Bloodmoney

23

Perkins wanted to get out of London. He proposed flying to Paris in his G5 for a late dinner. He would call Jean-Marie at Taillevent, who would hold a table for them. Sophie thought he was joking, but she didn’t understand: She had just made Perkins’s firm a billion dollars. If she spent a million dollars a day, five days a week, it would take nearly four years to work through that stash. Why shouldn’t she fly on a private jet to Paris for dinner? Money truly didn’t matter when there was so much of it. That was unnerving for Sophie, who had grown up wishing for the things that money could buy. But as she was packing her overnight bag in her room at the Dorchester, her phone rang. It was Perkins.

“It’s too late,” he said. She wasn’t sure at first what he meant. “My pilot says we can’t get a landing slot in Paris until tomorrow morning. He thought I was daft.”

They settled on the River Cafe, which was outside central London, but only barely. It was a stylish place on the Thames, up near Hammersmith. The interior was shades of blue, a sea-bright carpet and an aquamarine wall, set against the gleaming stainless steel of the open kitchen. Perkins was a regular; he went to places he liked, where risk of a bad meal was low.

Perkins took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and in the low light of the restaurant he didn’t look quite so much like the Pacman. Sophie had been wearing a tight, tailored jacket over a blue blouse. She threw her jacket over a chair, too. One thing about being rich, momentarily, was that you could afford to be untidy. She was a handsome woman: supple, bright-eyed, her face always on the verge of a mischievous smile. And on this evening, relaxing in the afterglow of a successful day, he was a handsome man: shy in the way that famous people are, looking for the things in life that didn’t have a price tag.

Perkins knew the menu, and he ordered everything he thought she would like: roasted yellow peppers; bruschetta with wild oregano; risotto with white peach; and grilled fishes whose Italian names, spiedino and branzino, made them sound much tastier than monkfish and sea bass. He couldn’t resist ordering another lovely bottle, this one from the Alto Adige. It wasn’t like Sophie to allow herself to be spoiled, but she acceded quite happily in this case, and devoured what was put before her.

“Tell me about Sophie Marx, if that’s permitted,” said Perkins. “I don’t know anything about you, except that you seem awfully good at your job.”

“‘The CIA-we make a world of difference.’ That’s the slogan the recruiters use.”

“And does it? Make a difference, I mean.”

“Enough to keep me interested. I’m sort of an action junkie. And I like keeping secrets. I’ve had lots of practice.”

“You still haven’t told me anything. Where did you grow up? Let’s start there. That’s not classified, is it?”

“In Florida, mostly. And then in St. Croix for a while. And then I ran away from home. Just your normal childhood.”

“I think you’re going to have to explain yourself, madam.”

“I never explain myself.”

But then she did. In the flush of that summer evening, she told him the story that she never told anyone outside work. She trusted him, for reasons she only half understood. She sensed that he was caught, like her, in a world in which he was successful but not entirely happy. He was chasing a glowing filament that receded even as he advanced. Perkins was a good listener, and he let her tell the tale.

“My parents were hippies, sort of,” she began. “They were on the run. I was never sure who from, the cops or the FBI, or just from normal people. And they pulled me along with them. We had a lot of things we couldn’t talk about with anybody. I guess that’s how I got started with the secrecy thing.”

“What was your mother like? She wasn’t a spy, I take it.”

“Do you really want to know? This is private, and it’s sort of embarrassing.”

“Yes, I really want to know. I want to understand what makes a woman turn out like you.”

“My mother was a rebel. She looked like those sixties pictures you see of beautiful girls at Woodstock, or Joni Mitchell album covers. And she was a daredevil. If you told her she couldn’t do something, then she had to do it. Unfortunately, she had a habit of wandering off. I thought she wanted to get away from me and my father, but she said she was just a free spirit. When she was having a good time, she forgot about going home.”

“Would she come back?”

“Usually, but sometimes it took a while. I had to take care of things while she was gone. Cook, and do the shopping, and pay the bills. And take care of my dad when he was blue. I was like Junior Mom. No wonder I’m weird, right?”

“You’re not weird in the slightest. I’m sorry to break that to you. What was he like, your father?”

