Authors: Andrew Gross
Reckless (11 page)
I
n her cluttered, windowless office, in the basement of a drab gray building a block from the Treasury Department in Washington, DC, Naomi Blum was trying to put it all together too.
Everyone was buzzing about it. Wertheimer Grant going under. Years of believing they were the right hand of God had dragged them to the edge. Not to mention huge bets on the subprime mess and leveraging up thirty to one.
All it took was a single rogue money manager to push them over.
But what was adding to the trouble was the new news feed on her computer: MURDERED TRADER NOT LINKED TO LOCAL BREAK-INS.
Not linked…
Naomi sucked on a kiwi-mango smoothie, her lunch. On her desk was a slim blue folder labeled SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL. She had been copied on it by a liaison over at the FBI. The file contained a series of transcripts picked up from the cell phone of a wealthy Bahraini businessman long suspected of being a financial go-between with people in the region who might want to do the U.S. harm. Probably why the transcript had landed on her desk in the first place. She put on her glasses and browsed through the last, cryptic entry, dated February 8.
What did it mean?
As the lead investigator for the newly formed Financial Crime and Terrorism Task Force, a unit of eight under the Department of the Treasury, her job was to identify and interrupt wide-scale financial fraud and conspiracies that might have national-security or market-impact implications.
They were the first responders, so to speak, in potential economic attacks against the United States. They followed money around the world, charted patterns of deposits in nonconforming banks, monitored the real work of certain questionable “charities,” and pretty much “chalkboarded” various potential security threats to the financial landscape here.
It all sounded very important—at least that’s what Naomi’s mother always told her.
Still, Treasury wasn’t exactly the glamour posting these days.
In her two years on the job, they had laid open giant health care schemes aimed at bilking hundreds of millions of subscribers with underpaid claims. They’d prosecuted two prominent hedge fund principals who had diverted billions in duped investors’ assets—one who was apprehended trying to fake his own death in an attempt to flee the country, the other presently serving a twenty-year RICO charge at the federal correctional facility in Jesup, Georgia.
Of course, by the time it all got to an arrest, Treasury was no longer running the show. It would be turned over to the financial terrorism section of the FBI. Or the AG’s office.
Still, Naomi didn’t mind. She sort of liked being the behind-the-scenes investigator. Like CSI. The
real
CSI, not the TV glamour guys who took the bad guys down and, guns out, were first through the door.
Not that she couldn’t handle herself in that way if she had to.
Naomi was five foot three, fit as any field agent, wore stylish black glasses, and kept her dark hair short, Mika Brzezinski–style. She had what guys might call a sort of “bookish” look, like a library rat, despite, behind her frames, her brilliant gray eyes.
She hadn’t set out to be in this role. She had actually started out studying music theory at Princeton. Under Amos Kershorn. Her big claim to fame was being first cello in the Anne Arundel County High School Orchestra outside of Baltimore. Along with being an all-Ivy striker on the women’s field hockey team.
After 9/11, her twin brother, Jeremy, a lacrosse player at UVA, had dropped out and enlisted. All he said was it was something he just had to do. Growing up, the two of them couldn’t have been less alike and still come from the same womb. Jeremy was six foot two, wide shouldered, charismatic, solid as a rock. Cocky as all hell. Only started cracking the books the night before a test.
She was a foot shorter, quiet, to this day actually kept her driver’s license hidden behind her library card. She’d gotten the brains, they always joked, and Jer got whatever was leftover. After a tour in Iraq, he was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia as part of Airborne Ranger training, but in his second week there, the copter he was flying in crashed. He survived but lost both his legs. When she went to see him in the hospital—this big, brave, brawny guy, first-team all-ACC—he turned away. Empty. A shell of what he once was. Even a blind person could have seen the disappointment written on his face.
Two days later, she left Princeton and signed up herself.
She had never really been into the military or overly patriotic before. Her dad was a newspaper editor in Baltimore. She just felt inside that it was something she had to do. In the steps of her big brother. She even pushed for Jim’s old regiment, but the army took a look at the fancy school she’d come from and those impressive test results and placed her into an intelligence unit. Naomi spent two years in Iraq as a junior member on the army’s internal investigative team. One of her assignments was to look into the bloodbath that occurred at Nisoor Square in Baghdad, where a handful of private security guards, claiming they were provoked, fired wildly into a crowded square, leaving seventeen Iraqis dead. Naomi pushed hard in her search, sure that an unprovoked and criminal act had been committed. She urged her superiors to detain the participants, but by that time the agency had secretly whisked the guilty contractors “out of country,” and the government seemed intent on papering everything over and letting them go.
Years later, it still burned her.
Naomi realized that the accountability went much higher, but by that point the result was merely a whitewash, a PR exercise, though in the wake of press exposure from her findings, the security outfit was forever banned from Iraq.
After her second tour—she saw action on a couple of hairy convoys—she opted out and went back to school. Changed her major to economics. A degree in music no longer carried the same weight in her new way of thinking of the world. She figured she’d go to law school, maybe Wall Street, do the sixteen-hour-days-until-you-make-partner thing, but when she was recommended to Treasury by a superior she had worked with in the field, and he told the department they would never find anyone smarter or more dogged on a case, something just clicked.
What clicked was the chance to finally feel she was making a difference.
She’d always been on the small side physically, and private. Part of her had always needed to prove that she was tough enough. It went back to the way she played attack on the field—hide on the flank, spot the opening, worm her way in among the bigger girls. Use her speed and guile and knowledge of the game.
Then hammer it home.
It was what she was still doing. At Treasury. She just happened to be the only one doing it with the five-note opening progression of Glass’s “Music in the Shape of a Square” tattooed on her butt.
