The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  “Can the funds be traced?”

  “That’s the wrong question,” the Swiss said. “Anything tangible can be traced. What you want to know is if there’s any way that you can be stopped from making a withdrawal, and the answer to that question is no. This particular sort of transaction is based on accounting misdirection. To detect it would require a gifted auditor with immense patience and enough time to devote himself solely to the task for weeks. The money is quite secure until you want it, and then it is yours. Nothing can be done to prevent that.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Your colleagues? They wanted to know if any of the money had been withdrawn.”

  “And you told them.”

  “It’s easy to tell the truth, and of course the ledger entries were evidence. They told me to report any attempt at withdrawal. In accordance with their request I’ve put a hold on the funds—frozen them in place.”

  Frash stiffened. “Then how—”

  Schiller cut him off. “Remember, the cabinet opens two ways, but the freeze applies only to the numbers and codes on, shall we say, the front side, and only if you try to move the funds through the Swiss system. In Italy there will be no problem.”

  “But the ledger will reflect movement?”

  “It will show movement, but I’m assuming you will make only one withdrawal, and by the time it shows up there will be nothing they can do about it. From their perspective it will look as if water has evaporated. Who can trace vapor in the clouds? In any event, if you make the withdrawal at the time I’ve specified there will be no record for forty-eight hours, by which time you can be well on your way.”

  “Where does that leave you?”

  Schiller seemed surprised by the question. “A good architect builds a house that will withstand the most severe weather. If your compatriots are willing to invest a great deal of time and effort to learn how it was done, they will eventually learn the secret, but it will not point to me.” He paused and lowered his voice. “The Italians are such a messy people,” he said. “Even a clever auditor will find nothing to incriminate me; it will look like a coincidence, an accident bred by the coming together of two banking systems. I will remain credible and will have served my client of record in accordance with the established traditions of my profession.”

  Frash thought about this briefly. “You’re sure you’ve told them nothing that would lead them to suspect I’m here?”

  “The money is untouched and frozen as per their instructions. What would motivate me to tell them more?”

  The arrangement had been that both he and Schiller could draw from the account, and while the lion’s share would go to Frash via an Italian bank, the remainder would be Schiller’s, his fee for engineering the arrangement.

  “There’s absolutely nothing to fear,” the banker said. “I’ve covered every contingency.”

  “All but one.”

  “What is that?” Schiller asked as Frash pushed him backward to the top of a stairwell that led down to a cellar entrance, placed the barrel of his 9 mm against the banker’s left eye, squeezed and let the body fall backwards. Then he took Schiller’s wallet, watch, pocket money and wedding ring and hurried back toward the park. Partway through he caught his heel on a crack in the sidewalk and fell on his left side, but recovered quickly. When he saw the Jaguar again with the silhouette of the American inside he skirted south along the river. Don’t hurry, he reminded himself. They’re watching the bank, and when they find Schiller it will look like the work of a common thief. By tomorrow you’ll be in Italy. If Kennedy comes to Europe, will he stop in Italy? Powerful Catholics are as drawn to the Pope in Rome as Muslims are to Mecca. It would be interesting to get Kennedy alone. Stay out of this, Albert said.

  98TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1961, 9:30 P.M.Moscow

  Bailov’s men had been too long in Moscow and were eager for anything that would take them away from the boring grind of guarding the General Secretary, so an assault on the building identified by Lenya was a welcome diversion. Even Bailov saw this task as real, which made it a lot more satisfying than the ghost hunt that had occupied the team for weeks.

  Yet when they had taken and secured the place they found that it had been abandoned. Melko and Ezdovo had returned less than six hours before and the operation had been mounted quickly, but apparently not quickly enough.

  “What now?” one of his Spetsnaz asked.

  “We do what soldiers do best,” Bailov said. “Sit on our asses until we are called.” His gladiators laughed. The mission had been a zero, but at least they were with their commander and together.

  99TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1961, 9:45 P.M.Moscow

  Melko and Talia used their Red Badges to gain admittance to Annochka’s building. When they reached her floor they knocked but got no answer, and Melko quickly picked the lock. He was first into the bedroom, and after one look tried to block Talia’s way, but she pushed past him. Annochka and her husband were facedown on the bed, their hands bound behind them, their lower legs bent back to their buttocks and tied securely to their wrists. Like pigs ready for slaughter, Melko thought. Each had been shot once in the back of the head.

  Neither of them said anything for a long while; Melko felt queasy as he touched Annochka’s cold hand and realized she would never be warm again. “Don’t touch anything,” Talia said. “Where are her children?”

  Melko found them face down in the bathtub and vomited when he realized that someone had drowned them. He lifted the tiny bodies out of the water and began wrapping them in towels. “I can’t leave them like this,” he apologized to Talia, who patted him on the back and immediately knelt to help. They carried the children into their bedroom and laid them gently on their beds.

  When Melko came out of the room Talia was surveying the damage to the apartment. “What do you make of this?” she asked.

  “Not what it appears,” he said softly. “It’s been made to look like amateurs did it, but whoever was here knew how to take a place apart.”

