“For that money, I give ’em fifty-fifty odds of getting back,” he said. “It’s their last payday and they know it. Make it out alive and retire to a white sand beach far, far away.”
“Twenty-four shooters earning a million apiece,” said Alex. “And it was supposed to be thirty. Who’s got that kind of dough?”
“Want my answer?” said Graves. “State-sponsored.”
Alex nodded. But which state? Only a rogue nation would go outside its own intelligence bureau to mount such a large operation.
One personnel dossier especially interested her. It belonged to an Alexander “Sandy” Beaufoy, age forty, former lieutenant in the South African Army and, like Lambert and Salt, a participant in the ill-fated Comoros coup. Under the section marked “Past Experience,” she noted that Beaufoy’s nickname was Skinner. It was Beaufoy who had sent Salt the ominous message stating “The Eagle Has Landed. Gott mitt uns” and with whom Salt had spoken for fourteen minutes shortly after GRAIL had alerted him to Alex’s visit.
It was imperative to ping the phone.
Materiel provided a combined how-to manual and road map of international arms smuggling. There were names of dealers, ports of loading and unloading, false bills of lading, contacts at three U.S. ports of entry, including JFK, Philadelphia Port Authority, and Houston. The list of weapons purchased corresponded to a T with the armaments found at Windermere. Except for one difference: there was more than three times the amount.
Last, and to Alex’s mind most important, came Logistics. The stack held flight details to and from Namibia, then onward to Caracas via Angola (which she noted was a former Portuguese territory). There were names of contact people at each stop, including phone numbers and e-mail addresses. There were names of hotels, along with confirmation numbers and prepaid vouchers. Alex was especially interested in the hotel in Mexico City where two nights earlier twelve rooms had been reserved under the name Excelsior Holdings. There was the name of the transportation company contracted to pick up “a party of twenty-five” from Benito Juárez International Airport, including details of the arriving flight. There was even the name of one General Jaime Fortuno of the Mexican Federales, who had agreed to meet the passengers and ease their passage through immigration, along with the general’s banking details. A handwritten note on top of Fortuno’s file stated, “Paid $10,000 cash. 15 July.”
The funding, it seemed, was unlimited. But the trail ended there. There was no further mention of Excelsior or of the Bank of Vaduz. Nothing at all to lead them to Salt’s “old friend.”
Alex was frustrated. She had all the evidence any prosecutor would need to put away the bad guys for a hundred life sentences after the fact. But the trove of information brought her no closer to the essentials of the plot: where, when, how. Like all her fellow agents, she was conscious of the FBI’s less-than-stellar record at stopping acts of terror before they occurred. When she’d assumed command of CT-26, she’d sworn that she would be the one to spot the attack before, and not the one who responded after. Yet once again she, and by extension the Bureau, found herself facing a brick wall. She needed actionable intelligence to get her people in place to foil the attack.
“You missed these,” said Graves, dropping another stack of folders on the desk. “Fell behind the radiator.”
“What are they?”
“Something you’ll find interesting.”
Alex picked up the folder. “Arrivals/USA.” She looked at Graves. “Salt knew all along.”
She opened the folder and read. Three groups. The first entering through Matamoros. The second via an oil rig off the Gulf Coast. And the third through Canada. All under the guise of being corporate employees. All slated for arrival in the greater New York metropolitan area yesterday evening.
The Eagle Has Landed. Gott mitt uns.
But where were they staying? She shuffled through the papers looking for any mention of a safe house, a place where the group would hole up and get their bearings prior to the attack. There was nothing about Windermere or anywhere else. She took that to mean one thing: the operation had a contact already in place in America.
It was as she reread the papers that she caught the name. The address for the drop-off in Matamoros belonged to a large supermarket chain called Pecos. The oil rig was owned by Noble Energy. And the drop-off in Canada was at the Silicon Solutions plant in Kitchener-Waterloo.
Pecos. Noble Energy. Silicon Solutions.
Alex dropped the file onto the desk. “Oh, no.”
“What is it?” asked Graves.
“He was right,” she said.
“Who?”
“Bobby.”
71
“Hello, Marv.”
Astor poked his head out of the elevator and peered around the landing. “Marv?”
He saw no one. For once, Shank wasn’t there to greet him.
Astor entered his office. The trading floor was surprisingly quiet. No one glanced up as he passed the desk. Even Longfellow and Goodchild had their faces buried in their computer screens. The calm disturbed him. It was like the silence before an execution. He reached his office and looked inside. No Shank there, either. Conference room one was packed with lawyers. They were sharply dressed, straight-backed, and disciplined to look at. He recognized Frank Arcano from Skadden, who would be leading the charge to grant him more time to meet the margin requirements. They were the good lawyers.
Conference room two was packed with more lawyers. They wore baggy suits and had their neckties undone and shaggy haircuts. He didn’t recognize any of them and he knew they hailed from the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the body that regulated foreign currency transactions. They were the bad lawyers.
He craned his head toward conference room three. He half expected to see a camera crew from CNBC setting up camp and the Money Honey herself getting made up in preparation for an interview with the latest victim of Wall Street hubris. Enter Robert Astor. Thankfully, conference room three was empty.
