straight ahead, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
I leaned forward in my chair and spoke quietly to him. “Don’t. If they contact you and demand money wired to some offshore account, I know you’d do it in a heartbeat. I know you. But I need you to promise me you won’t. Not until you consult with me and we make sure it’s done the right way. If you want to get your daughter back alive.”
He kept staring, his eyes focusing on something that wasn’t in the room.
“Marshall?” I said. “I want your word on this.”
“Fine.”
“You never did call the police, did you?” I said.
“I—”
I interrupted him before he could go on. “You need to know something about me,” I said. “I don’t like being lied to by my clients. I took this job because of Alexa, but if I find out you’re lying, or holding anything back, I’ll walk away. Simple as that. Got it?”
He looked at me for a long time, blinking fast.
“I’ll give you amnesty for anything you did or said up till now,” I said. “But from here on out, any lie, and I’m off the case. So let’s try again: Did you call the police?”
He paused. Then, eyes closed, he shook his head. “No.”
“Okay. This is a start. Why not?”
“Because I knew they’d just bring in the FBI.”
“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