“What are you talking about?”
Biscuit returned to the conference room. Torres glanced at him, one of those faces that say, “I owe you one, buddy.”
“No luck,” the big man announced, and sat down. “I’ll try Annie in another hour.”
Torres resumed the examination. “Your stepmother was married to a sailor once. Biscuit found out surfing the Web.”
Claire’s eyes widened. Her jaw hung slack. “Which yacht club?”
“U.S. Navy.”
“You’re kidding,” she almost scoffed.
“Chief Petty Officer James Berenson. Divorced from Mrs. Kincaid three years prior to her marriage to your father. Now serving in the Middle East.”
“You’re wrong.”
Biscuit cocked his head. So did Torres. The force of Claire’s words dazed them both for a moment.
“Say what?” The agent could not believe her ears.
“You heard me.”
“Why am I wrong?”
“JoJo and my father got married in the Catholic Church.”
“Not everyone tells their priest,” argued Torres.
“My father isn’t everyone.”
“What priests don’t know won’t hurt them.”
“No way JoJo was married before.” Claire shook her head and folded her arms. She was adamant, 100 percent certain.
Torres said nothing. But her head was cocked, her face curious. Her lips curled up to the right and slid down to the left in a thin, colorless line. And her chin was perched between thumb and forefinger. She was the picture of skepticism.
Claire read the signs. “Have you seen the photos of my father at the Vatican?”
“They’re everywhere. How could I miss them?”
“Yeah, why do you think my dad was at the Vatican?”
“Every Catholic wants to visit.”
“He went to get my marriage annulled.”
“Irrelevant,” the agent argued. “That has nothing to do with Mrs. Kincaid.”
“You don’t know my father.” Claire kept shaking her head. “He insisted on my annulment. Otherwise, I couldn’t get remarried and still take communion.”
“Why the fuss over a cracker?” Almost at once, Biscuit realized it was an unfortunate comment. The two women grimaced as though he were the lord of all pagans. “Sorry.”
“If my father had married a divorcée,” persisted Claire, “he would have told the Church. You can take that to the bank.”
“If your father’s friend knew about JoJo’s first marriage, he’d say something, right?”
“Gordie. Those two finished each other’s sentences. What’s your point?”
“It’s like this—”
Before the agent could explain, Jill buzzed through the intercom. “Father Ricardo’s on the line.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
TURKS AND CAICOS
SEVENTY-FIVE MINUTES EARLIER
My world was black. Crazy, rubbish thoughts eddied through my head. It was cold, so very cold.
There were a thousand shades of blue, disparate hues from azure to turquoise swirling through the lens of a powerful microscope. The slide sucked me down the optical tubes into a vast, hungry void, an ocean of nothing spread across three inches of glass.
What happened?
I had coldcocked a club with the back of my head. Rattled it good. Now I was rolling on a ship’s deck, the sea pitching me back and forth. The waves were growing in size and shape, crashing against the hull and gaining strength.
I was swimming, washed over the gunwales by back-to-back breakers. A fierce riptide dragged me down, down, down. Everything was wet and cold, so very cold.
Air. I need air. I can’t breathe.
My head broke through the ocean’s surface. Consciousness returned but just barely. The light was overwhelming. The back of my head throbbed. I wanted to wretch. I was drenched, sitting bolt upright in a bedroom, my eyes flickering, my head a bucket of mud.
Ricardo came into focus, slowly, unsteadily. It was like viewing him through an ear canal. He had just doused me with a pitcher of water. The bedroom reminded me of the Delano in South Beach, everything white and crisp. We were somewhere in the Turks and Caicos.
Or maybe not.
“Hello, sunshine.” Ricardo smiled sadistically, his black pupils surrounded by red. They were piranha eyes, cold and ruthless.
He reared back and crashed a massive right against my cheekbone, opening the skin and bowling me off the bed. I landed on my butt, pain searing through my tailbone and up my spine. Ricardo bounded toward me and stepped on my chest, his foot holding me down.
