Chapter 36
CHAPTER 36
HUDSON
I ’ve been waiting for Frank for over an hour now. I look at my wristwatch, 8:54 pm. Today has been riddled with so much to do, and with Alison gone, I’m stuck with having to do everything by myself. I’ve gone through the dossier Rakeem gave me and contacted all but one of them. The result of my meeting with Frank will determine how my conversation with the last person on the list goes. Sitting at the corner booth, watching people move in and out, I wonder what Juliette is up to. Even in all the raucousness, she still finds a way to center herself in the middle of my heart. That is how powerful her effect on me is.
I decide to give Frank thirty more minutes before leaving. His failure to show up means just one thing: I’ll make the call, and all the cards Frank has stacked high will come crashing down on him. An expository he isn’t ready for. Frank chose this venue, chose a time convenient for him, and told me where to sit and wait for him. I’ll oblige him with all his eccentricities and let him play around for a bit longer. I need him to feel comfortable in the cushion of comfort he seems to think he has around him. He lives in a world of illusion, is deeply engrossed in it, and there is no helping him but giving him a rude awakening by showing him the world has moved on from him.
Fifteen minutes later, he walks through the door, and one of his bodyguards is with him. He has the guard sit a couple of feet away from me as he joins me.
“I had important business to attend to,” he tells me as he sits, implying that this isn’t important. “And we need to wrap this up as soon as possible.”
“That depends on you and your willingness to pull off the embargo you’ve set on my company.”
“You know the investigation must run its course. There is no pulling strings unless, of course, you’re willing to let go of it now. I’ll be generous. I’ll upgrade my offer. 1.5 billion dollars.”
“We’re not here to discuss a sale.”
“Oh, we’re not? Then this is a waste of my time, isn’t it?” Frank stands.
“You’ll do well to sit down and be patient,” I tell him, my face telling him all he needs to know. He frowns, but he sits anyway.
“What is this?” Frank asks as I pass him a file. He opens it, and in the dim light of the restaurant, he reads through the document I passed him. His eyes go wild. “Where did you get this?” he asks.
“You’re asking the wrong questions.”
“This can’t prove anything,” he says. “There is no evidence that arms were exchanged, and money definitely didn’t get exchanged, so where is the sale you’re referring to?”
“I told you; you’re asking the wrong question. The right question will be: If I have this, how many more do I have? This doesn’t outrightly incriminate you. You know there are things out there that will incriminate you. What if I somehow came into ownership of everything? Every single thing.
“If you had it, you’d have used it,” Frank hisses.
“You see, you and me, we’re not alike, Frank. This is the difference between us. I’ll give you the chance to redeem yourself. Step away, protect your image and your ability to do business within the country. That has to be more important to you than any frayed ego.”
Frank chuckles. “You’ve outplayed my expectations here, Hudson. Made a very good action, but there is no way in hell you have the things you imply you have. No way. The only person who could have given it to you is…”
Frank stops; reality catching up with him.
“She wouldn’t do that,” he says, doubtful. “She’d never do that! I’m her father.”
“You’ve been a terrible father.”
“But that is no reason to commit mutiny!” Frank yelled, drawing the attention of other diners to us. “Excuse me,” he says and stands up. He walks into the inner room in the restaurant and when he returns, some of the waiters come with him. I watch as the waiters walk to the other people in the restaurant and whisper into their ears. There are grunts of complaints and dissent, but slowly, the restaurant starts to empty and soon, it’s just me and Frank in the restaurant. Now, we have the freedom to speak without risking being heard. Frank must have thought he’d meet with me and be on his way in no time.
The poor thing.
“Now, what lies did you tell Elizabeth for her to turn on me?”
“I didn’t have to lie. I just stoked am ember that is looking to burn. You started the fire.”
“Because I didn’t give her the attention she was hungry for?”
“Because you didn’t see your daughter in the way she was worthy to be seen and because you’ve gone myopic.”
“Myopic,” Frank scoffs.
I remove the dossier Rakeem gave to me and hand it to Frank, who eyes it suspiciously.
“Come on, it won’t bite,” I tell him pushing it closer to him, so he picks it up. He frowns as he reads the contents of the dossier. “You’ve for a long time refused to see the world beyond what your lenses have provided you, and in doing that, you’ve created more enemies than you should have. So many enemies that those who you call your friends do it just so they don’t join the long list of men blacklisted by Frank Dubois and not because they want to. How long do you think such an arrangement will last? How long before someone finally says, this is bullshit, we deserve better.”
“So, what? So, a couple of people have banded together, and they think they can usurp me. My control runs deeper than that. I can bring institutions to their knees if I want to. I can cripple businesses just because I want to. There is no stopping me.”
“Like, I said, you’ve been myopic. So much has been going on right under your nose.”
I pass him another dossier. “I didn’t come to Manhattan just to party and wait around for you to hand me a nice deal. I saw the way you dealt with my father. It doesn’t matter what deal I make with you; it doesn’t matter even if I sell to you; you just don’t have the capacity to be satisfied.”
“What did you do?”
“I’ve been meeting with your friends,” I tell him. “You thought Rakeem was the only person I came here to see. Even my own assistant thought so too. Rakeem provided me with a source of funds, funds that if all things go as I plan, I won’t need it. I had a bigger plan. To cripple you entirely, but it wasn’t enough that I take away that which you use to terrorize others, I wanted you to feel pain. For my father. I wanted you to know what betrayal is like.”
“What did you do?” Frank asks again, his nostrils flaring in anticipation. And is that fear? Good. He should be afraid.
