Need You Now (23 page)

44

T
raffic out of the city was worse than usual, and Barber was stuck in a limousine that was barely moving. He would have preferred to make the phone call from his home, but there was no telling when that would be. He raised the soundproof partition between him and the driver, then dialed from memory on a special encrypted line to the West Wing of the White House.

Barber had first met Brett Woods at Saxton Silvers, when they were making their mark and earning tons of money as young bond traders at what was then the premier investment bank on Wall Street. They were friends but highly competitive, not just in their work but in thousand-dollar side bets on everything from whether the next unescorted woman to walk into the bar would be blond or brunette to which drop of rain clinging to the window outside their trading floor would be the first to trickle from top to bottom. The twentysomething cowboys eventually grew up, and the last two decades had seen them in and out of public service, though on very different tracks. Barber worked his way up in Treasury, eventually reaching the number two post. Woods parlayed his international business skills into matters of state, serving as ambassador to Turkey, then deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and finally national security advisor. Woods probably had the most solid business background of any national security advisor since Frank Carlucci in the Reagan administration, and both Woods and Barber had been savvy enough to cash out of Saxton Silvers before the subprime crisis drove the bank into receivership. Some said Barber was jealous of his old friend for snagging such a prestigious White House appointment. Others acknowledged that Barber’s position was one that his friend could never have attained—that it had been hard enough to secure Senate confirmation for Woods’ ambassadorship to Turkey, and that more recent controversy had virtually ensured he could never be named deputy secretary of the Treasury, or anything else that required confirmation by the Senate.

“I have a meeting with Mongoose later tonight,” Barber said into the telephone.

“Nothing has changed,” said Woods. “Until we eliminate the threat, it’s business as usual.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that until you hear otherwise, he’s got our backs to the wall. Give him what he wants.”

“He wants two billion dollars.”

“Once upon a time, that was a lot of money.”

“You’re missing my point. He wants
Robledo
’s two billion dollars.”

“Better it goes to Mongoose than back to Robledo.”

“That money is
gone
. The Gerry Collins–to–Lilly Scanlon pipeline is a dead end. She doesn’t know squat. I’ve tried everything, even pitting her against her boyfriend—which backfired, to say the least. It’s time to face facts: Gerry Collins scammed Robledo
and us
. You’ve heard the tape.”

Barber was talking about the recorded conversation of Gerry Collins pleading with Robledo for his life after Mongoose had been shot on the boat. The yacht, taken from a drug lord in a forfeiture proceeding and commissioned for use in Operation BAQ, was fully wired for eavesdropping.

“Yes, I’ve heard the tape,” said Woods.

“I haven’t been with the bank long, but it’s been long enough to confirm that Collins wasn’t bluffing when he said that Robledo’s money never went to Cushman, that he’d stashed it all away. He brought in Robledo’s money, just like he was supposed to, but he didn’t funnel it to Cushman. He used Lilly Scanlon—made her, Robledo, and us think she was part of the pipeline to Cushman—but he moved the money offshore.”

“Do your job, Joe.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It may have been pressure from Mongoose that made us find a place for you in BOS management, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad idea. You’re inside. Find the money.”

“I can’t! It looks like Collins took that information to the grave.”

“Forensic accounting can do wonders. Unwind it.”

“There’s no way. Collins used
hawalas
. Southeast Asia
hawalas
, as best I can tell. There’s no paper trail.”

Barber didn’t have to elaborate. For all the politically correct rhetoric about the value and legitimacy of the informal “nonbanking system” that operates across the globe in the Islamic world, even some Muslim countries had made
hawalas
illegal because of the way they allowed money to “move” without actually moving, without any paper trail, without any way for law enforcement to detect money laundering. The national security advisor knew better than anyone that
hawalas
were much more than an efficient way for taxi drivers in Manhattan to send funds back to their family in Pakistan.

“Shit,” said Woods.

“We’re teetering on disaster,” said Barber.

“Don’t get all Chicken Little on me.”

“We’re in a situation where no one can trace the money, but Robledo has seen a redacted version of my memo identifying Lilly Scanlon and the bank’s Singapore office as Treasury’s best lead.”

