Fiduciary Duty

Fiduciary Duty

by

Tim Michaels

Copyright © 2013 Tim Michaels

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction, and all characters and incidents depicted in it are purely the result of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely co-incidental.

“Perchè si ha a notare, che gli uomini si debbono o vezzeggiare o spegnere, perchè si vendicano delle leggieri offese; delle gravi non possono: sicchè l’offesa che si fa all’uomo, deve essere in modo, che ella non tema la vendetta.”

—Niccolo Machiavelli, Il Principe

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Sir John Dalberg-Acton, Letter to Mandell Creighton

Prologue

“This isn’t about revenge,” said the driver, emphatically.

A small automatic with a silencer lay in the seat next to him. Behind him, on the floor of the nondescript blue gray van was a well dressed older man. The older man was handcuffed, gagged and bleeding freely from a bullet-hole in his thigh. He was unconscious.

“This isn’t about revenge,” repeated the driver.

It was a beautiful summer morning in Northeast Ohio.

Part 1. The Prince

Chapter 1. Ashes

I started with the Saudi Prince. You know the one – the fourth wealthiest man in the world. Or the seventeenth. Or the thirtieth. It changed from year to the year, and according to who did the counting. Given the Prince’s immense wealth, it was surprising that he wasn’t in the line of succession to be King. Well, technically he was, but thirty six of his male brothers, cousins, and uncles would have to die for him to take the crown or whatever it is the king gets to wear in Saudi Arabia.

There were people who bore more responsibility – the Prince was only eighth on my list, after all. But logic dictated he would be the hardest target, and he’d be harder still if he had any warning at all. The only way to ensure he’d have no warning was if he came first. But how do you kill a Saudi Prince who also happens to be one of the richest men in the world?

Frankly, I had no idea. James Bond would have broken into one of his villas or strangled him on one of his planes. I’m in very good shape, at least for a forty-two year old with persistent lower back pains, but I’m no superhero. Besides, as I quickly learned, just knowing where the Prince was going to be on any given day and time was a difficult challenge, let alone getting close to him.

I started doing some research. I read everything about him I could find. I learned he had gone to high school in Geneva and college at the University of Bern. He also had two wives. The older one apparently had disappeared from view a while ago. Even in this internet age I couldn’t find a single picture of her. So it wasn’t just my family that was disposable. His own family was too.

The younger wife was gorgeous in a high-maintenance lots-of-makeup way. She was thirty-two, a former model, and she seemed to accompany the Prince everywhere he made a public appearance outside Saudi Arabia. From the gleam in her eyes in the pictures I saw, it was clear that she loved attention and accolades as much as the Prince did. I wondered if she ever thought about where she’d be when the Prince picked wife number three.

The Prince had two children, both by the first wife, and both were grown and married. His son supposedly lived in Geneva, or maybe Moscow, and his daughter in Antwerp, but with the sort of jet-setting both did, place of residence meant nothing. The Prince also had three grandchildren, all of them less than ten years old. A Fortune Magazine spread showed the Prince and wife number two stiffly playing with the grandchildren in what looked to be a bedroom the size of a warehouse.

The precise origin of the Prince’s wealth, at least the part of it that was extraordinary by the standards of Saudi society, was nebulous. Some of it came from influence peddling. His father had been in charge of granting import and export licenses for agricultural products into the Kingdom. The Prince took over that function from his father when he was in his twenties. Along the way the Prince apparently discovered that people could be charged for the privilege of expediting a process that would otherwise take a year, or could be made to take a year – or forever, for that matter.

But apparently even large-scale bribery did not explain everything. In the late 1990’s a German newspaper published a story noting that the returns on investments made by the Prince were fairly paltry and were easily eclipsed by his yearly spending. Despite that, the newspaper noted, his wealth seemed to increase at a fairly rapid clip. The story went on to speculate that the Prince was primarily a front man for some of the top tier members of the Saudi royal family. Ironically, that article itself would enhance the Prince’s wealth as he successfully sued the newspaper for libel and the judgment put the newspaper out of business.

What vices the Prince had were impossible to discover from what I could find on the internet. Reading between the lines, I got the impression he was simultaneously ruthless and soft. He liked having people grovel before him, but he had probably never so much as picked up his own suitcase. That type of personality generated a lot of enemies, and the Prince had survived two assassination attempts. As a result, he had a lot of bodyguards. Even an amateur like me could spot them. Just in the hundred or so pictures I had printed out, there were at least ten recurring faces, big men with no-nonsense attitudes hovering around in the background.

