Zaharia had a light and energetic way of walking, rolling off his toes and almost bouncing. Sometimes he jumped or skipped or ran ahead and waited. He was twenty now and a head taller than Louis, but in some ways, he was still a boy. “I can’t ask you to do this,” said Louis.
“To do what?” said Zaharia.
“Break into a bank.”
“I’m not interested in breaking into anything. I’m interested in constructing and then solving computer problems.”
“That’s sophistry. Do you know what sophistry is?”
Zaharia gave him a look.
“Besides,” said Louis, “it could be dangerous. You could get in serious trouble.”
“Why? We want to move money that a thief has stolen back where it belongs.”
“It would be against the law.”
“Would it be wrong?”
“It would be wrong because it is against the law.”
“That’s sophistry,” said Zaharia. “Do you know what sophistry is?”
“And how exactly would you do it?” said Louis.
“It always begins with an exact formulation of the problem, which has to include a precise exploration of the engineering of that which we are seeking to penetrate. Codes, firewalls, encryption—you’ve heard of those things? They’re really all the same thing as everything else on a computer, electronic impulses assembled differently to do different things. So I explore the engineering by bumping up against it again and again, the way you might test any fortification. What I want to do is reduce it to its basic electronics, find how it’s made, its grammar, its logic.
“It’s never a matter of penetrating anything, compromising anything, although that’s the way a lot of people think of it. I think of it as trying to join an exclusive community. Once you’re part of it, they do not see you as an intruder. They recognize you only as part of the family.”
XXXIX
ON HIS WAY BACK TO France, Louis called Carolyne Bushwick. “It’s Louis Coburn, Ms. Bushwick. You showed me some Greenwich properties a while back. I’d like to bring my wife up to see them.”
There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. “Oh, yes, Mr. Coburn. I remember. We’ve been very busy since you were here. As I told you, properties in the range you were looking at are moving fast. Let me see whether anything I showed you is still available.” Louis heard some papers rattling. “I’m sorry, Mr. Coburn. Three of those properties have sold. The fourth one, the one on Midgen Lane, is awaiting an offer. We’re expecting it at any moment.”
“In fact, I liked that one best of the four,” said Louis. “So I’d still like to bring Mrs. Coburn up for a look.”
“You’ll have to move quickly, Mr. Coburn. As I say, there may be an offer any day now.”
“I understand,” said Louis. “We’ll rearrange our schedule and see whether we can get up in the next couple of days.”
“Call first,” said Carolyne. “Just to make sure.”
“And in the meantime, could you put me in touch with the bank you mentioned? It would help speed things up to know what kind of terms we can get.”
“It’s the Charter Island National Bank, Mr. Coburn.”
“Charter Island National Bank. And the phone number?”
“They are an online bank, Mr. Coburn. They’re in the Cayman Islands. I also deal in Caribbean properties. I’ve worked with Charter Island for a number of years and have found them very reliable. They generally offer favorable rates. I know it sounds a bit unusual to have a mortgage with an offshore bank, but Charter Island has charters in the United States, England, and France. Go to Charterislandnationalbank.com, and you’ll find everything you need to know about them—who they are, mortgage banking, private banking, and so on. And you’ll find loan application forms you can download.”
Next Louis called Zaharia. “Where are you?” said Zaharia. He could hear a loudspeaker making announcements in the background.
“Kennedy airport,” said Louis. “It was wonderful to see you, Zaharia. Pauline will be jealous. Will you visit us in France?”
“I’m going home to Granny for spring break. I could stop on my way. Would you mind?”
“You have money for the flight?”
“I’ve been robbing banks.”
Louis didn’t laugh. He felt uneasy about involving Zaharia in his shenanigans. That’s what Renard called it. Shenanigans.
“I’ve been writing programs for the university,” said Zaharia. “A part-time job. It’s easy, and it pays well.”
