Ghost in the Machine td-90

  Ghost in the Machine

  ( The Destroyer - 90 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Buried in his debts, billionaire Randal T. Rumpp makes a deal with a fiend who is intent on sending the Big Apple into the darkest depths of the earth, and only Remo and Chiun can stop him.

  Destroyer 90: Ghost in the Machine

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  Randal T. Rumpp lived by the telephone.

  The lowly telephone was the symbol of his empire, his great fame, his vast wealth. In his hands, it was transformed from a mere instrument for idle conversation into a lightning rod for raw money.

  Randal Rumpp was never far from the telephone. A bank of them sat on his office desk. Cellular units filled every car and yacht he owned. When the maid set his table, there was a cellular handset where the salad fork should be. In restaurants, the maitre d' would see to it that Mr. Rumpp's special table-and he had special tables in restaurants throughout Manhattan, Paris, and other world-class cities-was set with a telephone to the immediate left of the dinner fork.

  For alleged billionaire Randal Tiberius Rumpp was a maker of deals. And deals were best made by telephone.

  On the day the telephones stopped ringing all over the Rumpp Tower, Randal T. Rumpp, for the first time in his life, lived in fear of their clarion call.

  He arrived at six in the morning and put to his executive assistant the crisp question always asked of her.

  "Any calls, Dorma?"

  "No, Mr. Rumpp."

  And for the first time in his meteoric career, Randy Rumpp-as the tabloids and gossip columnists styled him-was pleased to hear that there had been no messages lying in wait for him. Usually, the messages were stacked to the ceiling. From Tokyo. From Hong Kong. From Zurich. There were always deals swirling around Randy Rumpp's pompadoured head.

  Those kind of calls had long ago ceased to pour in.

  Now, the only people who called were his creditors. If there were no messages, then the banks hadn't yet foreclosed on Randal Rumpp's last major trophies of an ill-spent business career: the Rumpp Tower, overlooking New York's Fifth Avenue, and the Rumpp Regis Hotel, up on Third.

  Still, it was a blow to his ego.

  "Are you sure?" he asked.

  "I think the phone company is having problems again."

  "Well," he said, "if anyone does call, take names and numbers. And try to give the impression that I'm too busy to get back time anytime soon. Okay?"

  "Yes, Mr. Rumpp."

  "Remember, we're selling success here."

  "Yes. Mr. Rumpp."

  Self-consciously, Randal Rumpp patted his famous sandy crown of hair and entered his sumptuous, cathedral-like office overlooking Central Park. He set down the Spanish leather briefcase that contained the cellular telephone that was his lifeline when he was between stationary phones, and removed the handset. The way the phone company was plagued by service interruptions these days, one couldn't be too careful.

  Once, Randal Rumpp, on his way to a major deal, had had the misfortune to be stranded in an elevator.

  First he called his broker, obtaining the latest market quotes. Second, he called for help.

  It took twenty minutes for the maintenance people to pry the elevator doors apart and haul him from the cage that had been stuck between the fourteenth and fifteenth floors. In that short span of time, Randal Rumpp made a cool two million in a series of brilliant stock transactions. Flushed with success, he strode into his business meeting and, simply by announcing his good fortune, demoralized his business adversaries, who had in fact arranged for the elevator to malfunction in a blatant attempt to put him at a psychological disadvantage. Rumpp greenmailed them into bankruptcy court in less time than he had spent in that elevator.

  Now, surrounded by the very instruments that had, during the heady days of the 1980s, made him into a multibillionaire who oversaw a real-estate empire that spread faster than lymph node cancer, Randal Rumpp fervently prayed they would start ringing again on this final day in October.

  He strode over to his magnificent view of upper Manhattan. Directly across the street was a skyscraper of silvery polished glass, not nearly as tall and fine as the tower that bore Rumpp's proud name.

  When the rival building had first been proposed, Randal Rumpp sued to have it quashed, claiming that it would ruin his unique view. When the higher courts threw out the suit, he resorted to other types of legal harassment.

