Another bullet whizzed past my ear. McVee continued to fire in my direction, but I couldn’t see him. I, on the other hand, was a sitting duck, and as my thoughts became less and less coherent, I had a memory flash of Papa telling me the story of the LST-“large stationary target”-that had transported him and some other very unlucky souls onto the beach at Normandy. I fought off the mind fog, giving it my all, but it felt as though I were moving at a turtle’s pace. Had McVee been a better shot, I would have been dead already. But I couldn’t remain out in the open, an easy target-LST-just waiting for him to finally hit the bull’s-eye. I suddenly recalled Burn’s warning about the fuel. I reached inside for one last burst of energy and sprang toward the open doorway. In midair I reached back and aimed in the direction of the fuel cans Wald had dropped to the floor. I squeezed off a shot as I rolled out the doorway.
68
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” SHOUTED AGENT ANDIE HENNING.
Andie was three hundred yards from the heliport, inside an FBI mobile command unit that was parked on the entrance road. A full hostage negotiation team was with her.
Minutes earlier, FBI tech agents had just completed an infrared-camera scan of the hangar, which picked up a fourth hostage inside the helicopter. A recent corpse could give off enough body heat to be picked up by a scan, but the possibility of a fourth hostage tipped the already shaky balance away from an all-out SWAT assault. A peaceful resolution also seemed highly achievable once Kyle McVee had entered the building, a powerful businessman whose entire life was about cutting deals. The negotiators were just thirty seconds away from initiating contact by loudspeaker when the shooting started. Andie raced out of the command unit and couldn’t believe what she was hearing in her headset. WhiteSands Hangar No. 3 sounded like a war zone.
Andie was immediately on the bone microphone with the FBI sniper, who was on the rooftop of WhiteSands Hangar No. 2, directly across the heliport from Hangar No. 3.
“The order was to hold your fire!” she shouted.
“Roger that,” came the reply. “No shot from here.”
She switched over to the SWAT unit commander. Agent Kowalski and his team had taken various strategic positions, completely surrounding Hangar No. 3, invisible even to Andie, ready to move in the event that the planned negotiations broke down.
“Are you green on breach?” asked Andie.
The breach was forced entry-showtime in SWAT-speak. Green was the assault-the moment of life and death, literally-after yellow, the final position of cover and concealment.
“Negative,” said Kowalski, his voice crackling with radio squelch. “Hot environment, no element of surprise. Holding at yellow.”
From the sound of things in Andie’s headset, Kowalksi was positioned right outside the building.
“Who went green?”
“Local SWAT.”
“Repeat that, please.”
“Local SWAT sniper did not copy the order to hold fire.”
Andie had been in a similar situation before. It seemed that everyone right down to neighborhood crime-watch volunteers had a SWAT unit these days. Usually the SWAT leaders were able to agree and coordinate efforts. Usually.
An unmarked car squealed around the corner, and it screeched to a halt so quickly that its front bumper nearly kissed the pavement. Supervisory Agent Malcolm Spear jumped out and hurried toward Andie at the mobile command center.
“What the hell happened?” he shouted.
Andie looked toward the flaming building just as it exploded.
69
IT MAY HAVE BEEN A DIRECT HIT, OR PERHAPS MY SHOT RICOCHETED off the floor, skipped up, and punctured the fuel can. Regardless, the explosion threw me out the door and at least another ten yards toward the helipad, which was a good thing. The hangar was engulfed in flames.
And then I blacked out-but only for a moment. When my eyes blinked open, I was looking up at Ivy. Olivia was beside her.
“Michael, can you hear me?” Ivy asked.
It was a feeling I’d never had before-knowing my name only because she was calling me “Michael.”
“Yeah, I can hear you,” I said. I tried to sit up, but Olivia gently pushed me back onto the pavement.
“Be still,” said Ivy. The expression on her face was somewhere between fright and concern; her tone was beyond urgent. “Do you have pain anywhere besides your leg?”