“How do you know he’s seen it?”

“Mongoose told me that he sent it to him. That was his first threat: play ball, or next time I send the full decrypted version of your memo and blow the lid off Operation BAQ.”

There was silence on the line. Then the NSA spoke, his tone beyond serious. “The fallout would be bad enough if the American public were to find out that its government knew Cushman was running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme but let it happen.”

“No one understood the scope of Cushman’s fraud when we formulated Operation BAQ. Sixty billion dollars still sounds like a fantasy world. Our estimates were one-tenth that amount.”

“There are all kinds of excuses,” said Woods. “No one expected Cushman to kill himself before the feds could swoop down and recover at least
some
money for the innocent investors. No one anticipated that Cushman would collapse at a time when the entire world economy was in crisis and the financial system itself was teetering on the brink of ruin.”

“Those are all true statements,” said Barber.

“This isn’t about the truth. What do you suppose a special congressional oversight committee is going to say about those excuses when it comes out that a certain deputy secretary of the Treasury and the president’s national security advisor not only knew about Cushman but actually
wanted
him to collapse, in furtherance of Operation BAQ?”

Hearing the NSA ask the question aloud had conveyed the gravity of the situation. “Go to jail,” said Barber, “go directly to jail.”

“Exactly,” said Woods. “So, we need to deal with the problem at hand. At this point, Lilly Scanlon is at risk.”

“Let’s not mince words,” said Barber. “Robledo is going to kill her if she doesn’t come up with that money. And Mongoose is going public with Operation BAQ if I don’t deliver it to him.”

“So it’s either us or Lilly Scanlon.”

“Knock off the sarcasm. People have already died over this. The money is
gone
.”

“Fix it.”

“How do you expect me to come up with that kind of money?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Weren’t you one of the geniuses over at Treasury who decided to give BOS about eight billion dollars in stimulus money? Maybe you can go to the board of directors and claw back the bonuses they paid to themselves.”

“Bite me, all right?”

“Just find the money somewhere and give Mongoose what he wants.”

“Then what is your decision on Lilly Scanlon?”

“Whatever happens there is not our fault. It was Gerry Collins who identified her as his point person, not us.”

“But
I
put her name in the memo. I’m not exaggerating here: Robledo will kill her if he doesn’t get his money. He may kill her boyfriend, too.”

“I’ve said it before, and I don’t think I can be any clearer about this: Robledo can’t get his money back.”

“Then neutralize Robledo. Or put him in jail.”

“If Robledo is out of the picture, we’ll never find out who his funders are. Phase two of Operation BAQ fails.”

“So you’re saying . . .”

“The bureau is already on board with this. In fact, it’s already taken care of. I think you know what I’m saying.”

The NSA wished him luck. The call was over—and, yes, Barber knew what he was saying:

Lilly Scanlon and Patrick Lloyd were on their own.

45

A
round eleven o’clock I went outside and sat on the front stoop. Every unit on Connie’s block had the same facade—a couple of concrete steps leading to a storm door with duct tape on the cracked glass. On such a frigid January night I was the only lunatic in the neighborhood sitting outside as if it were mid-July. Connie’s tiny one-bedroom just didn’t offer a place to escape, and after three hours, I desperately needed time away from her and Scully. I was alone for only a few minutes when Lilly joined me.

“Good news,” she said as she sidled up next to me on the top step. “We finally got the sleeping arrangements figured out.”

By “we” I knew she meant Connie. “What was the scoutmaster’s decision?” I asked.

“Connie and I will take the bedroom. The men are in the living room: Scully gets the couch, and you get the air mattress on the floor.”

“Ah, the air mattress. I knew we’d break out the camping equipment. When do we start the campfire and make the s’mores?”

“Be nice,” said Lilly.

I smiled, but Lilly was right. As we sat together in the cold, Lilly’s head against my shoulder, it occurred to me that I had yet to give Connie a proper thank-you for all she had done.

“Something bothers me about Scully,” she said.

Lilly’s remark had taken me aback. We were seated side by side, so I couldn’t read her expression, and my attention had been drawn across the street, where a kitten seemed to be losing the race against time to find a warm place to spend the night.