  “Her husband’s files?”

  “She was supposed to bring them to us and never showed up. What sort of animal drowns babies?” he asked, his voice cracking.

  Talia touched his arm. “Keep your mind on the mission,” she whispered. “Help her by helping us.”

  “I’m all right,” he said. Annochka had said that her husband had brought the files home where he could study them safely. Presumably he had looked at them more than once, which ruled out permanent concealment. Annochka was to have brought them on Sunday, which also meant that they must have been here. He moved through the rooms like a hunter, taking a step, pausing, letting his eyes work, trying to think like the dead man. Closet: the clothes bar had been removed, examined and cast aside. The doors had been unhinged so that they could be checked for hollow places. The carpets and bedding were slashed, pipes broken, the back of the toilet lifted off, an oversized wooden chest smashed, the pieces scattered like so many fallen soldiers. Where would you hide them, he asked himself as he sat down beside Annochka’s body and stared at the blood that had soaked into her robe. He saw that all but two of her toenails were freshly painted. Was this what she had been doing when the intruders arrived?

  Talia followed him into the bathroom. “What is it?” she asked, but he was too lost in his thoughts to answer.

  Soiled towels were heaped on the floor. There were some rubber toys in the tub and an open bottle of shampoo on the ledge under the faucet. Where was the nail polish? He leaned down and found it tucked beside the base of the commode. The cap was loose, as if the applicator had been hurriedly pushed into the opening and not tightened.

  “What is it?” Talia asked again.

  He closed his eyes and waited for a scene to unfold. The children are playing in their bath, but Annochka is not concerned. She is beside them, painting her nails. They are safe, within arm’s length. Probably she does not hear the watchman ring the apartment to tell them that visitors are coming up. Her husband waits for the d
oorbell, then goes to the door and peeks through the eyehole. He sees the intruders, senses what is about to happen, shouts at his wife and rushes into the bathroom. The children are out of the tub; their mother is watching them wiggle in their towels. No time, he says. He shoves the folders at her; Quick, hide them. She drops the applicator into the polish bottle and pushes it out of the way. Quickly, my little ones, back into the tub; I can still see some dirt behind your ears. What’s wrong, Mommy? Quiet, quiet, I just want to give you a little more soap. Here, let me scrub. Then the holocaust, which was more a series of sounds than pictures in Melko’s mind because he refused to let himself see the babies being murdered. Where were the files? He slid to his knees and stared into the gray water in the tub. He rolled up his sleeve, fished for the plug and pulled it loose, watching the water drain away, curling finally into a tiny whirlpool that gurgled like a tiny death rattle. On the floor of the tub was a white rubber mat with ridges to keep the children from slipping. Annochka was a careful mother. “There,” he said to Talia with a nod of his head.

  She leaned past him, lifted the rubber mat and saw the papers encased in plastic. When she looked up, Melko was weeping silently. Annochka had shielded the papers with her children’s lives.

  100TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1961, 10:35 P.M.Zurich

  Sylvia was elated; Arizona was getting reserves to help them and this had been a boost. Now she felt sure that Frash was coming to Zurich and that it would end here. As she hurried through the park she felt a pebble in her shoe and stopped to get rid of it. A man was hurrying down one of the walkways about ten meters away. She saw him stumble and fall, then jump to his feet, glance in her direction and hurry on. When she reached the Jaguar she looked back but could no longer see the man; she wondered if he had hurt himself. Valentine was sitting with his feet crossed over the gearshift. She tapped on his window.

  “Next time can we get something a bit bigger than a toy?” he complained.

  She started to say something but suddenly stiffened and fled back into the park with her pistol unholstered and held over her head. Valentine struggled out of the Jag and sprinted to catch up. “Dammit,” she shouted. “Goddammit!”

  “What?” he asked, but she was spooked and angered and obviously didn’t hear him. “What the hell is going on? You took off like somebody pinched your ass.”

  “Frash,” she hissed. “Here.”

  “In Zurich?”

  “Here” she said as she began to stomp the cement. “Right here. I saw him. He slipped and fell down and I saw him get up.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Less than three minutes ago. He looked right at me, then went that way,” she said, pointing to a path along the river. When he started in that direction she caught him by the arm. “No! We’re not going to screw this up. It’s a small place. We’ll get help. Between our people and the locals we can close this place down.”

  “And if he’s on his way out right this minute?”

  “We’ll get him.”

  Valentine didn’t share her optimism.

  101TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1961, 10:45 P.M.Bakovka, Russia

  The front door of the stately dacha was standing open and Ezdovo knew immediately that something was wrong. There were two bodies in the study on the ground floor. Annochka’s father was in a chair and had been shot once through the back of the head; the impact had snapped him forward and knocked over an inkwell, whose contents had mingled with his blood. The woman had been shot in the mouth and was on the floor beside the chair. She had white-blond hair, but her death had caused a chemical reaction and turned the peroxide a ghastly pinkish-brown. A revolver was on the floor beside her, and Ezdovo saw quickly that the situation was intended to be misread as a murder-suicide. He rejected the obvious. Women seldom shot themselves. Poison, asphyxiation, slashed wrists—these, not guns, were the methods of escape taken by women.