“He was a dreamer. A romantic, I guess. He was very handsome, sort of impulsive. He did his share of bed-hopping, too. His big problem was that he wasn’t very well organized. He had gotten busted for selling LSD in New York when he was still at Columbia, and then he violated his parole, so we had to move a lot, and sometimes he used false names, and it was a big mess every fall when I had to go to school and we had to fill out all the forms.”

“Where did you live?”

“We started on the Gulf Coast, in Naples, then in Daytona Beach on the Atlantic side, and then in Key West. In the summers I would sometimes go up north to stay with relatives. But the school thing was a problem every September. That’s why we moved to Christiansted in the islands. Some of my parents’ screwy friends were setting up a private school there, so that their children could be freethinkers and not have to study reactionary subjects like spelling and grammar. We lived on a houseboat in Christiansted Harbor. It was the only thing they could afford. I hated it. Every day was like the cast party for Hair .”

“How did you end up so normal, Sophie? I don’t get it. With a childhood like that, you should be in a mental hospital.”

“I have a nonstick coating. What saved me was that I ran away. I knew I couldn’t live like that anymore, and my parents weren’t going to change, so finally I just left. I was fifteen. I had a rich aunt, my father’s sister, who lived in Chicago. She took me in.”

“Is that where the Marx family came from? Chicago?”

“Not exactly. Marx wasn’t our real name. My father changed it to that when he was on the run. The family name was Devereux. My aunt wanted me to change it back when I came to live with her, but I said no. The next year she arranged for me to go to a boarding school in New Hampshire. That’s where I learned how to act normal. But believe me, I’m not.”

“You could have fooled me. From the moment you walked into Edward’s, I thought you were Greta Garbo.”

“I’m a good pretender. That’s one of the survival skills I learned. And having lived that crazy life, I knew things the other kids didn’t, so I was popular. And I did well at Exeter, too. Somehow, all those years of bad schools and listening to my parents’ dopey ideas hadn’t made me stupid. So I was a ‘success.’”

“I still don’t get the CIA part. How did you end up there? With that crazy childhood, I would think you’d want to do something utterly ordinary-work in a bank, or an insurance company.”

Her eyes were alight. She was getting tipsy, on the wine and the company.

“Isn’t it obvious? The CIA was the only place where people understood me. I found a whole government agency full of people who lived on the run, and had secrets they couldn’t tell anyone, and were always pretending. It was a building full of weirdos like me. I told the agency recruiters everything about myself. I had to. It was the first time I had told anyone the whole story. And do you know what? They loved it.”

“Come, now, Miss Devereux. Are you always pretending? Like now, for example.”

“Every minute, and especially now. I’m always afraid someone will expose me as a fraud. I have dreams about it. And my name is Marx.”

Perkins took her hand. It was an unusual thing to do, even in the midst of this intimate conversation.

“You probably won’t believe this, but I have the same anxiety. I think I’m going to be found out. The world I’ve built is going to come crashing down, and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to pick up the pieces. I’m scared, all the time.”

“You? That’s ridiculous. What do you have to be afraid of?”

“Failure, collapse, bankruptcy. When you’re playing with so much money, it’s easy to get in trouble. That’s why I agreed to help the agency. I tried to explain this to you. At the time we got seriously connected, I was on the ropes. My investors didn’t know it, and the Street didn’t know it. But your friends did. They understood that I was vulnerable. That made me a perfect recruit. Isn’t that what you people say?”

“Yes, that’s what we say.”

She looked at Perkins across the table. He wanted to explain, and she was truly the only one he could tell.

“How did it happen?” she asked. “How did we recruit you?”

So he told her the story. It was a peculiar play, where the audience seemed to understand the story as well as the actor.

“You know Anthony Cronin, the man who introduced us?” he began.

She nodded. Yes, she knew him. That was all she wanted to say, for now.

“I first met Cronin in New York five or six years ago, I can’t remember. That was the easy part, before the squeeze began. The meeting had been arranged by a hedge fund manager I knew. It was obvious that he had intelligence connections but he never explained them.”

“He was the spotter,” Marx said with a wink. “That’s what we call them.”

“Okay, so he called one day and said he had a friend in the government named Cronin who was a big deal, and that we should meet the next time I was in the States. And I thought, sure, great. A lot of people in finance were helping out after 9/11 and I thought I should, too. So I telephoned the number he gave me for Cronin and left a message saying that I would be in New York in a week. Cronin called back the next day. He suggested we meet at the Athenian Club, where I guess he was a member.”

