The old man just signaled to his passenger side and said, “Sube.”
The money changed hands and the van re-initiated its lumbering climb out of the valley. At a small outpost town that was little more than a gas station with a general store the man bought Dupree a track suit with the insignias of the Barcelona soccer team and the name Messi printed on the back, two changes of underwear, and a pair of Nike knockoffs. Jean changed in the back of the van, rolled up his tunic and put it in the plastic bag together with the sandals he was given at the monastery and threw them in the trash. With it went his alliance to the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
In Girona, Dupree bought a couple of suits, shirts, ties, shoes, underwear, a valise, and other odds and ends needed to begin his life as a private citizen and financial entrepreneur. He checked into a three-star hotel, took a long, hot shower, shaved clean the beard that he had grown out of necessity – leaving only a well-trimmed Van Dyke – and went around the corner to a salon where he got his first haircut in months. He looked at himself in the mirror and was happy to see a middle-aged man of prosperous countenance and clear eyes. He walked back to the hotel with a spring in his step and a new outlook on life. On the way he stopped at one of the international phone booths that over-populate such tourist towns. He made a call to San Marino and another one to Saint Bartholomew in the Caribbean. Using the codes he had put in place he transferred a modest amount of money to his account in Luxembourg. None of these accounts were in the privy of the IOR and would see him through a start in his new life…even if a billion euros is not what it used to be. It took three days for the prior of the monastery to discover that Cardinal Dupree had absconded. It was normal for penitents to forego food for a few days in purification fast; it was also common for them not to leave their cells for a few days, so it was only when the prior had asked to see Dupree that they discovered his absence. Word was slow to get to Rome, slower to get to the pope, and even slower for word to get back to the prior. Do nothing.
For a month Enrico Testa sat stone still and tomb quiet as the interrogators tried to get a word out of him. Neither sleep deprivation, loud noise, time disruption nor any other stress inducing method had fazed him. He had simply retired to a place in his mind where no one but God could go. When frustrated interrogators tried waterboarding him his heart rate went down instead of up and was at 45 beats when the medic stopped the procedure. He was being fed twice a day, but barely ate enough to sustain life. No one knew when he was awake or asleep as little changed from one state to the other. Thus was the situation when the transfer order arrived from the Department of Homeland Security requesting the preparation of the prisoner for transportation to Guantanamo. When the day came, Testa was shackled hand and foot to a leather belt that buckled in the back and was led out by six armed guards, two of which flanked him and held his arms. At the loading dock there was an armored vehicle with the insignias of the Department of Homeland Security and a phalanx of heavily armed guards. The prisoner was unceremoniously shoved into the back, where two other armed guards with body armor and full-face helmets awaited him. Extensive paperwork changed hands and the vehicle took off with the escort vehicles following. An hour later as the truck appeared to Enrico to be traveling along an unpaved road, it stopped and the back door opened. One of the guards got off and the driver handed the remaining guard a set of keys and he and the guard got into the escort vehicle and went off back towards where they came. The remaining guard unlocked Testa’s shackles from the chain that was welded to the floor and then un-cuffed him and removed the shackles from his legs. Enrico had no idea what was going on but tensed, ready to attack if it was necessary.
“Be calm, my son,” said the guard taking off the helmet. “It has been a long time…” Enrico Testa looked upon the countenance of Cardinal Jean Dupree.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Marco and Patricia were back in New York, staying at his old apartment that had been kept clean and updated by the management company. It was like a trip in time for Marco; this was a part of a life that he did not even recognize anymore. He was not sure Patricia was happy staying there because she made a little joke about sharing his bed with him and a dozen girls from Black Card Escort Service. He had brushed it off but made sure that nothing that might remind her of his previous life was around. They were leaving for their meeting with Leon Goddard and Samuel Goldman to see the plan for restructuring Carducci Enterprises and the preliminary prospectus for the two IPOs that would result from it.
“You don’t have to go around rearranging the apartment, Marco, I know what was going on here,” said Patricia with a mischievous smile. “I just hope you can offer me the same courtesies.”
“You get all the courtesy you need,” said Marco with a smile of his own.
“Do I?” asked Patricia.
“We can go back upstairs, you know…”
“Keep that thought for after the meetings,” said Patricia as she walked ahead of him towards the waiting limo and reminding him that those curves knew how to sway.
The division of the companies was quite logical. The financial corporations, Scorpio Multimodal Brokers, the laundry, the parking, the franchises and several other smaller businesses were going to a new US entity that would go public in the fall of that year; the rest of the properties, including everything outside the US, went to the Canadian company that would go public in the early part of the following year. The estimated value of the US IPO was thirteen and a half billion dollars and the Canadian offering should bring seven billion Canadian dollars. Investment bankers were lined up for both offerings and a minimum price per share was sounded. A meeting with Ian Carlo later on would issue a confirmation and trigger this move. Now both goals of the Carducci family were on the way to being fulfilled; the businesses on both sides of the imaginary fence would cease to be in the hands of Salvatore Carducci’s heirs. Ian Carlo’s son would come into the world unencumbered by the shadow of lawlessness and both his children would grow up far from where their fortune was made.
