Hansen said confidently, “Couldn’t be done. The aerodynamics of parachute manufacturing is not something you can learn in books or take a cram course in. It takes years to learn.”
They continued along the aisle. A rigger was tapping a grommet with a ball-peen hammer. A purposeful expression tightened Alejandro’s face. “Can you think of any way to set up a phony parachute company so that it would look legit?”
Lighting a cigarette, Hansen said, “You can’t manufacture ’em, so you’re going to have to buy them.” He took a drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke up at a limp parachute, looked at the stranger with the fake beard and mustache and baseball hat with its brim down over his forehead, and said, “I assume you want to retain control over the system, forcing your clients to keep coming back to you.”
“Yes.”
“Take a cram course in rigging. Learn how to pack them. That way they’ll be forced to come back to you.”
“Where do I go to learn?”
“There are private instructors, and schools, all FAA certified.” He took another drag. “I’m sure Mr. Hicks could make the necessary arrangements for you. That way you could set up a phony skydiving school.”
“Would it be possible to buy your product without any identifying manufacturing marks?”
“We do it all the time for certain clients.”
“Besides rigging, can you think of any other way I could control the longevity of the system, insuring that they would have to bring the complete system back to me?”
Hansen walked over to a large oyster shell on top of a desk in the corner. He took a final pull on his cigarette and thoughtfully mashed it out inside the shell. Turning, he brushed his palms across his bald head and said, “You could screw up the electronics, causing it to short out every few days.”
He walked back over to a tool bench and picked up the black box’s circuit board. He took it back to A. Brown and started to trace the circuitry with his pen while talking aloud to himself. “Cross the feeder line here so that it’ll short after a few days, then remove this resistor, and … that way they’d have to bring it back to be rearmed.” A satisfied smile crossed his mouth. “Yeah, that would do it, nicely.”
“Couldn’t their people fix it?”
“First, I don’t know who their people are. But it makes no difference, because if they’re not expert on Parapoint, they’d never find the problem. I’d show you how to rig the circuits.”
Alejandro took off his cap and waved it vaguely in the air. “If strangers came ’round checking to see if you sold me Parapoint, how would you deal with it?”
“I stick with whatever story we agreed upon. You’re not the first of Mr. Hicks’s friends we’ve done business with, Mr. Brown.”
“What would ten Parapoints cost me?”
“Three hundred fifty thousand. Since you are with Wade Hicks, your company would save the state and federal tax.”
“I’ll let you know where to deliver them.”
“Let’s go into my office,” Hansen said, leading the way.
Sunlight speared through the windows of Hansen’s corner office. His desk was covered in machine parts, invoices, and swatches of different-colored nylon. Miniature parachutes hung from the ceiling, and a large photograph of a smiling circle of free-falling skydivers was on the wall. Hansen walked behind his desk, pushed some parts out of the way, and lifted his blotter, sliding out a sheet of paper. Passing it to Alejandro, he said, “Here is a list of my IRS-approved covert accounts. Wire-transfer the money into them, but no deposit can be over thirty-five thousand.”
“Okay,” Alejandro said, slipping the paper into his jeans pocket. “Now, how about us agreeing on a story for me—and then you teaching me how to sabotage Parapoint’s electronics.”
A clap of thunder and a flash of lightning splintered the sky Thursday afternoon, causing people to look up and quicken their step.
Alejandro took his time deciphering the old tombstones in Trinity Church’s cemetery. He looked at the time: 12:50. He was a bit early for his one o’clock meeting with Seaver.
Traffic was moving freely along Broadway.
Alejandro wore his jeans and a blue T-shirt under a white cotton jacket. Tasseled loafers, no socks.
Tourists walked around the hallowed ground, snapping photographs. A gaggle of schoolchildren gleefully posed in front of Alexander Hamilton’s pyramid-shaped monument.
