Killing Floor (29 page)

Since then, he had been poking and prying, hovering around on the edge of our hidden investigation. He had wanted in and he had been a willing helper. Finlay had used him on lookout duty. And all the time he was running to Teale with the snippets he was getting from us.

Finlay was blasting north at a hell of a speed. He flung the Chevy around the cloverleaf and mashed the pedal. The big car hurtled forward up the highway.

“Could we try the Coast Guard?” he said. “Get them to stand by Sunday for when they start shipping out? Some kind of an extra patrol?”

“You’re joking,” I said. “The political flak the president’s taken over that, he’s not going to reverse himself the very first day, just because you ask him to.”

“So what do we do?” he said.

“Call Princeton back,” I told him. “Get hold of that research assistant again. He may be able to piece together what Bartholomew figured out last night. Hole up somewhere safe and get busy.”

He laughed.

“Where the hell’s safe now?” he said.

I told him to use the Alabama motel we’d used Monday. It was in the middle of nowhere and it was as safe as he needed to get. I told him I’d find him there when I got back. Asked him to bring the Bentley to the airport and to leave the key and the parking claim at the arrivals information desk. He repeated all the arrangements back to me to confirm he was solid. He was doing more than ninety miles an hour, but he was turning his head to look at me every time he spoke.

“Watch the road, Finlay,” I said. “No good to anybody if you kill us in a damn car.”

He grinned and faced forward. Jammed his foot down harder. The big police Chevy eased up over a hundred. Then he turned again and looked straight into my eyes for about three hundred yards.

“Coward,” he said.

25

NO EASY WAY TO GET THROUGH THE AIRPORT SECURITY
hoops with a sap and a knife and a big metal gun, so I left my camouflage jacket in Finlay’s car and told him to transfer it to the Bentley. He ducked into departures with me and put the best part of seven hundred bucks on his credit card for my round trip ticket on Delta to New York. Then he took off to find the Alabama motel and I went through to the gate for the plane to La Guardia.

I was airborne for a shade over two hours and in a cab for thirty-five minutes. Arrived in Manhattan just after four-thirty. I’d been there in May and it looked pretty much the same in September. The summer heat was over and the city was back to work. The cab took me over the Triborough Bridge and headed west on 116th. Slid around Morningside Park and dropped me at Columbia University’s main entrance. I went in and found my way to the campus security office. Knocked on the glass.

A campus policeman checked a clipboard and let me in. Led me through to a room in back and pointed to Professor Kelvin Kelstein. I saw a very old guy, tiny, wizened with age, sporting a huge shock of white hair. He looked exactly like that cleaner I’d seen on the third floor at Warburton, except he was white.

“The two Hispanic guys been back?” I asked the college cop.

He shook his head.

“Haven’t seen them,” he said. “The old guy’s office told them that the lunch date was canceled. Maybe they went away.”

“I hope so,” I said. “Meanwhile, you’re going to have to watch over this guy for a spell. Give it until Sunday.”

“Why?” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Not sure, exactly,” I said. “I’m hoping the old guy can tell me.”

The guard walked us back to Kelstein’s own office and left us there. It was a small and untidy room crammed full to the ceiling with books and thick journals. Kelstein sat in an old armchair and gestured me to sit opposite him in another.

“What exactly happened to Bartholomew?” he asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” I said. “Jersey police say he got stabbed during a mugging outside his home.”

“But you remain skeptical?” Kelstein asked.

“My brother made a list of contacts,” I said. “You’re the only one of them still alive.”

“Your brother was Mr. Joe Reacher?” he said.

I nodded.

“He was murdered last Thursday,” I said. “I’m trying to find out why.”

Kelstein inclined his head and peered out of a grimy window.

“I’m sure you know why,” he said. “He was an investigator. Clearly he was killed in the course of an investigation. What you need to know is what he was investigating.”

“Can you tell me what that was?” I said.

The old professor shook his head.

“Only in the most general terms,” he said. “I can’t help you with specifics.”

“Didn’t he discuss specifics with you?” I said.

“He used me as a sounding board,” he said. “We were speculating together. I enjoyed it tremendously. Your brother Joe was a stimulating companion. He had a keen mind and a very attractive precision in the manner in which he expressed himself. It was a pleasure to work with him.”

“But you didn’t discuss specifics?” I said again.

Kelstein cupped his hands like a man holding an empty vessel.

“We discussed everything,” he said. “But we came to no conclusions.”

“OK,” I said. “Can we start at the beginning? The discussion was about counterfeit currency, right?”

Kelstein tilted his great head to one side. Looked amused.

