Chapter 8 - The Scheme
Raymond recovered his composure with a speed that frightened me almost as much as anything else, and moved to block the door, and sat down in a chair, and tried — actually tried — to negotiate with me, as though I were a difficult clause in one of his contracts.
And in his cold, businesslike explanation, the true shape of it finally came clear, and it was not, in the end, only the horror I had imagined in that room.
It was a business.
A major real estate development in the city was stalled, he explained, because certain landowners would not sign, and certain investors needed guarantees.
And for years, Raymond and his associates had solved such problems the same way: they identified a person who stood in the way of a lucrative deal, arranged an intimate dinner, drugged them, manufactured compromising material, and used it to force signatures — the transfer of land rights, the approval of sales to shell companies at a fraction of their worth.
It was extortion, industrialized, run out of a beautiful house in the hills over ribeye steak.
And I, it turned out, was not a random victim.
I was a key.
Through my work as a senior auditor, I had — without knowing what I was looking at — reviewed corporate documents tied to the shell companies behind this very development, and they needed my professional signature to validate a set of fraudulent property transfers.
The whole four-month campaign against me had a single, cold, commercial purpose: to break me, and frighten me, and compromise me, until I signed.
“Just sign the paperwork,” Raymond said, “and this ends.
Forty million in a private trust.
Two condos in San Diego, in your name and Christopher’s.” He believed, to the end, that there was a number large enough to buy what he had tried to take from me.
May you like
There was not.
There never could have been.
