by Robert Baer
Max, please call immediately. Marissa suffered a stroke.
Rikki needs you as soon as you can get here. You need to come to Istanbul.
Marissa’s father had sent it, followed by six others, all ending with a plea to come be with Rikki.
I e-mailed him back a pile of nonsense with just enough verisimilitude to it that I thought he might believe me: I was in Central Asia, places unnamed, hush-hush. Terribly sorry. I’d come with the first plane out. He had gotten used to similar evasions when I was married to his daughter.
Then I picked up a hotel phone and called Rikki, not at the Istanbul phone number her father had left but on her cell.
“Hello?”
It was her voice, tentative, the way it used to be around strangers.
“Rikki.”
“Da—”
“No, honey. Don’t say anything yet. Are you in the hospital room?” She whispered a yes. “With your grandparents?” Another yes. “Maybe you could step out into the hallway. A boyfriend calling.”
I heard her footsteps, what I guessed was a hospital cart being pushed by, monitors beeping.
“I’m at the end of the hall,” she finally said, “by the window.”
“Sweetheart, I just e-mailed your grandfather. I didn’t want him to get upset on the phone, but I can’t come now. It’s—”
“It’s all right, Daddy. You can’t be around all the time. I know what you do.”
I hope you don’t, I thought. Oh, Jesus, I hope you don’t. I let the implication sit there, though, another small lie to add to my skyscraper of deceit.
“How’s your mother?”
“Better,” she said. There were tears in her voice. “She’s only thirty-three, Daddy. A stroke! How does that happen? Her face is paralyzed on the left side. She looks so old. She can’t really speak yet.”
The words were gushing out now, a torrent. I heard about how Rikki had been swimming in the Adriatic and came back to the villa just before supper to find Marissa sprawled on the kitchen floor, about the lighthouse keeper and his first aid, about the helicopter that flew them to Zadar, on the Croatian coast, and the airplane her parents had chartered at ruinous expense to bring Marissa to Istanbul for treatment. I knew Marissa’s age, of course, but hearing Rikki say it shocked me, too. She’d seemed so old for nineteen when we married. She seemed so young for this, now. Marissa’s grandmother had died at the same age, dropped dead at the stove. I was hoping Rikki couldn’t see her own fate sitting out there, less than two decades ahead.
“I don’t know what to do, Daddy,” she finally said. “School starts in two weeks. I can’t go back; I can’t leave her.”
“Yes, you can, sweetheart. You can. You have to. Your mother would want it. I know she would. Grandma and Grandpa can look after her. She’ll get better. You have to go on with your life. You’re too young to be a nursemaid.”
I was gushing now, running my own words together. We didn’t have much time. I wanted to say everything I could.
“Daddy, Grandpa is waving at me from the door. I think we’re going. He looks upset.”
“He’s just impatient, honey. He’s not angry at anyone. Not at you. Go. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I could hear her footsteps starting back up the hall.
“Rikki!”
“Yes?”
“I’ll get to England. In September. I’ll see you there.”
“Will you?”
We were cut off there. Whether it was Rikki hanging up or the network failing, I didn’t know. But I thought that if I didn’t get to England the way I said I would, she would remember me the same way I remembered my own mother. The thought of it made me shiver. She’d have someone to hate forever.
I had never met Michelle Zwanzig. Indeed, I never would have heard of her if Frank hadn’t given me her card and told me she would be my conduit to the Saudi billionaire. But I was sure she was chatty as a clam. All Swiss fiduciaries are. They hold private fortunes in their own names, based only on blind trust and total discretion. When their clients ask for their money back, Swiss fiduciaries are expected to have it. Still, I wanted to see her office. I couldn’t use my real name; Frank had probably warned her about me. But maybe we would meet, and I could elicit something from her, tight-mouthed or not. At the least, I would get a look at the layout. Always better to do something than nothing.
Private Investment Services was located on the third floor of a sixteenth-century four-story Palladian on Rue Soleil Levant. There was no plaque out front, nor was Zwanzig’s name on the building list.
