by Thomas Perry
Once a prisoner in Danbury saw him walking on his hands and said aloud, “What’s he doing?” His companion said, “Training himself to kill you quicker.” Now that the inmates understood him better, that didn’t seem unlikely.
Today as he walked along Wilshire Boulevard from his office, he was Brian Louis Summers, and he had no plans to harm anyone again. He had no plans at all beyond today. The plans for the long term had been made and were not alterable. The Duquesne family had transformed one of its many shell corporations into an entity devoted to his welfare. It was called 467 LLC, after the suite number of its Los Angeles office.
They had begun the transition as soon as he was convicted in federal court. At first 467 LLC had made investments in the stocks of reliable companies, corporate and municipal bonds, real estate that provided rental income, and other quiet activities. In time the family had 467 interact with other Duquesne corporations, buying from them, selling to them, or merging with them to increase the company’s assets.
The employees of 467 LLC were all lawyers and accountants at first, since the company produced no goods or services, only collected profits and grew. Brian Louis Summers was its president and only stockholder. He was allowed to do nothing except receive a salary, which 467 paid directly to his bank, and which he spent through his credit cards, automatically paid by his bank. On the one occasion when he’d wanted anything more expensive than things people usually bought with credit cards, it had been a car. One of the lawyers paid for it with a cashier’s check, then picked up the vehicle, registered it, drove it to Brian Summers’s house, and parked it in the garage.
Paul Duquesne had been born in Philadelphia and raised at his great-great-great-grandparents’ country estate on the Main Line west of the city center, which was no longer in the country, and in the city mansion on Rittenhouse Square. Even when he was a small child, his time spent in each place did not coincide with the time spent by his mother. She was an Englishwoman who saw him as shaming evidence that she was not as young and untouched as she wished to appear. It was an offense that only got worse as both grew older. His father, the formidable businessman Mark Duquesne, was the one in charge of the extended family’s holdings, and this left him little time for either of them.
Paul went to college in Boston and then spent years building his own business in New York. He developed a service that helped people who wanted to avoid paying taxes move money offshore. He had twenty-eight employees who handled every aspect of the issue, from filling out tax forms to physically transporting money or other physical assets to other countries and putting them in secret accounts. Paul attributed his success partly to this business model, which prevented amateur mistakes by never involving the amateurs, his clients, in the process. He depended entirely on word of mouth for new clients, so theoretically nobody would learn about it who wasn’t known and vouched for by people in his own social stratum. He miscalculated drastically, and it was only six years before one of the people who heard about the service was an Exeter and Harvard man married to a U.S. attorney.
When the raid came, several people traded testimony for leniency, so evidence that might have been difficult to find was not. He was charged with money laundering, tax evasion, wire fraud, forgery, counterfeiting legal documents, and a number of ancillary infractions. Ultimately, he was convicted of all of them, and of murdering a federal officer, which he had done during his troubles mainly as a piece of theater, meant to embolden the employees who performed that sort of work, and to cow the others into silence. He received a life sentence and enough additional years to make up two more at the actuarial male life expectancy of 78.7 years.
The Duquesnes were an old family with wealth founded on profits made in the days of French exploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They had been traders, meaning speculators and smugglers, and they were good enough at it to have been accused of profiteering after every war since the War of the Spanish Succession. At the onset of the French Revolution, this branch of the family had been sent to America to exert closer supervision over the family’s holdings there, and had brought a great many of the other branches’ movable assets with them. Some of these assets were later accounted for and returned to their owners, but most were not.
When Paul had been tried for his crimes, a strong minority of the extended family in the United States and Europe felt he should be cut off from funds for lawyers and left to die in a federal prison. Family reputations were not something one selfish fool should be allowed to destroy. Paul had not threatened or vilified any of these relatives, but he was hurt that one of them was his mother. She was the younger sister of a British earl who was gay and not likely to produce an heir; so depending on who else lived or died, she might have passed a title to her male heir, Paul. There was no money involved, which was why she had married Paul’s father, Mark, over thirty years earlier.
Mark was this generation’s manager and the caretaker of the family’s fortunes. His intellect consisted of an ability to hold on to many facts at once and recombine them in different ways until he perceived temporary imbalances or could create them. He would use them to make profitable exchanges quickly before normal conditions reasserted themselves.
Mark was able to see clearly from the beginning that no condition was ever going to change in a way that would exonerate his son. There was no solution in the courts. He continued to think about his son’s predicament for a couple of years. When his son came up with the idea of assembling a team of specialists from within the prison system and breaking out, he experienced one of the few moments of pride in his son that he had ever felt. Mark Duquesne began to work on the idea.
