A Billion Ways to Die (37 page)

“So you’re not arresting us?”

Jersey beamed at her.

“No ma’am. Nobody’s arresting you. You’re both free and clear.”

Except for a little wetness in the eyes, she took it calmly.

“That’s nice to know,” she said, then looked at me. “This is the news you were referring to?”

“It was only confirmed a few hours ago,” said Jersey, saving me. “Arthur didn’t know for sure.”

I told her about visiting Stephen Holt in his Maryland home. How I’d taken him at gunpoint to a hotel room where Jersey had agreed to meet after I’d laid out the whole embezzlement story and all the players involved, supported by evidence that Strider had neatly arranged into a step-by-step narrative, complete with charts, graphs and screenshots of accounting ledgers.

Jersey was a bit startled to see his boss sitting on the hotel bed, but he let me play the recording I’d made of our conversation in the car on the way over, where Holt told me he’d make sure I’d live in exile, unmolested and fabulously wealthy, for the rest of my life.

Not good enough, I’d told him.

It wasn’t an easy process, but eventually the internal investigators at the FBI were convinced by Strider’s overwhelming evidence to charge Holt with a long list of offenses and issue a warrant for Albalita, who disappeared before they had a chance to pluck her out of Switzerland.

“We also lost track of Joselito,” said Jersey. “Holt accused him of killing Andalusky, pretty convincingly, since Holt’s alibi on that one is airtight. We assume he’s in Latin America somewhere.”

Desiree, who’d mostly been an attentive audience till then, suddenly had a question.

“What happened to the billion dollars?”

Jersey insisted on giving the answer.

“Before bringing me Holt, Arthur made a deal with the bureau to exchange the money stolen from The People Project for blanket immunity. Implicit in all this was the threat of wicked bad publicity, which everyone from the State Department on down was very eager to avoid.”

“How big a blanket?” Natsumi asked.

“As big as we need,” I said. “Shelly brokered the deal.”

“So you got to him after all,” Natsumi asked.

“No. Evelyn did.”

At that point, Natsumi and Desiree broke free and went down to the galley to make dinner. Jersey and I played with Omni and talked about sailboats and the relative merits of sloops over cutters when sailing into the wind. We ate as darkness shrank the surrounding sea and opened up the sky above to the infinite stars. Jersey and Desiree agreed to stay onboard for the night, so we were all there when Jersey said there was a little more of the story left to tell. Natsumi looked concerned until he laughed and patted her knee.

“Don’t worry, Arthur’s got his deal,” he said, “and the bureau’s got its renegade Holt. But then somebody realized it was time for the State Department to get its money. And son of a bitch, wouldn’t you know, it disappeared again. Poof.”

“Arthur?” said Natsumi.

Jersey started to explain, but then turned it back over to me.

“Go ahead, Arthur. You know this better than I do.”

I reminded them of some of the background before embarking on new territory.

“The concept behind The People Project’s microfinancing program was to take a big hunk of money and distribute it in small amounts to thousands of people all over the world. When Albalita brought Joselito in as a consultant, he immediately saw an opportunity. The reason there isn’t a lot more thievery of government funds in programs like this are the auditors. Even if everyone’s crooked, including the fiduciary—which in this case he was—you still have the auditors checking over the books in meticulous detail.”

Omni chose that moment to bring me the gnarled remains of a stuffed dinosaur.

“She wants you to throw it to the bow,” said Natsumi. “It’s taken me weeks to keep those things out of the water.”

The trick was repeated about a dozen times before she had enough, stopping amidships to chew on the slobbered fabric. I continued the story.

“Standard practice in any audit is checking with the recipients at the end of a disbursal to make sure they got the money they were supposed to get. It’s impractical to check with everybody, so they pick a sample of recipients, say 10 percent, at random, and survey them. But what if your recipients are impoverished people in remote areas with shaky communications and minimum financial sophistication? And what if there are thousands of them? Not really a problem if all the recipients you manage to reach report receiving every penny of the money promised, standard audit procedure confirms that all the money’s been disbursed.”

“But it hasn’t,” said Natsumi.

“No. Because two-thirds of the people on the list of recipients don’t exist. The proper information was there, in rigorous detail, but none of it was real. Joselito wrote a software program that generated thousands of these phony approved loans, each with their own account number. These accounts were labeled with their own special code, so when the time came, Joselito could punch in a few commands and transfer the orphaned money however and wherever he wanted.”

“And Strider figured this out,” said Natsumi.

“All she did was double-check the contact information, confirming the business registrations, addresses and telephone numbers. It only took uncovering a half-dozen phantom borrowers to realize what was up. Once she isolated the special tag on each of the fake accounts, she had the whole thing.”

I was doing the talking, but everyone was looking at Jersey, who seemed to be bursting at the seams to chime in. So I let him.

“Joselito labeled all these phony accounts to make it easy for the computer to go in there and scoop out all the embezzled money,” he said. “It made it just as easy for Strider to write a command that transferred that same money into the accounts of legitimate borrowers, in equal amounts spread out across the entire program. With a friendly note that said, ‘Please accept this one-time gift from the People of the United States of America, who wish you long life and prosperity.’ ”

We raised a toast to Strider, along with the heartfelt hope that she continue to evade capture, and if not, that she’d plundered enough bank accounts to afford a really good lawyer.

W
E
GAVE
Jersey and Desiree our big V berth and set ourselves up in the cockpit with pillows, quilts and the dubious attention of a small mutt. I was happier for it, to be in the warm air driven by the persistent trade winds that I’d thought about every day and night from the moment the mercenaries took it from me.

And that night, the gentle slap of the bay waves against the hull spoke to me as a whole man. Having lived in every world outside of the one I was born into, I knew with utter conviction that this was the one I would always long for.

Whether they let me stay here or not.