Mortal Bonds

ALSO BY MICHAEL SEARS

Black Fridays

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

Publishers Since 1838

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2013 by Michael Sears

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sears, Michael, date.

Mortal bonds / Michael Sears.

p. cm.—(A Jason Stafford Novel)

ISBN 978-1-101-63644-2

1. Finance—Corrupt practices—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.E2565M67 2013 2013015373

813'.6—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

for the Muses

A
ccording to the police report, the victim, Serge Biondi, an eighty-year-old tax and estate attorney and partner with the firm Kuhn Lauber Biondi, made two phone calls after his secretary left the offices at 6:48 that Friday evening. The first call was to Frau Hilde Biondi, his seventy-four-year-old wife of nearly fifty years. He informed her that he was working late, a not-unusual occurrence, but planned on being home for dinner by 8:30. They briefly discussed plans for the weekend that included some early Christmas shopping for their two sons and their families.

The second call was to the Zurich Escort Center, where, police later learned, he was a steady, but not frequent, client, generally preferring discreet sessions in his office after hours with tall, large-breasted, Eastern European women. Herr Biondi was just over 1.7 meters, or five-foot-five.

The assignment was given to a twenty-seven-year-old airline stewardess with LOT by the name of Adrianna Marchek who had met with Serge Biondi on two previous occasions. When interviewed the following day, Ms. Marchek said that she had been held up by an emergency with her dog and did not arrive at the offices of Kuhn Lauber Biondi until sometime after 7:45. There was no answer when she rang the intercom, so she called her office. The dispatcher attempted to reach Herr Biondi by phone, and when that failed, told Ms. Marchek that she was free to leave. Detectives who took Ms. Marchek’s statement further reported that she fit Herr Biondi’s request in every particular.

Zurich police were first called to the scene at 9:09 by a hysterical and nearly unintelligible cleaning woman, one Nkoyo Adeyemo, a citizen of Nigeria. Adeyemo had a valid work visa and was also employed at a commercial laundry establishment in Kloten. Her testimony was that she had arrived at the offices at 7:58, two minutes early for her evening cleaning shift. She’d worked her way up, floor by floor, and so did not find the body for more than an hour.

Closed-circuit television tapes of the lobby confirmed Adeyemo’s timetable. They also showed two men arriving exactly at 7:00 and leaving twenty-eight minutes later. The men were both approximately two meters tall, one slighter of build than the other and dressed in nearly identical long overcoats, gloves, and broad-brimmed hats. Neither one’s face could be observed because of the hats and the location of the camera. They entered from the street, proceeded directly to the elevator just outside of camera view. One man carried a light leather satchel. Judging by the way he held it, the bag was empty, or almost so. When leaving, they walked in the same unhurried but very direct manner.

It appears that during the twenty-eight minutes the two men were upstairs, they went directly to Herr Biondi’s office, where they tied the lawyer to his chair with gray duct tape and began to beat him about the face, chest, and groin. If their ultimate goal was the death of Herr Biondi, they were almost immediately successful, though if they were attempting to extract information, they were no doubt frustrated, as the first heavy blow to the chest precipitated a massive heart attack that dispatched their victim in seconds.

The room was searched thoroughly, with the file drawers and the small safe receiving the most attention. Herr Biondi kept few files in his office, his secretary reported, as the custom at the firm was to move all inactive case materials to a basement storage room referred to by all as
der katakomben
. Neither the secretary nor Herr Kuhn could identify anything missing from the room (Herr Lauber was not available, as he had passed away in 2001). The door had been removed from the ancient safe, and a jeweler’s box containing an emerald brooch—possibly a Christmas present for Frau Biondi, who admitted to a particular fondness for emeralds—was left untouched.

Upon further questioning of Herr Kuhn, the three junior lawyers, and the clerical staff, there was unanimous consent that there was nothing that Herr Biondi could have been working on that would have warranted such an attack.

Six months later, the file was still open.