“Bothers you how?” I asked.

“It’s mostly a feeling I get.”

“There must be something behind it.”

“Well, for one, I don’t like the way he’s been trying to talk you into a gunfight.”

“He’s training me to protect myself so that I don’t end up like Evan. That’s all.”

“Maybe. But even more than the guns, it worries me the way Agent Henning cut you loose tonight—just like that. Two hours after Evan was shot, the three of us were in Chinatown trying to figure out how the FBI could help us and how we could help the FBI. Another two hours later, we’re sitting at the kitchen table with Scully—whom you haven’t seen since you were a teenager—and Agent Henning calls to tell you that we’re on our own.”

“Scully didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“I’d hate to think he did,” she said. “But why does it keep gnawing at me?”

I didn’t have an answer, but she didn’t seem to be waiting for one. It was just something she wanted out in the open, off her chest. I was about to suggest that we rescue that kitten across the street, but a neighbor opened his front door and called the nearly frozen feline inside.

“Don’t you love happy endings?” asked Lilly. She’d been watching, too.

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

She paused before asking the follow-up, but I could feel it coming.

“Patrick, what do you think is going to happen with us?”

No easy answer came to me, so I ducked it. “I think Shia LaBeouf will play me and Jillian Michaels will play you in a summer blockbuster that will spin off into a reality show called
Wall Street Three: The Biggest Losers
.”

Her puff of laughter crystallized in the night air before me. “Seriously,” she said. “So much has happened in the last few days, but we haven’t really talked about us. I’m just asking: assuming we don’t get shot, strangled, or arrested, where do you and I end up?”

“That’s a pretty big question,” I said.

“That’s a pretty vague answer.”

She was right. “The fact that after four full days of hell we’re sitting here next to each other says a lot, don’t you think?”

I had intended to speak from the heart, but I could feel from her reaction that my words had fallen short. Maybe I was too tired to do better. Maybe she wished I wasn’t so afraid to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Maybe all the stress since Lilly had dragged me into Puffy’s Tavern on Monday morning had made our six months in Singapore seem like the distant past—made us seem like two different people, even.

Lilly squeezed my hand gently as she rose and said good night. The cold metal hinges creaked as she pulled open the storm door.

“Lilly?” I said.

She stopped and looked at me.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, then tried to do better. “I’m glad you’re with me.”

There was warmth in her eyes, but she offered no words. She pushed open the front door, and I heard the loud slap of the metal storm door as she went inside. I was alone on the stoop, and the night felt colder without her. I started a mental list of perfect responses to Lilly’s question, but I fought off the second-guessing. It suddenly occurred to me why I was having so much trouble with the thrust of her question—
What’s going to happen to us?
It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Lilly and me, the relationship.

I was more worried about Lilly. Really worried.

46

A
ndie ducked under the yellow plastic tape in Evan Hunt’s doorway and reentered the apartment. Two hours of decoding Evan’s walls had left her bleary-eyed and in need of coffee. She was recaffeinated and rejuvenated, ready for the second leg of a Tour de France–like journey through the mind of a quant.

Even though the body had been found in the Dumpster, the living space of Evan’s apartment was the focus of the crime scene investigation. Members of the team, some on hands and knees, aimed LED flashlights at anything of potential interest, bagging and tagging everything from suspicious hairs and fibers to traces of dirt that may have come from the killer’s shoes. A ballistics specialist scoured the walls for stray bullets that may have missed their target and buried themselves in the plasterboard. Two other investigators collected fingerprints. The investigation team was exclusively NYPD. The FBI’s investigation into BOS money laundering had officially ended, and homicide was technically outside the jurisdiction of the FBI. Technically. There was no doubt in Andie’s mind that Evan Hunt was caught up in a financial crime of federal proportions, and until she was on a jet flying back to Miami, she would spend every waking hour trying to prove it.

“How long you staying?” the lead detective asked. He was a young guy, full of confidence, with eyes that roamed Andie’s body as he spoke.

“Just wanted to take one more look at the wall for my final report,” Andie said.

