The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  The photos documented the stones’ journey to Freetown, on the Atlantic coast. When I put down the pictures that showed Lily buying the stones from traders in Freetown, and later, in the customs office in Banjul showing the official where to put the phony stamps, she reached out and slid the last two photographs toward her. She cocked her head at the pictures, turning them this way and that, and then fixed me again with her appraising eyes.

  “That haircut,” she said. “A disaster, no?”

  I thought it looked great. We’d been in that room together for a while. It had started to feel as if some hidden machine was slowly winching us closer together. Every time she opened her lips to draw a breath, I had to drag my eyes away from her mouth. In the tight confines of the room, we were barely murmuring. Both of us glistened with perspiration.

  Lily didn’t roll at the first tap. She tried to bluff. Let the Belgians lock her up, she said. It wouldn’t be for long.

  But the club I carried wasn’t jail. It was the Dodd-Frank Act, which said that companies doing business in the United States had to know all about their customers. If I reported the blood diamonds, the Treasury would threaten the Antwerp banks the Russians used with exclusion from the US banking system. The banks would drop the Russians in a heartbeat.

  By the time we left the airport, Lily was my agent. That’s how I should have left it.

  * * *

  Tommy and I left the diner and drove to Greenwich Village and parked in front of a row of eighteenth-century redbrick townhouses on Clarkson Street. Nothing about the mellow buildings would make you suspect what was inside—a nest of spies, accountants, phone techs, and hackers working for the US Treasury.

  “You know that Chuck is going to make you carry the can for this,” Tommy said. “He is going to say that Lily tipped off Lime about you, and that’s why they had a plan in place for her to get away.”

  “Lime doesn’t need Lily to warn him about me. I shut down his blood diamonds. I shut down the rough he was stealing from the Russian mines. His Russian partners will eat him alive if he doesn’t find another way to get hold of US dollars. So I think you can bet he knows who I am.”

  We got out and headed up the front steps. No sign identified the building, and you didn’t need to knock. The guard had been watching us since we’d parked. He knew us, but he still examined our IDs through the little square of bulletproof glass before he unlocked the heavy door and let us in.

  “One more thing,” Tommy said when we reached the stairs. His office was on the top floor, mine in the basement. He checked back along the hall. All the doors were closed. “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” he said in a low voice, “and I’m not giving you advice. But when you play defensive football, you learn how to read a play. Sometimes it’s obvious what’s going on, but sometimes you just get a hunch. Like sixth sense. You know something’s coming and you know where. I’ve got that feeling now, Alex. Somebody’s running a play. And you know what? They’re running it on you.”

  3

  When I got to my office, I stared into the glass panel until the iris scan flashed green. Then I pressed the fingers of my right hand on the black pad. The lock clicked open and I went in.

  They built these rooms like vaults. The steel doors would automatically shut unless you propped them open. I kicked a rubber wedge into place, unlocked my window, and opened it a few inches to let in cool air from the alley. My office was small and stuffy. I always left the window open, and security always shut and locked it, even though it was protected by bank-grade steel bars.

  In 1990 the US Treasury established the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, to combat increasingly sophisticated money laundering and cybercrime. FinCEN was always secretive. After 9/11, even more. That’s when they created Special Audits, the unit I work for. Our assignment was what they called “enhanced data capture.” In other words, breaking into secure locations and stealing information. Sometimes, if you have to, shooting people, although you won’t find that in the legislation.

  I got hired because I knew diamonds. Diamonds are a kind of cash, except without the serial numbers. Criminals and terrorists like that.

  Four messages from Chuck waited on my desk. I scrunched them up and tossed them in the waste basket, unlocked the in-tray, and took out the tamper-proof file.

  “Oh, you’re here,” Tabitha said, popping her head around the door. Her auburn hair flew around her head in disarray. “Wow, you look sort of bad,” she said, fixing me with her intimidating, sea-green eyes. “Did you know you were leaking?”

  She leaned in for a closer look. A lock of hair fell across her eyes. She blew it away with a puff and went clacking out of the room in her slingbacks. She came back with a first aid kit. Her eyes had an eager glint.

  “Chuck’s been calling every fifteen minutes,” she said as she ripped a strip of adhesive from my chin and replaced it with a fresh one. She cocked her head to survey her handiwork, then tore off a second Band-Aid. She dabbed at the cut with a ball of cotton wool and taped on another strip. “Perfect. Even more like a gangster than usual.”

  I broke the tamperproof clear plastic strip on the agenda folder and examined the list of items.

  “What does ‘stat review’ mean?”

  “There’s a statutory requirement to review any operation that results in death,” Tabitha said. “So that’s one thing. Then there’s the departmental protocol that stipulates a review when a multi-agency operation fails.”

  “That’s where everybody makes sure the blame gets placed as close to me as possible?”

  “Uh-huh. And there was an overnight blue from Washington.”

  “I thought I was supposed to see all those.”

  She put a finger on the pale-blue flimsy that was sitting on my desk and pushed it into an even more visible position.

