by Diane Duane
Peter had long since learned that the safest kind of response to this kind of rather mixed compliment was to smile and say nothing. But something was niggling at the back of his mind. “Forgive me for being nosy,” he said, “but why would Mel Ahrens be interested in these?”
“Huh?” Kate looked up from the drawer for a moment. “Oh. He’s been working on a series of stories on the Russian infiltration of the New York crime scene. Well, that’s not quite right. He’s been working on a book, and the paper’s been printing extracts. Very interesting stuff—maybe a little too interesting.” She went back to rummaging in her drawer. “Now where did I put that Belgian stuff? Now listen, Peter. Vreni Byrne spoke very highly of you in terms of—”
“Sorry,” Peter said, “wait a minute. This is the guy that the mobsters keep trying to kill?”
Kate looked up, nodded. “The names change from week to week, but yes. Mel’s been lucky so far, and he’s such an alert guy that I could see why anyone who wanted him dead would need to move pretty fast.”
“Does he need a photographer?”
She paused a moment then, and blinked. “Now that you mention it, over the past few weeks he has dropped some hints that he might need a photog to work with him occasionally. You were busy then, so I tried a couple of other people on him. It didn’t take. He can be a hard man to get along with.” Kate gave him a cockeyed look. “Are you saying you want to try? Wouldn’t you rather go to Belgium and the South of France for a couple of weeks? I was thinking of sending you along with the stringer who’s going to the European Film Festival in Brussels.”
“Uhhh…” Peter stared at her. Then he said, “Kate, I really like the sound of this.”
“Of what? Being shot at by men with heavy accents?”
“Not that, specifically. It’s just that the Russian thing has been—interesting me for a while.” A very little while, he thought.
Kate looked at him thoughtfully. “You haven’t actually met Mel, then.”
“No. I’ve heard the usual newsroom stuff, though. Isn’t he one of the guys who made such a stink when we went over to computers?”
Kate laughed quietly. “That was diplomatically put. You mean, the only guy who made even more of a stink than I did.” She gave her own desktop terminal a sidelong look. “Yeah, that’s Mel. Well, I guess you might as well meet him. Be warned, though—I said he’s kind of a hard man to work with. That’s not just where his partners or assistants are concerned. He’s got this tendency to jump in with both feet where—”
“Where angels fear to tread?” Peter suggested.
“I was going to say, where walking softly would produce a better effect. Like not letting certain people know you’re there at all. If this assignment works, then remember that he’ll take you with him when he jumps. That could lead to trouble.”
“I think I can cope.”
“Good. Come on; I’ll perform the introductions.”
Kate led Peter out to the City Room, right into the interdenominational desert of desks called, appropriately enough, No Man’s Land. Most of these desks were for temporary use by journalists on short-term assignments, or by staffers in transition between one section of the paper and another. Robbie Robertson, the editor in chief, often referred to them as the “Flying Dutchmen.”
Kate and Peter made their way across to one desk in particular. There was a computer on it, and a great drift of papers, and—set pointedly in front of the computer monitor—the hunchbacked bulk of a splendid old 1940s-period Smith-Corona commercial typewriter. Black, with gold lettering and hair-fine gold lining along what Peter could only think of as its coach work, the typewriter gleamed with that deep patina that could only have come from much polishing throughout its working life.
“Wow,” he said admiringly. “Just look at this thing. It shines.”
“He’s gonna like you,” Kate said with a certain air of amused resignation. “But then, he likes anybody who doesn’t call it a piece of outdated junk.”
“This isn’t junk. It’s an antique. No, it’s more than an antique, it’s—”
“It’s a work of art,” said a sharp voice from behind them.
Peter turned. From the stories he had heard about Mel Ahrens, and from the look of the desk, he had been expecting an older man. But the guy with the shock of blond hair who was advancing on him, one hand already extended to shake, couldn’t have been more than in his late twenties.
“Mel,” Katherine said, “this is Peter Parker. He’s the photographer I mentioned to you a couple of weeks ago.”
“So you’re the one who keeps pulling in those action shots of Spider-Man,” said Ahrens. “Good. Very good. Not like those other losers.” He shot Kate a look. “Here, pull up a chair.”
As they appropriated the chairs from a nearby empty desk, Peter looked around him at the other temporary desks. “Why have they stuck you over here?” he asked. “I mean, you’ve been working with the paper for a while now.”
“A year or so, yeah.” Ahrens laughed. “But I like the buzz here, the feeling of uncertainty. God knows, it’s everywhere else in my work. At least this office gives me a background I’m familiar with. Sit, sit, sit.”
They did.
“That’s a beautiful typewriter,” said Peter.
“It’s a noble instrument,” said Ahrens, favoring Kate with another dirty look, “and if there were any justice in an unjust world, I’d be able to submit my stories typed on good heavy paper stock rather than using that travesty.” He waved an accusing, dismissive hand toward the terminal that squatted dark and silent at the corner of his desk.
“Why don’t you at least leave it running?” Kate said. “We’ve got perfectly good screen savers in the system.”
