Cut to the Chase

About the Book

Intrigue, politics, even assassination marks rival quests for an offshore fortune in cash

When mercenaries from the 1980s Nicaraguan contra war team up with a Latino ex-dictator to beat back Uncle Sam's efforts at restitution of $60 million-plus stolen and secreted away by a banker in numbered offshore accounts, things get nasty quickly.

What makes everybody desperate is that, although the Government imprisoned the banker for his crime three years earlier, now, in July 1993, he's due for early release and, once sprung, will obviously shuffle the cached cash around the world so lightning-fast and launder it so legal-looking that nobody will ever get near it again, let alone see any of it.

But the Contra War gang is taking no bets on his getting away scot-free. Once he's free they'll grab him for ransom—and torture—if need be. And he knows it. The only one who doesn't know it is Megan Reuben, an investigator who works for the private investigation firm hired by the Government to find and freeze the cash for restitution to the U.S. Treasury. Though at first Megan doesn't even know of the existence of her dangerous rivals for the cash, they know about her mission, and set about sabotaging it.

Megan is a hotshot office-bound investigator who leans heavily on the Internet, the World Wide Web, and little-known databases, but augments those measures with lots of telephone detectiving, the occasional sting or pretext or other quasi-legal caper to capture the elusive facts, cash, tangible assets, or concealed illegalities or revealing dirt about her targets for paying clients.

But this case is different. It takes her outside the office and into a world of global play-for-keeps money game players, dangerous people, men and women willing to kill when the stakes skyrocket up into the tens of millions of dollars.

Her first field operation is to Allenwood Federal Penitentiary where the banker is still serving his time. She succeeds brilliantly at a confidence game that suckers in the banker's girlfriend, a stunt that rewards her with solid leads to the whereabouts of a couple of chunks of the hidden hoard. Emboldened by that success, she flies to the British West Indies, where she's located one of the banker's secret accounts, but runs up against scarcely concealed collusion between old CIA-hands and the British colonial establishment protecting the island's immensely profitable secret banking system. From there she flies to Panama, where she falls into harm's way more than once in pursuit of the money. There, all the way from the Canal at sea level to a death-squad training camp a mile high in the cordillera that runs along the north coast of the isthmus, Megan Reuben is thrown against dangerous players-for-keeps.

But it is when she returns to Manhattan that her life falls into greater harm's way--plus more complications: her sex life becomes intertwined with the all-enveloping case in unexpected ways. Then politics enters the case, taking her to the White House just when newly-elected President Bill Clinton is reeling from the first of the several scandals of his first administration.

What intrigues Megan from the start of the case is the mystery of what made this banker, already a millionaire many times over, steal his depositors' money not once, but twice. That question plus whether or not the gang grabs the $60 million as against Megan's recovering it for Uncle Sam's Treasury doesn't play out till the very last page.

About the Author

The author, S. Norinsky, has been a writer all his life. After three years of Air Force service and a B.A. at N.Y.U., he entered the technical writing field, then went to ad copyriting, industrial films, journalism, and fiction. He lives with his artist wife, Lynne Friedman, in Sunnyside Gardens, New York.