“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.”
“You’re just trusting whoever.”
“That’s right.” She smiled grimly. “I told you, that’s how the world is today. Marie set it up.”
Howard was still, brooding in the dull lamplight, the smoke from his cigarette rising in front of him, sometimes fogging around the lampshade before dissipating, adding another layer of acrid stench to the wallpaper in the room of conspiracies.
“Okay,” he said after a minute or two, “okay, you don’t know where Harry and Marie are.”
“No.”
“Claude’s gone.”
She nodded.
“Clymer?”
“I have no idea.”
Howard smoked. Ariana had put out her cigarette a while ago and wanted another, but she had already smoked far too much. What she wanted was a drink, but she didn’t say so.
“I don’t understand why you’re not already dead,” he grunted as he shifted on the sofa. His white shirt was growing more wrinkled by the hour. “He obviously found Claude.”
“Maybe that was because Claude was still selling him drawings.”
“What?”
“He signaled that in one of his advertisements.”
“So he was sticking his head in the lion’s mouth.”
“Something like that.”
“I didn’t have any idea that mild-mannered bear had that kind of balls.”
“There’s a lot you didn’t have any idea about, Bill.”
Howard snorted, looked toward the green light of the window. “You people . . . I don’t know.” He turned back to her. “You don’t know anything about how Schrade reacted to this? You don’t know what he’s doing? Do you know anything about him?”
“I heard he cut his ties with the FIS about eighteen months ago.”
“No, damn it. I mean about this, about discovering what the hell you’ve done.”
“All I know is that Claude did not put his advertisement in the International Herald Tribune. I know that means that he couldn’t. I know that is the trigger that was supposed to warn me that something had broken loose.” She paused for emphasis. “And I know Schrade’s going to kill me if the FIS doesn’t stop him.”
Howard nodded impatiently, irritated at her persistence.
“Okay, okay. They’re going to want to hear more from you, that’s for damn sure. I’ll take it back to them. I’ll do the best I can, but, hell, this is huge. This is a fucking disaster.”
Ariana stared at him. She didn’t like the way he was sounding. She had a bad feeling about it. Panic grew in her chest, and every beat of her heart became a labored struggle for breath and for self-control.
CHAPTER 17
Until now Mara’s eyes had never left him, not even for a second, not even a glance away. As Strand moved from the window and began pacing, she got up from the bed and walked to the closet, tossing her towel over the back of a chair. She slipped on her dressing gown, tying the sash as she walked to the French doors to look outside. Strand stopped pacing and looked at her. She had folded her arms, and the light coming in from the balcony struck her across her chest and fell the full length of her to the floor. Her face was in the shadow.
He felt so terribly bad for her. He had presented himself to her as being stable and reliable and, if complex, at least straightforward. Strand knew very well how he came across to most people, and he had always used that knowledge to his advantage. If things had been different, she might never have known at all about the man within the man, even if she had lived with him for the rest of their lives.
All of this ran through Strand’s mind as he paused before going on. He wanted her to put his deception into its proper context. Time, he knew, was growing short, but he needed to set things right between them if he could. He realized that whatever he salvaged out of this mess he salvaged for them, not just for himself. If he was going to have anything to live for when all of this was over, he had to redeem himself to Mara Song.
“Are you all right?” he asked.<
br />
There was a moment of silence as she continued looking out over the balcony. The peacock nearby cried several times, a wild, otherworldly sound.
“I don’t have any idea how to answer such a question,” she said.
“I know this sounds bizarre. . . .”
She nodded. “Yes, exactly. Bizarre.” Her eyes were focused on the palms in the garden. “I want you to get to the point, Harry. You said something horrible had happened. I need for you to get to the point of all this.” She paused. “Then I’ll tell you if I’m all right.”
Strand took a few steps, to the edge of the sunlight on the stone floor.
“Schrade, of course, accepted our offer. Soon the arrangement was working perfectly. Schrade was productive and had no scruples whatsoever about betraying the people he worked with, always shrewd and careful to cover his tracks. He was brilliant at it.”