Marx smiled at the thought of such a rendezvous. She had visited the club herself, with one of her professors, when she was an undergraduate at Princeton. It was a handsome beaux arts front on West Forty-Third Street, with a white marble facade, elaborate carvings and moldings and a club flag flapping in the breeze next to Old Glory.

“A perfect place to take an ex-professor like you,” she said. “Old paintings on the wall, books in the library shelves, rooms with bathtubs and no showers: old school. Nothing bad could happen there.”

“Cronin was waiting upstairs, sitting in a leather chair and sipping a martini as if he owned the place. He rose as soon as I entered the room. He obviously had a picture of what I looked like. The waiter arrived, and I thought, what the hell, do the James Bond thing, so I ordered a martini, too. I took a sip, we talked for a while. He told me about how some famous names in finance were helping: This man got them a new building on Fifth Avenue, pronto, after the New York station went down on 9/11. That one used his company as a front to catch a terrorist from Pakistan. All very impressive.”

“So the hook was in.”

“Definitely. After a while, he popped the question: ‘How would you like to help your country in a time of need?’”

“We call that ‘the pitch.’ What did you say?”

“I told him of course I would. I had decided that I would say yes on the flight over. I asked him what it would involve, and he said little things, until we got to know each other better. And that’s all it was, the first few years. Little things: Can you tell us about your foreign contacts? Can you help us facilitate a payment overseas? Can we use one of your houses as a meeting place? Easy stuff.”

“That’s ‘development,’ by the way, the part where we watch you and see how you’re doing. When did it get nasty?”

Perkins looked down at his plate. As much as he had wanted to tell the story, it got harder at this point.

“They caught me cheating. That was the start. I had a man inside the Bank of England. He was giving me information about the Monetary Policy Committee. I was paying him five hundred thousand dollars a year, to a bank in the Cayman Islands, and making twenty times that off his information. But the transfers got picked up by the U.S. money-laundering snoops, and my guy panicked. He thought he had been caught by the Inland Revenue for tax evasion.”

“So you asked for help?”

“Exactly. I told Cronin about it. I didn’t exactly ask him to fix it, but he knew that’s what I wanted. Case went away. Poof. No more questions.”

“And you were relieved. And you thought, these intelligence friends of mine are pretty helpful.”

“Just so. But then it turned. The markets began to go screwy, and I was in trouble. Like a lot of people, I had bought fistfuls of credit swaps that I thought could never go bad, I mean, how’s Morgan Stanley ever going to go bust, right? But everything turned to shit in a couple of weeks, and I was desperate to raise cash.”

“And you got a call from Cronin?”

“You know the script. Cronin called and said he had a great idea. He’d heard I was in a little trouble and he knew the perfect way out. We should do what I had been doing with my guy in the Bank of England, but on a global scale. He would supply the inside information, I would trade on it and we would split the profits.”

“‘The system.’”

Perkins nodded. “And now you’re part of it. That’s my fault.”

Marx shook her head. “I’m a big girl. I know what I’m doing. And this guy Anthony Cronin isn’t ten feet tall. Believe me. If you really want a way out, you’ll find one.”

Perkins wanted to order cheese, but she said no, at the end of so much heavy talk she wanted something sweet. Dolce, she said, but not dolcissime. He ordered panna cotta, a delicate dessert of cooked cream, served with grappa and baked nespole, an Italian fruit that looked like an apricot and had a taste between sweet and tart.

“Tell me about Beirut,” he said, as they were drinking the last of the dessert wine. “You said that you worked there, but you didn’t tell me what you did.”

“Of course I didn’t. Don’t be silly. That’s a no-no.”

“I don’t mean the details, just generically, sort of. Make it up, as if it were a spy novel.”

“Okay. Imagine an international civil servant. She works for UNESCO in Paris, at least that’s what her card says. She travels regularly to Beirut. She stays at the Phoenicia, on the corniche. She spends her days at UNESCO’s office out near the airport, but she has free time at night and on the weekends. She goes to restaurants. She has a chalet at the beach. She’s always meeting people. Sometimes they’re her agents. Sometimes they work for Lebanese intelligence, or for the Syrians, or the Iranians. Sometimes they exchange information for money. One of them tells her a big secret about how Hezbollah communicates with its operatives. They have a private telephone system. He tells her where the cables are buried.”

