The Palace

by Reich, Christopher

  The Federal Republic of Germany was a liberal country, in politics and worldview. Still, Shaka was an outsider, struggling to learn a new language, his English scarred by a strong Afrikaans accent. He took his mother’s family name but thought of himself simply as “Shaka.”

  By temperament, he was possessed of a short fuse and a simmering rage. An offhand glance, the wrong word, a misunderstood gesture, could set him off. People avoided him. He had few friends. He found solace in sport. His schoolmates had been playing soccer for years, real soccer—not kicking a deflated ball across a dirt field. He chose gymnastics instead. It was a good fit, the various disciplines tailor-made for an unnaturally strong and agile young man. His favorite was the rings. No one could hold the “iron cross” longer. His body grew accordingly, his arms, shoulders, and chest a tangled knot of muscle. There was talk of the national team, a trip to the Olympic Games in Sydney. An argument ended his dreams. Athletes did not shatter the jaw of their coach, no matter how badly they disagreed with him.

  From high school to the army. By now he spoke German fluently, as well as English, Afrikaans, and his father’s Xhosa. His language skills and innate intelligence combined with his physical prowess made him a natural for special forces, the GSG 9—the Grenzschutzgruppe 9. He thrived in the atmosphere of discipline and comradery, for once accepted as an equal. He trained with the Delta Force at Fort Bragg and the SAS at Hereford. He deployed to Kosovo and Afghanistan. In combat, he discovered his true self. He was a killer, especially adept with a knife and his bare hands. No one moved more quietly. They called him “The Wind.”

  An altercation with a superior ended his military career. A pattern was emerging, an inability to control his temper, a disposition to violence toward his peers, mental unrest.

  He returned to his home, to the new South Africa. It was 2008. There was only one place for a man of his training. The Hawks, formally known as the Directorate for Priority Criminal Investigation, in reality the president’s Praetorian Guard. A sniper, a master of hand-to-hand combat, a man in peak physical condition, Shaka quickly found himself assigned to “Night Operations,” a euphemism for the death squads charged with liquidating the president’s most stubborn enemies, and sometimes his friends, too.

  When the minister of finance refused to pay a reasonable percentage of the funds he skimmed from the education budget, Shaka infiltrated his luxury, gated community in Cape Town and cut his throat while he slept between his two wives.

  When the president’s cousin, holder of a diamond concession in Kimberley, balked at a royalty fee of ten million dollars, Shaka crossed thirty kilometers of open veldt, breached a twenty-foot security fence, killed two bodyguards, and gained entry to his home in order to cut off the man’s left hand. A warning, nothing more. The cousin promptly paid up.

  Word of Shaka’s reputation spread in those circles where men of his peculiar skill set were appreciated. One day he received a call from his former commander, General Moltke. Moltke wanted Shaka’s services for a new army, a secret force charged with the protection of Europe, a rampart against the barbarian hordes. Shaka was a good German. Given the current state of affairs, surely he could appreciate the urgency of the request. The irony was not lost on him. He would be protecting Europe against people like himself. He accepted at once.

  And so here he was in Bangkok, studying his hands beneath the glare of a streetlamp. The skin on his fingertips had started to go black with frostbite from his excursion in the Alps.

  Shaka checked his phone. An app showed a map of the city, a pulsing red dot indicating Riske’s location. He was not tracing Riske’s phone. That would require cooperation from the local authorities. Strictly a last resort. Shaka disliked working with intelligence agencies, friendly or not. The same went for law enforcement. He preferred to operate below the surface. Under the radar, so to speak. Unseen and unbeknownst. The pulsing red dot came from an RFID transmitter—radio-frequency identification.

  He’d tagged Riske as the American passed through baggage claim at Suvarnabhumi Airport. It had been easy enough, the sea of humanity making for the exits practically doing his job for him. A nudge from the rear. One body jostling another. A slight stinging sensation, gone before it could be questioned. It was over in a split second.

