EIGHT

LIZ SKIPPED HER RUN, GOT the kids up and fed, and dropped them off at school with little fanfare, one of their better mornings. At work now, she felt the presence of her cell phone weighing on her purse, hoping it might ring, that she might hear from Lou about Danny Foreman being a “victim” and what that meant to the investigation. Still caught up in the events of Friday, culminating in the discovery that Hayes had used her maiden name on his safe-deposit box, she felt hypersensitive to her surroundings and the goings-on within the bank. Asked to turn over the list of names of bank employees with security clearance to the UNIX and AS/400 servers, Liz also felt obligated to personally notify all five of them of this development, not so much as a warning but as a courtesy, one colleague to another.

She spoke to Phillip in person, clearing both her release of the names and letting him know that she intended to make the calls herself. His reaction was positive, though guarded. As WestCorp’s CEO, he wanted his employees and his computer systems protected, but he reminded Liz no less than three times of the impending merger and how any negative publicity could affect the company’s stock price. With equity markets tanking, many a merger had been put off or canceled outright. WestCorp could ill afford any such setback this late in the game.

Liz’s first warning was to go out to Tony LaRossa, her director of Information Technology, seemingly a target for Hayes since Tony knew the bank’s computer systems inside and out and was one of a select few who could program an IBM AS/400. She decided to see Tony in person as well, using her security pass to allow her access to the twenty-fifth floor. The elevator doors slid open and she stepped through to the quiet chaos of the busiest division in the company: hers. With the technical transfer of the merger only days away, her people were basically working around the clock. And they showed it.

“Two-five,” as Liz’s I.T. team referred to this floor-never “twenty-five”-was of an open floor plan: eleven office cubicles with walkways between them. All but two were currently occupied. To her right, a meeting was under way in the larger of two corner conference rooms. To her left, the entire north end was now screened off by a wall of thick shatterproof, bullet-resistant glass and the buffed steel girders to support it. This dividing wall had been erected after the fact, post-9/11, and offered but a single door, accessed by one of the now infamous electronic palm-scanners. Inside this glassed-in room there was also a door accessing a second server. To her left was Tony’s private office, one of two executive offices on this floor.

Liz approached Tony’s secretary, a sweet-faced Hispanic woman who favored a good deal of makeup. “Can he see me?” She barely hesitated, already moving toward his office door.

“He could if he were here,” the secretary responded.

Liz checked her watch and then the wall clock: 9:20. Tony LaRossa was typically the first to arrive and the last to leave.

Liz teased, “He’s not allowed to be sick this week. Call the CDC.” But then the more dreaded conclusion seeped into her consciousness. “When you say he’s not here, since when?”

“Not here, since all morning.”

“You’ve called home? Spoken to Beth?”

“Called home, of course. No answer. And his cell. Voice mail. He missed a very important conference call with MTK. No one ever heard from him, which was when I heard about it. And believe me, I heard about it.”

Liz clarified, “Beth didn’t answer the home phone?”

“No, ma’am.”

“The twins,” she said. “The twins must be sick.” Beth and Tony had adopted Russian twins less than six months earlier.

“You all right, Mrs. Boldt?”

“Fine,” Liz said. “Concerned is all.”

“I’m sure he’s all right.”

“No answer on his cell phone?”

“No.”

“You paged him?”

“I did. Twice now.”

Liz couldn’t help but wonder if the money drop had not been more than just a distraction away from the bank. Had David, or whomever, used it to abduct Tony LaRossa at the same time? Liz scribbled out her cell phone number on a yellow Post-it and passed it to the secretary. “I want to know the moment you hear from him. Okay? And have Tony call this same number as well. I want to be the first to speak to him after you.”

“Sure thing.” The secretary picked up on Liz’s jumpy nerves and interrupted her departure. “What’s going on, Mrs. Boldt?”

She avoided giving an answer, understanding then how practiced Lou had to have become to endure bad news without the slightest indication, how he must have learned to quash his own emotions, to keep himself out of it, and this went a long way to explain him to her. It struck her as odd that she was still learning things about him, that it had taken hardship to open her eyes.

She crossed the room to Tommy Ling’s cubicle. She’d had a lot of dealings with Tommy over the past year because his bailiwick was computer/security integration. Tommy’s Chinese American heritage put him a third-generation American, with not a twinge of Asian accent. He wore a sumptuous dark green wool suit and a shiny black tie against a gunpowder gray shirt with an English spread collar. He looked to be in his early twenties, but she knew from his employment records that he was pushing forty.

“Tommy,” she said, “you can set it up to have the system alert you when Tony enters the building, can’t you?”

“If you say to.”

“I’m saying to.” She wrote down her office extension and cell phone number, to save him having to look them up. “The moment he enters. Okay?”

“Is there anything wrong?”

She considered how to answer. “I have some really good news for him, for the whole department, and I want him to be the first to hear.”

The answer clearly satisfied, even pleased, Ling.

She returned to the executive floor before trying to reach Lou. By now her heart was working a little harder than normal, her chest warm, her face flushed. She peeled off the gray suit jacket hoping to cool off, the phone pinched at her shoulder.

“It’s Tony,” she told her husband, without introductions. “He’d be right at the top of my list, in terms of people with access to the system.”

“What about him?” She heard concern in his voice; she knew she was speaking too quickly, but couldn’t control herself.

“He’s not in.”

“So?”

“You know what they call him on Two-five? The Rooster, because he’s up before everyone else. It’s nine-thirty, Lou!”

“Liz, I’m going to say something, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but when you get excited or nervous you beat around the bush, and you’re doing that now, and that’s getting me nervous and excited. So please just take a second to settle down and tell me what it is you want me to come away with from this call.”

The reprimand and Lou’s instinct toward professionalism had their desired effect. She felt her frustration sink and her thoughts clarify. She also felt a little ticked off at him for being so blunt, but knew she deserved it. “He’s not answering any of his phones. More puzzling, Beth isn’t picking up at home. Tony has already missed an important conference call and a meeting. That’s not like him.”

She knew to allow Lou time to think.

“An emergency with the twins?” Boldt suggested.

“I know,” Liz said. “That’s what I thought, too. But his cell phone and his pager? His secretary can’t find him. Tony LaRossa? He’s the most wired-in guy there is.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?” she asked, feeling the heat return.

“I agree it’s significant. I can send a patrol unit out to their house. Make inquiries. But more than likely they’re just broken down in a tunnel or on a bridge-somewhere that interferes with reception. Hospitals require you to shut off phones and pagers, which brings us back to the twins. Or maybe it’s batteries. It happens. There’s usually a pretty simple explanation for things like this.”