Inside Out [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE I WOKE WITH NUMBERS in my head, a one followed by seven zeros. That was ten million. More precisely, it was ten million six. hundred thousand. As in dollars. The nagging question was: Where was it? If it had been transferred according to my instructions it was safely lodged in my new account at Morgan Grenfell Ltd., in the Cayman Islands, and everything was all right. But if it was still at Bank Leu Intemational Ltd,, in Nassau, there was trouble ahead. Laurie, waking slowly at my side, fought off a bout of morning sickness; we had just learned that she was pregnant with our second child. She knew nothing about the secret hoard, and thus could not realize my turmoil. Money was not a worry to Laurie. Long ago I had proclaimed to her, with youthful exuberance, that I would be a milUonaire before I was thirty, and she had believed me. I had achieved that goal with room to spare, and if I had told her about the secret $10.6 million that preoccupied my thoughts this morning, she would have asked—after expressing her initial shock at learning of its existence—"Why in the world do we need it?" I would have had no coherent answer.