  Blues were single-sheet notices from the secretary of the Treasury notifying us when there was high-level interest in an investigation.

  “Order to consult,” I read out loud. I ran my eyes down the few paragraphs that spelled out the demand. “The secretary wants to be kept up to date on the Lime investigation. Imagine that. A lifelong Wall Street crony of the president wants the lowdown on an investigation possibly linked to Harry Nash, the main threat to the president’s re-election.”

  “Astonishing,” Tabitha said.

  She sat down purposefully and crossed her slender legs and fixed me with a gaze like a roofing nail.

  “Let’s just run through that business with the pink last night. It would help if I understood it, especially if you want me to lie to the secretary.”

  People who didn’t know her background made the mistake of thinking that because Tabitha didn’t spend much time on her appearance and was impervious to rank, she came from one of the well-connected families that have been inserting their children into the government since they set it up for their own benefit in the eighteenth century. But Tabitha’s dad raised pigs in Minnesota. She’d gone to Vassar on a scholarship. She was an intelligence officer who’d been through Camp Peary, the CIA training base in Virginia that spies call “the Farm.” Tabitha was way too smart to be seconded to Special Audits as my assistant, but I wasn’t complaining.

  “What do you know about pinks?” I said.

  “That they’re worth a lot.”

  “They’re among the most valuable jewels on earth. Take Nash’s pink. I don’t know what he paid for it, but it could easily be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  “But it’s huge. The one that showed up in the church was tiny.”

  “Tiny by comparison. But it weighed at least three carats. Say it polished out to a finished stone of two carats. If the color stayed strong, that’s a quarter-million-dollar stone. And anyway, the important thing about the pink last night, at least in Washington, is that it might provide some dirt to rub on Nash.”

  “Oh, that reminds me. I meant to tell you, Chuck was in Washington yesterday.”

  �
�That’s not unusual.”

  She sat back and folded her hands in her lap.

  “Before he left,” she said, “he asked Langley to pull your 906.”

  OK, that was something else. Personnel 906 files were the top-secret vetting reports for officers cleared to operate under cover. They contained the most sensitive details of an operative’s past. The things that you were most ashamed of. A 906 was like a bad conscience copied into someone else’s memory. Because I had worked for the CIA before coming to the Treasury my 906 was held at Langley.

  * * *

  There are two ways into the CIA. The most common is straight from university. You download what they call a “Job Fit Tool” from the CIA website. It tells you if you’ve got a chance. Then you take some tests. If they like the results, you’re in.

  But there’s another way. You don’t go to university. You don’t download anything. All you do is answer the door one night.

  I was twenty-two, with a mountainside condo in Cape Town. Wraparound balcony with a view of Table Bay. In the garage a cream-colored Mercedes 190SL. I was doing OK for a young guy home-schooled in diamond camps in Africa by his mom.

  I could see her now. Just managing to keep her desperation at bay with that determined smile, with the good china she always packed and brought along, with the cotton dresses that she ironed in the kitchen of whatever flat-pack house we lived in. Anything to preserve the idea of who she’d been—a New York girl off to see the world with her dashing husband. And a heart that broke every time she realized where she came on his list of priorities.

  That wouldn’t be in my 906. All they would have about my mother was that she’d died when I was twelve.

  For the next six years, until I was eighteen, it was just Dad and me. Then he went to prison for defrauding investors. I was on my own, and became the tough kid who opened his door that night in Cape Town.

  I lived by trading diamonds. Some of them were legal, bought from small operators mining the old deposits on the Vaal River. But that was for cover. My main supply was stolen goods. High-end rough from Namibia and Botswana. I ran it up to Antwerp every month, timing my trips to coincide with the big London diamond sales, when Antwerp was full of disappointed traders who didn’t get the goods they wanted. The guy who came to my apartment that night in Cape Town knew all about it.

  At the time, al Qaeda was financing some of its operations with contraband diamonds. The US government wanted to know how that worked. That night in Cape Town the proposition was a simple one. I could come with him, or wait for the South African arrest team stationed nearby, ready for his signal. Welcome to the CIA.

  * * *

  Chuck had his feet on his desk when I walked in. The desk had appeared two months ago, a massive rectangle of steel that replaced a suite of repro Sheraton. At Chuck’s grade, he could pick his own furniture. He’d been fine with the Sheraton until he started visiting art galleries in Chelsea, where he discovered that taste-makers didn’t have period furniture from Macy’s. They had welded steel.

  He wore a crisp white shirt and black jeans. The jeans had that straight-from-the-dumpster look that costs real money. And in case you didn’t get that right away, he drove the point home with his $800 Ermenegildo Zegna loafers. His wireless phone headset left both his hands free to clutch at his thick blonde hair as he stared in desperation at the ceiling.

  “No, sir,” he was saying, “of course I’m not defending it.” Pause. “Absolutely, sir. They had a right to be angry.” Pause. “Of course it’s suspicious. I understand your concern. Yes, sir. Yes. Goodbye.”

  He took his feet off the desk and leaned forward and banged his head on the steel surface.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The secretary.”

