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THE SAMARITAN
By Stephen Besecker bancroft press
Copyright © 2011 Stephen Besecker
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-61088-026-8
Chapter One
Manhattan, New York
Just as the private elevator carrying Emily Silverstone reached the sixteenth-floor penthouse suite, a thunderous explosion blew the apartment building's double glass doors and much of the brick and steel façade into the street-level lobby. Outside the Fifth Avenue building, where Jeremy Silverstone's black limousine had been idling in the frigid December night, pieces of charred steel, burning upholstery, and a single mangled axle smoldered in a deep, blackened crater.
And so a life had ended—or begun, depending upon one's point of view.
The insatiable New York media scrutinized the brilliant financier's violent death as only the media can. And though more than five years had now passed since the bomb had detonated outside one of Manhattan's most exclusive East Side properties, an air of skepticism still hung over a select group of irate investors, all of whom the victim had monetarily exploited before the limousine's explosion presumably ended his life.
As was exhaustively reported at the time, the dead man in question had been professionally assassinated at the direction of a bitter business associate, an irate client, or one of the many powerful political figures embarrassed by a very public scandal. After numerous investigations, conducted by no fewer than five state and federal agencies, the evidence left no doubt that the blast, which ripped apart the armor-plated limousine, had been intentional. And inside Washington's beltway, it was believed that Jeremy Silverstone's secrets had been permanently silenced.
The New York Post headline got it right: "SILVERSTONE GOES OUT WITH A BANG."
Privately, many breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
The recently elected New York State attorney general had promised a lengthy list of indictments against Silverstone and his associates as early as February. Painted as a monster who raided retirement accounts and mortgaged his clients' futures by purchasing subprime loans and other risky paper, Silverstone had
Crumbling on a foundation of mud and straw, Silverstone's multi-billion-dollar empire was about to be decimated by a violent storm. His company hemorrhaged money from the very powerful investors who had trusted this new breed of Wall Street wizard. His unstable global firm would soon topple, taking with it a tidy percentage of fortunes from many of America's most prominent citizens: Hollywood celebrities, music icons, professional athletes, politicians, and business giants. No one was immune. Silverstone had not only laundered their money through an elaborate banking system with strong ties to the drug cartels in Mexico, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, but he'd also made the unfortunate mistake of getting caught. Old money and squeaky-clean reputations were at stake.
And then the whispers about Silverstone's cooperation with the feds grew louder. Anonymous sources insisted he was about to roll over and implicate others. For some, that betrayal could not be tolerated.
The public's interest in the explosion waned, but as with most scandalous conspiracies, unresolved questions and theories lingered—even after five long years. Who paid to have Jeremy Silverstone killed? And why? What damning evidence did he hold?
Even the location of most of the missing $250 million was a mystery.
To those intimately familiar with Silverstone's life and gruesome death, an additional question—one more sinister in nature—would not fade away entirely: Did he really die that snowy December night in New York City?
Bahamas
Securing the monopod to the thirty-eight-foot fishing boat's port quarter, CIA field operative Kevin Easter removed his straw hat and tucked his long black hair behind his ears. He pressed his right eye to the viewfinder, focused the telephoto lens attached to the Nikon D2X, and surveyed the exotic landscape while recalling some of the more graphic details of Mr. Jeremy Silverstone's staged death.
A warm August breeze gently washed over the palm trees, grass huts, and miles of white sand. A multi-million-dollar Mediterranean-style home—expansive, modern, and very private—stood as a centerpiece to this portion of paradise. A wrought-iron fence ran along the property's perimeter—a perimeter kept secure by two sentries carrying MP7 assault rifles. Though Easter had no intention of breaching the security, he knew there were seventeen cameras, numerous motion detectors, and hundreds of pressure pads and thermo-activated sensors placed in and around the estate. The message to outsiders was loud and clear: You are not welcome here.
All of this information would be in his final report, the one he would hand-deliver to his employer within the next few days.
The background on Silverstone—a manila folder with the title GREENBACK and a red stripe indicating its top-secret classification, along with an encrypted CD—had been given to Easter by Jack Slattery, the deputy director for intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency, six weeks earlier. From all indications, its classified contents neglected very little of the life and purported death of Silverstone, a financial, political, and social icon who'd lived and worked in New York City almost his entire life. Still, finding his latest subject had taken Easter nearly a month, even though a few key CIA analysts already suspected Jeremy Silverstone was indeed a fugitive, living under the radar south of the United States border. An innocent wire transfer—one a Bahamian bank manager had botched—set off an alarm inside the Agency. It had been their first solid starting point in five years.
