China Strike

by Matt Rees

  McCarthy lowered his hands to his lap and licked his lips. If he’d signed up a new account based on a phone call from someone who didn’t even pretend to be the account holder, the ICE agent would need to dig deeper. The Irishman didn’t appreciate that. He looked at her with the face of a child disappointed to have forgotten to lie. “It was not the account holder himself who opened the account.”

  “Who was it?”

  “An assistant to Mister Allaf.”

  “Name?”

  “I don’t recall, I’m afraid.”

  “Another Syrian?”

  “Perhaps.” He glanced toward a photo in a frame across his desk. It showed McCarthy with a young man who wore a Rutgers University T-shirt and baseball cap. He had the same nose and eyes as the banker. Kinsella figured it was his son.

  She laid the binder on the desk. “Look at that handwriting,” she said.

  “What of it?”

  “That’s the hand of a native English speaker. It’s completely fluent.” Then she let her head angle a little to the left as she glared at McCarthy. “You made a deal with my colleague Special Agent Haddad. But you didn’t make a deal with me. I’m just about ready to rip up that deal.”

  “You’re going a little far, aren’t you?”

  “You’re not going far enough. The person who set up the account for Allaf was Syrian?”

  McCarthy decided to give up something more. Kinsella saw it in the businesslike way he answered her. “No. The accent. The vocabulary.”

  “What accent?”

  “American.”

  “American like me, or American like John Wayne?”

  “It’s a while since I saw his movies—”

  Kinsella jabbed a finger at the handwriting on the form. “From the voice, I assume you could also tell us something about the age of the person. This isn’t a young guy’s handwriting.”

  “Not John Wayne’s accent, but not yours either,” McCarthy said. “You’re from the New York area, right? I’d say the accent was Southern. Fairly formal. Male. Deep voiced. As you’ve observed from the handwriting, if indeed it was the man on the phone who filled in those forms, he was an older man. I’d say older than me. Perhaps even in his sixties.”

  Kinsella took back the binder. She flipped to the last page and turned it around to show McCarthy. “These are transfers made in the last year. They’re mostly to Asia, by the looks of it. But these here”—she jabbed with her freckled index finger—“are to the United States. Here, here, and here. To an account at EWYK. What’s EWYK?”

  McCarthy’s eyes flickered toward the photo of the kid in the Rutgers gear. His sing-song accent was suddenly flat and tense. “It’s a private securities trading company.”

  “Where?”

  “They’re in New York.”

  “The money transferred to this firm in New York City—what’s it for?”

  “To make a trade. An equity trade, most likely.”

  “On the stock exchange?”

  “Not necessarily. EWYK are involved in private equity placements too.”

  “You’re going to help me find out.”

  “If I called, they wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “You want one of my New York agents to go to them? Ask them questions? Tell them we got most of the story from our friend McCarthy at Bainc Príobháideach, but we just need to confirm a couple details with them?”

  “Don’t do that.” He lifted his hand from the desk to his throat. He left the outline of his palm in sweat on the desk blotter. “They’re not good people.”

  “They’re stock brokers. How scary can they be?”

  “EWYK stands for Eat What You Kill. That could be boastful, macho shite. But they have a reputation for being nastier than the average Wall Street hooligan.”

  “Did you send some instructions to EWYK along with the money? Did Allaf give you any special instructions to pass on?”

  McCarthy dropped his head. “He’s certainly a scary bastard.”

  “Allaf?”

  “I told you, I never talked to Allaf.”

  “The man on the phone?”

  “You have to protect me.”

  “You have to help us get to him. That’s the only protection you get. When we take him out of circulation, you’re safe.”

  The Irishman’s tanned skin paled. Kinsella moved forward on her seat. They were coming to it. “The day he sent me instructions to wire the money and the trading instructions to New York,” McCarthy said, “that same day he told me over the phone to go to my office window and watch the bus stop.”

  Kinsella stood and crossed the room. From the window, she looked over the entrance of an underground parking lot. On the street, a group of commuters waited under the canopy of the bus stop in the light rain. “And?”

