Chapter 1100: He Knows Too Much About Me
June 1997
"Call Alicia."
She had waited for the dean, Yeremov and the rest of them to file out, and then two seconds more for the door, and then Sloane put the phone in his hand and folded his fingers around it.
She stayed on her feet for it. "Right now nobody outside this floor knows you're awake. That firm still has your seal, your client files and signing authority on two operating accounts. Replace your private counsel tonight, and the legal work of A+ Copyright and Asset Management with it, while they don't see it coming. Let Alicia take over McGill & Hamlin's files and their business as fast as she can."
His eyes stayed shut. "Don't bring too many people into this, Sloane. I only just woke up. McGill knows too much about me."
"That's exactly why it's the most urgent thing on the list, APLUS."
His mind worked, at least, as long as nothing came up out of the dark to interrupt it.
Sloane's plan was to boot McGill and Hamlin out before they could react, grab as much of the paperwork as possible as evidence while they still had surprise, and then claw the money back. But you don't change lawyers with a phone call. It takes a termination letter, a transfer of files and a new engagement letter with a signature at the bottom, and until that signature exists the old firm is still the firm of record everywhere.
And McGill was in everything, from the Barn case down to the Sinaloa business, big secrets and small ones, all the way in. Could Alicia be trusted? Her husband was the governor — a dark, ruthless governor with roots that ran deep into law enforcement. Hand her McGill's position now, after five months of coma, and then find out she'd made the same calculation McGill had made, and the damage would be worse, not better. And even if she could be trusted: once Alicia was inside and holding everything McGill and Hamlin had held, then short of the governor losing power someday, there'd be no getting her out again.
It was also a lousy moment to be negotiating from.
Sloane had it all worked out already, and she ticked it off on her fingers. "Alicia Florrick takes the engagement. A+ Copyright goes with it — the registrations, the files, every piece of client work McGill's people have touched. And the two paralegals who did the filing, because they're the only two people alive who know where anything is."
"Slow down, Sloane. My head's still full of hospital."
"I've had five months to think about this and you've had forty minutes. Let me talk." She didn't slow down at all. "And McGill cut off the political donations in February. All of them. The state committee, both aldermen, and he told every one of them it came from you. So every politician in Illinois is going to be very happy to hear you're awake. Governor Peter Florrick most of all. With his backing, certain less conventional methods become available to us..."
She wanted the knot cut with a knife, and she turned to Old Mike for support.
Old Mike was over by the window with his good ear turned into the room, and plainly didn't want to be the one handling McGill and Hamlin personally. "Hold on, now. There's a camera running in here."
"Oh, for God's sake," Sloane said, and glared at the red light.
"House put that thing up three weeks ago. Wants to catch the kid 'smiling' in his sleep again, whatever that means. It feeds a machine in his own office, not the ward. I'll go get the tapes off him and make them shut it down."
He looked up at the little red light, found his excuse, and left, taking Sloane's hint out the door with him. They heard him start on somebody in the corridor inside four steps.
"Make the call," Sloane said. "Have Alicia draw up the documents and fly out tonight for your signature. She can be at this bed before the courts open in Chicago."
But Alex didn't have the strength to hold anything yet, and the phone slid neatly out of his fingers onto the sheet. She reached to pick it up. He got his hand across, backhanded, and blocked her, and it cost him. He had to find his breath before he could talk.
"McGill knows too much about me. Seven years, Sloane. He isn't stupid. Suppose I really had become a vegetable and he was going to eat my businesses — you think he wouldn't have thought about the long term? A+ Records is in Chicago. There's no way a man in his position hasn't made friends with politicians..."
He got his breath and went on. "Which means he'll move my political and business relationships over to himself, slowly, one at a time. Or to put it another way — maybe he and Hamlin are already taking the money they stole from me and putting it into politicians under their own names."
"You don't know the rest of it."
Sloane sat down on the edge of the chair. "About a month ago, Dr. House bluffed and went public with a theory that you might have locked-in syndrome. That you're awake in there and can't move anything. That you could hear everything, and might find some way to communicate. He told the department, he told a reporter, and it ran in two papers in New Jersey and one in Chicago."
