Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  Wrong on several counts.

  More apt was the gripe by the Roman poet Plautus, two hundred years before the birth of Christ: “I hate gold; it has persuaded many men in many matters to do evil.”

  Quite right.

  I was disturbed from my reverie by the sight of Molly sinking to the concrete floor, her back against the wall of gold bullion. The vitality seemed to have drained from her body. She had not fainted, but she appeared woozy.

  “Who’s the other owner?” she asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “A guess?”

  “Not even that. Not yet.”

  She wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged them to her chest. “How much?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Gold. How much gold is here?” Her eyes were closed.

  I surveyed the chamber. The stack was about six feet tall. Each bar was nine inches long, three inches wide, and an inch thick.

  It took me quite some time, but I counted 526 stacks, each six feet high. Which was 3,156 linear feet. Which was … 37,879 gold bars.

  Was I calculating right?

  I remembered reading an article once about the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. I called it to mind. The Fed’s gold vault, which is half the length of a football field, holds something like 126 billion dollars worth of gold if you calculate it at the market price of $400 an ounce. I didn’t know what gold was selling for when Orlov and Sinclair raided the Soviet national treasury, but $400 an ounce sounded about right, for the sake of calculation.

  No. That wouldn’t do it.

  All right. The largest gold compartment in the Fed’s vault contained a wall of gold ten feet wide by ten feet high by eighteen feet deep. Which was 107,000 bars. Worth seventeen billion dollars.

  My head swam with fevered calculations. The volume here was about a third of that.

  I returned to my original calculation of 37,879 gold bars. Gold was now selling at not $400 an ounce, but more like $330. Okay. At $330 per ounce, one gold bar, of four hundred troy ounces, was worth $132,000.

  Which brought us to …

  Five billion dollars.

  “Five,” I said.

  “Five billion?”

  “Right.”

  “I can’t even conceive of that,” Molly said. “It’s sitting here, stacked up—I’m leaning against it—and I can’t conceive of five billion dollars—and all mine—”

  “No.”

  “Half of it?”

  “No. It belongs to Russia.”

  She fixed me with a cold stare, then said: “You’re no fun.”

  “You’re right.”

  “He said ten,” I interrupted.

  “What?”

  “There’s maybe five billion here. Orlov told me ten billion dollars.”

  “Then he was wrong. Or lying to you.”

  “Or half of it is gone.”

  “Gone? What are you getting at, Ben?”

  “I thought we’d finally found the gold,” I mused aloud. “And we found only part of it.”

  “What’s this?” she said, startled.

  “What?”

  Sandwiched in the crack between two vertical stacks of gold, at floor level, was a small square ecru envelope.

  “What the hell—?” she said, tugging at it.

  It came out easily.

  Her eyes wide, she turned the blank envelope over, saw that there was nothing on either side, and gingerly tore open the flap.

  It was a blue-bordered card—a Tiffany’s correspondence card, from the look of it—which bore the name Harrison Sinclair in capital letters at the top.

  Something was written at the center of the card in her father’s hand.

  “It’s—” Molly began, but I interrupted.

  “Don’t say it aloud. Show it to me.”

  Two lines.

  The first was: “Box 322. Banque de Raspail.”

  The second was: “Boulevard Raspail, 128, Paris 7e.”

  That was all. The name and address of a bank in Paris. A box number, presumably a safe-deposit box. What for? What was this supposed to mean? Boxes, literally, within boxes: that was what this whole matter had come to.

  “What—?” she said.

  “Come on,” I said impatiently, pocketing the card. “Let’s have another chat with Eisler.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  “A dead man,” according to Plutarch’s Lives, “cannot bite.” It was, I believe, John Dryden who centuries ago wrote: “Dead men tell no tales.”

  Wrong, both of them. Hal Sinclair continued to tell tales long after his funeral, tales that remained mystifying.

  The brilliant old spymaster Harrison Sinclair had surprised hundreds of people in his six decades on this earth—friends and associates, superiors and subordinates, enemies around the world and at Langley. And even after his death, it seemed, the surprises, the twists and reversals, did not stop. Who would ever have expected as much on the trail of a dead man?

  By the time Molly and I had had a rapid whispered conference, Eisler’s personal assistant was waiting in the corridor outside the vault. We had summoned her and demanded immediately to see the director.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked, her face radiating concern.

  “Yes,” Molly said but did not elaborate.

  “We will be glad to help in any way,” she said, escorting us into the elevator and up to Eisler’s office. She was all business, but her Swiss reserve had melted somewhat: she chirped familiarly, as if we’d all become old friends in the last hour.

  Molly conversed with her politely, while I kept silent. In my right front pocket I fingered the Glock.

  Getting it into the bank, through the metal detectors, was no mean feat, and for that I must acknowledge my CIA training. A casual acquaintance of mine from my Agency days, Charles Stone (whose extraordinary saga is no doubt familiar to you), once described to me how he had smuggled a Glock pistol through an airline security gate at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. The Glock is predominantly, though not entirely, composed of plastic, and Stone (rather ingeniously, I think) disassembled the gun into its components, placed the small metal parts into a sticky shaving kit and the larger metal parts into the frame of a garment bag—both of which went through the luggage X-ray machine—and the plastic pieces on his person.

