“Just… talk to me, Teddy. I don’t… I don’t understand. How could you do this to me, Teddy? What did I ever do to you, Teddy?”
Finally, Sniff turned to his boss, brought his chin up, and said in a deadly serious voice: “Don’t call me Teddy. I hate that name. I’ve always hated that name. My name is Theodore. Understand, motherfucker?”
After the elevator doors closed, Storm and Cracker were shunted over to the bench. It suited Storm well. He needed time to think anyway, to fill in with meat and skin the skeleton of the plan he had made.
Cracker mostly paced. He had a lot to think about, too.
“So,” he said at one point, “all those bugs in my house. Was that all the FBI?”
“Actually, that was the CIA,” Storm said. “They… they were looking to protect the assets of one of your more strategically important foreign clients.”
“Ah, yes. Prince Hashem.”
“You got it.”
They lapsed back into contemplation. About a half hour later, an agent came down and said Agent Colston — the burly guy with the goatee, apparently — was grateful for their patience, but he needed a little more time to interrogate the defendant.
Sniff wasn’t the suspect anymore. He was now the defendant.
An hour later, Storm received a text message from Kevin Bryan’s cell phone. “A truck has departed Volkov’s Bayonne location. Will advise of further movement. You safe?”
Storm thought about his current location and texted back: “Couldn’t be safer.”
The reply: “Good. Stay that way.”
Storm hadn’t expected Volkov to remain in Bayonne. He was a predator. Predators stay on the move. It’s a fact in the animal kingdom that carnivores tend to have much larger home ranges than herbivores. The equivalent could be said about the human world. Storm was just trying to think about how to use that fact against Volkov.
He wished he could somehow harness the Bureau’s considerable muscle, but he knew too much about how they operated. They had laws to follow, jurisdiction to respect, procedure to which they adhered. Most of all, this wasn’t their investigation. They had no evidence that would justify action against Volkov. The say-so of one private investigator wouldn’t begin to do the trick.
He was back to thinking about what he would be able to accomplish on his own, when an agent came back downstairs, invited them into the elevator, and led them to a conference room on the second floor.
There, Agent Colston received them.
“Thank you for staying, Mr. Cracker,” Colston said, then turned to Storm. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Derrick Storm.”
A smile crept across Colston’s face for a brief moment before he tamped it down. “What a coincidence. I was just chatting with a man named Carl Storm earlier this morning. Is he a relative, perhaps?”
“Perhaps,” Storm said.
“And what is your interest in this matter?”
“I’m a private investigator,” Storm said, presenting his Storm Investigations business card. “Mr. Cracker has me on retainer.”
“Fair enough,” Colston said. He pivoted his attention away from Storm. “Mr. Cracker, I have to say, it’s a little unusual to have the victim of a crime waiting in our lobby when I come in with the man we’re accusing of defrauding him. But I suppose it’s also convenient.”
“Saves you a trip to Manhattan,” Cracker said amiably.
“Well, yes.” Colston paused, folded his hands, unfolded them. “I guess we should start at the beginning. I’ll spare you some of the details, but I can give you a rough outline of our investigation. We got a tip that there were some financial irregularities at Prime Resource Investment Group that were worth investigating.”
“A tip? From whom?”
Colston again wrestled with how much to say. But, ultimately, Cracker would probably learn it anyway.
“Actually, it was your wife.”
“Melissa?” Cracker said, as if he had more than one wife and her identity needed to be clarified.
“That’s right.”
“But how did she…” he started, then he shook his head. “And to think people don’t believe me when I say she’s smarter than me.”
“Anyhow, we got some warrants, and sure enough, we were able to find that there had been a steady drip of money out of your accounts, going back years. Like a lot of embezzlers, Mr. Sniff started out small, then got more bold as time went along and he didn’t get caught. Eventually, he figured out that you just weren’t minding the store at all, and the drip became more like a torrent. He was very sophisticated about how he did it, and it took us a while to unravel it all. But, essentially, he was robbing you blind. He has buried billions in offshore accounts, both in the Caribbean and Switzerland.”
“I knew it!” Cracker said.
Colston and Storm looked at him incredulously.
“Well, okay, obviously, I didn’t know it. But I just… It’s like I was telling Mr. Storm before. I knew my trades were mostly good. It just didn’t make any sense that I was out of money. Like, a few weeks ago, I had converted some grain futures into…”
“Mr. Cracker, if you don’t mind, I have a lot of work to do here,” Colston said.
“Sorry, sorry. Continue.”
“Anyhow, he maintained fake books for you, for a while, anyway. Then he figured out it was actually more fun — for him — if you thought you were broke. It would not only stress you out, it would make you borrow money to try and make up what you had lost, thus putting you in an even deeper hole when he eventually pulled the plug. He wanted you humiliated as much as possible. He maintained fake account ledgers for your clients and the SEC, of course. So it took us a while to untangle it all. Eventually, we were able to establish what he was doing and how he was doing it. But it was more on the level of being able to observe general patterns secondhand. We still had to catch him in the act. So we convinced Lee Fulcher to pretend that he had a margin call and ask for all his money.”
“That was fake?”
“That was a trap,” Colston said. “Mr. Sniff had grown incredibly greedy. Again, he wanted to put you in the deepest hole possible. We knew that if there was a sudden demand for forty-three million dollars, it would put him into action.”
“Because it would make him have to come up with the money?”
“No, actually, the opposite: because it would make him steal the last little bit he could. He knew the margin call would be the thing that pushed you over the edge. This was his last withdrawal before you got closed out for good. Lucky for you, we were watching. He made his move right before the end of business yesterday. We made sure we had it fully documented, then picked him up earlier today.”
A look of utter amazement had washed over Cracker. “Unbelievable,” he said. “So what happens now?”
“Well, we’ve been having, ah, discussions with Mr. Sniff for the last few hours,” Colston said. “We showed him some of our evidence and presented him with two scenarios. One is where he decides to fight us. He has no assets with which to do so, because we’ve gotten a judge to freeze all his accounts. But he goes down swinging anyway. We pile on the charges, insist on consecutive sentences rather than concurrent ones, and send him to the nastiest hole of a prison we can find, where he is more than likely raped and beaten by his fellow inmates until he either dies of old age or sheer exhaustion. Or…”
Colston allowed himself another small smile before he continued: “Or he cooperates, admits wrongdoing, returns the money he stole from you and your clients, and serves ten years in a minimum security prison for white collar felons. It may be too generous an offer, but it’s one that saves us a lot of time and resources that are better spent catching other crooks. And it makes you financially whole a lot faster than if the thing had to drag through the courts.”
“And?” Cracker asked, leaning forward.
“He’s waiting to sign the plea bargain documents as we speak,” Colston said. “The good news for you is that he hadn’t spent any of the money he stole. Actually, he had done quite a fine job investing it. I think you’ll end up liking the return he got for you.”