“You’ll know soon enough,” I tell him, and at that moment, his phone rings. I wish I could listen to the other end of the conversation as he receives the first wave of bad news.
“Andrew, what’s going on?” Frank says as he answers the call. I watch him, his face going from impassive to crestfallen.
“Andrew there surely must be something we can do. Moving away from us will cost you a lot. You know that. This is a perennial relationship that shouldn’t be abandoned for pesky hurt feelings. Yes, I know.”
There is a pause as he listens to the man on the other end.
“Andrew listen?—”
Another pause.
“Yes, it was good business. You know, that was just an oversight. I promise you nothing of the kind is true.”
More pause,
“Andrew, I?—”
Pause.
Frank removes the phone from his ear and sets it down.
“You had the chance to make the right choices, Frank.”
“How did you do it?”
“You’ll never find out, but without your covetousness, it couldn’t have worked out so well. Your deal with the Middle Easterners and the Russians was the perfect incinerator I needed. With that news, no one would want to risk being around you when it breaks.
Another call comes in just as Frank moves to speak. I see his hands tremble as he moves to answer it. It feels exhilarating to get Frank Dubois to tremble.
“You know, someone will do this very same thing to you along the way. It’s the rule of the game. There is always someone coming along to replace you.”
“I have no intention of staying any longer in the game. I came in to defeat you, now I’ll bow out with my crown intact.”
His phone continues to ring.
“You should answer that,” I say as I stand up and walk out of the restaurant.
I sit in my car for a long time and reminisce over the long plan that was hatched to give me this result,
After the party that night with Frank, where we spoke, it was obvious there was no getting to him, and I already suspected he wanted the company for something beyond just his ego. I knew I had to find out what that was, but first, I needed allies. Allies different from Rakeem. The purpose of my allies was simple. They’ll help me unseat Frank. The reason he had so much control was that a large percentage of companies banked with him, and because they did, they got access to loans and funds to stay afloat. They have no reason to leave Frank. He’s been good to them. He’s provided them with stability to have a flourishing business. To convince them to leave, I needed something big. Something they couldn’t forgive.
Frank being Frank, that wasn’t hard to come by. I looked into the public records of all the companies he worked with, dug deep into the volume of cash they moved with him, and discovered that he’s been siphoning funds from all companies that were registered under him, and he has a perfect cover-up for everything. The loans he provides them.
It is counterintuitive to steal from a company when you’re loaning them money. However, it is a beautiful plan when you know without a doubt that the companies will pay up. If they fail to and they fold up, you can just buy them, plug the hole you drilled in initially, and then they start to make money.
This scheme is why he has many friends in the SEC. They overlook the cooked books he offers up to certify his finances. The company he provides loans to will go through the same book certified by the SEC and find no issues in it simply because it was certified by the SEC.
It was a perfect trick. One that has lasted decades and would have continued if I hadn’t taken a closer look. Too many of the companies that receive loans from Frank end up folding up three to four years later and a majority of them cite the same reason, lack of funds. How can they lack funds if they are banked by Frank, who is known to be generous to his clients? Something felt off to me, so I created a fake company, made it look real enough, and applied for the loan. I didn’t expect to be accepted because if the due diligence is done, they’ll easily find out the company doesn’t exist.
But I got approval, and a meeting was scheduled to discuss the loan policies. I requested a copy of the policy to read through before the meeting so I could be prepared to ask questions. I read through it and found the discrepancies. I didn’t go to the meeting. Instead, I met with others who have banked with Frank to discuss the policies and whatever they found strange in it. Everyone points out a clause in the agreement that doesn’t sit right with them but don’t dispute it because they didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to be banked by Frank.
The clause more or less states that in case the company folds, Frank will be allowed to purchase it for the lowest possible value. He’s bought companies for less than ten thousand dollars using this scheme.
Armed with this, I made a list of Frank’s biggest moneymakers and met with them. Unfortunately for Frank, he had found a way to include this clause in all the recent policies he had the companies sign. In essence, Frank is banking on them and just counting on their failure so he can buy them.
That’s more than enough reason for most of them to decide to stop banking with Frank. But the question remained: who would they bank with if they left Frank?
And for that, I had another perfect solution. These big spenders have companies with large equities and can form a coalition and start up their own bank. The next issue with that is that starting a bank is crippling and will drain most of their funds. Unless, of course, they don’t need to start from scratch and can simply absorb a bank that has an existing infrastructure whose collapse is inevitable. If all of Frank’s big spenders pull out from his bank, it loses value quickly. If his illegal gun running scheme and loan scheme make the news, the value of his bank falls even further, and the coalition of big spenders can use the loans they’ve taken out from Frank’s bank to buy his bank. In essence, they lose nothing and cut off a parasite.
As for who will run the bank, there were suggestions that I do, but when I told Frank that I have no intention of staying in the game, I meant it. I did provide them with a recommendation, though.
I pick up my phone and make a call.
“Hey,” the man on the other end says. “Should we run the news?”
“Yes,” I tell Tin, the chief editor of the paper that ran that feature about Juliette and me. I promised to give him a bigger news story if he removed that story. Now, they’ll be the first to run Frank’s story. Both the gun running and the fraud.
“Is the evidence you’ve provided valid.”
“Yes. I need this big, Blow it up,”
“I know just what to do,” he tells me. “Thank you.”
I call Darry next.
“You should get the call to start work by tomorrow before midnight,” I tell him.
“You did it huh?”
“Frank is never going to bother us again.”