I rang the buzzer for the rez-de-chaussée.
“Yes?”
“I’d like to talk to Private Investment Services.”
“About what?”
“A new account.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
I wished the damned lady would come out and show herself. It’s virtually impossible to recruit someone through a squawk box.
“Please wait.”
I took a quick survey of the lobby and the hallway leading upstairs. A closed-circuit camera perched up in the corner covered the front door. The camera looked to be fed with a standard hookup. Disrupt the power supply, and you could fry the camera by crossing the wires. By the time the security company arrived, the electricity would be back on. If it was the weekend, they wouldn’t get around to replacing the camera until Monday morning.
The problem was the front-door lock—a sophisticated Swiss laser-cut. I’d never be able to pick it. I had no way to tell what lock Zwanzig had on her own door, but it was probably the same one. If I decided to go in, I’d have to drill them both. No problem so long as the invisible rez-dechaussée lady was away, but I’d still need to get in and out fast. Strictly a bash-and-dash entry.
I’d been standing there at least ten minutes before the squawk box came alive again.
“Private Investment Services thanks you very much for your visit, but at the moment they are not taking any new clients.”
I considered asking her to relay the message that Frank Beckman had told me to get in touch with Madame Zwanzig, but I’d been throwing caution to the wind ever since I left Washington, and for the most part, I’d done nothing but pay for it. Besides, now I knew my way to Private Investment Services. In my own way, I’d even cased the place. The day hadn’t been a total waste.
The next morning, I had nothing to do, so I prowled Geneva instead—ate, walked, had more coffee, watched the storm clouds gather over the lake, piling on top of one another like some fraternity phone-booth prank. I was on the Quai du Mont-Blanc when they finally broke and an ocean of rain fell from the sky seemingly all at once. Maybe ten seconds later, a Beau Rivage doorman walked halfway down the block to meet me with a huge umbrella.
I was just inside the lobby, mopping my hair, when I heard a familiar voice—“Mr. Kozeniowski!”—and looked up to see India standing at the reception desk. She was far more drenched than I.
“Don’t you own a raincoat?” she whispered.
“Sarcasm is unattractive in the young. And by the way, where’s yours? How did you get so, so…”
“Wet?”
I nodded.
“The storm. The run from the train station. It was the last block that put me over the top. Wet-wise.”
“Ever hear of taxis?”
“The train is so much easier. At least when it’s not raining.”
The Beau Rivage had been Frank’s favorite hotel. It’s where he told me that he and Jill had separated, where I first learned that he had a daughter, where I first heard her name. Frank must have brought India here later when he could really afford the place, but if the staff knew her, they weren’t letting on.
“Luggage?” I asked.
“They put it in your room until mine is ready. Hope you don’t mind. I need a shower.”
“By the way, how did you get here so soon? I checked the schedules. The first plane—”
> “The one before it. It was sitting on the tarmac at Dulles when I got there. You underestimate me.”
So I had. We headed to the elevator.
I offered to have coffee or tea sent up, but India immediately popped into the bathroom, extended one delicate arm out the slightly cracked door with a plastic dry-cleaning bag containing all her dripping wear, and stepped into the shower while I called laundry.
A half hour later steam was still pouring out under the door.
“Hey!” she called out. “Let’s celebrate. How about a bottle of Bollinger? And why don’t you get into something dry. ” As she spoke, the bathroom door cracked open again and a terry-cloth robe came flying out.
The Bollinger and India’s newly dry wear arrived together twenty minutes later, just as she was stepping out of the bathroom—or steam-bath, it was hard to tell—wrapped in a towel. Her flushed, angular face and the raven hair plastered close to her scalp would have driven Modigliani straight back to his easel.
We stood quietly by the window, sipping our champagne and watching sheets of rain buffeting the lake. Finally, I pointed to the tidy pile on the desk.
