by Andrew Gross
“Hey,” Hauck called after her, “one more thing…”
Naomi turned, a hand over her eyes, squinting against the sun.
“I have a daughter.” He tossed O’Toole’s hat back on the tracks and caught up to her. “I bet right now she’d like to put her arms around you and thank you for a helluva shot. As would I.”
Naomi smiled. She turned and headed back along the tracks. “Told you I knew how to use this thing.”
CHAPTER NINETY
Only moments before, Thomas Keaton had stood behind the president on the White House lawn, outlining the details of the administration’s aggressive plan to brace the deteriorating economy.
His government car had just dropped him off at the guarded gate off Fifteenth Street behind the Treasury building, and he hurried through the marble three-story lobby where Alexander Hamilton, Salmon Chase, and Henry Morgenthau had all walked, followed by Mitch Hastings, his chief counsel, a group of House members expecting him upstairs.
Naomi stepped up. “Secretary Keaton…”
The Treasury head appeared caught by surprise. His gaze flashed to her arm, loosely hanging in a sling under her suit jacket. She stood, looking up at him, with a quiet but resolute stare that seemed to disarm him. “Agent Blum… I heard you were…”
“Heard I was what, sir, detained?”
“I heard you were injured,” he said, showing surprise. “But I’m relieved to see you’re okay. Come, walk me up to my office. I’ve just come from the president. I was told about Hassani. Dismal news…I’d like to hear your report.”
“This is Ty Hauck,” Naomi said. “I think you know his name.”
From against the wall, Hauck, his sport jacket ripped at the arm, came up to them. He stared into the shifting eyes of the white-haired government man who had come from years on Wall Street, where he had had a distinguished and lucrative career.
“Mr. Hauck.” Thomas Keaton extended his hand. “It’s great to finally meet you. You know Mitch Hastings. I’ve heard we owe you quite a debt of gratitude for what you’ve already done on this matter.” Hauck took his hand and stared into his eyes. The man seemed to flinch. “Walk with me. I’d like to hear what you both have to say.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Naomi said to him. “I was hoping we might spare you that and have that conversation here.”
The ruddy-complexioned, dark-suited Treasury man looked perplexed. “Spare me?” He glanced at Hastings.
“I’m afraid the secretary has an important meeting scheduled. There are House members who have carved out time from their schedules waiting for him there—”
“Which is why,” Naomi said, cutting him off, “it might be better if you heard what we had to say down here.”
An intransigence dug its way into Keaton’s jaw. Clearly, he wasn’t keen on being dictated to by an investigator. And one from his own staff. “Alright…” He stepped over to an isolated spot in the corner as people rushed by. “I’m listening, Agent Blum. Go on.”
Naomi cleared her throat. “You said you heard that Mr. Hassani was killed? Before we were able to pick him up.”
“I did. As I said, tragic. I also heard there was a lead on his killer.”
“There is a lead,” Naomi said. “But I don’t know if it would trouble you or not to know he’s dead too.”
“Trouble me…” The treasury secretary narrowed his eyes sharply, the steely gaze of rank bearing down on her.
“It always bothered me,” Naomi said, “how Hassani always seemed to have a step on us. When it came to apprehending Thibault in Serbia. What we had learned about his past, things no one else could know. What happened in London…I shared my feeling that there was no one I felt I could trust. I came to you directly with what I knew.” She stared solidly into her boss’s eyes. “You must’ve thought I was one helluva fool, Mr. Secretary. And maybe I was.”
“Agent Blum…” Keaton was growing impatient. “I’m not sure where you’re going with all this, but I remind you, despite all your good efforts, the arc of where your career is headed is still very much in play here.”
“My career…” Naomi nodded thoughtfully. “My career isn’t where I would be thinking right now, sir. I was thinking more of yours. Al-Bashir told us it was so much larger than terrorism—larger than anything I could imagine. And it took me a while to put it all together. To even have the will to think it…”
“I’m very interested to hear where your mind is going,” Keaton said with a glance at Hastings, his dismissive tone beating down on her.
