“So what was the problem?” I asked him.
Kelstein made a couple of precise little motions with his small white hands, like he was moving one scenario aside and introducing another.
“The problem lay abroad,” he said. “Outside the United States. The situation there is very different. Did you know there are twice as many dollars outside the U.S. as inside?”
I nodded. I summarized what Molly had told me about foreign holdings. The trust and the faith. The fear of a sudden collapse in the desirability of the dollar. Kelstein was nodding away like I was his student and he liked my thesis.
“Quite so,” he said. “It’s more about politics than crime. In the end, a government’s primary duty is to defend the value of its currency. We have two hundred and sixty billion dollars abroad. The dollar is the unofficial currency of dozens of nations. In the new Russia, for instance, there are more dollars than rubles. In effect, it’s like Washington has raised a massive foreign loan. Raised any other way, that loan would cost us twenty-six billion dollars a year in interest payments alone. But this way, it costs us nothing at all except what we spend on printing pictures of dead politicians on little pieces of paper. That’s what it’s all about, Mr. Reacher. Printing currency for foreigners to buy is the best racket a government can get into. So Joe’s job in reality was worth twenty-six billion dollars a year to this country. And he pursued it with an energy appropriate to those high stakes.”
“So where was the problem?” I said. “Geographically?”
“Two main places,” Kelstein said. “First, the Middle East. Joe believed there was a plant in the Bekaa Valley that turned out fake hundreds which were practically perfect. But there was very little he could do about it. Have you been there?”
I shook my head. I’d been stationed in Beirut for a while. I had known a few people who had gone out to the Bekaa Valley for one reason or another. Not too many of them had come back.
“Syrian-controlled Lebanon,” Kelstein said. “Joe called it the badlands. They do everything there. Training camps for the world’s terrorists, drug processing laboratories, you name it, they’ve got it. Including a pretty good replica of our own Bureau of Printing and Engraving.”
I thought about it. Thought about my time there.
“Protected by who?” I asked him.
Kelstein smiled at me again. Nodded.
“A perceptive question,” he said. “You instinctively grasp that an operation of that size is so visible, so complex, that it must be in some way sponsored. Joe believed it was protected by, or maybe even owned by, the Syrian government. Therefore his involvement was marginal. His conclusion was that the only solution was diplomatic. Failing that, he was in favor of air strikes against it. We may live to see such a solution one day.”
“And the second place?” I asked him.
He pointed his finger at his grimy office window. Aiming south down Amsterdam Avenue.
“South America,” he said. “The second source is Venezuela. Joe had located it. That is what he was working on. Absolutely outstanding counterfeit hundred-dollar bills are coming out of Venezuela. But strictly private enterprise. No suggestion of government involvement.”
I nodded.
“We got that far,” I said. “A guy called Kliner, based down in Georgia where Joe was killed.”
“Quite so,” Kelstein said. “The ingenious Mr. Kliner. It’s his operation. He’s running the whole thing. We knew that for certain. How is he?”
“He’s panicking,” I said. “He’s killing people.”
Kelstein nodded sadly.
“We thought Kliner might panic,” he said. “He’s protecting an outstanding operation. The very best we’ve ever seen.”
“The best?” I said.
Kelstein nodded enthusiastically.
“Outstanding,” he said again. “How much do you know about counterfeiting?”
I shrugged at him.
“More than I did last week,” I said. “But not enough, I guess.”
Kelstein nodded and shifted his frail weight forward in his chair. His eyes lit up. He was about to start a lecture on his favorite subject.
“There are two sorts of counterfeiters,” he said. “The bad ones and the good ones. The good ones do it properly. Do you know the difference between intaglio and lithography?”
I shrugged and shook my head. Kelstein scooped up a magazine from a pile and handed it to me. It was a quarterly bulletin from a history society.
“Open it,” he said. “Any page will do. Run your fingers over the paper. It’s smooth, isn’t it? That’s lithographic printing. That’s how virtually everything is printed. Books, magazines, newspapers, everything. An inked roller passes over the blank paper. But intaglio is different.”
