Black Market (15 page)

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Walter Trentkamp came in. The FBI man walked slowly across the room. He leaned against the cluttered desk and sighed loudly.

“I'd quit, too, if I had an office like this.” Trentkamp frowned. He stared around the room. “I mean, I've seen bleak before.”

“What can I do for you, Walter?”

“You can reconsider the decision you made in Washington.”

“Did somebody send you up here? Did they tell you to go talk some sense into Carroll?”

Trentkamp pursed his lips. He shook his head. “What'll you do now?”

“Law,” Carroll lied. It was something to say.

“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 goddamn 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 son of a bitch.”

“Do you think I got where I am without some small understanding of human foibles?” Trentkamp asked. He held out his hand. “You're a cop. It's in your blood. 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, he hesitated. 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.”

Manhattan

On the second floor of 13 Wall, meanwhile, Caitlin Dillon sat in dark silhouette on a high wooden stool. Most of the overhead lights in the room known as the crisis room had been dimmed. She listened to the soothing electronic whirr of half a dozen IBM and Hewlett-Packard computers, complex machines she was entirely comfortable around.

It had been Caitlin's original 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 the 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 international financial collapse.

The other was the intricate and almost hopeless puzzle of her own private life.

Caitlin was aware that she had lived her thirty-four years subject to two strong and contrary urges, two radically different pulls on her energies and emotions. Part of her wanted to be a traditional woman: feminine, desirable, the kind of woman who loved to dress in expensive things from Saks, or Bergdorf Goodman, or Chloe and Chanel in Paris.

The other separate and equal part was independent, highly competitive, and ambitious, possessed of an unusually fierce will.

Many years before, Caitlin's father, who was a deeply principled and intelligent investment banker in the Midwest, had tried to stand up to the large 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'd lectured bitterly against the injustice, the unfairness, and sometimes the utter 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 finally come east as a kind of avenging angel. She was 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 moral 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 oversize T-shirts, leather boots that came almost to her butt.

She might happily devote a particular Sunday afternoon to some exotic Italian recipe from Marcella Hazan-but she could easily go weeks abhorring the idea of doing any cooking at all, avoiding all housework in her East Side apartment. She was proud of earning almost six figures a year at the SEC, but sometimes she wanted desperately to throw it all over and have a baby. Sometimes she was afraid she might never have a child. She
ached
with the idea the way one ached 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 lines ever since that surprising kiss on the Washington – New York plane. It had been quick, casual, yet she had the instinctive feeling she wanted to go beyond that first kiss with Archer Carroll. But where?

What was she thinking of, 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 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 from which there was no escape.

“I had Michel Chevron all ready to talk about the European black market,” he said.

“Don't keep blaming yourself.”

“Somebody knows all of our moves. Christ, who knows what Michel Chevron could have told me?” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. She was reminded of a restless, agile prizefighter warming up.

“How's the arm? Hurt?”

“Only when I think about Paris.”

“Then don't think.” She slid off the wooden stool. She wanted to go across the room and somehow ease his discomfort, his embarrassment. “I'm glad…”

“Glad?”

She stared at him. Carroll had a vulnerable quality that inspired her to strange sympathies and concerns, but also to 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.

There was a breathless silence in the room.

She turned 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 screen message. She watched him, wondering again what the kiss on the plane had meant.

Carroll merely nodded. “The West Germans are using Green Band as an excuse to solve their local terrorism problems. The BND is very pragmatic. They're probably the toughest police force in Western Europe.”

Caitlin perched herself atop the high wooden stool again and hugged her knees. Another message started to blip over the nearest computer. She turned to watch the computer screen closely.

And froze.

“Look at this, Arch.”

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 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.

Carroll gnawed at his lip. “I think this might be the moment of truth.”

“Something's definitely happening. But why is it happening 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, all at once.

As bad as it seemed, there was the sense of relief that
something
was happening. Was Green Band finally moving?

ZURICH. PREVALENT RUMORS HERE TONIGHT OF 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.

The final sum 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 one hundred companies. Those reported to date created an unusual, elite universe. Was there a clue or potential lead in that?

Rank in Company Fortune 500-Stockholder Equity

1 Exxon (New York)-$29,443,095,000

2 General Motors (Detroit)-20,766,600,000

3 Mobile (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)-2,525,663,000

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, III.)-2,275,967,000

97 North American Philips (New York)-883,874,000

By nine-fifteen the crisis room was filled with officials from the White House and the Pentagon. They 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 complained angrily when she found out.

“You've got the wrong friends,” Carroll said. “You're traveling in some bad company.”

“You?”

“Yeah. Me.”

Zavidavo, Russia

At four-thirty that morning, three sets of yellow headlights lanced a dense gray wall of fog. The lights stopped suddenly, making circles on a twelve-foot-high electrified gate that dripped snow and ice.

The oppressive gate was meant to help protect the Russian version of Camp David, a heavily fortified hunting lodge called Zavidavo.