She said, “The past two presidential administrations have stripped most regulatory control out of the system. Am I right? Banks acting as investment houses, dealing in complex financial products even an MBA wouldn’t understand. Leveraged with debt at forty to one. The rating agencies all looking the other way…We had the whole teetering house of cards, the worldwide economy, all holding together just as long as the system continued to grow. As long as one last house could be sold, one last mortgage approved, right?”
The secretary looked at her.
“And then it didn’t,” Naomi said.
“I’m not sure I need the lesson in current events, Agent Blum.” Keaton glanced at his watch. “Mitch, maybe you could—”
“Stay,” Naomi said, looking at Hastings. “I think you’ll find this interesting too. Suddenly China stopped rushing in to buy up our debt. Russia issued half a trillion dollars of notes built on future petro-rubles and the price of oil halved. The housing market dropped off a cliff. All you had to do was take a step back and see it—a train wreck about to take place. The real question wasn’t whether you could prevent it. It was who, in the end, would be saved? Separating the winners from the losers. Sort of a Darwinian thing, no? Except it wasn’t. You just rigged the deck.
“You put together the largest trove of stopgap funding the world had ever seen—almost a trillion dollars—and sold it as a bailout. A giant injection of liquidity to keep the economy in gear. When all it did was prop up the banks. Some were rescued; some were left to be swallowed up by the tsunami. Who decided? The ones that made the wrong bet—Wertheimer, Beeston, Lehman—they’re gone. While others got the brass ring. All you had to do was tip the balance just a little bit, if you could see it from high enough. To be one of the winners. Am I making any sense, sir?”
“And who exactly would those winners be, Agent Blum,” the treasury secretary huffed at her, “as seen from your lofty heights?”
Naomi realized the next years of her life would be dictated by what she was about to say. “Why don’t we start with the Gstaad Gang? Or, even better, sir, Reynolds Reid.”
The space around them in the vast lobby became suddenly quiet. Her voice echoed off the marble walls.
“I saw the names.” Naomi stared into his eyes. “Stephen Cain. Vladimir Tursanov. Al-Bashir. Hassani. Simons. The head of the largest investment bank in the world. All of them who were there. I suddenly realized they all had one thing in common. How could I have missed it? One thing: they were all Reynolds Reid.”
Thomas Keaton blinked.
“Isn’t that right, sir? All trained, grew rich, cut their teeth, at Reynolds Reid. And then it hit me.” She shook her head. “How could I have been so blind? It hit me that you should know that better than anyone, sir.
“Because you were Reynolds Reid too. You were a managing director there. You knew all these people. Not to mention Kessler of the New York Fed, and Carl McKnight, in charge of dispersing the bank relief fund…All of you were Reynolds Reid.”
Keaton’s jaw went slack and his eyes reflected the worry of someone about to take a great fall.
“We are the government, isn’t that right, sir? We are the Fed. That old bromide about GM…Now it’s ‘What’s good for Wall Street is good for government.’ Because you’re all embedded. You’re everywhere. We are the reason some banks are saved and others are left to fail. Maybe you weren’t all involved, but it’s clear: a nod from you, and no one was standing i
n the way.”
“It’s no crime, Agent Blum”—the treasury secretary’s gaze became granite—“that the firm has a long-standing tradition of service.”
“Service? It’s not service, Mr. Secretary. It’s the gradual takeover of the government by a bunch of insiders whose power and money are used to buy elections, weaken regulations, so their firms can one day profit at the expense of all these blind, unwitting shareholders, who we used to call simply taxpayers. It’s an oligarchy. Same as any little banana republic. Except just an extra couple of zeros at the end.
“The Gstaad Gang…” Naomi smiled. “We checked the hotel records. We found the names. Every one of them. Al-Bashir. Tursanov. Hassani. Simons. All but one, sir…Maybe that’s because he didn’t stay at any of the hotels. Maybe because he didn’t even remain in town overnight…”
“And who was that?” Thomas Keaton glared, his gaze that of a cat about to spring.
