Storm Front

“Anyhow, we got some warrants, and sure enough, we were able to find that there had been a steady drip of money out of your accounts, going back years. Like a lot of embezzlers, Mr. Sniff started out small, then got more bold as time went along and he didn’t get caught. Eventually, he figured out that you just weren’t minding the store at all, and the drip became more like a torrent. He was very sophisticated about how he did it, and it took us a while to unravel it all. But, essentially, he was robbing you blind. He has buried billions in offshore accounts, both in the Caribbean and Switzerland.”

“I knew it!” Cracker said.

Colston and Storm looked at him incredulously.

“Well, okay, obviously, I didn’t know it. But I just… It’s like I was telling Mr. Storm before. I knew my trades were mostly good. It just didn’t make any sense that I was out of money. Like, a few weeks ago, I had converted some grain futures into…”

“Mr. Cracker, if you don’t mind, I have a lot of work to do here,” Colston said.

“Sorry, sorry. Continue.”

“Anyhow, he maintained fake books for you, for a while, anyway. Then he figured out it was actually more fun — for him — if you thought you were broke. It would not only stress you out, it would make you borrow money to try and make up what you had lost, thus putting you in an even deeper hole when he eventually pulled the plug. He wanted you humiliated as much as possible. He maintained fake account ledgers for your clients and the SEC, of course. So it took us a while to untangle it all. Eventually, we were able to establish what he was doing and how he was doing it. But it was more on the level of being able to observe general patterns secondhand. We still had to catch him in the act. So we convinced Lee Fulcher to pretend that he had a margin call and ask for all his money.”

“That was fake?”

“That was a trap,” Colston said. “Mr. Sniff had grown incredibly greedy. Again, he wanted to put you in the deepest hole possible. We knew that if there was a sudden demand for forty-three million dollars, it would put him into action.”

“Because it would make him have to come up with the money?”

“No, actually, the opposite: because it would make him steal the last little bit he could. He knew the margin call would be the thing that pushed you over the edge. This was his last withdrawal before you got closed out for good. Lucky for you, we were watching. He made his move right before the end of business yesterday. We made sure we had it fully documented, then picked him up earlier today.”

A look of utter amazement had washed over Cracker. “Unbelievable,” he said. “So what happens now?”

“Well, we’ve been having, ah, discussions with Mr. Sniff for the last few hours,” Colston said. “We showed him some of our evidence and presented him with two scenarios. One is where he decides to fight us. He has no assets with which to do so, because we’ve gotten a judge to freeze all his accounts. But he goes down swinging anyway. We pile on the charges, insist on consecutive sentences rather than concurrent ones, and send him to the nastiest hole of a prison we can find, where he is more than likely raped and beaten by his fellow inmates until he either dies of old age or sheer exhaustion. Or…”

Colston allowed himself another small smile before he continued: “Or he cooperates, admits wrongdoing, returns the money he stole from you and your clients, and serves ten years in a minimum security prison for white collar felons. It may be too generous an offer, but it’s one that saves us a lot of time and resources that are better spent catching other crooks. And it makes you financially whole a lot faster than if the thing had to drag through the courts.”

“And?” Cracker asked, leaning forward.

“He’s waiting to sign the plea bargain documents as we speak,” Colston said. “The good news for you is that he hadn’t spent any of the money he stole. Actually, he had done quite a fine job investing it. I think you’ll end up liking the return he got for you.”

His fortune restored, Cracker was beaming, enough that Storm was quite sure he had — at least momentarily — forgotten that he still had a sociopathic Russian on his tail.

But after he received assurances that he would get updates from Colston and left the building, it didn’t take long for him to remember. He and Storm had made a right turn out of the Poison Pill’s parking lot, pulling onto Route 17’s three lanes of southbound traffic.

They were no more than a half mile down the road when the bullets started flying.

Three slugs slammed into the back of the Jaguar, making three nickel-sized holes in the bumper.

Cracker promptly dove into the well of the passenger seat. “Someone’s shooting at us!” he yelped. “Why is someone shooting at us?”