The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  * * *

  I had just come out of the building and was crossing the plaza when a young army officer stepped to my side.

  “Sir, if you could spare a moment? The general would like a word.”

  The car had a black military license plate with two silver stars. The driver got out and opened the back door, and I slid in.

  The general had taken off his green jacket and tossed it over the front seat. The purple heart dangled against the dark green fabric. His tie was loosened and his sleeves rolled up and he was smoking. Up close, he didn’t look young. His face was hatched with tiny scars. Plastic surgery had left a smooth strip of scar tissue on his chin.

  “You didn’t have much to say in there.”

  “No,” I said.

  He took a last, deep drag and flicked the cigarette out the open window.

  “Yet you’re the guy Vanderloo was after. I saw your report. If it weren’t for that hood with the tire iron he’d have killed you, and your wife and kid too.”

  “Ex,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Ex-wife.”

  “But just as dead.” He lit another cigarette. “So I would think you’ve done some thinking about who exactly was behind it.”

  One of the cops patrolling the square stopped to run his eye over the car. He wore a helmet and dark goggles and his finger lay alongside the trigger of his Colt M4 rifle. He noted the military plate and the young officer standing outside, and moved on.

  “You came up here to find out what we know about Vanderloo,” I said, “but I didn’t notice anything you had to trade.”

  He pulled his tunic from the seat and shrugged it back on. With the stars glinting on his shoulders and the ribbons blazing on his chest he looked like a general again.

  “Vanderloo should have been sectioned out long ago. Proceedings had already begun for an administrative discharge, which is a way to get rid of crazy people so they keep their pensions. He had friends. Turns out, important friends. The proceedings were terminated. Files disappeared. I’ll send you what I have.”

  His hands were folded in his lap. They weren’t a pretty sight. He’d been badly injured, and wherever they’d put him back together, they’d been in a hurry.

  “So there’s something from me. Now it’s your turn. Excerpts from intercepts don’t help us. We need to know who Vanderloo was taking orders from, or thought he was.”

  I watched men and women hurrying across the square, cell phones pressed to their ears as they pursued their lives. A young man pushing a stroller stopped to peer at his child. Suddenly he grinned and stuck out a finger, and a tiny pink hand reached up to seize it.

  “OK,” I said. “You want the phone intercepts. My guess, some of those have disappeared. I’ll get what I can. Have somebody contact me. I’ll say where we meet. He comes alone. After that, we never met.”

  The general rapped a knuckle on the window. The young officer opened my door. When I got out, he closed it and climbed into the front seat, beside the driver. As the car pulled away, the general was lighting another cigarette.

  * * *

  “Sounds like Silver Bill and the rest of you got handed your asses,” Tommy shouted. He had the top down on the 1962 Chevrolet Impala he’d got as a loaner. His car guru was ransacking America for another vintage Eldorado. For now, Tommy had to settle for the Chev.

  He was irritated I’d found out that the paint was a vintage shade called Twilight Turquoise. That was one thing. Another was, he’d arrived at Police Plaza to pick me up just as I was getting out of the general’s car, and my evasions about what we’d talked about were driving him crazy. He was running the unit now.

  “That two-star guy, do you even know who he works for?”

  “We’re all making this up as we go along, Tommy.”

  “Not everybody. Somebody seems to know exactly where they’re going.”

  He was right about that. An announcement from Great Pipe had detonated on the business wires. An independent diamond lab had established, from an examination of fragments obtained from a “reputable source” in Antwerp, that the origin of the Russian Pink was the Camafoza Diamond Pipe.

  We were heading east on Canal Street to Chinatown when Great Pipe’s shares went past five dollars. By now the story had swept into the general news. The Pink was the most famous diamond in the world, and Nash and Honey Li the most dazzling couple. Their fame was the gas poured on a bonfire of speculation, and the share price blazed and crackled.

  The news feed cut to a live shot at a Nash campaign stop in Iowa. This would be his last appearance before he locked up the nomination in twenty-four hours.

