The Vulture Fund Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  The Vulture Fund

  “Ultra-exciting…a powerful and multi-layered financial and political thriller….It’s only a matter of time before Frey achieves the same recognition as Cook and Grisham have obtained in their respective fields of medical and legal thrillers.”

  —Ed’s Internet Book Review

  “A Wall Street and Washington shocker from the author of The Takeover.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Frey, dubbed the Grisham of financial thrillers, follows his Takeover debut with another hot story.”

  —Daily Variety

  “Following the success of his debut novel, The Takeover, Frey follows up with a second book that’s every bit as good….The action gets hotter and hotter and finishes with a stunning conclusion…mesmerizes readers.”

  —Booklist

  “This story was spun for the movies.”

  —Poisoned Pen

  PRAISE FOR

  STEPHEN W. FREY’S BESTSELLER

  The Takeover

  “Better than The Firm…resembles Robert Ludlum when Ludlum was fresh and young…a grand first novel.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Grisham meets Ludlum on Wall Street…a fast-paced roller coaster of love and lust, murder and betrayal, politics and business.”

  —USA Today

  “Offers insider’s knowledge of the high-stakes world of investment banking.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Entertaining and energetic…superbly taut…Frey keeps up the suspense right to the end.”

  —Financial Times

  “Fast-action…the author’s worst-case scenario of scary political ramifications could easily become tomorrow’s news.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “Enormous wealth, murder, dirty tricks, political intrigue, colorful villains, relentless pacing…enjoy!”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Money, sex, secrecy, conspircy, killings…exciting.”

  —Mystery News

  “Grishamesque skullduggery and intrigue.”

  —Library Journal

  SIGNET

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Published by Signet, an imprint of Dutton Signet,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. Previously appeared in a Dutton edition.

  Copyright © Stephen2, Inc., 1996

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Ebook ISBN 9780593160169

  Cover design: Scott Biel

  Cover image: Image Source/Getty Images

  v5.4

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  The woman leaned back against the large granite boulder and gazed up at the thousands of black, leafless branches above her. They formed millions of intricate geometric shapes—like cobwebs—against the dark gray winter clouds beyond. She shivered. It was late afternoon, and she was freezing, tired, and hungry. What a mistake this had been.

  “Hey, I think I know where we are now.”

  The woman glanced slowly away from the eerie shapes above and toward her husband of three weeks. He was squatting in the snow, hunched over a topographic map, gnawing on a candy bar. He didn’t know where they were. He had uttered the same words at least once an hour since early this morning.

  Three days ago they had somehow missed a marker on the Appalachian Trail and had been wandering through the backwoods of West Virginia since, completely lost. They might be a mile from the trail or they might be twenty miles from it. For three days they had climbed mountain after mountain, pausing only long enough at the bottom of each valley to sip water from the stream that inevitably lay at the base of each peak, before scaling the next one. She shook her head. “You don’t have any idea where we are. How could I possibly have let you talk me into a hiking trip as our honeymoon? I could be lying on the beach on St. Thomas right now, being served pina coladas by a nice man in a white dinner jacket. But no, I’m lost somewhere north of Sugar Grove, West Virginia, freezing my behind off.”

  “And a nice little behind it is.” He smiled at her.

  “Yeah, well, you’re not going to see any more of it as long as we’re out here in the middle of nowhere. I’ve had enough tent sex in the last three weeks to last me a lifetime.” She rubbed her aching knees.

  The man watched her hands work for a moment, then refocused on the map. “Give me just a bit longer to get my bearings; then we’ll start moving again. I’m going to have us back on the trail by this evening. Promise.”

  The woman groaned. She didn’t want to find the trail. She wanted to find a nice hot tub and lie in it for two or three hours.

  “Just a few more minutes,” the man said, more to himself than to her.

  The woman turned and began climbing carefully up the side of a huge boulder. She was athletic, and in a few seconds she had scaled the thirty-foot outcrop. It was a remarkable view of the Appalachian Mountains from the precipice, and had they not been lost, she would have enjoyed it immensely. They had ample food
supplies and were in no real danger, but suddenly she wanted to get back to civilization.

