Lunar Descent Read online

  The wind picked up a little just then. Listening to its forceful shush as it moved down’ the long, meandering canyon, he opened his eyes to gaze upwards. The rain clouds were moving away, ghostly blue-black forms racing across the pale moonlight. The clouds parted for a moment, exposing the cool distant beauty of the first-quarter moon: a toenail in the sky, shining down across two hundred and fifty thousand miles of space.

  He knew it well. Even in those few instants, he could pick up the thin wedge of the highlands west of the Sea of Tranquillity. I’m still here, it said to Lester. You can’t get rid of me that easily, can you? We’ve left some things unsaid, you and I, and I don’t accept collect calls. Come back, and we’ll talk to the night together.…

  In another moment, the clouds had moved in front of the Moon again. Yet the pay phone was still ringing; the operator was demanding more money for an unfinished call. Sure, Lester thought, you can hang up and walk away, sneering as the phone company gets stiffed for a few quarters … but don’t you wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if AT&T has purchased your soul for eighty-five cents?

  Neck sore and aching, he looked back down at the gravel parking lot and the camp store. Hey, we’ve got four acres of mud here at Lester’s, just the place to park the car and pitch the tent. We’ve got ice for your cold beer, and good food if you don’t mind cellophane-wrapped sandwiches which were made three weeks ago in New Jersey. There’s a shelf full of worthless ceramic bullshit, a charger for your car battery, which works some of the time, and a wooden outhouse which smells as if Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys were the first ones to take a dump there. And if you put all this crap together and shut your eyes, you might even begin to imagine that you’re having a real wilderness experience.…

  Unless, of course, you’ve really been in the wilderness. Such as having walked on the Moon. Once you’ve been there, the frontier never lets you go. You’ll never be the same again.

  We need a ramrod up there, Moss had said. Someone with experience, because we don’t have time to train a new general manager. Someone who can work with the guys who survived the purge, get ’em to toe the line and work like mules. I don’t care what I said before, it’s a job for a real son of a bitch, but it’s gotta be one who can do it without himself getting chucked out the airlock. Not only that, but we’re sending fifty-six new guys up there to replace the ones we pink-slipped. Some of ’em are fresh out of the simulators and don’t know shit about what it’s really like up there. You did the job before. You even did it well before you fucked up. I’m betting my own ass that you won’t screw up. It’s only for a year, for chrissakes. We’ll even manage the campground for you while you’re away and you can have it back when you return … we’ll put it in the contract. So what do you say, Les?

  I should have told him to take a flying fuck, Lester thought. I should have kicked his conniving butt out into the highway, right in front of the next sixteen-wheeler highballing down from Maine. Jesus, I should have just said no to the bastard.…

  He stood in the middle of his gravel lot and gazed at his store. At thirty-nine, he was no longer young, but he still had much of his youth. The years hadn’t really touched him yet; there was only a little gray in his hair, and he had whittled away his beer gut when he had stopped drinking and drugging. But inside the store, he saw an old man hanging around the wood stove, sitting in a rocker beneath pictures of friends long since vanished, taken in a place a quarter of a million miles away and getting further every day. Old, gray, and bitter: hobbling out to stick a charge cable in someone else’s fast car, selling Twinkies to runny-nosed kids, giving directions to Mt. Washington or the Old Man of the Mountains to another lost tourist. Dying in his trailer one day, alone and forgotten, his last chance to get back to the frontier a faded memory.

  Lester stood on the highway for a long time. He finally took a deep breath of midnight mountain air, then slowly walked back to his trailer.

  The business card was on top of the kitchen counter where he had dropped it, but Arnie had told him where he was staying in North Conway, so he didn’t need to call Huntsville. Lester found the motel’s number in the phone book; he called the front desk and asked the half-awake night clerk to connect him to Arnie Moss’s room.

  Moss had been dead asleep, but he had spent the evening in one of the tourist bars in town. Lester could tell by the boozy slur in Arnie’s voice when he picked up the phone on the sixth ring. ’Lo? he said.

  “It’s me, you disgusting drunk,” Lester said. “You want me?”