The Prince also didn’t seem to have any obvious schedule that exposed him to the public. A man in his position doesn’t just commute to the office every day; the office commutes to wherever he happens to be. He tended to show up at a lot of high-profile events, but that wasn’t any help. An ordinary guy like me isn’t going to be informed ahead of time of a meeting between the Prince and the Canadian Prime Minister, or that the Prince is going to the Cannes Film Festival. Besides, taking out the Prince at events like that would require dealing not just with the Prince’s formidable team, but with many additional layers of security as well.

So finding out where the Prince was going to be long enough ahead to find a way to kill him would need to be a priority. At first I considered finding ways to manipulate his schedule. For instance, everyone attends the funeral of their loved ones. And considering what happened to me, by rights I should have killed a wife and a child. On the other hand, I only had one wife and one child, and he had several of each. Did an eye for an eye justify killing a family for a family? Did he even care about his family the way I loved my dead wife and son? I realized it didn’t matter. Killing his family members and leaving him alive might square things between him and me, but I wasn’t the Prince. I wasn’t ruthless. I wasn’t prepared to kill the innocent.

A bit more searching provided the solution. Although the Prince tended to avoid investing in real estate, he made an exception for trophies, particularly big name hotels and buildings. He especially loved once-storied properties that had deteriorated. He would buy them and restore them to their former glory and beyond. After buying the historic Blue Heron hotel in New York, he reportedly spent $100 million in renovations. Photos from the grand reopening show the Prince and wife number two standing between the two former Presidents Bush and their spouses. He reportedly spent twice that renovating the Savoie Au Lac in London. Pictures from that event showed the Prince and wife number two with Prince Charles. The Prince, the Saudi one, looked uncomfortable at that event, perhaps because Charles’ suit was cut noticeably better than his.

But there were also many quirky choices, such as the compound of a former cocaine dealer in Cartagena, complete with a miniature zoo. Among these lesser properties there were quite a few that had some connection to the supernatural or to violence. There was a reportedly haunted house outside of Innsbruck, Austria, an abandoned animist temple in the outskirts of Addis Ababa, and an 8,000 square foot beachfront home just south of Carpinteria, California, where, in 1954 police had broken up a Satanist cult. All told, I tracked down fourteen such “lesser” properties throughout the globe, and no doubt there were plenty more. Each of these properties was renovated and made into either a hotel, a restaurant, or, in the case of a long-ago shuttered training camp for the PLO a couple hours from Tunis, a resort.

The latest odd acquisition by the Prince’s holding company, the Royal Saudi Golden Desert Hawk-Fortress Investment Company, or GDH Fortress for short, was in Ternos, a coastal resort town about three hours from São Paulo, Brazil. And the property, the so-called Castelo Torrimpietra, was, from the pictures I had seen, a visual masterpiece. It sat on hill overlooking the waterfront and was shaped like a 17th century galleon crashing out of the stone walls of a 14th century castle. A headless angel stood at the prow, leaning forward. Since the castle’s construction, the town had grown up around it, and the building was now hemmed in by condos. If anything, that made it an even stranger sight.

Castelo Torrimpietra was built by Antonio Torrimpietra, an Italian immigrant and architect who styled himself an alchemist and necromancer in the 1920s. A few years after the castle was completed Torrimpietra held a banquet for the town worthies. At precisely midnight, in front of a room full of prominent locals, Torrimpietra simply disappeared. No smoke, no mirrors. Witnesses claimed he was seated in his customary chair, more of a throne really, and all of a sudden, he was no longer there. As per a document signed and witnessed several hours before his disappearance, the castle was turned over to the city. The city auctioned it off but it didn’t make much money, probably because of an odd provision formalized in the property title: anyone who bought the home agreed to return it to Torrimpietra for the nominal sum of three gold coins upon his return, which would happen at midnight on an unstated anniversary of his disappearance.

Local press indicated Castelo Torrimpietra was last bought for about 4.2 million dollars, perhaps twice what it was worth, and that an additional five million dollars was being spent making it into a restaurant and conference center. The grand opening was to be five weeks away, in late November. On a Monday at midnight. On the 85th anniversary of Torrimpietra’s disappearance. Given what he was spending on the property, it was clear the Prince was not expecting Torrimpietra back any time soon.