  Far below and to the north the woman noticed a gaping wound in the side of a large hill. “Must be an old coal mine,” she remarked to herself. Five days ago the old man behind the counter at the grocery store in Sugar Grove had told them that mining was about the only thing that kept the people in this area employed anymore. Even that revenue stream was drying up now. She wished she could turn back time to the day they had gone into that store for supplies. She would have insisted that they rent the nearest car available, drive directly to the closest airport, and fly to the Caribbean.

  The woman removed a small pair of high-powered binoculars from her jacket and brought them to her eyes. Tucked beneath the hillside next to the mine were several large buildings that appeared to be abandoned and in varying states of disrepair and decay. Her breath rose before the binoculars. Just as she was about to replace the field glasses into her jacket pocket, she noticed several figures moving together alongside one of the buildings. Her spirits rose instantly. They had somehow stumbled onto civilization or at least people who would know how to get back to it. In a few hours they would be out of these damn woods and on their way to warmer latitudes.

  The woman adjusted the focus of the glasses and watched intently as the figures moved past the buildings far below. Suddenly she pulled the glasses away from her face, then quickly back to her eyes one more time. Each of the figures appeared to be holding a gun. And not some run-of-the-mill hunting rifle. She had been around guns all her life—her father was an avid hunter—and those were not hunting rifles. She could not be certain from this distance, but they seemed to be assault weapons. “Jesus!”

  “Did you say something, sweetheart?” the man called from below.

  The woman replaced the binoculars in her coat and moved back down the rock quickly. She jumped the last several feet into the six-inch-deep snow. Her husband rose from his squatting position as she neared.

  “It looks like—” But she did not finish the sentence.

  The bullet entered the man’s head from the back and exited just above his right eye. His skullcap exploded immediately, and fragments of brain matter, blood, and bone shot thirty feet into the air, spraying the trees and the snow with a fine red mist. As she watched in horror, what little remained of his face toppled forward with the rest of his body into the fresh white powder. The woman attempted to scream, but nothing came to her lips. It was as if her throat had suddenly become locked in the jaws of a steely vise.

  Almost immediately another bullet sliced through the cold air, its high-pitched whine creating a sickening echo among the trees. The bullet barely grazed her right arm, but its tremendous force still knocked her backward into the snow. A searing pain burst through her body.

  “Oh, my God.” She scrambled to her feet and, holding her right hand in her left, began to run away from the spot where her husband had fallen. Whoever had pulled the trigger had not hit her husband by accident. Or her. The odds were too long that a second shot would hit her as well. They had been standing at least fifteen feet apart. This was not a case of mistaken identity, not a case of an intoxicated hunter somehow mistaking them for deer. The shots were meant to kill them. But why?

  The mountainside suddenly fell away sharply beneath her boots, and she tumbled down the slope. Tears streamed down her cheeks even as she fell. God, her husband’s face had been there one second, smiling at her, and then it had exploded before her eyes the next. Now they were after her. She could feel them behind her. She sensed their pursuit. And she was leaving obvious tracks in the snow for them to follow.

  A tree trunk stopped her fall abruptly as she slammed into its wide base. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs, but she barely noticed the pain. Survival adrenaline pumped through her body, effectively anesthetizing her.

  For several moments she lay on her side next to the tree, deathly still, clutching her useless arm to her body, listening for any sounds of pursuit. But there were no sounds save a gentle breeze moving through the upper branches of the forest.

  Finally the woman rolled onto her back and gazed at the gray sky. In fifteen minutes it would be dark enough to make following her tracks much more difficult, dark enough to escape. If she could just reach a stream that was not yet frozen over, she could walk in it for a distance, leaving no tracks, and lose them. The boots were waterproof and would protect her from the icy water. Then she would make it back to civilization. She was going to make it out of here. She was.

  The woman rose unsteadily, using the tree for support, and again began to move down the hillside, maintaining her balance as best she could. Several times she slipped and fell, ten or twenty feet in a second, falling hard on the injured arm. But she managed not to scream despite the intense pain, knowing that if she yielded to the urge to cry out, she would give away her position immediately.

  At last she reached the bottom of the mountain. For a few moments she lay next to a large rock, quietly catching her breath, listening intently for any sound. There was nothing but the wind in the trees. Perhaps she had somehow avoided whoever had killed her husband and wounded her. Perhaps they had lost her trail in the fading light. Perhaps she really was going to elude them. But there was no time to rest. She had to keep going.