  He groaned. “The NYPD has been on the phone to him all morning, blaming us for that fiasco in the church.” He parked his elbows on the table and seized his head in his hands. There was nothing like a bomb dropped from DC to give Chuck real anguish. “Jesus Christ, Alex, it was a diamond swap. In Brighton fucking Beach! It’s not like you had to chopper into Pakistan and take out Osama bin Laden. What the hell went wrong?”

  I sat down and put my folder on the table. I opened it and took out the agenda and ran my finger down it.

  “Is this the statutory review that I’ve been hearing about? Because if it is,” I said, drawing another paper from the folder, “we should start with the memo of execution you sent me.”

  That was Tabitha’s idea. Execution memos were the written authority that detailed an actual field operation. Hit him with the memo, she’d said. He wrote it. He hates being caught in print.

  “Let’s see,” I said. “That’s right. Here it is. Operational control, including timing.” I tossed the page on his desk. “Me. Yet it wasn’t me who suddenly advanced the operation, it was you. And it blew up in our face.”

  Chuck looked pointedly at my bandages and gave me the display of dentition he thought of as a smile.

  “Well, your face.”

  Chuck was Charles Chandler III. He’d got where he was largely by being the son of Charles Chandler II. If Chuck could somehow ooze a little further up the ladder, he would leave the Treasury for one of Washington’s high-powered lobbying firms, where he would earn a fat salary advising clients how to avoid bastards like me.

  “Let’s not squabble over the fine points, Alex. What we should be asking ourselves is if Lime knew about the operation in advance.”

  “If he didn’t before, you sure gave him a heads-up by posting a bonehead in the church who didn’t even know how to mute his earpiece.”

  It was a wild shot, but I saw it hit.

  Chuck got up and went to the window and stared out at the summer foliage. “It’s the department I’m trying to protect, Alex,” he said bitterly. “That pink diamond is going to drag us into the mud.”

  I wondered where else he thought we spent our time.

  He returned to the desk and flicked a switch. A huge pane of thick glass slid into view with a hydraulic hiss. Imprinted with invisible circuitry, it was a powerful computer that performed deductive acrobatics in plain view. FinCEN techs had come up from Washington and hardwired it not only into the government network but also to a streaming system that could suck up data from the entire Web. It could pierce the firewalls of other countries.

  Chuck pulled out the keyboard.

  “The only entry I’m typing in is the number for the report you filed from Brighton Beach,” he said grimly. “Watch.”

  The lights dimmed, the windows turned opaque. A metallic click from the door announced that the lock had engaged. A red light would now be blinking in the hall to alert the staff that we were not to be disturbed.

  Text and images spilled across the glass. The software reached into its vast resources, and with blinding speed, pulled up data and deployed it on the screen.

  First the operational target: Sergei Lime. Then a summarized bullet-point account of his business life appeared. A financial wizard, he’d helped Russian investors steal $30 billion in two years by asset-stripping Soviet-era state companies. With the profits, he’d formed a London fund, First Partners. It was only then that the Russians discovered how much money Lime himself had made from the asset-stripping.

  They demanded a share. Lime refused.

  They waited until he arrived in Moscow for a meeting. Up came a video grab from a security cam at Sheremetyevo Airport. We watched them take him as he came through the gate. He had a dislocated shoulder and a broken jaw before they even dragged him from the building. After a week in the Lubyanka prison, he caved, selling a large chunk of his stake in First Partners. The date appeared.

  The second that information flashed on the screen, a red line flicked out and drew a new box on the right-hand side and labelled it NASH. Immediately after that it printed: DATE OF ACQUISITION OF FIRST PARTNERS INTEREST. A line shot out to join the date that Nash bought his shares with the date Lime sold. They were the same.

  “Oh, boy,”
I said.

  “I know. He had to have bought those shares directly from Lime.”

  “Or the oligarchs,” I said, “after they beat them out of Lime.”

  “It gets worse,” Chuck muttered.

  The system was Chuck’s brainchild. He’d worked on it for more than a year, allocating much of our investigative budget to the development. Now he watched with a stricken look as it opened a thread on Nash. Images flowed onto the screen, of Nash as a young naval officer, Nash on the beach at his palatial home on Martha’s Vineyard. The machine riffled through a stream of images until it pounced on one of Nash and his wife, Honey Li, at a society ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The huge pink diamond blazed against her skin. Because of online rumors that the diamond had originated in the imperial treasury at the Kremlin, the press had christened it the Russian Pink.

  Now a news clip ran of Nash, swarmed by reporters demanding to know if it was true that he owned shares in the Russian fund he’d bought the diamond from.

  “Guys, guys,” Nash said with his Kennedy smile. “ ‘American businessman scoops Russian treasure.’ Is that your story? Hey, that’s a headline I can live with.”

  The screen began to rapidly shed data, refining what was left into a few simple connections. Red lines connected the pink diamond in my report from the church to the Russian Pink, Nash to Lime, date to date, transaction to transaction. Then it made a beep, and a line of print popped out at the bottom of the screen: