Westport, p.1
Westport, page 1
WESTPORT
JAMES COMEY
To my grandchildren,
an endless source of joy and optimism
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I once worked served as the General Counsel of a large investment manager in Westport, Connecticut, where I worked with extraordinary people. Like all lawyers for private clients, though, my duty to protect client confidences never ends.
That obligation, however, does not preclude me from using my imagination in writing a novel. In other words, Westport is a work of fiction. It’s made up. For that reason, my former colleagues are not in the book, but I will always be grateful for their friendship and all they taught me.
PROLOGUE
The sun was now fully above the horizon and Ernie Sosa could see the outline of Long Island across the Sound, which meant the best part of his day was finished. He had squeezed in almost two hours of fishing by starting while it was still dark. His family would eat fresh flounder for dinner, and now it was time to get to his real job.
The route in and out was tricky for a midsize motorboat like Ernie’s Pride and Joy—the name stenciled on the back. Seymour Rock could eat your boat. And it was hard to spot that small pile of stone early in the morning, especially in late October, so Ernie Sosa cut his engine to a crawl as he headed for the Connecticut side. The water near shore, still warm from baking all summer, was giving off morning mist like a steam iron. That, plus the fact that Seymour Rock sat low and directly in the path to the Saugatuck River harbor, made it a dangerous hazard for a boat like his.
Not today, rock, Sosa thought. He would just barely have enough time to dock his boat, change, and make it to his job at Newman’s Own, the charitable food company based in Westport. But he still wasn’t going to hurry past “the rock” and risk the boat it took him twenty years to buy. So he watched carefully as Seymour Rock slid by the left side—and, yes, he knew it was called port, but he still couldn’t get used to saying fancy boating stuff.
He saw it, even with the mist. There was something long and red on the rock—a kayak, canoe maybe. Who the hell would leave their boat out here? He quickly looked around. There were no other boats or people. He squeezed his hand on the throttle handle, trying to force himself to motor past and make it to work on time. Goddammit. Ernie eased the throttle back and gently steered toward the rock. He could use a boat pole to grab and tow. It was the right thing to do. Five minutes late isn’t a disaster.
Ernie paused his boat a few feet from Seymour Rock, throwing two fenders over the side in case a swell carried him against the rock face. He reached out with his pole and hooked the back end of the canoe. It was entirely up on the rock, about a foot above the waterline. He began to pull the canoe toward the water so it could slalom onto the Sound without flipping over. It didn’t move. Wow, a lot heavier than it looks.
Ernie’s second pull on the pole only moved his boat closer to the rock. He made sure his third yank was short and sharp, pulling so forcefully that his boat swayed. That did it. One end of the canoe slid toward him and slapped the water. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe.
Ernie was looking down at a fully dressed middle-aged woman with short brown hair. She was lying on her back, with her head toward him, under the rear crossbeam. Her legs stretched out toward the front of the canoe, which was still stuck on Seymour Rock. He started to shout, “Lady!” but stopped. There was no lady here anymore. Her eyes were closed and her throat was cut wide open. Around her head, the canoe was filled with partially congealed blood. Ernie dropped the pole and grappled for his radio, his heartbeat pounding in his ears.
CHAPTER ONE
Nora Carleton took a drink from her travel mug and stared out at the Long Island Sound, which was like yellow glass in the morning sun. She really should be getting to work, but the same thing that made her turn right instead of left from her driveway was keeping her from getting off this bench at Southport Beach. She lifted the steel gray mug toward her mouth again, but stopped short this time to study the faded gold and blue circular logo. The eagle in the middle was almost gone. As was the red, white, and blue shield. God, I miss that work.
It had been two years since Nora left her job at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. She moved only fifty miles away, but it seemed like another planet—Westport, Connecticut, and a job at the world’s largest hedge fund. She liked the people at Saugatuck Associates. They were brilliant, honest, and sometimes funny, but most of them had never known what it was like to have a job where you were supposed to do good, to rescue the taken or stop evil people from harming the weak. They had never been the organized crime prosecutor she once was. They worked ridiculous hours, as she had in the government, but it was to make money for the firm’s clients, and for themselves. Sure, many of the assets were retirement funds for teachers or firefighters, and making money for those folks was good, but even that moral bank shot required squinting past clients like Middle Eastern oligarchs and genocidal authoritarian governments.
Nora was careful how she talked about this at work—it wouldn’t do for the firm’s general counsel to be badmouthing the business—but some of her friends there knew what was eating at her. Her mentor and boss, Chief Operating Officer Helen Carmichael, urged her to try to find meaning through the “kibbutz theory.” There was a moral purpose, Helen argued, in the collection of people who had come together to work at Saugatuck. They cared for one another, shared a goal of excellence, and promised to tell one another the truth at all times. Whether they made shoes or invested money, she said, the community itself was a source of meaning. And in a world where lying seemed to be epidemic, a culture based on truth above all else intrigued Nora. She took the job mostly for the money and the location, but it was a benefit that the place apparently despised liars as much as she did.
