Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “Under the Bahnhofstrasse.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But wouldn’t it be more convenient to sell the gold here, put it into liquid assets? Deutsche marks, Swiss francs, whatever?”

  “Not quite. The Swiss government is terrified of inflation, so they have limits on the amount of cash foreigners can keep. There even used to be a limit of a hundred thousand francs on foreign accounts.”

  “Gold doesn’t earn interest, right?”

  “Of course not,” Knapp said. “But come on, you don’t bank in Switzerland to earn interest, for Christ’s sake. Their interest rates are, like, one percent. Or zero. Sometimes you have to pay for the privilege of keeping your money here. I’m not kidding. Lots of the banks charge something like one and a half percent for all withdrawals.”

  “All right. Now, you can tell by looking at gold where it’s from, isn’t that right?”

  “Usually. Gold—the sort of gold that central banks use as their monetary reserves—is kept in the form of gold ingots, usually four hundred troy ounces per bar. Usually ‘three nines’ gold, which means it’s 99.9 percent pure. And usually it’s earmarked, stamped with numbers and assay numbers, the ID and serial numbers.” The waiter came with his kirschwasser, and Knapp took it without acknowledging where it had materialized from. “For every ten bars of gold that are poured, one is assayed, by drilling holes in six different locations on the bar, taking a few milligrams of shavings, and assaying it. Anyway, yeah, most gold bars you can tell where they’re from.”

  He chuckled, sipped his drink thoughtfully. “You should try this stuff. You really get to like it. Anyway, the gold market is a funny, high-strung thing. I remember when the gold market went crazy not too long ago. The Soviets were trying to sell a shipment of gold bars here, and someone noticed that some of the bars had czarist eagles on them. The gnomes flipped out.”

  “Why?”

  “Come on, big guy. This was back in Christmas 1990. Gold bars with Romanoff eagles on it! The Gorby government was in the process of going down the tubes and was selling off the last of its gold! Scraping the bottom of the barrel! Why else would they be dipping into the czarist reserves? So the price of gold shot up fifty bucks an ounce.”

  I froze in mid-sip, felt the blood rush to my head. “Then what?” I asked.

  “Then what? Then nothing. It turned out to be an elaborate hoax. A pretty sophisticated bit of financial disinformation on the part of the Sovs. Turned out they’d mixed a few old czarist bars in the pile deliberately. Watched the market go haywire, as they knew it would, then unloaded their gold at the higher price. Pretty clever, huh? The Sovs weren’t total numbskulls.”

  I thought in silence for a moment. What if it hadn’t been disinformation? I wondered. What if … But I couldn’t make any sense of this. Instead, I set my glass down and continued, as unflustered-seeming as possible: “So can gold be laundered?”

  He paused a moment. “Yeah … sure. You just melt it down—re-refine it, re-assay it, get rid of the earmarks. If you’re trying to be secretive about it, it’s sort of a pain in the ass to move it around and get it done, but it’s possible. And it’s cheap. Gold’s completely fungible. But Ben, I don’t get this. You’re looking for a huge load of gold that belongs to one of your clients, and you don’t know where it is?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that. I can’t be too specific. Tell me this: When you talk about the secrecy of Swiss banking, what does that mean? How difficult is it to penetrate the secrecy?”

  “Whoa,” Knapp said. “Sounds a little cloak-and-dagger to me.”

  I glared at him, and he replied, “It ain’t easy, Ben. Some of the most revered words in this town are ‘the principle of confidentiality’ and ‘the freedom of currency exchange.’ Translation: the inalienable right to hide money. That’s their reason for being. Money is their religion. I mean, when Huldrych Zwingli launched the Reformation of Zurich by chucking all the Catholic statues into the Limmat River, he made sure first to salvage the gold from the statues and give it to the town council. Thus giving birth to Swiss banking.

