Plan B by Joseph Finder Read Free Book Online

gotcha,” I said. For a long moment I found myself looking out the window. I’d been doing that a lot lately. I liked the view. You could see right down High Street to the ocean, the waterfront at Rowes Wharf framed by a grand Italianate marble arch.
    I’d moved to Boston from Washington a few months ago and was lucky enough to find an office in an old brick-and-beam building in the financial district, a rehabbed nineteenth-century lead-pipe factory. From the outside it looked like a Victorian poorhouse out of Dickens. But on the inside, with its bare brick walls and tall arched windows and exposed ductwork and factory-floor open spaces, you couldn’t forget it was a place where they used to actually make stuff. And I liked that. It had a sort of steampunk vibe. The other tenants in the building were consulting firms, an accounting firm, and several small real-estate offices. On the first floor was an “exotic sushi and tapas” place that had gone out of business, and the showroom for Derderian Fine Oriental Rugs.
    My office had belonged to some high-flying dot-com that made nothing, including money. They’d gone bust suddenly, so I caught a nice break on the price. They’d absconded so quickly they left all their fancy hanging metal-and-glass light fixtures and even some very expensive office chairs.
    “So you say someone on your board of directors is leaking derogatory information about your company,” I said, turning around slowly, “and you want us to—how’d you put it?—‘plug the leak.’ Right?”
    “Exactly.”
    I gave him my finest conspiratorial grin. “Meaning you want their phones tapped and their e-mails accessed.”
    “Hey, you’re a pro,” he said with a quick, smarmy wink. “I’d never tell you how to do your job.”
    “Better not to know the details, right? How we work our magic?”
    He nodded, a couple of sharp up-and-downs. “Plausible deniability and all that. You got it.”
    “Of course. Obviously you know that what you’re asking me to do is basically illegal.”
    “We’re both big boys,” he said.
    I had to bite my lip. One of us was, anyway.
    Just then my phone buzzed—an internal line—and I picked it up. “Yeah?”
    “Okay, you were right.” The smoky voice of my forensic data tech, Dorothy Duval. “His name isn’t Philip Curtis.”
    “Of course,” I said.
    “Don’t rub it in.”
    “Not at all,” I said. “It’s a teachable moment. You should know by now not to question me.”
    “Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m stuck. If you have any ideas, just IM me, and I’ll check them out.”
    “Thanks,” I said, and I hung up.
    The man who wasn’t Philip Curtis had a strong Chicago accent. Wherever he lived now, he was raised in Chicago. He had a rich dad: The hand-me-down Patek Philippe confirmed that.
    Then there was the black luggage tag on his Louis Vuitton briefcase. A fractional jet card. He leased a private jet for some limited number of hours per year. Which meant he wanted a private jet but couldn’t afford one.
    I had a vague recollection of an item I’d seen on BizWire about troubles in a family-held business in Chicago. “Will you excuse me for just one more minute?” I said. “I have to put out a fire.” Then I typed out an instant message and sent it to Dorothy.
    The answer came back less than a minute later: a Wall Street Journal article she’d pulled up on ProQuest. I skimmed it, and I knew I’d guessed right. I remembered hearing the whole sordid story not too long ago.
    Then I leaned back in my chair. “So here’s the problem,” I said.
    “Problem?”
    “I’m not interested in your business.”
    Stunned, he whirled around to look at me. “What did you just say?”
    “If you really did your homework, you know that I do intelligence work for private clients. I’m not a private investigator, I don’t tap phones, and I don’t do divorces. And I’m sure as hell not a family therapist.”
    “Family…?”
    “This is clearly a family