Chapter 20: Banking

I’D BEEN TRANSFERRING FUNDS from account to account. I knew how to hide tracks when moving money, Simon knew where to put it. The twenty-one named accounts that I’d found were the shadow accounts that Simon had set up and into which he was gradually bleeding off the assets of the company.

I couldn’t believe how quickly I had fallen back under Simon’s charismatic spell. I didn’t for a minute believe that he was doing anything out of his altruistic nature, though I came to suspect that it pleased Angel to see money going to various charities. And it pleased me to see title to Far East Exchange transferred back to Earl Schwarz.

It was going to take a couple of days for me to move all the funds that Simon had identified and not leave tracks until it was too late to follow them. Simon sat across from me with his sleeves rolled up and his collar unbuttoned. Gold chains hung loosely around his neck. I shook my head to myself and went back to work. Sometimes he was such a little bantam rooster. But to him it was all part of the role he’d chosen.

I looked back up at Simon. One of the gold chains had a state-of-the-art jump-drive hanging from it. He saw me looking and automatically reached a hand to his neck.

“What’s that?” I asked pointing. I studiously tried to focus my attention back on my computer screen. I glanced back up. He had a pursed-lip smile that I recognized as Simon when he perceived he had been too, too clever.

“That is my life insurance policy,” he said. “If anything ever happens to me, all you have to do is look on this and you will know exactly who the villain is. You cracked my laptop, long before I gave you my password, and found lots of interesting things, but what’s on here, you can’t imagine. It’s my insurance policy. Anything happens to me, I release this. Instant calamity, earth-shaking disaster that would collapse the economies of half a dozen countries and even more businesses. Bradley and Brenda think I kept everything on my computer. The real goods are on here.”

“Seems like an albatross around your neck,” I quipped. “So if something happens to you, you release the disk?”

“Right.”

“How? You’re dead.”

“They’ll find it.”

“Which they? And what if you aren’t found?” I continued. It wasn’t often in my life that I’d caught an outright fallacy in Simon’s thinking, but when I did it was always incumbent upon me to make the most of it.

“I’ll be go-to-hell,” he said and left the room.

I worked late into the night. When I finally lay down, I’d transferred ten businesses on a time-clock so that they would all move at one time on the day before Thanksgiving next week. That would reduce the risk of discovery until all transactions had cleared in Europe and Asia.

I was back under Simon’s spell. I asked myself a dozen times before I fell asleep if what I was doing was right. The answer always came back in the form of a question.

Does what I’m doing make a difference?