Ransom (4 page)

The wave continued to build for nearly three years, as Allan continued to invest in other ventures, and huge blocks of stock in high-risk high-tech companies. He had enormous confidence in his own intuition, sometimes counter to all reason. His friends and colleagues in the dot-com world called him the Mad Cowboy, and teased him about it. And more often than not, Fernanda felt guilty about not being more supportive. He had lacked confidence as a kid, and his father had often put him down for not being more brazen, and suddenly he was so confident she felt that he was constantly dancing on a ledge and totally fearless. But her love for him overcame all her misgivings, and eventually all she could do was cheer him on from the sidelines. She didn't have anything to complain about certainly. Within three years their net worth had almost trebled, and he was worth half a billion dollars. It was beyond thinking.

She and Allan had always been happy together, even before they had money. He was an easygoing nice guy, who loved his wife and kids. It had been a joy they shared each time she gave birth, and he truly adored his children, as she did. He was especially proud of Will, who was a natural athlete. And the first time he saw Ashley at her ballet recital, at five, tears had rolled down his cheeks. He was a wonderful husband and father, and his ability to turn a modest investment into a windfall was going to give their children opportunities that neither of them had ever dreamed of. He was talking about moving to London for a year at some point, so the kids could go to school in Europe. And the thought of spending days on end at the British Museum and the Tate was a major lure for Fernanda. As a result, she didn't even complain when he bought the house on Belgrave Square for twenty million dollars. It was the highest price that had been paid for a house there in recent history. But it was certainly splendid.

The children didn't even object, nor did she, when they went to spend a month there when school got out. They loved exploring London. They spent the rest of the summer on their yacht in the South of France, and invited some of their Silicon Valley friends to join them. Allan had become a legend by then, and there were others making nearly as much money as he had. But as with the gaming tables in Las Vegas, some took their winnings and disappeared, while others put them back on the table and continued to gamble. Allan was continually making deals, and huge investments. She no longer had any clear understanding of what he was doing. All she did was run their houses and take care of their kids, and she had almost stopped worrying about it. She wondered if this was what being rich felt like. It had taken her three years to actually believe it, and for the dream of his success to finally seem real.

The bubble burst finally, three years after his initial windfall. There was a scandal involving one of his companies, one he had heavily invested in as a silent partner. No one actually knew officially if, or to what extent, he had invested, but he lost over a hundred million dollars. Miraculously, at that point, it scarcely made a dent in his fortune. Fernanda read something about the company going under in the newspapers, remembered hearing him talk about it, and asked him. He told her not to worry. According to him, a hundred million dollars meant nothing to them. He was well on his way to being worth nearly a billion dollars. He didn't explain it to her, but he was borrowing against his ever-inflating stocks at that point, and when they started to collapse, he couldn't sell them fast enough to cover the debt. He leveraged his assets by borrowing to buy more assets.

The second big hit was harder than the first, and nearly twice the amount. And after the third hit, as the market plummeted, even Allan began to look worried. The assets he had borrowed against were worth nothing suddenly and all he had left was debt. What came after that was a swan dive so staggering that the entire dot-com world went with it. Within six months almost everything Allan had made had gone up in smoke, and stocks that had been worth two hundred dollars were worth pennies. The implication to the Barneses was disastrous, to say the least.

Complaining bitterly about it, he sold the yacht and the plane, while assuring Fernanda and himself that he would buy them back again, or better ones, within a year, when the market turned around again, but of course it didn't. It wasn't just that he was losing what they had, the investments he had made were literally imploding, creating colossal debt as all his high-risk investments fell like a house of cards. By year's end, he was staring at a debt almost as enormous as his sudden fortune. And just as she hadn't when he made the windfall on the first company, Fernanda didn't fully grasp the implications of what was happening, because he explained almost nothing to her. He was constantly stressed, always on the phone, traveling from one end of the world to another, and shouting at her when he got home. Overnight, he became a madman. He was absolutely, totally panicked, and with good reason.

All she knew before Christmas the year before was that he was several hundred million in debt, and most of his stock was worth nothing. She knew that much, but she had no idea what he was going to do to fix it, or how desperate their situation was becoming. And miraculously, he had made many investments in the name of anonymous partnerships and “letterbox” corporations, which were set up without his name being publicly disclosed. As a result, the world he did business in had not yet caught on to how disastrous his situation was, and he didn't want anyone to know. He concealed it as much out of pride as because he didn't want people to be nervous about doing business with him. He was beginning to feel as though he was surrounded by the stench of failure, just as he had once worn the perfume of victory. Fear was suddenly in the air all around him, as Fernanda silently panicked, wanting to support him emotionally, but desperately afraid of what was going to happen to them and their children. She was urging him to sell the house in London, the co-op in New York, and the condo in Hawaii, when he left for Mexico right after Christmas. He went there to make a deal with a group of men, and told her before he left that if it worked out, it would recoup nearly all their losses. Before he left, she suggested they sell the house in the city and move back to Palo Alto, and he told her she was being ridiculous. He assured her that everything was going to turn around again very quickly, and not to worry. But the deal in Mexico didn't happen.

He had been there for two days, when there was suddenly another catastrophe in his financial life. Three major companies fell like thatched huts within a week, and took two of Allan's largest investments with them. In a word, they were ruined. He sounded hoarse when he called her from his hotel room late one night. He had been negotiating for hours, but it was all bluff. He had nothing left to negotiate with, or trade. He started crying as she listened to him, and Fernanda assured him that it made no difference to her, she loved him anyway. That didn't console him. For Allan, it was about defeat and victory, climbing Everest and falling off again, and having to start at the beginning. He had just turned forty weeks before, and the success that had meant everything to him for four years was suddenly over. He was, in his own eyes at least, a total failure. And nothing she said seemed to console him. She told him she didn't care. That it didn't matter to her. That she would be happy in a grass hut with him, as long as they had each other and their children. And he sat at the other end and sobbed, telling her that life just wasn't worth living. He said he'd be a laughingstock around the world, and the only real money he had left was his life insurance. She reminded him that they still had several houses to sell, which all together were worth close to a hundred million dollars.