"That crazy bastard. He was right, too. I heard every word."
"So McGill and Hamlin have probably stopped thinking about the long term altogether. If you can hear, you can testify."
"And they ran for it."
"Nobody's seen either of them at the office since Thursday. Hamlin's secretary says he's at a conference. There is no conference, I checked. Only Jimmy's been going in, and I don't think Jimmy knows what day it is."
At that same hour, in Chicago, Jimmy McGill let himself onto the thirty-second floor with a key nobody had asked him to give back.
He turned on one bank of lights out of four, because the building charged for them, and sat down at the reception desk. A phone that had stopped ringing in April rang.
"McGill and Hamlin, good evening."
Nobody on the other end. He held it a while and put it down. Then he went around shutting the filing cabinets somebody had left hanging open, and put Hamlin's decanter back in the cabinet. Jimmy had passed the bar on the third try and hadn't spoken to his brother in a week, and he didn't have the first idea what was going on in this office, except that it was bad. He stayed until half past two, and turned the lights off behind him.
"Let me think about it a little longer. All right?" Alex said.
"You get until tomorrow morning. After that I'm calling her myself and forging your signature. I've seen it enough times."
He crooked his index finger at her. She took his hand and held it.
"My head hurts. It's like there's a storm going on in there," he said, and let his eyelids fall shut.
Sloane sat and looked at his face. Two years she'd worked for him, and she'd never heard him admit to a pain in front of anybody on the payroll. She'd spent five months getting ready to run a billion dollars for somebody who was never going to wake up, and now she'd have to learn, fast, to run it for a boss who couldn't pick up a telephone.
"Sloane, what did the firm sign while I was out? All of it. Don't dress it up."
She got the folder out of her bag, opened it flat on her knee and read it straight off the page. She'd rehearsed this across the road, and she knew that if she looked at his face she wouldn't get through it.
"A+ Records. McGill sold your half to Geffen on the fourteenth of March. Forty-one million dollars, for the half Geffen paid eighty for in January, and half the publishing with it — the half that sat inside the label, not the half inside A+ Copyright. McGill signed the sale himself, under the general power of attorney the firm has held since the Barn case, with a doctor's letter stapled to it. No board meeting. The only other director is Hamlin."
After today we're all family, Geffen had said at the New Year signing, with the ink still wet on his half. Now he had the whole family. He knew exactly what a label with a coma victim's name on the door was worth, and exactly how little to pay for it. Forty-one million for the other half of seven years of APLUS records was a fire-sale price, and Geffen knew it.
"Then in April Disney exercised its option on Metropolitan and went from twenty percent to fifty. The exercise money was paid into A+ Records' account, and by April A+ Records belonged to Geffen, so that went to Geffen too."
"A+ Wine's distribution went to Seagram in February. Riiser signed a ten-year exclusive on the advice of two men who used to work for Seagram, and it gives Seagram first refusal if the wine business is ever sold. The magazines, High Fidelity, Stereo Review and the rest, have been losing a million and a half a month since January, and Barry Diller's been calling about buying them since May."
A ten-year exclusive meant A+ Wine went into every liquor store in the country through a Bronfman truck, on Bronfman terms.
Diller sat on the Home Shopping Network and a chain of TV stations these days, looking for things to buy cheap.
She turned the page. "Oh, and A+ Apparel, Scott's clothing company, made money every single month. It paid out ten million in dividends for last year. And nobody in this organization has talked to Scott once since February."
"And 3dfx?"
"They asked for a bridge loan in April. McGill wrote it for eleven million out of the operating account without a board vote."
"The stock went up in May anyway. Ha. So the one thing McGill did with your money that made any, he did by accident." Sloane turned the page hard enough to tear it a little. "Don't get excited. The eleven million's still gone."
"What about the trust?"
"O'Grady hasn't let a living soul near it. Hamlin came over to Northern Trust with papers in March, and O'Grady sat there throwing a baseball into his glove the whole meeting and said no to every page."
"Good."
