CHRISTOPHER MONTGOMERY WAS THREE YEARS OLDER THAN HIS LITTLE sister. Age, however, provided little leverage and no advantage. Avery was better than him at most things—she had been a better student and was a better sailor. She was more charismatic and outgoing. She could likely, if things ever got out of control between them, overpower him in a wrestling match. But there was one thing Christopher beat her at. Math. He was a savant when it came to numbers. Math and all its derivatives came easily to him. In fact, he had never felt the need to learn the subject. The knowledge was somehow already in his brain. He was born with it. All he had to do was organize the information and apply it to any version of math. In college, he majored in mathematics. After college he earned a master’s degree in applied and computational mathematics. If he had had a normal father, perhaps Christopher Montgomery would have become a professor or an actuary for the insurance industry. Instead, he took his mathematical brain to Wall Street and joined Montgomery Investment Services as an analyst.
Christopher applied himself to studying the market and determining the probabilities and statistical analysis of making money by trading stocks and commodities. Surprising to no one, he was very good at it. So good, in fact, that he rose to the top of the food chain at his father’s firm and was soon offering his advice not just to his father, but to every partner, about which industries to place the hedge fund’s assets into. Christopher became so lost in the statistical analysis of the firm’s funds that he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Until one night when he was alone and working late. His mind functioned best when the offices of Montgomery Investment Services were empty. That was when he first began to unravel the fraud that was taking place. It took him weeks of working through the night to dissect the firm’s financial misdeeds.
The offices of Montgomery Investment Services occupied the entire fortieth floor of the Prudential building in lower Manhattan, and once Christopher smelled corruption, he didn’t care how many chances he took. Late at night, after the cleaning crew was gone, he entered his father’s office and searched through his computer. He did the same to each of the partners. What took the feds two years to uncover, Christopher had learned in two weeks. Montgomery Investment Services was dirty as sin, and Christopher’s name and brainpower was behind nearly every deal that had been made.
As quickly as he pieced together the fraud, Christopher also figured out that he would be considered as guilty as anyone else at the firm. His digital fingerprints were on nearly every trade. He would be implicated in the Ponzi scheme as much as his father or any of the partners. Implicated, prosecuted, indicted, and imprisoned. And the feds were coming, he knew. An old friend with whom he had studied applied mathematics worked for the IRS and had confirmed Christopher’s suspicions. Christopher asked for a favor, and his friend obliged. While Christopher spent two weeks unraveling the financial crimes at Montgomery Investment Services, his friend made a few calls and did some snooping of his own. The friend didn’t know much, he told Christopher, but he had learned that there was an active investigation going on that involved the FBI’s Math Geeks—the nickname used for the forensic accountants who worked for the government. His friend had even managed to get the name of the operation: House of Cards.
There were many choices Christopher Montgomery could have made. He could have gone to the feds and cut a deal. He could provide all the access they needed. He could have been a siphon to it all. He could have confronted his father and demanded that things change, but he knew things were too far gone. He could have attempted to erase his fingerprints from the trades and plead ignorance. But each of those choices had flaws. Attached to all of them was the likelihood that he would go to prison. So, instead, he had told Claire about their father’s hedge fund and the fraud and the billions in assets that were nothing but a mirage. He told her how he was neck deep in it all, even though until recently he knew nothing about any of it. Then, he had asked for her help.
There was no perfect way to fake your own death. But he had been adamant that he needed to do it before the feds busted down the doors. Because to fake your death after an indictment was too suspicious. To fake your death a year before anyone at Montgomery Investment Services came under federal indictment was possible. If they did it the right way.
Sacrificing her Oyster 625 took some convincing, but after Christopher explained that the boat—and everything else in their lives—had come from dirty money, Claire had agreed. Knowing that the marina had surveillance cameras, he and Claire had climbed aboard the Claire-Voyance, prepared the boat for a sail, and pushed off. It was only after they were a mile offshore that Christopher boarded the dingy and made it back to land—a different marina where surveillance was less severe. Then, he had prayed that Claire would survive.
The storm was as brutal as forecasted, and Christopher did his best to keep track of the news as he drove. It was sixteen hours from Manhattan to Sister Bay, Wisconsin, and Christopher stopped only for gas. When he did, he kept his sunglasses on his face and his ball cap pulled low over his eyes. By the time he reached Connie Clarkson’s sailing camp it was six in the morning and the sun was rising. When he opened the door to cabin 12 he was met with the smell of fresh brewed coffee and pancakes, and said a silent prayer of thanks that he had Connie in his life. He clicked on the news and ate like a wild animal.
His biggest regret—even greater than asking Claire to sacrifice the Oyster 625, and risk her life for him—was that the money Connie Clarkson had given his father for safekeeping was gone. Like many of his father’s victims, Connie Clarkson was blind to the fraud until she learned the cold, hard truth that any money given to Montgomery Investment Services had disappeared like smoke in the wind.
It was noon before Christopher found the story on CNN’s Web page. A sailboat had sunk off the coast of Manhattan during a violent storm. One passenger, a woman, had been rescued by the Coast Guard. A search and rescue operation had been launched for a second passenger.
Up to that point, things had worked. He had planned to hide at Connie’s for a couple of weeks. He never imagined it would take three years to leave cabin 12 and the sailing camp.
CHAPTER 77