Bloodmoney

40

The Eurostar arrivals hall at St. Pancras station was thick with well-dressed young men and women, their computer bags slung over their shoulders and rolling their luggage behind them. There was the faint sound of a thousand tiny wheels clicking across the floor as they busily sped off to their London destinations. They were bound for Euro-Britain, a nation of espresso bars and gourmet sandwich shops that seemed barely connected to the old country of dingy corridors and cigarette butts.

Sophie Marx was traveling on a new diplomatic passport, supplied by the embassy in Brussels, so she avoided the queue at Immigration. She took a black taxi to the Dorchester Hotel, where she had left her luggage in storage when she had decamped suddenly for Islamabad a week before. The doorman tipped his black top hat, and the concierge in his morning coat welcomed her “back home,” as if she’d been off sporting on the Cote d’Azur these past few days. Nothing in her appearance gave her away; she wore a pair of well-tailored slacks and her snug leather jacket and she did look, at a glance, like someone who belonged on a yacht rather than in a safe house.

Marx asked the man at the front desk for a simple room that would fit her new budget, but she was family now, and they gave her a big room with a four-poster double bed and windows that overlooked the park.

She rang Thomas Perkins’s numbers again when she got upstairs. She had been calling him for two days without success, at his office, home and cell numbers. It was evident that something bad had happened to him but she didn’t yet know what, and she blamed herself.

She unpacked her things, took a long shower and collapsed on the bed. She wanted to hide for a while, from the people who were pursuing her and from thoughts about the people she had placed in danger. She unhooked the chintz curtains that surrounded the bed and let them fall, so that she was enclosed in a doll’s house of floral print fabric and down pillows. She hugged a pillow tight against her chest, the way she had as a girl in her first weeks at boarding school, fighting the loneliness of separation from her crazy parents. Sleep came quickly; she was awakened ninety minutes later by the insistent ring of her cellular phone.

Marx fumbled for the handset, uncertain where she was in the dark of the bed. It was odd to hear the ring at all; so few people knew how to reach her. She looked at the number of the incoming caller; it was a London mobile phone she didn’t recognize, and she thought at first that it might be Thomas Perkins.

“Hello,” she answered. “Who is this?”

The answer was the clipped, emphatic and all too familiar voice of Jeffrey Gertz.

“It’s your boss. Or should I say, your former boss. I gather you’ve gone over to the parent company.”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. “You’re hazardous to my health.”

“I need to see you. We have to talk.”

“Wrong. We have nothing to talk about. You are a menace. I mean it. Don’t call again. Goodbye.”

She pressed the red button on the phone and ended the call. The phone rang again, twice, from the same number, and she let it roll over to voice mail both times. Ten minutes later, there was a call from a “private number,” not otherwise identified. She ignored that one, too.

Marx put on her jeans and black leather and walked the half dozen blocks across Mayfair to the handsome building that housed Alphabet Capital. It was a Friday afternoon and the pubs along the way were already crowded with merry-makers, spilling onto the sidewalks with their pints of beer and their wine coolers. As she threaded the crowds, several men offered to buy her a round.

The police had departed Perkins’s building. When the elevator door opened at the top floor, the Alphabet offices looked depopulated, with perhaps a third of the normal contingent on the trading floor. The boisterous feeling she remembered was gone, too; it had the dazed and enervated look of a business in liquidation. Marx walked toward Perkins’s office. The door was shut and the windows that looked out on the trading floor were curtained.

Perkins’s secretary, Mona, was sitting alone at what had been a bank of three assistants. Her eyes were red from days of sleeplessness and crying. She saw Marx approach and pulled back at first. The American woman was part of the problem that had capsized her boss and his firm.

“Where have you been?” she asked Marx. “You missed all the, what, action, but that’s not quite the right word. More like a typhoon.”

“I was away. What happened? It’s so quiet. It looks like they just had a funeral here.”

“Might as well have been. There police were here all week. They just left this morning. Shut the place down, you might say. Took whatever they liked: half the files, and the proprietor, too.”

