Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  She slowly tipped her seat back until it was almost horizontal, then closed her eyes, as if she were in analysis. “When he went overt, when he was publicly identified as a CIA officer, it wasn’t any easier then either. He worked all the time, a real slave to his career. So what did I do? I became a slave to my career, went into medicine, which in some ways is even worse.”

  I noticed she’d begun to cry, which I attributed to her being tired, or the trauma we’d both just been through.

  She continued, heaving a soulful sigh. “I guess I always thought that he and I would get to know each other better after he retired, and when I had a family. And now—” Her voice got small, choked, high-pitched. A little girl again. “And now, I’ll never…”

  She couldn’t continue, but I stroked her hair to let her know she didn’t need to.

  * * *

  The last time I saw Molly’s father was on a business trip to Washington. He had been Director of Central Intelligence for several months. I was in Washington on legal business. There was no good reason for me to call him from the Jefferson, where I was staying. Probably I wanted, on some level, to share in the excitement of Hal’s new importance, of having my father-in-law in such a prominent office. Selfish? Naturally. I wanted to bask in the reflected glory. No doubt, too, I wanted to return to CIA headquarters in some triumphal manner, even if the triumph was someone else’s.

  On the phone Hal said he’d be delighted to get together for a quick lunch or a drink (he’d become a health fanatic, had given up all alcohol; he’d drink some nonalcoholic beer or his favorite pseudo-cocktail, cranberry juice, seltzer, and lime).

  He sent a car and a driver for me to take me to McLean, which made me nervous: what if The Washington Post caught wind of Hal’s abuse of office? Harrison Sinclair, that avatar of rectitude, had sent a government limo, at taxpayer expense, to pick up his son-in-law. Who could have gotten a cab. Would I see my picture on the front page of tomorrow’s Post, getting into a big black government limo?

  Unlike my last time at CIA, when I skulked out with a cardboard box under one arm, trudging alone through the cavernous lobby to the parking lot, this time was indeed triumphal. I was met in the lobby by Sheila McAdams, Hal’s thirtyish, attractive executive assistant, who brought me up the elevator to Hal’s office.

  He radiated good health. He really did seem delighted to see me. Part of it, I think, was that he was excited to show off his new digs. We had lunch in his private dining room: Greek salads and grilled-eggplant sandwiches and tall, icy glasses of cranberry juice, seltzer, and lime.

  We talked for a bit, perfunctorily, about the business that had brought me to Washington. We talked about how the Agency had changed since the demise of the Soviet Union, about what he planned to do in his tenure as director. We gossiped about people we knew. A little political talk. Altogether, a pleasant if unremarkable lunch.

  But I will never forget something he said as I left. As I walked out, he put his arm around my shoulders and said: “I know we haven’t ever talked about what happened in Paris.”

  I looked quizzical.

  “What happened to you, I mean—”

  “Yes—” I said.

  “Someday I want us to talk,” he said. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

  I felt instantly nauseated. “Let’s talk now,” I said.

  I was relieved when he said, “I can’t.”

  “Your schedule must be—”

  “Not just that. I can’t. We’ll talk. Not now, but soon.”

  We never did.

  * * *

  When Molly and I arrived at Kloten airport, we took a Mercedes taxi into the center of Zurich. We passed the mammoth, newly renovated Hauptbahnhof, swerved around the statue of Alfred Escher, the nineteenth-century politician who’s credited with making Zurich a modern banking center.

  I had booked us at the Savoy Baur en Ville, the oldest hotel in the city and a favorite among well-to-do American lawyers and businessmen. It had been nicely renovated, in 1975, and was right on the Paradeplatz, near everything—and, most important, next to the Bahnhofstrasse, where nearly every other building is a bank.

  We signed in, and went up to our room, which was pleasant—a lot of brass and pearwood marquetry cabinets—and neither modern nor antique. We talked for a while until we were both too drowsy to continue. Once again she offered to get me a sedative; I refused. I watched Molly begin to drift off; I tried to join her. I desperately needed sleep, but it wouldn’t come. The pain in my hands and arms was surging with a tingling heat, and my mind was spinning with the events, the revelations, of the last several days.

  In one of the vaults under the Bahnhofstrasse, just a few yards from our hotel, lay the answer to what had happened to more than ten billion dollars in gold stolen from the former Soviet Union, the answer to the enigma of Sinclair’s death. In a few hours, quite likely, we’d be much closer to solving the mystery. I wished it were morning already.

  On the end table next to the base of the lamp was the International Herald-Tribune the hotel had left for us in the room. I picked it up and idly scanned the front page.

  One of the articles, a one-column piece on the right-hand side of the page, was headed by a photograph of a face that was by now quite familiar. Although I was not surprised to see the notice there, its contents were ominous.

  Last KGB Chief

  Is Found Slain

  in Northern Italy

  BY CRAIG RIMER

  WASHINGTON POST SERVICE

  ROME—Vladimir A. Orlov, the last head of the Soviet intelligence agency the KGB, was discovered dead by local police at his residence 25 kilometers from Siena. He was 72.

  Diplomatic sources here revealed that Mr. Orlov had been in hiding in the Tuscany region of Italy for several months since his defection from Russia.

  Italian authorities confirm that Mr. Orlov was killed in an armed attack. His assailants have not been identified, but are believed to be either political enemies or members of the Sicilian Mafia. According to unconfirmed reports, Mr. Orlov may have been engaged in illicit financial operations before his death.

  The Russian government refused to comment on Mr. Orlov’s death, but in a statement released this morning from Washington, the newly appointed head of the CIA, Alexander Truslow, said: “Vladimir Orlov presided over the dismantling of the greatest agency of Soviet oppression, for which we must all be grateful. We mourn his passing.”

  I sat up in bed, my heart pounding along with my throbbing head, hands, and arms. The adjacent article concerned the new leader of Germany. “Vogel,” the headline read, “Embraces American Ties.”

  It began: “Chancellor-elect Wilhelm Vogel of Germany, whose recent landslide election occurred just days after the German stock market crash plunged the nation into widespread panic, has invited the newly confirmed head of the CIA, Alexander Truslow, to Germany for consultations on how best to ensure stable U.S.–German relations. The new intelligence chief accepted the invitation immediately as his first official state visit, and is believed to be flying to Bonn for a meeting with the chancellor-elect as well as Mr. Truslow’s German counterpart, the director of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or the German Federal Intelligence Service, Hans Koenig…”

  And I knew that Truslow was in danger.

  It was the juxtaposition.

  Vladimir Orlov had warned about hard-line Russians seizing his country. What was it that my British correspondent friend Miles Preston had said about a weak Russia being necessary for a strong Germany? Orlov, who with Harrison Sinclair had tried to save Russia, was dead. A new German leader had been vaulted into power in the wake of a weakened, straitened Russia.

  Conspiracy theorists, of whom (as I’ve said) I’m not one, like to write and talk about neo-Nazis, as if all of Germany wanted nothing more than a return to the Third Reich. It’s nonsense, absolute foolishness—the Germans I came to know, eventually to like, during my brief sojourn in Leipzig, were nothing like that. They were
n’t Nazis, or brownshirts; they weren’t swastika-wearers, or anything of the sort. They were good, decent, patriotic people, no different in essence from the average Russian, the average American, the average Swede, the average Cambodian.

  But the point wasn’t the people, was it?

  Germany, man, Miles had said. The wave of the future. We’re about to see a new German dictatorship. And it won’t happen accidentally, Ben. It’s been in the planning for a good long time.

  In the planning …

  And Toby had warned of an impending assassination plot.

  And then a light went on, a flash of illumination in the murky darkness, a brief moment of insight.

  It was the picture of the slain Vladimir Orlov that did it. He had talked about the American stock market crash of 1987.

  A stock market “crash,” to use your word, is not necessarily a disaster to one who is prepared for it. Very much the opposite; a group of savvy investors can make huge profits in a stock market crash.…

  Did the Wise Men, I had asked, make money in the stock market collapse?

  Certainly, he had replied. Using computerized program trading and fourteen hundred separate trading accounts, calibrating precisely with Tokyo’s Nikkei and pulling the levers at exactly the right time, and with the right velocity, they not only made vast sums of money in the crash, Mr. Ellison, they caused it.

  If the Wise Men had caused the significant—yet, at the same time, relatively benign stock market crisis of 1987—

  —had they done the same in Germany?

  There was, Alex had warned darkly, a cancer of corruption in CIA. A corruption that included gathering and using top-secret economic intelligence from around the world to manipulate stock markets, and thus nations.

  Could this be?

  And could, therefore, there be a darker motive for Chancellor-elect Vogel’s invitation to Alexander Truslow to visit Germany?

  What if there were protests in Bonn against this American spy chief? After all, neo-Nazi demonstrations were in the news constantly. Who would be all that surprised if Alexander Truslow were slain by German “extremists”? It was a perfect, logical plan.

  Alex, who must certainly know too much about the Wise Men, about the German stock market crash …

  It was nine o’clock in the evening in Washington by the time I reached Miles Preston.

  “The German stock market crash?” he echoed gruffly as if I had taken leave of my senses. “Ben, the German crash happened because the Germans finally formed a single, unified stock market, the Deutsche Börse. It couldn’t have happened four years ago. Now tell me: What brings about this interest in the German economy all of a sudden?”

  “I can’t say, Miles—”

  “But what are you doing? You’re in Europe somewhere, am I right? Where?”

  “Let’s just say Europe, and leave it at that.”

  “What are you looking into?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Ben Ellison—we’re friends. Level with me.”

  “If I could, I would. But I can’t.”

  “Look here—all right, fair enough. If you’re going to stay with it, at least let me help you. I’ll ask around, dig around for you, talk to some friends. Tell me where I can reach you.”

  “Can’t—”

  “Then you call me—”

  “I’ll be in touch, Miles,” I said, and terminated the call.

  Only then did I begin to have an inkling.

  For a long while I sat there, on the edge of the bed, staring out the window at the elegant view of the Paradeplatz, the buildings glinting in the sunshine, and I was momentarily paralyzed with a great, dull terror.

  FORTY-THREE

  I didn’t sleep; I couldn’t.

  Instead, I placed a call to one of the several lawyers I knew in Zurich, and was fortunate enough to find him in town, and in his office. John Knapp was an attorney specializing in corporate law—the only practice duller than patent law, which pleased me. He had been living in Zurich, working for an outpost of a prestigious American law firm, for five years or so. He also knew more about the Swiss banking system than anyone I knew, having studied at the University of Zurich and supervised quite a few less-than-reputable secret transactions for some of his clients. Knapp and I had known each other since law school, where we were in the same year and section, and we occasionally played squash together. I suspected that deep down he disliked me as much as I disliked him, but our business dealings frequently brought us together, and so we both faked an easygoing, boisterous comradeship so integral to male friendships.

  I left a note for the sleeping Molly, telling her I’d be back in an hour or two. Then, in front of the hotel I got into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the Kronenhalle on Ramistrasse.

  * * *

  John Knapp was a short, slim man with a terminal case of short man’s disease. Like a chihuahua trying to menace a Saint Bernard, he swaggered and affected imperious gestures that were faintly ridiculous, cartoonlike. He had small brown eyes and close-cropped brown hair speckled with gray, cut in bangs that made him look like a dissolute monk. After all this time in Zurich, he’d begun to take on the local coloration and dress like a Swiss banker, he wore an English-tailored blue suit and burgundy-striped shirt that probably came from Charvet in Paris; certainly his woven silk cuff links did. He’d arrived fifteen minutes late—almost certainly a deliberate power move. This was a guy who’d read all the books on power and success and how to do a power lunch and how to get a corner office.

  The bar at the Kronenhalle was so crowded I could barely squeeze through to get a seat. But the patrons were clearly the right sort of people, the Zurich glitterati. Knapp, who liked high living, collected places like this. He regularly skied at St. Moritz and Gstaad.

  “Jesus, what happened to your hands?” he asked as he shook my bandaged right hand a little too firmly and saw me wince.

  “Bad manicure,” I said.

  His look of horror transformed instantly into one of exaggerated hilarity. “You sure it’s not paper cuts from your exciting life of thumbing through patent applications?”

  I smiled, tempted to unleash my arsenal of put-downs (corporate lawyers are especially vulnerable, I’ve learned), but said nothing. It’s important to keep in mind, I think, that a bore is someone who talks when you want him to listen. And in any case, within a moment he’d forgotten all about the bandaged hands.

  After we’d gotten through the preliminaries, he asked, “So what the hell brings you to Z-town?”

  I was drinking a Scotch; he made a point of ordering a kirschwasser in Schweitzerdeutsch, the Swiss dialect of German.

  “This time, I’m afraid, I’m going to have to be a little circumspect,” I said. “Business.”

  “Ah-ha,” he said significantly. No doubt he’d heard from one or another of our mutual friends that I’d done time in the Agency. Probably he thought that was the key to my legal success (and, of course, he wouldn’t be so far off). In any case, I figured that with Knapp it was better to be mysterious than to give a bland cover tale.

  I pretended to relent a bit. “I’ve got a client who has assets here he’s trying to locate.”

  “Isn’t that sort of outside your line of work?”

  “Not entirely. It’s related to a deal my firm is putting together. If you don’t mind, I can’t say a whole lot more than that.”

  He pursed his lips and grinned, as if he knew more about what I was alluding to than even I did. “Let’s hear it.”

  So high was the ambient noise level here that the thought of trying to read his mind was preposterous. I did try in a few instances, leaning toward him, focusing as hard as I could, but nothing. Still, there was nothing I wanted to know from him that he wouldn’t say aloud. To say nothing of how banal, how mind-numbingly and teeth-achingly dull Knapp’s thoughts surely were.

  “How much do you know about gold?”

  “How much do you want to know?”

  “I’
m trying to track down a deposit of gold made to one of the banks here.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He snorted derisively. “There’re four hundred banks registered here, big guy. Almost five thousand branch offices. And there’re millions of ounces of new gold coming into Switzerland every year, from South Africa or wherever. Good luck.”

  “Which ones are the biggest?”

  “The biggest banks? The Big Three—the Anstalt, the Verein, and the Gesellschaft.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Sorry. The Anstalt’s what we call Credit Suisse, or Schweizerische Kreditanstalt. The Verein is the Swiss Bank Corporation. The Gesellschaft is the Union Bank of Switzerland. So you’re looking for gold deposited in one of the big three, only you don’t know which one?”

  “Right.”

  “How much gold?”

  “Tons.”

  “Tons?” Another snort. “I doubt it seriously. What are we talking about here, a country?”

  I shook my head. “A prosperous enterprise.”

  He gave a low whistle. A blond woman in a pale green, tight-fitting, spaghetti-strap outfit glanced over at him, mistakenly thinking she was being admired, then quickly looked away. Presumably she had no interest in a dissolute monk in a blue suit. “So what’s the problem?” he asked, draining his kirschwasser and snapping his fingers at the waiter to signal for another. “Someone misplaced the account number?”

  “Stay with me for a second,” I said. I was beginning to sound like Knapp, and I didn’t like it. “If a significant amount of gold were shipped into Zurich and placed into a numbered account, where would it go, physically?”

  “Vaults. It’s an increasing problem for the banks here, actually. They’ve got all this money and gold to stash, and they’re running out of space and the municipal laws won’t permit them to put up taller buildings, so they have to burrow underground like gophers.”