He glanced at the jumble of words and photographs on the only wall with a window—the window that Evan had covered with butcher paper in order to keep his flowchart continuous. “Good luck,” he said. “Looks like the work of a class-A nut job to me.”

Andie shrugged and smiled, but the detective’s words struck a deeper cord. Indeed, he’d hit precisely on the reason she’d returned to Evan’s apartment. The suspicion was unavoidable that certain people in Washington—the powers who had abruptly shut down her BOS investigation—wanted the world to dismiss Evan’s analysis with similar disparagement.

Just the work of a class-A nut job.

The detective checked her out one more time as he started away, then stopped himself. “We’re ordering Chinese from the restaurant downstairs. You interested?”

“No, thanks.”

He handed her the menu. “If you change your mind, there’s a bit of a trick to reading this thing. The restaurant saves trees by making double-sided copies, but it’s all screwed up. Page four is page one, page two is page two, page three is page three, and page one is page four.”

Andie gave it a look. “Wow, that is confusing.”

“The hostess said it happens all the time. The busboy they send to the copy center to run off the takeout menus speaks no English and always forgets to hit the collate button. It’s become a running joke—kind of a signature of their takeout business. The regulars dig it.”

Information you dug up, no doubt, while hitting on the hostess.

“If you don’t want takeout,” he said, “maybe later you and I could—”

“Four, two, three, one,” said Andie, noting the wedding ring on his finger. “I got it.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

Andie walked to the middle of the room, turning slowly to take in the 360 version of the Cushman world through the eyes of Evan Hunt. A photographer was on the scene to capture it in segments. A videographer recorded the panoramic version. They were working too fast to appreciate the details. Andie allowed herself a long, studied view.

It would have been easy to dismiss Evan’s walls as the work of a disturbed, paranoid genius. At first blush they were a jumble of unframed photographs connected by hand-drawn lines in a variety of colors. The rest of the story was told in words, a handwritten narrative in which each independent thought was expressed inside a separate oval, rectangle, or other seemingly random shape. It reminded Andie of a crude version of an LCD that was connected to a computer with no pop-up blocker. The arrows, however, were the key. If Andie followed the color sequence, she could follow the story. She couldn’t blame NYPD for not seeing it. Andie’s investigation of Lilly Scanlon and BOS/Singapore had given her at least a glimpse into Evan’s world. But these walls supplied pieces that even the FBI didn’t have. Until now.

Evan Hunt was definitely no nut job.

Andie stepped closer to the wall near the kitchenette. She was following a long yellow line that had puzzled her all night. It started near the bathroom, rose up and over the closet that held Evan’s collection of orange dress shirts, and continued down the other side of the wall. There were various forks in the line along the way, but the main thread ran to a small, hand-drawn rectangle just above the baseboard near the kitchenette. It was no bigger than a standard index card. Inside the rectangle was a list of dates, all from the same period of time: the last six months of Gerry Collins’ life.

Andie stepped back again for a broader view. She knew the dates had to be important, falling so close to Collins’ murder and Cushman’s collapse. But the rectangle contained no other information, and the dates bore no apparent relationship to the surrounding clutter of information on the wall. The long yellow line that stretched halfway across the room also suggested that the dates were significant, but it connected the rectangle to nothing.

“Last call for food,” the detective announced. “You change your mind yet, Henning?”

“No, I’m okay,” she said.

“One of us dumb locals can help you decode the menu, if that’s the problem.”

Clearly, he fancied himself a smooth operator, and when all else failed, there was self-deprecation. “I got the sequence,” said Andie. “Four, two, three—”

She stopped herself in midsentence, and she remembered what he had said earlier about the screwed-up menu.

The hostess said it happens all the time. It’s become a running joke—kind of a signature of their takeout business. The regulars dig it.

There were four pages in the “signature” menu. Four walls in Evan’s flowchart. Andie turned and faced the flowchart again. She’d studied that rectangle long enough, looked at it from enough different angles, to recall where it fell in the seemingly endless sequence of squares, rectangles, circles, ovals and other hand-drawn shapes in Evan’s narrative. It was a hunch, but Evan was a quant, and numbers were his entertainment. She counted again, just to make sure, and her hunch proved to be correct. The little rectangle that had seemed so randomly placed, that contained such an important list of dates, that was tethered to a long yellow line that led to nowhere, was indeed the fourth rectangle on the wall.

