Hunters pa-3

by W. E. B Griffin

  "Who put that money in that account?" Castillo asked.

  "It came from another numbered account in the Caledonian Bank and Trust Limited. And what's very interesting about that is-this is also in Appendix 2-is that that's a very substantial account, with just over forty-six million dollars in it."

  "In cash?" Castillo asked, incredulously.

  "Five million in cash, the rest in instruments something like the ones Lorimer used in Uruguay-not the same thing, exactly, but something like it. You want me to explain that?"

  "First tell me what's 'very interesting' about this second account."

  "There have been no deposits made to it since March 23, 2003. The invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003."

  "We know that date," Miller said. "When Castillo and I were simple, honest soldiers, we were there."

  "Which suggests to you what?"

  "The oil-for-food scam ended with the invasion," Yung said. "That final deposit, nine-point-five million, was probably in the pipeline, so to speak, for that three-day difference."

  "Who owns the account with the forty-six million in it?"

  "We don't know. NSA can't get data like that," Yung replied. "But Appendix 3 says that a lot of people are snooping around the Caledonian Bank and Trust Limited, including the FBI. One of them should know."

  "You hear that, Inspector?" Castillo asked.

  "I heard it," Doherty said. "Would you be surprised if my first reaction was to say fuck you?"

  "No," Castillo said. "But?"

  "And not just because I don't like you and this operation of yours, but because if NSA says the bureau is interested in this Caledonian Bank that means there is a legitimate, ongoing investigation which may very well be screwed up by you nosing around."

  "But?" Castillo asked again.

  "If I don't do this for you, you'll go back to Montvale, he'll go back to Director Schmidt and he'll either order me to get the information or tell somebody else to do it."

  "Please give Inspector Doherty the numbers of the accounts we're interested in, Dave." Doherty hung up the phone fifteen minutes later and handed Castillo a sheet of notepaper on which was written: "Kenyon Oil Refining and Brokerage Company, Midland, Texas."

  Castillo was momentarily surprised at hearing Midland, Texas, but then realized that it was because Munz's family was on the Double-Bar-C ranch there, not because the oil company was in Midland.

  There's probably three or four hundred oil companies in Midland. And it's not surprising that I never heard of this one. Many of them are nothing more than a phone number and a post office box.

  "That's the account with the forty-six million in it," Doherty reported. "The information the bureau has is that they're a small independent outfit, primarily involved in the business of buying and selling crude oil. They have a small refinery in Houston, but that's usually involved in refining other people's oil. There is an ongoing investigation that has so far not turned up anything they're looking for."

  "What is the FBI looking for?" Castillo asked.

  "They didn't tell me and I didn't ask."

  "Get back on the horn, please, Inspector, and ask. And while you've got them on the phone, find out what the FBI have-anything, everything, they have-on the other numbers Yung gave you."

  Doherty glowered at him and didn't move.

  "Do it, Inspector," Castillo said, unpleasantly.

  Doherty grabbed the telephone. Making no effort to hide it, Castillo listened and watched him carefully while he made the call.

  "It'll take some time to get that information," Doherty reported when he had finished. "They'll call."

  "And while we're waiting, we'll all going to take a quick course in how the scans worked," Castillo said.

  "From who?" Doherty asked.

  "From my Budapest source, who is now in Argentina."

  "I told you, Castillo, I didn't want any data from those people until we sort out what we already have."

  "Do you speak Hungarian, Inspector?"

  "No, I don't speak Hungarian," Doherty responded in exasperation.

  "Then you'll just have to guess what I'm saying to my source," Castillo said and picked up the Delta Force radio handset.

  "Sergeant Neidermeyer," a voice came over the handset.

  "Are we up?" Castillo asked.

  "All green, sir."

  "Data link, too?"

  "All up, Colonel."

  "Wake them up, Neidermeyer," Castillo ordered, then switched the radio to SPEAKERPHONE and hung up the handset. "Davidson," a voice came over the speaker ten seconds later.

  "Got you working the radio, do they, Jack?" Castillo asked, in a strange tongue Inspector Davidson had never heard before. He had no idea what it was but it wasn't Hungarian.