“Please come. We’d love to see you. And here’s a bank—Charter Island National Bank—that might be useful to look into. In the Cayman Islands. They have a Web site—”
“Charter Island National. I’ll find it.” Louis heard a keyboard clicking in the background.
“Just find out a bit about them for the moment, all right? Who they are, what they do. Nothing else. Don’t do anything else. You promise?”
“I promise,” said Zaharia.
When Louis got home late the next morning, there was a telephone message from Zaharia. “Call me.”
“Have you found something interesting?”
“Yes. I didn’t take anything or change anything, I promise. They know someone’s been there looking because they have tracking software. But I set up a phantom ISP, so they don’t know who or where I am.”
“You’re speaking a language I don’t understand.”
“I know,” said Zaharia. “Charter Island is a bank that exists entirely online. Their Web site lists them as being chartered in Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and several other countries, including the Cayman Islands, where their headquarters are located. And their name is misleading, because they’re not anybody’s national bank, and they never have been. They say they’re affiliated with UBS, a giant Swiss bank, but I don’t find any connections.”
“Affiliated can mean almost anything.”
“They say they offer traditional banking services, commercial banking, private banking. What is private banking?”
“Private banking is for rich clients. That’s the part of the business that interests us, I suspect.”
“Well, that’s where the highest security seems to be,” said Zaharia. “So that’s where I went. The site seems straightforward and normal. It’s when you get behind the site that things get kind of messy and interesting. In the private banking pages, there are links that shuffle you through other intermediate links, like going through boxes inside boxes. It’s not something you’d notice if you just clicked on the link. The security isn’t especially remarkable, but having lots of layers makes it hard to get through if you’re trying to follow a trail. That’s one interesting thing.”
“What makes that interesting?” Louis wondered.
“Well, it’s more than just a security measure. It means that the site engineer wanted to prevent anyone from following a trail. They wanted to keep the destination secret.” Zaharia was reading from notes. “Okay. Another interesting thing—not a computer thing—is that their physical address in the Caymans is only a drop box. It’s not even at a post office. I didn’t know banks could do that.”
“It means,” said Louis, “without court orders, it’s impossible to know who rents the lockbox and who gets the mail. In fact, I bet it gets forwarded somewhere else.”
“And this is also interesting,” said Zaharia. “While they list the US and other countries as where they do business, nowhere on the site do they mention where they do most of their business.”
“Ah,” said Louis. “And where is that?”
“Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Andorra, and the Netherland Antilles. Most of their traffic goes back and forth between the Caymans and those places.”
“My guess is they’re laundering money, Zaharia. They take stolen money and filter it into legitimate businesses—bonds, mortgages, and loans. Maybe real estate. Can you tell who sends and receives the traffic?”
“No, I can
’t tell any of that. The Caymans IPO is a cover address that hides the real one. It could be anyone anywhere. All electronic addresses are like that.”
“So, somebody has built a kind of maze behind the scenes that goes beyond normal bank security?”
“That’s a good way of saying it.”
“Is there some way to check the bank sites and subsidiary sites or the correspondence between those sites to see if certain names come up?”
“Names?”
“People. Either in the body of e-mails or the headings or … wherever else there might be names.”
“That would mean breaking their encryption.” Louis could tell Zaharia was eager to try. He gave him a list of names to check.
Zaharia called back an hour later. “There’s only one hit from the names you gave me. Smythe, Richard J. You want his e-mail address?”
XL
PAULINE WAS UNHAPPY THAT LOUIS was using Zaharia—using was her word, not his—to advance his investigation. She agreed to listen to his explanation if he promised not to give her a lecture about truth and virtue and the obligations of citizenship. And if he peeled the onions. They had decided to make Rosita’s weeping stew. Louis got his swim goggles from the cabinet above the stove. He wore them whenever he peeled onions.
First, Louis said, he was fairly sure that Larrimer’s former wife was up to no good, and if she was not complicit in the actual theft of the three billion dollars, then she was at least complicit in concealing it and profiting from it, spiriting it out of the country and helping launder it. And thanks to Zaharia, Louis had a pretty good idea where that money was going and how it was being laundered.