I
found that if I kept my focus on the horizon, I could almost convince my stomach that I was not traveling at one hundred miles per hour in a loud, throbbing, whining machine, tilted, like some perverse carnival ride, at an angle, so that forward motion actually felt exactly like falling out of the sky. My stomach rumbled in protest, threatening to liquefy all matter currently in my lower intestines.

I hated helicopters.

I squelched the impulse to make idiotic conversation, such as “Isn’t this where John Kennedy’s plane went down?” or “I understand this chopper has the highest safety record of any light aircraft in the world.” It was all mental static, anyway, obscuring the single screaming question that was threatening to shut down all of my cognitive functions—if I were to die in a helicopter accident, who would take care of my beautiful six-year-old son?

We were flying east down the middle of Long Island Sound on a cloudless day in late May. Another man might have enjoyed the view.

The invitation to join the Von Becker family for an afternoon at their estate in Newport had come at one of my low points. I was eight months out of prison and finding it hard to find work. The Wall Street fraud consulting I had been doing was drying up, as the big firms realized I wasn’t above sharing my findings with the FBI and SEC regulators. Wall Street greatly prefers self-regulation—hyphenated shorthand for “sweeping things under the carpet.” So, if the currently most notorious banking family in the world wanted to talk with me about a project that might take me a few weeks to complete—with hints of a substantial performance bonus—I was willing to meet with them. Even if it meant taking an hour-long helicopter ride to get there.

I had assets—five million in offshore funds, which I had moved into a Swiss annuity, untraceable, but untouchable for five years—and a turret apartment in the Ansonia—in my opinion, the most beautiful apartment building in New York. What I didn’t have was ready cash. I was hungry. And, I was curious.

William Von Becker had run one of the largest privately held investment banks in North America, with branch offices on four continents—he had not yet extended his reach to Africa, the South Pacific, or Antarctica. He ran investment funds totaling in the hundreds of billions, universally recognized as safe, consistent earners. He was also a philanthropist, giving away millions each year, and, after the multiple-hurricane disaster in Haiti, running a $10,000-per-ticket annual fund-raising party for the Hurricane Relief Fund.

Then the bottom fell out. It came at the end of a bad week. The stock market hiccuped for three days, and then hemorrhaged on Thursday. Friday morning, a South American finance minister announced he was pulling all of his dollar accounts. It was a bit of hysteria from one source—but it was enough. When the money from the Von Becker funds didn’t arrive on Monday, the world took notice. On Tuesday, there was a run on both his funds and the banks he owned throughout Central and South America. And by the week’s end, the truth was out. The Von Becker empire was just another hollow shell—a multibillion-dollar hollow shell. Bigger than most, smaller than a few, it was just one more in an ever-lengthening list of failed Ponzi schemes.

The pilot nudged my arm and pointed down at the water. Even from that height, the sailboat looked huge. The mast must have been two hundred feet tall. The sail could have gift-wrapped a small house. There was a full platoon of men in bright red uniforms sitting out on the rail waving at us as the boat heeled in the strong winds off Point Judith.

My stomach lurched again as we tilted and veered down into the harbor. The bay seemed to be rushing up at me.

I gripped the door handle hard enough to hurt—I don’t know whether I was getting ready to throw it open or hold it closed. Then, as abruptly as changing a television channel, we were flying over land—a rocky beach, a flash of trees—and we circled suddenly and settled onto a concrete helipad, the landing struts neatly framed by a big yellow “
H
.” Two men in gray business suits ran to open the door and help me out.

Solid ground felt only slightly better, with the rotors still swirling over my head. Though there had to have been a four- to six-foot clearance, it still felt right to duck. I noticed that the other two ducked as well.

“Jason, thank you for coming out on such short notice. The family will certainly appreciate this.” The man projected over the continuing whine of the helicopter engine in a nasal whine of his own. It was the kind of voice that came from generations of careful breeding or well-practiced mimicry. I knew Everett. It was a bit of both.