Olivia’s coat was tied around my thigh to stop the bleeding, and before the question, the pain had oddly gone away. But suddenly my leg was throbbing again.
“Just in the hamstrings,” I said.
There was another explosion from inside the hangar, and I felt the blast of heat on my face. Fortunately, we were far enough away to be out of danger. Sirens sounded from somewhere down the road. Olivia jumped up and darted off into the darkness. I could no longer see her, but I heard her shouting for help.
“Over here!”
“You’re going to be okay,” said Ivy.
“This way!” someone else shouted.
A moment later I was looking up at another woman. It gave me a moment of confusion-What the hell is Mallory’s friend doing here?-but then my thoughts cleared, and I remembered that she was an FBI agent. She had paramedics with her, and right behind them was the FBI SWAT unit dressed in full tactical armor. A fire truck rumbled right past us and the firefighters jumped off and went immediately into action. The SWAT guy cut Ivy’s hands free from the plastic cuffs with a serrated knife. As the paramedics checked me out and lifted me up onto the gurney, I heard Andie screaming at two men, one from FBI SWAT and the other wearing a black flak jacket that said SHERIFF in white letters. Both men were shouting back at her. As best I could tell, the plan had been for SWAT to hold its fire until negotiations failed, but there had been a miscommunication. It was hard for me to comprehend a blunder like that, but it would soon mesh perfectly with everything I would read about law enforcement activities directed toward Wall Street.
The paramedics lifted me into the ambulance, and Ivy started to climb inside with me.
“Sorry, miss,” said the paramedic. “You can’t ride in here.”
“You can’t stop me,” she said.
He grabbed her arm. “Who are you?”
“I’m his wife,” she said.
“And I’m her husband,” I said, just feeling a need to say it.
The paramedic was too rushed to argue.
“Hurry up then,” he said.
Ivy climbed inside, and it felt good as she took my hand and laced her fingers with mine. Through the open ambulance doors, we glanced back at the firefighters battling the inferno, knowing that there was no way McVee had survived. Ivy’s reason to run was no more.
The ambulance doors closed, and I looked up at her face. She leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead.
“You feeling okay?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yup,” I said, feeling a little foggy again, another one of those memory flashes to Papa coming on. “Just another beautiful day in paradise.”
Epilogue
I SPENT A COUPLE DAYS IN BED AFTER THE EXPLOSION. NANA WAS a retired nurse, so my grandparents stayed in New York to drive me crazy-I mean care for me. I couldn’t stand watching the television, so Papa brought me a book from the library. An old book-ancient, you might say.
When I was a young boy, Nana worked nights at the hospital, so it was my grandfather who used to bathe me before bed, put me in my Spiderman pajamas, and read to me from Aesop’s Fables as he rocked me to sleep. His personal favorite was “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” As the fable goes, the ant was the disciplined one, storing up food for hard times. The grasshopper was the singing and chirping party animal-er, insect-who blew through summer as if life were one red-hot streak at a blackjack table. And then winter came.
Papa was an ant, a Depression-era immigrant raised on an honest wage for an honest day’s work. We never talked about stocks. The first I’d he
ard of the Dow Jones Industrials was in fifth-grade social studies class, and I still find it unbelievable that when I was ten the Dow was at 802. That was just fine for ants, but the grasshoppers of the 1980s dreamed of riding in limousines. In the 1990s, it was stretch limousines. Then, in the insanity of the twenty-first century, it had to be a stretch Hummer limousine with a hot tub, a posse, and at least one B-list celebrity with no panties. But ants had no use for any of this. They knew winter would come.
Never had I dreamed that I would be a grasshopper. That all my friends would be grasshoppers. That the entire world would be one big swarming, borrowing, and spending orgy of grasshoppers-a world in which anything worth doing was naturally worth overdoing.
Like I said before: There was a time when people all but worshipped guys like me. Now, of course, they’ve come to hate us. It was understandable; the man I’d worshipped deserved no forgiveness.
Eric Volke was one of Bernard Madoff’s feeders.
