Gold (24 page)

FOURTEEN

It’s very dangerous,” the old man said to Halden, looking evenly at him from the cracked leather armchair in front of the fire. “But I can’t argue with your analysis of the situation. It may be your solution is the only alternative you have.”

Peter Wagner’s face looked troubled by the complexity of the problem and the responsibility the two men were taking on themselves.

The two warmed themselves by the fireplace, holding snifters of brandy to restore warmth to their bodies after their short hike in the crisp Maine autumn.

Wagner was a widower and lived in his Maine cabin alone with his Irish setter, Samson. Despite a distinguished head of white hair, Wagner, a tall and bony man, looked more at home in the flannel shirt and corduroy pants of the Maine backwoods than he had in his navy blue pinstripe testifying before Congress.

One of the duties of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is to account to lawmakers for the Fed’s conduct of monetary policy, its view of the economy, its surveillance of the banking system. The explosive growth of banking and finance had elevated the Fed chairmanship into one of the most powerful positions in the country.

Even the President had to defer to the Fed chairman. Once appointed, the chairman enjoyed an independence enforced by law. Of course the politics of reappointment had encouraged many a Fed chairman to heed the wishes of the chief executive, but Wagner had leveraged his statutory autonomy by never needing to use it.

Halden admired Wagner without reserve. Wagner had brought Halden from his obscure post as president of the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, one of twelve regional banks that together constituted the central bank of the United States, and had made him his confidant, his protegé. When Halden took his turn in the rotation to sit on the Open Market Committee, the panel composed of the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board and five Federal Reserve Bank presidents, the two invariably steered the board to adopt the policy measures they had already decided upon. Shortly after the debt crisis broke in 1982, Wagner had encouraged the ineffectual president of the New York Fed to step down and installed Halden in the key position, which Wagner himself had filled before ascending to the chairmanship.

“You see what I was telling you all those years,” the old man resumed. “How difficult it is to take on the responsibility for these decisions. You’re the only one who really understands them, the only one who foresees the consequences.”

Halden willingly played the attentive pupil. This was what he had come for, after all, the reassurance that he was doing the right thing, that he had to do it.

The past week of intensive preparation had made him more confident. He had consulted his experts, gathered information to refine his plan. He had been careful to discuss only isolated facets of it, to short-circuit normal chains of command, to keep anyone from getting an idea of what he was doing.

His plan was too big, too dangerous to share with anyone but Wagner. Halden had come to believe in the past few weeks that the world monetary system was past saving. The crash in the wake of the gold mine sabotage had definitively destabilized the delicate balance of an increasingly makeshift arrangement. The only constructive action at this moment was to prepare the transition to a new type of monetary order, purged of all the problems and anomalies that had accumulated in the old. That meant choosing the time—through a preemptive strike against the old system.

The old man came back to Halden’s proposal. “It’s funny to spend so long repairing something, fixing it up to keep on running, only to push it off the cliff in the end. Are you sure the damage can be contained?”

“I’ve used the computers, everything I could think of to play out the various scenarios.” Halden paused. “Peter, I feel the system will collapse very soon anyway, and it is much better if we initiate it in a reasonably controlled environment.”

The older man was reflective. “You’re undoubtedly right about the collapse, Mark. You know I’ve been expecting it for many years. The system has been surprisingly resilient, but it’s resting on too many hollow structures. It has to collapse.”

He looked into the fire for several moments.

“Tomorrow morning we can go over the details together,” Wagner said, looking up again at Halden. He paused. “It’s something neither Roberts nor Johnson could grasp, let alone the cowboys in the White House.” He sighed audibly. “Will you warn anyone?”

“No. I would have talked to Martinez, but there’s no one else I trust.”

“You think gold can be the catalyst for your action?” Wagner asked.

“It’s the wild card of the monetary system. There’s something very funny going on. The sabotage should have reduced supply much more than seems to be the case. The market’s nervous as a result, and I feel something is going to break soon.” Halden did not explain to Wagner that he expected a certain American journalist to be the source of that break.

Samson stirred in his corner. Then the dog sat up and began a scratching routine. “Time for his food,” Wagner said. “And I’d better scare up our steaks.”

FIFTEEN

Drew replayed the message.

“Here is Hannes,” the voice on his answering machine said. “I have found something astounding, crazy. I must talk to you as soon as possible. Call me only at home.
Servus
!”

Drew tried Kraml’s home number again, but again got no answer. The trader had not said what day he was calling, but it seemed to be sometime early in the week.

It was Sunday morning. Drew had just come from the airport after his long flight from Johannesburg.

The message bothered him. There was a strain, an urgency in Kraml’s voice that went beyond his normal high-strung tendencies. There were several later beeps on the tape, signaling calls without messages, that Drew feared were later attempts by the Austrian to reach him.

Drew unpacked, showered, tried Kraml’s number again. The phone rang several times, but finally a woman answered with the name Kraml as though it took great effort.

“Hello, it’s Drew Dumesnil in London,” he said in English. “I’ve been out of town but I have a message from Hannes to call him at home.”

There was a silence on the other end, so long that Drew was ready to repeat his greeting in German, although he knew that Brigitte, Kraml’s wife, spoke fluent English.

“Hannes is dead,” the woman said finally, hesitating to find the English words. “He has been killed on the highway.”

Drew was numb. He switched to German, trying to console the young widow while finding out just what had happened. Kraml’s car had gone off the road on a curve along the highway to Zug on Tuesday morning. The trader had been crushed; the car was going at a high speed and there was a deep ravine. The curve was marked
DANGER
and had caused several fatal accidents before.

