A Calculated Risk

by Katherine Neville

  “Indeed we are,” he told me gravely. “There’s little you can do about it at this late date—so I suggest you make the best of your situation, accept our million-dollar offer, and autograph these papers. That is—if you can figure out which among you might be empowered to sign.”

  “Perhaps someone can fill me in, first, on just what’s happening?” suggested Tor.

  “They must have been planning this deal for ages,” I told him. “They own hundreds of millions in bank stock—maybe bought on margin at fifty cents on the dollar—but bought by them with their own money. As soon as they own this island—which we’ve conveniently provided for them—they can incorporate a parent company here, under their own laws, transfer that bank stock to this company—and have it take over the Bank of the World!”

  “A fairly accurate summary,” Lawrence agreed, still holding the contracts between his fingers. “We’d planned to incorporate in Liechtenstein or Luxembourg or Malta—or wherever—until this opportunity arose. But we’ve spent time and money enough; I believe it’s time to wrap things up. You see, nothing you do can really stop us now. Essentially, we own this island and the bank as well.”

  He was right, and I knew exactly what they’d do as soon as they took command. They hadn’t gone to all these lengths to install better management, improve services, or increase corporate assets for the other shareholders. When they got their hands on a business like that—they’d milk it dry, and not only of dividends. They’d do what had been done to Bibi’s bank. But this time, on an inconceivable scale. What they were proposing might topple the entire U.S. economy. And thanks to the fact we’d handed a brand-new country over to them, everything they did would remain entirely within the parameters of the law—laws that they would clearly be able to write all by themselves!

  The biggest mistake I had made in all of this was in failing to recognize genuine evil when it stared me in the face. I’d been pussyfooting around with Lawrence, trying to slip one over on him by proving the bank’s security was no good. What a fool I’d been—when the corruption itself started at the top; not in a computer system or a steering committee, but in the black and power-hungry mind of a single man. I might not be able to stop him—but I certainly wasn’t going to help him get away with this.

  But suddenly Tor appeared at my elbow, handing me a glass of champagne with a smile. What came next was a real surprise.

  “My dear Verity, let’s have a toast to the better man, and try to assuage our failure with the million he’s offered. After all, we put up a good fight, but even the cleverest among us can’t always win.”

  I stared at him, but for the life of me couldn’t imagine what he was doing. Tor never gave up without a fight. Indeed, I’d never seen him give up anything—including his courtship of me—until he won.

  But he clinked his glass against mine and raised it aloft as Lelia, in confusion, did the same.

  “To Lawrence, and his compatriots who are still off exploring the isle. Too bad they can’t be here as well to witness our capitulation. But their celebration will surely be just as joyous when they return to see these contracts duly signed and witnessed.” He took another sip of the wine and gripped my arm with unnecessary force. “And to Verity, our silent partner, whose cleverness put this deal together. Though it isn’t the prize you’d hoped for, I’m certain the million you’ve earned will compensate somewhat for the billion or so you’ve invested these three or four months—”

  “What did Banks have to do with that capital?” demanded Lawrence. “I thought that the baroness was the backer of this deal.”

  “Not in the back, but in the front,” said Lelia, gracing me with a conspiratorial smile.

  Obviously, everybody knew what was going on but me.

  “What the baroness means,” Tor explained, “is that she was the front for our whole investment—the purchase of the bonds we used as collateral, the acquisition of financing, as well as the island’s purchase and creation of the business. But the mastermind—and financial angel, if you will—was Verity Banks.”

  “That’s completely absurd,” said Lawrence. “Where could Banks raise capital of that magnitude? You’re talking about a billion in securities!”

  He looked more than a bit uneasy. It was clear even to him that things weren’t as they should be. But I myself was still at sea.

  “Perhaps you should tell him how you raised the funds,” suggested Tor, with that ravishing smile. He pressed my arm more firmly, and added, “Exactly how you raised a billion dollars—and on such short notice, too!”