My cobwebs vanished.
“You got lucky at the beach,” he growled, his voice low and menacing. There was a purple lump bulging from his forehead, the spot where my foot had connected.
“You look like a fucking eggplant.”
“You double-crossed me.” Ricardo leaned with all his weight, the oxygen wheezing from my lungs.
There’s one thing I know from Wall Street. The most powerful person in the room is the one who wants something the least, the one who couldn’t give a shit about the outcome. Ricardo was obsessed with his $200 million payday. I had stopped caring what happened to me. It was my only hope.
“We can talk a deal when you let JoJo go.”
“Hey, Jake,” Ricardo called, laughing, amused by my resistance. “The douche bag’s still telling us what to do.”
That’s when I understood what had happened. Standing over Ricardo at the beach, I never heard anyone sneaking up from behind. It was the pilot, who clocked the back of my head. My skull hurt like a bastard. And now, warm blood from a fresh cut was flowing down my cheek.
Jake walked into the room, his tie-dyed shirt annoying as ever. “Just get on with it. You know how anxious Moreno gets.”
“But I’m starting to enjoy myself.” Ricardo’s black clothes were gone. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The heel of his sandal was pressing into my chest, deeper and deeper.
“Did we forget our meds today?” The right opening, and I’d slap his sneer into Sunday.
“Let’s get JoJo on the line.”
She’s still alive.
“Give me your phone,” Ricardo instructed the pilot.
“What for?”
“Captain America seems to have forgotten my home movie. I want him to hear JoJo alive and in concert. We’ll see who’s a hard-ass then.” Ricardo bounced on my torso, driving home the point.
“Use your own phone.”
“I lost it.”
It was now or never. I knew what was coming. I will never forget that video of JoJo. “You assholes really want to swab urinals on the Jersey Pike the rest of your lives?”
Ricardo smirked, his face quizzical.
“I mean, what are washed-out money launderers to do? Moreno won’t give you a reference. And the economy’s tough these days. After a while, any job will do. You’ll be mopping back and forth, doing the math in your head, calculating how many Jersey boys miss the bowl. Won’t be long before one of those galvanized squeeze buckets is your best friend.”
Ricardo and Jake were both gaping now.
“And every swipe of the mop, you’ll be moaning over what could have been. What it’s like to have two hundred million dollars. Why you didn’t listen to me. Because you’ll never see a fucking dime from the Palmetto Foundation if you touch JoJo again.”
“Can you believe this guy?” Ricardo shook his head and dialed South Carolina. His heel dug like a spade into my chest.
I had to do something fast. Bong’s weight was too much for me to break free. Working on the Street, you learn how to rant. Dishing out insults is both an art and a required form of self-defense. I decided to keep mine short and crisp. “You ever thought about donating your body to science?”
Ricardo took the phone away from his ear. I could hear the other side ringing. He looked at me with an amused expression, curious what I had to say. For a moment, the mailbo
x relaxed his pressure on my chest. “And why’s that?”
“So they can study what happens when a maggot disguised as sperm finds its way into the gene pool.”
The call connected.
Ricardo looked at Jake. The pilot’s eyes were crazy, like his LSD flashback had finally arrived. “Bong, why don’t you take the left. I’ll take the right, and we’ll kick the shit out of him.”
For a split second I thought, Mission accomplished. They’d focus on me and forget JoJo. But no such luck.
Ricardo rattled off some Spanish into the receiver, his tone gruff. Every once in a while, he said, “Bueno.” But there was nothing “good” back at Rafter’s.
He bent over and held the cell phone over my ear. I heard slapping, the sound of leather. Blows rained hard and fast, vicious every one of them. And there was JoJo’s voice. Agony with every strike. She wailed and pleaded until I thought my head would explode.
Bong dug his sandal deeper and deeper into my chest. But that’s not where I felt the pain. It was in my ears, in my head, me processing the scene at Rafter’s. “No,” I gasped, arching my back and twisting.
