“What are you talking about? She’s my wife. She loves me!”
“Maybe she loved your money more.”
“She knew I was broke for months. It never changed anything with us.”
“Well, Marcus, there’s broke and there’s broke, right?”
A long pause.
He then turned away.
“Come on, Marshall. Did you really think you could move forty-five million dollars offshore without anyone finding out? It’s not so easy anymore.”
Marcus flushed. “Okay, so there was a little nest egg,” he said. “Money I wasn’t going to touch. Money I’ll need if I’m ever going to get back in the game.” He sounded defensive, almost indignant. “Look, I’m not going to apologize for what I’ve got.”
“Apologize? What do you have to apologize for?” I said.
“Exactly.”
He didn’t notice my caustic tone. “I mean, you’ve been consistent from the beginning—you’ve never stopped lying to me. Even back when Alexa was kidnapped the first time and you told me you had no idea who was behind it. You knew it was David Schechter’s people, cracking the whip. Making sure you did what you were told. I’m guessing Annelise had her suspicions, though. Maybe it had something to do with why she couldn’t live with you anymore.”
He hesitated a few seconds, apparently deciding not to deny it. “Look, if this is about money, then fine. I’ll pay your bill in full.” The ends of his mouth twitched as if trying to conceal a tiny smile.
I laughed. “Like I said, Marcus, there’s broke and there’s broke. As of nine o’clock this morning, you’re wiped out for real. Check with the Royal Cayman Bank and Trust. The entire forty-five million dollars was withdrawn this morning.”
“It’s gone?” Marcus sank into the sofa and started to rock back and forth. Like he was either about to pray or about to weep. “How could this happen to me again?”
“Well,” I said, “maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea to put it all in Belinda’s name.”
110.
David Schechter wanted to meet with me before the FBI arrived at his office. He said it was a matter of some urgency.
“I wanted to apologize to you,” he said. He sat in his rickety antique chair behind the tiny antique desk.
“For what?”
“I overreacted, I’ll be the first to admit it. I should have been up-front with you from the get-go. You’re a reasonable man. More than that, you’re a true American hero.”
He fixed me with a look of the deepest admiration, as if I were some great statesman, like Winston Churchill. Or maybe Bono.
“You’re too kind,” I said. “Apology accepted.”
“You of all people understand that our national security must never be compromised.”
“No question,” I said.
“I’ve already impressed upon Marshall the importance of not divulging to the FBI anything about Mercury that’s not germane to their investigation.”
“Why keep it secret from the FBI?”
“Nick, you know how Washington works. If it ever gets out that ten billion dollars in military black-budget funds has been lost because it was being privately invested—dear Lord, we’d be throwing buckets of chum upon the water. The sharks will come for miles. You were a soldier. Can you imagine what damage such a revelation would do to our nation’s defense?”
“Not really.”
He blinked owlishly behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “You don’t understand what a huge scandal would result?”
“Oh, sure. It’ll be huge, all right. Lots of people are going to wonder how you stole all that money from the Pentagon.”
He smiled uneasily.
111.
Because I’d finally learned the real story in a hotel suite at the Mandarin.
“You must realize,” Roman Navrozov had said, “how frustrating it is to sit on the sidelines with billions of dollars and billions of euros at my disposal, ready to invest in American industry, and yet every single one of my deals is blocked by the U.S. government. While America sells itself off to every country in the world. Including its sworn enemies.”
“I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” I’d said.
“Ten percent of America is owned by the Saudis, do you know this? And look what they did to your World Trade Center. The Communist Chinese own most of your Treasury bonds. Some of your biggest defense contractors are owned by foreign conglomerates. But when I try to buy an American steel company or an energy company or a computer company, your government refuses. Some anonymous bureaucrats in the Treasury Department say it would harm national security.”
“So you wanted the Mercury files for leverage? To force the U.S. government to rubber-stamp all of