When a new interrogation team that included experts from Homeland Security and a couple of consultants from Walter Reed – who were challenged with discerning the psychological nature of Testa – arrived at the secret location, they were surprised that the inmate wasn’t available. It took them two hours and two calls to the director’s office to finally be told that Testa had been transferred to Guantanamo the day before and another six to discover that there were no transfer orders from Homeland Security’s operations director, or from anyone else for that matter. Finger-pointing reached new levels. Papers were sought, security films were scanned, viewed and reviewed until one lowly guard recognized a colleague who had left the service some months back. Once identified he was promptly located and interrogated. The man had written proof that HS personnel had called him back into service for a special transfer. He had been driving an escort van but halfway to the airport they were told to go home. He didn’t know who the prisoner was, he knew they were taking him to Guantanamo and yes, he had the orders that they had received from Directorate of National Protection. This had been an inside job, no doubt about it; and until they found out who, how, and why not a word was coming out of the department.
The Piper Chieftain left Driggs, Idaho, and climbed to 23,000 feet headed west. It flew over the Rocky Mountains in clear skies but hit bad weather just west of the range. After a few hours of tempestuous flight it landed at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California. It taxied to a NetJets Terminal, where the two passengers transferred to a Falcon 2000 LX. The crew confirmed that all luggage was on board and taxied with an IFR plan for the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian archipelago. Dupree and Testa spent a few nights at a small resort outside of Honolulu because Testa was getting fitted for prosthesis for his left eye. It was not a great improvement over the black eye patch, but it changed his expected appearance. Once finished with that they went to Swiss Port where they boarded a Malayan cargo vessel with a final destination of Democratic
Republic of Timor Leste.
On board the freighter Enrico Testa started to exercise, awakening muscles that his confinement had numbed and reacquiring lost flexibility and speed. He found among the crew a couple of hard cases that were good martial arts practitioners and sparred with them every day until his skills accommodated his diminished eyesight and depth perception. The cardinal had explained to him that due to strife within the Church he was asked by His Holiness the Pope to start a new financial institution far away from the IOR and the greedy hands of some cardinals and lay functionaries. Testa did not question his master for a heartbeat. His was to follow God’s design through the guiding hand of Jean Dupree. He had drifted from that for a short time and had lost an eye and his liberty at the hands of His enemies. No more would that happen than the sun not shine. He was obliged to call the cardinal by his first name, Jean, and that had been the hardest part of his retraining. Only after two weeks he was getting to overcome his reflexes and stopped calling the cardinal “Your Eminence.” He had to pray in private and in silence because their crew was Muslim and they didn’t want to offend or call attention on their devotions.
The liberation of Enrico Testa had cost Dupree a cool million dollars but it was cheap compared to having a bodyguard and servant with the capabilities of this man. His lapse in obedience would not be repeated because it had cost Enrico dearly and Dupree reminded him constantly. In Timor, Dupree had acquired a small bank that soon would reach much greater proportions, but it would need money and a strong physical incentive to get all the officials and bureaucrats on board. Thus the need for Enrico; otherwise he could rot in hell as far as the cardinal was concerned. The one thing that he didn’t know was a great stroke of luck for him. The Vatican did not want to make public the AWOL cardinal, nor did the Department of Homeland Security want the other agencies to know about the major fuck-up that had let loose on the world a criminal like Testa, therefore no one was really looking for them. There was no Interpol search, no biometric scans going on, nothing. They were free but didn’t know it.
Francisco Lujan and his people had been glued to the screens for weeks, waiting for the indication that it was the right time to strike. Signs that the moment was approaching had everyone on tenterhooks; numbers came and went, graphics took a life of their own, layer upon layer of information accumulated until this orchestra reached its crescendo and Francisco called Marco, gave him the status and they agreed to go ahead. It was just one small algorithm that was typed into one little keyboard that let loose the kraken. Within seconds terminals all over the world received orders, queried the sender, and received confirmations that set transfers in motion. Money flew in its electronic persona from dozens of banks to hundreds of other banks to thousands of accounts and, like a swarm of bees landed on flowering small businesses in Africa, South America, China, the Middle East, and Australia. The loans issued were guaranteed in kind by a bank in Cyprus that belonged to a bank in Poland that belonged to a bank in Canada who co-owned it with the British Overseas Investment Bank. The money in question had left the accounts that Sheik Faruk was stewarding for the benefit of Edward Meredith, Lord Humphrey, and their associates. Eight and a half billion dollars had been spread like manure on hungry crops; all by the grace and ability of Francisco Lujan and Marco Carducci in representation of The Board.