He suddenly clapped his hands together. I jumped. The sound was very loud in his quiet office.
“That’s intaglio,” he said. “A metal plate is smashed into the paper with considerable force. It leaves a definite embossed feel to the product. The printed image looks three dimensional. It feels three dimensional. It’s unmistakable.”
He eased himself up and took his wallet out of his hip pocket. Pulled out a ten-dollar bill. Passed it over to me.
“Can you feel it?” he asked. “The metal plates are nickel, coated with chromium. Fine lines are engraved into the chromium and the lines are filled with ink. The plate hits the paper and the ink is printed onto its topmost surface. Understand? The ink is in the valleys of the plate, so it’s transferred to the ridges on the paper. Intaglio printing is the only way to get that raised image. The only way to make the forgery feel right. It’s how the real thing is done.”
“What about the ink?” I said.
“There are three colors,” he said. “Black, and two greens. The back of the bill is printed first, with the darker green. Then the paper is left to dry, and the next day, the front is printed with the black ink. That dries, and the front is printed again, with the lighter green. That’s the other stuff you see there on the front, including the serial number. But the lighter green is printed by a different process, called letterpress. It’s a stamping action, the same as intaglio, but the ink is stamped into the valleys on the paper, not onto the peaks.”
I nodded and looked at the ten-dollar bill, front and back. Ran my fingers over it carefully. I’d never really studied one before.
“So, four problems,” Kelstein said. “The press, the plates, the inks, and the paper. The press can be bought, new or used, anywhere in the world. There are hundreds of sources. Most countries print money and securities and bonds on them. So the presses are obtainable abroad. They can even be improvised. Joe found one intaglio operation in Thailand which was using a converted squid-processing machine. Their hundreds were absolutely immaculate.”
“What about the plates?” I asked him.
“Plates are problem number two,” he said. “But it’s a matter of talent. There are people in the world who can forge Old Master paintings and there are people who can play a Mozart piano concerto after hearing it once. And certainly there are engravers who can reproduce banknotes. It’s a perfectly logical proposition, isn’t it? If a human being in Washington can engrave the original, certainly there’s a human being somewhere else who can copy it. But they’re rare. Really good copyists, rarer still. There are a few in Armenia. The Thai operation using the squid-processor got a Malaysian to make the plates.”
“OK,” I said. “So Kliner has bought a press, and he’s found an engraver. What about the inks?”
“The inks are problem number three,” he said. “You can’t buy anything vaguely like them in the U.S. Joe saw to that. But abroad, they’re available. As I said, virtually every country in the world has its own banknote printing industry. And obviously, Joe couldn’t enforce his systems in every country in the world. So the inks are easy enough to find. The greens are only a question of color. They mix them and experiment until they get them right. The black ink is magnetic, did you kno
w that?”
I shook my head again. Looked at the sawbuck closely. Kelstein smiled.
“You can’t see it,” he said. “A liquid ferrous chemical is mixed with the black ink. That’s how electronic money counters work. They scan the engraving down the center of the portrait, and the machine reads the signal it gives off, like a tape head reads the sounds on a music cassette.”
“And they can get that ink?” I said.
“Anywhere in the world,” he said. “Everybody uses it. We lag behind other countries. We don’t like to admit we worry about counterfeiting.”
I remembered what Molly had said. Faith and trust. I nodded.
“The currency must look stable,” Kelstein said. “That’s why we’re so reluctant to change it. It’s got to look reliable, solid, unchanging. Turn that ten over and take a look.”
I looked at the green picture on the back of the ten. The Treasury Building was standing in a deserted street. Only one car was driving past. It looked like a Model-T Ford.
“Hardly changed since 1929,” Kelstein said. “Psychologically, it’s very important. We choose to put the appearance of dependability before security. It made Joe’s job very difficult.”
I nodded again.
