Long Way Down

ALSO BY MICHAEL SEARS

Mortal Bonds

Black Fridays

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

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Copyright © 2014 by Michael Sears

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sears, Michael, date.

Long way down / Michael Sears.

p. cm.—(A Jason Stafford novel ; 3)

ISBN 978-0-698-13629-8

1. Finance—Corrupt practices—Fiction. 2. Wall Street (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.E2565L66 2014 2014008970

813'.6—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For MLW

T
he banker was not so much a traditionalist as he was simply a man who, somewhat lacking in creativity or imagination, greatly enjoyed the comforts of consistency in his habits. When he drank scotch, he took no water, soda, or ice, never pouring more than two fingers into a wide-mouthed, heavy-bottomed glass tumbler. When he snorted cocaine, he always rolled a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill into a tube and used the same pearl-handled miniature pocketknife to form the unvarying inch-long lines of the drug.

That night he had many crisp one-hundred-dollar bills to choose from. Five hundred of them. Five packets of a hundred each. Though they would easily have fit in a large envelope, or even the pockets of his suit jacket, they had been delivered in a small plastic attaché case. He removed them and stacked them on the glass coffee table. The briefcase went by the door so that he would remember to put it out with the garbage when he left for the office in the morning.

The Glenlivet 18 was running low. He thought he would finish the bottle that night. He wrote a note to remind himself to have a
case delivered the next day. He was not an alcoholic—he rarely had more than two or three drinks in an evening—but he had a dread of running out and not being able to sleep. It was difficult to fall asleep alone. Ever since Agathe had taken the children and escaped back to his mother’s house in Cornwall, he had begun to have problems sleeping. The big apartment, taking up the top two floors of the building, with views of Hamilton Harbour, the islands, and Great Sound beyond, felt both much too large and uncomfortably small. The humming of the electric clock in the kitchen could be heard in every room on the first floor. The electronic click of the American refrigerator—the one thing that Agathe probably regretted leaving behind—when the circulating motor turned on, could be deafening in the vast lonely emptiness of three a.m.

The suspicion that fifty thousand dollars was too much—too big a bribe for the favor he had performed—nagged at him again. He sipped the whiskey, surprised as he always was by the strength of the peat in the long finish. There was so little in the nose, on the lip, but so much remained long after the swallow.

He had facilitated opening an account without checking the man’s identification. The man’s name was unknown to him, though the name on the account was not. He had seen that name on the pages of the
Financial Times
often enough. Questions as to why such a man would want to open an account at such a small private bank had been quashed by the first utterance of the man with the cold gray eyes across the desk. He was being paid not to ask.

Tomorrow he would write down all of the particulars—everything he remembered about the man, the words he spoke, the details of the transaction—and send the document to his uncle, a London barrister, to hold “in the event of my early demise.” Then he would forget about it all and enjoy the thought of fifty thousand dollars—invisible to the tax authority, to Agathe and her solicitor, and even to his grabbing bitch of a mother, whom he had been
supporting ever since his father’s death a decade ago and who repaid his kindness, generosity, and filial duty by siding with Agathe in this latest episode of the guerrilla warfare that passed for their marriage, now halfway through its second decade of insult, degradation, and remorse.

He took the little polythene baggie from his pocket and shook it, admiring the mound of white powder. The American had offered a gram or two along with the cash, but the banker had insisted upon a full ounce. His business was negotiation; he never took the first offer. An almost iridescent light reflected off the rocks and shards of the coke. It appeared to be quite pure. Even at his current rate of consumption, an ounce of uncut cocaine would last him a month or more. Weeks of not having to speak to the acned social misfit in client accounting, who regularly supplied the banker and his colleagues with the crystalline spice that made life in the stultifying environment of Bermuda banking bearable.

The little knife made a grating sound as he chopped the larger crystals into a fine powder. The consistency of the cocaine was slightly different than he was used to—flakier, he thought—a factor that he attributed to the described purity of the drug.

The banker broke the wrapper on a packet of hundreds, removed the top bill, and rolled it into a short tube. He preferred using American currency; it seemed appropriate, as the price of cocaine was, like petroleum or gold, universally quoted in U.S. dollars. The conversion factor for British pounds was something he knew much about, as the most updated number flashed on his Bloomberg Terminal all day long. Every transaction he engaged in for his clients—from purchasing German stocks priced in euros to South African real estate trusts offered in rands—he thought of in terms of pounds, making the conversion automatically and effortlessly. It was what his clients wanted. But whenever he thought of cocaine, and he thought of it often, he thought in terms of dollars. And with only a
modest bit of self-discipline, he now had enough dollars to keep himself supplied for years.

He snorted the first line. The freeze hit immediately and he felt the left side of his face begin to numb. The cocaine was very good, possibly the best he had ever had. The big American with the odd request had outdone himself. The second line went up his right nostril, producing a similar glow and restoring his symmetry. He moistened the tip of his index finger and wiped up the remaining dust where the two lines had lain. He gently rubbed it across his gums and felt the cold numbness penetrate. Very good cocaine.

He put his head back and waited for the rush. A moment later, his eyes closed. He sat up abruptly. That was the strangest reaction he had ever had to the drug. He felt good, warm and safe, languid, and at the same time sexually aroused. His whole body had become a single erogenous zone. A momentary flash of paranoia tripped through his numbed consciousness. This was very unusual. But the thought was gone before it had fully taken shape. The soaring euphoria erased all fears. He may have been a very small god, even a lonely one, the ruler of a small bit of couch in an empty apartment, but he was still a god. He took a breath. He was suddenly very aware of his breathing, not that it took effort exactly, because he was all-powerful on this couch and effort had become a meaningless concept, as though the very air had become irrelevant.

The cocaine dripped from his sinuses down to the back of his throat, coating, soothing, numbing. He lost all sense of taste; his sense of smell was already gone. His fingers seemed to be a long distance away. They were clumsy and thick and wooden. He forced them to pick up the paper tube and they answered slowly and reluctantly. He leaned over and snorted up the two remaining lines and felt the top of his head lift off. His eyes bulged, and he exhaled in a hoarse rasp, unable anymore to control even his vocal cords.

The hundred-dollar bill dropped from his fingers and slowly
unraveled on the glass table. He stared at it, trying to think of why such a small piece of paper had any importance in his life, but his eyes closed and he forgot about it. He kept sinking. It was a long way down. Already half-dreaming, he took one last gasping breath. His heart continued to beat for a short while before it too gave up and surrendered.