  "That's not Hungarian!" Doherty accused.

  Castillo looked at him and softly said, in English, "Actually, Inspector, it's Pashto, one of the two major languages spoken in Afghanistan, the other being Afghan Persian."

  Delchamps and Miller smiled and shook their heads.

  Castillo turned to the radio and, switching back to Pashto, said, "Do you know if the old man's up yet, Jack?"

  The reply came in Pashto: "That's why I'm working the radios, Colonel. Kocian and Kensington are kicking the soccer ball for Max. I was, but that big sonofabitch knocked me on my ass and I quit."

  "I need to talk to the old man right now."

  "Hold one, Colonel."

  "Tell him to speak Hungarian," Castillo ordered, looking at Doherty and smiling.

  "Will do. Hold one." "I wondered if I was ever going to hear from you, Karlchen," Eric Kocian said, in Hungarian. "And I am not surprised that you called ninety seconds before Max and I are to have our breakfast."

  "Uncle Billy, did you ever see one of those books, Windows for Dummies, Microsoft Word for Dummies?"

  "You called me on your science fiction radio and are making me late for breakfast to ask a stupid question like that?"

  Delchamps laughed and said, "I think I like this guy," which caused Inspector Doherty to realize that Delchamps spoke Hungarian and caused him further discomfiture.

  "It's important or I wouldn't have interfered with Max's breakfast," Castillo said. "What I need is a lecture: 'How the Oil-for-Food Scam Worked for Dummies.'" He switched to English. "And give it to me in English and slow, because we have a man here who's going to write it down-make a chart of it-on a blackboard."

  "I have the strangest feeling this odd request of yours is important to you," Kocian said, in English.

  "One can sense an enormous feeling of relief on the part of our FBI coconspirator," Delchamps said, in Hungarian.

  Castillo chuckled.

  Doherty picked up on the "FBI" and glared at Delchamps, which caused Castillo to chuckle again.

  "It's very important to us, Uncle Billy," Castillo said, in Hungarian. "I think we're getting close."

  "I thought we were going to speak English," Kocian said, also in Hungarian. "Make up your mind, Karlchen!"

  "I really like this guy!" Delchamps said. "Make up your mind, Ace!"

  "English, please, Uncle Billy," Castillo said, in English. "We believe that an American company in Midland, Texas, a small broker, is involved. I need to know how likely that would be, who he had to pay off, and how that was done."

  There was a perceptible pause as Kocian gathered his thoughts.

  "Remember the first time we did this, Karl, in the bath at the Gellert? Let's try that again. It worked for the dummies the first time."

  "Unsheath your Magic Marker, please, Inspector," Castillo said.

  "I'm supposed to put what this guy says on my blackboards?"

  "Yes, you are," Castillo said. "Go ahead, Uncle Billy."

  "Draw a rough map of Iraq on the blackboard," Kocian ordered. "Down off the lower right corner, draw in the Persian Gulf. Put a dot on the Iraqi coast and label that Mahashar. That's the major Iraqi oil terminal. I'll spell that for you."

  Doherty drew the map as ord
ered.

  "Done, Uncle Billy," Castillo said.

  "Very well. Now, understand that Iraq was a virtually unlimited pool of crude oil. Outside of Iraq, that oil was worth at least fifty U.S. dollars a barrel-say, a dollar a gallon. The problem Saddam had was, the UN had forbidden him to export this oil so it was worthless to him.

  "I should mention that under his benevolent administration of Iraq, the oil all belonged to the government, which is to say him. He had absolute control of it and nobody could ask him any questions.

  "The way he got around his problem was to have the UN authorize him to sell some of his oil, the proceeds from which could be used only to purchase food and medicine for the Iraqi people.

  "Aside from saying that resulted in a good many aspirin pills being sold to Iraq at five dollars per pill-and similar outrages-do you want me to get into that?"

  "Stick with the crude oil, please, for now," Castillo said.

  "Very well. I presumed you knew at least a little about the price scams and payoffs," Kocian said. "About the crude oil. Do you know how much crude oil a tanker carries?"

