Word spread on Ivy Crescent that one of its own home-grown had blossomed into a computer guru. Neighbours waved at Heywood as he entered and left his driveway; he responded in a princely manner, a hand held up and shaking slightly.
Beyond Jaime’s clever interceptions, the accordionic folder of the devil also swelled with excerpts of data stashed away in the Service’s historical records. Reports, analyses, memos, letters – all old Carson stuff which the Czar revived. He found minutes of meetings where Carson had spoken. He consulted attendance records. He searched employee expense claims pertaining to international travel. The information heap became immense.
One weekend at home – it was late spring, early summer – Hannah, remarking at breakfast that the fine weather stirred her, added she thought they should make good use of the afternoon. “We ought to do some work in the garden, darling.” But Heywood had decided the time had come.
“Sorry, sweet. Can’t. Not right away. You won’t believe how much I’ve got on the go. Have to do some penance in the office. I’ll help later when I get home.”
“Penance, darling? Have you been disingenuous again? Are you now?”
“Sweet, you know me. Never less than forthright. All the time and absolutely.”
Hannah clucked her tongue with mock severity, but sent Irving on his way.
Departing Ivy Crescent, he was overwhelmed by rapture. Had the world ever looked this good? He at his peak; Hannah fully supportive; the spring already like summer. The temperature! Perfect for serene, ongoing biological evolution. The fittest of the species everywhere were in peak form. Flowering fruit trees down every street dazzled with their blood-red purple and pink-white blossoms. Like a gazillion fresh labia, thought Irving. So fertile, so ready to conceive and bear fruit. Crossing the river on his favourite bridges, he saw the canoes were out, lazy as in August’s dog-days, with the couples in them – why not think it? – yes, pretty as flowers. He grinned. The stamens and pistils there would be hot and ready to perform too. Amidst the glorious reproductive forces evident all through his neighbourhood, the Czar’s heart beat proudly. It beat more proudly still when the Service complex came into view. How eclipsing it looked. Like an elevated citadel. His citadel. One could claim, he rhapsodized, that on any good day of any working week the rhythms inside were no less fecund than what surrounded it today. But with one twist. Inside he, not nature, called the shots. Inside he was the prime mover, the evolutionary force, the agent, you might say, that kept the cogs of progress oiled.
The garage door rumbled up; the guard waved him through with a salute. Inside, wheeling to a reserved spot at the front, Heywood’s rapture grew to bursting point. His intuition was telling him this was the day Zadokite Port would gel. Switching the ignition off, he sensed a victory force. And hauling himself out the car, he made a vow: at this day’s end Carson would stand exposed. A conspirator bereft of shame had taunted him and today would bring the reckoning. As Irving trudged in, the momentum of his billowing torso was matched by a certainty swelling in his mind.
On the way up he snapped hellos to this Sunday’s army of young bloods. As usual they were out in force ministering to the eternal miseries of the world. Bright kids, he thought. Good workers. Global crises don’t slip into a weekend slumber on Friday night. Someone’s got to come to work to tend to the emergencies. Over the years he’d stabilised more than his share. A role model, that’s what he had become. The way the young ones studied him, they obviously knew his exploits. He assumed his presence – them seeing a living legend – helped them carry on.
Settled into his chair he fired up the computer, closed his eyes as it loaded and rubbed thumbs against fingertips to warm them up. Next, punch in Zadokite Port’s PINS. Having entered, inhaling deeply, loving the moment, he allowed Zadokite Port to vitalise his neurons. A mystical union became established between the circuitry of the computer and the networks in his brain. The moment brought pure ecstasy; he could feel the metaphysics of millennia come alive. No time for much of that today though, nor for snuffling through a clutch of folders. Today he went directly to the one he loved and hated most, the red one, the one devoted to the devil. Ah, new stuff in it. From Jaime. Damn. Another report on Rachel. Not again. Especially not today. He’d have to remind Jaime once more that stuff on Rachel was to be left out. Because it was fabricated. Obviously so. All that kind of material proved that a refined but heinous feint continued to be developed by Carson. Today he’d brook no distractions. So click here, on this cross, this useful little cross, click Jaime’s latest message away. Think Carson, the Czar urged himself, think only Carson. Think never-ending deviousness. Think limitless deceit.