Everett Payne had been a constant on my personal radar screen for most of my adult life, but I could easily say I barely knew him, although, if you had charted our respective résumés, you might have assumed we were bosom buddies. He had been a business major at Cornell two years ahead of me and in a different fraternity. We never met at that time. Later, at Wharton in the mid-eighties, we were in the same class, though we hung out with different crowds—I was with the quants and grinds, he with the “coast to a C because I’m going to work at my father’s firm anyway” crowd. Only, in his case, that plan bit the dust during our last semester, when Payne the Elder ran a billion-dollar S&L into insolvency. Instead of stepping into a sinecure, young Everett started his career as a sales assistant at a Memphis bond shop. But over the intervening years, he had networked his way through a succession of ever-improving positions, until he landed as a senior portfolio manager at the Von Becker funds.

Everett’s greatest achievement, however, had been his ability to stay out of jail—to not even be indicted—following the collapse of the Von Becker funds. Though he had been nominally in charge of overseeing a wide range of investments and executives, he was still able to deny—convincingly—any knowledge of the mega-sized con game his boss had been running in the next room.

The second man was from a very different milieu. Though he was dressed in a simple gray suit, white shirt, and blue striped tie, he looked as though he would have been more comfortable in combat fatigues and a Kevlar vest. As security, he was more mercenary than bodyguard. In prison I had learned that reading tats quickly and accurately was a key element of survival, but the mixed message on the backs of his hands was confusing. On his right was a professionally done design of a fist holding lightning bolts that I had learned was a U.S. Army accessory for Fisters—Fire Support Teams, the forward spotters for artillery. They called down the lightning. But the left hand had a blued prison blur of a shamrock and the letters
AB
—Aryan Brotherhood. I had met his brethren before.

Everett didn’t introduce us. The man looked me over, judged me to be only a minor potential threat, and mentally photographed my face, coloring, and body type. He would remember me, and be able to pick me out of the crowd at Yankee Stadium if need be. I gave him my best imitation of a smile, just to see what effect it might have. He didn’t flinch.

“Right this way, Jason. Everyone’s down at the beach. I’ll introduce you.”

A house was barely visible through a screen of tall pines. It was a big house—probably a bit small for a castle, but very big for a house. Guests would probably need a floor plan to get from their bedroom suites down to the breakfast room. Maybe not. There were probably enough servants on hand to keep anyone from getting lost.

We followed a freshly raked gravel path through a well-manicured landscape of gentle slopes and sand traps—a series of elaborate putting greens, though it took me a few moments to realize it. We took a turn and looked out at a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree panorama of Newport and the bay. To the left was the town proper, Goat Island, and beyond it the soaring bridge that spanned the bay on both sides of the island. Directly in front of us stood Fort Adams and the lower headland. And to the right, a pink-and-white-striped tent big enough to house a full band of Bedouins—camels, goats, wives, and children—blocked the view of the lower bay.

Everett filled me in as we walked. “Livy, the matriarch, is the decider. If she likes you, you’re in. But Virgil is the one you’ll be dealing with. He’s all about details.” He thought for a moment before continuing. “You two might actually get along.”

He passed through a canvas portal in the back of the tent, and I pushed through behind him. A blast of frigid air hit me. A pair of air conditioners—each the size of a compact car—were spewing arctic breezes onto a string of buffet tables loaded with iced shrimp, oysters, clams, and what must have been the last of the Florida stone-crab harvest for the year. In the center of this bounty was a bowl of black caviar. My bathroom sink was smaller than that bowl. Buckets held bottles of Gosset champagne and Chopin vodka.

The women wore pearls, sipped champagne, and smelled of Chanel. The men all had cigars and glasses of a heavily peated single-malt scotch. They smelled like a Highlands brush fire. The premium vodka was going untouched. No one was eating.

The far side of the tent was open, giving a wide view of the mouth of the harbor. Three of the men at the party—all in dark suits, as though just come from a funeral—were standing at telescopes mounted on tall tripods, staring out to sea. I followed their gaze. Two miles or so away, I could see the big yacht we had passed just a few minutes before. It was still heeled over and flying.

Everett took my elbow and guided me through the small crowd. “Come, Jason. I’ll have you meet the mater while the boys are playing with their boat.” He led me toward a wall of four thick-necked men in gray suits. They all frisked me with their eyes, checking for threats. I passed. The wall parted. I didn’t see any more tattoos.