  “Guys, guys,” he was saying to the sea of reporters, “sounds like a terrific stock. Great Pipe, is that what they call it? Maybe I should buy some.”

  Doyers Street is a crooked lane that runs off the Bowery. Halfway along, two young Chinese men, bulging out of black T-shirts, stood beside a metal garage door practicing their killer stares. They wore earbuds and had small mikes clipped to their shirts. One of them spoke as we drove up, and a camera mounted above the door panned in our direction. A moment later the door rolled up and we drove down a ramp into a large, white, underground garage.

  Ho Wang Wei, Patrick’s father, owned most of a block of Chinatown. At street level he had a number of businesses, including a traditional Chinese pharmacy, the largest kitchen-supply store in Manhattan, and his daughter’s fashion shop. Ho’s biggest business, a bank, not being strictly legal, hummed along out of sight in the carpeted, sleekly modern rooms that spread through the basements below.

  Tabitha’s Mini was already parked. Tommy eased into the space beside it indicated by a woman in scarlet overalls.

  “Cool,” she said, running her eyes along the paintwork.

  “Twilight Turquoise,” I said. “He picked it for the color.”

  “Trez cool.” She stepped back to snap a picture on her phone. “Minnie Ho,” she said, dropping the phone in a voluminous pocket and thrusting out her hand. “Patrick’s sister.” She led the way through a door that hissed open at the swipe of her card.

  Thousands of Chinese immigrate to New York City every year. Some of them, like the billionaire who bought the top two floors of a tower on West Fifty-Seventh Street for $120 million, don’t need banking help. Most do. Smuggled into the United States, they arrive without papers. Without proper ID, they can’t open accounts at American banks to wire money home, or save, or eventually, as many will, borrow to open a business of their own. So they bank with Ho Wang Wei. He does all those things, and he does them faster and cheaper than American banks. If he’d made himself rich by providing an unlicensed service to people whose kids were going to end up at MIT, sue me, because I’m looking the other way.

  Minnie kept shooting sideways glances at Tommy. Suddenly she stopped and put a hand against his chest. Even in the voluminous overalls she was an elfin creature, but her eyes had stopping power. She caught a fold of fabric in her fingers and rubbed it briskly. The shirt was the color of dark moss, with a paler snow-pea piping.

  “This heavy rayon,” she said, “you can’t get it now. It’s the quality of the fabric that lets it take on that intensity from the dye.” She snatched the phone from her pocket and snapped a picture. She winked at Tommy. “Very cool, big guy. Also, love the hair.”

  She led the way through another set of secure doors into a dimly lit room. A screen displaying a map of the world took up an entire wall.

  Patrick Ho had hacked deep into First Partners. Since we now knew that Nash controlled the fund, the computer had begun to examine all the fund’s transactions in terms of how they might benefit Nash. Everything the machine had taught itself about Lime it now applied to Nash. It was unwinding Nash’s business secrets by the second, spewing out reams of elaborate transactions. Patrick’s software plotted those dealings on the screen, creating a fantastic web of lines that looked like one of those airline route maps in the back of the in-flight magazi
ne.

  I slid into a seat beside Tabitha. Tommy scowled at the screen and stomped around in front of Minnie with his chest pushed out. Patrick rattled some keys and the lines vanished from the screen.

  “The market’s just suspended trading in Great Pipe,” he said. “They’re demanding the company provide the scientific data that proves the Pink came from the Camafoza pipe. In the meantime I can show you how Nash trades. It’s actually kind of beautiful.”

  He tapped a key, and a light glowed on in London.

  “This is not in real time. It’s the computer’s replication of a pattern. When you gave me the new information from Jersey about how Nash effectively controls the company, we re-ran the analyses of thousands of trading sequences. So we were ready for today. Here’s how Nash has been running up the price so far. That light going on in London is a trading order from Nash to First Partners. It’s First Partners that actually owned the stock.”

