Bloodmoney

by David Ignatius

  “You got it. That’s their game. The question is, what do you want me and Chumley to do about it?”

  “Go to trial. Win the case. Get me off.”

  “Not so easy, big boy. The Brits have gathered enough evidence to nail you: fraudulent statements to the regulators; insider trading; numbered Swiss bank accounts not declared to the Inland Revenue. They have a lot of shit, my friend. And I have some bad news for you: Juries don’t like billionaires, even in England. They want to crucify them. You’d have trouble finding a respectable barrister who would argue the case in court.”

  Perkins listened to this litany of misdeeds and then shook his head.

  “It’s all crap. They used me as long as it suited them, and then they ratted me out to the Brits. This is a setup, first to last.”

  “Look, Tom, do you want my professional opinion?”

  “No.”

  “This case is a loser. If you take it to trial, you’re going down. Now, Mr. Chumley here has been talking to the prosecutors, which I am not allowed to do. And I think you should listen to what he has to say.”

  “Can he get me off?”

  “Sort of. Hear him out.”

  “Fine. And stop calling this man Chumley, for god’s sake. He already told you it’s Gormley.”

  The British solicitor looked relieved.

  “Thank you. What Mr. Tarullo said is quite accurate. I have been in discussion this morning with Mr. Crane of the Serious Fraud Office, who was accompanied by a rather aggressive gentleman from the Crown Prosecution Service. We discussed the possibility of your entering a guilty plea to reduced charges. That would avoid the risk of going before a jury, which as Mr. Tarullo said would carry risks, given the current public mood toward, um, finance.”

  “What would I plead to? Assuming that I was willing to pretend I did anything wrong.”

  “That is still under discussion. But I was given to believe this morning that a possible arrangement might involve pleading guilty to a low-level count of banking fraud and a similarly low-level count of revenue fraud.”

  “What would the sentence be?”

  “That would be at the discretion of the judge. The guidelines suggest there should always be some reduction in sentence for a guilty plea. But there might still be a brief prison sentence.”

  “How long is ‘brief’?”

  “For the simplest banking fraud conviction, the guidelines recommend twenty-six weeks. For revenue fraud, it is twelve weeks. So let us imagine something well under a year. It could be more or less, of course, or nothing at all.”

  “Take it,” said Tarullo. “It’s your best shot.”

  “Shut up. Now, suppose I don’t accept this plea deal and I get convicted, what would I be facing?”

  “Goodness, hard to say, but it would be quite unpleasant. The judge would not be amused by your subornation of an employee of the Bank of England.”

  “How much time?”

  “For major banking fraud, the recommendation is five years, plus five more years for major revenue fraud, plus ten years for false representations, plus seven years for false accounting, plus five years for obtaining services dishonestly. So it could add up to, let me see, approximately thirty years. But that would be a very hard-hearted judge.”

  “Thirty-two years, to be precise,” said Tarullo. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Okay, suppose I listen to my lawyers and agree to plead guilty, Mr. Gormley, would I be able to work in the investment business again?”

  “Probably not, I’m afraid, certainly not in the United Kingdom.”

  “And would I be liable for civil suits from investors?”

  “Yes, sorry to say, there would be no stopping that. The guilty plea would be dispositive, your plaintiffs would argue, so you would be rather vulnerable.”

  He turned back to the burly American counselor.

  “And the same would be true in the States, isn’t that right, Vince? We would have to settle with the SEC, and at a minimum they would bar me from being a broker-dealer or an investment adviser. The evidence from the British court could be used as evidence in civil cases in America, and every shyster lawyer who wanted free money could file a strike suit. Am I correct?”

  “We would fight the suits, obviously,” said Tarullo. “Maybe we could talk national security with the judges, but I doubt it would work.”

  “So basically I’m screwed. That’s what you’re telling me. Either I go to court and run the risk of a ridiculously long prison sentence on multiple fraud charges, or I make a deal for a short sentence, but I still get bankrupted with damages from civil suits that I can’t pay because I can’t work in finance again. Is that it, more or less?”