  A miniature surgical instrument, what they called a “mosquito,” had implanted the device beneath the skin of Riske’s upper arm, a spot nearly impossible to see without the help of a mirror, the transmitter smaller than a grain of rice.

  Shaka sent a text. R has the goods. Permission to intercede?

  The reply: Negative. Stand down. Possible additional targets. Await instructions.

  Shaka frowned. It was a mistake to leave when the target could be so easily taken. He debated disobeying the order. He could be upstairs and inside Riske’s room in a minute and back on the street a minute after that. He felt a sudden throbbing at the base of his neck. Do it, he thought. Get it over with. The man is exhausted. He’s been on the move one way or another for more than a day. There won’t be a better opportunity.

  And then, his training. Years in the military taught to obey his superiors. As much as he trusted his instinct, knew his course of action was the wiser one, he could not act.

  Shaka was a servant to his past.

  So be it.

  Another time, then.

  Soon.

  Chapter 23

  Tel Aviv

  Midnight.

  Lights burned in the offices of the SON Group. Danni Pine sat at her desk, frustrated, tired, at the end of her tether. She’d left the office just once since the laptop and phone had arrived from Thailand, allowing herself a shower, a nap, and a change of clothes. At some point she’d taken Luca Borgia’s urgency as her own. She didn’t like it when someone questioned either her efficacy or her integrity. Borgia had done both. She meant to prove him wrong.

  “Major?”

  “Danni?”

  Danni raised her head. Dov and Isaac crowded the doorway. “If you tell me one more time you can’t do it,” she said, “you’re fired. You can go to the Galilee. Join a kibbutz. Grow grapes. Make wine.”

  “We did it,” said Dov, meekly. “Finally.”

  “Got it,” said Isaac, nodding.

  Danni motioned them forward.

  The engineers advanced, stopping at Danni’s desk. Neither man took a seat.

  “Speak,” she said. “You’ve kept me waiting long enough.”

  “He fragged the hard drive,” said Isaac. “Used some Russian software we haven’t seen in eons. Old, but good.”

  “We had to start from scratch, retrieve the—”

  “Spare me the details,” said Danni, hand raised. “What did you learn?”

  A pause. Isaac looked at Dov, who cleared his throat. “He cleaned them out.”

  “Top to bottom. Emptied all the drawers.”

  “I’ll need you to be more specific unless, that is, you expect me to tell Mr. Borgia that Rafael de Bourbon stole his underwear.”

  “Specific?” Isaac checked the tablet he used for diagnostics. “Let’s see. He stole 2.7 million files, eight hundred thousand emails, and three years of text messages between PetroSaud’s top executives.”

  “So that’s who this is about? PetroSaud?”

  The engineers nodded.

  Danni knew the name. Over the past seventy-two hours she’d versed herself on all of Luca Borgia’s businesses. She had a nose for shady dealings.

  “Texts? How did he get those?”

  “All digital correspondence conducted on company hardware was copied and saved to a central hard drive.”

  Of course it was. They did the same. “Go on, then. What did you learn?”

  “You didn’t ask us to read the take,” said Dov.

  Danni regarded him from beneath her brow. Maybe she allowed herself a hint of a smile. Please.

  Isaac cleared his throat. “PetroSaud is a dirty shop.”

  “Smart, but dirty,” added Dov. �
��And greedy.”

  “Essentially, they were helping sovereign wealth funds defraud their investors.”

  “Encouraging them, even. Instructing the fund managers how to pull off the thefts. Phony oil leases, shell companies, the whole shebang.”

  “How much?” asked Danni.

  “Billions,” said Isaac.

  “Lots of billions,” said Dov. “And they were taking commissions on each transaction. Big commissions.”

  “Mega,” said Isaac.

  “Is that right?” Danni tapped a piece of misshapen lead on the table. It was the remnants of a Syrian bullet taken from her leg. “And De Bourbon…I take it he was in on it?”

  Isaac shook his head. “Turns out he was the one honest guy. They tried to lure him in. He refused.”

  “But that’s not the problem,” said Dov.

