The Color of Night

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.

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 saw 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?”

She nodded. She understood, and she believed him. Her face had changed, and he could see her mind beginning to grapple with the present reality, connecting to the moment.

“Yeah,” she said, looking around. “Okay.” She straightened up. “I’ll throw some things in a suitcase. I’ll pack some things.” She turned away from him and started across the room.

U.S. EMBASSY, VIENNA

“Well, for openers, it’s a hell of a lot more money than Schrade told us they’d taken,” Howard said. Today the air conditioning was freezing, even for him. He was drumming the eraser end of the pencil on the notepad. “Well, hell, Gene, it’s got to be hundreds of millions. I don’t even believe this. No wonder Schrade didn’t tell us the whole truth on this. I mean, there’s a difference between being embezzled and being buggered. Schrade was buggered.”

Howard listened and shrugged against the frigid air. Shit, he was going to get pneumonia.

“Yeah, damn right,” he said. “That woman was not only a financial genius, but gutsy to the point of insanity. She must’ve been damn sure of herself. You just don’t do something like this unless you think you’ve got it sewed up-tight. Hell, she knew everything from the inside. I mean, it was like stealing from your mother. Schrade wasn’t double-checking on her, of all people.”

He listened. He nodded.

“Yeah, and listen, I’ve got to admit, Gene, Harry might’ve been hard to handle, might’ve been a wild card sometimes, but he was always careful, methodical. He could throw in some surprises, but he never did anything half-assed. When he set up something you knew it was going to work. He was brilliant in that way. I’ll give him that. Hell, maybe we can’t get the money.”

Howard suddenly picked up the notepad and threw it at the plate-glass window. When the engineers looked around at the noise, he hugged himself and scowled at them and pointed his thumb upward and jacked it up and down. One of the engineers got up from his chair as though it were a big chore and walked to the wall and diddled with the thermostat. Howard didn’t believe it. The guy just pretended to diddle with it. Shit.

“Yeah, well, she’d heard that Schrade had left us, but she obviously doesn’t know why.”

He listened.

“I don’t know. It’s discouraging as hell. I mean, it took us four months to get you people over there to agree to do this, a couple of months to agree on how, and then eight months for training and planning, and just when we get ready to put it into gear Schrade decides to wade in and start killing off everybody.” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t know why the hell he waited so long. It’s been eighteen months, you’d’ve thought he would’ve gone on a rampage when he discovered it. I guess he didn’t want to do anything until his accountants had picked the bones of this thing clean.”

He listened.

“You know what, to tell you the truth, now that we’ve got a better idea of how much money was involved in that scheme, I’m surprised that Schrade didn’t do more than just accuse us of double-crossing him and break off our deal. I’m thinking maybe he decided, Don’t get mad, get even.”

He listened.

“What I’m saying is, we know he’s working with the French, the Germans.” He hesitated a beat. “Gene, I’m convinced every operation he was involved in with us has been compromised. He’s spilled his guts about us to his new partners. I know, I fought that theory myself”-he shook his head-“but that was before I had a grip on how much money was involved here. Look, we’ve had our own financial people looking into this from the first day Schrade came to us boiling mad. After all this time they hadn’t figured out that the numbers were this big. Even so, we thought they were big enough to justify this operation if the end results ended in a forfeiture situation. But now we know that this is an incredible amount of money. And I think Schrade will go to incredible lengths to get even for having had it stolen from him.”