  Unfortunately, Stone’s technique wouldn’t have worked here, because I didn’t have the luxury of dealing with both a metal detector and a luggage X-ray. Everything had to be on my body, and the gun would unquestionably have set off the alarms.

  So I’d devised my own method, taking advantage of an anomaly in all metal detectors. These machines are nowhere near as sensitive at their extremities as they are at the center of the field. And the Glock is made up of a relatively small amount of steel. What I did, therefore, was to attach the pistol to a long nylon cord affixed to my belt and running through a small hole I’d cut in my right-hand front trouser pocket. The gun dangled in my right pant leg, close to my shoe; I held it steady by keeping a hand in my pocket and gripping the cord as I passed through the metal detector gate. Essentially, I was kicking the gun through the detector at the perimeter of the magnetic field, where it is so attenuated that it can detect virtually nothing. Naturally, as I went through, I was almost catatonic with fear that the trick wouldn’t work, that my attempt to spoof the metal detector would somehow go wrong. But I passed through without incident, and by stopping off in the restroom shortly thereafter I had been able to retrieve the small pistol and place it comfortably in my pants pocket.

  Dr. Eisler, who appeared even more perturbed than his assistant, offered us coffee. We politely declined. His brow wrinkled in concern as he sat down on the sofa opposite us.

  “Now then,” he said in his gravelly yet refined voice. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “The contents of the vault,” I said, “are incomplete.”

  He glared at me a long, long time, then shrugged imperiously. “We know no
thing of the contents of a client’s vault. We are obligated only to maintain all security precautions, all—”

  “The bank is liable.”

  He gave a dry laugh. “I’m afraid not. And in any case, your wife is merely the co-owner.”

  “A rather large quantity of gold,” I said, “seems to be missing. Rather too much to misplace. I’d like to know where it might have gone.”

  Eisler exhaled through his nostrils and nodded kindly. He seemed to be relieved. “Mr. Ellison—Ms. Sinclair—surely you both understand that I am not free to discuss any transactions—”

  “Since it was made on my account,” Molly broke in, “I have the right to know where it was moved to!”

  Eisler hesitated, nodded again. “Madam, sir. In the case of numbered accounts, our responsibility is to permit access to anyone who fulfills the requirements stipulated by the person or persons who have established the account. Beyond that, in order to protect all involved, we must maintain total confidentiality.”

  “We are talking,” Molly said steely, “about my account. I want to know where the gold went!”

  “Ms. Sinclair, confidentiality in these matters is a tradition of our nation’s banking system and one which the Bank of Zurich is compelled to observe. I am awfully sorry. If there is anything further we can do—”

  In one smooth motion I pulled out the Glock and aimed it at his high, broad forehead.

  “This pistol is loaded,” I said. “I am fully prepared to use it. Don’t”—I released the safety when I saw him begin to slide his foot to the right, ever so subtly, toward what I now saw was a silent alarm button at the base of his desk, a few inches away—“don’t be so foolish as to hit the silent alarm.”

  I moved closer, so that the barrel of the pistol was barely an inch or two from his forehead.

  I hardly had to concentrate now, his thoughts were flowing so discernibly now. I could pick up on a great deal: rushes of thought, mostly in German, but with the occasional patch of English as he readied to speak sentences, objections, declamations of outrage.

  “We are, as you see, desperate,” I said. My expression let him know that desperate though I was, I retained full composure and was prepared to shoot at any moment.

  “If you are so foolhardy as to shoot me,” Eisler said with astonishing equanimity, “you will accomplish nothing. For one thing, you will not leave this room. Not only will the gunshot be audible to my secretary, but there are motion sensors in this room that—”

  He was lying; that much I could pick up. And he was understandably scared: this had never happened to him before. He continued: “Even assuming I were to give you the information you seek, which I will not, you will certainly not make it out of the bank.”

  On that, I concluded, he seemed to be telling the truth; but it did not take extrasensory perception to realize the logic in what he was saying.

  “I am prepared, however, to call an end to this idiocy,” he went on. “If you put down this gun and leave at once, I shall not report this. I understand that you are desperate. But you gain nothing by threatening me.”

  “We’re not threatening. We want transaction information pertaining to the account which rightfully, by American and Swiss banking laws, belongs to my wife.”

  A few beads of sweat began to run down his forehead, starting at the smooth bald crown of his head and coursing across the deeply grooved parallel lines inscribed there. I could see that his resolve was weakening.

  I heard a rush of thoughts, some angry, some pleading. He was going through an agony of indecision.

  “Has anyone removed gold from this vault?” I asked quietly.

  Nein, I heard distinctly. Nein.

  He closed his eyes, seeming to brace for the shot that would end his life. The sweat came down in rivulets now.

  “I cannot say,” he said.

  No one had removed any gold. But …

  Suddenly, I had a thought. “There was other gold, though, wasn’t there? Gold that wasn’t moved into the vault.”