  “Hey, Tom, it is what it is. Not a great situation, I admit. Should you take the deal? Depends on your tolerance for getting ass-fucked for the next thirty-two years at Brixton.”

  Perkins put his palms to his head, so that they covered his eyes and most of his face. He murmured to himself as he thought about his options. When he removed his hands, he was smiling. It was uncanny, a big grin, as if he had been released from his cell and sent home.

  “No fucking way. That’s what I’ve decided. Let them try to prosecute me. You know what? They won’t dare. They think they can nail me for stuff that happened before they got in deep. But I’m not going to play. This evidence is all tainted by the fact that I was involved in secret intelligence activities the CIA may be claiming don’t exist, but which they will never, ever allow to come out in open court. And the minute they ask the judge to go in camera to discuss secrets, I’ve made my point, I’ve won.”

  “So you want to roll the dice?” asked Tarullo.

  “Gambling is for suckers, Vince. This is a no-brainer. I’ve made my career knowing when to take risks and, honestly, it’s not even close in this case. These people are bluffing. They will fold. Mr. Gormley, tell the Crown Prosecution Service, ‘Thank you very much for the offer, and we’ll see you in court.’ But I promise you, it will never get there.”

  “Bracing words, Mr. Perkins,” said the solicitor. “I will convey your message. I do hope you’re right.”

  Perkins said he wanted a few words alone with his American attorney before they left. The prim British solicitor padded off down the hall to wait in the entryway.

  Perkins leaned close to Tarullo and spoke as quietly as he could.

  “This will work, Vince. You have to believe me.”

  “If you say so, Tom. What do I know? I’m just your lawyer.”

  Perkins lowered his voice another few decibels.

  “I want you to do something for me. I want you to go see the CIA general counsel. Get all the records you can find of my accounts at FBS. Tell them that the CIA, or some spinoff somewhere, has been using these accounts to fund operations and using my firm as cover for its people. And I can prove it, if they make me. Will you do that?”

  “Sure. I know the general counsel. He was an associate in my firm a long time ago. He told me I was all wet when I asked about Anthony Cronin a couple of days ago. But he’ll see me.”

  “Tell him that what they’re doing is illegal, Vince. There is something called the ‘Anti-Deficiency Act.’ Do you know what that is?”

  “Of course I do. I’m a lawyer. It means that government agencies can’t spend money that hasn’t been appropriated by Congress. But how do you know?”

  “I’ve been doing my homework. I’ve known I would need to break with these people, eventually. The point is, somebody has been using me and my firm to violate that law. That’s what they were doing, running a fund off the books to provide money for their operations. And I want you to tell the general counsel that if they do not back off, I am going to say this in open court in Britain, and they are going down!”

  Perkins’s stage whisper had grown so loud the guard or anyone else listening could surely hear it. But he didn’t care.

  Tarullo got up to leave. He gave Perkins a kiss on both cheeks, Italian-style, and the hea
vy body lumbered out the door.

  Perkins leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. He put his feet up on the wooden table for a moment, savoring his act of defiance, but the guard pushed them away and ordered Perkins back to his cell.

  40

  LONDON

  The Eurostar arrivals hall at St. Pancras station was thick with well-dressed young men and women, their computer bags slung over their shoulders and rolling their luggage behind them. There was the faint sound of a thousand tiny wheels clicking across the floor as they busily sped off to their London destinations. They were bound for Euro-Britain, a nation of espresso bars and gourmet sandwich shops that seemed barely connected to the old country of dingy corridors and cigarette butts.

