"Despite the fact that he was home free if he just continued on that night with his original plan, and despite the certainty of more pain and the possibility of death-certain death if Feather had glimpsed his face before he'd knocked her out-Sinclair headed back to his cell and chained himself up again, just to buy time in order to try to rescue the Russian dissident and his wife.
"Well, he pulled it off, obviously-and the second time he escaped from his cell, he did it with Feather's help. He killed every torturer on that island, freed the prisoners, escaped from the island in a Russian helicopter with the pearls, prisoners, and Krowl's records. He turned the prisoners and half the pearls over to Gerard Patreaux, who was waiting on a hospital ship at a prearranged site off the Chilean coast. Sinclair had saved the lives of all those people, and he had swelled the coffers of Amnesty International by a hefty amount, and all he asked in return was that the people involved not reveal what had happened, not talk about him or what he had done. End of story."
"Maybe a ninja bullshit story," Garth said, and from his terse, dismissive tone of voice I could tell that was exactly what he considered it.
"Maybe," Veil replied easily. "But I've seen the scars left on Feather's body by Somoza's torturers, and those were not part of any fairy tale. Neither was her love for, and total devotion to, Chant Sinclair. Somehow, he managed to heal her soul. Whether that story is true or not, he was a tough act to follow. I loved her, and she at least seemed content to be with me, but my knowing that I was constantly being compared with him is the reason Feather and I are no longer together."
I looked at Harper, who had grown very pale, and said, "That certainly doesn't sound like a man who would sanction random killings, or torture to death a bunch of servants."
Veil slowly turned his coffee cup in its saucer. "I don't believe he did either of those things. The gunman at the hotel was an Asian, and Sinclair always works alone. And he couldn't have kidnapped Neuberger and killed his servants if he's still running around here in Switzerland."
Garth made a derisive gesture with his hand and started to say something, but Veil cut him off. "Extreme violence is certainly Sinclair's signature," he said, speaking directly to my brother, "but I suggest there's more to that signature if you closely examine his behavior and past record." He paused, looked at Harper and me, continued, "Discounting, for the moment, all of the incidents connected with this Cornucopia business, consider who all his victims have been. In every case I've ever read about, his victims were scum of the earth, people whom everyone at this table would agree got what they deserved. Check it out; I have. Sinclair scams corrupt, criminal people and outfits-child pornography rings, drug cartels, terrorist networks, the Mafia, rogue government operations. To a man, the people he's killed have been killers themselves, like the good doctor on Torture Island. He may be a butcher, but his victims have butchered tens, hundreds, even thousands, of innocent people. I read of one incident where his victim was the owner of a Dutch pharmaceutical concern. What Sinclair did to the man and his colleagues got all the headlines, but when you got down to the fine print at the back of the better newspapers, you found out that this man had decided to increase his company's profits a bit by watering down all the medicines he had contracted to deliver to an African nation where a plague was raging. The medicines were worse than useless, because the doctors who prescribed them, and the people who took them, had every reason to believe they would work and that there was no reason to take any further medical action. Before Sinclair exposed the wholesale adulteration scheme, hundreds of men, women, and children had died of disease. These are people who might have lived if the medication they had been given had been the proper dosage."
"How did John Sinclair kill the man?" Harper asked quietly.
Veil smiled grimly. "By forcing him to drink a glass of water contaminated with a heavy concentration of a certain type of microscopic worm that eats its way along the optic nerve into the brain. There is no cure. It was a cruel act, to be sure, but I suggest there was more than a trace of poetic justice to it. Other cases fit the same pattern-victims deserving what they get. It's another reason, Mongo, why I-and presumably Mr. Lippitt- tried to warn you off this one. If Sinclair had targeted Cornucopia for one of his scams, I considered the chances very good that Cornucopia was something more than the paradigm of philanthropic benevolence you obviously believed it to be."
"Well," I said with a small sigh, "I think even the village idiot in our midst can now begin to figure that one out. Assuming Cornucopia distributes any funds at all to the causes it claims to support, which I think it unquestionably does, its primary function has always been to serve as a vast money-laundering operation. Duane Insolers told me money has been continuously siphoned off from the foundation since its inception decades ago, and I have to assume he knows what he's talking about. Neuberger's grandfather set up Cornucopia, but only after he had already made a fortune legitimately. He didn't need to set up any criminal operation, because he certainly didn't need the money."
"Greedy people never have enough money," Harper said.
"You've got that right. But even if the elder Neuberger was the biggest crook who ever lived, I just don't believe Emmet P. Neuberger has the necessities, as it were, to run a big criminal organization. He certainly knows everything that's going on in Cornucopia, but as an administrator I see him straining his talents to the limit just to be a figurehead for the family foundation. You agree, Garth?"
"Yes," my brother replied simply. He appeared thoughtful, and had obviously been thinking about what I said. "The money-laundering operation exists for a person, or persons, unknown. It's probably some crime cartel that's been around for a long time, and that may have bankrolled the grandfather, and performed other services, while he was amassing his otherwise legitimate fortune."
Veil had been listening intently, but also tapping his fingers impatiently on the tabletop. Now he said, "Let's shift the focus back to Sinclair, because he's the puzzle we have to solve. The point I was trying to make is that Cornucopia, it now seems evident, is typical of the kind of organization Sinclair targets. It's corrupt at its core, and that's what made it vulnerable. Torturing to death Neuberger's servants? Yes, he's a killer, and he takes no prisoners, but, again, he's never done anything like that to anyone who wasn't richly deserving of his attention-not to my knowledge anyway."
I grunted, said only half jokingly: "That could serve as a description of both you and big brother here. I'm thinking the three of you might actually get along just fine."
Veil laughed, but quickly turned serious again. "The shooting at the hotel, the murders of the Interpol people and others, appear atypical of Sinclair's usual M.O. I say Sinclair has demonstrated a streak of altruism, although, for some reason, he goes to considerable lengths to disguise it. Consider the story about Torture Island: He got what he ostensibly went there for-revenge and a fortune in black pearls. And he'd already suffered considerably for his troubles. Feather told me what she'd done to him. He could have been out of there in twenty-four hours. He certainly didn't have to subject himself to three more days of torment just on the chance he might be able to rescue the Russian couple; he didn't have to concern himself with any of the other prisoners. He spared the life of his chief tormentor, Feather, because she had once been a torture victim herself. Finally, he certainly didn't have to turn over half the treasure he'd gained with his blood to Amnesty International."