  Wuhh … Lester? Hmmm … for the job? Yeah, uh-huh, yeah …

  “Okay, you got me. Be here at oh-eight hundred.”

  Oh-eight … inna morning? Tomorrow?

  “No, Arnie. This morning. Today.”

  Hey, um, Les, can’t we make it a little …?

  “You said you wanted an s.o.b. for a GM, didn’t you?” Surprisingly, it wasn’t hard for Les to keep the smile out of his voice. “See you in a few hours. Hey, and try to act sober for a change.”

  Then he hung up.

  Profile of a Con Artist as a Young Man (Pressclips.1)

  (Excerpt from “The Search For Willard DeWitt” by G. Luis Ortega; feature article, The Boston Globe Magazine, September 16, 2024):

  It took a long time for the authorities to catch up to Willard DeWitt; by the time they did, he was already plotting his escape.

  In that sense, he was a master criminal; he had the ability to slip in and out of his carefully selected aliases as easily as a great actor can assume different roles for the stage. Indeed, one of his high school teachers in his hometown of Albany, New York, English instructor and theater coach Paul Caswell, recalls when he took the role of Sergeant Gregovich in a school production of Teahouse of the August Moon. “Will was a natural for the part,” Caswell says today. “Gregovich is a minor character in the play—he does little more than answer the phone and fall down drunk—but Will was able to make the role his own. In fact, he stole scenes from the leads. I would even say that he was a natural actor. He had the ability to make an audience believe in him.” Yet the next semester, when Caswell offered to cast DeWitt as Stanley, the lead male role in A Streetcar Named Desire, DeWitt turned down the role flat. “He didn’t say so,” Caswell observes, “but I had the feeling that he thought theater was a waste of his talents.”

  Willard DeWitt obviously was already finding other uses for his talents, ones that did not limit themselves to acting. By the time he was ten years old, he had learned how to use computers; his mother, Jean DeWitt, remembers her son spending his after-school hours on his father’s home computer, conversing on several different networks. It wasn’t until George DeWitt, a telemarketing manager for General Electric, ran across a handful of prototype computer games in his PC’s hard drive—“beta test” games as yet unreleased to the public—that his parents found out what young Willard was doing: hacking his way into the mainframes of software manufacturers and downloading their experimental programs.

  Willard was given a spanking for his thievery and the software companies declined to press charges, but that didn’t deter him in the long run. When he was sixteen, Pinkerton Investigations caught him writing phony checks. Creating phony checks, actually. The teenager would take a part-time job at a local company long enough to get one paycheck—which he would never cash—then quit. With that check as a template, he would then use his dad’s desktop publishing system to produce a handful of new checks indistinguishable from the original, all drawn to phony aliases for which he had also created fake ID’s. He had managed to steal about $2,000 from several Albany businesses this way before a department store chain who had employed DeWitt as a stockboy for a little less than two weeks put the Pinkerton people on to him.

  Even then, DeWitt was only sentenced to two years in an Ithaca, New York rehabilitation school. It was a light sentence; he could have been tried as an adult, in which case he would have faced at least three years in prison for computer theft. �
��He snowed the juvenile court judge, plain and simple,” says Marjorie Bennett, an Ithaca social worker who was DeWitt’s guidance counselor at the school for two years following his conviction. “He was an attractive kid, and he made that judge believe that he was just a mixed-up young man instead of the cunning little hustler he really was.

  “In hindsight, maybe he should have been sent up the river,” she adds, “but I doubt it would have done any good. Willard was a born liar.”

  Bennett arranged for a standard IQ test to be administered to DeWitt, and was not entirely surprised to find that he scored 150 on the test—Willard wasn’t a genius, but he had better than average intelligence. There was also his obvious charisma. Bennett says that he looked older than his age—“like a young Paul Newman”—and used his looks to good advantage. “He could charm the socks off anyone,” she remembers. “All he had to do was fix those blue eyes on you and turn on the sugar machine, and you’d believe him if he told you he was the Prince of Wales.”