“Your clothes,” I said, but she just shook her head no, took my hand, and starting leading me toward the bed.
Looking back on it now, I think that’s the moment in this horrible skein I felt the sickest over. I fed India the bait, and she took it, hook, line, and sinker. I’d recruited her.
CHAPTER 35
THE TRUTH JABBED ME in the brain like a cranial probe. The faxes, the transcripts of KSM’s calls, the methyl nitrate, Frank’s options trades had all been boring deeply into my thoughts while India slept softly on my shoulder. Then I remembered a seminar on methyl nitrate I’d attended at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico maybe two years earlier. I knew little about it before, and still don’t understand the chemistry today, but the practical effects were staggering. It was completely plausible for KSM to introduce the stuff into the fuel system of a plane. The plane would blow up into millions of pieces and devour the evidence in the conflagration. He could do the same with a refinery—somehow introduce it into the flow, and the whole thing blows apart. The only calling card methyl nitrate leaves behind is a bright ocher hue as it burns, not the orange-red flash of burning gasoline or jet fuel.
“Time the explosion to happen over the ocean, and only the albatrosses and fishies will know,” the instructor had told us. “Forensics cannot detect methyl nitrate residue, unlike with conventional explosives.”
I sat bolt upright in bed. KSM was going to use “liquids” that would never be traced. And it was so much easier than trying to get plastic explosives on a plane. It was a foolproof way to protect his options trade. It couldn’t be anything else. The question now was when.
India was awake. “What time is it?”
The room was dark. There was no traffic on the Quai du Mont-Blanc. I looked over at the clock on the nightstand. A little after three, I told her.
“Max, are you okay?”
“I will be. First tell me again about Vernon Lawson.” Intuition leads. Facts follow. Somewhere in my descent-into-hell dream I’d been having, I’d seen the face of the journalist-whore who was ready to deliver my balls on a platter to readers of the Times and anywhere else willing to pick up the story.
India sat up beside me, plumped pillows for both of us, and as we sat there skin to skin in the dark, she told me what had happened.
It must have been almost six in the evening, she said. She left work early, stopped by a place in Georgetown to pick up some catfish. It wasn’t just Simon’s night off. The cook was gone, too, and the driver. She was going to bread the filets, then fry them up with red beans and rice, a favorite of Frank’s from the old days when money didn’t grow on trees.
The library doors were open when she got home. She could see two men sitting with her father. Frank rose immediately to greet her and close the doors before she tried to join them, but she got a good look at the guy I was certain was Vernon Lawson. Her physical description matched him to a tee.
“And Webber,” I asked, “did you get a good look at him? Where was he sitting?”
“I’m not sure…”
“Sure of what?”
“Sure that it was Webber.”
“But—”
“I never said that, Max. I never…” She let it trail off.
I was ransacking my memory. Hadn’t she told me before that Webber was there? Or was it my need that made me hear it that way?
“Whoever it was was sitting off to the side, maybe behind the desk. I didn’t get a look before Dad closed the doors.”
“India—”
“All I can tell you is what I remember, you understand? You weren’t there.”
I put my arm around her, pulled her closer to me. She had gone cold all of a sudden. I rubbed her shoulder and neck until whatever it was had passed.
“I didn’t care that he didn’t invite me in,” she began again. “That’s Dad. The Old Boys taking care of business.”
As she was starting up the stairs, though, she heard my name, or thought she did. Frank shushed whoever said it. That’s when India went up to her room and pressed her ear against the floor vent. The third one—not her father, not the journalist—was saying that I was on the dole of some ex–GRU officer. The FBI was dragging its heels, refusing to issue an international fugitives warrant, but it wouldn’t do any good even if they did. No one was going to execute it.
As she talked, I tried to imagine what a voice sounds like filtering from the floor below through an air vent. India had told me in Balabakk that Webber had hit on her. Did he send a mash note, a mash e-mail? If not, wouldn’t she recognize his voice? And if not from that, then from some staff meeting, an orientation lecture?
