Buried Secrets

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 a coronary right there in front of me.

“I think I see where this is going. You couldn’t tell your investors they’d lost all their money. Right?”

“Some of them had hundreds of millions of dollars invested with me. What was I going to tell them, I screwed up? I couldn’t face that. You know I never had a single losing quarter, all those decades? No one’s ever had a record like that. I mean, the sainted Warren Buffett lost almost ten percent a few years back.”

“So what’d you do, Marshall? Dummy up statements like Bernie Madoff?”

“No! I needed cash. Lots and lots of it. Massive infusions. And no bank in the world would lend me money.”

“Ah, gotcha. You took in new money. So you could make it look like you hadn’t lost anything.”

He nodded, shrugged.

“That’s still fraud,” I said.

“That wasn’t my intent!”

“No, of course not. So who’d you take money from?”

“You don’t want to know, Nickeleh. Believe me, you don’t want to know. The less you know, the better.”

“At this point I think you better tell me.”

“Let’s just say you’re not going to run into any of these guys at the Union League Club, okay? These are bad men, Nicky.” A twitch had started in his left eye.

“Let me hear some names.”

“You ever hear of Joost Van Zandt?”

“Are you out of your mind?” Van Zandt was a Dutch arms dealer whose private militia had supported Liberia’s murderous dictator, Charles Taylor.

“Desperate, more like,” he said. “How about Agim Grazdani? Or Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman?”

Agim Grazdani was the head of the Albanian mafia. His portfolio included gunrunning, human trafficking, and counterfeiting. When Italy’s top prosecutor issued a warrant for his arrest a couple of years ago, the prosecutor and his entire family turned up in the meat locker of the justice minister’s favorite restaurant in Rome, their bodies dismembered and frozen.

Since then Italian prosecutors have been too busy with other cases to go after him.

Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman, the leader of Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel, was one of the most violent narcotics traffickers in the world. He’d altered his appearance through repeated plastic surgeries, was believed to be living somewhere in Brazil, and basically made Pablo Escobar look like Mister Rogers.

“And the damned Russians,” he said. “Stanislav Luzhin and Roman Navrozov and Oleg Uspensky.”

“My God, Marshall, what the hell was the idea?” I said.

“I thought I could get the ship righted with all the new cash and I’d be back on my feet. But it wasn’t enough to meet all the margin calls. My whole firm went down the crapper anyway.”

“The new money with the old.”

He nodded.

“Guzman and Van Zandt and Grazdani and the Russians,” I said.

“Right.”

“You lost all their money too.”

He winced.

“You know, when Bernie Madoff’s investors lost everything the most they could do was cry in front of a judge. These guys aren’t the crying type. So which one of them took your daughter?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’m going to need a list of all of your investors.”

“You’re not walking away? Thank you.” Tears sprang to Marcus’s eyes. He gripped my forearms in his bear paws. “Thank you, Nick.”

“A complete list,” I said. “Every single name. No omissions.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“I also want a list of all your employees, past and present. Including household staff, past and present. Personnel files too.”

There was a knock on the door.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Dorothy said, “but the live feed’s back up.”

“The feed?” Marcus said, confused.

“It’s Alexa,” she said. “The video stream is back online.”





28.



We crowded around the monitor. Marcus hunched forward in his chair while Dorothy worked the keyboard.

“It just started up,” Dorothy said.

The same still photo of Alexa as a girl. Superimposed over it, in green letters: LIVE and ENTER CHAT. Dorothy moved the mouse and clicked.

Then Alexa’s face appeared again. That same extreme close-up. Eyes brimming with tears.

“Dad?” she said. She wasn’t looking straight at the camera but slightly off to the side, as if she didn’t know for sure where the lens was. “Dad?”

Marcus said, “Lexie? Daddy’s right here.”

“She still can’t hear you,” Dorothy said.

“Daddy, they’re not going to let me go unless you give them something, okay?”

The picture was sort of stuttery and jittery. Not very high quality. Like TV reception used to be in the days before cable.

“Um … first, they say if you contact the police or anything they’re just going to…”

She blinked rapidly, tears streaming down her cheeks. She shuddered.

“I’m so cold and I’m so afraid that I’m too weak and I can’t change,” she said suddenly, almost in a monotone. “I—I twist and turn in the darkest space and … I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy.”

“Oh, Lord,” Dorothy said.

“Shhh!” Marcus said. “Please!”