Nora liked and trusted Helen, who was kind and protective of “her people,” but she wasn’t persuaded by the kibbutz argument. Of course, even with Helen she didn’t say so. But she didn’t have to. After all, the company’s founder, legendary investor David Jepson, had explained the shared commitment to honesty this way: You don’t need to say everything that’s on your mind, but if it’s on your lips, it better be what’s on your mind. So Nora couldn’t lie about it, but she kept quiet about her growing doubts, the ache that kept her staring out at the Sound when she should be making the short drive to her office. It wasn’t on her lips, but it was eating a hole in her heart.
Still, the money was damn good. She ran her fingers through her hair and smiled. With Nora’s starting bonus and the money her mother made from selling the family town house in Hoboken, New Jersey, they had purchased a big house in Westport. Sure, it was close enough to Interstate 95 that the dull roar of traffic was a constant feature. But it was a “water feature,” Teresa Carleton routinely insisted, with a smile. “Our waterfall.” Nora didn’t find it so charming, but the third generation of Carleton women in the house—eight-year-old Sophie—did. “Nana’s waterfall,” she called the noise, which grew louder on her short drive to school, then somehow disappeared as they passed under I-95 to the lush campus of Greens Farms Academy on a former Vanderbilt estate overlooking the Sound. Nora liked to joke that rich people had found a way to pay the highway noise to move only inland, so as not to mar the sparkling vistas along Beachside Avenue.
She took another sip from her aging Department of Justice mug and laughed at her own moping. There was no disputing that life on Connecticut’s “Gold Coast” had been good to them. Sophie was thriving in the second grade at GFA, with small classes and deeply committed teachers. Sophie’s father, Nick, lived nearby with his new wife, Vicki, and had the good grace not to mention that Vicki’s extremely wealthy father had helped Nora get her job at Saugatuck Associates and paid Sophie’s tuition at her fancy private school. But Nora knew it, and was grateful, both for the help and that it went unspoken.
She and Nick had never been a great couple, even when they were dating in Hoboken and created Sophie by accident. But they agreed Sophie was a gift and easily cooperated to move her between their Westport homes on alternating weeks. She missed the “nesting” days in Hoboken—before Nick got married—when Sophie lived with Nora’s mom, leaving Nora and Nick to take turns staying in the “nest” with Sophie. Teresa continued to be a huge help with Sophie, while also volunteering in Bridgeport, a less wealthy, very diverse city nestled up against the rich, predominantly White towns that gave the Gold Coast its name. Her family was happy and thriving. Things were good.
Nora imagined her mother’s voice. C’mon Debbie Downer, time to get to work. Smiling, she levered her six-foot frame off the bench and stepped to the sidewalk, stomping her feet to get the sand off her shoes. She backed the car out and steered down Beachside. She would drive past Greens Farms Academy—Sophie was at Nick’s this week, so he had taken her to school—and parallel to I-95 until she reached the Saugatuck, and the firm’s modern fieldstone and glass offices on the bank of the river.
CHAPTER TWO
Nora grinned as she pulled her Honda CRV into the Saugatuck Associates parking garage, with its rows of moderately priced cars. David Jepson was seventy now and determined to transition out of running the company he built, but his presence was everywhere in its culture, including the parking lot. Every employee knew that the billionaire Jepson drove a beat-up Ford Explorer. They had also heard the story about his visit to the office of an investment firm interested in a merger, where he looked with disgust at the fancy cars parked outside and loudly asked the Saugatuck employees with him,
The garage walls were studded with cameras. Saugatuck was as serious about security as it was about truth and transparency. The company made millions—billions, really—for itself and its clients because, over decades, it had deciphered connections among world events and used those connections to automate its investment decisions. Drought in central Asia? That meant the stock price of American big-box retailers was destined to go down. Why? Because the ships that weren’t needed to move grain drove down the cost of shipping electronics from Asia and forced competing retailers to lower their prices. Most people didn’t know that, or the hundreds of other connections that made up Saugatuck’s “secret sauce.” This complex recipe of causes and effects could never get out or the company would lose its edge.
That explained the cameras and the fingerprint scanner Nora pressed to open the door from the garage. More cameras in the ceiling watched her walk down the long hallway past chrome and glass walls toward Abe, who was waiting for her outside her office door.
“Morning, boss,” he said with a smile.
“Boss? You know we have no hierarchies here at the Saugatuck meritocracy.”
“Oh yeah, then why am I called your ‘assistant’ and I sit in a cubicle while you get a private office with a big desk and a view?”
“Fair point,” Nora answered. “And how are truth and transparency this fine morning?”
Abe followed her into her office, which, like all Saugatuck workspaces, was designed to have a microphone in the ceiling to record meetings. Saugatuck’s default was that all work-related conversations should be recorded so any person interested in the topic could review them—and to enforce the company rule against gossip: No absent person should be talked about unless the conversation was recorded and the subject notified. Not long after she started at the company, Nora stood on a chair and yanked the microphone out of the ceiling. She also unplugged the one connected to her desk phone.