  “But the Swiss—well, you gotta love ’em. They’re mad about secrecy, unless it benefits them to break confidentiality. Mafiosi, drug kingpins, corrupt third-world dictators with briefcases full of embezzled funds—the Swiss protect their secrecy like a priest in a confessional. But don’t forget, when the Nazis came during the war and started putting pressure on them, suddenly the Swiss got real accommodating. They gave the Nazis the names of the German Jews who had Swiss accounts. They like to spread this myth that they stood up to the Nazis, real steadfastlike, when they came to grab the Jews’ money, but no way. Unh-unh. Okay, not all the banks, but a lot. The Basler Handelsbank laundered Nazi money, and that’s a documented fact.” His eyes were roaming the crowd as if he were searching for someone. “Look, Ben, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  I nodded, traced a pattern in the condensation on the side of the glass. “Well,” I said, “I have a name.”

  “A name?”

  “A banker’s name, I think.” A name, I didn’t say, that Orlov had thought in connection with the gold and Zurich. “Koerfer.”

  “Well, all right,” he said triumphantly. “Why didn’t you say so earlier? Dr. Ernst Koerfer’s the managing director of the Bank of Zurich. Or, at least, he was, until a month or so ago.”

  “Retired?”

  “Died. Heart attack or something. Although I wouldn’t swear for the fact that he had a heart. A real son of a bitch. But he ran a tight ship.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Do you know anyone who’s at the Bank of Zurich now?”

  He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Come on, big guy. I know everyone in Swiss banking. That’s my job, man. The new managing director there is a guy named Eisler. Dr. Alfred Eisler. If you want, I can make a call, set up an introduction for you. You want that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That would be great.”

  “No problem.”

  “Thanks, big guy,” I said.

  * * *

  Procuring a gun in Switzerland proved to be more of a challenge than I’d anticipated. My contacts were limited, virtually nonexistent. I was afraid to contact Toby or anyone connected with the CIA; there was no one here I trusted. If absolutely necessary, I could reach Truslow, but that route was to be avoided: how could I be sure that the channels of communication hadn’t been penetrated? Far better not to call him. Finally, after bribing a manager of a sporting goods and hunting supply store, I got the name of someone who might be able to “help” me: the manager’s brother-in-law, who ran, of all things, an antiquarian bookshop.

  I found it a few blocks away. Gilt letters in the window, in old-style German Fraktur script, read:

  BUCHHÄNDLER ANTIQUITÄTEN UND MANUSKRIPTE

  A bell mounted on the door jingled as I entered. It was small and dark and redolent of mildew and dankness and the vanilla smell of ancient, crumbling bookbindings.

  High black metal shelves, overcrowded with haphazard stacks of books and yellowed magazines, took up virtually every available square inch of floor space. A narrow path between the shelves led back to a small, chaotic-looking oak desk piled high with papers and books, at which sat the proprietor. He called out, “Guten Tag!”

  I nodded a greeting and, peering around as if searching for a particular volume, asked the shopkeeper in German: “How late are you open?”

  “Until seven,” he replied.

  “I’ll be back when I have more time.”

  “But if you have just a few minutes,” he said, “I have some new acquisitions in the back room.” He got up, locked the front door, and placed a Closed sign in the window. Then he led me back to a tiny, cluttered room piled high with crumbling leather-bound books. In several shoe boxes he had a pitifully small selection of guns, the best of them being a Ruger Mark II (a decent semiautomatic but only a .22), a Smith & Wesson, and a Glock 19. I chose the Glock. It is a gun that has had
more than its share of problems, or so my Agency friends tell me, but I’ve always liked it. The price was exorbitant, but this was Switzerland, after all.

  * * *

  Throughout dinner at the Agnes Amberg on Hottingerstrasse, neither one of us brought up what was weighing so heavily on each other’s minds. It was as if we both needed to take a tension break and be ordinary tourists for a little while. With my hands bandaged I found it difficult, and not a little painful, to cut into my fowl.

  Follow the gold …

  I had a name now, and a bank. I was several steps closer.