  102WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1961, 12:35 P.M.Brennero, Trento Province, Italy

  There was still crusted snow on the limestone outcrops along the Brenner Pass, but Gino Knauer no longer climbed that high. At sixty he lacked the stamina and strength that had let him board trains and steal whatever struck his fancy, but after nearly forty years at the game he had learned a few tricks to offset the deficits of aging. Old age tended to turn your bones to chalk, but if you were lucky your mind could more than compensate. Not that a great deal of thought was required to do what had become second nature. In 1948 he had discovered a place where the trains moving between Italy and Switzerland had to slow almost to a dead stop because of a dangerous series of curves and grades. From here he could simply step down, do his shopping and get off when the train slowed again twenty kilometers down the line. In the old days he had boarded earlier, from the steep rocks in the Brenner Pass, and ridden the full forty kilometers into Bressanone; with that amount of time he had been able to clean out a train, especially when his sons were along, but nowadays he worked alone and there were only enough minutes and energy to root through half a dozen cars, or even fewer when padlocks had to be forced. It was more a hobby than a vocation now.

  This afternoon Gino sat at his usual place listening to the hoot of the whistle to the north. The sun was high and warm, the rocks alive with clear rivulets of water from melted snow, the air a soft caress that tempted him to ignore the train and enjoy the weather. Yet a man could not walk away from what he was, and above all else Gino was a thief, perhaps the best who had ever challenged trains in the mountains.

  Practically speaking, there was no need to keep stealing. He was a widower now and his eleven children were grown and on their own, his livelihood having given all of them a life much better than any of them had any reason to expect. Even so, a man needed purpose, and if you let sloth get its claws into you it would be the end to your edge.

  The train would arrive in ten minutes; in earlier times he had gauged by the smoke of locomotives, but now there were diesels along the line and only their whistles gave them away at a distance. Because of this it was now necessary to climb up several meters to watch the tracks below. A hundred meters north of him there was an odd little plain of grass. Engineers used it as a marker and when the engines passed it, the trains began to slow for the two sharp curves ahead. When the train began to decelerate he would climb back down to his ledge, remain in the shadows, count the cars after the engine passed and step down to the one he had chosen. The dismount was nearly as easy.

  Centuries before, a king of Portugal had tried to send an elephant across the Alps as a gift to a Hapsburg emperor. An inn in Bressanone was now called the Elephant in commemoration of that long-ago event, and Gino thought of boxcars as his elephants, and their contents as ivory to be poached. What interesting booty would he find today? A case of watches, perhaps, for his granddaughters, or sturdy German boots for his sons and sons-in-law? He enjoyed not knowing what each car would hold.

  When the engine reached the grass plain Gino began counting cars, but was interrupted when he saw something tumble onto the grass from the train, roll several times and stand up. A man? After the war there had been dozens of refugees on every southbound freight, but nowadays such vagabonds were rare. He was so astounded by the man’s athletic dismount that he lost his count and his chance to board, and instead watched the stranger quickly climb into the rocks. Had he been so graceful in the days when he leaped from moving trains? It was almost like watching himself.

  103WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1961, 2:30 P.M.Zurich

  The Swiss had used neutrality to carve their niche in the world community, yet for all their declared interest in peace they were more than happy to turn themselves inside out in the search for Albert Frash, and also to demonstrate herd behavior beyond anything Valentine had ever seen. All of this was triggered by the powerful but unseen hand of Arizona. By sunrise the border services of Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria and Italy had photographs of Frash to go along with the registration numbers of his twelve passports. The Zurich police had sent his photograph to
airports, train stations, bus depots and taxi services. The women who directed traffic in the city’s busiest intersections had them and day-boat services on the lake had them, as did hospitals, newspaper kiosks, post offices and virtually everyone in any position to make contact with the renegade American. Yet by midmorning their net was still empty. When Schiller failed to appear at his bank at his customary time, policemen were immediately dispatched to his house. He had not come home the previous night, his wife reported, but this was not unusual and she was not alarmed; her husband had a wide range of customers with peculiar notions about business hours, and after all Swiss bankers had built their reputations on their willingness to satisfy their customers. Eventually he would show up, she told the police; he always had.

  Sylvia did not take Schiller’s disappearance so lightly; within minutes of learning that he had not come home she was on the phone to the bank’s managing director, advising him that there was a high probability that Schiller might have been forced to engage in certain improprieties with the bank’s assets. She suggested that he order an immediate audit, but the man did not make any commitment over the phone. Instead he listened attentively, thanked her for the information and hung up. She guessed that he would have auditors at work within minutes. Swiss banks lived not only on their discretion but also on their reputations for reliability. In such a small country gossip traveled like lightning, and the mere suggestion of a scandal could bring a run on deposits and an almost immediate crash. Ironically, the same state-mandated secrecy that attracted depositors would send them into a panic if there was even a whisper of impropriety. Because of this Swiss bankers were quick to squelch rumors. Reputation counted for everything.