“Obviously,” he said. “What else would Mr. Joe Reacher and I find to discuss?”

“Why you?” I asked him bluntly.

The old professor smiled a modest smile which faded into a frown. Then he came up with an ironic grin.

“Because I am the biggest counterfeiter in history,” he said. “I was going to say I was one of the two biggest in history, but after the events of last night at Princeton, sadly now I alone remain.”

“You and Bartholomew?” I said. “You were counterfeiters?”

The old guy smiled again.

“Not by choice,” he said. “During the Second World War, young men like Walter and me ended up with strange occupations. He and I were considered more useful in an intelligence role than in combat. We were drafted into the SIS, which as you know was the very earliest incarnation of the CIA. Other people were responsible for attacking the enemy with guns and bombs. We were handed the job of attacking the enemy with economics. We derived a scheme for shattering the Nazi economy with an assault on the value of its paper currency. Our project manufactured hundreds of billions of counterfeit reichsmarks. Spare bombers littered Germany with them. They came down out of the sky like confetti.”

“Did it work?” I asked him.

“Yes and no,” he said. “Certainly, their economy was shattered. Their currency was worthless very quickly. But of course, much of their production used slave labor. Slaves aren’t interested one way or the other whether the content of somebody else’s wage packet is worth anything. And of course, alternative currencies were found. Chocolate, cigarettes, anything. Altogether, it was only a partial success. But it left Walter and me two of history’s greatest forgers. That is, if you use sheer volume as a measure. I can’t claim any great talent for the inky end of the process.”

“So Joe was picking your brains?” I asked him.

“Walter and I became obsessed,” Kelstein said. “We studied the history of money forging. It started the day after paper money was first introduced. It’s never gone away. We became experts. We carried on the interest after the war. We developed a loose relationship with the government. Finally, some years ago, a Senate subcommittee commissioned a report from us. With all due modesty, I can claim that it became the Treasury’s anticounterfeiting bible. Your brother was familiar with it, of course. That’s why he was talking to Walter and me.”

“But what was he talking to you about?” I said.

“Joe was a new broom,” Kelstein said. “He was brought in to solve problems. He was a very talented man indeed. His job was to eradicate counterfeiting. Now, that’s an impossible job. Walter and I told him that. But he nearly succeeded. He thought hard, and he applied strokes of appealing simplicity. He just about halted all illicit printing within the United States.”

I sat in his crowded office and listened to the old guy. Kelstein had known Joe better than I had. He had shared Joe’s hopes and plans. Celebrated his successes. Sympathized over his setbacks. They had talked at length, animatedly, sparking off each other. The last time I had spoken to Joe face to face was very briefly after our mother’s funeral. I hadn’t asked him what he was doing. I’d just seen him as my older brother. Just seen him as Joe. I hadn’t seen the reality of his life as a senior agent, with hundreds of people under him, trusted by the White House to solve big problems, capable of impressing a smart old bird like Kelstein. I sat there in the armchair and felt bad. I’d lost something I never knew I’d had.

“His systems were brilliant,” Kelstein said. “His analysis was acute. He targeted ink and paper. In the end, it all boils down to ink and paper, doesn’t it? If anybody bought the sort of ink or paper that could be used to forge a banknote, Joe’s people knew within hours. He swept people up within days. Inside the States, he reduced counterfeiting activity by ninety percent. And he tracked the remaining ten percent so vigorously he got almost all of them before they’d even distributed the fakes. He impressed me greatly.”

“So what was the problem?” I asked him.

Kelstein made a couple of precise little motions with his small white hands, like he was moving one scenario aside and introducing another.

“The problem lay abroad,” he said. “Outside the United States. The situation there is very different. Did you know there are twice as many dollars outside the U.S. as inside?”

I nodded. I summarized what Molly had told me about foreign holdings. The trust and the faith. The fear of a sudden collapse in the desirability of the dollar. Kelstein was nodding away like I was his student and he liked my thesis.

“Quite so,” he said. “It’s more about politics than crime. In the end, a government’s primary duty is to defend the value of its currency. We have two hundred and sixty billion dollars abroad. The dollar is the unofficial currency of dozens of nations. In the new Russia, for instance, there are more dollars than rubles. In effect, it’s like Washington has raised a massive foreign loan. Raised any other way, that loan would cost us twenty-six billion dollars a year in interest payments alone. But this way, it costs us nothing at all except what we spend on printing pictures of dead politicians on little pieces of paper. That’s what it’s all about, Mr. Reacher. Printing currency for foreigners to buy is the best racket a government can get into. So Joe’s job in reality was worth twenty-six billion dollars a year to this country. And he pursued it with an energy appropriate to those high stakes.”