  Once I had a direction, a path, I might come closer to learning why Sinclair was killed—that is, what conspiracy had to be covered up. Whether my midnight epiphany would be borne out.

  We sat in glum silence. Then, before I could say anything, Molly said, “You know, this is a place where women didn’t get the right to vote until 1969.”

  “What about it?”

  “And I thought the medical profession in the U.S. didn’t take women seriously. I’ll never say that again after the doctor I saw today.”

  “You saw a doctor?” I said, although I knew. “About the stomach thing?”

  “Yep.”

  “And?”

  “And,” she said, folding her white linen napkin neatly, “I’m pregnant. But you knew that.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I knew that.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  We could barely make it back to the hotel, Molly and I. There is something about the joy—and the terror—of discovering you are creating a human being that can be quite arousing, and that night we were both certainly feeling amorous. Although Laura had been pregnant with our child, I hadn’t known that while she was alive. So this was a first for me. And as far as Molly was concerned—well, for years she’d been sounding so antiprocreation that I fully expected her to be morose and even talk about getting rid of the child or something awful like that.

  But no. She was thrilled, overjoyed. Did it have something to do with the recent loss of her father? Probably, but who really knows the workings of the unconscious mind?

  She was tearing the clothes off me before we had the hotel room door closed. She was running her hands across my chest, under my belt to my buttocks, and then sliding them around to the front, all the while kissing me wildly. I responded with no less passion, tugging at her cream silk blouse, fumbling impatiently with the buttons (a few of which popped off onto the carpet), and reaching in to stroke her breasts, her nipples, which were already erect. Then, remembering my burned and bandaged hands, I instead used my tongue, licking in tighter and tighter concentric circles toward her nipples. She shuddered. With my shoulders and upper body—my throbbing arms averted like pegged lobster claws—I pushed her backward onto the enormous sleigh bed and fell on top of her. But she would not be dominated so easily. We tussled, wrestled with an aggressiveness I’d never before seen in our lovemaking but found I was enjoying immensely. Even before I entered her, she was moaning and groaning with pleasure, and anticipated pleasure.

  * * *

  And afterward, as they say, we lay there enjoying the sweatiness and stickiness and muskiness and the warm glow, stroking each other, talking quietly.

  “When did it happen?” I asked. I remembered when we made love, shortly after I’d become telepathic, and we were both so aroused that she hadn’t put in her diaphragm. But that was too recent.

  “Last month,” she said. “I didn’t think anything would happen.”

  “You forgot?”

  “Partly.”

  I smiled at her subterfuge, not at all resentful. “You see,” I said, “people our age try and try and try to conceive, buying ovulation kits and books and all that. And then you go and forget to put in your diaphragm once, and it happens by accident.”

  She nodded and smiled enigmatically. “Not entirely by accident.”

  “I wondered.”

  She shrugged. “Should we have talked about it in advance?”

  “Probably,” I said. “But that’s okay with me.”

  Another pause, and then she said: “How’s the burn?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Natural endorphins are great painkillers.”

  She hesitated, as if screwing up her courage to say something important. I could not help hearing a phrase—horrible thing he used to be—and then she spoke.

  “You’ve changed, haven’t you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know. You’ve become what you swore you’d never be again.”

  “It’s the right thing, Mol. There really wasn’t any choice.”

  Her reply was slow and sad. “No, I guess not. But you’re already different—I can feel it. I can sense it. I don’t need telepathy to see that—well, it’s as if all those years in Boston have just been wiped away. And you’re back in the thick of things. And I don’t like it. It scares me.”

  “It scares me, too.”

  “You were talking in the middle of the night.”

  “In my sleep?”

  “No, on the phone. Who were you talking to?”

  “A reporter I know, Miles Preston. Met him in Germany in my early CIA days.”

  “You asked him something about the German stock market crash.”

  “And I thought you were fast asleep.”

  “You think that has something to do with Dad’s murder?”