“Where’s Mr. Perkins? I’ve been trying to reach him for two days. He doesn’t answer my calls and he doesn’t respond to messages.”

“Don’t you know what happened, miss?”

“No, Mona, I have no idea. I told you, I’ve been away. Where is he?”

“He’s in prison, ma’am. They took him off two days ago. He’s in Pentonville now, or so they say. Mr. Tarullo has been up to visit. He’s the only one.”

“I need to see him. It’s really important. Can you contact him for me?”

The secretary shook her head sorrowfully. Her life had been devoted to making arrangements for people to see Thomas Perkins, and now she was useless.

“I told you, he’s in prison. No phone, no mobile, no visitors that aren’t on the list. You have to apply to the warden. And he isn’t seeing most people, I should warn you, only his attorneys. He thinks it’s better that way, or at least that’s what Mr. Tarullo told us.”

Marx got Tarullo’s number from the secretary and called him. The American lawyer sounded harassed and grumpy. Marx gave him her name and said she needed to visit Perkins in prison, but Tarullo sounded uninterested. Perkins, in his desire to protect her, had never mentioned her name to his lawyer.

Tarullo said he was preparing to leave for the States that night on the last British Airways flight, to “shake the tree,” as he put it.

“Who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked. “I never heard of you. Who do you work for?”

Marx thought a minute. She didn’t have time to play games and neither, evidently, did Tarullo.

“I work for the U.S. government. That’s all I want to say on the phone. But I’m a friend of Mr. Perkins’s, for real, and I suspect he doesn’t have too many right now. I need to see him.”

Now Tarullo was a little more interested. The busy lawyer’s go-away tone changed to something more solicitous.

“You work for a part of the government that doesn’t like to say that it’s the government. Am I right?”

“Yes. ‘I could tell you more but then I’d have to…’ You know the line. Can we talk?”

Tarullo decided to take a flyer. He had to leave for the airport soon, and he needed to know if this call was worth his time.

“Let me ask you something, whoever you are. Do you know anything about someone named Anthony Cronin?”

“Yes. I know all about him.”

“You’re shitting me. For real?”

“Yes. That’s why I need to see Mr. Perkins.”

“Not so fast, sister. Before you see Tom, you’re coming to see me. Can you get over to my hotel right now? I’m catching the eight o’clock flight to JFK, and I have to leave for Heathrow in an hour, max. I’m at the Park Lane Intercon. I’ll be in the bar. Ask the concierge for Mr. Tarullo.”

He was there, waiting impatiently, when she arrived ten minutes later. She didn’t have to ask the man at the desk. It was obvious that the big guy staring at his watch, the one with the slicked-back hair and the look of a superannuated pop star, must be Vincent Tarullo. He had already packed and was dressed for the flight in baggy slacks and a velour jacket. His eyes lit up when he saw her walking toward him.

“Howdy do,” he said, sticking out a meaty hand. “Buy you a drink?”

“I think we’re better off taking a walk,” said Marx, taking his arm. “A lot of people would like to hear what we’re going to talk about.”

They exited the hotel and took the underpass beneath Hyde Park Corner that led toward the green oval of the park. If there was surveillance, it was well organized; there was no sign of anyone following or watching.

“I need to see Tom Perkins,” she began, taking his arm and leaning in close. “I’m part of the reason he’s in this mess, and I think I can help get him out.”

“Where were you when I needed you, lady? The poor man is in prison now. They’re about to nail him with enough fraud charges to put him away for a long time. You picked a strange time to get in touch.”

“I was traveling. I can’t explain any more, except that I was dealing with the fallout from the same mess that got your client in all this trouble.”

They emerged from the tunnel into the light and turned north, heading up a pathway that traversed a bower of trees along Park Lane.

“My client thinks he can get off,” the lawyer said. “He says they’re bluffing. The CIA will never let them prosecute this case because of all the secrets that would come out.”

“Your client is right. This is all a house of cards. He was the cover for something very secret. They used him, and now they want to make him the fall guy. But it won’t work.”

