“It was the biggest story we’ve ever had. I reduced everything we knew, all the evidence we had, our research files, the entire story, to writing and copyrighted it. I talked to my lawyers and, only after they were satisfied, I shared one copy of the materials with Haze.
“He’s an old newspaper hand. It was where he cut his teeth when he was a kid. He knew a hot story when he saw one. He realized that with the copyrighted materials and the fact that the story was so big, that if we succeeded in getting to publication we could sell it all over the world. And everybody would be buying because if they didn’t, they would be locked out of some of the details on the biggest story since Watergate—bigger!” he says. “The revenue stream would be sufficient to carry us for years. Haze might not get another chance to buy the Gravesite, and he wanted it, wanted it badly.”
“So Haze bought the copyright,” I say.
Graves nods. “So now you understand why I can’t talk. Even if I wanted to. We have the exclusive rights on first publication, so the Gravesite gets attribution everywhere the story appears. But eighty percent of the revenue goes to Haze. The money he paid will keep our doors open for at least two more years. If we can publish in that time, and I think we can, the money from the story and the global publicity will carry us over the hump.”
“In the meantime, Alex goes to prison,” I tell him.
“If I talk. If I told you anything specific as to the story, Haze would sue me seven ways from Sunday. He’d get the Gravesite and everything it possesses, including the story,” says Graves. “I just can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
“What about Rubin Betz?” I ask.
Graves’s little eyes grow wider with the mention of the name.
“What can you tell me about him?”
“What did Alex tell you?”
“He said that you referred to Betz as the Holy Grail. The key to your story.”
“What exactly did he tell you? Did he use those words?”
I smile and play along. “He said that Betz held the key.”
With this he gives me a quizzical glance.
“Come on, at least give me a clue.”
“Then you don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“Never mind,” he says.
“Alex called Betz the whistleblower. Said he was in a federal prison. Maximum security to keep him quiet. He told me that Betz knew things about powerful people. That he claimed to have the goods on some prominent politicians with undeclared numbered accounts offshore. That Betz and Serna were, in a word, ‘acquainted.’ And that the government was doing everything in its power to keep him there, to shut him up.”
“I’ve never talked to the man. Nor has anyone from the Gravesite,” says Graves. “What we know about Betz is pretty much in the public domain. Everything except his ancient history with Serna. You can look it up,” he says. “Stories on the Internet. Stuff in the newspapers. Most of it unconfirmed. Now if you could get to Betz, talk to him and find some way to confirm what he knows, being that you’re a lawyer, you might be able to find out what we can’t. In that case, we might be able to work out a deal. Sharing information,” he says.
“You think the stuff on Betz is true?”
“What I think doesn’t matter,” says Graves. “All that counts is what we can confirm.”
“And what about Switzerland? Alex says the two of you took a couple of trips there looking for some information? And that you went to meet someone, alone.”
“No comment,” he says. “I can’t talk about that.”
“Give me a break,” I tell him. “Can’t you at least give me something? I assume you don’t want Alex to go to prison?”
“I don’t,” he says. “He’s a good reporter. Dogged. I like him. I like him a lot.” Graves looks like a man who’s trapped. Worried and perhaps feeling like a heel at this moment, at least I hope so, anything would help. “Let me think,” he says. He wheels around in his swivel chair, turns his back to me for a moment, and looks out the window, the wall of glass behind him toward the buildings across the street.
When he turns back, the fingers of both hands are steepled under his chin as if he is deep in thought. “I don’t know a lot about the law or copyright,” he says. “But I assume that if you were to discover what I know on your own, from other sources independent from any information we have here at the Gravesite, without any assistance from me or my staff, that Haze would have no claim against the Gravesite.”
Of course, this ignores what Alex has already told me. I nod. “That’s true.”
“Did you ever read the Bible?” he asks.
“I have.”
“Then you know that Jesus spoke in parables.”
I nod again.
“I make no pretense to be the Son of God,” he says, “but listen to my parable and see what you can draw from it.”
“Can I take notes?”
“No! Do you remember Abscam?”
“I remember the movie.”
“That was American Hustle. This was the real thing,” he says. “It may be that’s where they first got the idea.”
“Who?”
He gives me a face and shakes his head like that’s out of bounds. “You wanted a clue. I’m giving you one. Abscam was a political scandal back in the late seventies, early eighties. It started as an FBI undercover sting involving stolen property and corrupt business types in the Big Apple. It lasted for two years.
“Then in the last few months somebody at the FBI got the bright idea to take it in a different direction. It morphed into a probe of political corruption and migrated from New York to Washington. By the time it got here it had grown into a couple of mustachioed Arab oil sheiks throwing money to members of Congress willing to do official favors in return. In the end, by the time the FBI pulled the plug and shut it down, they had netted six members of the House and one US senator. There was one member of Congress who, when offered the money, actually said ‘No’ and another who mumbled sufficiently so that they couldn’t bring charges.
