When the raid came, several people traded testimony for leniency, so evidence that might have been difficult to find was not. He was charged with money laundering, tax evasion, wire fraud, forgery, counterfeiting legal documents, and a number of ancillary infractions. Ultimately, he was convicted of all of them, and of murdering a federal officer, which he had done during his troubles mainly as a piece of theater, meant to embolden the employees who performed that sort of work, and to cow the others into silence. He received a life sentence and enough additional years to make up two more at the actuarial male life expectancy of 78.7 years.

The Duquesnes were an old family with wealth founded on profits made in the days of French exploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They had been traders, meaning speculators and smugglers, and they were good enough at it to have been accused of profiteering after every war since the War of the Spanish Succession. At the onset of the French Revolution, this branch of the family had been sent to America to exert closer supervision over the family’s holdings there, and had brought a great many of the other branches’ movable assets with them. Some of these assets were later accounted for and returned to their owners, but most were not.

When Paul had been tried for his crimes, a strong minority of the extended family in the United States and Europe felt he should be cut off from funds for lawyers and left to die in a federal prison. Family reputations were not something one selfish fool should be allowed to destroy. Paul had not threatened or vilified any of these relatives, but he was hurt that one of them was his mother. She was the younger sister of a British earl who was gay and not likely to produce an heir; so depending on who else lived or died, she might have passed a title to her male heir, Paul. There was no money involved, which was why she had married Paul’s father, Mark, over thirty years earlier.

Mark was this generation’s manager and the caretaker of the family’s fortunes. His intellect consisted of an ability to hold on to many facts at once and recombine them in different ways until he perceived temporary imbalances or could create them. He would use them to make profitable exchanges quickly before normal conditions reasserted themselves.