“Do you have any idea what kind of debt we're looking at?” he asked, his voice cracking, and of course she didn't because he never told her. “We're talking hundreds of millions. We'd have to sell everything we own, and we'd still be in debt for another twenty years. I'm not even sure I could ever dig myself out of this. We're in too deep, babe. It's over. It's really, really over.” She couldn't see the tears rolling down his cheeks, but she could hear them in his voice. Although she didn't fully understand it, with his wild investment strategies, leveraging their assets, and constantly borrowing to buy more, he had lost it all. He had lost far more than that in fact. The debts he was facing were overwhelming.

“No, it's not over,” she said firmly. “You can declare bankruptcy. I'll get a job. We'll sell everything. So what? I don't give a damn about all that. I don't care if we stand on a street corner selling pencils, as long as we're together.” It was a sweet thought and the right attitude, but he was too distraught to even listen to her.

She called him again later that night; just to reassure him again, worried about him. She hadn't liked what he'd said about his life insurance, and she was more panicked about him than their financial situation. She knew that men did crazy things sometimes, over money lost or businesses that failed. His entire ego had been wrapped up in his fortune. And when she got him on the phone, she could hear that he'd been drinking. A lot presumably. He was slurring his words and kept telling her that his life was over. She was so upset that she was thinking of flying to Mexico the next day to be with him, while he continued his negotiations, but in the morning, before she could do anything about it, one of the men who was there with him called her. His voice was jagged and he sounded broken. All he knew was that Allan had gone out alone on the boat they'd chartered, after they all went to bed. The crew were off the boat, and he went late at night, handling the boat himself. All anyone knew was that he must have fallen overboard sometime before morning. The yacht was found by the local Coast Guard when the captain reported it missing, and Allan was nowhere to be found. An extensive search had turned up nothing.

Worse yet, when she got to Mexico herself later that day, the police handed her the letter he had left her. They had kept a copy for their records. It said how hopeless the situation was, that he could never climb back up, it was all over for him, and he'd rather be dead than face the horror and shame of the world finding out what a fool he'd been and what a mess he'd made of it. The letter was disastrous and convinced even her that he had committed suicide, or wanted to. Or maybe he was just drunk and had fallen overboard. There was no way to know for sure. But the greater likelihood was that he had killed himself.

The police turned the letter over to the insurance company, as they were obliged to. Based on his words, they had refused to pay the claim on his policy, and Fernanda's attorney said it was unlikely they ever would. The evidence was too damning.

When they recovered Allan's body finally, all they knew was that he had died by drowning. There was no evidence of foul play, he hadn't shot himself, he had either jumped or fallen in, but it seemed a reasonable belief that at that moment at least, he had wanted to die, given everything he had said to her right before that and what he'd written in the letter he had left behind.

Fernanda was in Mexico by the time they found his body, washed up on a beach nearby after a brief storm. It was a horrifying, heartbreaking experience, and she was grateful that the children weren't there to see it. Despite their protests, she had left them in California, and gone to Mexico on her own. A week later, after endless red tape, she returned, a widow, with Allan's remains in a casket in the cargo hold of the plane.

The funeral was a blur of agony, and the newspapers said that he had died in a boating accident in Mexico, which was what everyone had agreed to say. None of the people he had been doing business with had any idea how disastrous his situation was, and the police kept the contents of his letter confidential from the press. No one had any idea that he had hit rock bottom, and sunk even lower than that, in his own mind at least. Nor did anyone except she and his attorney have a clear picture of what the sum total of his financial disasters looked like.

He was worse than ruined, he was in debt to such a terrifying extent that it was going to take her years to clear up the mess he had made. And in the four months since he died, she had sold off all their property, except the city house, which was tied up in his estate. But as soon as they would let her, she had to sell it. Mercifully, he had put all their other properties in her name, as a gift to her, so she was able to sell them. She had death taxes hanging over her, which had to be paid soon, and the two Impressionists were going up for auction in New York in June. She was selling everything that wasn't nailed down, or planning to. Jack Waterman, their attorney, assured her that if she liquidated everything, including the house eventually, she might break even, without a penny to her name. The majority of Allan's debts were attached to corporate entities, and Jack was going to be declaring bankruptcy, but so far no one had any idea of the extent to which Allan's world had collapsed, and she was trying to keep it that way, out of respect for him. Even the children didn't know the full implications yet. And on a sunny May afternoon, she was still trying to absorb it herself four months after his death, as she sat in their kitchen, feeling numb and looking dazed.

She was going to pick Ashley and Sam up at school in twenty minutes, as she did like clockwork every day. Will drove himself home from high school normally, in the BMW his father had given him six months before, on his sixteenth birthday. The truth was that Fernanda barely had enough money left to feed them, and she couldn't wait to sell the house, to pay more of their debts, or even give them a slight cushion. She knew she would have to start looking for a job shortly, maybe at a museum. Their whole life had turned inside out and upside down, and she had no idea what to tell the children. They knew that the insurance was refusing to pay, and she claimed that their father's estate being in probate had made things tight for the moment. But none of the three children had any idea that before his death, their father had lost his entire fortune, nor that the reason the insurance wouldn't pay was because they thought he had killed himself. Everyone was told it was an accident. And unaware of the letter or his circumstances, the people who'd been with him weren't convinced it wasn't. Only she, her attorneys, and the authorities knew what had happened. For the moment.