“Why, you, Mr. Secretary.” Naomi looked back at him. “You were the last one who was there.”
She glanced toward Hauck, and he finally opened the envelope he’d been holding under his arm.
In it were the security photos Marcus Hird had e-mailed to him yesterday. Photos taken at the base of the Gstaad main ski lift. Showing all the members of the group. Arriving separately. Shipman. Cain. Tursanov. Simons. Al-Bashir and Hassani. All heading up the lift to the restaurant, where no one would ever spot them. The time and date clearly displayed at the bottom. June 26. Last year. Almost eight months before the call from Hassani to al-Bashir that had started it all. Before Marc and April Glassman were killed. Before the world began to fall apart.
Hauck laid a final photo on the top of the pile.
The treasury secretary’s head flinched.
“You, Secretary Keaton.” The fissure in Keaton’s forty-year career cracked open in his gaze, the practiced solidity of his impenetrable veneer breaking. “You were the one who set it all in motion. The bank rescue plan. That’s exactly what it was meant to do. Insure the survivors, so they could pick over the spoils. You had the power—”
“Power.” Keaton’s voice echoed suddenly across the lobby. “What would you possibly know about power, Agent Blum, in your little office where everything has to fit into your black and white vision of the world? Power was once the by-product of violence. Coups, militias. Oily little bribes. Secret envelopes stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, offshore accounts…
“But now power, real power, Agent Blum”—Keaton’s eyes bore down on her—“lies in policy. In recognizing that whatever keeps the system afloat is what’s good for everybody. If Wall Street’s interests fail, we all fail! Do you understand? That’s what we do, Agent Blum—Reynolds Reid. We keep the machine going. Regulators, academics, legislation, they’re just the buildup in the cogs that slows it down. Someone had to keep it going. Someone has to manage the risk. It was out of control. It would have broken for all of us. Just simply think of it as maintenance, Agent Blum, if that concept works. For a while, it just had to be shut down.”
“Four innocent people are dead,” Hauck said, staring into his eyes. “Four others are missing. Kids. Not to mention millions who have seen their savings collapse or lost their jobs.”
“We saved the world,” the treasury secretary said, offering no apology. “We kept it from collapsing. I had nothing to do with those murders. This O’Toole person, or whoever did those terrible things, I’ve never even met him or spoken with him.”
“You’re right, you haven’t.” Hauck nodded, agreeing. His gaze shifted to Hastings. “But your chief counsel has.”
Mitch Hastings’s eyes grew wide.
“When you worked at the Council of the Economic Forum, before Treasury. Jack O’Toole was assigned to your security detail while in Iraq. Not once but twice. Isn’t that right, Mr. Hastings?”
The chief counsel loudly cleared his throat, adjusting his wire-rim frames. “I can’t recall…”
“Do you think when we requisition your cell phone records, and they show you have made calls into the same areas where we know O’Toole to have been, you’ll be able to recall?” Hauck removed something from his pocket. O’Toole’s phone. “Maybe to this cell phone. Is there any chance the record of calls at the Waldorf, where Hassani was killed today, will show one from a location that you can be traced back to?
“Don’t be so surprised,” Hauck said to Keaton. “You may have only tipped your pal Hassani off about whatever Agent Blum here brought to you, but your loyal counsel here, Mr. Hastings, he’s got real blood on his hands.”
Keaton took his arm. “Don’t say a word, Mitch. I have forty years in public and private service, Agent Blum. Whether I was in Gstaad or not, whether Mitch may have been overzealous on some matters in protecting some of our interests, we’ll see where all that goes. But for you, I assure you, this investigation is through.”
“That may be true, sir,” Naomi said. “But I’m afraid there’s another one just beginning.”
Three men in tan and brown suits came up from behind them in the lobby. Part of Anthony Bruni’s financial terrorism team.