  As the woman rose to her knees, a huge hand curled about her delicate throat. She shook her head at the swarthy face beneath the black ski cap and grasped his massive wrist with both of her hands. Tears again began streaming down her crimson cheeks. “Please don’t do anything to me. Help me.” She gazed at the ice drops lodged in the man’s full black mustache directly below his nostrils. Her eyes pleaded for mercy.

  The man stared back down at her. He could snap the thin neck with one hand, but that would smack of a professional killer’s work. It had to appear as if the couple had been ambushed by amateurs looking for money or other ill-gotten goods. For a moment he thought of taking her back to the men and allowing them to relieve the tension of their stressful training before killing her, but he dismissed the thought quickly. He wanted them focused. After all, they had been at the abandoned mine for only a week. If they really started complaining near the end of the training, he would accommodate them.

  “It is nothing personal,” he said in a thick Middle Eastern accent. “You are just a very unlucky woman. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Then he jerked the woman to her feet, spun her around so that she was facing away from him, pulled the long hunting knife from his belt, and, with his huge left arm wrapped tightly around her neck, plunged the serrated ten-inch blade through her coat into her right lung. He withdrew the knife quickly and plunged it in again. Over and over he impaled her, careful to make certain the knife slashed across a rib each time he thrust it into her. Several times he plunged it into areas of her body where he knew there were no vital organs, all so that a coroner would not recognize the work of a professional when the woman was found. Finally he allowed the limp body to fall to the snow.

  “Nice work.” The assassin’s second-in-command stood nearby, beneath a tall pine tree. “Almost looks as if you like doing it.”

  The swarthy man grunted. Killing was not to be liked or disliked. It was simply to be done. “Let’s carry her back up the mountain to the other one. Then we’ll get back to the base. Tomorrow we’ll drive them fifty miles south of here and dump them on the Appalachian Trail. When the police find the bodies after the snow melts, we’ll be long gone from the training base. If the police somehow find the bodies before we leave this place, they’ll think the couple ran into an escaped convict looking for money.” He paused and looked around the woods. “Probably a few of them out here.”

  1

  Mace McLain moved smoothly into the conference room, careful to project nothing but quiet confidence to the Japanese commercial banker seated on the far side of the long table. At the last minute, as executi
on pages were being signed yesterday by all the other parties involved in the transaction, the man seated at the conference room table had gotten greedy and brought the billion-dollar deal to a halt just inches from the finish line. Now the rest of the money providers—the equity people, the insurance companies, and the other commercial banks—were threatening to walk away from the deal, an action that would crater Mace’s seven-million-dollar investment banking fee and render irrelevant six months of hard work.

  The other man rose as Mace neared him.

  “Good morning, Mr. Tashiro.” Mace’s voice was calm, neither friendly nor unfriendly.

  “Good morning, Mr. McLain.” Tashiro spoke with a heavy Japanese accent.

  Mace smiled quickly, towering over the other man as they came together, understanding that the thickness of the accent was being neatly manufactured. Sometimes the Japanese exaggerated their accents during difficult business negotiations so they could claim not to understand a critical point because of the language barrier. But Tashiro had been with Osaka Trust’s New York branch for three years—Mace had done his homework thoroughly—and if he tried to pull the language barrier crap, Mace would shoot him down quickly. As they shook hands, Mace noticed that the other man’s hand was damp with perspiration. So he was nervous. Mace laughed to himself. He ought to be.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Tashiro.”

  Tashiro bowed several times quickly, but did not sit right away, instead waiting as Mace made his way back around the end of the long table to the chair directly across from where he stood. Then Tashiro pulled out a business card—English type on one side, Japanese on the other—slid it across the polished mahogany toward Mace, and sat.

  Mace picked up the card from the tabletop and put it coolly into his shirt pocket, then placed his leather-bound notebook on the table and lowered himself slowly into the chair. It was silly to sit across the huge table from each other, ten feet apart, in a room big enough for an IBM board meeting. But that was how the Japanese liked to do things, and he needed Tashiro’s money. So he would play the game.