Lunar Descent by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online Page A

“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.
    â€œWe 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