His first act was to get to know a high-ranking official in the Federal Bureau of Prisons named Mundt. The Duquesne companies, and Mark Duquesne himself, had friendly and mutually beneficial relationships with many government officials, including appointees to the commissions that regulated mining, timber, trade, domestic commerce, pharmaceuticals, energy production, banking, and communication. He cultivated Pentagon officials, particularly those who had influence over purchasing and logistics. But he was especially welcoming to congressmen, who were in the regrettable predicament of having to raise the millions of dollars it took to run for office every two years. He often invited these people to parties, held dinners for them, even took them on trips. He added Mr. Mundt to the guest list for a few parties where he could meet people who impressed him.
After a time Mundt was included in some events where guests were provided with theme gifts—pheasant hunts where the guests were expected to keep the expensive shotguns they used, trips on a yacht to a company-owned resort where other guests included some unusually attractive younger women with foreign accents who were more appreciative and playful with older men than American women ever seemed to be. This phenomenon was explained by the suggestion that foreign women were simply less spoiled, but Mr. Duquesne was aware that they needed to be spoiled as much as anyone to ensure both receptivity in the present and loss of memory in the future. If Mr. Mundt ever wondered whether he was behaving recklessly, he could simply look to his right and his left and see men with much more to lose than he had.
During this period of a year or more, Mark Duquesne was waiting for his son’s list. When it came, it was encrypted in a code the family had commissioned more than two hundred years earlier for situations when one of them was held for ransom or doing business in an unfriendly country where he didn’t want to be understood. There were eleven names and the prisons where they were incarcerated. Paul had collected them patiently using the prison-to-prison system of gossip and rumors. He asked that he and the other eleven all be transferred from the prisons where they were to the penitentiary in Weldonville, Colorado.
These were special inmates. Three had escaped from prisons before. One was a chemical engineer, and another an electrical engineer. Two were Special Forces veterans with combat experience and extensive training who had both committed murders during their la
st enlistments. One was chosen because he had been known to sell impeccable identification to prisoners who were being released and wanted to start again with no records. Three were killers held in high regard by the major prison gangs that infested the prison system.
Mr. Mundt had never been surprised that Mark Duquesne would seek his acquaintance. In return, he had done a few small favors over a year’s time for Duquesne’s son—small improvements in his facilities, having infractions removed from his record, allowing him to have a cell phone. These were privileges usually reserved for prisoners who snitched on other inmates or provided information about crimes on the outside, but Mundt didn’t care. He considered the favors to be to his own advantage. Doing well for Paul Duquesne only proved that he had power over him. If he could help him, he could harm him. He knew Mark Duquesne was intelligent enough to see that. Mr. Mundt became comfortable and confident in the feeling that he had this very powerful family at his mercy. He began to find new ways to monetize the friendship. Twice he asked Duquesne for large contributions to law enforcement charities that they both knew didn’t exist. On three occasions he asked for large loans and got them, knowing that regardless of what papers he signed, he would never be asked to repay them, because Paul would be in prison forever.
The day came when Mark Duquesne took Mr. Mundt aside and talked to him in the privacy of his billiard room. He handed Mr. Mundt the list of inmates, and when Mr. Mundt understood what he was being asked to do, his heartbeat doubled. He said that this was a big favor, one that could get him into trouble.
Mr. Duquesne had never been unpleasant in Mundt’s presence. This time he said, “I’ll be very grateful if, as my friend, you will do me this favor.” It was said in a quiet, even way.
Mundt said, “It’s not that I don’t have power in the system. For instance, I can pretty much dictate what your son’s life will be like.”
Mark Duquesne said, “Then use the power to help him.”
“I don’t know, Mark,” Mundt said. “That kind of move could be risky for me personally. What keeps a public career viable is reputation.”
“You should know I have audio and video recordings of every moment you have ever spent on my property, my boats and my aircraft, my country houses, and my resorts. Sending copies to certain officials would land you in the same institutions as my son.”
“I can have your son killed in prison.”
“I can have you killed anywhere in the world outside prison. I do lots of favors for friends, and once in a while I ask for one in return.”
The transfers were done over a period of nine months. They were among many transfers from crowded maximum-security prisons after Weldonville had been reclassified to accept prisoners convicted of more-violent crimes.
Mr. Mundt continued to be on the guest list for various events hosted or sponsored by the Duquesne family’s companies. After a lull he attended some of them, but he seemed to be testing the temperature and found it had cooled, so his visits tapered off. After July 19 two years ago, he never attended another, and never called, wrote, or emailed anyone connected with the Duquesne interests.
On July 19 Paul Duquesne also learned that his situation had changed while he was away. When he arrived at the rendezvous in Denver driving a car stolen from a murdered prison guard, he was met by an emissary of the family, his cousin Charles, son of his uncle Philip. Charles explained the rules and conditions of Paul’s new life, set by the elders of the family who controlled the family money and, therefore, its power.
