Black Friday Page 14
Trentkamp pursed his lips. He shook his head. “What’ll you do now, anyhow?”
“Law,” Carroll lied.
“You’re too old already. Law’s a young man’s game.”
Carroll sighed. Quit, Walter. Quit it right now.
Trentkamp continued to frown. “Nobody knows terrorists the way you do. If you leave, lives will be lost And you know it. So what if your pride is a little wounded right now?”
Carroll sat down hard behind his desk. He hated Walter Trentkamp just then. He hated the idea that another person could see through him so easily. Walter was so goddamn smart. There was an impressive superiority that peeked through his policeman’s facade every now and then. “You’re a manipulative sonofabiteh.”
“Do you think I got where I am without some small understanding of human foibles?” Trentkamp asked. He held his hand out to be shaken. “You’re a cop. Every day you remind me a little more of your father. He was a stubborn bastard, too.”
Carroll hesitated. With his own hand in midair, halfway toward Walter Trentkamp, he hesitated. It was one of those moments when his private world seemed to spin on its own axis. He could choose—right now he had a choice.
He shrugged and shook Trentkamp’s hand.
“Welcome back on board, Archer.”
On board what? Carroll wondered. “One thing I want you to know. When Green Band is settled, I quit.”
“Sure,” Trentkamp said. “That’s understood. Just keep in touch until Green Band is settled.”
“I want to be a free man, Walter.”
“Don’t we all?” Walter Trentkamp asked, and finally smiled. “You’re so fucking cute when you pout.”
Chapter 39
ON THE SECOND FLOOR of No. 13 Wall, Caitlin Dillon sat in dark silhouette on a high wooden stool. Most of the overhead lights in the Crisis Room had been dimmed. She listened to the soothing electronic whirr of half a dozen IBM and Hewlett-Packard computers.
It had been Caitlin’s idea to collect and evaluate all the available newspaper information and police intelligence flowing in over the word processor consoles. The news arrived in sudden, urgent bursts, streams of tiny green letters that came from both the financial sectors and police agencies all around the world.
As she sat there, her eyes hurting from the glare of the screens, she pondered two things.
One was the scary and real possibility of a total financial collapse around the world.
The other was the intricate, the almost hopeless puzzle of her own private life.
Many years before, Caitlin’s father, who was a principled and intelligent investment banker in the Midwest, had tried to stand up to the Wall Street clique of firms. He had lost his battle, lost an unfair fight, and been thrown into bankruptcy. Year after year, Caitlin had listened as he bitterly lectured against the injustice, the unfairness, and sometimes the stupidity built into the American financial system. In the same way that some children grow up wanting to be crusading lawyers, Caitlin had decided that she wanted to help reform the financial system.
She had come East as a kind of avenging angel. She was both fascinated and repelled by the self-contained world of Big Business, and by Wall Street in particular. In her heart of hearts, Caitlin wanted the financial system to work properly, and she was fierce, almost obsessed with the application of her position as the SEC Enforcer …
It was likewise the independent, nontraditional part of Caitlin that enjoyed other mild eccentricities—like wandering the streets of New York in tight-fitting Italian jeans, crumpled oversized T-shirts, leather boots that came almost to her butt.
She might happily devote a Sunday afternoon to some exotic Italian recipe from Marcella Hazan—but she could go weeks abhorring the idea of doing any cooking at all, avoiding all housework in her East Side apartment. She was proud of earning six figures a year at the SEC, but sometimes she wanted to throw it all over and have a baby. Sometimes, she was physically afraid she might never have a child. She ached with the idea, the way one aches from a real loss. And she had no idea, absolutely none, whether these opposing impulses could ever peacefully coexist.
She had been thinking along these insane lines ever since that kiss on the Washington-to-New York airplane.
It had been quick, and yet she had the instinctive feeling she wanted to go beyond the first kiss with Carroll.
What was she thinking, anyhow?
She hardly knew Carroll. His kiss had been the kiss of a stranger. She wasn’t even sure if it had meant anything to him, or whether it had been something thrown up by the peculiar circumstances of the flight, his way of relieving tension, and disappointment, and more than a little justified anger.
I don’t really know the first thing about him, she thought.