  But DeWitt wasn’t about to pose as the heir to the English throne; he had a better game in mind. He earned his high-school GED while in rehab school, convinced Bennett and New York State juvenile reform officials that he had cleaned up his act—and then, only a few weeks after he was released to his family, ran away from home. Before he went on the lam, though, DeWitt stole $25,000 from his father’s savings account through computer networking: this time, the cash was transferred to a secret New York City bank account Willard had established under a bogus identity, again through the net. By the time anyone caught on, DeWitt had vanished from Albany, taking with him nothing more than a suitcase of clothes … and his father’s Toshiba laptop computer. George and Jean DeWitt didn’t see young Willard again for four years.

  They might have been pleased, if only slightly, to know that their son had run away from home to go to Yale University. But it wasn’t Willard DeWitt whom Yale had admitted on the false credentials and transcript DeWitt covertly sent its admissions office (obtained, again, through hackwork while he was back home in Albany): It was Willard G. Erikson. The “G” stood for “Gunnar” … as in Gunnar Erikson, the Norwegian billionaire entrepreneur. DeWitt passed himself off as an American nephew. Most of his father’s stolen money was spent to cover the first year’s tuition, paid by a check drawn on a dummy bank account in London; Willard had been busy with Dad’s Toshiba.

  Willard Erikson lived cheaply in a dorm for his first semester at Yale, faithfully attending classes in business administration. His high grades were apparently the one thing, perhaps the only thing, that DeWitt did not earn by hacking into a mainframe somewhere. Yale professors who remember him recall that he was alert, attentive, even creative (for instance, his advisor’s file stated that Willard Erikson “will probably be as successful as his uncle”). But he also managed to seed his cover story through his classmates, so well in fact that before the end of his first semester one of Yale’s leading fraternities, Alpha Beta Epsilon, actively sought him out. Willard Erikson pledged Alpha Beta; by January of his freshman year, he had moved into the frat house.

  Willard Erikson was a well-liked, and trusted, member of Alpha Beta. When the fraternity’s slush fund for parties inexplicably began to run low in the spring semester of ’19, no one suspected it was because DeWitt was stealing them blind. He had managed to ferret out the chapter treasurer’s bank passwords and transfer $7,800 to a dummy account at a different New Haven bank.

  How long DeWitt might have been able to carry on this subterfuge is a matter of conjecture. He had to go on the lam again by late April, near the end of the academic year, when Yale invited Gunnar Erikson to be its commencement speaker. Not only did they make their invitation public—before Erikson’s formal acceptance, the news was announced in the Yale campus paper, along with a brief mention of Willard Erikson’s association with the billionaire—but the boys at the frat house began pressuring Willard to get “Uncle Gunny” over for dinner. By the time Gunnar Erikson telexed Yale to ask “Willard who?” DeWitt had fled in the middle of the night.

  “We were very disappointed in Willard,” recalls former Alpha Beta chapter president C. Hoyt Waxford. “Very surprised and disappointed.”

  But DeWitt’s college career was not over. In the fall semester of 2019, Everett College—a small liberal arts school in central Massachusetts—admitted on scholarship a new sophomore, Martin Armstrong. Marty Armstrong was a student from Ohio who was known by a few to be the great-grandson of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon. Marty Armstrong was not only an A student, but he was also quite active in campus organizations. He wrote a column for the college paper, was active in various student groups, and in his second semester made a successful bid for election to the student senate. The following semester, Marty Armstrong, big man on campus, was elected by the senate as its new treasurer.

  It was like inviting the proverbial fox into the henhouse. Over the next six months DeWitt systematically tapped the budgets of the various Everett College student groups—the college paper, the yearbook, the homecoming committee, the radio station, and so forth—a few dollars at a time, eventually stealing more than $36,000, which was hidden in four bank accounts in various parts of the state. None of his fellow students noticed the nickel-and-dime discrepancies … but Floyd Gerrard, the college’s comptroller, did tumble to the unexplained absence of a few dollars here and there in the student-affairs budget when he was preparing the school’s federal tax return. The discrepancies in the books all led back to the student senate treasurer, and Gerrard began to smell a rat.