“You like to play?” Ricardo pushed down ever harder.
I managed to dislodge his foot and tried to sit up. But he was too fast, too alert, too strong. He dropped, and his knees pinned my arms. And holding the phone with his left hand, he slapped me open-palmed with his right. Back and forth, one after another, keeping time to JoJo’s screams.
“Please stop.” She was begging, bawling, the blows raining on and on, both hers and mine.
“That’s enough, Bong.” Jake pulled him off.
My face was already swelling, the pain searing my cheeks, forehead, ears, everything.
Ricardo jabbered something unintelligible into the cell phone. And almost at once, the screams stopped. The whipping was over. “You ready to call Claire with the wire instructions?”
“And what?” I shot back.
“We let her go.”
“You’ll kill her.”
“We have two hundred million reasons to let her go.”
Ricardo eased off my chest. I sat up and stared at him blankly, raging, seething, wanting to feed his face through a shredder.
“What’s it going to be, O’Rourke?”
* * *
A woman takes a beating.
The sounds are hellish over a camcorder, more so over the phone in real time. Smack of leather, moans and labored gasps—it feels like your head is wedged inside a shop vise. Bones are breaking. Flesh is tearing. But you can’t do shit, because the attack is going down ten thousand miles away.
It’s worse because you’re the idiot who drew the line in the sand and refused to pay. You flay yourself from the inside out. You try to remain tough through the whimpering. You keep thinking, It’s the only way. But upstairs, you know. The bleating and mewling were a decision. Yours. This one’s on you.
What could I do?
If I cooperated, Ricardo would kill JoJo. It was that simple. Claire would follow my instructions and wire the money, which made JoJo expendable, which made me expendable.
Game over. As we like to say in my business, “That’s all she wrote.”
I had never faced anything this dire back at the office. But fourteen bosses in ten years had presented me with some monumentally stupid options. More than I care to remember.
When there are no answers and the outcomes are unacceptable, there’s only one thing to do:
Negotiate.
* * *
“You watch the details,” I told Ricardo. “I’ll give you that.”
“Glad you approve.” He kicked me in the gut, a painful exclamation point to his sarcasm. Something cracked and poked against the walls of my side.
“Ugh,” hissed the air from my lungs. It took me a moment to recover. “So why are you dragging your feet?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nobody knows we’re down here in the Turks and Caicos except you, me, and dumb ass.”
“Hey,” snapped Jake.
“And my guess,” I continued, “is that you have the mother of all sweep accounts here. I give the instructions. Claire wires two hundred million. The money arrives for a nanosecond. And then it’s automatically whisked off to five different banks.”
“Ten countries,” he said. “Twenty million dollars to Russia. Twenty to Liechtenstein. Twenty to Nauru and so on until all two hundred million is gone. And the receiving banks all have sweep accounts on their end. You’ll never untangle my spaghetti.”
“Sweet. Too bad you’ll never see the money.”
Ricardo was cool. For a moment, I was unsure whether he would bite. “And why’s that?”
“I’m the only thing between you and two hundred million. And as long as you have JoJo, I’m never calling Claire. You got that or do I need to walk you through the facts one more time?”
The pilot’s eyes widened every time he heard “two hundred million.” He said nothing. But I assumed there was something behind the expression, his lips pursed as though he were whistling without making a sound.
Ricardo didn’t scare. And at first, he didn’t negotiate. “It’s time we take JoJo’s other pinkie. Make her hands match. Know what I’m saying?”
“You’re stressing me out. It’s Bong, right?”
He said nothing.
Nor did I wait for the answer. “The thing about pressure, Bong, it’s hard to hide. I wear feelings on my sleeve. Can’t keep secrets worth a damn. And that’s a problem for you.”
“You mean JoJo,” he interrupted.
