Lunar Descent (6 page)

They might have been pleased, if only slightly, to know that their son had run away from home to go to Yale University. But it wasn't Willard DeWitt whom Yale had admitted on the false credentials and transcript DeWitt covertly sent its admissions office (obtained, again, through hackwork while he was back home in Albany): It was Willard G. Erikson. The “G” stood for “Gunnar” … as in Gunnar Erikson, the Norwegian billionaire entrepreneur. DeWitt passed himself off as an American nephew. Most of his father's stolen money was spent to cover the first year's tuition, paid by a check drawn on a dummy bank account in London; Willard had been busy with Dad's Toshiba.

Willard Erikson lived cheaply in a dorm for his first semester at Yale, faithfully attending classes in business administration. His high grades were apparently the one thing, perhaps the only thing, that DeWitt did not earn by hacking into a mainframe somewhere. Yale professors who remember him recall that he was alert, attentive, even creative (for instance, his advisor's file stated that Willard Erikson “will probably be as successful as his uncle”). But he also managed to seed his cover story through his classmates, so well in fact that before the end of his first semester one of Yale's leading fraternities, Alpha Beta Epsilon, actively sought him out. Willard Erikson pledged Alpha Beta; by January of his freshman year, he had moved into the frat house.

Willard Erikson was a well-liked, and trusted, member of Alpha Beta. When the fraternity's slush fund for parties inexplicably began to run low in the spring semester of '19, no one suspected it was because DeWitt was stealing them blind. He had managed to ferret out the chapter treasurer's bank passwords and transfer $7,800 to a dummy account at a different New Haven bank.

How long DeWitt might have been able to carry on this subterfuge is a matter of conjecture. He had to go on the lam again by late April, near the end of the academic year, when Yale invited Gunnar Erikson to be its commencement speaker. Not only did they make their invitation public—before Erikson's formal acceptance, the news was announced in the Yale campus paper, along with a brief mention of Willard Erikson's association with the billionaire—but the boys at the frat house began pressuring Willard to get “Uncle Gunny” over for dinner. By the time Gunnar Erikson telexed Yale to ask “Willard who?” DeWitt had fled in the middle of the night.

“We were very disappointed in Willard,” recalls former Alpha Beta chapter president C. Hoyt Waxford. “Very surprised and disappointed.”

But DeWitt's college career was not over. In the fall semester of 2019, Everett College—a small liberal arts school in central Massachusetts—admitted on scholarship a new sophomore, Martin Armstrong. Marty Armstrong was a student from Ohio who was known by a few to be the great-grandson of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon. Marty Armstrong was not only an A student, but he was also quite active in campus organizations. He wrote a column for the college paper, was active in various student groups, and in his second semester made a successful bid for election to the student senate. The following semester, Marty Armstrong, big man on campus, was elected by the senate as its new treasurer.

It was like inviting the proverbial fox into the henhouse. Over the next six months DeWitt systematically tapped the budgets of the various Everett College student groups—the college paper, the yearbook, the homecoming committee, the radio station, and so forth—a few dollars at a time, eventually stealing more than $36,000, which was hidden in four bank accounts in various parts of the state. None of his fellow students noticed the nickel-and-dime discrepancies … but Floyd Gerrard, the college's comptroller, did tumble to the unexplained absence of a few dollars here and there in the student-affairs budget when he was preparing the school's federal tax return. The discrepancies in the books all led back to the student senate treasurer, and Gerrard began to smell a rat.

“I remembered reading about something like this happening at a Yale fraternity,” Gerrard says, “so I called [Yale's] security office and asked them to send me a picture of the kid who had posed as Gunnar Erikson's nephew.” It was just a hunch on Gerrard's part, but it paid off; when the photo was faxed to him, Gerrard found himself looking at a picture of Marty Armstrong.

This time, Willard DeWitt did not escape. He was in his apartment with a couple of friends when Gerrard, Everett College president Alice Gaynor, and two members of the Massachusetts State Police arrived to arrest him on charges of embezzlement and bank fraud. “He didn't seem too surprised to see us,” Gaynor recalls. “It was weird. When he opened the door and saw us standing there, his first remark was, ‘I figured this would happen sooner or later.'”