  “I didn’t see who did it.” McCarthy put his hands over his face. “My secretary went under a bus. One moment, she was waiting at the stop. Then her arms flew up as she fell forward. She was dead by the time I got down there.”

  “Her death was a warning?”

  “Bloody Christ, she was a mother of three. Couldn’t they have thought of an easier way to put the wind up me?”

  Kinsella watched the street. She felt heat prickling at her scalp. Was it just the story McCarthy told? Or was she being observed from out there? She turned to him. “What were the trading instructions?”

  His hands were back on the table, focusing, putting aside his secretary’s death. “The instructions were to make a short sale.”

  “A trade that profits when the stock goes down? What stock?”

  “More than one. There was a list.” McCarthy trembled and his voice wavered. He knew he was about to take this whole thing up a notch.

  Kinsella felt it. She figured out why. “Was Darien on the list?”

  “Darien was on the list. You’re right there. Then Theander. Jansen Trapp, Morota. And Wolfwagen.”

  “Add up those companies and all the different brands they control, you’ve got enough new cars to tie up every road in Europe and North America.”

  Kinsella saw that McCarthy had put two and two together when the Darien cars crashed a day ago. He didn’t know where this was going, but he was alert enough to figure out that it might involve a repeat on a grander scale. “Call the brokers,” she said.

  McCarthy twisted his mouth. He picked up the phone and hit the speed dial. Kinsella came to the desk and leaned over it. It rang once before someone picked up.

  “Michael, hey, it’s Dermot McCarthy at Bainc Príobháideach in Luxembourg.” He listened to a few curt words down the line. Then he recited a string of numbers, covering his mouth and the handset with his palm. He pulled away his hand and licked his lips before he spoke to the man on the other end of the phone. “Michael, I’m going to have to ask you to listen to me very well just now. Will you do that for me? I know the market’s open, but if you don’t pay attention and help me out, you and I will be finished with trading and quite possibly might be facing considerable legal difficulties. Do you understand? I’m going to put you on speakerphone.” McCarthy pressed a button and set down the handset. The background clamor of a Wall Street trading room filtered through the speaker on the phone. “I’m here with an agent from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Michael.”

  Someone called out a trade close to the other end of the line. But the man stayed quiet.

  “Agent Kinsella, we’re on the line with Michael Herrera at EWYK. He’s the equity products trading manager. Are you there, Michael?”

  “What do you want?” Herrera’s voice was pure concentration, as though his entire personality had been reduced like a sauce over heat to the essence that allowed him to do business.

  “Well, now, we have a bit of a situation, and all,” McCarthy stammered.

  “What do you want?” The intonation was absolutely identical the second time Herrera spoke.

  Kinsella kept her eyes on McCarthy. “This is Special Agent Noelle Kinsella. Mister He
rrera, I’m an agent in the New York field office. I can have agents come to your premises in New York, or you can help us on the phone.”

  “What part of ‘what do you want’ do you guys not understand?”

  The smartest people were the ones who knew how to give up what a government agent needed, without rolling over completely. Just keep the Feds from coming through the door—that was the smart guy’s rule. Because when an agent arrived on your premises, you couldn’t tell who’d open their mouth when they shouldn’t or what the government might stumble upon.

  “We are tracking an account at Bainc Príobháideach here in Luxembourg that is connected to the Darien crash. That account was used to transfer financing to EWYK.”

  “McCarthy, send me the account number and the transfer details by e-mail,” Herrera said.

  McCarthy figured he might be off the hook. His accent took on its charming, Irish breeziness once more. “I’ll be happy to—”

  “Do it now.”

  McCarthy spun toward the sleek laptop on the corner of his desk. “Okay, I’m just—ah, I’m not a computer guy, you know?” He fumbled with his index finger on the mouse and pecked at the keys with one hand. “Well, now you should have it.”

  An instant, then Herrera was tapping on a keyboard. “I’m looking at the account. Account in the name of Allaf, first name Nabil. Resident of Luxembourg, collateral certified with Bainc Príobháideach.”

  Kinsella glanced at McCarthy. “Resident of Luxembourg?”