This had the potential to be a lucky break for me. While I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, thanks to a State Department dad, I grew up in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the capitals of Argentina and Uruguay, respectively. I had been to Brazil many times, mostly Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro. I hated Brasilia, the capital, but I loved Rio. And though I was great with languages, by some quirk when I spoke Portuguese, I always ended up sounding like a Caipira, a.k.a. a central Brazilian hillbilly. It had been great for laughs when I was a kid, but I was certain I could resurrect that accent and use it again if I needed it.

I had never been to Ternos, the town where the Castle was located. But from what I could tell from the internet, Ternos was similar to any number of small beach towns in Brazil, and I knew the type of place well. It would be easy to blend in and pass unnoticed, either as an American tourist or rural visitor there to see the ocean. But would the Prince be there? He often wasn’t mentioned in press clippings about the openings of second – tier properties and Castelo Torrimpietra was definitely second tier by his standards. Worse, Ternos is pretty far off the beaten track.

At first I thought this was just another dead end. The too-familiar depression, kept at bay while doing my research, came rushing back. I realized with a start what that meant – for a little bit of time, I had had a purpose, and that had pushed the darkness away. With that realization, came another – I had to start thinking like my prey. And for my prey, a guy with his own luxury version of a navy and air force, Ternos is an easy trip from anywhere in South America. So that left the question: was there anything that would bring the Prince to South America around the date of the castle’s reopening? I went back and checked the date of the Castelo Torrimpietra’s grand opening. It was definitely on a Monday.

A Monday at midnight was an odd time and day to have a grand reopening, but the date was dictated by Torrimpietra’s disappearance. That still didn’t tell me whether the Prince would be there. I started digging around, trying to find whether there were other reasons the Prince might be in the area at about the same time. After a little more digging I found one of those engagements: the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Brazil, the final race of the Formula 1 season, was going to be held at the Interlagos track in São Paulo on Sunday, two days before the opening of the castle. The Prince was known for his love of racing. He had purchased numerous racehorses, and in recent years, a NASCAR team. In the last few months, rumors had started circulating that he was in the market for a Formula 1 team. All that made it very likely he would be at the Brazilian Grand Prix on Sunday, which in turn meant he would probably be at Torrimpietra Castle on Monday at midnight. That was enough for me to get started.

And then the depression hit again. I realized I might have just created another problem for myself. I had just spent three hours creating electronic tracks. If the Prince happened to die in Torrimpietra Castle on a Monday at midnight in late November, those electronic tracks would be of interest to people investigating his death. My internet provider had records of the search, and for all I knew, copies were stored with agencies such as the NSA. How long those tracks would be stored, and where, I had no idea. I did know that as prominent as the Prince was, any law enforcement agencies investigating his death weren’t going to leave any stones unturned. So if I couldn’t erase the tracks I had left, I needed to make them irrelevant.

I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. I thought about an episode in my life a long time ago, when I was in my twenties. I had bought a third-hand twenty-year-old BMW and spent a fair amount of time lovingly restoring it to showroom condition. The car was my pride and joy. About the time I finished restoring the car, I moved to the Bay Area. Since it was virgin territory for me, I used to enjoy driving around to just to soak up the scenery. One Saturday I was cruising at about 70 MPH along the 580 freeway in the East Bay, somewhere near Berkeley, when I spotted a tie-up up ahead. There was a complete standstill in front of me. I stepped on the brakes, and at that precise moment learned something important: my brakes didn’t work! I started frantically downshifting, but it was clear I wasn’t going to reduce my speed to zero before running into the wall of cars stopped ahead.

I did the only thing I could. I accelerated to get around the cars next to me, and then went careening along the embankment. Half on dirt and half on asphalt, I sped past the congestion and the accident that had caused it. I remember a few people flipping me the bird as I went by. I always wondered about that – couldn’t they tell by the expression on my face that I wasn’t exactly happy about my situation either?

Regardless, what I learned that day was that sometimes the only way to avoid slamming into walls ahead of you is to step on the gas. And that’s what I was going to have to do about my search. I spent the next few hours muddying the waters by doing the same thorough search I did for the Prince on a number of other well-known individuals: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, and, for good measure, Jon Stewart. I then sent each one an unsolicited job application for a position as their personal assistant. Not surprisingly, I never heard back from any of them. But if a neural net or two somewhere in the greater Washington DC area ever zeroed in on my search of the Prince, it would also conclude the search was innocuous. Gates, Buffett, Slim and Stewart were not on my list, after all.