Need You Now

42

T he subway ride from Midtown got Andie back to the FBI field office in lower Manhattan before six P.M. Barber had called their limousine meeting “unofficial,” but Andie intended to complete a formal interview report anyway. She was seated at her desk and about to start typing when Supervisory Agent Teese entered her office, closed the door, and delivered the news.

“We’re pulling the plug.”

Andie didn’t have to ask, On what? After eight months of investigating the movement of Cushman’s funds through BOS, however, she wasn’t about to simply pack her bags and fly back to Miami.

“Who made the decision?”

“Washington.”

“By ‘Washington,’ do you mean headquarters or someone outside the bureau?”

“The decision came to me from the director’s office.”

“That doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

He pulled up a chair and sat facing her, surprisingly contrite. “I’m sorry about this, Andie. It’s not a matter of my backing down to the political will. It’s embarrassing, is what it is.”

“For the bureau, you mean?”

“For me, and for everyone else who’s been trumpeting the theory that the actual money in Cushman’s Ponzi scheme was one-tenth of the sixty billion dollars that most estimates put it at. I was certain that Cushman was a money-laundering operation with mostly paper losses.”

“So you’ve changed your tune: Patrick Lloyd was not holding out on us.”

“Not holding out,” he said.

“So the final chapter on this investigation will read how?”

He thought about it, and the expression on his face was like that of a man writing his own obituary. “There was no evidence that Cushman funds were laundered by anyone at BOS/Singapore, least of all Lilly Scanlon.”

“But getting back to the embarrassment factor: this is not just the shutting down of our investigation into BOS.”

“No. It’s a wholesale rejection of the theory that Cushman’s Ponzi scheme was a money-laundering operation, and that the only real money was the phony ten percent return that Cushman pretended to pay his investors.”

Andie was not one to say I told you so . “I think we both saw this coming.”

“You did. I should have. The reason the ‘paper loss’ theory got any traction at all was because, at first, so little money was recovered for the victims. That’s changing. Every day I get reports that lawyers are hot on the trail of real money-nowhere near the full sixty-billion-dollar loss, but much more than the ten percent that was posited by the money-laundering theory.”

Andie said, “This probably doesn’t make you feel any better, but there must be regulators feeling more heat than us for missing a sixty-billion-dollar fraud with real victims who lost real money.”

“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head slowly, as if he’d just heard the world’s largest understatement. “The fallout is going to be huge.”

“How so?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.”

“I’d like to know. I think, after eight months of work, I deserve to know.”

Teese met her stare, but he was the one to blink. Andie didn’t take it as a sign of weakness. It was just a matter of fairness.

Teese said, “The view that the entire Cushman fraud was no bigger than six billion dollars of real money was an underlying assumption in the formulation of certain policies at Treasury.”

“Do you mean Operation BAQ?”

He hesitated, as if to measure his response. “Operation BAQ dates back over three years-before Cushman’s collapse.”

Andie connected the dots. “So that means it was known that Cushman was not legit.”

He didn’t offer a verbal response. Andie didn’t take his silence as a denial; he’d simply said all he could say, and she appreciated that. Even so, she pushed another button. “I met with retired agent Scully,” she said. “The handler for Tony Mandretti.”

“I know who he is. He worked out of this office for over twenty years.”

“The things he said about Operation BAQ were frankly difficult to swallow. But this conversation would seem to confirm everything he told me.”

Again, Teese didn’t answer directly. “Be careful with Scully.”

“That was my initial reaction,” she said. “But now my impression is that he was simply saying things that a retired FBI agent would tell another agent to make sure she didn’t become the bureau’s fifty-fourth special agent killed in the line of duty.”

“Scully is trouble,” said Teese. “You’d do well to stay away from him.”

Andie took the advice for what she thought it was worth. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Wrap it up. Go back to Miami.”

“What can I tell Patrick Lloyd?”

“That his cooperation is no longer needed. Nothing more.”

“What about his father?”

“He’ll receive medical attention until he passes. That satisfies our end of the deal.”

Teese rose, and he seemed ready to apologize once more, but he didn’t. Instead, he started for the door.

“Tell me something,” Andie said, stopping him. “How high does Operation BAQ go?”

He stood there for a moment, showing no reaction. Finally, he turned away, no answer, and left the office. Andie turned back to her computer, the blank report of her conversation with Joe Barber still up on the LCD.

That high, huh? she said to herself, answering her own question.