  Sophie Marx was traveling on a new diplomatic passport, supplied by the embassy in Brussels, so she avoided the queue at Immigration. She took a black taxi to the Dorchester Hotel, where she had left her luggage in storage when she had decamped suddenly for Islamabad a week before. The doorman tipped his black top hat, and the concierge in his morning coat welcomed her “back home,” as if she’d been off sporting on the Côte d’Azur these past few days. Nothing in her appearance gave her away; she wore a pair of well-tailored slacks and her snug leather jacket and she did look, at a glance, like someone who belonged on a yacht rather than in a safe house.

  Marx asked the man at the front desk for a simple room that would fit her new budget, but she was family now, and they gave her a big room with a four-poster double bed and windows that overlooked the park.

  She rang Thomas Perkins’s numbers again when she got upstairs. She had been calling him for two days without success, at his office, home and cell numbers. It was evident that something bad had happened to him but she didn’t yet know what, and she blamed herself.

  She unpacked her things, took a long shower and collapsed on the bed. She wanted to hide for a while, from the people who were pursuing her and from thoughts about the people she had placed in danger. She unhooked the chintz curtains that surrounded the bed and let them fall, so that she was enclosed in a doll’s house of floral print fabric and down pillows. She hugged a pillow tight against her chest, the way she had as a girl in her first weeks at boarding school, fighting the loneliness of separation from her crazy parents. Sleep came quickly; she was awakened ninety minutes later by the insistent ring of her cellular phone.

  Marx fumbled for the handset, uncertain where she was in the dark of the bed. It was odd to hear the ring at all; so few people knew how to reach her. She looked at the number of the incoming caller; it was a London mobile phone she didn’t recognize, and she thought at first that it might be Thomas Perkins.

  “Hello,” she answered. “Who is this?”

  The answer was the clipped, emphatic and all too familiar voice of Jeffrey Gertz.

  “It’s your boss. Or should I say, your former boss. I gather you’ve gone over to the parent company.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. “You’re hazardous to my health.”

  “I need to see you. We have to talk.”

  “Wrong. We have nothing to talk about. You are a menace. I mean it. Don’t call again. Goodbye.”

  She pressed the red button on the phone and ended the call. The phone rang again, twice, from the same number, and she let it roll over to voice mail both times. Ten minutes later, there was a call from a “private number,” not otherwise identified. She ignored that one, too.

  Marx put on her jeans and black leather and walked the half dozen blocks across Mayfair to the handsome building that housed Alphabet Capital. It was a Friday afternoon and the pubs along the way were already crowded with merry-makers, spilling onto the sidewalks with their pints of beer and their wine coolers. As she threaded the crowds, several men offered to buy her a round.

  The police had departed Perkins’s building. When the elevator door opened at the top floor, the Alphabet offices looked depopulated, with perhaps a third of the normal contingent on the trading floor. The boisterous feeling she remembered was gone, too; it had the dazed and enervated look of a business in liquidation. Marx walked toward Perkins’s office. The door was shut and the windows that looked out on the trading floor were curtained.

  Perkins’s secretary, Mona, was sitting alone at what had been a bank of three assistants. Her eyes were red from days of sleeplessness and crying. She saw Marx approach and pulled back at first. The American woman was part of the problem that had capsized her boss and his firm.

  “Where have you been?” she asked Marx. “You missed all the, what, action, but that’s not quite the right word. More like a typhoon.”

  “I was away. What happened? It’s so quiet. It looks like they just had a funeral here.”

  “Might as well have been. There police were here all week. They just left this morning. Shut the place down, you might say. Took whatever they liked: half the files, and the proprietor, too.”

  “Where’s Mr. Perkins? I’ve been trying to reach him for two days. He doesn’t answer my calls and he doesn’t respond to messages.”

  “Don’t you know what happened, miss?”

  “No, Mona, I have no idea. I told you, I’ve been away. Where is he?”

  “He’s in prison, ma’am. They took him off two days ago. He’s in Pentonville now, or so they say. Mr. Tarullo has been up to visit. He’s the only one.”

  “I need to see him. It’s really important. Can you contact him for me?”