A shuffling noise made her turn and she saw Carroll in the computer room doorway. She was embarrassed, as if she suspected he’d been standing there, reading her thoughts.
He had his arm in a fresh white sling and he looked pale. She smiled. She’d already heard about the success of Walter Trentkamp’s personal appeal and she was relieved—decisions made under duress were almost always the wrong ones, she knew. Carroll’s impetuousness was part of his charm: but one day, she thought, one day he might run into the kind of serious trouble he couldn’t extricate himself from.
“I had Michel Chevron ready to talk about the European black market,” he said.
“Don’t keep blaming yourself.”
“Somebody knows all our moves. Christ, who knows what Michel Chevron could have told me?” Carroll shifted his weight from one foot to the other. She was reminded of a restless prizefighter warming up.
“How’s the arm?” she asked. “Hurt?”
“Only when I think about Paris.”
“Then don’t think.” She slid down from the wooden stool. She wanted to go across the room and somehow ease his discomfort, his embarrassment. She didn’t. “I’m glad …” she said instead.
“Glad?”
She stared at him. Carroll had a vulnerable quality that inspired her to strange sympathies and concerns, but also anxieties she couldn’t quite articulate. He had a lost boy quality, maybe, that-was it.
“Glad you didn’t get yourself killed,” she said and finally smiled.
There was a breathless silence in the room.
She finally turned back to one of the computer screens, studying the mass of crawling green letters. The spell between them was broken again.
“Another Baader-Meinhof member was shot and killed in Munich.” Caitlin looked up from the display screen message. She watched him, wondering again what the kiss on the airplane had meant.
Carroll merely nodded. “The West Germans are using Green Band as an excuse to solve their local terrorism problems. The BND is pragmatic. They’re probably the toughest police force in Western Europe.”
Caitlin perched herself atop the high wooden stool again. She loosely hugged both her legs at the knees.
Another message started to blip over the nearest computer. Caitlin turned and watched the computer screen closely.
Her mind had suddenly frozen.
“Look at this, Arch.”
Chapter 40
MOSCOW. THE KGB HAS INTERCEPTED PYOTR ANDRONOV. IMPORTANT UNDERWORLD BLACK MARKET SPECIALIST. ANDRONOV HOLDING U.S. SECURITIES, PRESUMED STOLEN. ANDRONOV LINKS STOLEN BONDS TO GREEN BAND. AMOUNT: ONE MILLION, TWO HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. REFERRED TO AS “SAMPLES.”
Moments later, another equally curious item began to appear on the computer display screen.
The second entry was from the Swiss in Geneva.
INTERPOL. RELIABLE LOCAL INFORMER HAS REPORTED “FLOODING” OF GENEVA MARKET WITH STOLEN BOND OFFERS. SELLER LOOKING FOR “SERIOUS BUYER.” AMOUNT SUGGESTED AS HIGH AS FIVE TO TEN MILLION AMERICAN DOLLARS. SOURCE VERY RELIABLE.
“I think this could be the moment of truth.” Carroll stared and gnawed at his bottom lip.
“Something’s happening. But why is it happeni
ng all at once like this?”
For the next hour and a half, during which the various screens virtually exploded with new information, as many as a dozen U.S. Army and police officials rushed down to look at the messages inside the Crisis Room. News was being transmitted from all over the world now, all at once.
As bad as it seemed, there was relief that something was happening. Was Green Band finally moving?
ZURICH. PREVALENT RUMORS HERE TONIGHT OP STOLEN U.S. SECURITIES AVAILABLE. VERY LARGE AMOUNTS. HIGH SEVEN-FIGURE THEFT INDICATED BY SOURCES.
LONDON, SCOTLAND YARD. DURING ROUTINE SEARCH IN KENSINGTON, AMERICAN STOCK CERTIFICATES FOUND. SERIAL NUMBERS TO FOLLOW. SUSPECT NOT IN FLAT WITH CACHE. SUSPECT IS JOHN HALL-FRAZIER, A KNOWN FENCE IN EUROPE BOND MARKET. SUSPECT KNOWN TO MICHEL CHEVRON.
BEIRUT. AHMED JARREL ARRESTED THIS EVENING HERE. TRADED THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION… JARREL HAD BEEN ATTEMPTING TO SELL U.S. SECURITIES IN BEIRUT. ASKING PRICE THIRTY FIVE CENTS ON A DOLLAR VALUE. VERY HIGH QUALITY BONDS. SOME BLANK CHEQUES ALSO. JARREL CLAIMS AMOUNT AVAILABLE UP TO ONE HUNDRED MILLION AMERICAN!
Half an hour later, using an ordinary hand calculator, Caitlin added up the amounts indicated on the display screens so far. She gasped as she arrived at the final sum.
It came to just under a hundred million U.S. dollars.
“Samples.”
Next, she made a quick printout of the Fortune 500, America’s largest individual corporations, to check against the stolen securities reported thus far.
Nearly all the thefts were in the top 100 companies. Those reported to date created an unusual, elite universe. Was there a clue or potential lead in that?
Rank in Company Fortune 500Stockholder Equity
1 Exxon (New York) $29,443,095,000
2 General Motors (Detroit) 20,766,600,000
3 Mobil (New York) 13,952,000,000
5 International Business Machines (Armonk, N.Y.) 23,219,000,000
6 Texaco (Harrison, N.Y.) 14,726,000,000
8 Standard Oil (Indiana) (Chicago) 12,440,000,000
9 Standard Oil of California (San Francisco) 14,106,000,000
10 General Electric (Fairfield, Conn.) 11,270,000,000
15 U.S. Steel (Pittsburgh) 11,270,000,000
17 Sun (Radnor, Pa.) 5,355,000,000
20 ITT (New York) 6,106,084,000
26 AT&T Technologies (New York) 4,621,300,000
28 Dow Chemical (Midland, Mich.) 5,047,000,000
34 Westinghouse Electric (Pittsburgh) 3,410,300,000
39 Amerada Hess (New York) 2425,663,000
42 McDonnell-Douglas (St. Louis) 2,067,900,000
43 Rockwell International (Pittsburgh) 2,367,300,000
45 Ashland Oil (Russell, Ky.) 1,084,824,000
50 Lockheed (Burbank, Calif.) 826,200,000
52 Monsanto (St Louis) 3,667,000,000
55 Anheuser-Busch (St. Louis) 1,766,500,000
67 Gulf & Western Industries (New York) 1,893,924,000
69 Bethlehem Steel (Bethlehem, Pa.) 1,313,100,000
77 Texas Instruments (Dallas) 1,202,700,000
84 Digital Equipment (Maynard, Mass.) 3,541,282,000
89 Diamond Shamrock (Dallas) 2,743,327,000
92 Deere (Moline, HI.) 2,275,967,000
97 North American Philips (New York) 883,874,000
By 9:15, the Crisis Room at No. 13 Wall was filled with officials from the White House and the Pentagon who scrutinized the computer screens like gamblers nervously watching the outcome of their bets. The Secretary of the Treasury and the Vice-president were both present. Phil Berger of the CIA had been flown in by special Air Force helicopter from Washington.
At eleven o’clock, urgent reports were still chattering in over the computer terminals. The President had been kept informed; another National Security conference had already been called for late that night.
This time, however, neither Arch Carroll nor Caitlin Dillon was invited to travel down to Washington.
“What did I do?” Caitlin angrily complained to Carroll when she found out.
“You’ve got the wrong friends,” Carroll said. “You’re traveling in bad company.”
“You?” she asked.
“Yeah. Me.”
Chapter 41
AT 4:30 THAT MORNING, three sets of headlights lanced a dense gray wall of fog. The lights stopped suddenly, making circles on a twelve-foot-high electrified gate dripping snow and ice.
The oppressive gate was meant to help protect the Russian version of Camp David, a heavily fortified hunting lodge called Zavidavo.
“Prajol!” Two militiamen from the Internal Security Division waddled out into the bracing cold. They were carrying machine guns, dressed in bulky coats. It was their job to check the identification of all visitors.
In a matter of seconds, a Cheka and two hand-tooled Zil limousines were cleared to proceed up the icy lanes winding to the main hunting lodge.
The automobiles, side-blinds drawn, carried six of the most important decision makers in Soviet Russia. The military guards hurried back into their gatehouse and immediately called for emergency security for the resort compound.
Inside the main dacha, Major General Radomir Raskov of the GRU Secret Police was feeling apprehensive as well; but he was also heady with excitement. Raskov had commissioned an elegant country breakfast to be served in a sun parlor, which was heated by a blazing log fire.