Brigitte Kraml was obviously having trouble coping with the loss and seemed to be under sedation. But Drew pressed her for details of Hannes’s behavior the night before the accident. He had been nervous and irritable, she said, and had not slept well. He had called London often, she added.

Drew finally let her go, promising to attend the funeral the next day. Kraml was to be cremated, but Mr. Marcus had insisted on a memorial ceremony, the woman explained. The trader’s employer had been deeply touched by the tragedy and had been most generous and sympathetic. Marcus was paying the funeral costs and said he would pay Kraml’s salary to the widow for a year, although Hannes carried considerable insurance and her own family was quite well-to-do.

Drew sat ashen-faced next to the phone. MacLean dead. Van der Merwe dead. Now Kraml. The trader’s death may have been the unfortunate accident it appeared to be. Just like Drew’s own death might have seemed if the Renault had hit him crossing that Paris street!

MacLean had been involved in a scheme to beat the market. What had Kraml done? Was Marcus in on the scheme, and Kraml had found evidence of it? So what? Marcus used inside information to beat the markets every day. Kraml would not find that worth a panic call to a journalist.

No, it had to be related to the Russians and the South Africans. What had Kraml found out? Why had he been killed?

Drew didn’t know what to do about his discovery in South Africa. He felt he needed some evidence to corroborate what he had seen, but he wasn’t sure how to get it. He had hoped Kraml was going to get something from Marcus. The suspicious death of the trader proved to Drew that there was something to find out from Marcus, but the journalist needed more tangible evidence to break the story.

~

Drew’s cab delivered him to the funeral home the next morning, just as the ceremony was beginning. He slipped quietly into the back row as a cleric of some sort solemnly read a psalm. Drew saw Kraml’s wife in the front row, flanked by an older man and woman he presumed were her parents.

In the second row was a thin man with hunched shoulders, whom Drew recognized from photographs as Philip Marcus. Next to him was a short, flabby man Drew took to be Blackford Teller, Marcus’s alter ego.

Drew studied Marcus as the clergyman droned on. Marcus seemed confident, in control. Drew could not imagine him as a fugitive. And yet, that was just what he was to the U.S. government. With all his millions, Marcus could scarcely set foot outside Switzerland without risking arrest. He could live very well in Switzerland, of course, and did by all accounts. At least, he had acquired the trappings of the good life: the villa outside Zug, the chalet in the mountains, the cars.

But, in fact, Marcus had no time for his good life. He lived exclusively for his business, and his business was making more and more money.

Drew recalled the banker character in Zola’s
L’Argent
. He had to rise at five each morning to receive long lines of brokers and agents with their offers; he was reduced to living on milk alone because of stomach problems; he supported a large family without ever having the time for them. Like the French writer, Drew wondered at the motivation of these billionaires. Small wonder they did not feel bound by the social and moral strictures of normal people. The modest motivations and contentments of normal people were foreign to them.

But the journalist caught himself. Who, after all, was normal? What was normal about his own unthinking devotion to his work, his twelve-hour days, his single-minded pursuit of whatever journalistic task was set him? Like Marcus, he too had power of a sort, to compensate him for this devotion. He was just now getting a sense of how much power. But the power was not really his; he did not really control it. Neither did Marcus, for all his millions.

A reedy electric organ punctured Drew’s reverie. He stood with everyone else. A number of young men there appeared to be Kraml’s colleagues.

The organ piece marked the end of the ceremony. Drew maneuvered forward to speak to Kraml’s wife.

“I have something for you,” the woman said after he had expressed his condolences.

She was bearing up much better than she had on the phone. Pretty in the striking Swiss way, her pragmatism was asserting itself as Kraml’s death became a fact of life.

“I’m sorry I didn’t think of it yesterday. I was in bad shape, you know.” She drew an envelope out of her bag. “Hannes spent most of Monday night writing this down for you; I suppose he wanted to mail it, I don’t know. But here it is, anyway.”

Drew slipped the envelope into his coat pocket as Aunt somebody came up to the widow. The journalist turned and nearly walked into Philip Marcus.

“Mr. Marcus, Drew Dumesnil.” They were too close to attempt to shake hands. Marcus looked at the journalist blankly. “I work for World Commodities News, and I’d like to talk to you about the gold situation.” Drew didn’t hesitate. It was as close as he would ever get to Marcus, and the worst that could happen is that he would walk away.

Marcus looked straight at him, and Drew had an inkling of how the rabbit felt when fixed in the stare of a snake.

“Not here,” Marcus said.

Drew waited while Marcus murmured his sympathies to the widow, promising his assistance whenever she needed it. Then Marcus turned abruptly and moved quickly through the entrance of the church. Uncertain, Drew followed him outside. Marcus’s limousine was waiting at the curb. The journalist barely caught Marcus’s quick gesture to get into the back.

“It’s a seven-minute ride to the office,” Marcus said, as the Cadillac pulled away.

“Are you selling gold for the Russians?” Drew asked.

Marcus flashed a quick, wolfish smile. “No comment,” he said.

“The South Africans?”

Marcus leaned back. “I’m a trader. I trade for my own account, I trade for clients. I have many clients.” He paused to light a cigar.

“There was no sabotage; the South African gold is coming onto the market.” Drew’s remark was not a question.

Marcus’s eyes hardened. “I’m a trader. I don’t make policy or produce gold or bomb gold mines. I trade commodities.” He paused. “I don’t report the news, true or false. I read the papers, I do what my clients tell me.”

“You knew there was no sabotage; you’re selling the South African gold,” Drew persisted. “You’re part of the fraud.”