“Sir, my name is Ralph Wells. I’m a senior regional director of the FBI, and I have here, pending notification of the president of the United States, a court order to search your personal records, computers, and cell phone for information related to a criminal conspiracy of investment bankers to defraud the United States government.”
“What?” The treasury secretary became apoplectic. He grabbed the document, his jaw going slack. He took a step back and sank against the marble wall.
“And in terms of this investigation, sir,” Naomi said, staring at him, “it’s also possible Peter Simons might have some interesting things to add about you too.”
Hauck’s eyes met hers. There was no longer determination on Naomi’s face but a sheen of triumph in her eyes. The face of al-Bashir’s son reflected there. The triumph that comes after a bloody battle. Where it’s hard to tell who has won and who has lost.
Except this time they both knew.
PART VI
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
The resignations of Thomas Keaton and his chief counsel sent shock waves around the world. It was reported they were being held under house arrest, pending a Justice Department investigation into their actions in a conspiracy to defraud the financial markets in which eleven people, including some important figures in the world of finance, had died or were missing.
In New York, the related arrest of Peter Simons, Stephen Cain, and Marshall Shipman on charges of fraud and conspiracy to defraud only made the rumors wilder. The markets plunged 20 percent the next day and were held back from a total free fall only when the Fed announced at midday that it was pumping half a trillion dollars of new liquidity into the ailing economy.
Still, parts of the story were leaking out. Murdered Wall Street traders. An enigmatic Serbian playboy whose past was tied to a bloody massacre in the Bosnian War. A shadowy Middle Eastern financier murdered in his suite at the Waldorf. A wild shoot-out on an Amtrak train. The involvement of the CEO of one of the largest firms on Wall Street, leading all the way to the treasury secretary of the United States.
The president promised a swift and thorough investigation. “The financial markets must be above suspicion,” he declared from the White House lawn. “Its lifeblood is confidence, and confidence will be restored.”
In the meantime, the Department of the Treasury was to be run by Allen Schaper, currently head of the SEC—a corporate lawyer, an economist, a friend of the president.
And himself a former banker at Reynolds Reid.
Eleven people were either dead or presumed dead. Three Wall Street investment banks had gone under, their assets absorbed. Across the globe, millions of people had lost jobs, countless pensions destroyed, life savings halved. Millions of homes foreclosed on, industries set in crisis, bailed out; the deficit soared. On CNBC, Tim Schegel, the noted financial reporter, remarked, “Whatever their crimes, tho
se participants in what is now known as the Gstaad Gang only hastened, in their activities, what was sure to come.” The estimated loss in investor capital related to the economic meltdown was said to be over four trillion dollars.
Across the pond, in London, a related investigation into the unsolved disappearance of Saudi national Mashhur al-Bashir and his family was under way.
Their bodies would never be discovered.
Back in DC, Hauck and Naomi gave two days of testimony to officials at the Justice Department.
By Friday, Hauck was back at his desk.
Tom Foley was the first one there to congratulate him. Hauck thought it the better part of valor not to divulge how sure he was, until right up to the end, that his boss was the intermediary to Red O’Toole. Since word had come out, the phones at Talon were ringing off the hook. A new era of compliance and security and regulation was being promised and the business was coming to them. Foley promised that the firm would indeed be showing its appreciation, reflected in his bonus at year end. He came by later to take Hauck out for drinks.
But by that time Hauck had already gone.
He took the drive out to Dublin Hill Road. To Merrill Simons’s house. At this point it no longer mattered whether Foley gave the okay.
She deserved to hear it firsthand. Dani’s fate. Who he was. What he had been involved in. How her instincts had been right. And how Peter had been involved.
She was in the garden in a pair of white capris and a wide hat, planting begonias. She sat with Hauck on a chaise under an awning and stayed silent for a while after he told her, brooding on the story that might never fully be revealed.
“Two real bastards,” she finally said, shaking her head with a bit of a derisive laugh. “I surely can pick ’em, can’t I?”
Then it seemed to overwhelm her and she took her sunglasses off and wiped away a tear.