Right after breakfast, General Raskov would drop his private bombshell on the six visiting leaders.
At a little past 5:00 A.M., the Politburo steering group sat down to steaming platters heaped with duck eggs, country sausage and freshly caught fish.
The breakfast table group included Yori Ilich Belov, the Russian Premier; a Cossack, Red Army General named Yuri Sergeivitch Iranov; the First Secretary of the Communist Party; General Vasily Kalin; the heads of both the KGB and GRU.
General Radomir Raskov spoke informally over the clacking noise of forks and knives. His smile, which was usually a small tight fist of teeth, was surprisingly warm. “In addition to the main business of our meeting, I am delighted to report the wood pheasant are back on the north ridge.”
Premier Yori Belov clapped his huge hands. A stiffly formal man wearing thick bifocals, he raised his dark, fuzzy eyebrows and smiled for the first time since he’d arrived. Premier Belov was an obsessive hunter and fisherman.
General Raskov continued in a more serious tone. “On December sixth, as you all know, I spoke with our Mend Francois Monserrat about the dangerous and now potentially uncontrollable economic situation developing in the United States …
“At that time, he informed me he had been contacted by persons claiming responsibility for the Wall Street attack…. During the past two days, Monserrat’s representatives have met with representatives from the so-called Green Band faction. In London …”
Premier Belov tamed sharply to Yuri Demurin, director of the KGB. “Comrade Director, has your department been successful in discovering anything further about the provocateur group? How, for example, were they able to originally contact Monserrat?”
“We have been working very closely with General Raskov of course,” General Demurin lied with unctuous sincerity. “Unfortunately, at this time, we have been able to come up with nothing definitive.”
General Raskov clapped his hands harshly for a servant.
Demurin was his only rival in the Russian police world. Demurin was also a capital shit, a petty bureaucrat without a single redeeming characteristic. Whenever he was in a staff meeting with Demurin, General Raskov’s blood boiled.
A blond maid appeared, hovering nervously. The maid’s name was Margarita Kupchuck, and she had served at Zavi-davo since the early 1970s. Margarita Kupchuck’s quiet humor had made her a personal favorite with the important Soviets.
“We’re ready for more coffee and tea, my dear Margarita. Some preserves or fruit would be nice, as well. Would anyone prefer a stronger libation?”
Premier Belov smiled
once again. He had placed a blue packet of Austrian cigarettes in front of himself. “Yes, Margarita, please bring us a bottle of spirits. Some Georgian white lightning would be appropriate.”
Belov laughed now and his chins shook, giving everyone the impression that his face was about to slip through layers of his neck and vanish into his body.
General Raskov smiled. It was always politic to smile, at least, whenever Premier Belov took it upon himself to laugh. “We now believe we know the reason for the bombings in America,” he said, finally dropping his bombshell on the group.
General Raskov silently gazed around the breakfast parlor. The then sitting at the table had stopped lighting cigars, stopped taking sips of Russian coffee.
“This Green Band group has made a frightening proposal to us. Through Francois Monserrat’s terrorist cell, actually. The offer was made last evening…. This is why I’ve called all of you here so early in the morning.”
General Raskov lightly drummed his fingers on the dining table as he spoke the next words. “Comrades, the Green Band group has requested a payment. A total of one hundred twenty million dollars in gold bullion. This sum is in exchange for securities and bonds stolen during the December fourth bombings on Wall Street.
“The securities were apparently removed during the seven-hour evacuation itself…. Comrades, the net worth of the stolen goods offered to us… is in excess of two billion dollars!”
The men, the elite who ruled Soviet Russia, were silent; they were reeling at the massive numbers they had just heard.
There was no way anyone could have been prepared for such an announcement.
At first, no word at all from Green Band. And now this. Two billion dollars to be ransomed.
“They plan to sell to buyers other than ourselves as well. The total amount would be enough to cripple the Western economic system.” General Raskov went on. “This could mean a cataclysmic panic for the American Stock Market.”
Less than ten miles away from Zavidavo, a delivery truck marked flour fishtailed, then regained control. It was barreling down a narrow country road which seemed little more than an ice-slicked toboggan track.