She got to the last page, and he could tell from how carefully she kept her voice flat that this was the one.
"There's a certificate this hospital could have signed. Persistent vegetative state."
If any hospital had signed that, his shares at Northern Trust would have gone straight into McGill's trusteeship, along with the power to hire and fire every manager in every business he owned. And undoing it from a hospital bed would have taken years.
"The University of Chicago wouldn't sign it, and this place wouldn't either. If one of them had, there'd be nothing left for us to argue about. Nothing."
"Who asked them to sign it?"
She didn't need the page for that one. "Hamlin. Twice. The second time he brought a partner from a Loop firm along to lean on the chief of neurology, and the chief threw them both out. I'd like to send that man flowers. Can I send that man flowers?"
He was quiet for the length of two beeps.
The worst of it, the really unbearable part, was that McGill knew about his history with the Bobcats, and about Old Mike, and even about Vic. Cutting this knot with a knife was going to be a hell of a mess. Seven years. They'd held each other up the whole way here...
I trusted him too much. He'd been the closest man to the throne. There'd even been a provision for him in the will, drawn up years ahead — but nobody writing that will had pictured five months flat on his back in a bed.
And why didn't I picture it? I've been fainting whenever the weather turns since I was fifteen. In McGill's eyes... This time the man had moved fast and without a flicker of hesitation, had hooked up with Wall Street sharks and had the assets moving inside days. He must have run it in his head a hundred times. There'd be no getting that money back by ordinary means.
"Tell McGill: he gives me my money back, and I don't do anything to him."
"You can't be serious. He took forty-one million dollars of your label and tried to get you declared a vegetable, and you're letting him walk?"
"I said if he gives it back. All of it, with interest, and he signs whatever Cochran puts in front of him. Otherwise I bury him. Tell Cochran in the morning. Then he tells whoever McGill sends." A pause. "And hang on to the kid. Jimmy."
"McGill's little brother? He can barely work the fax machine."
"He's been going in to that office every night with nobody paying him. Keep him."
She'd got as far as opening her mouth when the footsteps came down the corridor — several sets, fast, one set of heels out in front doing about twice the work of all the others put together.
Sloane let go of his hand and was already at the window, curtain pulled back, looking down at the cars. "Your wife's here."
"Ex-wife."
"Tell her that. She's brought an entourage."
"Ah! It's TRUE!"
His ex-wife had arrived. The shriek that went off beside his ear had endless delight in it and no small amount of triumph, and then a warm weight came down on him in a cloud of perfume.
"I hate you! I actually hate you! Do you know how worried people have been? No — you don't, you never do. My mother lit a candle for you. My mother! My mother doesn't light candles for anybody! I flew into Chicago in February and Sherilyn had a man on the door with a clipboard who wouldn't write my name down, and I stood in a parking lot in the rain for forty minutes, and you just—"
"Ugh — hrk — hff—"
Heavier. Heavier. Alex was pressed into her so thoroughly that air would go out of him but not in, and the monitor by the bed started to complain. "Don't— don't do that, I can't breathe!"
"Hmph."
She pouted, sat up very straight, and put out her hands behind her for the baby. "Heyyy," she said, taking little Rhaegar from the assistant and making a face at him. He laughed at it. "Look. Daddy's awake. Let Daddy hold you..."
Rhaegar had been born last July. Almost a year old now, giggling, ridiculously cute.
"I'd love to, but—" Alex rolled his eyes and lifted both hands an inch off the blanket, and let them drop.
"Oh." She parked little Rhaegar against his neck instead, tilted her head away, and quietly wiped the corners of her eyes while the boy got hold of his father's ear and hung on.
"Thank you, Mimi," Alex said softly.
He got one hand off the blanket and closed it on the fabric at her hip. That was all the grip he had. It wouldn't have held a paperback. She sat perfectly still for it.
Then he saw them over her shoulder: Brenda and her godmother Patti LaBelle, plus the two lawyers and the doctor from Los Angeles, all poking their heads around the doorframe.