After reading Robert Fulton’s bronze bas relief, Alejandro walked over to the fence and looked across Broadway to the corner of Wall Street. A drug dealer was engaged in brief, furtive conversations with well-dressed men holding expensive briefcases. He watched as money was exchanged for packets of foil.
“The free enterprise system at work in the citadel of capitalism,” Mother Hen said, coming up behind his deep undercover.
“The resident scumbucket dealing with the resident assholes,” Alejandro said. He added curtly, “Let’s get out of here.”
They walked out of the churchyard, turned west into Rector Street, and crossed Trinity Place, heading for the vertical towers of Battery Park City.
“I’ll be meeting with Hector this evening,” Alejandro said.
“We believe the shooter in the Levi-DiLeo homicide was a dude named Hector. You can’t miss him. He has a streak of white running down the center of his hair. If the Hector you’re meeting is that Hector, he probably dyed the white out of his hair immediately after the hit.”
Alejandro shook his head in disagreement. “Not necessarily. Most of these macho shooters are so arrogant and overconfident that they never give a second thought to being ‘made’ at the scene.” Alejandro’s eyes darted to his control. “I’ll probably be ‘in play’ after meeting Hector. It won’t be wise for us to meet again until this is over.”
They fell silent, each man occupied with his own thoughts.
They knew that being “in play” was the most dangerous part of the operation for a deep one. It was during this period of time that the dopers’ counterintelligence apparatus would be smelling out the undercover’s legend, probing for the scent of cop.
“I was careful coming here,” Alejandro said. “I rode up and down half a dozen elevators before walking over here.”
“From now on only make contact through burst transmissions, unless you find yourself in deep shit, then telephone Control for the cavalry.”
Alejandro walked over to the wagon of a pretzel vendor on the corner. After brushing mustard on a pretzel, he broke it in half and handed it to Mother Hen, saying, “I’ve ordered ten Parapoints.”
“How much we talking about?”
“Three hundred fifty thousand.” Alejandro passed him the slip of paper with the parachute manufacturer’s bank accounts and told him Hansen’s instructions regarding wire transfers into the accounts.
Tucking the slip into his pocket, Seaver asked, “What else you going to need?”
“I’m not sure, maybe another two hundred thousand to open a skydiving school.”
“Getting you the money is easy, but how are you going to explain your sudden wealth to Che-Che and his crew?”
Alejandro had a ready answer. “I’ll borrow on my apartment and car.”
“No good,” Seaver said, tossing a chunk of pretzel into his mouth. “You have no real credit rating or record, you don’t exist. Not even one of our banks could justify lending you that much money.”
“Then I’ll borrow from Che-Che. I’ll make him a partner.”
“Will he lend it to you?”
“We’re blood brothers,” Alejandro said, smiling at Seaver. “He’ll lend it.”
“I’ll get the two hundred thousand, anyway, just in case.” Tossing the remainder of the pretzel into his mouth and licking a smear of mustard from his lips, he asked, “How you see this thing going down?”
Alejandro stopped walking and thought for a moment before he replied. “We buy duffel bags and install flexible circuit boards the size of credit cards in false panels se
wn into the canvas along with thin flexible batteries that we take out of Polaroid film packs. Then we insert two-foot-long pieces of wire for an antenna. Once they float the dope down into the drop zone here in the States, they’ll remove the duffel bags from the chutes and ship the entire load to New York. You’ll get our electronics people to throw a net over the entire area. When their beepers start chirping the mambo, all you have to do is follow those signals to their warehouses.”
Seaver sounded unconvinced. “And if they take the dope out of the duffel bags once they get it into the States, then what do we do?”
Alejandro responded, “We’ll spray tiny adhesive diodes inside the duffel bags. These chips aren’t powered and do not need an antenna, at least according to the tech guys at the Hacienda.”
“How do they work?” Seaver asked, rolling an unlit cheroot across his mouth.