  Then two pinpoints of light left London and streaked across the map, inscribing bright lines behind them. One line ended in Lichtenstein; the other, Singapore.

  “That’s the computer showing that as soon as Nash offered some of the Great Pipe stock held by First Partners for sale, two buyers immediately snapped it up.”

  Four more dots appeared on the map. Instantly, two lines took off from Lichtenstein and two from Singapore. The Singapore lines connected to Hong Kong and Shanghai. From Lichtenstein, the lights went streaking across the Atlantic, one landing in New York and the other in the British Virgin Islands.

  “So the original buyers each found two more buyers,” Patrick said, as a firework of blazing lines erupted onto the screen. “Now they’ll all trade it back and forth among themselves. Sometimes they sell the whole block of shares they’ve bought, sometimes they split it into smaller lots. The price increases fast.”

  “Those buyers are all Nash-owned companies,” I said. “He sold the stock to himself.”

  “Correct,” said Patrick.

  “They’re wash trading,” Tommy said. “Their only purpose in buying and selling is to run up the price.”

  “Yes, it’s a wash play,” Patrick agreed, “but a hard one to prove. Because the price escalates so quickly, all kinds of other trading programs kick in, and soon thousands of investors are trading.”

  Tommy nodded, then aimed a finger at Minnie.

  “This is a highly secret operation,” he said to Patrick. “You were supposed to be able to guarantee security. So what about her?” he nodded at Minnie.

  “I couldn’t have done it without her,” Patrick said.

  The program kept filling the screen with a tracer fire of trades while silence deepened around this news.

  “You’re telling me she helped you?”

  “She’s the fastest coder in New York,” Patrick said.

  “More than a pretty face, big guy,” Minnie said. “All this, plus knockout fashion.”

  “Sweetheart,” Tommy said, “I’m going to need your signature on a very serious non-disclosure document.”

  She slid a hand under his arm. “Oh, baby,” she purred, “please make me sign.”

  I would have liked to watch Tommy struggle in the quicksand of Minnie Ho, but the market had just posted Great Pipe’s scientific data.

  News feeds streamed across the bottom of the screen carrying the actual report that Great Pipe filed with the exchange.

  From the first phrase, I knew who’d written it. I could hear him in the prose. He laced his sentences together with a crisp, seductive logic. First he established that the impurities contained in diamonds existed in ratios that were unique to the pipes from which the diamonds came. Then he described the technique he’d developed for vaporizing tiny diamond chips and measuring the ratio of the impurities with mass spectrometry.

  “L. T. Labs,” Tabitha said. She’d been reading it too. “That’s the name of the company. Remember you asked me to see if there were any payments from Lime to a company in eastern Long Island? There were. That’s the company.”

  “Yes,” I said. I already knew. I’d seen it in the statements from the Jersey bank. Regular payments through a bank in Sag Harbor. L. T. Labs. Lane Turner. The man who invented diamond mineral chemistry. My dad.

  “The market is taking the suspension off,” Patrick said. “I’ll get rid of this old record.” His fingers chattered at the board. The lines disappeared. Dots of light remained on the map, marking the places where Nash’s trading companies were based.

  But now, none of them traded. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen, the price of a Great Pipe share had already passed ten dollars. The market was feverishly trading the stock. Yet Nash did nothing. His trading apparatus sat there like a giant spider, watching the action with its glowing eyes but not attacking.

  “I don’t get it,” Patrick said. “Why isn’t he trading?”

  I wondered the same thing. If Nash was running a pure stock play, he would continue to run up the stock by trading among his companies, while at the same time unwinding some of his massive position—selling it off into the rising market in small lots so as not to alert buyers that a large investor was bailing on the stock.

  And he would bail. Because he knew the pipe’s secret. He knew that the conclusions investors were drawing were wrong. The origin of the Russian Pink in the Camafoza Pipe didn’t point to a population of other fabulously large and valuable pinks. The only other diamonds explorers had found were the fractured browns.

