Free The Protégé by Stephen Frey

Justice?” Boyd asked, still annoyed. “They must be pissed.”
    “It’s definitely an embarrassment for them,” Ganze agreed. “It’s been ten months and they haven’t been able to find either of those guys. The higher-ups are putting a lot of heat on people in the trenches, but it’s not doing much good.”
    “Do you think they suspect that there’s help from the inside?”
    “My friend says they haven’t asked yet. Too much pride.”
    Boyd chuckled. “Idiots.” His smile faded. “Well, they’ll get over their pride at some point.” He thought for a moment. “Why are Gillette and Stiles so worried about this McGuire guy?”
    “If the conspiracy had worked, McGuire and his brother, Vince, would have made hundreds of millions. But Gillette and Stiles figured out what was going on at the last minute and blew the thing wide open. Turned the feds onto McGuire. Like I said, McGuire was never caught, but he lost out on the money. And his brother,” Ganze added.
    “What happened?”
    “Vince helped Tom arrange the murder attempts on Gillette, and the feds got him. He died in jail.”
    Boyd groaned. The last thing he needed was some psychopath out there stalking Gillette, hell-bent on revenge. “Should Gillette be worried about this guy?”
    “I checked McGuire out,” Ganze replied. “He’s ex-FBI. A nasty son of a bitch.”
    “We need Gillette alive, Daniel.”
    “I understand, sir.”
    Boyd pointed at Ganze. “Monitor that situation
very
closely. We might have to move on it quickly.”
    “I will,” Ganze promised.
    Boyd glanced at Gillette’s photograph once more. “When is our meeting with him?”
    “Friday at eleven. I called him back this afternoon. He can do it then.”
    Boyd tapped the desk. “Unfortunately, something’s come up since you spoke to him. I may have to go out of town on Friday. Would he come sooner?”
    “He came right to the hotel.”
    “Mmm.” Boyd took a long breath. “Think he’ll cooperate with us?”
    Ganze considered the question for a few moments. “You’ll have to use what we’ve found, make him understand that we can tell him things he’s been desperate to know for a long time. Then you might be able to bend him.”
    “But then we might have to tell him
how
we know all those things. He’ll ask. He won’t take us at our word. We might have to bring him inside.”
    Ganze shrugged. “Which is the bigger risk? Disclosing our secrets or detection from the outside?”
    “Yes,” Boyd said quietly. “That’s the question, isn’t it. Which is the bigger risk? But then, that’s always the question for us.”
     
    GILLETTE DREW the pool cue through the loop of his curled forefinger, aimed at a group of three tightly packed, brightly colored balls, and fired. With the crack of the cue, the seven, twelve, and fourteen split like a molecule, atoms racing and ricocheting in all directions. Then each ball slowed to a crawl and dropped neatly into different pockets. Running the table wasn’t fun anymore, so he practiced trick shots now.
    He straightened up slowly and checked his watch—almost eleven. The day had started eighteen hours ago, at five this morning. It had been a long one, but as Faraday had said in the corridor, overall pretty fucking good. The new fund was closed, with an extra five billion from the Wallace Family, and they’d gotten the Vegas NFL franchise.
    There’d been some challenges, too—there always were. A product liability suit had been filed by an aggressive Detroit watchdog group against Everest’s Ohio-based auto parts manufacturer, and the CEO of another portfolio company headquartered in Texas had resigned suddenly for personal reasons. Truth was, the guy was banging his executive assistant on his office desk and Gillette had given him no choice but to resign. However, the attorneys for the Ohio company—the best in the country for this type of litigation—had given him airtight guarantees that the suit had zero merit, and the