“I have no desire to sit here and be irradiated by the thing,” said Ahrens, “just for what someone else perceives to be my convenience. Which it’s not, particularly, but never mind. I don’t want to get into that all over again.”
He turned to Peter and, as he did so, gave the gleaming black bulk of the typewriter an affectionate pat. “I typed the first story I ever sold on this machine,” he said. “It was my dad’s. And it will have to be pried from my cold, dead fingers before I give it up.”
Peter smiled inwardly. If this was the notorious Ahrens eccentricity, at least it seemed amiable enough, and the other things he had heard about the man suggested that Mel could be granted the right to a little bit of eccentric behavior. He had heard a lot of people around the Bugle refer to Ahrens as an old-fashioned news-hound in a young body. Very sharp, they said; a good writer who never missed a deadline, a man with an eye for detail in both story and pictures, and a real gift for helping his photographer to find just the right picture for a given story.
“Has Kathryn told you what I’m working on?” he asked Peter.
“In general.”
“I just brought him over so you could fill him in,” said Kate. “You mentioned something about a photo opportunity coming up.”
Ahrens laughed. “Yeah, and I just bet the people involved in it think that as well. It’s the night after next.”
Kate raised one eyebrow. “So soon? Then I presume you’ve already put all your affairs in order.”
“If you mean, am I leaving you my porcelain collection, then the answer is no. You’re greedy, you know that?”
“Where Meissen is concerned, I’ve known it for a long time,” said Kate, standing up. “I’ll leave you to your briefing.” She nodded to Peter, then headed back to the elevator.
The two of them sat back in their chairs and looked at each other. Peter was very aware that Ahrens was studying him, sizing him up, almost filing him away in a mental card file. He smiled thinly and returned the favor with a long, hard stare.
Mel Ahrens nodded at last, after a few seconds of intense scrutiny that had seemed more like minutes. “I saw the Kennedy Space Center pictures,” he said. “Those were pretty impressive. You’ve got something of a head for heights.”
“Well, it’s the depths we’re heading for this time,” said Ahrens, reaching into his desk drawer and coming up with a Tootsie Roll. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
Ahrens chuckled and unwrapped the candy slowly, then swung his feet up onto the desk, narrowly missing Peter as he did so. “The Russians,” he said. “This is going to sound funny, but they really have a gift for organized crime. And they’re independent. The American version of the Mafia has always had associations, however distant, with the old Cosa Nostra from Sicily and Southern Italy. Tradition and old habits, maybe. But the Russians, no. When the reforms began, when glasnost and perestroika set in for real and the Wall came down, they realized that the West was the place to be.
“Whole families have been relocating in the U.S. for some years now, including crime families. One of the favorite cover stories,” he chuckled a little ruefully, “was religious persecution. A very sensitive subject, that, and a very powerful argument. It would be a very determined U.S. administration that would refuse. A lot of them claimed to be Jews, and some of them even are—but nothing like as many carrying papers that say so. That way they were able to gain direct asylum in the States, or favored immigration status through Israel. Or Germany. The Germans had very liberal asylum laws.”
“And again,” said Peter, “that claim of religious persecution was one that Germany would be reluctant to ignore.”
“Exactly,” said Ahrens. “But either way, the big gangs severed their ties with the Mother Country and started moving here. Needless to say,” he coughed, delicately, “certain, ah, concerns already well entrenched here didn’t take too kindly to the intrusion. You get the occasional turf war. Well, more than occasional. That sort of free and frank exchange of views has been getting very active lately. Last night, apparently.”
“These pictures,” said Peter, pulling another sheaf of prints from their envelope and handing them over.
“Yes, indeed,” said Ahrens with great satisfaction. He studied each picture in turn, then looked intently at the close-up of the assault rifle. “Well, well. This is a Kalashnikov AK-74. You can tell by the shape of the muzzle brake. Among other things.”
“The policeman I spoke to at the scene said that this was an army-issue weapon.”
“A current army-issue weapon,” Ahrens corrected. “Everybody who thinks they know about military weapons in the hands of criminals goes on at length about the AK-47.” Peter stifled a smile. Ahrens might well have said just that to Spider-Man last night. “After all, the old regime handed them out to satellite states and, ah, freedom fighters, rather like a jolly uncle with a box of candies.
“However,” Ahrens tapped the photo, “this is another matter. It’s frontline equipment, and something the Soviets never did was to give away or export anything they were still using themselves. Tanks were stripped to the basics, aircraft had inferior weapons and radar, that sort of thing. They called them ‘monkey models.’
“The AK-74 rifle isn’t quite state of the art, of course—at least, not so far as the West is concerned. Guns & Ammo wouldn’t be terribly excited about it. No caseless ammunition, no flechette projectiles, not even an impressive rate of fire. It does its job quite adequately, however, and that’s all the Soviet military ever worried about. Funny thing, though—”
“No issue numbers.”
“Exactly. This was never in service. It came straight from the factory into the hands of whoever was using it last night—and I notice they weren’t wearing Russian uniforms. Like every other manufacturer in the former Soviet Union, the armaments industry is desperate for hard currency now that its major customer has almost stopped buying. My guess is that this gun, and the rest of whatever consignment it came from, was acquired by barter. That method avoids leaving a trail, either paper or electronic.”