“Right,” I said. “So we’ve covered the press, the plates, and the inks. What about the paper?”
Kelstein brightened up and clasped his small hands like we’d reached the really interesting part.
“Paper is problem number four,” he said. “Actually, we should really say it’s problem number one. It’s by far the biggest problem. It’s the thing Joe and I couldn’t understand about Kliner’s operation.”
“Why not?” I asked him.
“Because their paper is perfect,” he said. “It’s one hundred percent perfect. Their paper is better than their printing. And that is absolutely unheard of.”
He started shaking his great white head in wonderment. Like he was lost in admiration for Kliner’s achievement. We sat there, knee to knee in the old armchairs in silence.
“Perfect?” I prompted him.
He nodded and started up with the lecture again.
“It’s unheard of,” he said again. “The paper is the hardest part of the whole process. Don’t forget, we’re not talking about some amateur thing here. We’re talking about an industrial-scale operation. In a year, they’re printing four billion dollars’ worth of hundreds.”
“That many?” I said, surprised.
“Four billion,” he said again. “About the same as the Lebanon operation. Those were Joe’s figures. He was in a position to know. And that makes it inexplicable. Four billion in hundreds is forty million banknotes. That’s a lot of paper. That’s a completely inexplicable amount of paper, Mr. Reacher. And their paper is perfect.”
“What sort of paper would they need?” I asked him.
He reached over and took the ten-dollar bill back from me. Crumpled it and pulled it and snapped it.
“It’s a blend of fibers,” he said. “Very clever and entirely unique. About eighty percent cotton, about twenty percent linen. No wood pulp in it at all. It’s got more in common with the shirt on your back than with a newspaper, for instance. It’s got a very clever chemical colorant in it, to give it a unique cream tint. And it’s got random red and blue polymer threads pulped in, as fine as silk. Currency stock is wonderful paper. Durable, lasts for years, won’t come apart in water, hot or cold. Absolutely precise absorbency, capable of accepting the finest engraving the platemakers can achieve.”
“So the paper would be difficult to copy?” I said.
“Virtually impossible,” he said. “In a way, it’s so difficult to copy that even the official government supplier can’t copy it. They have tremendous difficulty just keeping it consistent, batch to batch, and they’re by far the most sophisticated papermaker in the entire world.”
I ran it all through in my head. Press, plates, ink and paper.
“So the paper supply is really the key to all this?” I said.
Kelstein nodded ruefully.
“That was our conclusion,” he said. “We agreed the paper supply was crucial, and we agreed we had no idea how they were managing it. That’s why I can’t really help you. I couldn’t help Joe, and I can’t help you. I’m terribly sorry.”
I looked at him.
“They’ve got a warehouse full of something,” I said. “Could that be paper?”
He snorted in derision. Snapped his great head around toward me.
“Don’t you listen?” he said. “Currency stock is unobtainable. Completely unobtainable. You couldn’t get forty sheets of currency stock, never mind forty million sheets. The whole thing is a total mystery. Joe and Walter and I racked our brains for a year and we came up with nothing.”
“I think Bartholomew came up with something,” I said.
Kelstein nodded sadly. He levered himself slowly out of his chair and stepped to his desk. Pressed the replay button on his telephone answering machine. The room was filled with an electronic beep, then with the sound of a dead man’s voice.
“Kelstein?” the voice said. “Bartholomew here. It’s Thursday night, late. I’m going to call you in the morning and I’m going to tell you the answer. I knew I’d beat you to it. Goodnight, old man.”
The voice had excitement in it. Kelstein stood there and gazed into space as if Bartholomew’s spirit was hanging there in the still air. He looked upset. I couldn’t tell if that was because his old colleague was dead, or because his old colleague had beaten him to the answer.
“Poor Walter,” he said. “I knew him fifty-six years.”
I sat quietly for a spell. Then I stood up as well.
“I’ll figure it out,” I said.
Kelstein put his head on one side and looked at me sharply.
