Black Market

16

Manhattan

On the second floor of 13 Wall, meanwhile, Caitlin Dillon sat in dark silhouette on a high wooden stool. Most of the overhead lights in the room known as the crisis room had been dimmed. She listened to the soothing electronic whirr of half a dozen IBM and Hewlett-Packard computers, complex machines she was entirely comfortable around.

It had been Caitlin's original idea to collect and evaluate all the available newspaper information and police intelligence flowing in over the word processor consoles. The news arrived in sudden, urgent bursts, streams of tiny green letters that came from both the financial sectors and the police agencies all around the world. As she sat there, her eyes hurting from the glare of the screens, she pondered two things.

One was the scary and real possibility of a total international financial collapse.

The other was the intricate and almost hopeless puzzle of her own private life.

Caitlin was aware that she had lived her thirty-four years subject to two strong and contrary urges, two radically different pulls on her energies and emotions. Part of her wanted to be a traditional woman: feminine, desirable, the kind of woman who loved to dress in expensive things from Saks, or Bergdorf Goodman, or Chloe and Chanel in Paris.

The other separate and equal part was independent, highly competitive, and ambitious, possessed of an unusually fierce will.

Many years before, Caitlin's father, who was a deeply principled and intelligent investment banker in the Midwest, had tried to stand up to the large Wall Street clique of firms. He had lost his battle, lost an unfair fight, and been thrown into bankruptcy. Year after year Caitlin had listened as he'd lectured bitterly against the injustice, the unfairness, and sometimes the utter stupidity built into the American financial system. In the same way that some children grow up wanting to be crusading lawyers, Caitlin had decided that she wanted to help reform the financial system. She had finally come east as a kind of avenging angel. She was fascinated and repelled by the self-contained world of big business and by Wall Street in particular. In her heart of hearts Caitlin wanted the financial system to work properly, and she was fierce, almost obsessed with the application of her moral position as the SEC enforcer…

It was likewise the independent, nontraditional part of Caitlin that enjoyed other mild eccentricities-like wandering the streets of New York in tight-fitting Italian jeans, crumpled oversize T-shirts, leather boots that came almost to her butt.

She might happily devote a particular Sunday afternoon to some exotic Italian recipe from Marcella Hazan-but she could easily go weeks abhorring the idea of doing any cooking at all, avoiding all housework in her East Side apartment. She was proud of earning almost six figures a year at the SEC, but sometimes she wanted desperately to throw it all over and have a baby. Sometimes she was afraid she might never have a child. She ached with the idea the way one ached from a real loss. And she had no idea, absolutely none, whether these opposing impulses could ever peacefully coexist.

She had been thinking along these lines ever since that surprising kiss on the Washington – New York plane. It had been quick, casual, yet she had the instinctive feeling she wanted to go beyond that first kiss with Archer Carroll. But where?

What was she thinking of, anyhow?

She hardly knew Carroll. His kiss had been the kiss of a stranger. She wasn't even sure if it had meant anything to him or whether it had been something thrown up by the peculiar circumstances of the flight, his way of relieving tension, and disappointment, and more than a little justified anger.

I don't really know the first thing about him, she thought.

A shuffling noise made her turn, and she saw Carroll in the doorway. She was embarrassed, as if she suspected he'd been standing there, reading her thoughts.

He had his arm in a fresh white sling, and he looked pale. She smiled. She'd already heard about the success of Walter Trentkamp's personal appeal, and she was relieved-decisions made under duress were almost always the wrong ones, she knew. Carroll's impetuousness was part of his charm. But one day, she thought, one day he might run into the kind of serious trouble from which there was no escape.

“I had Michel Chevron all ready to talk about the European black market,” he said.

“Don't keep blaming yourself.”

“Somebody knows all of our moves. Christ, who knows what Michel Chevron could have told me?” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. She was reminded of a restless, agile prizefighter warming up.

“How's the arm? Hurt?”

“Only when I think about Paris.”

“Then don't think.” She slid off the wooden stool. She wanted to go across the room and somehow ease his discomfort, his embarrassment. “I'm glad…”

“Glad?”

She stared at him. Carroll had a vulnerable quality that inspired her to strange sympathies and concerns, but also to anxieties she couldn't quite articulate. He had a lost-boy quality; maybe that was it.

“Glad you didn't get yourself killed,” she said.

There was a breathless silence in the room.

She turned to one of the computer screens, studying the mass of crawling green letters. The spell between them was broken again.

“Another Baader-Meinhof member was shot and killed in Munich.” Caitlin looked up from the screen message. She watched him, wondering again what the kiss on the plane had meant.

Carroll merely nodded. “The West Germans are using Green Band as an excuse to solve their local terrorism problems. The BND is very pragmatic. They're probably the toughest police force in Western Europe.”

Caitlin perched herself atop the high wooden stool again and hugged her knees. Another message started to blip over the nearest computer. She turned to watch the computer screen closely.

And froze.

“Look at this, Arch.”

MOSCOW. THE KGB HAS INTERCEPTED

PYOTR ANDRONOV. IMPORTANT

UNDERWORLD BLACK MARKET SPECIALIST.

ANDRONOV HOLDING U.S. SECURITIES,

PRESUMED STOLEN. ANDRONOV LINKS

STOLEN BONDS TO GREEN BAND.