“When they finally went public, the FBI got hammered from every side. Some claimed it was a setup, that otherwise ethical politicians were induced to commit crimes because they were entrapped. Others said the FBI folded their tent and shut down the show because of fear that the political class, those who survived, would get their revenge by crushing the bureau when the dust settled. The FBI’s official version is that it all came to a sudden end because one young lawyer at the Justice Department who was privy to the details left his briefcase containing sensitive undercover information on a train. You can take your pick. I like the second one,” said Graves.
“You’ll notice that was thirty-five years ago and there hasn’t been another sting aimed at politicians in Washington since. That tells you something. The rumor was that had they let it go on for a few more months, they might not have been able to find a quorum for either house under that great big dome. The place would have been empty.” With this, the story stops and he looks at me.
“Your point is?”
“If you look closely, you’ll see there are several lessons here. One,” he says, “is that most politicians are oversize. They have massive egos and appetites to match. They are always testing to see if they can game the system. And monkeys learn from past mistakes.”
“OK.” I have no idea where he’s going with this.
“You don’t get it, do you?”
I shake my head.
“If people are getting stung, sent away for acts of corruption committed here, what’s the answer?” he says.
“Go straight?”
“Remember these are people with big egos,” he says.
“Do it offshore?” I say.
“Bingo.”
“OK, but I still don’t get it.”
“Second parable,” he says. “A lesson from J. Edgar. Very brief. Then I gotta run. Got a meeting and I’ll see you to the door,” he says.
“You remember back in the sev
enties, maybe before your time, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI? He died in ’72, I think. But he was director for almost forty years. They couldn’t get rid of him. They tried, believe me. Several presidents wanted to fire his ass. He was an irascible bastard with a lot of vices. Years after he died, we found out that the mob had been paying his gambling debts at racetracks for years. So according to Hoover’s Bureau, the official position of the FBI was that there was no such thing as organized crime in America. The next time somebody looks at today’s FBI and tells you this ain’t your daddy’s FBI, you tell them you sure as hell hope not.
“Anyway, they couldn’t fire the son of a bitch. Hoover had a card catalogue in his closet at home filled with all kinds of embarrassing information. For years he’d been using the bureau’s agents to dig up dirt on politicians all over this city. Not only here but back in their home states. If you were an aspiring politician with some dark skeleton under your bed you could be sure J. Edgar would find it and take pictures of it for his files. Anybody who was anybody had a file in Hoover’s closet. If you were important, you had two or three. And if you even dreamed about making a move on him, he let it be known that your life story with every wart highlighted in headlines would spread out all over the wires and in every newspaper in the country by the next morning. As you can imagine, he didn’t need to do a lot of arm twisting on Capitol Hill when it came to the bureau’s budget. Some people call it extortion. But I once heard a very wise man refer to it as ‘the Hoover Effect.’ Now you go home and you think about it, these two parables. Put ’em together and see what you come up with. I’m sure it will come to you.”
He opens the center draw of his desk, takes something out. Something small, because when he closes his hand it’s gone, I can no longer see it. Instantly he’s out from behind his desk, easing me out of my chair, his arm around my shoulder, guiding me toward the door while I’m still trying to close up my briefcase. “It was nice talking to you,” he says. “Perhaps we can do it again sometime under happier circumstances.” He waltzes me out through the computerized rock pile in the boiler room outside, past the receptionist, through the smoked glass doors, and into the public corridor outside.
He reaches out to shake my hand, then looks down as he does it. “You dropped something,” he says.
Before I can say anything Graves reaches down to pick it up. Without looking at it he hands it to me. Then he shakes my hand, smiles, and before I can say a word he is gone back into his office.
He disappears behind the counter and through the sea of workstations beyond. I look at the item in my left hand. It’s a business card, very stiff, raised lettering, something expensive: “Gruber Bank, A.G.” The information on the card appears to be printed in German, telephone numbers, a street address in Lucerne, and the name “Simon Korff, Auslandskonten.”
TWENTY-ONE
We know where he is. We know the general area. And we’re on top of it. Give us twenty-four hours, we should have him.” They had located Alex Ives.
“Where is he?” asked the Eagle.
“Mexico, a small resort town on the Pacific coast. Not a lot of places for him to hide there.”
“Are you sure?” The Eagle wasn’t convinced. “Ives didn’t have a passport. He was out on bail. The court would have forced him to surrender his passport as a condition of release.”
“Yeah, we thought about that,” said the other man. “Then it hit us. Ives’s old man has connections through his business. What if they chartered a flight and flew to a small strip where there’s nobody to check for a passport?”
“Go on,” said the Eagle.
“We haven’t seen him, but we know he’s there. All we have to do is hang tight. The man with him will lead us right to him.”
“Good job,” said the Eagle, “. . . if you’re right.”