There was a low rumble, and suddenly the image pixelated: It froze, turned into thousands of tiny squares that broke apart, and then the screen went dark.

“No!” Marcus said. “Not again! Why is this happening?”

But then the video was back. Alexa was saying, “They want Mercury, Daddy, okay? You have to give them Mercury in the raw. I—I don’t know what that means. They said you will. Please, Daddy, I don’t think I can hold out any longer.”

And the image went dark once again. We waited a few seconds, but this time it didn’t come back.

“Is that it?” Marcus said, looking wildly from me to Dorothy and back. “That’s the end of the video?”

“I’m sure it’s not the last,” I said.

“IR camera for sure,” Dorothy said. Infrared, she meant. The reason for the video’s monochrome, greenish cast. A video camera like that would have its own built-in infrared light source, invisible to the human eye.

“They’re holding her in total darkness,” I said.

Marcus shouted, “My little Lexie! What are they doing to her? Where is she?”

“They don’t want us to know yet,” I said. “It’s part of the pressure, the … cruelty. The not-knowing.”

Marcus put a hand over his eyes. His lower lip was trembling, his face was flushed. He was sobbing noiselessly.

“I really do think she’s lying down,” Dorothy said. “Just based on the appearance of her face.”

“So what happened to the image at the end?” I said. “What caused it to break up?”

“Some kind of transmission error, maybe.”

“I’m not so sure. You notice that low-pitched sound? Sounded like a car or a truck nearby.”

Dorothy nodded. “A big old truck, maybe. They’re probably near traffic. Probably right off a main road or a highway or something.”

“Nope,” I said. “Not a main road. Not a busy street. That was the first vehicle we heard. So that tells us she’s near a road but not a busy one.” I turned to Marcus. “What’s Mercury?”

He lifted his hand from his eyes. They were scrunched and red and flooded with tears. “No idea.”

“And what was all that about ‘I’m too weak and I can’t change’ and ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”

“Who the hell knows,” he said, his voice phlegmy. He cleared his throat. “She’s scared out of her mind.”

“But it’s not the way she normally talks, is it?”

“She’s terrified. She was just … babbling!”

“Was she quoting a poem, maybe?”

Marcus looked blank.

“It sounds like a reference to something. Like she was reciting something. Doesn’t sound familiar at all?”

He shook his head.

“A book?” I suggested. “Maybe something you used to read to her when she was a little kid?”

“I, you know…” He faltered. “You know, her mother read to her. And your mother. I—I never did. I really wasn’t around very much.”

And he put a hand over his eyes again.

* * *



AS WE drove away from Marcus’s house into the gloom of a starless night—away from what I now thought of as Marshall Marcus’s compound, defended as it was by armed guards—I told Dorothy about how Marshall Marcus had lost it all.

She reacted with the same kind of slack-jawed disbelief that I had. “You telling me this guy lost ten billion dollars like it dropped behind the sofa cushions?”

“Basically.”

“That can happen?”

“Easy.”

She shook her head. “See, this is why I’m glad I never went into finance. I’m always losing my keys and my glasses. If you can lose something, I’ll lose it.”

She was multitasking, tapping away at her BlackBerry as she talked.

“Remind me not to give you any money to manage,” I said.

“You have any idea what Mercury is?”

“Marshall doesn’t know. Why should I?”

“Marshall says he doesn’t know.”

“True.”

“Maybe it’s, like, one of his offshore funds or something. Money he’s stashed somewhere.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“If the kidnappers know they lost their whole investment, they also know he’s broke. So ‘Mercury’ can’t refer to money.”

“Maybe they figure he’s got something stashed away somewhere. All these guys hide chunky nuts of money away. They’re like squirrels. Evil squirrels.”

“But why not just say it straight? Why not just say, wire three hundred million dollars into such-and-such an offshore account or we kill the kid?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Well, what’s more valuable than money?”

“A virtuous woman.” Dorothy pursed her lips.

“Some proprietary trading algorithm, maybe. Some investment formula he invented.”

She shook her head, kept tapping away. “A trading algorithm? Guy’s busted flat. Whatever secret sauce the guy’s got I ain’t buying.”

I smiled.

“You think he knows but he’s not telling us?” she said.

“Yep.”

“Even if it gets his daughter killed?”

For a long time I said nothing. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“You know him,” she said. “I don’t.”

“No,” I said. “I thought I knew him. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Hmph,” she said.

“What?”

“Oh, man, this can’t be true.”

“What?”