“Oh, yeah? It seems to be working pretty good so far. Why is that going to change?”

“Because I’m ready to talk. I’ll testify in court if I have to. You can tell that to people in Washington tomorrow. Sophie Marx is prepared to testify about everything she knows concerning Tom Perkins and his firm, and its connections to the U.S. government. How’s that?”

“Pretty damn good.”

Tarullo looked at his watch. If he wasn’t in the cab and on the way to Heathrow in thirty minutes, he would miss his flight. He spoke quietly, even in the hush of the wooded glen.

“Level with me. I’m running out of time. Who’s Anthony Cronin? You said on the phone that you knew about him. Where can I find him?”

“You can’t. He doesn’t exist. His real name is Jeffrey Gertz. He’s the one who contacted Tom in the beginning and arranged to use Alphabet Capital as a front company. He’s the one who’s taking it apart now, to cover his tracks.”

“Shit! No wonder nobody had heard of him. Can I use his name when I talk with people in D.C.? It’s G-E-R-T-Z, right?”

“Yes, but be careful. This man is toxic. I mean it. Don’t use his name with people unless you trust them.”

They were moving west now, out of the trees and across the grass toward the Serpentine. Tarullo looked at his watch again.

“Listen, I have to head back now or I won’t get out of here tonight. What can I do for you before I go? What do you need?”

“I want to see Tom. Can you put me on the visitors’ list and get me into the prison?”

“Sure, why not? It’s too late today. Tomorrow morning. Remind me your name, and not one of those bullshit spook names, please.”

She repeated her name, Sophie Marx, the one that Perkins knew her by, not the one on her new diplomatic passport.

Tarullo popped open his cell phone and called the warden’s office at Pentonville. He gave the clerk Marx’s name and asked that she be allowed to meet with Thomas Perkins the next morning, at the special and urgent request of his attorney. He was put on hold for a moment, and then the warden himself came on the line and quizzed Tarullo to make sure this was indeed his special and urgent request. They haggled over dates and times, and then Tarullo ended the call.

“You can see him the day after tomorrow,” he told Sophie. “It’s too late for tomorrow. The list is already set. Sorry. Best I could do. In the meantime, I’ll be chumming the water in D.C. See if we can make some people nervous.”

Tarullo was walking faster now, gesticulating as he spoke on the phone and nervously checking his watch every twenty seconds.

Sophie strode along with him, determined to get him to the airport on time. Rather than take the tunnel, they bolted across Park Lane, waving down the traffic so that the big man could make his way across the busy thoroughfare. He lumbered into the hotel as quickly as he could, retrieved his bag and had the doorman hail a black taxi from the queue.

Tarullo gave the cabbie a forty-pound tip, in advance, and said he had to- had to-make the eight o’clock British Airways flight from Terminal Five. Marx watched him go and then walked the hundred yards up Park Lane to her own hotel.

At the entrance to the Dorchester was a concrete island that served as a turnaround for vehicles approaching the front door. A neat wrought-iron fence protected a fountain in the middle, where passersby liked to sit in the sun in the late afternoon and watch the famous people go through the revolving door of the hotel across the way.

Sitting by the fountain as Sophie Marx approached, scanning the entrance with the eye of a man trained in surveillance, was Jeffrey Gertz. He was wearing sunglasses, and he had a full beard now, but he was unmistakable.

When Gertz saw Sophie, he sprang to his feet and walked toward her. She thought of running away, but that would attract the attention of the police who were parked in a squad car on Mount Street, just to the right, and Marx wanted to deal with the London police at that point even less than she did with Gertz.

He was smiling as he walked toward her, with his hand extended in greeting.

“You’ve been ignoring me,” he said, still smiling. “I don’t like that.”

“Get over it,” she answered. “As you said, I’m a ‘former employee.’ And I don’t feel safe around you. I wonder why that is.”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Sophie. It doesn’t suit you. We need to talk. Let’s go someplace quiet.”

“The only place I’m going is into my hotel. How did you find out I was still here?”

