Lunar Descent by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œHe 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