I’d had no way of knowing that on the night everything blew up-literally-in WhiteSands’ Hangar No. 3. It came out much later, after Madoff pleaded guilty to the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history and became federal prison inmate No. 61727-054 for the rest of his life.
Only then did I learn the chief purpose of Agent Andie Henning’s undercover investigation at Saxton Silvers. After 9/11, the FBI’s focus shifted to homeland security, and the number of agents investigating financial crimes was cut by more than 75 percent. But Agent Henning presented a simple mathematical formula to her supervisors, showing that Madoff’s track record-10 percent returns or better for almost two decades-was the statistical equivalent of a major-league baseball player batting.960 for the season. She got approval to investigate. Her mission was to expose one of the biggest players to steer investors in Madoff’s direction, and hopefully get him to cut a deal with prosecutors and testify against Madoff.
Virtually none of Madoff’s feeders had conducted any due diligence before dropping to their knees and kissing the ground he walked on. The ones who had were even worse; they knew or at least suspected that he was a fraud and still fed him clients. But a very select few-Eric Volke among them-had known the truth from the very beginning. Over the years, Eric’s “fund of funds” at WhiteSands channeled billions of dollars from charities, pension funds, universities, and others into Madoff’s hands. The payoff for these feeders was enormous, and the warm turquoise waters surrounding a 160-foot yacht at the private island of Mustique could wash away a lot of sins. But the fact remained, Volke and people like him made Madoff’s scam into a colossal catastrophe, a giant Ponzi scheme.
Marcus McVee had figured out that Volke was dirty long before anyone else did. All it took was a call to the Chicago Board of Options Exchange to confirm that the total S &P 100 options that Eric’s WhiteSands option fund claimed to have acquired through Madoff exceeded the total open interest in S &P 100 contracts at that strike price. In Papa’s terms, that meant Eric claimed he was buying veal parmigiana when the only thing on the menu was spaghetti and meatballs. But Marcus’ decision to confront Eric rather than go to the FBI had cost him his life. Eric rode with him to the waterfront in the Hamptons, where he forced him to drink a bottle of tequila at gunpoint. I doubt that Marcus knew that Eric had dissolved a lethal dose of Vicodin into the tequila.
Eric Volke died in the hangar explosion at WhiteSands. So did Kyle McVee. Ironically, Ian Burn was dead before the fire even started. Ivy would never have to worry about them coming after her.
McVee’s nephew, Jason Wald, had beat Eric to the exit through the hangar’s maintenance office. He suffered burns on his back, but recovered well enough to talk through his lawyers. He would save some jail time by pointing the finger at his dead uncle for the contract killings of Chuck Bell, Tony Girelli, Nathaniel Locke, my driver Nick, and Rumsey the charter sailboat captain down in the Bahamas.
From one Monday to the next, Saxton Silvers went from a Wall Street landmark to bankruptcy. It was the beginning of the end for investment banks on Wall Street. The nation was one step closer to hearing words like bailout and stimulus about as often as hello and good-bye.
A week after the explosion at WhiteSands, I was getting around pretty well, weaning myself from crutches. The leg wound was healing, no signs of infection, no serious vascular damage, no broken bones. Doctors presumed that I’d caught a ricocheted projectile rather than a direct hit. On the following Friday morning the bankruptcy trustee allowed me back into the building to pack my belongings into a cardboard box. My brother helped. Papa came to supervise.
“No offense,” Papa said, shaking his head, “but I still say it’s all one big Fonzie scheme.”
Kevin looked up from the half-packed box in front of him. “Don’t you mean Ponzi?”
“No,” I said, “he really doesn’t.”
My box was full, and I lifted it from my desk. About a dozen clear Lucite cubes pushed right through the cardboard bottom and fell to the floor. Deal toys, they were called. Little desktop mementos that, depending on the nature and size of the transaction, could be anything from a simple rectangle encasing a miniature pineapple to a light-up sculpture of knights in shining armor jousting over the engraved sum of $125 million.