  "No," Castillo confessed.

  "I seem to recall that when the Exxon Valdez went down, she dumped 1.48 million barrels of crude oil into your pristine Alaskan waters," Kocian said. "But to keep it simple for the dummies to whom you refer, let's say just one million barrels. Doesn't that space-age laptop of yours have a calculator? Can it handle multiplying fifty dollars a barrel times a million?"

  Castillo could do that simple arithmetic in his head but he had his laptop open in front of him so he punched the keys anyway and reported: "Fifty million dollars, give or take."

  "Very good! Now we go back to Mahashar. The UN has authorized Saddam to sell, say, twenty-five million dollars' worth of his oil to buy food and medicine for his people. It has also dispatched UN inspectors to Mahashar to make sure that's all that leaves the country.

  "A tanker then arrives in Mahashar to take on the oil, which has already been sold to some fine fellow at a good price-the fellow being expected to make a small gift to Saddam, but that's yet another story.

  "Twenty-five million dollars' worth of oil is about half a million barrels and that's about half of the capacity of the tanker which shows up in Mahashar to haul it away under the watchful eyes of the UN. So the tanker pumps out half of the seawater ballast it has arrived with, replaces that with crude oil, and sails away half loaded with crude and half with seawater.

  "Now, no one has ever accused Saddam of being a rocket scientist, but it didn't take him long to figure out that if he could only devise some way to have future tankers pump out all of their ballast and sail away with the tanks full of crude there would be money in it for him.

  "He thinks: Eureka! All I have to do is slip the UN inspectors a little gift, they look away, and off goes the tanker with an extra twenty-five million dollars' worth of crude.

  "This poses some administrative problems. He can't just hand the UN inspector, say, fifty thousand dollars for looking the other way. That's a lot of money, even in one-hundred-dollar bills, and there's a chance, however slight, that an honest UN inspector exists and might blow the whistle on a dishonest one.

  "Further, what happens to the half million barrels of oil that nobody knows about, once it's sailing down the Persian Gulf toward the oil-hungry world? Until it's sold, it's worthless.

  "So they find some other government controlled by gangsters and thieves-the Russians come immediately to mind, but others were involved-who are oil producers and can legally export oil within the restrictions imposed by that other fine international body, OPEC.

  "If they buy the half million barrels of oil-since it's otherwise worthless to him, Saddam can sell it for, say, ten dollars a barrel under the table-they can turn right around and sell it as their own. And not have to deplete their natural resources."

  Castillo looked at Doherty, who had just about filled half of one blackboard with cryptic symbols.

  "But who to sell it to? ExxonMobil and its peers, believe it or not, are fairly honest. They won't touch it unless they know it's clean. Your Congress would love nothing better than to send them all to jail. So what they had to do was find small oil refiners-there are thousands of them-and offer them a real deal-say, thirty dollars a barrel.

  "But-you said a small refiner in Houston?"

  "I said a small broker in Midland," Castillo said. "The one we have in mind does have a small refinery in Houston."

  They heard Kocian grunt knowingly before he went on: "A small broker in Midland with a small refinery in Houston would be aware that your Internal Revenue Service would be looking at his books and might smell the Limburger when they saw he had been buying thirty-dollar-a-barrel oil.

  "So what does he do? He writes a check-actually, has his bank wire-the full, fair price of the oil to, say, the Cayman Islands Oil Brokers Ltd. Now he either owns this business or has a very cozy relationship with it. They acknowledge receipt of the money, take a cut, and put the difference between what he actually paid for the oil and what he's telling IRS he paid for it into another numbered account. Getting the picture, Karl?"

  "Yeah," Castillo said, although he was still trying to absorb it all.

  "And here's where your friends Lorimer and Pevsner enter the picture," Kocian said. "The UN inspector has to be paid for closing his eyes, the captain of the tanker has to be paid for taking on more crude in Mahashar than he reports to ship's owner-and who is better able to do this than Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer, a diplomat of the United Nations who's always flitting around the world doing good?"

