“We’ll never get this door open,” Mark said despondently. Oliver rummaged around in the drawers of the bathroom cabinet for any object he could use to unscrew the door’s hinges. He didn’t care if he broke something. He needed to warn Alex. Immediately.
Zack sat dead in the chair behind his desk. This was without a doubt the worst sight Alex had ever seen. Half his face was missing, and his remaining eye was wide open and seemed to look at her reproachfully. The blood running from his mouth had already congealed, and he held a gun in his left hand that hung down limply. Both the wall behind him and the light-colored carpet were splattered with blood.
Alex’s knees were as soft as butter, and her stomach lurched. She had triggered a catastrophe by tipping off Ringwood. She had just wanted to pull one over on Zack, Levy, and Sergio, but now she was responsible for Zack’s death! Sure the deal was as good as sealed, he had bought Whithers stock. When he heard that the deal was off, it seemed he saw no way out besides suicide. Alex fought her rising panic, overcame her disgust and horror, and looked around his desk—which, to her surprise, had been cleared out. The glass tabletop, which was usually covered in yellow post-it notes, was spick-and-span. Zack hadn’t left a suicide note, and Alex noticed that the briefcase he always carried around with him was nowhere to be found.
Then her gaze fell on the computer. There was a yellow light blinking, indicating that something was downloading. She forced herself not to look at the corpse, leaning over him to move the mouse. The computer started to rumble, and the cloudy sky desktop wallpaper appeared seconds later. Alex held her breath. A rotating E at the upper right corner of the screen indicated that there were unread e-mails on the server. She clicked on the icon to have a look.
The computer showed four unread messages. She quickly opened the e-mails and read through them. One was from a broker in San Francisco, one from a lawyer’s office in Los Angeles, and two from travel agencies in New York. Alex printed all of the messages so that she could read them later. Then she checked his outbox and sent folders.
“Bingo,” she murmured. Zack had written three e-mails tonight, but he only sent one of them. She opened the first e-mail, which was addressed to Ken Matsumo at the California Savings & Loan Bank in Los Angeles. Her eyes grew ever larger when she read what Zack had written.
Hello Ken,
I just wired the amount of $50 million to my account at your bank. Please transfer these funds first thing in the morning to account number A/CH/334677810 at Bankhaus Ruetli & Hartmann in Zurich, Switzerland. I must leave the city tonight.
“Unbelievable,” Alex whispered in amazement. That certainly didn’t sound like Zack had any plans of putting a bullet through his head. Did he suspect what Levy and Sergio were up to, and therefore embezzled fifty million dollars into his account at California Savings & Loan? He was certainly trying to make a run for it with this money. Clever boy! Sergio and Levy had clearly overestimated Zack’s loyalty.
The second e-mail was in French, addressed to Cécile d’Aubray in Geneva.
Cécile,
This is our last night apart. We’ll leave for Geneva at midday tomorrow and we will be immensely rich.
Zack wanted to leave the country and go to Geneva—with fifty million dollars in his luggage. Not too shabby. A third e-mail was addressed to a lawyer named John Sturgess in LA, asking him to forward a drafted document immediately to the US Attorney’s Office in New York, as discussed. Alex printed all the e-mails. Swissair had confirmed two flights for Mr. John Fallino and Ms. Cécile d’Aubray to Geneva, and there was also confirmation of an Air Canada flight to Vancouver for Zachary St. John.
Zack’s third unread message was by far the most interesting. The lawyer, John Sturgess, had sent him a three-page document in which Zack confessed to all of the illegal deals that he administered on behalf of Levy and Vitali, including the dates and amounts of transfers. This document directly threatened those who wanted to sacrifice him.
Alex slowly put two and two together and it all became clear as day. A chill ran down her spine when she realized what it meant. There was no way that Zack had committed suicide. Someone making such elaborate plans for his future wouldn’t put a .38 to his head and pull the trigger. Zack was planning to disappear in a few hours with fifty million dollars. Leaving behind a hundred million dollar debt and a ruined investment firm and wreaking havoc by sending his written confession to the US attorney.
But someone had spoiled his plan—someone with no interest in the value of a human life. Alex didn’t doubt for a second that Sergio had gotten rid of this dangerous accomplice, disguising the act as a suicide. It was a clever ploy; it seemed quite reasonable that someone in Zack’s situation would prefer death over prison.
Alex suddenly remembered that she was standing next to a dead body. With shaking hands, she collected the pages spewed out by the printer. On impulse, she deleted all the e-mails and emptied the trash. Her heart pounded frantically. If Sergio found out what she knew, she was as dead as Zack.
As Alex turned around, she knocked the swivel chair in which Zack’s corpse was dangling. The pages slipped out of her hands, and when she bent over to pick them up, her hand brushed against an object. She knelt down on the blood-splattered floor and grabbed a cell phone. She snuck it inside her jacket and left the office as quickly as possible. She’d nearly reached the fire door when she heard the elevator swoosh up. The red light next to the elevator door lit up. Someone was coming up! Alex looked around in utter panic and then opened the door to the ladies’ bathroom and slipped inside. Through a small crack in the door, she watched someone coming out of the elevator. She thought her heart would stop beating when she saw Sergio and Henry Monaghan.
“The computer’s on,” Henry Monaghan observed.
“My guys probably forgot to turn it off,” Sergio replied.
“Yes, apparently they did. But the screen is turned on and the printer is still warm.” Monaghan shook his head. “It can’t be more than fifteen minutes since someone used it. Otherwise the screensaver would have come up or the computer would have switched into sleep mode.”
With a stony expression, Sergio watched this stocky man with a bushy moustache move the mouse back and forth while staring grimly at the screen.
“This someone has deleted all of the e-mails,” he announced after a while. “There’s nothing left.”
A message on St. John’s answering machine explained why the two men would risk being surprised alongside Zack’s body at four in the morning. A lawyer by the name of John Sturgess had left a message saying that he’d recorded his statements and sent them to Zack’s office via e-mail. Maybe it was important, maybe not. The phone call from California had come in at ten thirty, right after Sergio had informed Zack that he and Alex were the new owners of MPM. Zack had died at around a quarter past eleven, and no one knew what he’d been doing in his office for these forty-five minutes. The word statements sounded dangerous to Monaghan, and Sergio completely agreed with him. Did Zack call the lawyer to tell him about the dilemma he was in? And now it seemed as if someone else had intercepted John Sturgess’s e-mail. Monaghan turned off the computer.