“Is she in danger, this woman?”

“Not usually, if she does it right. It may sound like she’s taking big risks, but she knows how to operate, she’s just another pretty girl in Beirut. But then people worry her cover is too thin, and she has to get out of Lebanon in a hurry. And then a bad thing happens to her, in Addis Ababa, and it’s obvious she has been burned. They make her go home. She gets a fancy job, but she’s bored stiff. She hates success.”

“You see! That’s why I like you so much. We’re the same person.”

“But I escaped success, Tom. I went back in the trenches. You’re still a billionaire.”

He shook his head. He loved her story, but it couldn’t be that easy, even for a woman who had mastered the covert life as a young girl, for whom lying was part of survival.

“Is that true, what you told me, more or less?”

“Not a word of it,” she said. She closed her eyes. “I’ll make up more stories another night.”

They were in Perkins’s car, heading back to Mayfair. The food and wine had sent her into low-earth orbit in the restaurant, but now she had come back to ground.

Neither of them spoke for a time, and in the silence Sophie recalled the events of the day. Whatever else you could say about it, the trading that had made a paper fortune in a few hours was illegal. Normal people went to jail for insider trading.

That wasn’t a stopper, in itself. What the agency did, routinely, was to break the laws of other countries. If a job were simple and aboveboard, then some other entity of the government could take care of it. Intelligence officers were supposed to do the twisty things, and that was especially true of the new service for which she worked. But even by these debased rules, she sensed that what she and Perkins had done was over the line.

“It was fraud, what we did today, wasn’t it?” she said. “Trading on private information, and making all that money. That’s against the law.”

“How can it be illegal, if the government told us to do it?”

She nodded. That was the right answer. That was what Jeff Gertz would say. But it was a mistake to confuse Gertz with the United States government.

“You want some advice from your new energy analyst?”

“Of course I do. I want to know everything you’re prepared to tell me, about every subject.”

“Okay, then, if my colleagues ask you to do something, and they say it’s legitimate, then get in writing. That’s my suggestion. Don’t go on a patriotic speech and a handshake. In our business, those don’t mean much.”

“I tried that already. I asked Anthony Cronin. He told me it wasn’t possible. He said, ‘Trust me.’ So I did.”

“Oh, Jesus.” She shook her head, and then she laughed. It was funny, really, when dishonest people told you to trust them.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you think you can get out of this, if you decide that it’s wrong?”

Perkins thought a long moment. He took her hand, and then let it go.

“It would be difficult now. When your people came to me, I had borrowed a lot of money. I had emptied the tank, pretty much, and was running on fumes. They helped me pay off the debts, and then once the system began to work, we were rolling in money. But they have a call on it. They take their share of the profits.”

“You mean they own you?”

“They call it partnership. And it’s so much money now that I don’t really care. I mean, it’s north of ten billion dollars, heading for twenty billion. Even if they take three quarters of it, I’m still absurdly rich.”

“Read the fine print, Tom. These people are killers. That’s what they do. Whereas you’re a nice person, so far as I can tell. I don’t want you to get caught.”

Perkins took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t look quite so young now.

“I am caught, Sophie. That’s the point. We have an expression in economics, ceteris paribus. It means ‘all other things being held constant.’ It allows you to make assumptions and build models. But in this case, all other things aren’t constant. What’s been done can’t be undone. I don’t like what’s happening. It scares me that Howard Egan got killed. If people found out he was a spy, they can find out other things about my business. And then the whole thing will come down.”

Marx took his hand and gave it a squeeze. She wanted to say something encouraging, even if she didn’t fully believe it.

“I don’t know anything about economics. But when I was a girl, my dad liked to tell me, ‘The only way you can be free is by working for yourself.’ In his case, that basically meant doing nothing, but he was right. You’ve got to find a way to get free of this. Maybe I can help you.”

“Smart man, your dad; smart daughter, too. I’m trying. I’m looking for ways to dig out. Maybe we could share a shovel.”

As they neared the Dorchester, Perkins asked, once more, if she wanted to come back with him to Ennismore Gardens for a nightcap. She answered once again that it was a nice idea, really nice, but no, she would not.