Purely by Accident

by Jim Beegle

  “Millions?” Amy asked. If he had any doubts about being able to talk Amy into going along with his plan they all vanished with the look in her eyes at that very moment. Mark nodded.

  “Yes, Amy. Millions.” He paused again to let the amount echo around in the kitchen. “When I was talking to him the other day, he mentioned that he was very unhappy with his current banking arrangement and was planning to move his entire portfolio just as soon as he could find a new bank. He told me he needed someone who understood overseas investments, especially oil futures. He also told me that he was looking for someone who could help him manage the money and invest it into new markets like the old Eastern Bloc countries.” This part of the story was specifically designed to allow Amy to think of this new “client” as not just someone with money to deposit, but more as her destiny.

  “So what does this have to do with Hamilton?” she asked. Mark was amazed at how much her mood had improved. He was sure that it had nothing to do with his declared truce.

  “Well, I told him about you and IBC. He was very excited. I assured him that you could handle anything he needed but he was a little concerned and, at least for the first meeting, wants to have a director of the bank involved. I’m sorry Amy but this guy is nuts about secrecy and security.”

  “Who is he?” She asked. Mark shook his head.

  “I can’t tell you. I’m sorry. He made it real clear to me that he has to be the one to reveal his identity and the nature of his business. I got the feeling that Hamilton may know who he is, which is why I think it best if he is at the meeting.” Amy thought for a while.

  “OK. What do we need to do?” Inside Mark sighed with relief. Getting Amy to go for his story was a critical step in his plan for the money. He knew that if he convinced her, she would do the rest of the work for him by bringing in the other players he felt would be necessary to put his plan into play.

  “I have arranged, on your behalf, a meeting with my client on Monday, here at our house, at around seven in the evening. Why I wanted to know about Hamilton was to make sure that you could get to him tomorrow and arrange to have him here on Monday. Amy, let me stress to you again, if there are more than three of us here, or this guy gets wind of the fact that others know of this arrangement, and trust me this guy is wired in, he will disappear faster than you can say ‘compound interest’. Understand?” Amy nodded that she did. “Good, I will talk with him on Monday and confirm the meeting. Your job is to get Hamilton here. That’s all. I’ll handle everything else.”

  Amy tried to get a few more details out of Mark. When it became obvious that she could not, she gave up and went off to shower and dress for her guests. Mark busied himself in the kitchen with the thousands of different things that have to be done in order to cook a full meal for a number of people. He was upstairs cleaning himself up after his kitchen duties when the guests began arriving just before noon.

  They ate about one-thirty. Everyone agreed that, as usual, Mark had done a wonderful job. Amy’s parents teased her about making sure that she did what she needed to in order to hang on to such a good catch. Amy was in a wonderful mood, Mark was sure she was buoyed by the earlier conversation concerning a chance to step up another rung on her ladder as she climbed ever upward at IBC. She drank more than usual and was giddy and talked with everyone in the room, including Mark.

  The last guests, Amy’s parents, finally departed about eleven. Mark had done a good deal of the cleaning as he cooked, so there was little mess that had to be disposed of after the meal. He loaded the dishwasher and put the remaining pots and pans away before taking a fresh glass of the wine left over from dinner with him into the study. Amy was sitting on the sofa watching a fire crackling away in the fireplace.

  “Do you want some of this?” Mark asked holding up his wineglass.

  “Heavens no,” Amy said. He could tell from her slow, thick words, and the near-empty highball glass in her hand, that she was correct in her assessment that she had had enough. “I have a question for you, Mr. Vogel.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Vogel?” he said in a playful tone. The success of dinner, the relative calm between them, and the buy-in from her on Monday’s meeting had given him a light heart. He assumed from Amy’s tone she was in a similar mood. He quickly discovered he was mistaken.

  “What do you get out of this deal?” Mark did not have to ask her which deal she was referring to.

  “What do you mean, what do I get out of it?”

  “Are you expecting anything from the bank, like a finder’s fee of some kind? Or,” she looked up at Mark and caught him looking at her legs. The dress that she had been wearing that evening was short to start with, but now with her sitting on the couch the skirt had moved up revealing a great deal more. “Are you after something from me?” Mark jerked his head up from where he had been gazing as if Amy had slapped him. He was immediately aware of what she was referring to in “something from me.”

  “Amy, you’ve had too much to drink. Go to bed. I am. It’s late, I’m tired and you should be.”

  “I’ll go,” she shot back at him, “but not until I’m ready and you’ve answered my question. What are you expecting out of the deal?” She asked again, leveling out her voice. Mark knew exactly what she was asking. He was still shocked to think that she had managed to size up the opportunity in the terms of assets and liabilities that would have to be covered and paid on her part.

