David Lindsey - The Color of Night v5

by The Color of Night (mobi)

  He turned to her. “Some terrible things have happened, Mara, things that have to do with my past. A past that’s going to require some explanation. Right now I’m going to try to tell you as much as I can as quickly as I can, because what has happened is going to turn my life inside out… starting now.” He paused. “I don’t know how much this will affect you. We have to talk about that. And we have some decisions to make. Fast.”

  She was stone.

  “Everything you know about me, Mara, is the truth,” he began. “It’s just that you don’t know all the truth there is.” He paused. “For nearly twenty years I was an intelligence officer with the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Intelligence Service. I ran agents in Eastern and Western Europe using my art business as a cover occupation. I bought and sold art under several different business names over the years and used several different names myself whenever the circumstances called for it. I retired four years ago, when I married Romy, moved to Houston, and bought out Paul Davies’s business, keeping his name for obvious reasons.”

  Mara swallowed.

  “All of that about how I got started, that’s true, that’s the way it happened. After I was recruited into the FIS I continued dealing in art, only now my profession became my operational cover. I ran businesses out of London, here in Rome, Vienna, Zurich… a number of places.

  “I met my first wife while on assignment in London. She knew nothing about my intelligence work. The marriage failed largely because I hadn’t yet learned how to handle the stresses of a secret profession. She was the type of person who needed a lot of attention, which I wasn’t able to give her. I really do feel responsible for much of the sadness that marked her life.”

  Mara was still holding the towel at her waist. She was beautiful like that, unaware of herself, totally disarmed by what she was hearing.

  Strand turned away from her and looked back outside, letting his eyes settle on the horizon.

  “My particular cell of agents relied mainly on two key people: Claude Corsier, an art dealer like myself, based in Geneva; and Ariana Kiriasis, a specialist in Hellenistic antiquities whom I’d met in Athens. From the mid-seventies through most of the eighties we were working the Soviet picture.

  “In the late eighties the FIS decided to get serious about gathering information on a developing phenomenon: the increasing cooperation among the major players in international organized crime. Throughout the eighties we’d seen mounting evidence that these new collaborations were going to become a serious problem. It was like watching storm clouds building over the sea.

  “In 1989 the FIS pulled my cell off of Soviet affairs just four months before the Berlin Wall came down. They put us on international crime; we spent the next year or so assessing the difficulties involved in launching an intelligence operation of this sort. One of our main sources in the Soviet operations was a German businessman named Wolfram Schrade, whose many commercial interests were spread widely over an international market.

  “Because we worked so closely with Schrade we knew a lot about him, more than he thought we knew. We knew he was getting in on the front end of a variety of international crime operations through contacts he was making during his travels to foreign countries on legitimate business. Borders to people like Schrade were incidental, if not irrelevant. He knew that profits from illegal activities were as big in one country as in the next. He understood the potential.

  “Soon, like all the big players, he had a cash problem. His money managers were scrambling for new ways to wash the stuff.”

  Strand paused and watched the shadows from the clouds move across the cityscape, an ever changing scene where light, or its absence, illuminated an ancient landmark in one moment and then plunged it into darkness the next. It was a moving metaphor for history, played out on the surviving architecture of a perished empire.

  “By 1991,” he went on, “my international criminal intelligence operation was ready to go active. The Soviet Union was only months away from implosion, and the black marketeers, who had kept a corrupt Soviet system from collapsing for fifty years, were becoming the Russian Mafia right before our eyes. Russia was swallowed by criminals so fast it shocked everyone. One of the enterprises they were best at was laundering money through their financial institutions. Our man Schrade was using them and paying a high premium for the privilege. The Russians were taking twenty-five percent of everything they washed, with no guarantee that their cut wasn’t going to go even higher.

  “At the time Schrade had no choice but to pay up. He was moving enormous amounts of money, and they were the only ones who could handle it. But it burned him up. Schrade hated the Russians, even though he’d made a lot of money out of corrupt Russians over the years. He never forgave them for dividing Germany after World War Two. That decision had ruined a huge family manufacturing business by splitting it in half. Spying against them was his revenge.”

  Strand paused. “Wolf has a whole philosophy of revenge,” he said. “He’s a believer.”

  Mara still hadn’t moved. Water was dripping from her body, from her hair, puddling on the tile floor.

  “About this time my people learned that Schrade had had enough of shoveling money out to the Russians. To avoid the high laundering premiums, Schrade went to a great deal of time and expense to design and put in motion his own complex laundering operation that cut them out. We had an informant inside and followed the entire development.

  “My immediate superior in the FIS at this time was a man named Bill Howard. He came up with a scheme to get Schrade to cooperate with us as a high-level informant. He drew up a secret engagement advance, proposing that we offer Schrade a negative incentive: The FIS would confront Schrade and show him that we knew all about his criminal connections with the Russians, the Chinese, Italians, the Yakuza, Uzbekistanis, Ukrainians. All of them. We’d show him we knew about his money laundering operation, inside out. We’d tell him that we’d overlook all of this—all of it—in exchange for information about his worldwide criminal associations. We would present him with a want list, and he would be expected to fill it. If he didn’t cooperate, we would arrange to have his criminal involvement exposed.

