The Power Broker Read Free

were a lot of strange things going on lately. Too many.
             
    THE THREE MEN hustled Alan Agee out of a limousine and into a freight elevator of the Stratosphere Hotel. Agee’s hands were bound behind his back, his mouth was gagged with a greasy rag, and a gray hood was drawn tightly over his head. As the elevator doors closed, the men picked Agee up and tossed him roughly into a garbage cart, then slammed the lid shut. His muffled screams were barely audible now.
    When the men reached the lobby, they wheeled Agee across it, straight past reception and a sleepy-eyed concierge. It was before seven and the lobby was still quiet, so only a few people saw them push the garbage cart into the tower elevator. Normally this elevator wouldn’t have been running until later, but today was different. Things had been arranged.
    Moments later the elevator doors opened and they were eleven hundred feet up, looking out over a crystal-clear Las Vegas morning. The wind was stiff, and the men had to lean into it to keep their balance. They hauled Agee from the cart, cut off the hood and removed the gag, then untied his hands. He wouldn’t try to run. There was nowhere to go.
    Agee squinted against the bright sun as the hood came off, then glanced toward the railing, terrified. “What do you want?” he asked the man standing closest to him, the leader of the crew.
    “I want you to call Christian Gillette and tell him you won’t meet with him. Not today, anyway. From now on, you’re mine. You do what I say.
Exactly
what I say.”
    Agee shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “You’re not gonna scare me like that. This is America.”
    The men chuckled callously. They’d heard that one before.
    The leader nodded and the other two men grabbed Agee. They dragged him to the edge of the deck kicking and shouting, then picked him up and dangled him over the railing by his ankles.
    “Please don’t drop me!” Agee screamed back up at them bug-eyed, his arms flailing wildly. “I’ll do anything you want!
Anything!
”
             
    PATTY ROTH knelt behind the base of a pine tree as the chopper landed, whipping needles, twigs, and dirt into a tornadic frenzy. She was a hundred feet from the helipad, well hidden in the underbrush, protected from the flying debris. Through the telephoto lens she watched the passenger shake the pilot’s hand, then hop out and run toward the lodge, bent over at the waist, an arm in front of his face. She hated these men for what they were doing to her husband. Treating him like he was nothing because he’d taken the fall for someone else.
    She had to help him. He wasn’t going to help himself.
             
    CHRISTIAN AND LANCASTER had been talking strategy. An intense investor, Christian was active in all of Everest’s portfolio companies, even the ones he wasn’t chairman of. And he loved football. He and his father had watched football and golf together on television when he was young. His father had been away a lot, so Christian had precious little time with him, and he’d coveted those Sunday afternoons in the big study watching a big game or a final round. But memories were all he had now. His father had died in a plane crash nearly twenty years ago.
    “Let me ask you something,” Ray Lancaster spoke up.
    “Shoot.”
    “I read on the Web site that you guys at Everest Capital own thirty companies. You’re chairman of Everest, chairman of eighteen of those thirty companies, including the one you created to buy the football team and build the casino, and you’re chairman of some public company in Chicago named, um, Central Satellite Telecom or something like that.”
    “Central States Telecom and Satellite,” Christian corrected, instantly reminded of the SEC’s sudden interest in the company. God, it irritated him to have to deal with the SEC. He was constantly on people’s asses to get them to go the extra mile to make sure something like this
never
happened.