Click, click, click, click, click. The high-speed shutter softly whirred. It was the second card of images Easter had shot since arriving at Andros, the Bahamas' largest island, one week earlier. Easter, who usually went by the nickname "Hatch," could sense the hunt's conclusion.
In his four years as a CIA field operative, there had been longer searches with more formidable quarry than Silverstone, but those had been political and military adversaries, all foreign and all labeled enemies of the United States. Up until six weeks ago, Hatch had never tracked an American citizen—a job typically left to the FBI.
Hatch was a man of extraordinary talents, with skills acquired from his grandfather, Low Dog, and honed in his youth on a Western New York Indian reservation. The Central Intelligence Agency not only furthered Hatch's education—both formal and nontraditional—but the clandestine organization also brought needed purpose and stability to his life.
What would eventually happen to this particular fugitive, once located, was of little concern to Hatch, but the fact that one of the world's best hunters of men was tracking Silverstone meant that his quarry, in faking his death and stealing nearly a quarter-billion dollars, had exploited the wrong people. A select few, with strong ties to the Thorn administration, wanted closure.
* * *
Sitting in a chaise lounge in the bright Bahamian sun 620 yards from Hatch's chartered fishing boat, Jeremy Silverstone was five years and 4,000 miles from his Manhattan life. The man considered legally dead back in the United States sipped something from a tall blue glass and read a hardcover thriller by Daniel Silva. Much thinner than in the dossier's three color photographs (head shots from his bankrupted company's last financial statement), Silverstone's sun-bleached hair was longer—nearly touching his shoulders. He looked refreshed and content with his change in venue. A multi-million-dollar estate on a private beach in the Bahamas could do that, Hatch thought, as could a pile of stolen money, servants, armed guards, two girlfriends, a new name, expensive toys, and a blank history.
But in today's world, it was nearly impossible to just disappear, especially for someone with expensive tastes and habits.
"Nice tan, Jeremy," Hatch said to himself. Click, click, click, click. "C'mon, how about a close-up of those dentures? Smile."
The evidence of Silverstone's fiery demise had included a few teeth, along with some hair, traces of blood, and fingernails scattered over snow-covered Fifth Avenue.
Click, click, click.
Turning toward the captain, Hatch cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted, "Take us in another fifty meters, Mr. Martinez! Then we'll call it a day."
Tipping his Miami Dolphins cap, the leathery-faced black man, a native of Andros Island, replied in British-accented English, "As you wish, Mr. Hatch, sir."
Hatch brought the Nikon camera around again. "Give me a quarter-billion-dollar smile, Jeremy. Come on." He turned the aperture ring, sharpened the frame, and drew in Silverstone's handsome face. "You are lookin' mighty fine." Click, click, click, click.
Nervously stroking his unshaven face, the captain looked down from the helm. "Ready to move on, Mr. Hatch?"
The CIA field operative peeked at his watch, then back to the man he'd come to depend upon these past few weeks. "How's the fishing around here, Captain?"
An errant gust swept Hatch's fine hair off his tanned face and revealed much of his lineage—soft features with brown oval eyes–and little about his life. He had a slight build, and his baby face, its walnut complexion darkened from his time on Andros, easily concealed the difficulties of his youth on the reservation, one from which he'd successfully distanced himself at Syracuse University. At twenty-five, Kevin Easter had already experienced more life than most people twice his age.
Removing his emerald green and white cap again, the captain dragged his thick fisherman's fingers through his dreadlocks and, for the first time since agreeing to chauffeur this American around Andros, seemed to relax. The grin was genuine. Huge. "I take you to the best of places, Mr. Hatch," he said, turning the boat away from the Silverstone estate and out into the Atlantic. "Blue marlin. It be the perfect fish for a good man like you."
Hatch felt the vibration as the twin Evinrudes throttled up. He looked back to see the private island shrink as they headed out to sea, and wondered, for some inexplicable reason, what would become of this now-resurrected financier who once resided in New York City as a king. Maybe a CIA colleague—whose job it was to take care of messy situations—would call on Jeremy in the very near future. Maybe Mr. Silverstone would be extradited back to the United States, arrested, and tried in a court of law.
"Jeremy," Hatch said quietly, "I suggest you read a little faster."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE SAMARITAN by Stephen Besecker Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Besecker. Excerpted by permission of bancroft press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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