For an hour the Czar scrolled through the devil’s file. Sometimes he clicked “print” because when all was said and done he still found it easier to compare texts if they lay juxtaposed before him. And thus it was that two piles grew. One on Nikko Krause, world-renowned financier (look him up in the Who’s Who of bankers), and the other containing the details of Morsi Abou-Ghazi’s global armageddonic emporium. The Foundation for the world’s poverty-stricken children figured too, but only as an empty shell, because Jaime had proven conclusively that even the few, scattered, genuine projects that really existed had basically been no more than theatre.
Outside the office window, the world teemed with carefree, sun-seeking hedonists. Inside, Heywood sat immune. Hour by hour he sank deeper into another world which had no resemblance to the utopia that was his neighbourhood. This world wasn’t orderly and splendid. It was chaotic. But the Czar knew all chaos is otherwise if only you delve deep enough. Whatever the appearances, somewhere below the surface causation awaits discovery. All that’s needed to get at it is a good dose of genius.
He wasn’t sparing his. He studied and thought, and slowly, various elemental theorems emerged from the mist, each one a building block, each one contributing to a logical construct. Heywood loved these fertile hours. Deep contemplation, he considered, had always been one of his great strengths.
Nikko Krause and Morsi Abou-Ghazi. A Junker and a Caliph. The more he came to understand them, the less he held them in contempt. Yes, their souls were barren, grotesquely barren, as barren as the Foundation they had contrived. Yet, as Irving studied the secret reports and reflected on what they did, he sensed a growing empathy with them, as if he could enter their minds, and could track their thinking. How was this possible? he asked himself. How did he manage it?
Because, bizarre as it might seem, he believed he had lived in their world. He had lived in their countries of business. And if he hadn’t actually lived in some, he was present there all the same, in all of them, all the time, through the resident embassies he tended to. He, the Czar, like the Junker and the Caliph, also masterminded a global operation. There was a difference, naturally. It was in approach. He pursued enlightenment, while they operated in the shadows. You could argue, Heywood reasoned, that globally he was propelled by virtue, whereas the roads they travelled were paved with depravity. But if you looked from higher up, took a cosmic view, you could plausibly conclude that he and they were symbiotic. Their existence provided a counterweight to his, as in nature. Where would carnivores be without herbivores, and vice-versa? How could he excel at seeking justice if the world was entirely devoid of crime? Yes, Irving developed such an affinity for Morsi and Nikko that a tingle went up his spine.
A clever duo, Kraut Nikko and Moor Morsi. You could tell they were smart by the way they kept their names off the public lists of billionaires. Heywood studied their business. Simple and straightforward. Buy arms, narcotics, nuclear materials, items of that kind. Disguise, hide, or substitute them in international shipments of generators, cables, pumps, bearings, filters, or any of the other humdrum products crisscrossing the oceans. Ensure the paperwork for the products is flawless and carries the names of companies reputed to be principled, of gold-plated insurance agents, and of houses of finance with excellent pedigrees. Keep all routine and all smooth as clockwork. Bec
ause discord is a perturbation and perturbations draw attention. Discord causes bells to ring in faraway places.
In a typical transaction the Caliph acquires, say, user-friendly, shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles from a French manufacturer. On paper the buyer might be a parastatal company in South-East Asia, in Thailand, for example, a country which, it could be argued, has a reasonable need for such weapons. The missiles are sent, but upon arrival in Bangkok get re-crated, made to appear on the outside as a Thai export of automotive parts to be sent to a car assembly plant in Brazil. Next stop for the missiles, now labelled as drive shafts, is a transshipment complex in the United Arab Emirates. Simple planning ensures that a consignment of drilling pipes from Germany destined for Iran arrived there a day or two before. The switch is child’s play. The anti-air missiles, now encased in fine German drill-pipe mouldings, cross the Persian Gulf into Iran and from there spread effortlessly west into Iraq and east into Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the German pipes, now in crates which claim the contents are automotive, move on too because car parts ought to be seen to be arriving in Brazil. Yet another switch, in Port Elizabeth, where real drive shafts wait. Once the pipes are out and the car parts are in, the shipment continues its journey and arrives in Brazil right on time. Everywhere the transactions, suitably greased, are effortless and silent.