“Claire and I have known each other since we were kids. She knows when I’m upset. She knows, Bong. I make your money call and hesitate even for a second, the time it takes to blink, and her antennae pick up the vibes. She calls the police, which is no problem from a safety point of view. Nobody knows where the hell we are. But your two hundred million, well that’s another story. It’s gone, and you’re back on the Jersey Pike choosing between Lysol and Mr. Clean.”
I glanced over at Jake. Eyes bulging. Lips like an upside-down U. What was eating him? I assumed Ricardo had promised him a piece of the action. He was worried about his cut.
Ricardo said nothing at first. He was deliberating, evaluating a tough decision. “O’Rourke makes any trouble,” he told Jake, “and I want you to make him a soprano.”
“Got it.”
Ricardo disappeared from the room.
I sat up on the floor and raised myself slowly to the bed. “What’s your cut? Is Bong paying you enough to replace that crap plane parked out in the harbor?”
“Shut up.”
My fishing expedition ended as quickly as it started. Ricardo returned a second or two later. He checked a paper once, twice, and handed it over to me. I took a quick look and asked, “What are these for?”
“Don’t you recognize wiring instructions, bright boy?”
“Claire already has them.”
“Change of plans. These are different from the ones you already received.”
I looked down and inspected the instructions more closely. The receiving bank was different, the Bahamas Banking Company. No big deal. But my eyes bugged at the receiving account:
Palmetto Foundation.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
TURKS AND CAICOS
I read and reread the wire instructions three different times. The recipient never changed. Palmetto Foundation. We were wiring money to ourselves. It made no sense.
At first I felt confusion, which shortly gave way to profound anger. Which took me back to bewilderment in a vicious cycle of conflicting emotions. I guess that’s what happens when you’re struggling to find answers and your demigods start to tumble.
Paragons. Heroes. I mean the guys you trust. The guys you model, because they figured out how to make money and do the right thing. The guys you believe in, until their secrets get exposed and your marrow gets bone-sucked dry of all hope and enthusiasm.
Take it from me, a guy on the Street. I’ve seen my share of double-dealing, and there are no antidotes. Betrayal breaks your spirit. It steals part of your soul. The wounds leave you with open sores, the unforgettable knowledge that your friend is dirty and all the veneration was a sack of crap. It took me less than two seconds to convict Palmer Kincaid, my mentor, and hang his memory forever.
Ricardo got to him.
* * *
The Palmetto Foundation didn’t need a bank account in the Turks and Caicos. None of our donors were funding philanthropic projects anywhere in the Caribbean. Nor did we operate a captive insurance subsidiary, a risk-management technique for which the islands are known. Claire, JoJo, and the people in accounting never mentioned a financial relationship with the Bahamas Banking Company.
The bank account served no legitimate purpose, which is why my thoughts returned to Ira Popowski, the trust and estate lawyer from New York City. After my visit to Maryknoll headquarters, he said, “It sounds to me like you stepped on a pile of tax fraud. And the FBI is building its case.”
If there’s one thing my clients hate, it’s taxes. They throw thousands of dollars at lawyers and accountants, a no-expense-spared vendetta against payments to Uncle Sam. Deductions are like free money. And nobody, not even a guy with $200 million, turns down free money.
I’m not proud of my initial reaction.
Ira Popowski, it seemed to me, was right. Palmer had pushed the envelope a little too far. I understood why. In my business, I see the extreme anti-IRS mentality all the time. Some people don’t know when to stop. That’s why you read crazy stories about Swiss wealth managers checking through airport security with toothpaste tubes packed full of diamonds. It’s all about cutting the IRS out of the picture.
But I didn’t understand how. For one, my knowledge of the Turks and Caicos as an offshore haven was limited. I suspected their charitable foundations could disburse funds with far less scrutiny than they would attract in the United States. But that was just a guess. For another, I wondered how a fake priest fit into a tax scam.
Ira’s words came roaring back. “The money’s going around in circles, which sounds like a tax scam if you ask me.” How could the Palmetto Foundation have opened a bank account in the Turks and Caicos without Palmer’s signature and, therefore, his approval?
The Trust Page 27