Astor retraced his steps toward the reception desk. He knocked at the CFO’s door, then opened it. The boss didn’t require an invitation. Marv Shank sat across the desk from Mandy Price.
“Look who decided to come to his own funeral,” said Shank.
“Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Astor pulled up a chair. “What have we got?”
“Per your instructions, we’re liquidating all equities in Comstock Astor showing a profit,” said Price. “So far we’ve sold a hundred million.”
“That’s a start.”
“We have another five hundred million in equities that are more or less where we bought them.”
“And the rest?”
“Losers.”
“At the moment,” said Astor.
“That’s all that matters today,” said Shank.
Astor buried his head in his hands. “The goddamned position.”
“And our contact?”
“Lee? He says wait till Friday.”
“There’s still Reventlow,” said Shank. “You call him?”
“The ball’s in his court.”
Shank looked at Astor with disgust. He started to speak, then settled for shaking his head and sighing.
The clock on the wall read 2:40. Astor was not optimistic.
He returned to his office. He sat down and darkened the blinds. His arm ached. He opened his drawer and took out the bottle of painkillers his doctor had prescribed. He shook one loose, then thought better of it, if only because he needed to have his wits about him.
Closing his eyes, he once more ran through everything he knew about his father’s special project.
In early July, Edward Astor was tipped to some type of imminent plot by Palantir. The plot involved at least seven companies that were now or had been owned by a private equity firm. Each company was a client of Britium’s and used the Empire Platform to manage its products. The industries included computers, software, satellites, engineering, and energy.
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br /> Astor concluded that it was their common tie to Britium that had most frightened his father and that his visit to Britium’s CEO was for the sole purpose of confirming or disproving Palantir’s accusations. He further concluded that since his father had inquired about whether Britium was in place before July 2011—the time of the Flash Crash—he had viewed Empire as responsible. Astor’s own experience with the elevator in his home testified to the fact that Empire was vulnerable to hacking. If systems controlling the New York Stock Exchange and his own home could be hacked, then so could any other system that relied on the Empire Platform, including the FBI’s and the CIA’s. No wonder his father had convinced Charles Hughes and Martin Gelman to join him in waking the president.
According to Palantir, “They were getting desperate.”
“And so?” Astor said aloud. “Who are ‘they’? What in the world are they planning?”
Astor was sure he possessed all the information he needed to find the answer, yet he felt as far away from understanding the forces he was up against as when he had first decided to look into his father’s cryptic message.
He stood too quickly, knocking his arm against the desk. He clutched his injured limb, grimacing until the pain subsided.
Who?
Astor spun to face the computer. He brought up Google and typed every relevant keyword he could think of into the query bar. First he listed the seven companies whose annual reports he had found in Penelope Evans’s house. To those he added the names of the five private equity firms. Finally he wrote, “Britium.” He hit Return.
He had an answer in .0025 seconds.
The first link was to an article titled “Watersmark Welcomes New Investor.” Astor read on. “Watersmark LLC, the New York–based private equity firm, today announced the sale of a thirty percent stake in the firm to the China Investment Corporation for three billion dollars. Watersmark chairman Duncan Newman stated, ‘We welcome CIC’s participation and look forward to working with them to make exciting investments in the future.’ Newman added that several of the Chinese sovereign wealth fund’s executives would take up residence in Watersmark’s New York office to gain firsthand experience of the private equity business and to offer a Pacific perspective.”
The China Investment Corporation. It couldn’t be.
And then Astor read the last line and the floor dropped from the gallows. “CIC Chairman Magnus Lee commented, ‘Of course, our participation is limited to a minority interest, but we hope to learn very much from our American business partners.’”
Magnus Lee. His special contact. The man whose advice he had summoned to place the biggest investment in his firm’s history.
Astor blinked, not quite believing his eyes—maybe not wanting to believe them. He stood, his feet as heavy as if they were embedded in concrete.
Lee was the connection.
Lee was the man behind his father’s death.
Astor forced himself back to his desk. He landed in his chair with a thud.
The next link read, “Oak Leaf Ventures Sells Twenty-five Percent Stake in Firm to China Investment Corporation.” It went on to say that the CIC would send three of its executives to Oak Leaf’s offices in Chicago. Again Magnus Lee was quoted as being “thrilled” with the investment while pointing out that CIC’s participation would be strictly as a silent partner.
Lies. Lies. More lies.
For ten minutes Astor continued reading link after link.
The China Investment Corporation had invested billions of dollars in each of the private equity firms involved with the corporations his father had been investigating. Lee always made the point that the investments were passive, but in every case the CIC had placed a few executives at the private equity firms as “executives in training.”
Read “spies.”
Astor remembered the Asian man with the keen blue eyes who had tried to kill him yesterday. Eyes the color of Magnus Lee’s.
Astor pulled up Watersmark’s web page. He searched under its list of executives and was not surprised to find a familiar name: “Herbert Hong. PhD Stanford, MIT…born in China.” Hong was one of the CIC execs implanted in Watersmark, who had then gone on to work at Britium.
