Promise Not To Tell(99)

“What?” Cabot asked.

“We’ve assumed that if Zane is still out there, he’s been living as an expat in various foreign locations,” Jack said.

“So?” Max prompted.

“I think there’s a very real possibility that the failure of his son and daughter will draw him out of hiding.”

“Because he wants revenge for the death of his son and the fact that his daughter is going to prison?” Cabot asked.

“Quinton Zane isn’t capable of caring enough about anyone, including his own offspring, to risk his neck in an effort to exact revenge,” Jack said. “No, if this situation brings him back to the U.S., it will be because he’s concluded that the catastrophic results of Fleming and Delbridge’s project reflect badly on him. Make him look weak.”

“Huh,” Max said. “Some kind of twisted view of the supposed superiority of his personal gene pool?”

“Hard to say exactly how he’ll rationalize it,” Jack said. “But if he’s out there, I think he will be looking for a way to prove to us and to himself that he really is the smartest, most powerful guy in the room.”

“To do that, he’ll have to destroy us,” Max said.

“Yes,” Jack said. “What’s more, he’ll try to do it with fire.”

Cabot remembered Virginia’s words.

“It’s Zane’s signature,” he said.

CHAPTER 74

It was time to go home.

The man who had once been Quinton Zane stood on the pristine white sand beach and contemplated the foaming waves of the turquoise-blue sea. By any measure his new life was perfect, but in the past few years he had been forced to accept the bitter truth – perfection inevitably induced boredom.

Twenty-two years ago he had pulled off the perfect escape. Officially he had been lost at sea in a fire that had consumed the stolen yacht.

Back at the start he had na?vely assumed that he would soon be able to return to the States under a new identity. After all, the fire at the compound had been investigated by a small-town police chief with few resources. He had failed to anticipate that Anson Salinas would not accept the lost-at-sea verdict.

It had come as a shock to discover that Salinas had quietly kept the case open. Still, there was little that Salinas could do under the circumstances. He was, after all, just a small-town cop – not exactly the FBI.

Salinas had never been a serious threat, Zane thought. And the press had soon grown tired of the story of a crazed cult leader who had torched his own compound and died in a fire at sea.

After a few years had passed, he had judged it safe to slip back into the country. He had been careful, sticking to the East Coast. There was so much money sloshing around New York.

He had set up a very successful hedge fund operation that was basically a pyramid scheme before drawing the attention of the SEC. He had not been overly concerned at first. He could have handled the feds. But there was the uncomfortable possibility that a serious investigation might lead to questions about his past. He could not risk being exposed as Quinton Zane.

He had been forced to slip out of the country one step ahead of the SEC. He had reinvented himself again in Europe.

It wasn’t as if he did not have a very nice life as an expat. He had made a lot of money running various operations in Europe and Asia. The explosion of the Internet had brought with it unlimited financial opportunities.

He had a pied-à-terre on the Amalfi Coast, an apartment in Paris and a town house in London. His clothes were bespoke and his wines were the best. He slept with very expensive, very beautiful women. Currently his headquarters were the exclusive private island where he now stood contemplating his utterly predictable, utterly boring life.

He had expected to be able to return to the U.S. again long before now. The SEC threat had faded but, as the years passed, it had become crystal clear that he had a new problem – three of them to be exact. The boys who Salinas had fostered after their mothers died in the compound fire had come of age, and it was soon obvious that they did not believe the yacht-fire story, either.

What was far more worrisome was that all three had pursued careers linked to law enforcement. At first he assumed it was because they had been raised by an old-school lawman and had followed in Salinas’s footsteps because they lacked the imagination to do anything else.

But each of the three had started searching for him online before they even graduated from high school. They had continued to watch for him even as they took up their careers. He had been forced to acknowledge the truth. None of them would let the past stay buried.

For years he had told himself that it did not matter that he could not return to the United States. He had been occupied with building a fortune abroad and living his glittering dream life. But all the while the rage and the frustration had burned deep within him.

He needed a strategy. He also required some pawns who could be sacrificed. That was the easy part. He had a talent for manipulating people, a gift for playing to their fantasies. The hard part was controlling them in such a way that he did not put himself at risk.

He turned away from the postcard-perfect view and walked back to the elegant white villa. He crossed the tiled floor, went into the room he used as his office and fired up the computer.

The latest news from Seattle was disappointing. He had watched the entire project from his secure island hideaway with the detached curiosity of a lab researcher observing the outcome of an experiment.