“You’re noisy. You move like an elephant. Come on, buy me a drink.”

Gertz walked toward the revolving door. Sophie followed along behind. She was curious what Gertz would have to say for himself after his imaginary world had come crashing down.

The doorman gave Sophie a concerned look as Gertz entered the hotel lobby, as if to ask whether this bearded roustabout was really a guest of Miss Marx, a member of the hotel family. She nodded that he was okay.

Sophie led the way to the bar, which flanked Park Lane. It was just beginning to fill with drinkers in the late afternoon. She found two chairs at the end of the long, curved counter. The martini glasses and bottles of liquor were lined up against the mirrored glass like an army at sunset. Sophie took her seat and told the bartender she wanted a kir.

“Don’t we want somewhere a little more private?” asked Gertz. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“Privacy is the opposite of what I want with you,” she answered. “I want a public place, in my hotel, where everyone knows me. It’s the only way I would feel remotely safe in your company.”

“Suit yourself,” said Gertz. He ordered a gin martini and began popping pistachio nuts into his mouth from the silver-plated dish.

“Nice spot, the Dorchester. A rich guy must have set you up here. But I guess he isn’t so rich anymore. From what I’m hearing, his hedge fund is about to go bankrupt. Let’s see how nice people are to him now that he’s an ex-rich guy trying to stay out of prison.”

“It won’t work, Jeff. Maybe you think you can hang it all on him, but it’s going to come out.”

“It doesn’t matter to me either way. My fingerprints aren’t on anything. I’m invisible. But you need to be careful, sweetie. You’re still a target. And a very bad person is coming your way. That’s why I tracked you down. I wanted to give you a warning. He knows where you are. He has all your aliases.”

“The Pakistani? We’re shutting him down. Mr. Hoffman told me so. We’re rolling up him and his people. His network wouldn’t exist, as near as I can tell, without your help.”

Gertz laughed and knocked the bar with his fist.

“That’s rich. ‘Mr. Hoffman told me so.’ I love that.”

She was angry now, at his arrogance and the dismissive tone. She had forgotten how compact and self-assured Gertz was.

“How could you do it, Jeff? This man was your ‘consultant.’ You let him see into your operations. How could you be so stupid?”

Gertz ran his index finger along the edge of his glass until it began to hum. He took a swig, and then another.

“What do you know?” he said. “Nothing.”

“I know his name. Omar al-Wazir. I know you used him in 2005, and that you stayed in contact with him. I know…” She paused, trying to think of the word that would sting him the most. “I know that you are a fuckup.”

Gertz muttered a curse of his own in response, but that wasn’t enough. He was a man whose inner balance required that he be needed and respected by others. That was his vulnerability. He had to prove he was right.

“You don’t get it. This isn’t ‘Tradecraft for Tots’ like they teach at the Farm. This is the real world. He was my asset. He helped me pick my targets for recruitment. He knew the pressure points in Pakistan. He helped me move money to them. He helped set up the network. The operation wouldn’t have been possible without him. He did a lot of good. It turned out he had flipped. He became dangerous. That wasn’t my fault.”

“Are you crazy? You got your own people killed, Jeff. How could there be anything worse than that?”

He took a sip of his martini, liquid ice on his tongue. He shook his head.

“I feel sorry for you. You’re a sucker, and you’re about to walk off a cliff.”

He stood up from his stool and dropped twenty pounds on the mirrored counter of the bar.

She stared at him, her eyes angry and defiant, but with just a flicker of uncertainty.

“Piece of advice,” he said. “Parting shot. Don’t trust Cyril Hoffman. Who do you think told me about the Pakistani professor in the first place? How do you think I know he’s on his way to London? From Hoffman, that’s how. You’re getting played.”

He turned and walked away, back toward the hotel lobby.

“You’re lying,” she muttered. But she wasn’t sure that she knew where the truth lay anymore. Sometimes it was indeterminate; the closer you got to it, the more you disrupted its pieces, so that it changed its shape and position. The truth wasn’t straight. It had bends and curves.