I raised the box higher, letting the rest of the toys drop to the floor.
The bottom falling out.
I almost had to laugh: how quickly things could crumble. In the late 1980s, junk bonds and federal indictments brought down Wall Street’s fifth largest investment bank over a period of years. Twenty years later, Moody’s downgrades the creditworthiness of the world’s largest insurance company on a Thursday, and on Monday it’s on life support. Were we headed for a world in which the destruction of major financial institutions and the people who run them could happen in a matter of hours? Minutes? The click of a mouse?
I didn’t want to hang around to find out.
“I’ll get them,” said Kevin, reaching for the fallen deal toys.
“Leave them,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I said, tossing a Lucite-encased replica of a waterless urinal onto the pile. Green investments came in all shapes and sizes, too. “I’m sure.”
Kevin loaded the last box onto the cart. We wheeled it down the hall and got on the elevator.
“Going down,” the mechanical voice said.
“You have no idea,” I replied.
Papa looked at me strangely, not really catching my drift. The door closed, and the elevator started its descent.
“So,” said Papa, “what’s going to happen with all that money you lost in your account?”
“Still working it out,” I said.
Kevin said, “We’re bringing suit against McVee’s estate. Might take a while, but we’ll get it back.”
“Less Mallory’s share,” I said. I had no idea what that would be. Her lawyer had advised her not to attend her dead lover’s memorial service, so they were clearly still posturing. Little did I know that in the coming months it would be the market, not Mallory, to take half of my remaining net worth.
The elevator doors opened and we exited through the main lobby. We had to step around the scaffolding on the sidewalk. Two workers above us were removing the signature gold letters that had once spelled SAXTON SILVERS on the building’s black granite facing. It was now down to SAXTON.
“I remember when they did that to Mr. Roebuck,” said Papa.
A couple of photographers were snapping away at the change in signage on the former Saxton Silvers’ headquarters, but the bulk of financial media had moved down the street, waiting for the next institution to crater beneath the weight of its own mistakes. It wouldn’t be long.
A taxi pulled up to the curb and stopped. Ivy was in the backseat, but she didn’t get out. She lowered the window and smiled.
“Hey, handsome. Need a ride?”
I hobbled over. “So, are we still hitched?”
Ivy had been meeting with a family-law specialis
t to sort through our marriage, her disappearance, my marriage to Mallory, Ivy’s return, and my pending divorce.
“Here’s the way I see it. We can pay a lawyer thousands of dollars to research the hell out of this. Or we can pay fifty bucks to the city of New York and get married again.”
There was silence. Of the two choices, the answer was obvious.
Papa stepped in and offered a third option. “Or…you could just have fun and get to know each other again.”
We looked at each other.
Ivy said, “It couldn’t hurt to talk it over.”
“Talk is good.”
“Yeah, let’s definitely talk about it,” she said.
“We could get a coffee.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of the Hôtel de Crillon.”
“In Paris?”
She held up two airline tickets. “We leave from JFK at five-twenty.”
I smiled. “That doesn’t give me much time to pack.”
“You could just run inside and buy a few things from Sax,” she said, pointing.
I turned. The workers had removed three more gold letters-T-O-N, leaving only the phonetic equivalent of the Fifth Avenue department store.
“Hop in,” she said. “I packed for you.”
Papa helped me into the taxi. I was about to close the door, but he stopped me, stuck his head inside and said, “Have fun. And remember: Love each other. That’s the main thing.”
I will never understand how he did it. That was his gift-the ability to say such cornball things and make them sound genuine.
“We will, Papa,” said Ivy, smiling.
I smiled, too-all the way to the airport.
Acknowledgments
Money to Burn IS A FIRST NOVEL OF SORTS-MY FIRST WITH SALLY Kim, my new editor at HarperCollins. If you enjoyed it, give her the credit. If not, blame my agent, Richard Pine. It was Richard who shot me an e-mail way back in 2007 and started me down the road of a “Wall Street thriller”-long before anyone saw the real-world crisis coming. The guy is that good.
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