AMOUNT: ONE MILLION TWO HUNDRED

FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. REFERRED TO

AS “SAMPLES.”

Moments later another equally curious item began to appear on the screen.

The second entry was from the Swiss in Geneva.

INTERPOL. RELIABLE LOCAL INFORMER

HAS REPORTED “FLOODING” OF GENEVA

MARKET WITH STOLEN BOND OFFERS.

SELLER LOOKING FOR “SERIOUS BUYER.”

AMOUNT SUGGESTED AS HIGH AS FIVE TO

TEN MILLION AMERICAN DOLLARS.

SOURCE VERY RELIABLE.

Carroll gnawed at his lip. “I think this might be the moment of truth.”

“Something's definitely happening. But why is it happening all at once like this?”

For the next hour and a half, during which the various screens virtually exploded with new information, as many as a dozen U.S. Army and police officials rushed down to look at the messages inside the crisis room. News was being transmitted from all over the world, all at once.

As bad as it seemed, there was the sense of relief that something was happening. Was Green Band finally moving?

ZURICH. PREVALENT RUMORS HERE TONIGHT OF STOLEN U.S. SECURITIES AVAILABLE. VERY LARGE AMOUNTS. HIGH SEVEN-FIGURE THEFT INDICATED BY SOURCES.

LONDON, SCOTLAND YARD. DURING ROUTINE SEARCH IN KENSINGTON, AMERICAN STOCK CERTIFICATES FOUND. SERIAL NUMBERS TO FOLLOW. SUSPECT NOT IN FLAT WITH CACHE. SUSPECT IS JOHN HALL-FRAZIER, A KNOWN FENCE IN EUROPE BOND MARKET. SUSPECT KNOWN TO MICHEL CHEVRON.

BEIRUT. AHMED JARREL ARRESTED THIS EVENING HERE. TRADED THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION… JARREL HAD BEEN ATTEMPTING TO SELL U.S. SECURITIES IN BEIRUT. ASKING PRICE THIRTY-FIVE CENTS ON A DOLLAR VALUE. VERY HIGH-QUALITY BONDS. SOME BLANK CHEQUES ALSO. JARREL CLAIMS AMOUNT AVAILABLE UP TO ONE HUNDRED MILLION AMERICAN.

Half an hour later, using an ordinary hand calculator, Caitlin added up the amounts indicated on the display screens so far.

The final sum came to just under a hundred million U.S. dollars.

“Samples…”

Next she made a quick printout of the Fortune 500, America 's largest individual corporations, to check against the stolen securities reported thus far.

Nearly all the thefts were in the top one hundred companies. Those reported to date created an unusual, elite universe. Was there a clue or potential lead in that?

Rank in Company Fortune 500-Stockholder Equity

1 Exxon (New York)-$29,443,095,000

2 General Motors (Detroit)-20,766,600,000

3 Mobile (New York)-13,952,000,000

5 International Business Machines (Armonk, N.Y.)-23,219,000,000

6 Texaco (Harrison, N.Y.)-14,726,000,000

8 Standard Oil (Indiana) (Chicago)-12,440,000,000

9 Standard Oil of California (San Francisco)-14,106,000,000

10 General Electric (Fairfield, Conn.)-11,270,000,000

15 U.S. Steel (Pittsburgh)-11,270,000,000

17 Sun (Radnor, Pa.)-5,355,000,000

20 ITT (New York)-6,106,084,000

26 AT &T Technologies (New York)-4,621,300,000

28 Dow Chemical (Midland, Mich.)-5,047,000,000

34 Westinghouse Electric (Pittsburgh)-3,410,300,000

39 Amerada Hess (New York)-2,525,663,000

42 McDonnell Douglas (St. Louis)-2,067,900,000

43 Rockwell International (Pittsburgh)-2,367,300,000

45 Ashland Oil (Russell, Ky.)-1,084,824,000

50 Lockheed (Burbank, Calif.)-826,200,000

52 Monsanto (St. Louis)-3,667,000,000

55 Anheuser-Busch (St. Louis)-1,766,500,000

67 Gulf & Western Industries (New York)-1,893,924,000

69 Bethlehem Steel (Bethlehem, Pa.)-1,313,100,000

77 Texas Instruments (Dallas)-1,202,700,000

84 Digital Equipment (Maynard, Mass.)-3,541,282,000

89 Diamond Shamrock (Dallas)-2,743,327,000

92 Deere (Moline, III.)-2,275,967,000

97 North American Philips (New York)-883,874,000

By nine-fifteen the crisis room was filled with officials from the White House and the Pentagon. They scrutinized the computer screens like gamblers nervously watching the outcome of their bets. The secretary of the Treasury and the vice president were both present. Phil Berger of the CIA had been flown in by special air force helicopter from Washington.

At eleven O'clock urgent reports were still chattering in over the computer terminals. The president had been kept informed; another National Security conference had already been called for late that night.

This time, however, neither Arch Carroll nor Caitlin Dillon was invited to travel down to Washington.

“What did I do?” Caitlin complained angrily when she found out.

“You've got the wrong friends,” Carroll said. “You're traveling in some bad company.”

“You?”

“Yeah. Me.”