  And then, of course, I knew, and I smiled myself.

  “I stole it,” I said sweetly, polished off my champagne, and went to replenish my glass.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Lawrence. When I glanced up from pouring, his pupils had disappeared in tiny slits. He actually removed his glasses and polished them, as if that would help him hear better.

  “Do I stammer?” I asked politely with raised brow. “I stole a billion dollars from the bank’s wire services—oh, and a bit from the Fed Reserve as well, which I shouldn’t forget to mention. We used it to buy securities—but we’d planned to return it all as soon as we made our thirty million. Of course now that you’ve reneged on your part, that won’t be possible.”

  Lawrence stood there silently, as we three beamed at him.

  “Of course, it really won’t matter—since I obviously didn’t move the money through accounts in my own name. Those stolen funds will never be traced to me,” I explained. Then I paused a beat. “They’ll be traced to you, of course—and your little friends.”

  Everything was so silent there on the terrace, it seemed we’d been sucked away into a vacuum. Lawrence was deathly pale and he gripped his glass so tightly I thought he might crush it in his hand. Surely it had dawned on him that no court of law in the land would believe a man who could put together a leveraged buyout of a major bank and a country—but who tried to pretend he knew nothing about how a billion in stolen money had wound up in his own bank account.

  Suddenly, Lawrence flung his glass across the terrace—directly at my head—and Tor shoved me out of the way as it struck the wall behind.

  “You miserable goddamned bitch!” he screamed in a voice so shrill, for a moment I thought it was an animal.

  I recovered from my shock, but Tor had raced to Lawrence’s side and pinned his arms as he screamed and screamed. Then all at once, everything was pandemonium as Pearl and Georgian came rushing down the road to the parapet, the Vagabonds just behind. Everyone was shouting at once and trying to hear at the same time as Tor wrestled the shrieking Lawrence into a nearby chair.

  Lelia banged a spoon on her champagne glass until we all came to order.

  “Gentlemen,” she said quietly, smiling at them, “I suggest you all are having some seats again. Our class is not yet finished—and we have something we wish for you to sign. It is not a contract, though.”

  “What’s going on here, Baroness?” asked one of the bankers, his eyes riveted on the frothing Lawrence.

  “We are just going to do the screwings in you like a nail,” she said sweetly, and she poured some more champagne.

  “Do you like it?” Tor asked, studying me in the candlelight.

  “This is the most disgusting stuff I’ve ever tasted,” I told him, spitting over the wall.

  “One must acquire a taste for retsina,” Pearl said.

  “It tastes like chlorine from a swimming pool,” I told her.

  “It’s pine resin,” Tor explained. “The ancient Greeks used to seal their wine in pine barrels to discourage the Romans from stealing it.”

  “Right,” said Georgian. “Give me a shooter of absinthe any day.”

  She was balanced on the seawall, wearing a dark red caftan, the sky beyond a pearly orchid, the sea dipped in flamingo. The candles had melted down in the walls, the few remaining flames flickering and sputtering. The musicians sat around in a small circle, the soft tinkling of the santo
uri mingling with the sweetish strains of the bouzouki. Tor had been teaching Lelia the complex steps of a dance as the rest of us watched the candles burn out one by one.

  “That little flute is a floghera, and the soft drum is a defi,” said Georgian. “We listened to them every week down in the harbor before you arrived. I hate to think of leaving this place—it’s lucky we could stay an extra week while Tor went up to Paris with the Vagabonds to get back our bonds.”

  “Do you think they’ll ever let Lawrence out of that nuthouse in Lourdes?” asked Pearl. “I guess when you’re that emotionally constipated, it just eats away your brain.”

  “He certainly did flip out,” I agreed. “But his colleagues seemed to see the reasonableness of our case. They’ve returned our collateral, unloaded their ‘takeover stock,’ and signed those confessions of their intent to defraud—all without a glitch. Just so we’d put all the stolen money back where it belongs and take it out of their names. But even though they’ll be hauled upon charges, they’ll surely get off easily. And they’re bound to blame it all on Lawrence, since he can hardly speak for himself.”