  Finally, the thing was finished. It had been intended to tower over the Rumpp Tower, but Randal Rumpp's law firm had so drained the financial resources of the development company that they were forced to strike the top ten floors from the original design. In its final form, it stood one story shy of matching the lofty eminence of his own Rumpp Tower. That single story was all that Randal Rumpp required. He had never cared much for the view, anyway. But he simply despised being bested in business.

  While the dedication ceremony was taking place many floors below his twenty-fourth-floor aerie, Randal Rumpp dictated a memo to his head of PR stating that the offending building was the ugliest dwarf since Quasimodo.

  The press, then in love with his every loutish witticism, printed it on page one. It became a Newsweek "Quote of the Week."

  After the furor had died down, Rumpp dictated another memo.

  "I've changed my mind," Rumpp said of the silvery skyscraper. "I like it. Every day when I come to work, I look out my office window and there it is: the Rumpp Tower, and me, reflected in the most expensive mirror ever built. And it cost the Rumpster nothing."

  That was Randal Rumpp in his salad days. A gracious victor.

  On this last day in October, Randal Rumpp stared out at the mirror-like surface across busy Fifth Avenue, and the reflection of his greatest holding.

  The Rumpp Tower was as brassy as its namesake. It looked like a phantasm of polarized bronze-colored glass, and steel. Fragile enough to be shattered by the throw of a common stone.

  The illusion was closer to the truth than Randal Rumpp would have cared to admit. The Rumpp empire had been erected of steel and glass and concrete and debt. Debt had never bothered Randal Rumpp in the 1980s. Debt wasn't real. It couldn't be cut like glass, drop-forged like steel, or poured like concrete. Yet it was the true foundation of Randal Rumpp's mighty real-estate holdings. The more he borrowed, the more Randal Rumpp was able to build and buy. And the more he built and bought, the more the banks would lend him. He went on the biggest buying spree in human history. There were only two criteria to catch his interest: The prize had to the best of its kind, and it had to have a blank area large enough to accommodate his last name in six-foot-high letters.

  That pretty much limited his major purchases to buildings, luxury yachts, and private aircraft. Once Randal Rumpp had considered making an offer on the world's largest diamond, and hired the premier diamond-cutter in the world as a consultant. He changed his mind when the respected jeweler informed him that cutting his name into the Hope Diamond would seriously reduce its value.

  "How seriously?" asked Randal Rumpp cautiously.

  "Seriously enough to make it unsalable at any price."

  "Listen, I've put my name on classier buys than that gaudy rock and resold them at a tidy profit."

  "Worthless, Mr. Rumpp."

  Disappointed, Rumpp went on to purchase a shuttle service, and soon had RUMPP SHUTTLE emblazoned on a fleet of 727s traversing the Northeast air corridor.

  It all started to unravel with the junk bond fiasco. Still, even as his debts mounted, they were just numbers on a computer. The buildings still stood, the planes still flew, and the flow of cash, altho
ugh not flowing overwhelmingly in Randal Rumpp's direction or favor, continued to flow. Payrolls were met. Rents came in. The bottom line, although fluctuating wildly, continued to be written. The top line was staggering. Best of all, the press continued to print his brash pronouncements.

  As long as Randal Rumpp got publicity, he knew he would eventually come out on top.

  Yet the debt continued to mount and mount, until one day his accountant-the best number-cruncher money could buy-took him aside and whispered, "You're broke."

  "Broke!" roared Randal Rumpp, in disbelief. "How can I be broke? I have assets of over two billion dollars."

  "It's very simple. You have a combined debt of three and one half billion."

  "So? I'll sell off a few trifles. That white elephant of a yacht. The Florida dump. It's no fun since the divorce, anyway."

  "In today's market, Mal-de-Mer is worth half what you originally paid for it."

  "We'll subdivide. That ought to piss off those Palm Beach jerk-offs who wouldn't let me join their private club, even after I gave them some of my beach frontage as inducement."

  "You don't understand. In today's market, your current holdings won't fetch back the outlay."