Two militiamen from the Internal Security Division immediately waddled out into the bracing cold. They were dressed in bulky coats and carrying machine guns. It was their job to check the identification of all visitors.

In a matter of seconds, with highly unusual dispatch, 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 woodland resort compound.

Both men had been shocked by the identity of the six people they had just seen at the front gate. They exchanged looks and muttered quietly to each other, their breath hanging like thick clouds of smoke on the chill air. All at once the peaceful atmosphere of the compound had changed; the guards were nervous and alarmed.

Inside the main dacha, meanwhile, Major General Radomir Raskov of the GRU Secret Police was feeling apprehensive as well, but he was also heady with excitement and heightened expectation. Raskov had commissioned an elegant country breakfast to be served in a sun parlor, which was heated by a blazing log fire. Everything was ready.

Right after breakfast, Major 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 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; and the heads of the KGB and GRU.

Raskov spoke informally over the clacking noise of forks and knives. His smile, which was usually tight and superficial, 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, hamlike 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. One of the things he liked best about General Raskov was that Raskov was a dedicated and intelligent student of human nature-a classic and unabashed manipulator-something he undoubtedly fine-tuned during his frequent stays in America.

Raskov continued in a more serious, sober tone. “On December sixth, as you all know, I spoke with our friend and comrad François 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 unprecedented Wall Street attack… During the past two days, Monserrat's representatives have actually met with representatives from the so-called Green Band faction. In London…”

Premier Belov turned sharply to Uri Demurin, director of the KGB. “Comrad Director, has
your
department been successful in discovering anything further about the provocateur group? How, for example, were they able to originally contact François Monserrat?”

“We have been working very closely with General Raskov,” General Demurin lied with unctuous sincerity. A network of veins ran across his sallow face. “Unfortunately, at this time we have been able to come up with nothing definitive about the precise makeup of the terrorist cell.”

General Radomir Raskov clapped his hand harshly, ostensibly for a servant.

Demurin was his only real rival in the highly competitive Soviet police world. Demurin was also a capital shit, a petty bureaucratic turd without a single redeeming characteristic. Whenever Raskov was in a staff meeting with Demurin, his blood would automatically boil; his eyes would bulge out of the broad slab that was his forehead.

A busty blond maid appeared, hovering nervously like a moth. The peasant maid's name was Margarita Kupchuck, and she had served at Zavidavo since the early 1970s. Her quiet, earthy humor had made her a personal favorite with all the important Soviet government members.

“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? To thicken the blood against the cold of this miserable morning?”

Premier Belov smiled once again. He had placed a navy 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. In case some of our engines don't start so easily in this arctic cold.”

Belov laughed now, and his various 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, atleast whenever Premier Belov took it upon himself to laugh. “We now believe we know the reason for the bombing in America,” he said, finally dropping his bombshell on the group.

General Raskov gazed silently around the handsome, rustic breakfast parlor. The important men sitting at the table had stopped lighting cigars, stopped taking sips of Russian coffee.

“This Green Band group has made a somewhat frightening proposal to us. Through François Monserrat's terrorist cell, actually. The offer was made last evening, in London… This is why I've called all of you here so early in the morning.”

General Raskov 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 bombing on Wall Street.

“The securities were apparently removed during the seven-hour evacuation. How this incredible robbery actually took place, I do not know… 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 uniformly silent; they were obviously 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 seem to be enough to cripple the Western economic system,” General Raskov went on. “This could easily mean a cataclysmic panic for the American stock market. An opportunity for control such as this has rarely been presented to the leadership of the Soviet Union. Either way, we must act now. We must act quickly, or they will withdraw their offer.”

General Raskov stopped speaking. His very round, widely spaced eyes circled the table, pausing at each perplexed face. He nodded with satisfaction; he had everyone's full attention, and more.

At 5:30 A.M., the highest-ranking Soviet leaders began heatedly to discuss the issues, the unbelievable decisions suddenly at hand.

Less than ten miles away from Zavidavo, a Russian delivery truck marked
Muka
(flour) fishtailed, then regained moderate control. It was barreling down a narrow country road that seemed little more than an ice-slicked toboggan track.

The truck finally plowed to a stop in front of a dilapidated cottage in the country village of Staritsa. The Russian driver leaped out and began to crunch his way through bright new snow that reached to his knees.

The cottage door opened, and a woman's arm, in a drab gray bathrobe, took an envelope. The driver then high-stepped back to his truck and drove away.

From the village of Staritsa, the contents of the envelope were relayed in telephone code to a young woman working at the GUM Department Store in Moscow. There the clerk used a special telephone and another complex code to make an urgent transatlantic call to the United States, specifically to the city of McLean, Virginia.

The original message had been sent by Margarita Kupchuck, the peasant housekeeper at Zavidavo. For nearly eleven years Margarita had been one of the most important operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency working in Russia.

The message provided the American team with the first substantial break in the Green Band investigation.

It consisted of just sixteen words:

Ritz Hotel, London. Thursday morning. Two billion dollars, stolen securities to be finally exchanged… Green Band.