A small, round, cloth-covered table had been set up, surrounded by six wooden folding chairs. Three of the seats were taken—a horse-faced woman in her sixties, a much younger woman who could have been her daughter, and a man with the still-trim figure of a tennis player. He had the unfashionable good looks of a silent film star, a Valentino maybe, the features a bit too prominent, the eyes too moody. His hair was black, so black as to make me question its provenance, but the eyebrows matched, and though he had no mustache or trace of beard, his chin and jawline were very dark.

“I’m Kurt Blake,” he said, stepping forward. His head was cocked at a slight angle, as though he were constantly appraising the world and finding it all slightly below his standards. “I run security for the family.”

Everett stepped in. “Livy, may I introduce my old friend, Jason Stafford. Jason, Mrs. Olivia Von Becker.”

Blake took being brushed aside much better than I would have. He sat back down and watched—carefully.

“Charmed,” the older woman said, sounding anything but. I’d seen warmer eyes on blackjack dealers. “Stafford? There was a Stafford girl at Miss Porter’s when Morgan was there. My daughter, Morgan, Mr. Stafford.” She gestured to the twenty-something, round-faced young woman to her left. Morgan Von Becker wore no makeup or jewelry, and her hair was cropped close to her head. Not a flattering look.

She greeted me by deigning to look briefly in my general direction. I didn’t take the snub personally. Morgan looked like she had decided at a very young age that she didn’t like boys and had yet to find any reason to revisit the question.

“The father sold office supplies,” Mrs. Von Becker continued. “He had a chain of stores, I believe. Help me, Morgan. The girl. You remember. She was named for a car.”

Morgan turned to her. “Mercedes, Mother.” She looked at me. “Her father started Home Office.”

The first of the big-box stationery stores. I remembered reading the
Journal
article after the founder sold out to Staples for a hundred and eighty-three million dollars.

“No relation, I’m afraid,” I said. “My family is in beverage distribution.” My father owned a bar in College Point, Queens, and still worked the closing shift six nights a week. He would have laughed himself into a case of hiccups if he’d heard my description.

Olivia Von Becker was no beauty. I could not imagine she had looked much better at twenty-three when she married. Her face was long and large-featured, her nose more Roman than patrician, her eyes slightly protuberant. Her strength was her strength. She radiated power, supreme self-confidence, and a zero tolerance for any dithering or wool-gathering—unless she was the one doing it.

“Everett tells me you are the man to help us, Mr. Stafford. I hope he is not exaggerating again.” She took a sip of clear liquid from an ice-filled tumbler. I had discovered who was putting away the vodka.

Everett made a visible effort not to wince. “Livy, I promised nothing. When Binks and Virgil are ready, we’ll all have a powwow and see if Jason can sort things out for us. Jason, can we get you a drink? Champagne? Something stronger?”

“A bit early for me,” I said. “What are you drinking, Miss Von Becker?”

The daughter looked startled—she was probably not used to being addressed directly by “the help.”

“I . . . I . . . Iced tea,” she managed, finally looking directly at me. It was my turn to be startled. Her eyes were a smoky gray, both compelling and frightening—like wolves’ eyes.

“Iced tea it is,” I said to Everett.

He leaned back and waved for a waiter.

“It’s quite beautiful here, Mrs. Von Becker. I didn’t know any of these grand estates had survived into the twenty-first century.”

She looked at me over the top of her glass for a moment. “I don’t know if you are paying a compliment or prying for information. I imagine both. Thank you for the first. The house is mine, as is the money to maintain it. My late husband had no claim to it, and neither do his creditors. It’s all in a trust designed to survive our barbaric inheritance taxes. Were you ever a Tea Partier, Mr. Stafford?”

A waiter set down a tall iced tea, with a translucent slice of lemon.

“Sugar, sir?”

I shook my head. “This is the only tea party I belong to, Mrs. Von Becker.” I raised the glass to her.

She was an arrogant blowhard, and I liked her.