  The secretary shook her head sorrowfully. Her life had been devoted to making arrangements for people to see Thomas Perkins, and now she was useless.

  “I told you, he’s in prison. No phone, no mobile, no visitors that aren’t on the list. You have to apply to the warden. And he isn’t seeing most people, I should warn you, only his attorneys. He thinks it’s better that way, or at least that’s what Mr. Tarullo told us.”

  Marx got Tarullo’s number from the secretary and called him. The American lawyer sounded harassed and grumpy. Marx gave him her name and said she needed to visit Perkins in prison, but Tarullo sounded uninterested. Perkins, in his desire to protect her, had never mentioned her name to his lawyer.

  Tarullo said he was preparing to leave for the States that night on the last British Airways flight, to “shake the tree,” as he put it.

  “Who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked. “I never heard of you. Who do you work for?”

  Marx thought a minute. She didn’t have time to play games and neither, evidently, did Tarullo.

  “I work for the U.S. government. That’s all I want to say on the phone. But I’m a friend of Mr. Perkins’s, for real, and I suspect he doesn’t have too many right now. I need to see him.”

  Now Tarullo was a little more interested. The busy lawyer’s go-away tone changed to something more solicitous.

  “You work for a part of the government that doesn’t like to say that it’s the government. Am I right?”

  “Yes. ‘I could tell you more but then I’d have to…’ You know the line. Can we talk?”

  Tarullo decided to take a flyer. He had to leave for the airport soon, and he needed to know if this call was worth his time.

  “Let me ask you something, whoever you are. Do you know anything about someone named Anthony Cronin?”

  “Yes. I know all about him.”

  “You’re shitting me. For real?”

  “Yes. That’s why I need to see Mr. Perkins.”

  “Not so fast, sister. Before you see Tom, you’re coming to see me. Can you get over to my hotel right now? I’m catching the eight o’clock flight to JFK, and I have to leave for Heathrow in an hour, max. I’m at the Park Lane Intercon. I’ll be in the bar. Ask the concierge for Mr. Tarullo.”

  He was there, waiting impatiently, when she arrived ten minutes later. She didn’t have to ask the man at the desk. It was obvious that the big guy staring at his watch, the one with the slicked-back hair and the look of a superannuated pop star, must be Vincent Tarullo. He had
already packed and was dressed for the flight in baggy slacks and a velour jacket. His eyes lit up when he saw her walking toward him.

  “Howdy do,” he said, sticking out a meaty hand. “Buy you a drink?”

  “I think we’re better off taking a walk,” said Marx, taking his arm. “A lot of people would like to hear what we’re going to talk about.”

  They exited the hotel and took the underpass beneath Hyde Park Corner that led toward the green oval of the park. If there was surveillance, it was well organized; there was no sign of anyone following or watching.

  “I need to see Tom Perkins,” she began, taking his arm and leaning in close. “I’m part of the reason he’s in this mess, and I think I can help get him out.”

  “Where were you when I needed you, lady? The poor man is in prison now. They’re about to nail him with enough fraud charges to put him away for a long time. You picked a strange time to get in touch.”

  “I was traveling. I can’t explain any more, except that I was dealing with the fallout from the same mess that got your client in all this trouble.”

  They emerged from the tunnel into the light and turned north, heading up a pathway that traversed a bower of trees along Park Lane.

  “My client thinks he can get off,” the lawyer said. “He says they’re bluffing. The CIA will never let them prosecute this case because of all the secrets that would come out.”

  “Your client is right. This is all a house of cards. He was the cover for something very secret. They used him, and now they want to make him the fall guy. But it won’t work.”

  “Oh, yeah? It seems to be working pretty good so far. Why is that going to change?”

  “Because I’m ready to talk. I’ll testify in court if I have to. You can tell that to people in Washington tomorrow. Sophie Marx is prepared to testify about everything she knows concerning Tom Perkins and his firm, and its connections to the U.S. government. How’s that?”