What works for missiles does for hand guns (disguise them as computer drives), heroine (spices), enriched uranium (watch batteries), or anything else for which there’s an illicit market. Countries of origin and transshipment may differ, but the process is the same. No supplier is ever connected with a buyer. Transactions occur inside a fog that conceals.
If contraband wormed its way to the destinations in complex ways, the accompanying financial flows were still more elegant. Irving whistled through his teeth. Good thing I grew up poor, he thought. He had always been convinced that lifting yourself from poverty is a pre-cursor for extra-sensory perception; poor kids can see into life’s shrouded dimensions, whereas the coddled ones are blind. Yes, he could appreciate the Junker’s use of financial smoke and mirrors.
Take the user-friendly anti-aircraft missiles now resting on the shoulders of the nimble Taliban. The French seller is paid from an account in a subsidiary of a German bank in Zurich. That account is replenished by transfers from a Bangkok financial house closely linked to the parastatal company which on paper bought the missiles. The Bangkok bank is a correspondent with one in Singapore, which in turns owns part of a trade-financing outfit headquartered in Dubai. The Dubai bankers are close associates of business favourites of the mullahs in Iran. Once the missiles are delivered an electronic money flow winds its way from account to account, bank to bank, country to country, each transaction de-linked from the others. The flow lessens as it goes, for everywhere there are fees – fees for banks maintaining the accounts, fees for bank managers to de-link outflows from inflows, fees for re-crating, fees for doctoring papers. The fees are significant, but the profits are immense, too large to come from trading in car parts, so most of the profits get hidden, by vanishing into all manner of nameless offshore accounts.
Heywood knew no agent on earth was powerful enough to disrupt this, not as long as the quaint notion of international sovereignty remained. Sovereignty spells chaos and chaos spells opportunity. The Junker and the Caliph perceived this brilliantly and exploited it masterfully. As for a mechanism to cleanse the dirty profits, why not a foundation for underprivileged and malnourished children?
The Caliph’s Foundation wasn’t exactly a stroke of genius, but, Heywood grudgingly acknowledged, it wasn’t a silly gag either. Its beauty was that no one had a right to look into its affairs. Anonymous donations arrive from the numbered offshore accounts. On paper the Foundation puts them to use. Do-good projects off and running all over Africa and Asia. Cash from the Foundation is deposited into project accounts that pay service agencies. The agencies appear to have proper legal structures, but their directors exist in name only. In reality they are illusions with mythical directors who hire nonexistent consultants. The nonexistent consultants are sent abroad by two competing service companies located in Monaco. A holding company incorporated in Bermuda owns them both. Jaime, after some light-duty hacking into that island’s banking sector, found that the holding company was privately owned, 50% each by the Caliph and the Junker.
Heywood smiled with savvy. You had to have been raised in the backwoods of New Brunswick to appreciate the cunning. Dirty money flows into the immense morass of world poverty kept going by the desertification of semi-arid regions, the dwindling offshore fisheries, the disappearing rain forests, the mushrooming slums in toxic valleys. In a perverse way poverty constitutes a stable market for Foundation funds which pour in. Who can monitor what’s going on? Who can prove, or disprove the projects? Who knows that no services are really rendered, that no squadrons of expensive experts really travel, that no fleets of four-wheel drive vehicles, or solar water heaters, or water pumps, pipes, or drills, are ever bought? Only paper says it happened. On paper it’s all paid for. In complex ways money from the Foundation cycles back to the service agencies in Monaco which are despatching all the non-existent advisors. From there it moves to the holding company in Bermuda, and so returns to Nikko and Morsi. Fool-proof, Heywood had to admit, how dirty philanthropic donations transform into spotless income. To succeed all you have to do is satisfy fee-hungry middlemen and maintain a small platoon of script writers good at producing fake project documents. Oh, and take out some insurance too, such as financing one or two real projects. That’s in case someone asks to see what’s happening. They get zipped out to some malaria infested swamp where grateful children in nice uniforms sing and dance and wave flags. It never fails to dew the eyes.
