Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

Chayefsky was the rich hedge fund guy who bankrolled Luminous Properties, one such building being the slum where Doyle had almost gotten creamed.

“It was all about what was in the box from the beginning,” Rylan started. “Frickin’ Houdini couldn’t crack that bank’s high-security vault during a burglary, so we had no other choice than to go in during the day. When we tripped the alarms, we only had a few precious minutes, so we had to have you thinking diamonds. That’s why we did those other jobs. We had to establish a pattern.”

“That was a pretty smart head fake,” I said. It worked, after all.

“Yeah, I’m so smart, look where I’m sitting,” Rylan said, rolling his eyes.

“How does a budding young Gordon Gecko know about knocking over jewelry stores?” I said.

“I’ll be straight with you, Detective. Growing up, the closest thing I had to a father was an uncle out in Staten Island who was a nine-to-five real-deal professional thief. I worked for him a few summers, driving up and down the East Coast hitting places. We had this cherry-picker tree-trimming truck that we would use to get onto roofs and cut into joints. Supermarkets, mostly. Pharmacies. I was his apprentice until he died from cancer, and then my mom made me concentrate on school and getting a scholarship.”

“They didn’t mention that in the New York Mag article,” I said.

“Listen, Detective—”

“Call me Mike,” I said, hoping Rylan would feel he could tell me anything.

“Well, Mike, my illustrious Bernie Madoff bio is tabloid bullshit. It wasn’t like that. I was legit. Well, maybe not legit, but I wasn’t doing anything that everyone else wasn’t doing.

“Sure, I was down in the books and shuffling investors’ money out the door, but it was to buy time. You don’t think the big firms do it? Grow up. It’s standard operating procedure. Had the feds come in three days later—three days later—the position I had planned would have made everyone whole again plus ten percent.

“But the market was crashing and the feds needed a quick sacrifice to hide the thumb they perpetually have firmly wedged up their ass, and I didn’t have the political juice to make it not be me.”

I nodded.

“What does that have to do with this bank and Chayefsky?”

“Well, when I got out of prison, I wanted to get my life back, clear my reputation, and get back into the financial industry. I loved being a trader, not just for the Lambos and bimbos, but for the juice. The risk. The daily tightrope walk. The best way I could think to do it was to rejoin the Greenwich Road Rats club I’d started back in oh-six.”

“The Road what?”

“So many financial guys are macho ex-NCAA student athletes who’ve never grown up. Like me. I started out with triathlons. I actually came in fourteenth in the 2003 Ironman and then got heavily into cycling. So I created a club for financial types. Which they reluctantly let me back into when I got out of jail. That’s how I met Chayefsky.”

CHAPTER 102

RYLAN WAS ON A roll now, I sensed. All I had to do was listen.

“Chayefsky was richest guy in the bike club by far,” he continued. “He’s a genius. MIT advanced math degree, got his fingers in the aerospace industry, Silicon Valley, biotech. He made his money off his hedge fund, where he developed this high-frequency trading algorithm that insiders call the crystal ball.

“Some say he cleaned up in the 2010 flash crash and others say he caused it on purpose. His software is a literal printing press. I mean, the man laid his own private transatlantic fiber cable to his offices in London! He also played soccer for MIT and is an incredible athlete. The dude’s a winged demigod.”

“How did you hook up with him, then?”

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t work to get in his good graces. He’d heard I’d doped during the Ironman and wanted to know about it, so I helped him with that. Then I helped him buy some drugs through some of my old Staten Island connections, helped him buy some women.

“Then, after a night of debauchery where he watched me beat the shit out of a Twenty-Third Street club bouncer who’d mouthed off to him, he approached me to help him with a problem he had. One that if I helped him fix, he would set me up with a desk on his fund. We’re talking two and a half billion in assets. He was offering me an opportunity to make my life whole again, a seat back at the table.”

“What was the catch?”

“Someone was blackmailing him,” Rylan said. “He told me someone had a video of him having sex with a girl who wasn’t his wife. That it was the daughter of a colleague, and she was apparently seventeen at the time, so he was looking at a lot of trouble at his office, plus a rape case, and an extremely messy divorce all wrapped up into one. He couldn’t have it coming out, and he was willing to pay to make sure it did not. The guy who was using it was hammering the shit out of him for millions.”

Rylan closed his eyes and balled his fists.

“But I saw the video, Mike. It was on a phone that I took from the vault. It’s not what he said…My God…”

His whole body started trembling. He grasped his skull in his hands.

“Why did I watch it? He told me to hand it over. Shit, why did I do any of this?”