“So?”
“All the FBI cares about is putting me in prison. Making an example of me.”
“And why’s that? Do they have a case?”
He hesitated. Then: “Yes.”
I looked at him. “They do?”
He just looked back.
“If you don’t tell me everything now, I’ll walk.”
“You wouldn’t do that to Alexa.”
“I haven’t done anything to Alexa.” I stood up. “And I’m sure the FBI will do everything possible to find her.”
“Nick,” he said. “You can’t do this.”
“Watch me.”
I walked toward his office door.
“Wait!” Marcus called after me. “Nick, listen to me.”
I turned back.
“Yes?”
“Even if they asked for ransom, I couldn’t pay it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
His face was full of humiliation and anger and deep sadness all at once. A terrible, vulnerable expression.
“I have nothing,” he said. “Completely wiped out. I’m ruined.”
PART TWO
Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.
– FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, DAYBREAK
27.
“It’s all gone,” Marcus said. He spoke without affect, like he’d been anaesthetized.
“You have ten billion dollars under management.”
“Had. It’s all gone.”
“Ten billion dollars is gone?”
He nodded.
“That’s not possible.” Then I had a terrible thought. “My God, you never had it in the first place, did you? Right? It was never real, was it?”
Marcus stiffened. “I’m no Bernie Madoff,” he said, offended.
I looked at him, cocked my head. He looked gutted, defeated. “So what happened?”
He looked down. For the first time I noticed the age spots mottling his face. The network of lines and wrinkles suddenly seemed to have gotten deeper and more pronounced. He looked pale and his eyes were sunken. “About six or seven months ago my CFO noticed something so bizarre he thought we’d accidentally gotten the wrong statements. He saw that all of our stock holdings had been sold. All the proceeds were wired out, along with all the rest of our cash on hand.”
“Wired where?”
“I don’t know.”
“By who?”
“If I knew, I’d have it back.”
“Well, you have a prime broker, don’t you, that does all your trading?”
“Sure.”
“So if they screwed up, they have to unwind it.”
Slowly he shook his head. “All the trades were authorized, using our codes and passwords. Our broker says they’re not responsible-there’s nothing they can do about it.”
“Isn’t there one guy there who’s in charge of your account?”
“Of course. But by the time we discovered what had happened, he’d left the bank. A few days later he was found in Venezuela. Dead. He and his entire family had been killed in a car accident in Caracas.”
“What brokerage firm do you use?” I was expecting to hear Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or Credit Suisse, one of the major players, and I was surprised when he answered, “Banco Transnacional de Panamá.”
“Panama?” I said. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Half of our funds are offshore, you know. Arabs and the like-those are the ones with the real money.”
But I was dubious. Panama was the Switzerland of Latin America: the land of bank secrecy, an excellent place to stash money with no questions asked. Even more secretive, actually.
Panama meant you had something to hide.
“Suddenly Marcus Capital Management had no capital to manage. We had nothing. Nothing.” A vein throbbed along the ridge of his forehead. I was afraid he might have a coronary right there in front of me.
“I think I see where this is going. You couldn’t tell your investors they’d lost all their money. Right?”
“Some of them had hundreds of millions of dollars invested with me. What was I going to tell them, I screwed up? I couldn’t face that. You know I never had a single losing quarter, all those decades? No one’s ever had a record like that. I mean, the sainted Warren Buffett lost almost ten percent a few years back.”
“So what’d you do, Marshall? Dummy up statements like Bernie Madoff?”
“No! I needed cash. Lots and lots of it. Massive infusions. And no bank in the world would lend me money.”
“Ah, gotcha. You took in new money. So you could make it look like you hadn’t lost anything.”
He nodded, shrugged.
“That’s still fraud,” I said.
“That wasn’t my intent!”
“No, of course not. So who’d you take money from?”
“You don’t want to know, Nickeleh. Believe me, you don’t want to know. The less you know, the better.”
“At this point I think you better tell me.”
“Let’s just say you’re not going to run into any of these guys at the Union League Club, okay? These are bad men, Nicky.” A twitch had started in his left eye.
“Let me hear some names.”
“You ever hear of Joost Van Zandt?”
“Are you out of your mind?” Van Zandt was a Dutch arms dealer whose private militia had supported Liberia’s murderous dictator, Charles Taylor.
“Desperate, more like,” he said. “How about Agim Grazdani? Or Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman?”
Agim Grazdani was the head of the Albanian mafia. His portfolio included gunrunning, human trafficking, and counterfeiting. When Italy’s top prosecutor issued a warrant for his arrest a couple of years ago, the prosecutor and his entire family turned up in the meat locker of the justice minister’s favorite restaurant in Rome, their bodies dismembered and frozen.
Since then Italian prosecutors have been too busy with other cases to go after him.
Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman, the leader of Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel, was one of the most violent narcotics traffickers in the world. He’d altered his appearance through repeated plastic surgeries, was believed to be living somewhere in Brazil, and basically made Pablo Escobar look like Mister Rogers.
“And the damned Russians,” he said. “Stanislav Luzhin and Roman Navrozov and Oleg Uspensky.”
“My God, Marshall, what the hell was the idea?” I said.
“I thought I could get the ship righted with all the new cash and I’d be back on my feet. But it wasn’t enough to meet all the margin calls. My whole firm went down the crapper anyway.”
“The new money with the old.”
He nodded.
“Guzman and Van Zandt and Grazdani and the Russians,” I said.
“Right.”
“You lost all their money too.”
He winced.
“You know, when Bernie Madoff’s investors lost everything the most they could do was cry in front of a judge. These guys aren’t the crying type. So which one of them took your daughter?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’m going to need a list of all of your investors.”
“You’re not walking away? Thank you.” Tears sprang to Marcus’s eyes. He gripped my forearms in his bear paws. “Thank you, Nick.”
“A complete list,” I said. “Every single name. No omissions.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
“I also want a list of all your employees, past and present. Including household staff, past and present. Personnel files too.”
There was a knock on the door.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Dorothy said, “but the live feed’s back up.”
“The feed?” Marcus said, confused.
“It’s Alexa,” she said. “The video stream is back online.”
28.
We crowded around the monitor. Marcus hunched forward in his chair while Dorothy worked the keyboard.
“It just started up,” Dorothy said.
The same still photo of Alexa as a girl. Superimposed over it, in green letters: LIVE and ENTER CHAT. Dorothy moved the mouse and clicked.