Free The Capitol Game by Brian Haig

Unless your board doesn’t meet my demands, then don’t bother.”
    “Jesus, Jack, that’s impossible. It’s after eight. There are twelve board members, mostly old men. They need their sleep.”
    “What makes you think I care? This is what you pay them for. After ten, I won’t be taking calls from you.”
    Bellweather and Walters listened to the tape with growing horror. By the sound of it, Wiley was rolling in offers, pitting at least four companies against one another and having a ball. A bidding war, and a rather brutal one, plain and simple. And Jack, holding all the cards, was clearly going for the kneecaps.
    “Why hasn’t he called us back?” Walters groaned. The past week he had been miserable to live with. His mood alternated between despair and rage, favoring the latter. He banged around the office bullying everyone in range. He’d fired an assistant, screamed at the head of the LBO section, and broken two phones after flinging them against a wall.
    None of it made him feel the least bit better.
    “Settle down, Mitch. He’ll call,” Bellweather, the older sage, assured him. It wasn’t his tail on the line, after all; he could afford to stay cool and unruffled.
    “What’s he waiting for?”
    “What would you do in his shoes?”
    “I don’t know. I’d want to have the best offer in my pocket, I guess.”
    “So there’s your answer.”
    Walters loosened his tie and fell back in his chair. “He’s a real smart boy.”
    “We already knew that.”
    “Yeah, but it’s not nice to see it in action.”
    Bellweather moved across the office and leaned casually against his old desk, the same desk shaped like an aircraft carrier, now manned by Walters’s rather ample rear end. “Give him two more days,” the old man said, looking and sounding quite sure of himself.
    “And then?”
    “Then we’ll make him call. Then we’ll order our friends over at TFAC pull out the stops and turn up the heat. What is it this time?”
    “Five pounds of marijuana, planted in his garage.”
    “Nice.”
    “We debated whether to use the dope scheme or the child porno scam. I opted for the dope. Fits his profile better, I think.”
    Bellweather grinned his approval. “So in another two days he gets a nasty little visit by our friends at TFAC. The usual routine.”
    Walters bit back a smile and nodded: the “routine” nearly always worked like a charm. Four of five times, the targets had collapsed like bowling pins. The more they had to lose, the faster they dropped—and Jack had a great deal to lose. Oh yes, it was a perfect little trap.
    They avoided each other’s eyes a moment, and both dreamed of how it would go down.
    As easily with Jack as it had with the others, both men were sure. A few of the TFAC boys would arrive at Jack’s doorstep, late at night, unannounced and unexpected. Out would come the authentic-looking search warrant and genuine DEA identifications. They would show up dressed as undercover cowboys: unmarked cars, shabby clothes, cute ponytails, earrings, tattoos, the whole nine yards. Before Jack could stop them or call his lawyer, they would push their way inside, he would be shoved up against the wall, patted down, and slapped in cuffs. Next a hurried search that would finish up, inevitably, in Jack’s garage. “Hey, looky-looky what I found,” one of the phony agents would declare, gleefully holding up five pounds of high-octane Mary Jane. “My goodness, Jack here’s been a naughty boy.”
    Jack would be understandably shocked; he would rail and scream, protest his innocence, the whole act—that he was legitimately innocent would only add to the fun. But he would eventually grow tired of being ignored, shut up, and insist on a lawyer.
    Once Jack brought the “lawyer” word into the discussion the TFAC boys would retreat into a quick whispering huddle. Eventually, one would approach him and, with a knowing grin, initiate a hard-edged, intimate conversation. From a “tip” they