  “I remembered reading about something like this happening at a Yale fraternity,” Gerrard says, “so I called [Yale’s] security office and asked them to send me a picture of the kid who had posed as Gunnar Erikson’s nephew.” It was just a hunch on Gerrard’s part, but it paid off; when the photo was faxed to him, Gerrard found himself looking at a picture of Marty Armstrong.

  This time, Willard DeWitt did not escape. He was in his apartment with a couple of friends when Gerrard, Everett College president Alice Gaynor, and two members of the Massachusetts State Police arrived to arrest him on charges of embezzlement and bank fraud. “He didn’t seem too surprised to see us,” Gaynor recalls. “It was weird. When he opened the door and saw us standing there, his first remark was, ‘I figured this would happen sooner or later.’”

  DeWitt went to trial in Worcester County Superior Court in February, 2020, where he was found guilty and sentenced to four years at New Braintree Prison. Officials at the minimum-security prison report that he was a model inmate. Even when his cellmate and several others made an escape attempt while working on a road crew, DeWitt didn’t run off with them, although he did nothing to deter or report their escape, either.

  “He never once broke the rules,” says Hal Allman, New Braintree’s assistant warden. “Not so much as disobeying lights-out. So when he came up for parole in three years, he looked good in the eyes of the review board.” Allman shrugs. “Maybe that’s what he had planned all along.”

  Indeed. Willard DeWitt was paroled in November, 2023. Seeing his skill with computers, his parole officer, Carrie Smyth-Consiglio, arranged for him to get a job as a robotics programmer at a factory in Worcester. DeWitt held that job for a personal record—six weeks—before he abruptly jumped parole. Smyth-Consiglio visited his apartment in the city to find that DeWitt had completely abandoned it, leaving behind not a trace of his destination.

  For six months, DeWitt completely disappeared from the radar screen. Then came the bogus-stock scandal at the Boston brokerage house of Geller Piperidge & Associates, and the criminal involvement of a junior broker named Peter Jurgenson.…

  3. The Flight of the Imposter

  The storm which had awakened Lester Riddell in his New Hampshire house-trailer careered south-southwest, out of the mountains and down the coastline into Massachusetts. By the time Lester was walking out onto the highway, the Greater Boston area was being raked by the same thunder
storm.

  Two strokes of lightning split the black night sky above Boston simultaneously. One hit somewhere in Dorchester, in the no-man’s-land where even the street gangs had fled from the thunderbolts and the cold, driving rain, taking shelter in the doorways of barricaded stores and housing projects; the other was its reflection, mirrored in the titanic glass wall of the Sony Tower, rising three hundred stories above the uptown streets, a black megalith that dwarfed the architectural Brahmins of yesteryear, the Hancock Building and the Pru.

  The thunderclap rumbled across the rain-drenched skyline, causing the windows of Willard DeWitt’s condo to shudder. It was at that moment the phone on his desk buzzed.

  Standing in his darkened living room, glass of wine cradled in his hands as he watched the cold rain streak his windows, DeWitt didn’t turn to his desk, didn’t reach to pick up the receiver. Instead, he listened carefully. The phone buzzed again, then a third time, then a fourth … then abruptly stopped. DeWitt held up his left wrist and watched the luminous face of his Rolex Oyster. Exactly fifteen seconds passed, then the phone buzzed again. When it was through buzzing three more times, Willard lowered his watch and took a last sip from his wineglass.

  “Damn,” he said quietly.

  The two unanswered phone calls had been from the computer mainframe at Geller Piperidge & Associates, the State Street stock brokerage where Peter Jurgenson was employed as a junior broker. When Willard had come aboard at Geller Piperidge ten months earlier, one of his first covert acts as Peter Jurgenson was to install his own encrypted master file in the mainframe. This file, containing his secret records, was guarded by a number of lockout and early-warning systems, one of which was programmed to call his home phone twice in quick succession if the master file was located and entered without his password. There was only one way this could occur: if a Securities and Exchange Commission bunco team were to link Geller Piperidge’s mainframe to its Cray-9 icebreaker in New York. And that could only be accomplished if the SEC inspectors were at the firm’s offices at this very moment, armed with a federal court order enabling them to conduct a surprise raid on the brokerage.