A long pause now. A sigh. “I was in it deep with Caleb before I figured out that he was rigging things, insider trading, corporate espionage. All sorts of dirty shit. Pissed me off. I confronted him.”
He is quiet for a long couple of minutes, staring into space.
“He’s a sly, manipulative bastard. Talked me around. Wasn’t hard, I guess. I mean, I was making serious bank. More than I’d ever made in my life by a factor of at least ten. I wasn’t stupid, I was scattering the accounts all over the place. Hiding some in tax shelters, offshore accounts, all that jazz. Nothing illegal, just spreading the money around so it wasn’t all in one account. But he had me by the balls, you know? Had me dead to rights. I was in it, I was on the hook as much as him if anything happened. Just go with it, he said. It’s only temporary. He was building up capital for a big buyout, a merger that would make both of us billions, billions with a big fat B. So I went with it. Obviously, hindsight is twenty-twenty. A basic life principle for you, Isabel: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. In this case, the big buyout was all a setup. He was working twice as hard as me behind the scenes, doing an end run on me. This is a complex world we live in, and the high-dollar, big-business scene here in Manhattan? It’s a small world. You don’t run the kind of game Caleb was running without attracting attention. He was getting too big too fast, making too much money too easily. People were suspicious. But it was his world, his game, and I was new to it all. What you have to understand here is that I’m glossing over the details because the real nitty-gritty of how Caleb set me up is boring business bullshit. It’s not an exciting narrative. He was running a scheme that ran the entire gamut of white-collar crime: embezzlement, money laundering, insider trading, corporate espionage. He’s smart, and he’s careful. Very little, if anything at all, can be directly traced back to him. I wasn’t innocent, mind you. I knew I was part of something dirty. I won’t bullshit you about that. But I wasn’t part of the grand scope of things either; I was just a piece, a minor player. I was good at the organizational stuff, getting the right people hired for the right job, keeping track of what went where and who did what. Caleb was the one running the big numbers, you know? But he had it all set up so that there were layers and layers between the actual dirty work and him. The SEC got a tip-off, probably. I don’t know. They came sniffing, and it all went to shit. Lots of people went down. His setup was elaborate, lots of people involved, and all of them knew to one degree or another what was going on, that it was a dirty operation. I think there were something like a dozen people who were arrested for a wide variety of white-collar crimes, including yours truly.”
A silence, and then a wave of his hand. “I was an idiot, and paid the price. No one to blame but myself. So I sang like a canary about everything I knew, except Caleb. I wasn’t protecting him, mind you. But telling stories about a ghost is how you get turned into one yourself. I told them everything I knew in exchange for a reduced sentence and a transfer to a more white-collar prison. Got ten years, did five.”
“And the only reason you did any prison time is that Caleb didn’t warn you?”
“It wasn’t that he didn’t warn me so much as that he made sure I was left out in the open for them to find. That was always the plan. There’s always someone as bait. He set me up, and I spent five years in a federal pen for it.”
“What I don’t understand is why you got involved with it in the first place. I mean, if you knew it was illegal, why do it?”
Logan doesn’t answer for a few moments. “You didn’t grow up the way I did.”