DeWitt went to trial in Worcester County Superior Court in February, 2020, where he was found guilty and sentenced to four years at New Braintree Prison. Officials at the minimum-security prison report that he was a model inmate. Even when his cellmate and several others made an escape attempt while working on a road crew, DeWitt didn't run off with them, although he did nothing to deter or report their escape, either.

“He never once broke the rules,” says Hal Allman, New Braintree's assistant warden. “Not so much as disobeying lights-out. So when he came up for parole in three years, he looked good in the eyes of the review board.” Allman shrugs. “Maybe that's what he had planned all along.”

Indeed. Willard DeWitt was paroled in November, 2023. Seeing his skill with computers, his parole officer, Carrie Smyth-Consiglio, arranged for him to get a job as a robotics programmer at a factory in Worcester. DeWitt held that job for a personal record—six weeks—before he abruptly jumped parole. Smyth-Consiglio visited his apartment in the city to find that DeWitt had completely abandoned it, leaving behind not a trace of his destination.

For six months, DeWitt completely disappeared from the radar screen. Then came the bogus-stock scandal at the Boston brokerage house of Geller Piperidge & Associates, and the criminal involvement of a junior broker named Peter Jurgenson.…

3. The Flight of the Imposter

The storm which had awakened Lester Riddell in his New Hampshire house-trailer careered south-southwest, out of the mountains and down the coastline into Massachusetts. By the time Lester was walking out onto the highway, the Greater Boston area was being raked by the same thunderstorm.

Two strokes of lightning split the black night sky above Boston simultaneously. One hit somewhere in Dorchester, in the no-man's-land where even the street gangs had fled from the thunderbolts and the cold, driving rain, taking shelter in the doorways of barricaded stores and housing projects; the other was its reflection, mirrored in the titanic glass wall of the Sony Tower, rising three hundred stories above the uptown streets, a black megalith that dwarfed the architectural Brahmins of yesteryear, the Hancock Building and the Pru.

The thunderclap rumbled across the rain-drenched skyline, causing the windows of Willard DeWitt's condo to shudder. It was at that moment the phone on his desk buzzed.

Standing in his darkened living room, glass of wine cradled in his hands as he watched the cold rain streak his windows, DeWitt didn't turn to his desk, didn't reach to pick up the receiver. Instead, he listened carefully. The phone buzzed again, then a third time, then a fourth … then abruptly stopped. DeWitt held up his left wrist and watched the luminous face of his Rolex Oyster. Exactly fifteen seconds passed, then the phone buzzed again. When it was through buzzing three more times, Willard lowered his watch and took a last sip from his wineglass.

“Damn,” he said quietly.

The two unanswered phone calls had been from the computer mainframe at Geller Piperidge & Associates, the State Street stock brokerage where Peter Jurgenson was employed as a junior broker. When Willard had come aboard at Geller Piperidge ten months earlier, one of his first covert acts as Peter Jurgenson was to install his own encrypted master file in the mainframe. This file, containing his secret records, was guarded by a number of lockout and early-warning systems, one of which was programmed to call his home phone twice in quick succession if the master file was located and entered without his password. There was only one way this could occur: if a Securities and Exchange Commission bunco team were to link Geller Piperidge's mainframe to its Cray-9 icebreaker in New York. And that could only be accomplished if the SEC inspectors were at the firm's offices at this very moment, armed with a federal court order enabling them to conduct a surprise raid on the brokerage.

DeWitt put down his wineglass and strode to his cherry-oak desk. He had been anticipating this; ugly rumors had been circulating through Boston's financial community for the past few days that the feds were getting suspicious about some phony-stock transactions that had been originating from Beantown. No one knew who had been flooding the market with bogus stock, but it seemed apparent that someone, somewhere in one of Boston's many brokerages, was using his or her company's prospects lists to solicit customers under an assumed name, selling worthless securities, and hiding the proceeds in a network of dummy corporations and offshore bank accounts.

Realistically, it wasn't a matter of
who
was selling crap stock, but
which
person the SEC was after. The Boston financial community was just as crooked as Tokyo or New York or London; there were no saints on State and Tremont Streets. Heads are about to roll, went the whispers downtown. Re-evaluate your friends and cancel your lunch dates with mere acquaintances. Take a long weekend off; now is a good time to visit the Vineyard or go out to the Berkshires to reopen your summer house. Destroy any notes you would rather not have read by a federal grand jury. Get out of town. Cover your ass.