  Anger now prompted his reply. “I’m helping a client find some expert help with his investments, and I am helping you gain the account and the glory that goes with it. That’s all, period, end of story. I don’t want to be paid and I don’t need a finder’s fee.” He turned and started to walk out of the room, but continued to talk as he went. “As for what it’s going to “cost” you personally? Not a damn thing, Amy.” He could feel the cold stare on his back. “You know why?” he asked, turning and looking back at her before finishing his statement. “There’s nothing you have that I want any more.” With that said he walked out of the room, leaving his wife to sort through his parting statement on her own.

  Either because of the early hour the morning before, or the emotional drain from his parting conversation with Amy, Mark slept until almost eight-thirty Friday morning. He had intended to sleep later than normal, even going so far as turning the alarm clock off, but not this late. Not that it was any big deal. There was really nothing major going on that required him to be up and out of bed right away.

  He made his way downstairs in his robe to make coffee. A teacup and plate in the sink told Mark that Amy had spent the night somewhere else in the house and that she was already gone for the day; at the moment that suited him just fine. He was still smarting from last night’s conversation. Why did she have to say those kinds of things? Was it the wine or was it planned? Was she trying to make some kind of statement to him about what she would and would not accept from him at this point in their marriage? Or was it the fact that the wine pulled her guard down far enough that she would say the things she was thinking? Either way, at this point it didn’t make any difference. The words had already been spoken. To try to change the impact of them at this point would be like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. He was still thinking about all these things as he went back upstairs, with a fresh cup of coffee in his hand, to shower and get dressed for the day.

  After going through his morning routine, his plan was to head out to Runaway Bay in the middle of the morning. However, like everything else today there was no schedule or specific time he planned on getting there. It was nice for a change not to have any place, in particular, to be right away. When he returned to the kitchen he was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He decided to treat himself to breakfast and set about making it. Eggs, bacon, toast, and more coffee disappeared while he read the morning paper. It was almost eleven o’clock before he backed his car out the garage for the drive northwest.

  He whiled away most of the drive by listening to the Auburn
and Alabama football game on the radio. It was a good game and the score was close right up to the end. It held his attention as the miles passed under the wheels of his car on the almost empty roads to Runaway Bay. He stopped at the Willies’ to collect his usual assortment of junk mail. They thanked him for the turkey he had given them for Thanksgiving and he told them he was delighted that they enjoyed it. Mrs. Willies sent him on his way with sandwiches made from the leftover turkey on homemade bread with lots of cheese and everything else that you could think to put on a sandwich.

  He spent the rest of the day doing odds and ends of stuff outside of the house, either in the barn or the surrounding area. It was still cold but the sun was out. Mark was aching to spend a day, any day for that matter, outside doing work that was manual and hard. It was good to do “honest work” every now and then as Mr. Willies had said, teasing him one day when he showed up to get his mail still dressed in a suit. His big breakfast carried him through the day and on until dark. It was a tired and exhausted Mark who headed into the house after it had become too dark to see outside anymore.

  He stripped off his dirty, sweat-stained clothes and stepped into the shower that had been running for several minutes. Even though the air was cold, he had managed to work up a good sweat. The water was hot and carried away the pains of a body that spent too much time sitting in an office. The water felt good and Mark stood under it for a long while. When he finally got out of the shower he dressed in a repeat of his dirty clothes—jeans and a sweatshirt. He went to the kitchen and pondered over whether to eat his Mrs. Willies’s sandwiches or just heat a can of Campbell’s soup. The appeal of a warm cup of soup won out over the sandwiches, but not by much.

  He ate sitting at the table in the kitchen while reading a novel that he had been working on for several weeks. He usually did not get much of a chance to read just for fun and it was one of the reasons that it had taken him nearly two months to read through two-thirds of an action-adventure novel he had bought in the drugstore in town one day. He had only been reading for fifteen minutes when it became very hard to keep his eyes open. After another five minutes of rereading the same paragraph interrupted by almost constant yawning, he gave in to his body and took the book to bed with him.

  Saturday morning dawned cloudy and still cool. Mark was outside just a little after it became light enough to see to work. He worked away most of the morning and well into the afternoon—cutting and laying boards on the rafters that currently made up part of the open air ceiling of the barn. He hoped by the time he finished with it to build a second story in the barn for things that he wanted to keep off the dirt floor. The truck, when parked inside, took up the biggest part of the available floor space in the old barn. He always had to move things around to get the old truck either in or out of the building. He worked on the project for hours, letting his mind do nothing more than calculate the size of the next floorboard to be cut. He stopped around two in the afternoon and ate one of the sandwiches from yesterday.

  After the quick, late lunch he went back to work cutting and hammering boards. He continued to do this until the arrival of darkness again forced him to stop. He was tired and sore but not as sore as he had been the day before. It always seemed to be that way. He would start out with his muscles tight, sore, and protesting from the use the day before. Soon into the task, the soreness would leave and he would discover that the muscles were working much better than the day before.

  Saturday evening ended just like Friday evening had ended: a shower and then dinner while he read. Tonight there was only one deviation from the process; he ate the last of the turkey sandwiches instead of soup. He read in the kitchen for about an hour before taking the book and retiring to bed where he read for an hour longer.