“What about the end-user certificate scam?” asked Peter. “A legal arms sale to a second party, who’s already arranged to pass the goods on down the line to a third. After all, counterfeit end-user certificates are supposed to be the third most popular forgery on the planet, after money and passports.” Ahrens raised his eyebrows, and Peter shrugged innocently. “Hey, I’m a photojournalist,” he said, then grinned broadly. “And I’ve been reading Frederick Forsyth for years.”
Ahrens’s own smile was a good deal thinner. He nodded, just once, and continued to leaf through the photographs.
“Anyway,” Peter continued more soberly, “I’ve been hearing about a lot of Russian activity over the past few months. That CCRC thing.”
“Yes. A nasty business. The whole affair was a bucket of dirty water so deep that I don’t think the authorities have reached the bottom yet. There were more scams and scandals being run out of that place than—well, never mind. And I have a feeling that what wasn’t discovered in time has already been hived off to other holding companies.”
“They would have to be, I guess. The parent organization was supposed to be shut down. There’s going to be some huge audit of it.”
“The only way to audit a company like that is with a battering ram at three in the morning,” said Ahrens firmly. “Anything that needed to be shredded has been confetti for a long time now. The government, the authorities, even the IRS, are never going to find all the evidence they need. It’s hopeless. A waste of time and resources. You can’t give people like CCRC time to cover their tracks. And they’re just one aspect of what’s been going on.”
“So? What else?”
Mel took a moment to munch on another Tootsie Roll. “The mobs in New York,” he said, “Coney Island and Brooklyn, have really stepped up their activities in the past few months. By something over a hundred percent, according to one of my better-informed sources.” Peter whistled through his teeth. “They’ve been getting into new rackets. Oriental, some of them. Franchised from the Triads, for all I know. But it all eventually turns into money laundering, and there’s been a lot of laundry done. Massive amounts. Do you know where the biggest supply of U.S. bank notes is, outside of the continental United States?”
Peter shook his head.
“Russia. It’s partly because they trust our currency more than they trust their own. The government there still isn’t completely stable, at least not enough to be relied on when you’re dealing with sums of money the size of small national debts. They tried to cut in on money laundering at a national level a few years ago by just abruptly withdrawing all the currency and issuing a new print—but it didn’t work, because nearly all the laundering was already in dollars rather than rubles anyway.”
“Laundering how, specifically?”
“Mr. Forsyth hasn’t gotten into this yet, eh?” said Ahrens, with a little flicker of dry amusement. “All right, here’s how the laundry works. First thing is to conceal who really owns the money, and where it came from. There’s no point in laundering at all if the origin is still known at the end of the process. Next, you’ve got to change its shape, preferably by increasing the value of each bill. If you’re starting out with ten million dollars in twenties, you don’t want to finish up with the same thing.”
“Even if all the bills now have different serial numbers?”
“Not good enough. You want no leads. Also, think logistics. If you change to higher-denomination bank notes, your ten mil at once becomes a much smaller package. That’s why the Treasury took the thousand-dollar bill out of circulation—”
“I never saw enough of them to notice,” said Peter sourly, but Ahrens didn’t even notice the interruption.
“—so that now it takes ten times as much paper, ten times as much bulk, to shift the same amount of cash from one place to another. It makes a transfer less convenient and more noticeable. Useful for surveillance.
“So.” Ahrens held up one hand and started counting points off on his fingers. “You want the origin of the money hidden, and you want the size of the bundle to shrink without redu
cing its value. Then the actual laundry trail itself has to be hidden. Why go to all that trouble if each step can be followed backwards?”
“I see your point.” Peter was beginning to understand why there had been attempts on Ahrens’s life. He was hearing a lecture on theory, but that theory was based on practical knowledge. The quickest way to get rid of what someone knew had always been to get rid of the someone.
“But the last and I suppose the most important thing is that you, or people you can trust implicitly, have to retain control of the money at every step of the laundering process. If the whole purpose of what you’re doing is to make sure that nobody can prove this money was yours in the first place, then if it’s stolen, you’re in trouble. If it’s dirty money, you can’t exactly go to the police, and even if it’s clean money, the tax folks are going to take an unhealthy interest in why you were laundering it in the first place.
“Let’s try the double-invoice method. One end of the laundry is, let’s say, a grocery store. The other is a wholesaler who sells stuff to the grocery store. And you’re both friendly. The same nationality, the same Family, whatever.” He pronounced the capital letter without difficulty. “One day you order fifty barrels of borscht from your wholesaler.”
“Does borscht come in barrels?”
“Who knows? I’m not a beet fan. Anyway, it might look like your wholesaler isn’t a fan, either, because he only sends you forty barrels—but then the person ‘doing the laundry’ hands you cash to make up the shortfall. That money, dirty for whatever reason, gets into the system disguised as clean. It looks fine to the bookkeepers, fine to the tax people, and pretty soon, if that’s doing well, you open another grocery store and start ordering more borscht. The more legal outlets you have, the better it gets.