“They’re simple unencapsulated diodes that are detected when a nonlinear junction detector beams a radio wave at them. The diodes return signals that radiate harmonic frequencies back to the detector. All the power to detect them comes from our tracing equipment. The Agency and the KGB used to seed office walls with them in order to confuse bug detectors. They’d give out so many signals that they would mask the real bug.”
He scratched the side of his face thoughtfully, looked at Mother Hen, and added, “Andy, it’s beautiful. When it all turns to bad, I won’t even be around. They’ll start blaming each other.”
Seaver’s eyes fell to the pavement. “I sincerely hope so, my friend.” He looked sideways at the undercover. “Besides money, what else are you going to need?”
“I need a crash course in rigging a Ram Air parachute.”
“The Garbage Disposal Machine at the Hacienda has riggers. Sanitizing you for a few days, now that you’re in play, won’t be easy. Getting you down there is going to require some fancy footwork—and more than likely the help of some outside people.”
“Use some people from Intelligence.”
“I’d never use anyone out of Puzzle Plaza for this kind of operation.”
Alejandro smiled at the derogatory reference to police headquarters.
“I’ll probably use some people from the Agency’s Theater Group. Be ready to go after your last show Saturday.”
Walking into Battery Park City’s plaza, Seaver paused to light up his cheroot. Alejandro watched him, a flicker of sadness in his eyes. “See ya ’round, amigo mío,” he said, and walked away.
Biting down on his cigar, Mother Hen watched Chilebean walking across the plaza, repressing an inexplicable urge to call him back.
The Second Federal Reserve District is housed in a sandstone-and-limestone fortress at 33 Liberty Street, three blocks north of Trinity Church. It took Seaver three minutes to walk there after having ridden skyscraper elevators for half an hour.
He showed his police credentials to the guards inside the vestibule and was escorted by one of them into a side office, where a dour little man sat behind a big desk. The man looked up, nodded recognition to Seaver, and dismissively thanked the guard. Getting up and walking out from behind his desk, the man asked, “How have you been?”
“Good,” Seaver said. “I need to go downstairs.”
“Of course,” the man said, and without another word led Seaver out into the corridor and to a heavy wooden door in the middle of the passageway.
The man unlocked the door with his key ring and held it open for the police lieutenant. They stepped inside. The man closed and locked the door. Black surveillance cameras were bracketed on the wall. The dour man flipped through his key ring and inserted one into the elevator lock. The door slid open; they stepped inside. Behind the latticed grille that formed the false ceiling of the elevator, Seaver caught the gleam of a lens. The door closed automatically under their weight. There were no floor indicator buttons on the panel, only six unnumbered keyholes. The man inserted another key into one of the locks, and the elevator descended four stories below the ground.
They stepped out into a cavernous subterranean chamber with seven tunnels radiating off a central hall that was just beyond the floor-to-ceiling steel gate that separated the chamber from the elevator.
Grottos had been cut into the walls of the tunnels, and each one was filled with pallets of gold bricks and paper money. Five levels below the street, gold belonging to many nations moved from one space to another, according to the ebb and flow of the balance of trade, without ever leaving the building. Miniature surveillance cameras were mounted inconspicuously in the corners of each grotto and along the tunnels. Electrically powered forklifts hummed through the tunnels with pallets of gold and money resting on their steel fingers.
Half a dozen armed Treasury Department guards were on station on both sides of the steel gate. Seaver took out his credentials and handed them to the sergeant in charge, who scrutinized them and then passed them through the bars to another sergeant, who took them and disappeared into an office to the left of the gate. The sergeant came out shortly, holding a photograph of Seaver along with his official pedigree.
After comparing the photographs to the face on the other side of the gate, the sergeant holding the credentials asked Seaver, “What was your mother’s maiden name?”
“Slingland.”
“What was your maternal grandmother’s maiden name?”
“McGovern.”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
“I’m not married.”
The sergeant motioned for the gate to be opened.