Well. So much for the lawyers waiting downstairs with their coffee, and so much for keeping any of this quiet. He looked over at Sloane, helpless. Sloane went out past the crowd in the doorway with the folder under her arm.
"Ms. Kelly." The hospital's lawyer had edged back in along the wall and was talking to Mariah's shoulder. "Mr. APLUS is insisting on being discharged against medical advice, and until an hour ago you held his proxy, so the form still comes to you first. If you would—"
"You're being impulsive," Mariah said to the bed, ignoring him completely. "You are always impulsive. Same as the vest. You whined about that vest every single day, you wanted it off, you wanted it off, and then look. Listen to the doctors. Be good."
"That cripple wants to open my head up!"
"He's a doctor! Are you listening to yourself?"
The mere mention of House set him off. He turned his eyes on the hospital's lawyer. "He also tried to keep me unconscious. I'm suing you, buddy. You and the whole building."
Her lawyer, Lee Phillips, came one step into the room at that and started in with the hospital's lawyer, low and fast, about the proxy and the form and who was liable for what if the patient walked out the door — and somewhere in the middle of it, Alex stopped hearing either of them. Two men in suits talking over each other about one piece of paper, neither one listening. He'd heard that sound before, somewhere else: a long table, men in gray suits, and a woman with charts nobody wanted to look at.
A Revelation. It came whole.
A film. Korean, subtitled, every frame of it finished: Default. The Bank of Korea, November 1997, this year. A country a week away from running out of dollars, a young bank consultant in Seoul who bet against his own country's currency, the foreign money pulling out, the won falling off a cliff, and the IMF flying in with a list of conditions.
[Revelation scene: Default — the Bank of Korea meeting room, the charts nobody wants to look at]
Every scene of it, start to credits, and the whole thing set five months from where he was lying.
The IMF was the International Monetary Fund in Washington, the lender a country went to when it had run out of dollars and nobody else would lend, and it never lent without conditions: spending cuts, interest rates through the roof, banks shut. Its managing director was a Frenchman named Michel Camdessus.
And right now, in June, nobody was worried about Korea. It was the eleventh-biggest economy in the world and had joined the OECD, the rich countries' club, only last December. Its chaebol, Hyundai and Samsung and Daewoo and the rest, grew by borrowing, much of it in short-term dollars. Hanbo Steel had gone bankrupt in January under billions in debt, and the papers had written it up as a scandal at one company.
Alex lay there with his son hanging off his ear and a lawyer arguing about a proxy form, and put it away where he kept things like that. Korea. November. The won. He didn't have the strength to lift a telephone, never mind move money across the Pacific. But he had five months.
"But... they said they still haven't found the cause of your coma," his ex-wife said, wavering.
"It's my body. It's my call."
Strictly speaking, she didn't have any right to decide anything for him anymore. But there wasn't a lawyer of his own in the room...
Damn it. Why did McGill have to be the one who turned? And Yeremov, of all people, stayed loyal...
"I'm going to go talk to the doctor myself," his ex-wife said, unconvinced. She lifted Rhaegar off his neck and handed him back to the assistant. "The tall one. Not the one with the stick."
She went out with Lee Phillips and the hospital's lawyer behind her.
"Don't let that lame bastard fool you!" Alex shouted after her, and the effort of getting any volume into it put him flat on the pillow with his eyes shut.
"Ho ho ho..."
When Mariah reached Dr. House's office with her lawyer Lee Phillips and her personal physician, House was sitting there reading a file and laughing at it.
"Can APLUS be discharged?" Lee Phillips asked. "I mean, if we're not insisting on establishing the cause of the coma."
"I wouldn't recommend that."
House gave them an evil little blink. "Look. APLUS's brain—" He steered the personal physician and Lee Phillips over to the light box with the CT films on it, and explained as he went. He also kept turning his head to give Mariah a very strange smile.
Mariah frowned. That smile. She'd seen it before — on the face of the doctor at the Mayo Clinic who'd been reading her young ex-husband's psychiatric evaluation. She looked at the file House had just put down, and yes. That was exactly what it was.
The records were lying right there on House's desk.
She picked them up.