Naomi looked again at the FBI security transcript. She sipped her smoothie. She didn’t know the caller, but she damn well knew the person he was caught speaking to.
And it wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.
The conversation had taken place about a month ago. Since then the world financial markets had fallen apart. The Dow was down 20 percent. One of the largest institutions brought down by a rogue trader.
And here was one of the most influential financial managers in the world, who oversaw one of the largest pools of investment capital anywhere, in contact with a suspected terrorist money mover.
And the cryptic words uttered in Arabic that had been passed along to her. That scared her. That left her wondering what this was all about.
The planes are in the air.
M
onday afternoon, Hauck sat in his car across the street from the Lake Avenue Lower School in Greenwich.
Three weeks had passed since the Glassman murders. Still no link to their killers had been found.
At a little after two forty in the afternoon, a stream of kids began to emerge from the gray concrete building. Moms, in capri pants and yoga outfits, chatting with other moms or on their cells, pulling up their SUVs. Some of the kids carted stuff from school, brightly colored presentation boards or artwork, knapsacks slung over their shoulders. Others carried baseball gloves or lacrosse sticks, shouting excitedly about the Rangers’ playoff game tonight or
American Idol
. The cars pulled up; the kids climbed in; the moms waved good-bye to one another and drove away.
The entrance quieted down.
A couple of minutes later, Hauck saw the small, sandy-haired boy in jeans and a Derek Jeter jersey come out, holding on to the hand of an older man. His grandfather. He carried a piece of paper all rolled up, a red knapsack slung over on his back.
Hauck remembered him as he saw him three or four years ago. In April’s car.
Evan.
It was his first day back at school after the incident. The local papers had picked it up. A couple of school officials came out and watched as he and his granddad made their way to the parking lot, making sure there were no reporters badgering them.
Hauck wanted to make sure too.
The boy had done well. He had snapped a couple of photos that might one day be used as evidence. He was a chip off the old block. His mom would have been proud.
Hauck didn’t know what had made him come here. Other than it made him feel close. Still attached. Mindful of his promise. He hadn’t forgotten. He wouldn’t.
See, I wasn’t just passing through,
he said.
The boy climbed into a silver Volvo wagon and his granddad drove away.
Hauck had an urge to follow him. But he just put the car in gear and remained there.
I
t took some time for the picture of Dani Thibault to begin to come together.
Merrill had hoped it might all just be a big waste of his time. A bit of overcaution on her part that would calm a few fears but ultimately lead nowhere.
It wasn’t.
Hauck tapped on the office phone, deciding whether to call her.
Thibault had lied about where he had gone to school. He had lied about having served in the Dutch army, assigned to a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He had lied about his connection to the Belgian royal family too. The truth was he had dated a party-happy cousin of the queen for a couple of weeks and maybe attended a family outing or two with her where the photos that hung on his office walls were taken. The relationship fizzled out, except for the requisite gossip-column snapshots of the two of them in posh clubs that Richard Snell had located on the Internet.
For the most part Thibault’s career consisted of a few progressively more senior positions in various shady banks, managing wealthy clients’ money and setting up hard-to-pierce financial trusts. He had taken his name and part of his background from a man who had been killed fifteen years ago in France.
Who does that,
Hauck wondered,
but a person with something very important to hide?
These last two weeks, Hauck had learned everything he could about Thibault’s personal affairs. He knew where he got his suits in London—at Kilgour on Savile Row. He knew where he stayed while in Dubai—at the Burj, seven stars. He knew what restaurants he frequented when he was in New York—Veritas, Daniel, Spartina. He paid his bills. There were no liens or judgments against him. His e-mail traffic showed a variety of normal business and personal contacts. Nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe a bit of a kinky side when it came to Merrill. He didn’t even seem to have anyone else on the side.
And he hadn’t committed any crimes.
All Hauck found was a shadowy past that surely covered up something that the man had gone to great lengths to conceal. Even from Merrill. Why was it up to Hauck to destroy him? He wasn’t with the police any longer.
We don’t do this kind of work,
he had said to Foley. Mess with people’s lives.
This time we do.
He opened a thick folder filled with photos he had compiled of Dani. Some were from
Greenwich Magazine
at charity events. He and Merrill. A few were from the Shiny Sheet in Palm Beach. The Garden Club Ball. Page Six in the
New York Post.
He didn’t exactly shy away from publicity.
He thumbed through a few contact sheets a friend of his who worked for
Fairfield Style
had sent over. A gathering for the state’s attorney general on Ron Tillerson’s yacht. “Merrill Simon and financier Dani Thibault.” Saturday polo matches at Conyers Farm. Thibault had some horses. The two of them looked happy, in love. Holding hands.
It was her choice, what to do with what they had found. Her call.
This wasn’t exactly the kind of work he had signed up for when he changed careers.
He picked up the phone and dialed Tom Foley to let him know what information they had. Let his boss decide how to take it to Merrill. Her ex-husband was still a very important account. It was still a new job for Hauck, and the whole thing was a bit uncomfortably politically charged. The receptionist at Talon’s New York office put him on hold.
He opened the folder and slid the photos back in.
One, near the bottom, caught his eye.
It was at the Conyers Farm polo gathering. A Patrons of Greenwich Library literacy thing. A bunch of the usual types Hauck had dealt with over the years: men in blazers and green pants, the women in expensive sundresses and large hats.
Thibault, wearing a white linen blazer and open white shirt, was caught in conversation with someone who seemed slightly familiar, behind dark sunglasses, his back turned to the camera but his profile clearly visible. It was an outtake, cropped from a larger shot. The two of them never even knew it was being snapped.
Hauck was about to stuff it back in the file when it hit him with a jolt just who the man Thibault was talking to was.