  "It's a temporary phenomenon. The market will bounce back. I'll call a press conference and announce I'm buying something big. Word will get out that Randal T. Rumpp is bullish on the economy. That should kick-start the commercial real-estate market just long enough for me to sell off a few soot-catchers and make a fast buck or two. Then I'll retire and leave the suckers holding the bag."

  "There are no profits out there, Mr. Rumpp," the accountant said morosely.

  "No one with assets of more than two billion dollars can be broke. Get real."

  "Mr. Rumpp, let me explain this in simple terms," the accountant said carefully. "If you had seventy cents to your name, but you owed a dollar twenty, how would you describe yourself?"

  "A pauper."

  "A kinder term would be 'over-leveraged.' Which is what you are. Your acquisition debts exceed your assets by almost two-to-one. And the debt service on outstanding loans is costing you a healthy six figures a day."

  Randal Rumpp paused in his pacing. "You're not listening to me, Chuck. I have assets of two billion. You said so yourself. I can't fall. No one is going to let me fall. What are the banks going to do-foreclose?"

  "They could."

  "Ridiculous. Nobody forecloses on multimillion dollar skyscrapers. My Atlantic City casinos alone are going to put me back in the black. Shangri-Rumpp is gonna bounce back."

  The accountant shook his head sorrowfully. "The numbers just aren't there. I'm sorry."

  "You're not sorry!" Randal Rumpp snarled back. "You're terminated! You just don't understand how business works! I am the economy!"

  Slowly, the accountant got to his feet. He closed his briefcase gently. "I will submit a final bill for services rendered."

  "Submit all you want!" Randal Rumpp snapped. "I'm not paying."

  "And why not?"

  "Take your pick," sneered Rumpp. "Either you're right, in which case you're way at the bottom of the creditor list. Or you're incompetent, and don't deserve to be paid. In fact, I should probably sue you for trying to pass off this garbage as accounting. You're a cheap fraud. Get out of my sight."

  Stiffly, the accountant retreated to the door.

  After he had gone, Randal Rumpp buzzed his executive assistant.

  "Yes, Mr. Rumpp?"

  "Have maintenance shut down the elevators. I want that fraud to walk all twenty-four stories to the ground."

  "Yes, Mr. Rumpp."

  Satisfied, Randal Rumpp hit the telephones. The world was full of businessmen who thought they were smarter than anyone else. Randal Rumpp had two PR firms working round the clock promoting the notion that Randal Rumpp was the man to beat in business. That always brought out the climbers. They were the easiest to fleece. They walked in the door with a chip on their shoulders-and usually left without their shirts.

  It took only an hour to discover that none of the usual fish were biting.

  "What the hell's going on here?" Randal Rumpp shouted into the telephone.

  The voice at the other end of the line said in a cool, detached matter, "I read your book, Rumpp."

  "The Scam of the Deal is earning me thirty grand a month in royalties!" Randal Rumpp snapped back.

  "It has also shown the world how you run your shoddy business, you simpering egotist."

  "Listen, Chuck. Randal Rumpp has the biggest ego money can buy, and don't you forget it!" shouted Rumpp, slamming down the receiver. But in the vast emptiness of his palatial office, the self-styled Rumpp-ster made a rare admission.

  "Okay, so maybe the book wasn't a good idea. I'll transcend this."

  But mounting debt, he soon found, was not so easily transcended.

  The holdings of the Rumpp Empire may have been as solid as the materials they were built of, but they were static. Debt, on the other hand, although as insubstantial as electrons in a bank mainframe, grew inexorably.

  One by one, markers were called in. One by one, his trophy assets had to be sold off at fire-sale prices. After each sale, Rumpp put the word out that he had gotten the best of the buyer. But this time, not even Randal Rumpp believed his own PR.

  Randal Rumpp was forced to hire the second best number-cruncher that money could buy, hoping to consolidate his affairs. After a month's time, the accountant broke the bad news.

  "You're hopelessly in debt."

  "I own the biggest yacht in the world," Rumpp retorted. "The owner of the biggest yacht afloat cannot possibly be broke."

  "According to my records, you sold the Rumpp Queen three months ago."