  McCarthy shook his head. “It’s a service we—Sometimes our clients need to—You know?”

  A tax scam. “Continue, Mister Herrera.”

  “The account was set up last year. There were a lot of initial trades. Then it went fairly quiet. In March we set up a series of positions on the instructions of Mister McCarthy.”

  “Short positions?”

  “Short sales of car stocks. I’m sending you the list now.”

  “You’re being very helpful. We appreciate it.” Kinsella let the meaning of her words sink in. She probably needn’t have bothered. Herrera was telling all this with the expectation that she’d look no closer at EWYK’s overseas clients once she was back in New York. “What happened to the short sale of Darien?”

  “We closed it out yesterday.”

  “When the Darien cars crashed, Darien stock went down. You bought the stocks at the low price to cover the shares you had sold earlier at a higher price. The difference—the drop in price—was profit.”

  “That’s correct.”

  She turned McCarthy’s laptop toward her. The list of car companies sold short with Allaf’s account appeared on the screen. “What was the profit?”

  “Darien shares dropped in one day from twelve bucks to two bucks. The account held a short position of a half million shares. The trade cleared five million profit.”

  “Didn’t anyone in the market notice you close out the position? Didn’t anyone question that?”

  “Are you kidding? They couldn’t get Darien out the door fast enough, and we were buying.”

  “What did you do with the proceeds of the trade?”

  “We transferred it under instructions from Bainc Príobháideach.”

  “The money came back into the account?”

  Herrera was quiet a moment. “You need to discuss that with Mister McCarthy.”

  Kinsella frowned at McCarthy. The Irishman’s shoulders shrank into chest, and his torso sunk down toward his waistband. He tried to smile. Kinsella had seen dead bodies with more gaiety in their faces.

  “There might be another account, see,” McCarthy said. “Well, I say ‘might be.’ Yes, there is another account, in fact.”

  “Another account?” She saw the light on the phone go out. Herrera had hung up. “Held by Nabil Allaf?”

  McCarthy shook his head. His face blanched to the color of his gray sideburns.

  “Who’s the account holder?” Kinsella said.

  McCarthy shook his head again.

  Kinsella grabbed the photo of the young man from the desk. “This is your son? He’s studying at Rutgers?”

  McCarthy murmured something that sounded like “yes,” though his lips were pressed tight.

  Kinsella waved the photo in front of his face. “I can make his student visa go away and have him on a plane out of the United States in six hours. You got me? I don’t know what future you have in mind for your boy, but a deportation from the US doesn’t look good on the background check for any job, does it?”

  She slammed the framed photo onto the desktop right before McCarthy. “Talk to me.”

  “The account.” McCarthy worked hard to get some spit into his mouth. He croaked, “It’s held by a gentleman named Lawton Wyatt.”

  “Who’s Wyatt?”

  “He’s the man who—” McCarthy shook his head remorsefully.

  “Damn it, who’s Lawton Wyatt?”

  “The man who set up the first account. The man with the Southern accent.”

  Kinsella clicked her tongue. McCarthy had been a bad boy. “When did he open the account?”

  “About a half hour after the Darien crashes.”

  The first Chinese engineer to die, Gao Rong, worked at Darien. The third one to die told Verrazzano that Gao had made the Dariens crash earlier than they were supposed to. This Lawton Wyatt had moved quickly to take the profit from his short sale of Darien stock. He’d have expected to have more time before the crash happened, but Gao’s move blindsided him. Perhaps using his own name was an error caused by haste. Kinsella had to push McCarthy. “Is the money still in the account? The Wyatt account?”

  “Some of it.”

  “The rest?”

  “I was instructed to use it to purchase Bitcoins.” He choked on the last word before he managed to get it out.

  “For what?”

  “To send them to another Bitcoin user.”