Paul would live in Southern California, a place he had never visited in his life except for airline terminals and hotels during stopovers while traveling to and from Asia or the Pacific. He must never go near any of the family homes in the Northeast and Europe, and never attempt to contact any member, friend, or employee of the family for any reason, either in person or through intermediaries. In return, the expenses incurred in defending him in court, freeing him from prison, and maintaining him for life would be forgiven.
The elders had selected Charles as the one to deliver the family’s message because he and Paul had been companions in childhood and adolescence before Paul had disqualified himself from attending any of the schools and colleges where the family sent its sons and, increasingly, daughters. Paul and Charles had remained on speaking terms long after most others had begun pretending Paul didn’t exist, simply dropping him from the lists, which became easier after he had gone to prison and wasn’t likely to show up at a family event. But Charles shared a quality with Paul, being a pragmatist who believed that it might be to his advantage to keep a cousin’s friendship—a small, nonperforming asset that cost him nothing. The two shook hands and thumped each other on the back when they parted the morning of July 20.
Paul was now thriving in Los Angeles, which he had found was in nearly every way superior to places in the East. He was bathed in sunshine and cooled by breezes from the ocean twelve months a year. He had a good house high in the hills between Hollywood and the Valley, slightly on the valley side of the crest line. The location, landscaping, and architecture made the house very private. He could activate the automatic door of his garage, drive out and down the quiet, winding street behind the tinted glass of his BMW, and go anywhere. His neighbors, who had also paid millions to live on this secluded street, had no more desire to notice him than he had to be noticed.
467 LLC retained three assistants to do things for the man they called Brian Summers that most people had to do for themselves. They brought him food from restaurants, ensured that his car was maintained and clean, and answered his door and his phone. Twice a week two of them would go to pick up an escort from her apartment, drive her to Summers’s house, and later pay her and drive her home.
This morning while Summers was in the middle of one of his exercise routines in the privacy of his secluded backyard, the assistant in charge of Summers’s phone came out to the patio and handed it to him. When Summers answered, he recognized the voice on the other end as Charles’s. “Brian,” said Charles. “I have some news, and I don’t think it will be especially good news. A man named Matt has called your emergency number.”
“Did he say what was up?”
“He left a number.”
Brian held out his hand and fluttered his fingers, and the assistant handed him a pen and a small pad. “Okay, go ahead.”
Charles read the number, and Paul repeated it.
“Correct. I do have to remind you that whatever it is, you’ve got to abide by the rules the old men have dictated. They won’t help again.”
“I know. Thanks,” said Paul. “I don’t suppose there’s any news about the family for me.”
“No. I don’t know if it occurred to you before, but they have rules for me too. That’s one of them.”
“I figured. You were always better than I was at the rules. Thanks again. If we don’t get to talk again, have a good life.”
“You too. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” He handed the phone back to the phone assistant. This wasn’t the first time it had occurred to him that his assistants weren’t only servants. They were also jailers. He said to this one, “Get me a phone I can use to call out.”
The man turned and went back into the house, then returned with a cheap-looking cell phone. Brian tested it, got a dial tone, and dialed the number Matt Bysantski had left. Matt came onto the line almost instantly.
“Paul?” After two years it was a jolt to hear anyone call him Paul.
“Hi. What’s up?”
“Reggie Varga called me, trying to get the word out. Her cousin Viktor Panko and her two brothers and another cousin got killed a few days ago.”
“Who did it?”
“She doesn’t know. She said there was a retired female cop in Buffalo who had been asking about Panko, and after some poking around, her brothers figured out the old cop was working with some other investigator, a woman who wasn’t local and had been asking around too. They were afraid she was FBI or sta
te police or something. Right after they killed the retired cop, they set up an ambush at the old woman’s house to get the younger woman she was working with. The ones who got killed were Attila Varga and his cousin. Then her other brother and Panko decided they’d better burn down their workshop to get rid of evidence. When they went over to do it, there were people waiting, and they got killed.”
“It just sounds like they killed some old woman for nothing, and her relatives didn’t appreciate it. A local thing.”
“No. Once Reggie started calling, she learned that it wasn’t just Panko and her family. Weiss has been missing in Florida for a while, maybe a month.”
“Another thing that could be nothing.”
“Could be but isn’t. Two days after her brothers and Panko got it, she says Alan Becker got killed in his apartment building in New York City. Somebody called the police, and when the police came, they found him in the stairwell. It was in the papers there.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s all you can say?”
“I just found out. Give me a second and I’ll do better. Is there anybody else, or is that all?”
“Reggie was in the middle of calling people, and I decided I’d better help get the word out. I think somebody has been out there hunting us down, and I’m trying to be sure that everybody who’s left knows about it.”
“Gee, I don’t know about this,” said Paul. “I picked these guys for a lot of reasons—knowledge, skills, and so on, but some of them were a little bit temperamental. In two years any of them could have made a lot of new enemies, or gotten pissed off at somebody and then found out the other guy thought faster.”