Once the transactions were completed another algorithm invaded the bank’s computers and all traces of the orders, confirmations and destinations evaporated from their memory banks. These money-laundering institutions were left holding the baby. Ufff! What a big, fat, ugly baby!
Francisco had left enough money in these accounts to cover routine payments, bank commissions, and small transfers so that the alarm would not trigger too soon. If there were big transfers, well too bad; but as it turned out it took a full week for things to get ugly. First with a couple of accounts, then with two or three more until all transfers, payments, commissions, etc. bounced from empty coffers, sending alarm up the ladder until some very powerful people got very worried and very angry. Some of these were high up in the mafias, cartels, corporations, NGOs, cover charities, political machines, bureaucrats, and churches. People who counted on the services of the banks organized by Meredith, Humphrey, and the sheik to clean their ill-gotten money found themselves short in more than funds; they had little recourse other than violence and that never gets your money back; ask your friendly neighborhood loan shark.
The banks had received the money and sent it out but had no proof as to where or to whom. This was a fatherless crisis and the banks were the unwed mothers of very nasty offspring. They couldn’t say the money had not been received. The credit had been issued for every penny and confirmation of the first dispersal was in the hands of the sheik, but from there on it was a blank. The problem with the type of clients Meredith and Humphrey had was that they were not open to explanations and excuses. Where is the money? Also, the fact that the sheik, and for that matter Edward Meredith and Lord Humphrey, had proof that the banks had received the funds was of no help. They were paid a hefty sum to make it clean and available at the other side of the gauntlet. So the question they got was “Where is our money?” and unfortunately they had no answer. The only good thing, if you could call it that, was that between Meredith, Humphrey, and the sheik, together with the affected banks, they had the money to cover the loss, but it would hurt oh so much! Then the problem was how to pay it back. They couldn’t use the same banks to disperse the funds and doing so from their banks could compromise them. This just got nastier by the minute.
In Nirihuau, Chile, Sonia Sotomayor had been begging the banks for a small loan to fix and convert the ancestral home of her family into a bed and breakfast for the increasing number of tourists that visited the town and its surroundings. Within one hour of Nirihuau you could see a lunar desert or a flush micro-climate valley of exceptional beauty. You could fish for trout in the river, hunt for ducks, or face very challenging sheer walls that are a rock climber’s paradise. But the bank owned the only crummy hotel in town and they didn’t want the competition. Yet one good day the order came from head office in Santiago: issue the loan. Sonia almost fell off the chair when the surly little branch manager told her to sign the papers and the money would be credited to her account.
The same thing was happening all over the place. In Mozambique a fisherman obtained a loan for an outboard, in Laos a woman head-of-household received a loan to buy a taxi, in Mexico a small restaurant got money to expand. The lives of hundreds of thousands of people improved overnight and a small fraction of the earth’s population began the climb towards prosperity and survival. In time they would bring upwards millions to whom they could give fair and durable employment.
Marco was looking at the outcome of their move and trying to work out all the possibilities. So far he didn’t see any problems or consequences that could affect him, his family, or The Board. As far as the other Board members were concerned none of this had happened because they simply didn’t know.
Marco was very aware of Cartwright’s betrayal and continued to feed him bull that kept the sheik misinformed and who, anyway, was otherwise engaged. Marco also realized that the money was an inconvenience for Meredith and company but not a blow; not by far. The largest consequence was the disruption of their banking system. They would have to reconstruct it from the ground up and that took time and money. The problem was that their clients, satisfied that Meredith responded, wanted – no, needed – to continue with the cleansing of the eternal river of money that came from the illicit activities of so many. If Meredith did not take the money, others would and the clients might be lost forever. If he did take the money there was nowhere to send it. This generated a lot of pressure on the pipelines because many of the people that used Meredith also used the Carducci connection so demand grew significantly and the pipelines were working almost one way all the time because it was faster to return an empty car and load it with money again than to wait for a loaded one to come,
unload the marijuana and load it with money.
The sheik was listening to the group of IT experts that he had hired to cooperate with the IT experts that the banks had hired to determine how the money had vanished. They concluded correctly what had happened, they just didn’t know how or who. What was certain was that the security of the electronic banking systems had been breached and that since they didn’t know how it was done there was little that they could do to prevent it from happening again. The only thing that could be done was return to a manual system for the Meredith money. That way none of those banks could be breached and the money would be safe – cumbersome and slow, but ultimately safe. Now it was a question of determining who you could trust to do this process without stealing and without talking. The usual formula was applied: pay them very well and threaten them and their families to the umpteenth generation if they fail; thus started a very slow and difficult reconstruction of his network.
The Carducci Convergence Page 37