“Do you really think you will?” he said. “When Joe couldn’t?”
I shrugged at the old guy.
“Maybe Joe did,” I said. “We don’t know what he’d figured out before they got him. Anyway, right now I’m going back to Georgia. Carry on the search.”
Kelstein nodded and sighed. He looked stressed.
“Good luck, Mr. Reacher,” he said. “I hope you finish your brother’s business. Perhaps you will. He spoke of you often. He liked you, you know.”
“He spoke of me?” I said.
“Often,” the old guy said again. “He was very fond of you. He was sorry your job kept you so far away.”
For a moment I couldn’t speak. I felt unbearably guilty. Years would pass, I wouldn’t think about him. But he was thinking about me?
“He was older, but you looked after him,” he said. “That’s what Joe told me. He said you were very fierce. Very tough. I guess if Joe wanted anybody to take care of the Kliners, he’d have nominated you.”
I nodded.
“I’m out of here,” I said.
I shook his frail hand and left him with the cops in the security office.
I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE WHERE KLINER WAS GETTING HIS perfect paper, and I was trying to figure if I could get the six o’clock flight back to Atlanta if I hurried, and I was trying to ignore what Kelstein had told me about Joe speaking fondly of me. The streets were clogged and I was busy thinking about it all and scanning for an empty cab, which was why I didn’t notice two Hispanic guys strolling up to me. But what I did notice was the gun the leading guy showed me. It was a small automatic held in a small hand, concealed under one of those khaki raincoats city people carry on their arms in September.
He showed me the weapon and his partner signaled to a car waiting twenty yards away at the curb. The car lurched forward and the partner stood ready to open a door like the top-hatted guys do outside the expensive apartment houses up there. I was looking at the gun and looking at the car, making choices.
“Get into the car,” the guy with the gun said softly. “Or I’ll shoot you.”
I stood there and all that was passing through my mind was that I might miss my fl
ight. I was trying to remember when the next non-stop left. Seven o’clock, I thought.
“In the car,” the guy said again.
I was pretty sure he wouldn’t fire the gun on the street. It was a small gun, but there was no silencer on it. It would make a hell of a noise, and it was a crowded street. The other guy’s hands were empty. He maybe had a gun in his pocket. There was just the driver in the car. Probably a gun on the seat beside him. I was unarmed. My jacket with the blackjack and the knife and the Desert Eagle was eight hundred miles away in Atlanta. Choices.
I chose not to get into the car. I just stood there in the street, gambling with my life that the guy wouldn’t shoot in public. He stood there, holding the raincoat out toward me. The car stopped next to us. His partner stood on the other side of me. They were small guys. The both of them wouldn’t have made one of me. The car waited, idling at the curb. Nobody moved. We were just frozen there like some kind of a display in a store window. Like new fashions for the fall, old army fatigues put with Burberry raincoats.
It gave the two guys a big problem. In a situation like that, there’s a split-second opportunity to carry out your threat. If you say you’re going to shoot, you’ve got to shoot. If you don’t, you’re a spent force. Your bluff is called. If you don’t shoot, you’re nothing. And the guy didn’t shoot. He just stood there, twisted up with indecision. People swirled around us on the busy sidewalk. Cars were blasting their horns at the guy stopped at the curb.
They were smart guys. Smart enough not to shoot me on a busy New York street. Smart enough to know I’d called their bluff. Smart enough to never again make a threat they weren’t going to keep. But not smart enough to walk away. They just stood there.
So I swayed backward, as if I was going to take a step away. The gun under the raincoat prodded forward at me. I tracked the movement and grabbed the little guy’s wrist with my left hand. Pulled the gun around behind me and hugged the guy close with my right arm around his shoulders. We looked like we were dancing the waltz together or we were lovers at a train station. Then I fell forward and crushed him against the car. All the time I was squeezing his wrist as hard as I could, with my nails dug in. Left-handed, but it was hurting him. My weight leaning up on him was giving him a struggle to breathe.
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