  Sunday morning was a repeat of Saturday. He was on the verge of monotony. After a bottomless cup of coffee, Mark walked outside of his kitchen door to be greeted by a day much colder than the day before. Dark gray clouds hung low over the whole horizon threatening to dump their contents in one form or another of precipitation. This suited him just fine. He had planned on spending the shortened day working inside at his desk before driving home. The weather gave him all the excuse he needed now.

  With a fresh cup of coffee, he went into the large living room where he could work. He split some logs into more manageable sizes and stoked up the fire that had burned itself out into a pile of hot gray embers. While the new fuel caught in the stone fireplace Mark unloaded his laptop computer from his briefcase. He missed the computer in his office. More to the point, he missed a full-sized keyboard. With the fire once again burning merrily, Mark settled into the desk chair, refilled his pipe, and booted up his computer. The system went through its connection checks while he lit and then re-tamped the tobacco in his pipe. By the time the pipe was burning to his satisfaction, the computer had produced the welcoming screen on the laptop’s small color monitor.

  Mark navigated through the software like a man driving down a road he had lived on for twenty years. He went immediately to the mail section. Ignoring all the other email in his electronic mailbox, he opened and downloaded the files that he had uploaded in Nassau: the files that were on the disk in Cecil’s safety deposit box. It took several minutes for the software to shuttle the files from the Dropbox server back onto another thumb drive. He fiddled with his pipe during the download. When the transfer was complete, he launched the encryption key to Find Me If You Can and decrypted the files.

  He opened each file one at a time. There were ten in all and each was a detailed record of the movement of the money from Houston through the various banks around the world. Amounts deposited in each bank, expenses both for Cecil’s cost of living and the charges leveled on the money each time he transferred it, were all carefully recorded. While the bank in Nassau held the single largest amount on deposit, there was a considerable sum scattered in a dozen banks in half a dozen countries all over the world. These banks all had the same things in common. They paid moderate levels of interest on the deposits, they were equipped to handle electronic funds transfers, they were all in countries with a long history of secretive banking laws, and finally, they all shielded the depositors from any and all questions from United States tax agencies.

  Mark spent the morning and most of the afternoon studying the files. For the first time since he became aware of his friend’s past and the money that shadowed it, Mark became aware of the vast sums of money that he now had control over. A man could live a good life with that kind of money, he thought more than once while reviewing the lists. However, each time that thought went through his mind, he remembered that his friend Cecil had died alone with nothing outside of their chance friendship. Each time he came to the same conclusion and each time he became more convinced that the decision he had made was the right one.

  He studied the files for hours. By that time he had become comfortable not only with where the money was deposited, but also, with some degree of accuracy, how much was at each location. When he was sure that he knew all he wanted to know about it, he repeated the laborious process of encrypting the files and sent them back to the Dropbox servers. Before sending the last file Mark pulled out the business card Mr. Roddy had given him in Nassau. He recorded the phone numbers in a plain text document and encrypted it as a final precaution. Once the numbers had been transferred, he threw the card into the fireplace and watched the flames consume it.

  He was going to log into his VPN at work and check his email but, as he did so, his attention was drawn to a blinking message in the corner of the computer screen. It announced that he was now running on reserve battery power and he needed to save all of his current work immediately or connect the external power to the computer. Mark swore softly at the interruption as he fished the power cable out of his briefcase. With the unlimited supply of power now feeding the computer, Mark spent the next two hours reading and replying to most of the pending mail.

  He had shut the computer down and starte
d to put it back into the briefcase before a yank on the line reminded him that it was still plugged into the wall. He disconnected the power cord, wrapped it into a tight but neat wad and then wrapped a Velcro strip around it to hold it that way. He put the cord into the case and once again noticed that he still had not put his passport back up in his desk. He made yet another mental note to do that when he got back to his home in Dallas He was about to put the computer away when his phone rang.

  Amy was on the other end of the line. Her voice was void of any emotion. “Are you planning on coming home tonight?” She asked him.

  “I was, why? Is that not a good idea?” He asked.

  “I am about to go out for the evening, I will be home late and wanted to make sure I caught you. I wanted to talk to you about tomorrow,” she told him ignoring his sarcastic question.

  “What about tomorrow?” Mark asked, sitting up in his chair.

  “Have you been in touch with your … ah … client?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And he is set for the meeting?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I talked to Hamilton on Friday. He’ll be here.” she reassured her husband.

  “Just Hamilton and you, right?” Mark asked, true concern creeping into his voice.

  “Yes, the two of us and you, I suppose. Well … and your mystery client.” she was obviously annoyed at Mark’s demand for secrecy.

  “When?” Mark asked.

  “Seven, just like you said. OK?”

  “That will be fine.” He paused and started to say something else but Amy interrupted him.

  “I’ll see you at seven then.” Before he could say anything else she hung up. Mark stared at the phone in his hand before slipping it back into his pocket. He noticed that his hand shook when he did, whether in rage or some other emotion he did not have the courage to ask himself.