Mara turned around, her back leaning against the hinged edge of the French doors.
“You should know that the FIS is strictly an intelligence organization—it has no prosecutive role at all. It doesn’t get involved with covert action. It gathers intelligence. That’s all it does. This intelligence is passed on to policy makers. They use it however they want, whatever suits their purpose. Usually it gets caught up in politics. Intelligence is power, and power is the ultimate political tool. An intelligence organization is its government’s fly on the wall. The fly’s job is to observe and then report what it saw. It may witness all manner of crime and treachery, but it never gets involved, not even to prevent something horrible.
“Anyway, Schrade’s illicit profits were laundered by several money managers who worked for him. One of these was a woman named Rosemarie Bienert. Her history with Schrade was . . . complicated. She was brilliant, held university degrees in international economics and finance. He called her Marie. I called her Romy.”
Mara reacted briefly in surprise. Suddenly, unexpectedly, taking Strand aback, her eyes glistened with tears. He quickly looked away from her and then went on.
“I’d actually met Romy while Schrade was spying on the Russians for us. I was his case officer, and Schrade was such an arrogant bastard that he often demanded I go to him in secret at his villa on Schwanenwerder, an island in the Havel River in the Nikolassee district of Berlin. I saw Romy there many times and got to know her.
“When FIS took me off the Soviet project, the abrupt interruption of my meetings with Schrade forced Romy and me to acknowledge how strongly we felt about each other. We arranged our first secret meeting in Geneva.”
The memory of that rendezvous was still so vivid and provocative that it actually disrupted Strand’s train of thought. How he would have liked to dwell on it, to have had the time to indulge himself with the intense remembrance of it. But he didn’t.
“For nearly a year I evaluated the prospect of an intelligence operation focusing on international crime. It was a hectic time for me. There were long, intense periods when the days and nights ran together. During all of this Romy and I would steal as many days together as we could manage, meeting at some out-of-the-way hotel or isolated cottage in Geneva, Lake Como, Paris, London, wherever we felt we could successfully elude Schrade and the FIS for a few days.”
Strand ran his fingers through his hair and turned to look out the window. Over the Tiber a flock of birds wheeled in a moire of light and shadow, a living, shifting Escher pattern.
“When the criminal intelligence operation began, Schrade thought he’d landed in paradise. We watched in silence while he unabashedly went about making deals to smuggle illegal arms and illegal aliens all over the world, watched as he bought and sold drugs from Mexico to Macao, watched as he rubbed shoulders with terrorists, watched as his illegal profits soared. While we watched we listened. We listened while he eagerly betrayed to us all of these associations from which he had profited so richly. He was very thorough about it, very matter-of-fact. He had no compunction, and apparently no fear, about playing both sides to his own benefit.
“This went on for nearly a year,” he said, glancing at his watch. He was taking too long. His neck and shoulders were aching with the tension of trying to remain calm in the face of the dazzling flight of time.
“Now that Romy and I were out of Schrade’s orbit we could see each other more easily, though we were still scrupulous about concealing our affair from both sides.”
Strand rubbed his face with his hands. “I’ve got to cut this short,” he said.
She didn’t react, and he went on.
“At the same time all of this was going on, the intelligence community was going through a sea change as the cold war ground to a halt. Internal blunders and scandals became public, and certain important people were calling for radical changes. All of us on the front lines knew there was going to be downsizing, some of us were going to be brought in and forced into early retirement. Romy and I decided that when that happened to me, she was going to break with Schrade and go with me.”
Strand hesitated only slightly before plunging on. “One day I told Romy that before they shut us down I wanted to do some damage to Schrade. I wanted to hurt him, and I wanted it to be serious. I knew that Schrade didn’t have any nerve endings at all unless they were connected to art or to money. I went with the money. Over the next several months we talked constantly about how to embezzle the money Romy was laundering for him. All forms of money are vulnerable to theft, but the most vulnerable is cash. Illicit cash is the most vulnerable of all. The people who have it, and need to launder it, usually possess ludicrously large amounts of it. And because of this they have to turn to unorthodox methods to move it. The same technology and the expertise required to steal from legitimate banks and institutions work just as well when they’re turned around and applied in the other direction. Schrade was vulnerable.