Abe had watched her on the chair that day, wide-eyed. He came to Saugatuck straight out of Harvard and was attracted, like dozens of other young graduates of elite schools, by the company’s determination to root out the twin poisons of hierarchy and gossip. And also by the money, although that was something one didn’t admit at Saugatuck.
Abe Evans had lasted two years so far, all of which he had spent as Nora’s assistant. As she stepped off the chair that morning two years ago, she noticed Abe’s thick rust-colored mustache had drooped along with his mouth. He looked sad and confused watching Nora destroy transparency.
“Oh, I should have explained,” she said. “No way the general counsel’s conversations can be recorded. Too much risk to the company that the taping and dissemination will blow the attorney–client privilege. But if there’s some meeting that doesn’t relate to my role as a lawyer, we can plug it back in.”
The mustache went back up. “Got it.”
With her right pointer finger, Nora mimed a mustache on her own face. “So you a redhead?”
Abe smiled and ran one hand over his shaved head. “Would be if I had enough hair to cover. Premature baldness is a big thing in my family. I’m way ahead of it.”
“Looks great,” she answered, immediately regretting that she asked about the man’s hair. After a half beat of awkward silence, she pressed on. “What does it mean for you to be my assistant?”
“Not really sure,” Abe replied. “One of those undefined Saugatuck things. All they told me was: Do what makes sense.”
Nora chuckled. “I’m from the federal government, where every job comes with a two-page, single-spaced definition. I kinda like ‘do what makes sense.’ Let’s go with that.”
And they had, for two years and counting. Abe didn’t know anything about the law, but he was extraordinarily bright, hardworking, and interested in learning. He did secretarial chores like making copies, but slowly grew into what Saugatuck called a “thought partner,” someone Nora could kick ideas around with. He also quickly became the younger brother Nora never had. As close as they were, though, she couldn’t quite bring herself to talk to him about her sense that things at Saugatuck were not always what they seemed.
Now, as she dropped her bag on the desk, he answered her usual morning question. “The search for truth at the weekly Management Committee meeting is delayed this morning. Not sure why, but I think they’re having trouble rounding up the members. We’ll get a five-minute warning before they start.”
The Management Committee, or “MC,” was made up of the eight most senior leaders of the company and met once a week in the large glass-walled conference room. The MC members sat at a big rectangular table, with assorted assistants and invited guests sitting behind in chairs along the walls. As the firm’s chief lawyer, Nora was always invited and liked to sit facing the Saugatuck River, which was only inches below the glass walls. This close to the Long Island Sound, the river was really an estuary, reversing direction with the tide in a mesmerizing water dance, which made things challenging for the frequent paddleboarders headed down to the Sound or up to the center of Westport. Nora found those distractions indispensable to enduring the endless MC meetings, which often went on for hours. She could only listen so long to brilliant people challenging each other’s thinking without refreshing herself by rooting for a paddleboarder. And now she had some extra time before the MC began its weekly marathon.
“Good,” Nora answered with a smile, “that gives me time for free food. Can I buy you something?”
Catered meals were provided to all company employees in break rooms spread throughout the sprawling three-story building. Abe had his plate covered with fresh fruit carefully arrayed around a bowl of granola on a bed of Greek yogurt. He set it on the counter to look at his buzzing phone. “They pushed the start back to eleven with lunch served at noon. I’ll come get you a few minutes before.”
“Sounds good,” Nora said. “I’ll be in my awesome office eating and drinking free stuff.”
“And I will be in my completely equal nonhierarchical cubicle, ready to provide assistance at a moment’s notice.”
Their laughter filled the hallway.
CHAPTER THREE
The door to the office next to Nora’s was closed, which was just as well because laughter tended to irritate Louis Lambert. It also seemed to Nora that he kept it closed because her very existence pissed him off. Lambert was a formal man—she once addressed him as “Lou” and was met with an icy “My name is Louis.” It didn’t help that he thought she stole his job. Lambert was twenty years older and had been the deputy general counsel at Saugatuck since Nora was in high school. He’d repeatedly demonstrated his mastery of all legal aspects of the financial management business and his devotion to the company. He should’ve been promoted to general counsel when Nora’s predecessor was hired—also from outside the firm—but at least that guy came from the finance industry and knew the actual work. Nora had put mobsters in jail—certainly worthwhile, but she hadn’t demonstrated competence in the business they were actually engaged in, something he found frustrating. He believed he’d been passed over because he was a White man and she had been hired because she was a woman and the firm was attempting to show more diversity to its institutional clients.
Nora knew all this because Lambert came into her office on her first day and told her these things, in precisely those words. He explained that he believed strongly in the culture of truth and felt duty bound to tell her she was an unqualified token hire. It wasn’t personal, he assured her, but he didn’t want to be less than fully candid with her.
Nora remembered the waves of anger, embarrassment, and fear that took turns washing over her as this balding middle-aged man with a flannel shirt tucked into his belted jeans stood in her doorway and delivered his “truth.” She was actually quite proud that she showed no reaction. In the awkward silence that followed, she could think of nothing to do except tell the first lie of her Saugatuck career. “I look forward to working with you,” she said as he turned to enter his office next door. And you can stick your transparency up your petty little butt.