The guy at the other end smiled as he explained how they did it. They had been using the cell phones belonging to the two lawyers, not only to listen in on their conversations and phone calls, but to track their locations.
Then suddenly both phones went dead, almost at the same time, as if someone had removed the batteries. It happened the night the girl was killed at the gas station, almost within minutes of the event. There was one quick call between the two lawyers and that was it. Both phones remained dead for almost twenty-four hours.
At the same time, incoming calls to the office from an investigator who worked for the firm, a man named Herman Diggs, whose cell was also being tapped, and who generally called in at least once or twice each day, dried up completely. They knew where the two lawyers were. One was in Washington. The Eagle confirmed that. The other was at the office in San Diego. But the investigator, Diggs, had disappeared.
Connecting the dots wasn’t hard. Diggs was babysitting Ives. The question was where?
About the same time that the cell phone traffic fell off, there seemed to be more frequency in the number of deliveries from private mail services to the office. It was hard to miss. DHL, in particular.
One of the more enterprising eaglets decided to go Dumpster diving in the trash bin behind the firm’s office late at night to see what he could find. Among the piles of trash he brought back, they looked for messages but found none. These they figured must have been shredded. But among the items pilfered were the various account numbers for the firm’s private delivery services, DHL, FedEx, and United Parcel.
Account numbers usually appeared on waybills that customers using the service often simply tossed into the trash when they were finished tracking packages that had already arrived at their destination. None of the waybills looked as if they had anything to do with Ives or where he might be.
It was the account numbers for the various carriers that turned out to be the key. With the cutting-edge software they possessed, the Eagle’s minions were able to marry up the Madriani account number for each carrier with the tracking number for each delivery paid for under that account. They didn’t have to go back very far, only a few days to the time when Ives disappeared.
The linkage of account numbers with individual tracking numbers on packages was accomplished by a stick-on barcode slapped on every package by the carrier when the item was first dispatched. The barcode allowed the carrier to use handheld scanners at each point along the delivery route to instantly collect the identifying information and show the location of the package. This information was fed wirelessly to a central computer system and could be used by the company or a customer who possessed the tracking number to go online and track the progress of the delivery from its point of origin to its ultimate destination.
It was the item from Zihuatanejo on the Mexican coast, a place some of the gringos and locals called “Zihua,” pronounced “Zee-wah,” with the name of the sender, H. Diggs, that instantly caught their attention.
For the Eagle, this was the sign that his crew had finally done something right. Before he could ask, they told him that they had already dispatched two men down to Mexico to hang out near the DHL office at that location. They had a picture of the investigator from the P.I.’s state licensing agency so they could easily identify him. If authorized, they were prepared to “scrub” Ives as well as the investigator if he got in the way, the latest in a long line of euphemisms for murder.
Mexico was the perfect cover. You didn’t need a traffic accident to do it down there. Make it look like a drug hit and even if they had to kill both men, it would draw less attention than death by natural causes in most other places. The Eagle didn’t bat an eye. All he said was: “Do it!”
Having gotten what he wanted, the man at the other end hung up.
The light on the Eagle’s smartphone went dark as his eyes returned to the picture window across the street. He was parked, seated in his car in Georgetown across from a small restaurant. Inside he could see the lawyer, Madriani, and another man at a table. They were talking over drinks. Through the open window of his car the Eagle took several pictures with a long-lens camera. He didn�
�t know who the other man was, but he intended to find out. He wanted no more loose ends.
Before our drinks arrive I realize that Cletus Proffit has been doing his homework, probably burning up the computer cables to LexisNexis, the lawyer’s crystal ball into the unknown. He is not only familiar with my client’s name, he knows that Ives worked for the Gravesite. On Nexis, if you punched in Alex’s name and did a search, no doubt you would find every story ever published under his byline. I am guessing that this must have rattled Proffit’s brain when he first saw it.
“What a coincidence,” he says, “that two people who worked here in Washington should be involved in an accident there.”
I play it down. I tell him that Ives actually worked for the Gravesite out on the West Coast, but still it is a small world.
“Indeed,” he says. If he knows about the story involving Serna, he hides it well. Any thought that his firm was under the glass being studied by Graves for prominent mention in the scandal sheets I would think would have curled his socks right up to his eyeballs. Instead, he changes gears and asks me whether I do very many drunk-driving cases.
I tell him no.
“I was wondering about that,” he says. “Because it would seem to be a very strange case.”
“Why is that?”
“From what I understand, your client’s blood alcohol level was well below the legal limit.”
The only way he could know this is if he had ordered up a copy of the police report. It answers one question: Someone at Proffit’s firm is keeping tabs on our case. That could be a problem if they decide to wade in, to push the prosecutor for sterner action.
“That’s true,” I tell him. There is no sense lying about it.
“Then how do you account for it? The accident, I mean?”
“It’s a mystery,” I tell him.
The Enemy Inside Page 15