“Then you should turn your findings over to your CIA contact.”
“You mean Peter Sanchez? And what will he do? As far as he’s concerned, my ‘findings’ are tainted because of how I got them.”
“Well, he’s right, isn’t he? They are tainted,” said Pauline.
“In a sense he’s right. But only in a sense. They violate procedures. They skirt the law. In a law court everything I’ve discovered would be thrown out and there’d be no case. And I would probably be indicted for fraud, conspiracy, that sort of thing.” In his agitation Louis had taken off the goggles, but he started to cry so he put them on again.
“That’s because they are crimes and a society depends on its citizens not taking the law into their own hands.”
“That’s the theory: that we live in a world ruled by laws. But the laws are almost constantly sidestepped and abused by the rich and the powerful to their own advantage.”
“So what makes you think that at some point there won’t be a case against you and there will be a case against Larrimer?”
“Honestly, I can’t be sure. But sometimes—not often, but sometimes—that’s how things work. Once the government has the money and they have Larrimer in shackles, then how all that came about won’t seem as important as it does now. Having a case might be too tempting to resist; maybe they’ll even turn a blind eye to how it was acquired.”
“Maybe,” said Pauline. “Maybe, maybe, maybe. That’s a lot of maybes.”
“At that point they can avoid looking at everything they’d rather not see. But not now; not yet.”
“And what about Zaharia? He’s a boy.”
“He’s twenty.”
“Louis, he’s a boy.”
“Yes, I know.” Louis stopped and remained silent for a long time. He peered past Pauline through his goggles, like an explorer from elsewhere in a poisonous atmosphere. “He’s a boy,” he said again. “Did you know he helped protestors get the word out about Algerian government corruption? He did. On his own. From Algiers, using his little laptop computer, he penetrated government computer security and helped shine a light on the government’s goons and thugs. Remember those images on television? Well, we saw that because Zaharia and others were operating outside the law. And the Algerian government never even knew he existed. They still don’t.”
“What you’re doing is different.”
“He tells me this can be exactly the same kind of operation. No one will ever know who he is or what he’s done unless he tells them.”
“But you’ll know. And he will know.”
Louis did not have an answer. He peeled and chopped, and Pauline browned the lamb in a sizzling skillet.
“These aren’t fanatics and thugs,” said Pauline.
“Maybe not fanatics. But thugs. And thieves. Abetting terrorists and outlaw regimes. Their bank is laundering money from Nigeria and Pakistan. Drug money. Terrorist money. Human trafficking money. The fact that Larrimer and his banker don’t traffic in drugs or women doesn’t mean he’s innocent of that trafficking. If he’s involved in a money laundering enterprise, he’s part of it.”
“You’re not God,” said Pauline.
“I wish the world were an orderly place,” said Louis, ignoring her implication. “I wish it were a place where those in power go after wrongdoers, bring them to justice, and then restore what was stolen to its rightful owners. But it isn’t. You know that. The strong and the rich rule, and the billions—the poor and the vulnerable—get trampled underfoot. I guess some powers are better than others when it comes to justice. But every nation—even the US, even France—are constrained by the worst among them, because nations are sovereign. We all have to treat North Korea as though it had rights. But it doesn’t.”
“But it does,” said Pauline.
“In my mind it doesn’t,” said Louis. “The North Korean people have rights, but North Korea doesn’t. As far as I can tell, it’s no different than any other criminal enterprise, except maybe in its scale and the scale of its evil. How can any country claim rights for itself greater than the rights it gives its own citizens?”
“You are like an Old Testament prophet,” said Pauline. “With goggles.” She laughed and took his head between her hands and kissed him. The onions were finally in the pot, and the goggles came off.
“I don’t see why everyone doesn’t use goggles to peel onions,” said Louis.
The stew was delicious, Pauline agreed.
“I’m glad to be home,” said Louis. He reached across the table for her hand.
“Are you?” she said.
“My children are there. And when I’m there, I admit, there are moments when it’s almost as though I had never left. I can feel an odd yearning.”
“I can imagine,” she said. “But I’m glad you’re here.”
“Those moments pass. They get crowded out by the culture. That strange, superficial, juvenile culture takes hold again, where forward motion is everything. Life in America doesn’t just advance. It surges forward on waves of money and fashion and celebrity and narcissism. The next big thing is all that matters. That seems to breed the Larrimers and the Madoffs. And nothing really stops them.”
“But you will,” said Pauline, unwilling to surrender her sense of the absurdity of the entire enterprise. At that moment Louis glimpsed his reflection in a cabinet door, obscured and distorted by the old glass and the stacks of cups and saucers behind the glass. There was something ghostly about the face. His eyes were lost in dark shadow, his neck thin and insubstantial, his hair all but invisible. It was as though he was seeing the very preposterousness of his pursuit in those glass panes.
“What is it?” said Pauline.
“It’s this world. I don’t like it; I’m an alien here.”
“Well, you’re old. Old people are aliens everywhere.”
XLI
CHARANJEET KAPOOR DID NOT BELIEVE in omens or other such hocus-pocus; he was an Oxford and London School of Economics graduate, after all. He believed in charts and statistics and capital and markets. But when Abinaash appeared suddenly in his father’s hospital room wearing the Insouciante scarf around her head, it was like a sign from the gods. She seemed an oracle, the bearer, Charanjeet was certain, of bad news and ominous implications. Jeremy, Charanjeet’s almost forgotten alter ego, was suddenly front and center,
summoned back from the subconscious oblivion into which Charanjeet had banished him. Jeremy’s misdeeds loomed large, his culpability even larger, and the prospect of just punishment—which Abinaash and the scarf represented—caused Charanjeet to tremble and perspire.
Mohan noticed. “Is something the matter, my boy?”
“It’s nothing,” Charanjeet snapped. “I’m fine.” After a moment he was able to steady himself enough to conduct the interview of Abinaash and test her qualifications. To his dismay, she met all the criteria Charanjeet and his parents had agreed upon. He could not easily send her away. Still, when he looked at her, he saw only the scarf. She was an oracle, and the scarf was his downfall.
Charanjeet turned to his parents. “She will not do at all. She is too young and too small and extremely insolent.”
Mohan and Golapi looked at him in astonishment. “What are you saying, Charanjeet? She seems highly qualified to me,” said Mohan. “And as for insolence, well, I see no such thing.” Abinaash stood watching the back and forth with interest.
“I’m sorry, Daddy, but you are not seeing things clearly,” said Charanjeet.
“I think I am seeing things quite clearly,” said Mohan. “And since I am the one who will pay her wages, the decision is mine.” Charanjeet had no choice but to make the offer. “We can pay you fifty dollars a month plus your room and board.” He was rattled, so he spoke in dollars.
“How much money is that?” Abinaash wanted to know.
“That is thirty-five hundred rupees,” said Charanjeet.
“But that is not what we agreed upon, Charanjeet,” said Mohan. “It is to be seven thousand rupees.”
Charanjeet continued as though he had not heard. “There will be a one-month trial to make sure your service is satisfactory. You must move in next Monday. The cook will show you where you will sleep.” Charanjeet sought refuge in the ways of old Pakistan. Because Abinaash was of a lower caste, he spoke to her in a patronizing manner. He took no note of her name, nor did he inquire after her origins. And yet he could not help but notice when she turned her head and the scar was out of view, that she was strikingly pretty, with coffee-colored skin slightly darker than his own and large dark eyes, a narrow nose, and beautiful teeth. And she was not diffident or retiring either, as he might have expected, but inappropriately proud and confident. It made him angry all over again that she did not cast her eyes downward when he looked at her. Instead her eyes met his and held them.
The Capitalist Page 16