“The journalist, Lawson, he said that the Times was ready to run his story that you’d gone to work for a hostile intel service. Then the other person said—”
“Said what?”
“Said that the story had to run as soon as possible. He told Lawson to find whatever confirmation he needed to write it.”
“Are you sure?” I interrupted.
“He was adamant about it. You had to be stopped.”
“Stopped from what?”
“No one said. Anyhow, Lawson didn’t seem to know or care. He just wanted to burn you.”
“But it didn’t run. Or at least not so far.”
“Believe me, Max. I don’t know why.”
Another dead end.
India reached over, patted my hand. “What did you say to Dad to make him so angry?”
“When he called me a well-hit three-wood in a tile bathroom?” It still hurt. Maybe because he wasn’t that far off.
“A truth for a truth: It’s your own rule, Max. Dad used to say you were damaged goods. I was always intrigued. I never knew what he meant. Are you?”
Am I?
“He said something had happened to you when you were a kid. I don’t think even he knew what it was, but he said you would never get over it.”
“He was right.”
“Did you?”
“No. Not really, I guess. Just compensated around it the way people do in life.”
“So,” India said.
“So?”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“My mother,” I began, “was born with the biological capacity to reproduce but with no maternal instincts. She despised me from conception. It was unfortunate. For me at least.”
And so for the second time in my life, I told the story.
“Your aunt?” India asked when I was through. “The one who came and got you?”
“My mother’s sister. The only one who even knew where we were. The only family I ever cared about. She died last year.”
“And your mother?”
I shrugged, turned my palms up. “She used to contact my aunt occasionally. No more. Alive. Dead. I hope the latter.”
With that, we sat in silence holding han
ds. I had been drunk, stoned, a twenty-year-old college student unpracticed in deceit when I’d told Chris the story. Now I was sober, a liar par excellence, in bed with a woman not much older than I was then, a graduate of the same university. Life has weird circular harmonics, I’ve found, if we just listen to them. But we move on, too. We become different people. And that night in Geneva, thinking about what I had just recounted and all that had happened over the last months, I felt as if I could almost see my entire life’s story coming together: the Baluchs and KSM; Beirut and Buckley; Webber and Frank Beckman and John O’Neill; Murtaza Ali Mousavi and his dentist and Millis’s displaced brain; abandonment, loss, and recovery; the search for truth that would never, ever let me alone.
Isn’t that what every introductory perspectives course teaches in art school, that at the horizon, all points converge?
I’ll tell the story one more time, I thought, to Rikki, when she’s old enough to understand. Only a few years more. It can die with her.
India was shaking quietly beside me, on the verge of tears, I realized. To forestall, I asked her if she knew either Rousset or the Saudi billionaire, her father’s partner. She’d heard him mention them but never met either.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Dad knows Rousset is about to be indicted in New York for selling Kazak oil to Iran. He stopped doing business with him at least a year ago.”
That was another dot clear and bold. If Rousset was about to be indicted, there was only one reason for Frank to give me his number: burn me, dirty me up in some illegal oil deal, dispose of me for good.
India got up, put on a robe, and went to the minibar. She poured herself a straight-up Scotch. “Want one?” I didn’t. She got back into bed, farther away than she’d been earlier, no more skin to skin.
“Dad’s in even worse trouble than I told you.”
“You never told me anything.”
“I shouldn’t be saying any of this.”
She did anyhow. India didn’t know exactly what had happened, but she was beginning to piece the picture together. Frank was deep into commodities speculation and the options market. Airlines. Insurance companies. Especially oil. A lot of the money he played with was borrowed from his Saudi partners, as was a lot of the advice he acted on, such as how much crude they were pumping on a day-to-day basis. If his Saudi friends told Frank they were about to cut back on production or there was a problem with a field, he bought calls on oil—bets that the price of oil would go up. If they were ratcheting production up, he bet the other way. It was easy money, and for several years Frank made an absolute killing. Even when he was betting someone else’s money.