Suddenly it was clear to him. The CIC used its power as a minority partner in Watersmark and Oak Leaf and all the others to gain influence over certain key companies in the funds’ portfolios—companies involved in critical sectors of the nation’s economy: computers, energy, satellites, missiles. But to what end?
Control.
Until now, Lee’s actions—and by extension his country’s—had been hidden behind the cloak of everyday corporate activity. But Astor knew that time was coming to an end. Lee was no longer content to spy. He had something else in mind. Something terrible was brewing. His father had had knowledge of it and it had cost him his life. Palantir knew it, too.
“They’re getting desperate.”
Lee himself had told him to wait until Friday.
Whatever it was, it was happening now.
Astor took out his phone to call Alex. He’d gone as far as he could. He felt no satisfaction from his efforts, only horror. It was up to the FBI. As he dialed, his secretary’s voice came over the speaker. “Call for you, Bobby. Septimus Reventlow.”
Astor looked at the clock. It was one minute before three. One and a half hours until the funds to meet the margin call were due. One and a half hours to bankruptcy.
Astor hung up the cell and picked up the landline.
“Hello, Septimus.”
72
Phone pressed to her ear, Alex Forza stared out the window at the shadowy contours of the passing English countryside. It was after nine. The late European dusk was turning to night. Charles Graves sat beside her at the wheel, driving hell-bent for Gatwick Airport. He promised to have her there in an hour. She told him she could make it in forty minutes. They settled for “as bloody fast as possible.”
“I don’t have his new number,” Alex said to Bobby’s secretary. “It’s important that I reach him.”
“He left five minutes ago to see a client. Septimus Reventlow. I believe Mr. Sullivan is driving him. Perhaps you can try him.”
Alex hung up and called Sully’s number. No one answered, and the call rolled to voice mail. “Sully, this is Alex. Tell Bobby to call me right away. It’s urgent.”
Alex tried again, thinking it was the lousy New York City cell-phone reception. Again the call rolled to voice mail. Damn you, Sully, she cursed silently, wanting to attribute the failure to him.
There’d been no love lost between them when they’d worked on the JTTF, and her faith in him had taken a further hit after his failure to protect Bobby at Cherry Hill. To her mind, Sully was a slacker. He’d taken a bullet early in his career and coasted on it for thirty years. He wasn’t a bad cop. He was just an average one. To Alex, the two were synonymous.
She hung up and called McVeigh to relate the discoveries made at Salt’s house.
“Hi, Jan. I’m calling to talk to you about Bobby.”
“What about him?”
“He called you yesterday, right?”
“No. What did he need to discuss with the FBI?”
“No?” Alex pressed the phone against her leg for a second, so McVeigh wouldn’t hear her swear. She drew a calming breath, then related as best she could everything she knew about Bobby’s investigation into his father’s death and the links to it she’d found at Salt’s home.
“So you’re saying that Luc Lambert and the weapons we found at Windermere are tied to the deaths of Edward Astor, Charles Hughes, and Martin Gelman?”
“It would appear so. Prior to his death, Edward Astor was looking into the same corporations, which either wittingly or unwittingly helped smuggle the shooters into the States. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
“I should say it isn’t. Why didn’t you relay this to me earlier?”
“My bad. I was counting on Bobby to tell you in person so you could sit
him down and grill him. Frankly, I didn’t think there was much to go on.”
“This Palantir—all you have is his Skype handle?”
“That’s correct.”
“I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, write up the deets and e-mail them to headquarters.”
“Do they have anything new?”
“One thing. The forensic team discovered a device attached to the steering column and throttle of the Secret Service vehicle Astor and the others were riding in. There isn’t much of it left, but the smart money is saying it’s some type of receiver that enables a third party to operate the car.”
“Like a remote control?”
“Exactly.”
“So we can write off the rogue Secret Service agent?”
“Maybe. There are lots of other questions about how anyone could hijack a vehicle. And we still don’t know why Astor insisted on meeting Hughes and Gelman on Sunday and what they planned to tell the president. I’ll pass on your info to the director right away. He’ll be happy to have something to go on.”
“Did we ping the phone?”
“We’re waiting on the phone carrier in South Africa.”
“And the bank?”
“Forget the bank. We’ll never have that information in time. And Alex, tell Bobby to get his butt into my office pronto or else I’m going to send a team to bring him in. And I’ll make sure it isn’t a warm and fuzzy encounter.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m getting on a plane in an hour or so. I’ll see you in the morning. Am I still on the bricks?”
“I’ll decide that tomorrow.”
Alex found Graves staring at her when she ended the call. “What?”
“Sounds like you’re in hot water.”
“You know what they say. Act now. Apologize later.”
“Brave girl.”
“Either that or stupid.”
Alex walked with Charles Graves across the tarmac. A light rain fell, and the weather was forecast to worsen in the next hour. The captain stood at the base of the stairs to Bobby’s jet, motioning for her to hurry. “There’s an active storm cell moving in. We’ve got to get this bird into the air or we’ll be stuck on the ground for hours.”
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