  “The legality of Howard’s proposal was highly questionable, but the payoff was enticing. If Schrade was successful at fulfilling this list, we would have the most in-depth picture of global organized crime that any governmental agency had ever had. In the end someone in the FIS decided to take the risk. But it was a ‘shrouded’ operation—an FIS secret. Howard got the green light.”

  Mara was now sitting on the foot of the bed, the towel tied around her chest. He was reminded of the first time he had seen her, drying herself with a towel after getting out of the pool at the River Oaks Swimming Club. He leaned a shoulder against the window frame, facing her, and went on.

  “I had a problem with it. It had nothing to do with the morality of what we were doing. Intelligence services cozy up to the worst people in the world. Always have; always will. Sometimes intelligence services get what they need by making compromises that would seem abhorrent in another context. There’s no way around that. That’s just the way it is. In Schrade’s case, I was faced with other factors.

  “First of all, every intelligence officer knows going into an operation like this that if it all unravels somehow, the lowest man in the pecking order is always the one who hangs. That was me. If the operation ever blew up in our faces, it would be a disaster for me personally. The legality of what we were doing would be challenged, and I would catch the full brunt of the investigation. I was very much at risk and knew it. So I had to assess that.

  “Also troubling was the prospect of working with Wolfram Schrade. I detested the man. I’d learned too much about him when he was spying on the Russians for us.”

  Strand stopped, thinking of Schrade. “He was internationally powerful, but wielded all of his influence from behind the scenes. Shunned publicity. Reclusive. You never saw his name in The Wall Street Journal or U.S. Ne
ws & World Report or Fortune. You never heard his name in the news at all. If his legitimate business involvements were buried in secrecy, his illegitimate relationships were hidden even deeper. Almost even beyond rumor.

  “I was assigned to work with him because he was a passionate art collector and had a scholarly hunger for knowledge about it. Read constantly. Studied. That was our connection. Much of our communication occurred in that context. It was an efficient and useful cover. Unfortunately, Schrade pursued art as ruthlessly as he pursued everything else. It wasn’t a pretty thing to see, and I hated that he was even remotely involved in something that meant so much to me.”

  Strand twisted his shoulders against the window frame, trying to alleviate the growing tension.

  “What troubled me the most about what we were about to do was that we were turning a blind eye on too much crime. Considering the amount—and type—of criminal enterprises Schrade was involved in, by giving him a free hand, regardless of the kind of information he was feeding to us, I thought we were dangerously close to becoming part of the problem instead of part of the solution. I didn’t like it at all.”

  Mara sat straight backed as a sphinx and just as silent, watching him. He could hardly blame her. God only knew what he would say next, where this was taking him and, by extension, her too.

  He shook his head and looked outside again. Her total focus on him was understandable, but it was also disconcerting.

  “God help me, I went ahead with it.”

  CHAPTER 16

  VIENNA

  “You know how much Harry hated Wolfram Schrade,” Ariana said. “You must’ve known.”

  “Sure.”

  “He was never comfortable having to launder for him.”

  “Nobody was asking him to be comfortable with it.”

  She threw him an amused look. He could barely hide his intolerance of Strand, who had never been enough of a team player in his opinion. Howard used to keep a firmer grip on his biases. Things changed. Ariana ignored his testiness.

  “It’s too late to talk about scruples, too late to claim we had any”—she shook her head, remembering—“but Harry came the closest of any of us to agonizing over what we did for Schrade.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, Bill, it’s true. Harry never believed in the ‘percentages’ argument, that official explanation that we all pretended was a genuine justification. Help one murderer kill a few people and use the information he gives us to prevent ten murderers from killing hundreds of people.”

  “Well, he may not have believed it, but he bloody well spent nearly twenty years doing just exactly that,” Howard said.

  “Maybe, but he paid a terrible price.”

  “We all do. That’s the cost of fighting a war. You sacrifice the few to save the many. The concept is as old as civilization.”

  “See,” she said. “You have it all worked out, a little moral formula that sums it all up neatly so that we don’t have to confront the terrible things that we do. If someone asks us how we could do such things, if, in the middle of the night, we ask ourselves how we could have done such things, we immediately hold up the formula, like a talisman. It makes everything justifiable, helps us look at ourselves in the mirror without turning away in shame.” She stopped. “Harry refused to do that.”

  “Christ, you sound like you want to canonize him.”

  “I am just trying to help you understand what I am about to tell you, Bill. It may be more complex than it first appears to you.”

  In a way, she sympathized with Bill Howard. He had not advanced in the FIS the way he had wanted. He would end his career as a station chief, and although that in itself was an admirable accomplishment and Vienna was a plum assignment, it was not as good as having a headquarters position with division-level responsibilities in Washington. That was what Howard wanted and had wanted for a long time and would never get. Now this scandal. It had happened on his watch, and Howard knew that it had destroyed even the slightest little ray of hope that he might have been able to keep alive that maybe, someday, he would be called out of the dubious shadows and into the respectable light of a Washington directorate office.