“Oh, dear God, please don’t let this be true.”

“What are you talking about?”

For a quick second I took my eyes off the road to glance at Dorothy. She was staring at her BlackBerry. “That crazy stuff Alexa was saying? ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”

“Yeah?”

“I Googled it. Nick, it’s a lyric from a song by a rock group called Alter Bridge.”

“Okay.”

“The song’s called ‘Buried Alive.’”





29.



By the time I’d dropped Dorothy off at her apartment in Mission Hill, it was almost nine at night.

My apartment was a loft in the leather district, which may sound kinky, but actually refers to the six-square-block area of downtown Boston between Chinatown and the financial district, where the old red-brick buildings used to be shoe factories and leather tanneries and warehouses.

I found a parking space a few blocks away, cut through the alley into the grim service entrance and up the steel-treaded back stairwell to the back door on the fifth floor.

The loft was one large open space with a fifteen-foot ceiling. The bedroom was in an alcove, on the opposite side of the apartment from the bathroom. Bad design. In another alcove was a kitchen equipped with high-end appliances, none of which I’d ever used, except the refrigerator. There were a lot of cast-iron support columns and exposed brick and of course the obligatory exposed ductwork. The place was spare and functional and unadorned. Uncluttered.

I’m sure a psychiatrist would say that I was reacting against my upbringing in an immense mansion in Bedford, New York, stuffed with precious antiques. My brother and I couldn’t run around inside without knocking over some priceless Etruscan vase or a John Townsend highboy.

But maybe I just hate clutter.

The comedian George Carlin used to do a great routine about “stuff,” the crap we all go through life accumulating and shuffling around from place to place. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it, he said, a place to put your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. I have as little stuff as possible, but what I have is simple and good.

I went straight to the bathroom, stripped, and jumped in the shower. For a long time I stood there, feeling the hot water pound my head, my neck, my back.

Unable to get the image of poor Alexa Marcus out of my head. The raccoon eyes, the abject terror. It reminded me of one of the most harrowing Web videos I’ve ever seen: the beheading of a brave Wall Street Journal reporter some years ago by monsters in black hoods.

And that association filled me with dread.

I wondered what she meant by “buried alive.” Maybe she was locked in an underground bunker or vault of some kind.

When I shut off the water and reached for the towel I thought I heard a noise.

A snap or a click.

Or nothing.

I stopped, listened a moment longer, then began toweling myself off.

And heard it again. Definitely something.

Inside the apartment.





30.



I stared out through the halfway-open bathroom door, saw nothing.

In such an old building in the middle of a city at night, there were all sorts of sounds. Delivery trucks and garbage compactors and screeching brakes and car doors slamming and buses belching diesel. Car alarms, night and day.

But this was coming from inside my apartment for sure.

A scritch scritch scritch from the front of the loft.

Naked, still wet, I let the towel drop and nudged the bathroom door open a bit wider. Stepped out, dripping on the hardwood floor.

Listened harder.

The scritch scritch scritch even more distinct. It was definitely inside the loft, at the front.

Both of my firearms were out of reach. The SIG-Sauer P250 semiautomatic pistol was under my bed. But to reach the bedroom alcove I’d have to pass them first. I cursed the idiotic layout of the place, putting the bathroom so far from the bedroom. The other weapon, a Smith & Wesson M&P nine-millimeter, was in a floor safe under the kitchen floor.

Closer to them than to me.

The wooden floors, once scarred and dented, had been recently refinished. They were solid and silky-smooth and they didn’t squeak when you walked on them. Barefoot, I was able to take a few noiseless steps into the room.

Two men in black ambush jackets. One was large and heavily muscled with a Neanderthal forehead and a black brush cut. He was sitting at my desk, doing something to my keyboard, even though he didn’t look like the computer-savvy type. The other was small and slender with short mouse-brown hair, sallow complexion, and cheeks deeply pitted with acne scars. He sat on the floor beneath my huge wall-mounted flat-screen TV. He was holding my cable modem and doing something with a screwdriver.

Both of them wore latex gloves. They were also wearing new-looking jeans and dark jackets. Most people wouldn’t notice anything special about the way they were dressed. But if you’ve ever worked undercover, their clothing was as conspicuous as an electronic Times Square billboard. It was carry-conceal attire, with hidden pistol pockets and magazine pouches.

I had no idea who they were or why they were here, but I knew immediately they were armed.

And I wasn’t.

I wasn’t even dressed.