Turning clockwise in the center of the room, Andie shifted her gaze to the next wall. Following the pattern—four, two, three, one—she located the second rectangle on the wall. This one, too, seemed out of context, though the information in it didn’t cry out for Andie’s attention the way the dates had. There was no reason to notice it, unless she was following the pattern. It contained the names of several business establishments—Precious Jewelry Exchange, Discount Diamonds, and the like. She jotted down the names on a notepad, then turned and faced the next wall.

Andie found the third rectangle just above the baseboard. Like before, the information inside the rectangle bore no relationship to the information around it. Andy recognized it as a list of towns and regions in Singapore: Woodlands, Bedok, Hougang, Jurong West, and Bukit Merah. Andie scribbled them all into her notepad next to the dates and the list of businesses.

Finally, Andie faced the fourth wall, which was the one with the papered-over window. The first rectangle—the last in the four, two, three, one sequence—was enormous in comparison to the others. The wall was basically a person-by-person profile of key players in the Cushman fraud.

Rectangle number one was all about Gerry Collins.

Andie reread her notes. Four, two, three, one. It only seemed logical that each date in rectangle number four marked a business transaction of some sort. She’d investigated enough financial crimes to sniff out bogus transactions, however, and she noted that each establishment identified by name in rectangle number three appeared to be in a line of business that lent itself to the creation (fabrication) of big invoices—tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. Rectangle number two confirmed that the businesses operated in Singapore, not exactly a model state of tight financial regulation. And it all went back to rectangle number one in the cast of characters: Gerry Collins. Phony business transactions were one way to launder the fruits of criminal activity, and it was no leap of logic to conclude that jewelry invoices from Singapore that bore Gerry Collins’ fingerprints—actual or virtual—were probably fakes.

Four, two, three, one.

It happens all the time. It’s become a running joke—kind of a signature of their takeout business.

Of all the ingenious codes that a math whiz could have devised to stop a stranger from breaking into his apartment and uncovering key information in his Cushman flowchart, Evan Hunt had simply borrowed the pattern established by the consistently screwed-up pagination of the takeout menu from the Chinese restaurant below him. Evan was one of the regulars who liked the “running joke.” It was as if he was making fun of every movie, every TV show, every book that had ever strained to find “codes” in meaningless number sequences. The quant had a sense of humor.

Who knew?

Andie stepped back from the wall, and the broader perspective confirmed her hunch: There was indeed no line of any color connecting these 4–2–3–1 boxes to Cushman. Andie was beginning to feel the excitement of a multibillion-dollar lead on missing investment funds—funds that, she suspected, Gerry Collins had never actually fed to Cushman.

She went into the bathroom and closed the door, then dialed the number of a colleague she had worked with on another financial crimes investigation. He worked in the Office of Law Enforcement Support at FinCEN—the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—and she didn’t have to remind him that he owed her a favor or two.

“Andie, hey, it’s good to hear from you.”

“Sorry to call so late,” she said.

“No problem. How can I be of help?”

“I’ve come across the names of a few business establishments in Singapore, and I was hoping that you could check to see if any have shown up on your radar screen.”

“You mean in suspicious-activity reports?”

“Not exactly.”

Andie paused, knowing that she had to be careful, since the plug had been pulled on her investigation. What she wanted was some very specific information about the oldest informal banking system in Southeast Asia. One that often operated as a side business to jewelry stores, rug dealers, and other going concerns in local communities from New York to Karachi, from London to Dubai. A $300 billion-a-year system that relied on an unregulated global network of personal relationships and trust, and that involved no actual exchange of money or formal record keeping—definitely nothing electronic. Unrecorded conversations were king—conversations in Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, and Farsi.

For Andie’s present needs, English would do, and it was perhaps best to speak in generalities.

“I want to talk to you about
hawalas
,” she said. “
Hawalas
in Singapore.”