up with nothing, even when I included her name alongside. A further trawl produced a handful of Solene Escotts, including a banker, a writer, and a housewife who had died in a car accident in October 2001 somewhere north of Milford, New Hampshire.
I looked again at those twelve digits beside Solene Escott’s name, which, unlike the others on the list, was typed in red, then separated them into two six-digit numbers. The first set ended in ‘65’, the second in ‘01’. The first numbers conformed to the date of Solene Escott’s birth, according to her obituary, and the second set matched the date on which she died. But according to the newspaper found in the plane, it had gone down in July 2001, three months before Solene Escott perished. Either someone connected to that plane had a direct line to God, or Solene Escott’s death had been planned well in advance.
The obituary also gave me the name of Solene Escott’s husband. Solene had kept her own name when she married. Her husband’s name was Kenneth Chan, apparently known to his friends and associates as Kenny. His name was typed above Solene’s on the list.
Beside it was written the word ‘Accepted’.
It took me another hour to come up with a possible identity for one further name on the list, and again it was Solene Escott who provided the link. The only person with ‘Refused’ beside his name was one Brandon Felice. A Brandon Felice had been killed in a gas station robbery outside of Newburyport, Massachusetts in March 2002. There was no apparent reason for his death. According to an eyewitness, a salesman who had been drinking coffee in his car across the street when the robbery occurred, Felice had been pumping gas into his Mercedes when two masked men pulled up in a Buick, both armed with pistols. One of the men ordered the attendant to empty the register while the other forced Felice and a woman, Antonia Viga, who had been putting air in the tires of her minivan, to lie on the ground. When the first raider emerged with the cash, having first shot and seriously wounded the attendant, the second walked to where Felice and Viga were lying and shot both of them in the back of the head. The men then drove off, and the Buick was later found burned out off Route 1. The Buick had been stolen earlier from Back Bay in Boston. The raiders netted a total of $163 in the course of the robbery, and were never found.
Brandon Felice was linked to Solene Escott through her husband, Kenny Chan. Felice, Escott and Chan had been involved in a software start-up company, Branken Developments Inc., in which each of them held a one-third share. Felice had not been married and had no children. Upon his death, his share was acquired by a company named Pryor Investments. Meanwhile, Solene Escott’s share in the company had passed to her husband following her fatal accident.
I’d never heard of Pryor Investments, but another search revealed a little about the company. It was a very discreet operation, working on behalf of clients who preferred that their business dealings should remain as anonymous as possible. The only time that Pryor made the news was when something went wrong, most recently in 2009 when it was found to have ‘inadvertently’ broken an embargo on new investment in Burma. One of Pryor’s junior partners appended his signature to a contract from what was ostensibly a foreign-incorporated and headquartered subsidiary of a shelf company in Panama, but which was traced back to Pryor’s offices in Boston. Pryor had received a $50,000 fine following an investigation by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the junior partner had been punished with the equivalent of an hour on the naughty step. Garrison Pryor, the company’s CEO, described it as ‘an isolated incident’ and ‘an error of detail’, whatever that meant.
Branken Developments, meanwhile, had specialized in security algorithms for the defense and weapons industries, and became a significant player in its field. In 2004, the company had quietly ceased trading, its operations were folded into a subsidiary of the Defense Department, and Kenny Chan had retired, reputedly a very wealthy man. Pryor Investments was once again involved: it had brokered the deal for a percentage of the profits from the sale.
The twist to the tale lay in the fate of Kenny Chan: in 2006 he was found dead in his own safe, surrounded