Mortal Bonds Read Online Free Page A

Becker himself, were two junior clerks who worked directly for the man. According to the
Times
, they were sacrificial lambs, serving six months each for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. According to the
Journal
, they were the true villains and had gotten off much too lightly.
    Virgil shook his head. “I don’t think anyone really knew. Each line of business was set up as a separate corporation, all reporting to him only. Some people knew little bits, but more often, they didn’t even know they knew it. My father fooled some of the brightest people on the planet. I don’t include myself in that description, by the way.”
    “What do you think I can do for you? The way I hear it, you’ve got the full resources of the federal government combing through the firm’s books—everybody from the SEC and the FBI to Homeland Security. NASA and the EPA, too, for all I know. What are they going to miss that you want me to find?”
    “I’ll get to that. I wish to save what I can of the firm, and to do that, the firm needs to settle up with the Feds and move on. Quickly. The money management business is lost, and all of our overseas operations as well. But the core businesses of underwriting, research, and trading are healthy. Untainted. Implicated only because of some missing funds. Given the chance—meaning if we can get out from under—my brother and I can salvage something of the family name.”
    “Binks?”
    “James is one of our foreign exchange traders. He’s always said he would rather grow grapes than count bottles.”
    “No taste for management?”
    “Nor any ability, I imagine. It’s not for everyone.”
    It was hard to imagine the handsome but profoundly disinterested man I had just met going head-to-head with the FX market, but it was harder still thinking of him trying to manage a bunch of booty-hungry pirates on a trading desk.
    “And Wyatt?”
    “Wyatt lives at home.”
    I nodded. I might be saying the same of my son for decades to come.
    “These missing funds? How much are we talking?”
    “Three billion dollars,” he said with somewhat forced casualness.
    If it was meant to impress me, it worked.
    “You know,” I said. “I might just take a short glass of scotch if it’s still on offer.”
    “Or so.” Virgil smiled and signaled for a waiter. “The Feds believe they have accounted for all of my father’s misappropriation of funds. The ‘missing’ forty billion you have read about in the paper isn’t missing. It never existed.”
    I understood. Before becoming a guest of the federal prison system, I had pled guilty to a similar fraud, though on a considerably smaller scale. The trading losses I had covered up had been recouped many times over. It was the falsification of trading profits that had done me in.
    “They have also followed the paper trail of another twelve billion, which is, I am afraid, quite gone. My father maintained both a lavish lifestyle and a generous philanthropic image. The cost of fuel for his private jet is no more recoverable than the forty million he spent building a hospital in Puerto Barrios in Guatemala.”
    “And they can’t account for a measly three billion? Sounds like a rounding error.”
    Blake was following the conversation with a preoccupied smile—I imagined that he had heard it all before and he was more concerned with protecting us from the deranged lynch mobs that might appear out of the woods, intent on taking revenge for their depleted 401(k)s. Everett, on the other hand, was practically drooling on my shoulder at the smell of so much unattached money still out there.
    “The firm executed hundreds of international wire transfers a day. It has taken the Feds months to sift through it all. I have looked at their numbers, and I’m convinced. Somehow, my father managed to squirrel away as much money as a third-world dictator.”
    The waiter set down the scotch. I didn’t want it anymore.
    “And you think I can find it? An army of