“Eventually Romy designed an astonishingly complex system to divert some of the money she was laundering for Schrade, which the FIS was allowing him to launder in exchange for his skills in providing us with information.” He hesitated. “Actually, she was able to divert huge amounts of it. Hundreds of millions.”
“Oh, God.” Mara gaped at him.
The Roman sunlight was creeping across the floor between them, receding toward the balcony, less and less of it as it steadily escaped through the French doors. Soon it would be visible only on the sill, and then it would vanish.
With his hands in his pockets Strand stood in front of Mara.
“The strategy that Romy devised was sophisticated and knotted. She had a lot of advantages. Aside from being brilliant, she was in a pivotal position inside the organization. She knew intimately how it worked and why it worked that way. The plan involved half a dozen people, all of them the very best at what they did. We all considered the risks. The weak spots in the scheme were examined and corrected. We worked at it until we were all exhausted, until we all agreed we couldn’t do anything else to improve it. Then we went ahead with it. And it worked.
“We ran this thing for six months before I stopped it. It could have gone on much longer, some of them thought a lot longer, but I wanted to pull out of it while we still knew we were a long way from being discovered.”
“You mean discovered by Schrade, or by the people you worked for?”
“Either.”
“So, you and . . . your ‘cell,’ your people, were hiding this from the government, from FIS? This Howard, he didn’t even know?”
“That’s right.”
“Harry—you really thought you could get by with this?”
“That’s right. We had every reason to believe we would. At worst, if it was discovered, we thought it would be so far down the road, and so much more laundered cash would have passed through the system behind it, that the whole thing would be impossible to sort out. The key was stopping early, letting subsequent business flow over it, bury it. Every year that passed made us feel even more secure and convinced us that we had been successful.”
Mara sa
w it coming. “But it didn’t work out that way,” she said.
Strand shook his head. “For nearly a year I’ve thought Romy’s death was an accident. Last night I found out that it wasn’t.”
He told her what had happened with the videotape in her VCR.
“Oh . . . oh . . .”
He told her who Dennis Clymer was and what had happened to him. He saw her brace her back against the door frame.
Then he told her about Meret.
She gasped, a burst of breath that sounded as if she had been hit in the stomach. Her knees bent slowly and ever so slightly; Strand thought she was going to sink to the floor, but she didn’t. Her arms crossed slowly over her abdomen, and she held herself, her shoulders slumped forward.
“Good God, Harry,” she said hoarsely. “What . . . what have you done?”
Strand stepped toward her, but she quickly raised one hand, palm out, stopping him.
“No, don’t . . . I’ve got to think. . . .” Her expression betrayed her inability to absorb everything she had heard. “Meret is dead ?”
Strand nodded. He wanted to go to her and put his arms around her and talk it out with her, even if it took all day or several days or a week. Whatever it took. But that was impossible. He could feel sweat on his forehead. He could feel his nerves slowly beginning to throb, his adrenaline going to work.
“Mara, listen to me. There’s a lot more you need to know, but we don’t have the time for that right now,” he said. “We’ve got to leave here—”
“‘We’?”
He spoke very deliberately. “That’s right. For now, for the next twenty-four hours, you’ve got to stay with me. I can’t be sure you’re safe unless you’re with me.”
“Why wouldn’t I be safe? I’m not involved here.”
“If you’re involved with me, you’re involved with Schrade. I’m sorry, Mara, but that’s the way it is.”
He could see her thinking about this, thinking, he guessed, about Meret.
“The point is,” he went on, “if you want, I can help you get away from all of this later. Right now we have to take care of right now. Okay?”
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