  “Could Nash be hesitant because he knows that you and Lily uncovered his control of First Partners?” Tabitha said.

  I smiled at her. She had the decency to blush. Lily’s name hadn’t been in my report.

  “Who are you, masked stranger?” I said quietly.

  Then an alert pinged on my phone.

  One of Lime’s credit cards had been swiped at a gas station in Sag Harbor.

  I showed the screen to Tabitha.

  She grabbed her keys and I followed her out.

  20

  We cleared the city. As we headed out Long Island, Great Pipe continued its meteoric climb. The market issued warnings. No one paid attention. At sixty dollars the market suspended trading a second time. The frenzied buying and selling switched to the gray market. Inside an hour, the pressure to clear the swelling backlog of trades forced the market to remove the stop order. Great Pipe blew like a magnum of champagne. It had just passed seventy dollars when Patrick called.

  “A European broker is selling 500,000 shares every time the price goes through a five-dollar increment.”

  “When did they buy?”

  “I can’t find any record that they bought.”

  “Maybe it’s one of the funds that had an early investment, and they’re taking a profit.”

  “It’s not a fund.”

  “OK.” I thought for a minute. “Where’s the broker?”

  “They’re using a New York nominee, but the orders are coming from Helsinki.”

  * * *

  Sag Harbor is a pretty, shaded town full of those enormous cedar-shake houses that the original inhabitants would have built if they’d been partners in hedge funds instead of fishermen. The bank was on a side street, leaving the charming, cobbled main drag for the coffee shops and bookstores and sellers of expensive handmade soaps. We parked in a lane behind the bank.

  The manager had a roomy, old-fashioned office at the back. A ceiling fan stirred the soupy air. I’d called ahead. The file for L. T. Labs lay open on his desk. He was going through it—what there was. Only a few pages. He was frowning at them. And us.

  “Sag Harbor is a long way from Washington, DC,” he said, tilting his head back to stare down his nose at my Treasury ID.

  The manager was in his thirties. He had a red face, as if he’d just come in from a jog. A hank of black hair fell across his forehead.

  “I’m not sure what I can tell you,” he said. “This account was closed a month ago. I don’t even know if this business exists anymore.”


  “We just need a few particulars,” I said, “such as where they were located.”

  He pushed the hank of hair from his forehead. It fell back again.

  “We only had an address in the city,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “And I’ll need that too. But what I need today is where the physical premises were and what was the nature of the business.”

  He nodded and made another futile attempt to brush the hair from his forehead. His face glistened with a sheen of perspiration.

  “All I know is what’s in the file.”

  “I know you’re familiar with the provisions of the Dodd-Frank legislation,” I said in a reasonable tone. “But just so we know what provisions I mean—you’re supposed to know the nature of a client’s business. By that I mean, you are required to know it. That’s to prevent the I-didn’t-know-what-they-were-up-to defense if we have to prosecute you for abetting a crime.”

  The sweat was pouring off him now.

  “Research,” he blurted out. “It was some kind of research company. That’s all I know.”

  “You don’t know where they had their building?”

  He shuffled through the statements in the file again, then closed it and took a deep breath.

  “Look, this account was opened by head office in New York. Deposits came by wire. Mostly it was used to pay bills for L. T. Labs. There was an authorized person for cash withdrawals.”

  “And he was?”

  He glanced at the file. “Lane Turner.”

  “Where did the wires come from?”

  “A bank in Liechtenstein.”

  “Oh, boy,” I said, and after that he shut up like a clam.

  * * *

  “He was more afraid of someone else than he was of you,” Tabitha said when we left.

  We walked around the corner to the real estate office. The salesman wore a black polo jersey and those faded pink cotton pants that New Yorkers hope will make them look as if they come from an island other than Manhattan. He had the local newspaper spread out in front of him and was deep in a story about local politicians caught up in a corruption probe. There’s a surprise. Prime oceanfront properties located in small municipalities with rudimentary oversight, a short helicopter ride from the richest people on the planet. What could go wrong?