  I held the gun steady, and then moved it slowly closer until the end of the barrel touched his damp temple. I pressed it against the skin. It compressed with an easy elasticity, forming tiny stretch marks all around the barrel’s end.

  “Please,” he whispered. I could barely hear him.

  His thoughts were coming fast and jumbled now, incoherent; I could not make them out.

  “An answer,” I said, “and we will leave you.”

  He swallowed, closed his eyes, and then opened them again. “A shipment,” he whispered. “Ten billion dollars worth of gold bullion. We received it all here at the Bank of Zurich.”

  “Where did it go?”

  “Some of it was moved into the vault. That is the gold you saw.”

  “And the rest?”

  He swallowed again. “Liquidated. We assisted in its sale through gold brokers we deal with on a confidential basis. It was melted down and then recast.”

  “What was the value?”

  “Perhaps five … perhaps six…”

  “Billion.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was converted to liquid assets? Cash?”

  “It was wire-transferred.”

  “Where?”

  He closed his eyes again. The muscles around them tightened as if he were praying.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Where?”

  “I mustn’t say.”

  “Was the money wired to Paris?”

  “No … please, I cannot—”

  “Where was the money wired?”

  Deutschland … Deutschland … München …

  “Was the money wired to Munich?”

  “You will have to kill me,” he whispered, his eyes still closed. “I am prepared to die.”

  His resolve surprised me. What possessed him? What sustained him in this foolish resolve? Was he attempting to call my bluff? By now he had to know, surely, that I wasn’t bluffing. Or if I was, with this gun at his temple, what sane man would take the chance that I was bluffing, that the gun wasn’t loaded? He would rather be killed than violate Swiss banking confidentiality!

  There was a faint liquid sound, and I saw that he had lost control of his bladder. A dark spot spread in a large irregular area across the crotch of his pants. His fright was genuine. His eyes were still closed, and he was frozen still, paralyzed with fear.

  But I did not let up; I couldn’t.

  Compressing the barrel still harder against his temple, I said slowly: “All we want is a name. Tell us where the money was wired. To whom. Give us a name.”

  Now Eisler’s entire body was racked by a visible tremor. His eyes were not just closed, the lids were squeezed tight, screwed up in little wrinkled knots of muscular tension. The sweat poured down his face, across his jawline, down his neck. Sweat darkened the lapels of his gray suit and spotted his tie.

  “All we want,” I said, “is a name.”

  Molly watched me, her eyes brimming with tears, from time to time wincing. The scene was too much for her to stand. Stick with it, Mol, I wanted to say. Hang in there.

  “You know what name I want.”

  And within a minute I had a name.

  He remained silent. His lips trembled as if he were about to weep, but he did not. He did not speak.

  He thought.

  He did not speak.

  I was about to lower the gun, when another question occurred to me. “When was the last time funds were transferred to him from this bank?”

  This morning, Eisler thought.

  He squeezed his eyes tighter. Droplets of perspiration rolled down his nose, onto his lips.

  This morning.

  And then I said, lowering the gun, “Well. I can see you are a man of steel will.”

  Slowly, he opened his eyes and looked directly at me. There was great fear in them, of course, but there was something more. A glint of triumph, it seemed; a flash of defiance.

  Finally, he spoke. His voice cracke
d. “If you will leave my office at once—”

  “You haven’t talked,” I said. “I admire that.”

  “If you will leave—”

  “I do not plan to kill you,” I went on. “You’re a man of honor; you’re doing your job. Instead, if we can agree that this never happened—if you agree not to report this, and agree to let both of us leave the bank undisturbed, we will call an end to this. We will leave.”

  I knew, of course, that the moment we left the bank he would call the police—in his position, I’d have done the same thing—but this would buy us a few much-needed minutes.

  “Yes,” he said. His voice cracked again. He cleared his throat. “Leave here immediately. And if you have any sense at all, which I seriously doubt, you will leave Zurich at once.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  We strode quickly out of the bank and then accelerated to a run down Bahnhofstrasse. Eisler seemed to have abided by his agreement to let us out of the bank (for his own safety and that of his employees), but by now, I calculated, he had certainly called in both bank security and the municipal police. He had our real names, though not our cover names, which was an encouragement, but it was probably only a matter of hours—if that long—before we were apprehended. And once the Wise Men’s forces knew that we were here, if they didn’t already—but I didn’t want to think along those lines.

  “Did you get it?” Molly asked as we ran.

  “Yes. But we can’t talk now.” I was hyper-alert, keeping a close watch on all passersby, searching for that one face that I recognized, the washed-out face of the blond would-be assassin I’d first seen in Boston.

  Not here.

  But a moment later I sensed that we once again had company.

  There are dozens of different techniques employed to follow a man, and the really good operatives are seldom caught. The problem for the blond man was that I had “made” him, in surveillance argot: I’d recognized him. Except in the loosest sort of tail, he couldn’t hope to follow me unnoticed. And indeed, I didn’t see him anywhere near us.

  But, as I was to learn soon, there were others, tails I didn’t recognize. In the crowded foot traffic of Bahnhofstrasse, it would be difficult if not impossible to spot a tail.