So that explains the business of the Junker and the Caliph. But what about that other scam artist, the one going about his business scot-free one tower over and a few floors down? What’s Carson’s contribution to all this? Why for years would he have kept information on the Foundation to himself?
“Find the chink in the armour, Jaime,” the Czar had commanded. “Expose his Achilles heel.” Jaime soon came back saying she’d looked everywhere and Carson was squeaky clean. “No armour, Irv, so no chink either. He devotes his days to doing good. What you’ve got is what you see.”
The Czar had squinted with suspicion.
Jaime then came up with more nonsense about Rachel. “It’s her comings and goings with Nikko and Morsi, Irv. No good. Smelly. You could add her to that moniker of yours, make it The Junker, the Caliph, and their Courtesan.” How irritating the chiming of the baubles on Jaime’s wrists had been.
Heywood could only sputter. “Jaime, you’re a fine hacker. You’ve got no equal. I’ll say that. But I know people. And I say it’s a set-up. Someone is framing Rachel.”
“Someone? I know who you mean. What did you call Carson the other day. Killjoy? I’m telling you, he isn’t. And he isn’t framing anyone.”
They had eyed each other silently. “I like that,” Heywood had said calmly. “The Junker, the Caliph, and the Killjoy. That sounds much better.”
He had turned on his heels to leave Jaime’s lab and puffed his way back up the stairs feeling hurt. Rachel a courtesan? Slanderous. He stopped on the first landing to regain his breath, and it was there that he realised Jaime had a blind spot. Continuing to the second landing, his clairvoyance deepened. Jaime had a blind spot because she had a soft spot…for Killjoy. Carson squeaky clean? Not likely. If anything he was a cesspool. How could she miss it? Because, Heywood reasoned, regaining his breath, she’d become partial to him. Carson had found a way to take her into his power; he had turned her into an emotional hostage. The only thing was, she didn’t know it. And in her vulnerability she had developed an attachment to her captor. Why did it take me this long to see it? The Stockholm Syndrome all over again. The thought sickened him. By the time the wheezing Czar was back in his office he’d worked it through, he’d drawn the consequen
ces. Jaime had turned unreliable. From here on, he’d have to work alone.
And how majestic it is, he thought as the Sunday afternoon wore on, true solitude, a big picture coming into view. The Junker and the Caliph he had figured out, but Killjoy was proving trickier. Take stock, Heywood urged himself. Rearrange the tea leaves. Enter the subtle psychic in-between spaces, the ones beyond the grasp of ordinary folk.
The Czar leaned back in the tilting chair, closed his eyes, opened his mind and waited for truth to rush in.
He waited. An item appeared. It was good, good enough for him to jerk back up in the chair, grab a pencil and a sheet of paper and jot down a quick note.
Killjoy knows about the Junker and the Caliph, but files no reports. He keeps what he knows to himself. He encrypts it in a cipher so devious it took Jaime three days to figure out.
He protects them.
One good thought begets others. In high gear, Heywood’s mind dwelt on other Carson oddities.
Killjoy doesn’t like reality. He alters it to suits himself.
Take the plague. Jaime proved Carson doctored computer files to hide the fact that Benedictus Athenasiu launched it from Romania. If he changed what happened then, how many other times had that been done?
Love this clear thinking, Heywood murmured, jotting down more insight.
Killjoy hates Rachel.
Does he? Think about it? Yes, he does. Sure he does. He must. He’s fixed on destroying her. That’s why he alters reality. He goes out of his way to make it appear that she is in cahoots with the Foundation. Why? Heywood mulled over the possibilities. Was Carson busy preparing Rachel’s ruination because he was spiteful, because she had energy and passion, and loved living, because she was so contrary to Carson’s sullen cynicism. Or, was Rachel a cog in a bigger, more complex machination? Perhaps he, Irving Heywood – given his elevated purposefulness – was Carson’s larger target. Heywood nodded. It could be that. He had suspected it before.
Borderless Deceit Page 30