  Randal Rumpp's bee-stung mouth pursed. "I did? Oh, right. I forgot. I hardly go near the thing anyway. I'm allergic to water, or something."

  "Your interest payments alone obviate any hope of recovery, Mr. Rumpp. I recommend Chapter Eleven."

  Intrigued, Randal Rumpp picked a copy of The Scam of the Deal off his desk and began leafing through it, saying, "Now you're talking my language."

  When he came to the right chapter he looked up, scowling.

  "My football league scam--I mean, deal? How will that help?"

  "That's not what I meant," the accountant said dryly.

  "Oh, right," said Rumpp, dropping the book and grabbing the sequel, People Hate a Winner. He had written it before his fortunes had changed, and now it was an embarrassment. Still, if Chapter Eleven got him out of this mess, it would have been worth it.

  "What's this? Chapter Eleven is about that has-been boxer, Tyson."

  "I meant," the accountant put in, "declaring bankruptcy."

  Randal Rumpp clapped the book shut, his eyes glittering. "No chance. I just won't pay my creditors."

  "The banks will have to foreclose."

  "Then they'll be foreclosing on their own future," Rumpp snarled. "I'll drag them down with me."

  "That doesn't change your bottom line."

  "The hell it doesn't! All my life I've been playing financial chicken with the old-money crowd, the banks, the insurance companies, speculators. Well, now I play for keeps. From this day forward Randal Tiberius Rumpp pays out no money. Not one red cent. Let's take this to the edge. Let's see who swerves first."

  Within a month, the bankers had started foreclosure proceedings. First it was the Florida estate. Then the surviving casinos. Then they came after his Manhattan holdings. Each time another trophy was seized, the phones lit up. For a day. But when the Rumpp organization put out the word that its CEO was no longer giving press interviews, even those flurries of interest ceased.

  On the day the phones fell totally silent, Randal Rumpp was down to the Rumpp Tower and his Rumpp Regis Hotel.

  "There's gotta be a way out of this black hole," he muttered. "Maybe I'll buy Russia on credit and rename it 'Rumpponia'."

  The intercom buzzed.

  "What is it?" demanded Randal Rumpp.

  "
There's a representative from Chemical Percolator's Hoboken Bank down in the lobby asking to see you."

  "Is he alone?"

  "I'm told there's a man from the sheriff's office with him."

  "Sheriff's office? What do they think I am, some nickel-and-dime Savings and Loan?"

  "What shall I tell the guard captain?"

  "Don't let him in. In fact, have security throw them out on their asses."

  Randal Rumpp severed the intercom connection.

  A phone rang. At first, Rumpp didn't know which phone had rung. There were so many in the office it looked like an AT . A beeping red light on his desk cellular console began flashing.

  It was his private direct number, available only to his main squeeze of the month and close friends. The number was changed often.

  Smiling, he picked it up. "This is the Rumppster," he announced, primping the four and a quarter pounds of hair that squatted on his head like a startled sea anemone.

  "And this is your ex!" a throaty voice purred.

  "Igoria?"

  "Of course, dahling. A little birdie tells me you're about to undergo foreclosure. I just wanted to be the first to say how very, very sorry I am."

  "You're not sorry at all," Rumpp snarled.

  "You know, dahling, you're right. And how is that little blond thing? The one with the inverted nipples?"

  "How did you know about those?"

  "You should never have canceled your subscription to Spy, dahling."

  Randal Rumpp's simpering expression went prim. "Igoria, you know how you're going to end up? Like Zsa Zsa Gabor-your face stretched to the tearing point, slapping traffic cops to get ink."

  "If you ever need a place to crash, dahling, I just bought this insouciant little Louis XIV couch. Bring your own bedding."

  Randal Rumpp hung up. "Hag."

  His face screwed up into his trademark scowl. He thought a moment. "I gotta get back. I gotta get back." Rumpp snapped his fingers. "I know. I'll leak the name of her plastic surgeon to Vogue."

  He picked up the main phone. It was dead. He tried another. It, too, was dead.

  "What's going on with the phones?" Randal Rumpp demanded of his executive secretary through the intercom.