“So where was the problem?” I said. “Geographically?”

“Two main places,” Kelstein said. “First, the Middle East. Joe believed there was a plant in the Bekaa Valley that turned out fake hundreds which were practically perfect. But there was very little he could do about it. Have you been there?”

I shook my head. I’d been stationed in Beirut for a while. I had known a few people who had gone out to the Bekaa Valley for one reason or another. Not too many of them had come back.

“Syrian-controlled Lebanon,” Kelstein said. “Joe called it the badlands. They do everything there. Training camps for the world’s terrorists, drug processing laboratories, you name it, they’ve got it. Including a pretty good replica of our own Bureau of Printing and Engraving.”

I thought about it. Thought about my time there.

“Protected by who?” I asked him.

Kelstein smiled at me again. Nodded.

“A perceptive question,” he said. “You instinctively grasp that an operation of that size is so visible, so complex, that it must be in some way sponsored. Joe believed it was protected by, or maybe even owned by, the Syrian government. Therefore his involvement was marginal. His conclusion was that the only solution was diplomatic. Failing that, he was in favor of air strikes against it. We may live to see such a solution one day.”

“And the second place?” I asked him.

He pointed his finger at his grimy office window. Aiming south down Amsterdam Avenue.

“South America,” he said. “The second source is Venezuela. Joe had located it. That is what he was working on. Absolutely outstanding counterfeit hundred-dollar bills are coming out of Venezuela. But strictly private enterprise. No suggestion of government involvement.”

I nodded.

“We got that far,” I said. “A guy called Kliner, based down in Georgia where Joe was killed.”

“Quite so,” Kelstein said. “The ingenious Mr. Kliner. It’s his operation. He’s running the whole thing. We knew that for certain. How is he?”

“He’s panicking,” I said. “He’s killing people.”

Kelstein nodded sadly.

“We thought Kliner might panic,” he said. “He’s protecting an outstanding operation. The very best we’ve ever seen.”

“The best?” I said.

Kelstein nodded enthusiastically.

“Outstanding,” he said again. “How much do you know about counterfeiting?”

I shrugged at him.

“More than I did last week,” I said. “But not enough, I guess.”

Kelstein nodded and shifted his frail weight forward in his chair. His eyes lit up. He was about to start a lecture on his favorite subject.

“There are two sorts of counterfeiters,” he said. “The bad ones and the good ones. The good ones do it properly. Do you know the difference between intaglio and lithography?”

I shrugged and shook my head. Kelstein scooped up a magazine from a pile and handed it to me. It was a quarterly bulletin from a history society.

“Open it,” he said. “Any page will do. Run your fingers over the paper. It’s smooth, isn’t it? That’s lithographic printing. That’s how virtually everything is printed. Books, magazines, newspapers, everything. An inked roller passes over the blank paper. But intaglio is different.”

He suddenly clapped his hands together. I jumped. The sound was very loud in his quiet office.

“That’s intaglio,” he said. “A metal plate is smashed into the paper with considerable force. It leaves a definite embossed feel to the product. The printed image looks three dimensional. It feels three dimensional. It’s unmistakable.”

He eased himself up and took his wallet out of his hip pocket. Pulled out a ten-dollar bill. Passed it over to me.

“Can you feel it?” he asked. “The metal plates are nickel, coated with chromium. Fine lines are engraved into the chromium and the lines are filled with ink. The plate hits the paper and the ink is printed onto its topmost surface. Understand? The ink is in the valleys of the plate, so it’s transferred to the ridges on the paper. Intaglio printing is the only way to get that raised image. The only way to make the forgery feel right. It’s how the real thing is done.”

“What about the ink?” I said.

“There are three colors,” he said. “Black, and two greens. The back of the bill is printed first, with the darker green. Then the paper is left to dry, and the next day, the front is printed with the black ink. That dries, and the front is printed again, with the lighter green. That’s the other stuff you see there on the front, including the serial number. But the lighter green is printed by a different process, called letterpress. It’s a stamping action, the same as intaglio, but the ink is stamped into the valleys on the paper, not onto the peaks.”

I nodded and looked at the ten-dollar bill, front and back. Ran my fingers over it carefully. I’d never really studied one before.

“So, four problems,” Kelstein said. “The press, the plates, the inks, and the paper. The press can be bought, new or used, anywhere in the world. There are hundreds of sources. Most countries print money and securities and bonds on them. So the presses are obtainable abroad. They can even be improvised. Joe found one intaglio operation in Thailand which was using a converted squid-processing machine. Their hundreds were absolutely immaculate.”