  “We gave them a little push in the right direction—just in case.” Georgian laughed. “Pearl and I took them to the hot pool while you were here chatting. I’ve got some rather nice Polaroids to show you.…”

  She handed over the glossy photos—there were the dozen Vagabonds, splashing about in the buff and pouring champagne on Pearl! They were having a hell of a time.

  “We thought it best to have some insurance of blackmail, in the event things didn’t work out with you,” said Georgian, admiring her handiwork. “Look at that resolution! You can see every drop of champagne on her tits! I had to hide in the bushes to take these, too.”

  “You two are ruthless.” I laughed.

  “The deadlier of the species,” agreed Pearl. “You taught me that.”

  At midnight, when the musicians had wrapped up to go, we sat in the cool, damp darkness and watched the first of the procession ascend the mountain. The candles were massed below us at the sea, and we could see against the plum-and-silver-tinted waters the silhouettes of figures as they broke and moved single file slowly, singing, up the hill.

  “It’s called the Akathistos,” Tor whispered as he sat with his arm around me. “One of the kontakion—the only one that’s remained intact. It was written by Serge the Patriarch on the eve of the deliverance of Constantinople from the Persians—a hymn of thanksgiving. But they sing it at midnight here each Easter.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I murmured.

  Lelia was rising from her seat.

  “Now we will go to hear the Mass,” she said. But as the others rose Tor restrained me with a hand.

  “Not the two of us,” he said, and turning to the others, he explained, “We’ve still some unfinished business.”

  So the others trooped down to the cart to follow the procession across the cone of Omphalos to the little church. When we could no longer see the lights of the procession, Tor turned to me.

  “Today is the last day of our wager,” he told me. “And I believe you’ve won. At least, I assume you came a bit closer than I in gathering the thirty million we’d agreed upon. I’d like to discuss our settlement. But first, I’d like to discuss us.”

  “I don’t know if I can even think about this,” I said. “It seems my life’s been ripped away and a new one put in its place—one I’m hardly familiar with just yet. I want to be with you, but four months ago, I couldn’t even imagine having a relationship.”

  “I don’t want a relationship with a capital R,” he assured me, studying me carefully in the dim moonlight. “What about starting out with a small-r relationship?”

  “How about no r at all?” I suggested with a smile. “Then it will be an relationship.”

  “Absolutely.” He smiled. “But if I get you that job at the Fed, you’ll be in Washington, and I’ll still be in New York. Haven’t we had enough years apart already? Tell me—exactly how old are you now?”

  “I must confess that I am on the dark side of twenty. Why do you ask?”

  “Old enough to know that very few people are graced—as we’ve been—with what we have. I’d like to shed some light on the matter. Just a moment; I’ll be right back.”

  He went into the house, leaving me out on the parapet with the bottle of cognac and glasses. I poured myself a drink and watched the clouds scudding across the moon and listened to the waves softly lapping at the fortifications below. When Tor returned, he was carrying a large portfolio. He dumped the contents out on the tiles and lit a match. I saw his coppery hair illuminated in the glow, then glanced at the pile on the ground just as he picked up a sheet and lit it.

  “What are you doing?” I cried in alarm. “Those are the bonds! The real ones! That’s a billion dollars’ worth of paper you’re setting fire to! Are you mad?”

  “Perhaps,” he said with a smile, his flame-colored eyes turned golden in the firelight. “I’ve wired the Depository from Paris with the serial numbers of the counterfeits in their vaults. I thought it best to destroy all trace of how they might have arrived there—just in case the Vagabonds ever got wise and tried to do unto us as we’ve done unto them. Our point has been made nonetheless. Those brokers and bankers who refused a physical inventory will have trouble explaining how the securities they sent there are forgeries—though the clients they sold them to will be protected by their proof of purchase—Oh, do sit down, my dear—you’re making me nervous, standing on one foot like that.”