  "Where did Lorimer actually get the cash-I presume we're talking cash-to make the payoffs?" Castillo asked.

  "Offshore banks simply will not take cash deposits," Kocian said. "They virtuously want to know where the money comes from."

  "Okay."

  "But there are virtually no restrictions on the withdrawal of funds committed to their care. They will happily wire your money to anyplace you designate and there are no export restrictions on cash from a Cayman Islands bank being hauled away on an airplane.

  "I would suspect that Lorimer had one or more accounts in the Cayman Islands-you understand, Karl, I'm just using the Caymans as an example; banks in twenty other places offer exactly the same services-into which money was deposited by wire from some reputable bank and from which he made withdrawals either by wire or in cash.

  "A lot of the cash went to Iraq. In one of the palaces of one of Saddam's sons, they found a billion-a billion-dollars in brand-new American one-hundred dollar bills, still in the plastic wrappers in which they had come from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

  "I suspect most of the money-the cash-was carried into Iraq on one of Pevsner's airplanes, although others were probably involved. But Pevsner has the reputation for being reliable in the quiet hauling of large amounts of cash."

  "Is there a Russian or a Cuban connection?" Castillo asked.

  "Karlchen, I already told you Putin is involved in this up to his skinny little buttocks," Kocian said. "I just don't have enough proof to print it."

  "Which Putin is he talking about, Castillo?" Doherty asked. "Your mafiosipal or the president of the Russian Federation?"

  Castillo hesitated just perceptibly before replying, "He's not talking about Pevsner."

  "Jesus Christ!" Doherty said.

  "They're no longer useful," Edgar Delchamps said, softly and thoughtfully. "But the hook's been set so why not reel them in as necessary?"

  "Excuse me?" Castillo said.

  Delchamps raised his voice.

  "Thank you, Ur Kocian," he said, in Hungarian. "We'll get back to you. I really want to hear more of this."

  "Who is that?" Kocian demanded.

  "My name is Delchamps, Ur Kocian. I'm a friend of Karlchen's."

  "Well, that makes two," Kocian said. "May I presume I may now take my breakfast?"

  "Bon appetit," Delchamps said, then turned to Castillo and, switching to English
, said, "I really want to talk to your friend, Karlchen."

  "Break it down, Neidermeyer," Castillo ordered and then turned to Delchamps. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about, Edgar."

  Delchamps smiled. "I've been trying to make sense of Doherty's mystic symbols for two days and getting nowhere, and then, the moment I hear about the generous small-time Texas oilman, eureka!"

  Everybody waited for him to go on.

  "Why the hell would a small-time Texas oilman-presumably, a patriotic Texas oilman-suddenly donate two million dollars to a bunch of lunatic wannabe Muslims in Philadelphia? Answer: He's been converted. Unlikely. Answer: He did not do so willingly. So why would he? Because he's been turned, the hook is already set in him."

  "What do you mean turned?" Miller asked.

  Delchamps didn't reply directly.

  "I also asked myself, What's with the suitcase nukes?" he went on. "Where did that come from?"

  "I have no goddamned idea where you're going with this, Edgar," Doherty said.

  Delchamps ignored him.

  "According to Karlchen here…"

  "Uncle Billy can call me that, Edgar, but you can't," Castillo said, evenly.

  "My most profound apologies, Ace," Delchamps said, insincerely, "according to Ace here, the Ninjas he took down at the Never-Never Land hacienda-"

  "Estancia Shangri-La," Castillo corrected him without thinking.

  "Whatever," Delchamps went on, "in far-off Uruguay were professionals. And we have since learned that one of them was a heavy hitter Cuban spook. And Ace tells us the people who tried to snatch Uncle Billy on the Franz Josef Bridge in romantic Budapest also were pros. As were the two you took down in the Gellert, right, Ace?"

  Castillo nodded. "And they all had garrotes."

  "They all had what?" Doherty asked.

  "It's a device-these were stainless steel-not unlike the plastic handcuffs the cops are now using. They put it around your neck and choke you to death," Castillo said.

  "And what was that about you taking someone down in the Gellert? What's the Gellert?"