Money to Burn

58

OLIVIA AND ERIC PICKED ME UP IN LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES. IN forty-five more, we were in central New Jersey-Somerset County, to be exact, one of the oldest and wealthiest in the United States. WhiteSands had moved there after its World Trade Center headquarters was destroyed on 9/11, one of many financial firms displaced by the sudden loss of the office-space equivalent of twenty-five Empire State Buildings. The firm had no plans to return to Manhattan, its current CEO rather liking the comfortable distance between himself and WhiteSands’ founder and board chairman emeritus, Eric Volke.

“Make a left here,” said Eric. It was his car, but I’d insisted on driving. Thirty years of chauffeured limousines had turned Eric into a terror on the highways.

It felt like the country, but most of Somerset’s agricultural roots had been lost long ago to developers. We were actually on a dark private road owned by WhiteSands-still owned by them, despite the bankruptcy of its 49 percent shareholder, Saxton Silvers. In fact, no aspect of WhiteSands’ business was affected by the recent filing. Not its 2.3 million square feet of office space in Franklin. Not the 275 acres it owned inside the Princeton Forrestal Center. Not the billions of dollars’ worth of other real estate holdings throughout the United States and Europe. Not its seven hundred investment advisors with over $1.3 trillion in assets under management.

And most important of all-at least for my immediate purposes-not the company helicopter and on-site heliport.

“The pilot won’t be here for another forty minutes,” said Eric.

I checked the time on the dash-nine-forty P.M.-and tried to remember the last time I’d eaten. “Is there food at the hangar?”

There wasn’t, so Eric navigated our way into the complex and into the corporate cafeteria for something quick. We ate cold sandwiches in the corporate dining room, the flat screen playing on the wall. Pundits on CNN were analyzing the financial fallout from the failure of Saxton Silvers. The cast of losers included everyone from guys like Nick and his kids’ college fund to a group of Japanese banks that were out $1.5 billion. Somehow, I knew who would be all right, and who wouldn’t be.

I switched to a local news station, where the breaking-news coverage was all about the emergency-room shooting in North Bergen. I was happy to hear that “miraculously, no one was injured,” but I was suddenly wondering if I would ever see Ivy again. Was she gone for good this time, another disappearing act? The reporter’s closing words jarred me loose from my thoughts.

“The suspect escaped before police arrived,” she said into the camera, speaking from the parking lot outside the hospital, “and he remains at large. Anyone with information about this crime is encouraged to notify the police.”

She signed off, and I nearly choked on my sandwich. “I told the nine-one-one operator who did it,” I said. “Why the hell don’t they have Ian Burn’s name and photograph all over the airwaves?”

“Don’t take this personally,” said Olivia, “but maybe they’re waiting for a credible source before they send everyone looking for a Mumbai hit man with a french-fried ear.”

Olivia excused herself for a bathroom break, leaving Eric and me alone in the dining room. He switched the station to FNN, where experts were saying that the ripple effects from Saxton Silvers and the subprime crisis could push the Dow as low as 10,000-a prediction “as lunatic as gas going up to four dollars a gallon,” shouted Chuck Bell’s replacement.

I wrapped up the last few bites of my sandwich and opened a bottled water.

“So what’s going to happen next?” I asked. “To Olivia and me, I mean.”

Eric lowered the television volume. “We drive out to the hangar. The helicopter will get you into Martha’s Vineyard before midnight. My yacht’s ready to go as soon as you land. You should be on your way to Bermuda in a few hours. If it’s still not safe by the time you dock there, we’ll refuel and keep you moving.”

“How long can that go on?”

“As long as it takes.”

I drank my water. “Is that what you told Ivy four years ago?”

We exchanged glances. I hadn’t intended it as a barb exactly, but he did seem to take my meaning. I grabbed the remote and clicked off the television, making it clear that I needed to get to the root of it.

“When we were in the emergency room,” I said, “Ivy told me about the corporate espionage she was doing for WhiteSands. She started to tell me why McVee wanted her dead, but the shooting started before she could finish.”

Eric showed little reaction, his tone matter-of-fact. “She did a good job. That’s why McVee wants her dead.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ivy didn’t just figure out what Ploutus was doing to manipulate the market for WhiteSands’ stock. She caught the mastermind himself red-handed. If we had gone to the D.A., the things she’d uncovered could have put Kyle McVee’s son in jail for a very long time.”

“Why didn’t you go to the D.A.?”

“We would have. Except that…”

“He killed himself.”

“Yes,” said Eric. “No one saw it coming. But he took his own life.”

“McVee blames Ivy for that?”

Eric gave me a sobering look. “He sure as hell doesn’t blame himself.”

I was well aware that Marcus McVee had committed suicide. I’d seen the newspaper photographs of his Maserati parked on the waterfront in the Hamptons. I’d read the story of his body slumped over in the front seat, an empty liter of tequila on the floor and a half-empty bottle of Vicodin on the seat beside him. The autopsy confirmed that he’d washed down at least two dozen 500 milligram pills with the tequila. I was also aware-firsthand-of how the loss of his only son had changed the old man, turning Kyle McVee from simply aggressive to outright ruthless on Wall Street. But I’d had no idea how ruthless.

“So long as Ivy was alive,” said Eric, “no one she loved was safe. We spoke on the phone on your wedding day. She told me about the SUV that ran you off the road. And the hired thug who roughed you up at the FTAA riot in Miami.”

“I don’t understand. Usually when the mob or someone like that goes after your family, isn’t it because they want you to pay them money, or because they want you to forget that you were a witness to a crime? They want you to do something. What is it that McVee wanted Ivy to do?”

“Suffer,” said Eric. “McVee was in agony over the death of his son. He wanted Ivy to agonize with the fear of something terrible happening to someone she loved-namely, you or her mother. So his thugs played with you. Ran you off the road with an SUV. Roughed you up in Miami. She knew eventually McVee would get bored with the game and step things up.”

“Or maybe not,” I said. “The flaming envelope was more of the same, four years later.”

“But he will tire of it-this we knew four years ago. Then he would kill Ivy. Or maybe he would kill you or her mother, let Ivy live with the sense of loss that she had forced him to live with. The SUV running you off the road could have killed you. That envelope could have killed you. The bottom line was clear: So long as Ivy was alive, someone was going to end up dead-either her, you, or her mother. Ivy knew it. And so did I. That was when I helped her disappear.”

It was starting to make sense. But not entirely.

“You’re the guy who hired Ivy,” I said. “Why would McVee want her blood but not yours?”

“I guess he decided to wait for the right time and hit me where it really hurt. He brought down Saxton Silvers-assassinated it, in plain English, with his short selling.”

“But he hasn’t put you in the poorhouse. You still have WhiteSands. There has to be more to this.”

Our eyes locked-but not in an adversarial way. It was more like two men coming to an understanding that something needed to be said-probably should have been said a long time ago-and that things would never be the same between them once it was out there.

Eric crossed the dining room to the doorway and checked the hallway, making sure that Olivia was not on her way back from the restroom. Then he closed the door, and the expression on his face was about as serious as I’d ever seen.

“I never wanted to be the one to tell you this, Michael. But it’s time you knew the God’s honest truth about that woman you married.”