  I was making him nervous! I sat on the edge of the table and watched as he lit one paper after another until the mass caught fire. At last, the flames died down to a mass of crumbling ash, and the wind lifted and moved it away in slow curls across the parapet. By morning, a billion dollars would have disappeared without a trace, along with our theft. Were the next thirty-two years of my life to be like that, too? Tor came to me and drew me into his arms as if he’d read my thoughts, and buried his face in my neck and inhaled my hair.

  “I have to go home and water my orchids and think about this for a while,” I told him, my arms around him. “When I got into this wager, I had no way of seeing I’d be a different person at the end. I’m not prescient like you.”

  “Clearly,” he said as he kissed my throat and held me away to search my face. “But instead of worrying about yesterday or tomorrow, what of today? I have the feeling there’s something we’ve left undone.”

  “Undone?” I said, surprised. “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t you see that—although we’ve stopped the Vagabonds in their progress—anyone choosing to try the same again could do so, with or without a country of his own, as they might have done? Furthermore, any bank can easily buy up another using overvalued stock as part of the purchase. There’s simply no way, through the international economic system, to ensure that bank assets are properly valued or insured—or that any greedy bastard who comes along tomorrow can’t pull the same caper as today.”

  “What does this have to do with us?” I asked.

  “With you at the Fed—examining their reserves and asset liquidity,” he said, smiling that strange and dangerous smile as he looked at me in the moonlight, “and me analyzing acquisition portfolios through the exchanges, we ought to do a rather thorough job of it, wouldn’t you say? I’d wager that I could knock off more illicit mergers and corrupt takeovers than you could in, say, a one-year time frame. What do you think of that, my little competitor?”

  I shot him a look of indignation—but I couldn’t stay sober for long. I started to laugh.

  “Okay—how much do you want to bet?” I said.

  A Biography of Katherine Neville

  Katherine Neville (b. 1945) is an American author, best known for her spellbinding adventure novels The Eight, A Calculated Risk, and The Magic Circle.

  Neville was born in the Midwest and from an early age spent many of her summers and holidays in the Rocky Mountains and the Paci
fic Northwest. She would listen with fascination to the yarns of cowboys, miners, lumberjacks, riverboat folks along the Mississippi, Native Americans, and the legendary Mountain Men of the Rockies. These tales sparked her early desire to have adventures and to become a storyteller herself. However, that desire was to be deferred for quite a while.

  While growing up, Neville disliked having to sit in stuffy classrooms, listen to lectures, and take exams. She preferred to be outside climbing trees. Instead of reading the dull texts assigned in her history, geography, and social studies classes, she escaped into sagas like The Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts, swashbuckling adventure tales like Rafael Sabatini’s pirate novels Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk, and Captain Blood, and Jules Verne’s fantasy adventures 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. When she was sixteen, she saw a movie that changed her life: Lawrence of Arabia. The film thrilled Neville more than all those imaginary tales combined and inspired in her a yearning to live in a wild and remote foreign land one day.

  Throughout high school and college, Neville earned money by drawing and painting people’s horses, dogs, and grandchildren and by teaching art classes. Later on, during years of economic boom and bust, she turned to modeling to support herself. Not only did she get to meet interesting new people, she had an opportunity to work with highly skilled photographers and learn the art of photography. Eventually, she saved enough money to buy a Nikon F and a set of lenses, and she started snapping shots of everything and everyone.

  When Neville graduated from college, she found that job opportunities for women were limited. After searching for work in several cities, she took a national exam for a new field called data processing, scoring in the top one percent nationally. It landed her a job in New York at IBM in the Transportation and Utilities industries, automating businesses for clients like Con Edison and Long Island Railroad. She became a devotee of early computer wizards Admiral Grace Hopper and Alan Turing and discovered a passion for code making and breaking. This was the inspiration for her first novel, A Calculated Risk, which she would complete nearly twenty years later.