  “One day—it was May about five years ago—I got a message from Harry. I was in Prague. He was in Rome, soon to leave, and wanted to meet me as soon as possible. We agreed on Trieste. It was the next evening before we were able to meet, and a wet cold front was moving across the Adriatic. We sat in a small café on a side street a couple of blocks off the waterfront, and all during the meal I had no idea what the meeting was about.

  “Finally, Harry told me he had a proposition. He said he wanted me to know that he was going to be retiring in a little over a year. He wanted me to know so I could be thinking about what I wanted to do.”

  She stopped. “Could I have another cigarette?”

  Howard gave her one, lighted it, and she went on.

  “Harry said, ‘Before I leave, Ana, I want to burn Wolf.’ I stared at him across the table. I couldn’t believe my ears. He said he was going to give me and Claude a chance to get in on the operation if we wanted. If I was interested, he would arrange a meeting for all of us, probably the only meeting in which we would all be together at the same time. He said there would be a lot of money in it for all of us. Enough for us to protect ourselves from retaliation if we used our heads. Though he wouldn’t tell me much more than that, he did answer enough questions for me to say that, yes, I was interested and I would like to be included in that meeting.

  “Then Harry hesitated—just that, a hesitation. That little thing gave me some idea of the enormity of what he was planning. Harry never gave himself away like that. He was a master of opacity… the ‘poker face,’ you say.” She smoked. “The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘Marie is designing the plan.’”

  “Good… God…” For a split second she thought Howard was going to smile.

  “I don’t know the details, of course I wouldn’t,” Ariana went on, ignoring him, “but I know that she had a major role in putting it all together. Claude and I became couriers. For the next several months we traveled constantly. We carried legal documents and communications. Often we met in Brussels and Liechtenstein with the legal wizard they got to carry out Marie’s scheme. On her advice, Strand himself went to Los Angeles and recruited this man. Dennis Clymer. I’m not sure what he did, but it was very complex and, eventually, legal. Or so I understood. It was through him that everything Marie diverted from Schrade’s money laundering operations—or at least the part she handled—found its way into the legitimate marketplace. After six months Harry closed down the operation.”

  “Closed it down? What went wrong?”

  “Nothing. Everything was running perfectly. Harry said that was the best time to quit, before we made any mistakes. Not only had we avoided mistakes, but if we quit then, we would have six months to take our time and carefully cover our tracks from every conceivable direction. We would have time to think, time to make sure.”

  Ariana drew long on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly, lazily.

  “It would take you a decade to extract that money now,” she said. “Actually, I don’t know that it can ever be done.”

  Howard stared at her, silent for a moment.

  “How in the hell could Schrade let something like that get by him?”

  “At some point in life everyone has to trust someone, Bill. Even people like Wolfram Schrade. It’s not possible to live without doing that. Wolf kept a sharp eye on his money, at least on what the computers told him he had. And on what Marie told him he had. That’s the great leap of faith of modern finance. I even do that. I get a piece of paper from the bank in Cyprus that tells me how much money I have there. Is it really there?” She shrugged.

  Howard had been concentrating on something.

  “A moment ago… you used the word ‘enormity.’” He was sober. “What kind of money are we talking about here?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly,�
�� she said. “All I know is that I’ve been getting a percentage of part of it. You know, the interest thrown off by part of it.”

  “How much?”

  She hesitated. “I get almost a million U.S. dollars annually.”

  Howard’s face sagged. “Fuck.”

  Ariana had never heard Bill Howard say that word.

  “In… credible,” he said softly. “In… credible.”

  He dropped his face into his hands, his elbows resting on his knees. He rubbed his face. He rested his forehead in the palms of his hands.

  “And you all shared in it.”

  Ariana nodded.

  “This… Clymer, yourself…”

  “Me and Claude and Clymer and Marie and Harry.”

  “Five of you.”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Goddamn.” Howard’s eyes rolled to the side as he calculated. “I suppose you all shared equally. You said the interest… that’s, hell, that’s five million in interest—just interest.” He gaped at her. “I don’t even… I don’t even know how to calculate the principal on something like that.” He stopped. “Are you sure?”

  “What do you think, Bill?”

  Howard spoke softly. “You stupid idiots. And you’re surprised that Schrade wants to kill you?”

  “Of course not, not after he found out what we had done. But I am surprised that he finally discovered it.”

  Howard was incensed but controlling it. “You’ve been talking interest here. What about the principal?”

  “Harry stipulated that we never touch the principal. We’ve been splitting only the interest.”

  Howard’s hand was in front of his mouth, holding the cigarette as he sucked on it. “And how does that work?”

  “It just shows up in my account in Cyprus. Quarterly.”

  “Who’s responsible for that?”

  “I don’t know.”