None of this greatly bothered Willard. He was an expert at covering his ass.

The drawer contained a small stack of airline tickets: all for flights originating from Logan International, all purchased two weeks in advance through the net. They were registered under a variety of aliases: Harry Papp, John Fowler, Kent Llewellyn, Mario Bodini. Every day Willard had canceled the soon-to-expire tickets and purchased new ones, charging them to any one of a revolving number of bogus Visa or MasterCard accounts. He shuffled through the tickets and picked out a Pan Am Boston-to-Orlando ticket registered under Kent Llewellyn's name, then opened his attaché case and thrust the rest of the tickets into a pocket, to be destroyed later.

The chosen ticket went into the inside pocket of the black leather jacket which he picked off the back of his desk chair, along with the packet of Amex traveler's checks he had purchased a couple of days earlier: two thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds. He pulled on the jacket, closed the desk drawer-he had already cleaned out his desk, disposing of everything that was either incriminating or which could link Peter Jurgenson to Willard DeWitt—then picked up the folded Toshiba PC and headed for the foyer closet. At the bottom of the closet was his getaway bag, perpetually packed and ready to go. He had learned to keep a suitcase packed for such emergencies from his days at Yale. Who says you don't learn anything in college?

Attaché case and Toshiba in his right hand, suitcase in his left, Willard DeWitt walked out of his condo, letting the door close and lock behind him. He barely looked back at the expensive furniture, clothes, toys and appliances he was abandoning; all that stuff belonged to Peter Jurgenson, and Jurgenson was now a ghost, an electronic specter haunting the mainframe at Geller Piperidge & Associates. Soon even that evil spirit would be exorcised. At this moment, a virus program contained in DeWitt's secret file, activated by the intrusion of the SEC inspectors, would be running through the system like a cybernetic shaman casting a cleansing spell, eradicating all mention of Peter Jurgenson and the many other aliases and dummy corporations DeWitt had utilized. The virus would even clean out the SEC's Cray-9, if it had already broken through his redundant defenses, before the virus destroyed all traces of itself. When it was done, all that would remain of Peter Jurgenson would be an empty desk at Geller Piperidge, some unpaid utility bills, and an unlisted telephone number.

Goodbye, Pete
, Willard thought as he walked down the hall and took the stairs down to the front door.
It was fun while it lasted, pal
.…

He caught a cab on Newbury Street, just outside his building. The driver, a middle-aged Hispanic punkster wearing a studded leather vest which looked as if a cat had used it for claw-sharpening, was in the mood for conversation. He tried to initiate some small talk—“Sheeit, what do you think of this storm, man?”—but Willard answered his comments about the weather with monosyllables and grunts until the driver got the hint and left him alone to contemplate the streets through the cab's chicken-wired back windows.

The rainstorm had diminished to a thin drizzle; out on the sidewalks, people were emerging from alleys and expensive hangouts to resume their nocturnal prowling: Here, a group of college kids slumming tonight outside the safe, walled confines of the BU or Harvard or MIT campuses, loitering outside a rock club as they waited for girls, dope, or whatever other extracurricular activity might pass their way. There, two representatives of Boston's ubiquitous homeless population, squatting under the neon sign of an art gallery showing a collection of Dillon prints, hugging their damp sleeping bags to their chests and watchful for the next police cruiser. A trio of wealthy young businesswomen emerged from an Italian café, chatting gaily amongst themselves, escorted by a well-dressed gorilla from a bodyguard service. A black Cadillac nosed-dived into a rare vacant parking place, cutting off a beat-up Ford Slipstream which had been angling for the same precious spot.

The cab turned right onto Essex, then swung left through a red light onto Boylston. DeWitt pulled the Toshiba into his lap, opened the clamshell screen and switched it on. It was time for him to assume a new identity, but which one? Where to go now? Kent Llewellyn was only a getaway alias, devised solely for the purpose of making quick escapes. Beyond the plane ticket and a single credit account, there was no extensive background for this disposable persona: He was a name and some conjured numbers, that was all. Now DeWitt had to assume another verifiable, flesh-and-blood alias.