A guard pulled open a gray metal wall box and worked the levers. The steel gate slid back, allowing Seaver and the man to walk inside the chamber. The two men continued along one of the tunnels until they came to a hingeless steel door that had a chrome plate beside it that contained a cipher lock pad, a miniaturized camera lens, and a handprint pad.
Seaver punched his code number into the cipher pad and stood in front of the camera lens. A red dot glowed inside the lens, and an automaton’s voice ordered, “Place. Your. Right. Hand. Into. The. Handprint.”
Seaver did this, and the steel door slid up into the wall.
“Okay. Take care,” the man said, and walked off.
The room that Seaver walked into was crammed with all sorts of sophisticated consoles and equipment. He was inside the most secret P Room, an abbreviation for Police Room, used by each of the twenty-four Federal Reserve Districts to transfer federal monies to police departments for use in undercover narcotics operations that were beyond the financial resources of the local agencies.
Ray Kinnahan, a stocky man with a ruddy face, wearing gray trousers and a black shirt with the collar open, was waiting on the other side of the door. Going up to Seaver and pumping his hand, he said, “Thanks for getting my nephew transferred out of that Six-seven shithouse, Andy. The kid was going ape having to deal with those Rastafarians.”
“How does he like the Nineteenth?”
“All sunshine and roses.” Kinnahan was the Federal Reserve District’s liaison with law enforcement within the second district’s jurisdiction. He led Seaver along a wide aisle between the consoles. A large translucent plot board on the wall had a flat map of the world on which was marked the worldwide clandestine transfers of federal monies out of the second district.
Kinnahan’s windowless office had an American flag in the corner and a photograph of the Kinnahan family on his desk that included his wife and their six sons and their wives and children. The family posed around a Christmas tree.
After lowering himself onto his chair, Kinnahan reached into a side drawer and took out a packet of forms, which he then pushed across the desk to Seaver. The forms requested covert funds from the government, and each one had TOP SECRET stamped across its face.
Seaver pushed across the list of bank accounts that Hansen had given to Alejandro. “These accounts belong to an authorized vendor.” He outlined how the wire transfer of funds was to take place.
Looking over the list, Kinnahan asked,
“How much?”
“Three hundred fifty thousand to play, and a coupla hundred thousand walking-around money.”
Leaning back in his chair, Kinnahan asked, “Usual terms?”
“Yes. Uncle gets his back first, plus half of all confiscated assets.”
“Done.”
Seaver tore off the paper ribbon around the packet and separated the pages. Each one had a warning across the top advising that any false statement was perjury under the U.S. Code. On the back of each form was an abridged explanation of the Internal Revenue Tax Code, which required all cash transactions over ten thousand dollars to be reported on Form 4787, except as provided for under Section 4e of the code, which gave congressional authorization for the secret transfer and laundering of federal monies to be used in covert law enforcement operations. This provision of the code also approved the secret transfer of government funds into the private accounts of vendors and manufacturers who supplied police agencies with the necessary “tools of the trade,” as long as these secret accounts were not “offshore” and were registered with and had the approval of the Internal Revenue Service.
Watching Seaver fill out the forms, Kinnahan asked, “A big operation?”
“They’re all big, Ray, you know that. But this one, yeah, it’s important. It’s what we in the trade call personal.”
Kinnahan took the forms and stacked them neatly in a pile. “You going to want to take the two hundred grand with you?”
“No. I might get mugged.”
Kinnahan laughed. “You gotta gun.”
“A cop’s gun don’t mean shit in this town. Last week in the Seven-nine two rookies were patrolling their beats together. At Fulton and Nostrand, a gang of drug dealers surrounded them, shoved TEC-9s in their faces, took their guns and shields, and told them that if they see them again, they’re gonna be dead meat.”
Shaking his head with disbelief, Kinnahan asked, “What did the cops do?”
“They went into the station house and resigned.”
The Sapphire Room, on the second floor of the Hotel Versailles, was a gilt-trimmed cobalt blue room with a custom-designed cherrywood bar, dark blue carpet, high ceilings, and soft lighting.
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