  “What is?”

  “His bonus.”

  “Explain.”

  “De Bourbon stole the files because PetroSaud balked at paying him a bonus they’d promised him.”

  “So this whole thing is just so De Bourbon can get his bonus?” said Danni.

  “Five million Swiss francs,” said Dov. “I’d have done the same.”

  Danni considered this. De Bourbon’s motivations weren’t her concern, nor were PetroSaud’s crimes. She’d been hired to retrieve information, not to deliberate on the actions of someone she didn’t know. Still, she was bothered.

  “There’s more,” said Isaac.

  Of course there is, thought Danni.

  “Someone else is pulling the strings. Not PetroSaud.”

  Danni sensed she was treading on dangerous ground. She tapped the piece of lead faster.

  “The fund managers didn’t keep all the money for themselves,” said Isaac. “They wired a percentage of the money they stole to a bank.”

  “The Bank of Liechtenstein,” said Dov. “Vaduz branch.”

  “How much?” asked Danni.

  “In total, six billion dollars.”

  Danni swallowed. The numbers were making her dizzy. “Do we know who the account at the Bank of Liechtenstein belongs to?”

  “Brick wall,” said Isaac.

  “Dead end,” said Dov. Then, with a glint in his eye: “But we can find out.”

  “We can find out anything,” added Isaac. “Say the word.”

  Danni shook her head. She had a very good idea to whom the account in Liechtenstein belonged. “And the email De Bourbon sent prior to his arrest. Did you get that, too?”

  “L dot L-i at F-T dot com.”

  “A name, please, boys.”

  “London Li. An investigative reporter with the Financial Times.”

  Danni spun in her chair, palming the chunk of lead. She remembered the flash of the policeman’s pistol, the sharp stinging in her thigh. On that night in Damascus, she had had something in her possession the Syrians wanted. Something they were willing to kill for.

  She didn’t know who London Li was, but she did know the Financial Times. There was no more powerful a news organization. And she knew what any investigative journalist would do if she learned about sovereign wealth funds defrauding investors of billions of dollars. “What did De Bourbon tell her?”

  “Not much. No names. No countries. Just a few clues.”

  “Is it enough to go on?”

  “Yes,” said Isaac, without hesitation.

  “Probably,” said Dov. “It would be for me.”

  Danni slapped her palms on the desk. Meeting concluded. It was a gesture she’d learned from her father. “Give me everything you have.”

  “Sent to your box before we came up,” said Dov.

  “You’re good boys.” Danni thanked the engineers and sent them on their way, telling them to get a good night’s sleep and, for God’s sake, to shower before coming back tomorrow.

  Danni opened the drawer of the cabinet behind her and removed a bottle of Wyborowa, pouring herself a generous measure of the Polish vodka. Ah, Signor Borgia. Ah, Luca. Not industrial espionage at all, at least not the way she saw it. More like blackmail or extortion. Or…justice. Though not from Borgia’s point of view.

  She drank her vodka in one swallow, enjoying the burn, how her eyes watered. This is why we do not do business with private individuals or enterprises. Certainly, they had an obligation to Borgia. Without him, she would not be sitting at this desk. The SON Group would not exist. And yet…

  The Saudis had implanted SON software in a journalist’s phone and used it to read every piece of correspondence on the mobile device, track his every move, listen to his phone conversations, read his text messages, and, in the end, lure him to a meeting and execute him. Would not a journalist who threatened to expose the theft of so many billions of dollars merit a similar fate?

  And what of Rafael de Bourbon?

  Danni had no reason to believe Luca Borgia was a murderer. Then again, she had no reason not to. In her former profession, one erred on the side of caution or one died.

  Danni knew whose name was on the account at the Bank of Liechtenstein.

  And yet…

  She poured herself another drink, then picked up the phone. The warm baritone voice answered promptly. “Luca? It’s Danni Pine. I have some news. You had better sit down.”

  Chapter 24

  Singapore

  The Lion City.

