in the market. Looks like . . . at least two of them are traders operating in New York City.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Bloch. “Why go through all the trouble of setting up dummy corporations in tax havens if you’re just going to leave yourself vulnerable by having people make investments in their own names?”
“What if all these other people are involved in some way?” asked Morgan.
“It doesn’t add up,” said O’Neal. “If they were all involved in the same scheme, they would match their strategies. No, this is something else. Someone is feeding these people information they’re not supposed to be getting.”
“I say we go ask them,” said Morgan. “Looks like we’ve got some house calls to make.”
CHAPTER 16
New York, January 7
“Incoming,” said Lincoln Shepard, and the phone rang. Morgan checked his watch: 6:40 PM, right on time. The people around the room tensed up just slightly: in a chair across from Morgan was Bishop, who dropped the pen that he was using to doodle on the hotel room notepad in order to listen. Leaning against the wall was young Risa Rispoli, with her deceptively innocent face, her arm crossed in front of her. She was a spy for hire, a sort of independent contractor whom Bloch had vouched for. Morgan only had to set eyes on her to know what her specialty was: seduction. She stood up straight when Shepard announced the call. Diana Bloch, who had been in position in front of the phone, took a measured breath, her hand hovering over the phone, and picked up.
“Club Royale,” she said, managing to capture both the solicitousness and the haughty superiority of people who worked in VIP services.
“Five-thirty-three,” came the deadpan voice over the earpiece that Morgan had inserted in his right ear to listen in on the call. The others, watching Bloch intently, were listening in too.
“And your code, sir?” said Bloch.
“Champagne dreams,” he said with a derisive voice.
“That is correct,” she replied. “What can I help you with today, sir?”
“I want to set up an appointment. House call.”
“Will that be for tonight as usual, sir?” asked Bloch. The escort agency’s records showed that he always scheduled his rendezvous on the same day.
“I want a new girl this time. A nine-ruby.”
Morgan had to smirk at this one. The ruby system ranked the women in the brothel by quality, nine being the highest and, of course, most expensive. Except the whole system was a scam, and a brilliant one at that. All the women who worked there were equally gorgeous, all of them top model material. But the ruby system let the johns believe that there was a difference, and pay accordingly. This way, they could charge more from those who could pay more—the highest price was something like five times greater than the lowest—while still being affordable to those whose budgets were on a lower level. More than that, the ruby system kept everyone who paid for below nine rubies always thinking there was something better, something to aspire to. He had to admire the simple genius of this charade.
“Big spender,” she said. “Celebrating tonight?”
“I thought your job required discretion,” he said in a prickly tone.
“Sorry, sir,” said Bloch. She was, of course, quite aware of what she was doing; even that bit of mild break from protocol was calculated, a way to deflect thoughts of suspicion. “We have a new nine-ruby girl that you might be interested in. Young, tall, slender redhead. Green eyes and the face of an angel.” Morgan looked at Risa, whose lips curved ever so slightly to form a sly smile. “Might that pique your interest?”
There was a pause. “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good.”
“Shall I make an appointment at the usual place, at ten tonight?” That’s when he always had them come in, according to Club Royale’s records.
“Do it,” came the voice, and then hung up.
Their assets inside escort services were some of the most useful that Zeta Division had, both for finding out secrets and for blackmail. Few powerful men could resist engaging such services, and the threat of scandal usually proved to be just the right amount of leverage to get some small political favors and just about any piece of information out of them. And while they did not own Club Royale, they had enough pull with the management that organizing this whole ruse had been trivial. They had come out not only with the client’s contact information, but also with everything that Royale had on him in their files.