  “I don’t know. It might.”

  “I found something.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I remember your saying something when I was drifting off in Greve.”

  “I think I now understand why Dad left me that letter of authorization.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Remember the document left to me in his will? There was the title to his house, and the stocks and bonds, and that bizarre financial ‘instrument,’ as the lawyers kept calling it authorizing me to have all the rights of beneficiary, foreign and domestic?”

  “Right. And?”

  “Well, that would have been pointless for any domestic accounts, which automatically go to me anyway. As for foreign accounts, where banking laws vary so widely, a letter like that would come in handy.”

  “Especially with a Swiss account.”

  “Exactly.” She got up from the bed and walked over to the closet, opened a suitcase, and soon retrieved an envelope. “The financial instrument,” she announced. She foraged a bit longer and then produced the book her father had for some reason bequeathed me, the first edition of Allen Dulles’s memoirs, The Craft of Intelligence.

  “What the hell did you bring this for?” I asked.

  She didn’t reply. Instead, she returned to the bed and set both items down carefully on the rumpled sheets.

  Next, she opened the book. The predominantly gray jacket was immaculate, and the spine of the book cracked as she opened it to the middle. It had probably been opened a few times before. Maybe just once, when the legendary Mr. Dulles had taken out his Waterman fountain pen and written on the title page in blue-black ink in his neat script: “For Hal, With deepest admiration, Allen.”

  “This was the only thing Dad left to you,” she said. “And for a long time I wondered why.”

  “As did I.”

  “He loved you. And although he was always sort of frugal, he was never cheap. And I wondered why he’d leave you just this book. I knew his mind pretty well—he was a game player. So when they let me pack up my things, I collected all the documents Dad left me, and I decided to take this along and look through it carefully for any kind of markings—that’s the sort of thing he’d do for me when I was young, mark books up for me so I’d make sure not to miss the important passage. And I found it.”

  “Hmm?”

  I looked at the page she was indicating. On page 73, which dealt with codes and ciphers and cryptanalysis, the phrase “Pink Code” was underlined in the text. Next to it, scrawled lightly in pencil, was “L2576HJ.”

  “That’s his seven
,” she explained. “And definitely his two. And his J.”

  I understood immediately. “Pink Code” really meant the Onyx Code; Dulles had clearly wanted not to give away the actual name. The Onyx Code was a legendary World War I codebook that the Agency had inherited from the U.S. Diplomatic Service. It was still kicking around, though rarely used, since it had long ago been cracked. L2576HJ was a coded phrase.

  Hal Sinclair had left Molly the legal means to access the account.

  He had left me the account number. If only I could decrypt it.

  “One more,” she said. “The page before.”

  She pointed. At the top of Page 72 was a series of numbers, 79648, which Dulles had cited as an example for the general reader of how codes work. It was underlined lightly in pencil, and next to it Sinclair had penciled “R2.”

  R2 referred to a codebook of much more recent vintage, which I’d never used. I assumed that 79648 was another code that would translate into a different series of numbers (or perhaps letters) when the R2 code was applied.

  I needed code information from within the CIA, yet I couldn’t risk disclosing my whereabouts. So I placed a call to an Agency friend from Paris days who had retired some years ago and was teaching political science in Erie, Pennsylvania. I had saved his ass twice—once on an all-night stakeout that had gone bad, and once bureaucratically, by clearing his name in the subsequent investigation.

  He owed me big, and he agreed without hesitation to place a call to a trusted friend of his, still in the Agency, and ask him, as a favor to an old friend, to take a quick stroll over to the cryptography archives one floor below. Since any codebook three quarters of a century old was hardly a matter of national security, my friend’s source read to him a series of codes. He then placed a call to the pay phone outside the hotel and read them to me.

  And finally I had the account number in hand.

  The second code, however, was a tougher nut to crack. The book wouldn’t be stored in the crypto archives (the Crypt, as it was called), since it was still active.