  London Li was playing tourist in her hometown. Phone at the ready to snap a photo, she walked down Orchard Road marveling at the glittering malls, each fancier than the last, taking in the succession of luxury boutiques. Prada, Gucci, Burberry. On and on.

  London stopped at the corner, waiting for the light to turn. Mercedes, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche. The cars zipped past. Did anyone still drive Japanese cars? Oh yes, a Lexus. And every one of them slapped with a two hundred percent duty upon landing. This was the Asian miracle on steroids.

  The light changed. London crossed the street, swallowed by a sea of pedestrians, most of them her age or younger, and far better dressed. She wore a pair of old shorts, a loose T-shirt, a floppy brimmed sun hat with her hair tucked up, cheap sunglasses, and a pair of flip-flops. A mainlander, people would say. A country mouse. From Chongqing, not Shanghai, bless her soul.

  Orchard Road was a four-lane thoroughfare, Singapore’s Fifth Avenue, Rodeo Drive, and Champs-Élysées rolled into one, with a shot of adrenaline added for good measure. The architecture, the design, the overwhelming “Wow” of it all. Everything so clean, modern, and, dare she say it…Singaporean. The entire area sparkled with success, optimism, the indomitability of the human spirit. Everything really was possible.

  As cynical as they come, a born doubter, the devil’s advocate’s best friend, London couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride. Fifty years ago Singapore was another Asian backwater, located at the tip of the Malay Peninsula one degree north of the equator. For centuries it had existed on fishing, the export of natural resources—rubber, teak, a little oil—and, since 1830, the largesse of the British Empire.

  In 1965, after declaring its independence, things changed. Some kind of benevolent entrepreneurial spirit swept down from the heavens and, by the grace of Buddha, Allah, Shiva, Jesus Christ—all saviors welcome—blessed Singapore with an unparalleled period of prosperity. Of course, hard work had something to do with it. Long hours. The legendary Chinese work ethic. A religious devotion to saving. In one generation, the city-state went from developing to developed, the original Asian Tiger.

  Turning left onto Beach Road, she walked past the Raffles Hotel and slowed to peer through the windows of its gift shop. She wasn’t interested in any souvenirs but in the reflection of the building across the street, a thirty-story steel-and-glass skyscraper that was home to the Singaporean offices of PetroSaud. Her eyes studied the entry and the three security guards flanking the revolving door. Farther along the street there were buildings just like it. Nowhere did she see another guard.

  London’s phone buzzed. Benson Chow’s name appeared on the screen
. She answered, walking into the lobby of the hotel, taking the stairs to the second floor.

  “Benson.”

  “How did you know.” A statement, not a question.

  “Know what?” said London, stopping on the landing, making sure she was alone.

  “The investment was seven hundred million dollars.”

  “You found it.”

  “Indonesia.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “It wasn’t the only investment they made in Saudi. They dropped two more the same year. One for a billion, another for four hundred mil.”

  Indonesia was an oil-rich country and earned a large percentage of its GDP from the sale of oil. Therein lay the problem. Sovereign wealth funds were about diversification, mitigating risk. Loading up on one bet, putting all your chips on red—oil, in this case—did the opposite. Less diversification. More risk.

  “Does that sound normal?”

  “Not by a long shot,” said Benson Chow. “Too many eggs in one basket. A firing offense.”

  “I guess a finance minister can do what he wants.”

  “The prerogative of autocracy.”

  London entered the Long Bar, taking a seat at the far end, where she could look out the window at the entry to the Beach Road tower. She’d slept poorly the night before, bothered by bad dreams. In the morning, she’d woken to find herself consumed by a terrible sense of foreboding. R was in danger.

  “Do you know who brokered the sale?” she asked.

  “You tell me.”

  “Does the name PetroSaud ring a bell?”

  “Like Great Tom,” said Chow, referring to the bell tower at Oxford, where they’d first met. “To the tune of two billion and change. What’s going on, Lo?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But if I were you, I’d consider decreasing any exposure you might have in the Indonesian SWF.”