  “Give me the Bitcoin account ID.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The pianist played another damned waltz. Wyatt had been in Vienna three hours, and he had already heard almost the entire output of Johann Strauss, the nineteenth-century king of the three-step. The waiter set down another coffee for the colonel and a plate with Feng Yi’s second slice of Sachertorte. Feng leaned over the plate and sniffed the rich chocolate. He forked up a big mouthful and sat back, face toward the ceiling in ecstasy. He ran his palms over the bench seat’s expensive velvet upholstery. When he brought his gaze down to Wyatt, the pleasure disappeared from his features. “You’re a downer, Colonel,” he said, chewing with his mouth open.

  “If you want a buddy to share conversation and indulgent desserts, you’d best try one of them chubby State Department dweebs.”

  “Mostly those guys are all worked out. Pumped. The kind that are at the gym before six in the morning. Type A, you call it, right? But there are one or two sad fatties, you’re right.”

  Wyatt drank the rest of his mélange and set the cup down. The Austrian coffee was bitter and thin. Like him. At least it won’t kill you, he thought. That’s where it differed from him. He folded his hands on his knee and waited.

  Feng sighed. Down to business. “I am not convinced that you have done as you are required, Colonel Wyatt.” He took another bite of cake. “You set everything up very well. But I asked you to make sure that we could stop things at short notice. Have you done this?”

  The pianist finished the waltz. In the quiet that followed, the chants of the antiglobalization protesters came through from the street outside. When Wyatt entered the hotel, a famous Indian writer had been bawling into a megaphone for the edification of a crowd of about two hundred European kids in camouflage jackets and kaffiyeh scarves. The Indian was opposed to a big dam back home that screwed over some peasant villages. The Euro kids were mad about that. Wyatt said to Feng, “I made sure the operation could be aborted at will.”

  Feng glanced out of the window, into the street at the protesters thrusting their placards and banners into the air
. He seemed to be looking for someone. “No, no. I mean, have you stopped it?”

  Wyatt wasn’t about to pull back from the edge. He had been ordered to look over into the abyss, and then he had been told to jump. Told by someone to whom he owed a greater allegiance than this Chinese cyberwarfare mope with a mouthful of chocolate cake. Dick Bruce wanted this operation to go ahead, and Wyatt was almost scared of Bruce. Scared, at least, of the power he wielded and his absolute unconcern for the welfare of any living being except himself. “I am in the process of rescinding the orders to the operatives.”

  Feng translated that slowly, making sure he wasn’t reversing the meaning of the complicated English phrasing. “Is that a yes?”

  “To what question?”

  Feng threw down his tiny fork. “You think I am a joker, Colonel?”

  Wyatt stared. “What do you care what I think?”

  “I care how you respond to me and my orders, and I’m also noting the fact that you chose not to answer the question about whether I am a joker.” Feng had another hard stare out of the window toward the protesters. He wiped his mouth and stood up. “Come with me.”

  Wyatt followed Feng to the lobby. They went out past a crowd of security men with their earpieces and shades, the Americans and Europeans and Chinese bodyguards spread in tangents that never met. Spotlights illuminated the State Opera House for a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio. The Austrian police watched the Indian author give the crowd what it wanted. Feng took Wyatt’s elbow and led him along Kärntner Strasse toward the Ring.

  Some of the antiglobalization punks had broken away from the protest and headed for the U-Bahn. Feng and Wyatt went down the steps to the subway with them. They entered a long tunnel that cut under the old ring road and led to the Karlsplatz station. The tunnel was crowded, and the musty air smelled vaguely of marijuana. Feng gestured toward a young couple who had evidently left the protest not long before. The man’s head was shaven, and he wore a desert camouflage jacket and a long, pointed ginger goatee. He was in his midtwenties, a few years older than his girlfriend, whose blonde hair was also shaved, except for a long wisp that came out of the crown of her head. She wore a shapeless green hoodie and a kilt, and her ear was circled by enough rings to hang all the curtains in a suburban family home. At her side, she held a placard made for the protest. It showed a montage of old, jowly, male faces clipped out of magazines and glued onto the wasted, black bodies of poor Africans. In the English of someone writing in a second language, the slogan read, “Imagine to live with $1 every day only. Fatfarm Nazis.” Wyatt recognized the faces. Dick Bruce was on the extreme left. That, he thought, showed how little those punks knew.