Grand Master (8 page)

“All that needed to be done was to add
certain specific requirements to some major defense procurement
contracts, requirements that could only be met by firms owned and
controlled by the same investment house.”

“The Four Sisters,” said Burdick, just to be
sure.

“Yes, of course. But you need to understand
that the money, the serious money, wasn’t in the value of the
contract itself. It was in the advance knowledge that the contract
was going to them.”

Quentin Burdick knew a thing or two about
Wall Street and the way serious money was made. “The jump in the
price of the stock, inside information - they could buy before
anyone else knew.”

“Right; and then with the money they made,
they bought other companies; or rather had companies they
controlled do it for them, because The Four Sisters does not exist.
They moved money all around the world. Some of the money they moved
here came from places we supposedly don’t do business with.

“Do you understand what I’m telling you? The
Four Sisters is a shell game, a way for companies, and countries,
to acquire influence that, if we knew about it, we would never
permit. They’re into everything: television, movies, the whole
entertainment industry; newspapers, magazines, book publishing.
That’s when I started to question what they were doing, when I
threatened to go public and bring it all to stop. And that’s why
I’m here - because they would not let that happen.”

Burdick pushed aside the notebook and sat
back. He did not have a doubt that Morris was telling the truth.
“What about Constable? Was the President involved?”

A look of cynicism and contempt shot across
Morris’ tired face. “He was never about anything except himself. I
went to him when I found out what I just told you. You know what he
told me? - That none of it mattered, that there was nothing to
worry about, that we had not done anything wrong, that no one would
ever find out.” Morris could still not quite believe it.

“Can you imagine? In the same breath: we
haven’t done anything wrong, and no one will ever find out! Well
someone found out, didn’t they? Someone found out because my good
friend, Robert Constable, the guy I helped elect president, had to
tell his friends, and his friends made sure there was enough
evidence that when someone tipped off the FBI that I had taken a
bribe they could find the money; money, by the way, in an account
in the Cayman Islands I didn’t know I had.”

Instead of cynicism, there was a look of
something harsher, and more unforgiving, on Frank Morris’ face, a
sense of retribution that Burdick did not understand. “They had to
shut me up,” Morris continued, the look bitter and aggrieved. “The
way to do that was to discredit me, make me out to be a liar and a
thief, someone no one could believe. And they succeeded. But they
must have had a different problem with our good friend, the
President, something they could only solve with more drastic
measures.”

“What are you saying?” cried Burdick,
wondering if in his bitterness and rage, Morris had lost his
senses. “Constable died of a heart attack, the night before I was
supposed to see him.”

“To talk to him about The Four Sisters?”
asked Morris with a quick, eager movement of his eyes that said he
was certain he was right.

“That’s what I told him, but -”

“Do you really think that was just a
coincidence? You don’t know what you’re dealing with. The Four
Sisters isn’t just a bank that moves money around in ways it
shouldn’t. Do you know anything about it? Do you know who the head
of it is?”

“I didn’t even know what The Four Sisters
was, until you told me,” admitted Burdick.

The door suddenly opened and the guard
appeared. Burdick had been there an hour. It was time to leave.

“Come back tomorrow,” said Morris with new
urgency. “There are things you need to know.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Quentin Burdick checked into the first motel
he found. He went back through his notes, making sure, while
everything was fresh in his mind, that it was all there, that he
had not forgotten to make a record of the most important parts of
what Frank Morris had said. Then, when he was finished, he went
back to the beginning and from those fragmentary, short-hand notes,
wrote out in longhand a full account of what he had been told. He
had learned in his years of reporting that even the best memory
failed after a fairly short time to recall in all its nuanced
specificity the language of a conversation. This was likely to be
the biggest story of his career, and he could not afford to make a
mistake.

Burdick worked straight through until he had
it all down on paper, not just what Frank Morris had said, but how
the once all-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means
Committee had looked and sounded, the changes that had made him
seem at times a pale imitation of his former self. When he was
finally finished, Burdick started to turn on the television to see
what news he had missed, but then decided he was too tired to care.
He was asleep almost the moment his head hit the pillow.

When he went back to the prison late the next
morning, he found Frank Morris more energized, more combative, as
if now that he had made his first confession, told Burdick what
really had happened, he could not wait to tell him everything.
There was something else, another, darker aspect, to the change.
Beneath the apparent eagerness to get on with it, to tell Burdick
what he knew, there was now a strange, lingering fatalism in his
eyes, a belief - no, more than that, a certainty - that what
Burdick was going to write would be the last thing that would be
written about him, that after this there was nothing.

“Cancer,” he explained with a shrug, a show
of indifference he expected from himself. “Six months, maybe less.”
Then, flashing a crooked, modest smile meant to put his visitor at
his ease, he added, “Unless that fucking Frenchman gets me
first.”

“That -?”

“What we talked about yesterday, The Four
Sisters. A Frenchman owns it, ‘de la’ something. I’ll remember
later. I only met him once, and we didn’t exactly have a
conversation. There were a dozen of us, members of Congress on a
fact-finding trip in Europe, looking at ways to improve trade, that
kind of thing - mainly an excuse to travel at taxpayer expense.
There was a reception in Paris, hosted by their foreign ministry.
The room was full of bankers and industrialists, but it quickly
became apparent that they all deferred to him. And I have to tell
you, he was one impressive son-of-a-bitch. He spoke perfect English
- no accent - like someone who had gone to an Ivy League college,
though I don’t think he did. I remember someone saying that he was
from one of France’s oldest families, but I’m not even sure about
that.

“All I know for certain is that he knew more
about American history than anyone I’ve ever met. He told us things
about our history I didn’t know, and he did it in the course of one
of those short welcoming speeches that usually don’t say anything.
He may have memorized it, it may have been just off the cuff - he
didn’t have any notes, he didn’t read it - but he stood there, and
without a false start or a word out of place summarized two hundred
years of French-American relations. Maybe that was the reason I
didn’t like him: it was all too perfect.”

Morris looked down at his hands. His eyes
seemed to draw back on themselves. A shrewd smile cut across his
mouth, a sign that he now understood something he should have known
before. “It’s always smart to make a mistake, trip over a word now
and then, show the people you’re talking to that you’re human, just
like them. Make a mistake, and then laugh at yourself; no one wants
to vote against you if you do that. But this guy, I think he’d kill
himself before he’d make a mistake, or admit it if he did. He
wasn’t arrogant, not the way we usually mean. It went deeper than
that. It was almost the opposite of arrogance, someone embarrassed
because what he was doing was so easy. Look, I’m no scholar, but I
read to all my kids when they were little. That’s what it was like,
a grown up talking to a bunch of children. That isn’t arrogance;
that’s someone operating on a different plane, someone who knows
how to do something, and someone just starting to learn.”

Burdick had stopped making notes. He was too
intent on catching the changing expression on Morris’ face, the
added meaning it gave to what he said. Morris had always had a
native shrewdness about the character of other people, a way of
gauging what, despite their various levels of self-deceit, they
really wanted, but Burdick had never heard him describe anyone
quite like this, someone who did not seem to fit any of the normal
categories by which vanity and ambition were measured. And there
was something more. He was not sure what it was, but he was certain
that Morris had left out a crucial part of the equation.

“That isn’t the only reason you didn’t like
him, is it?”

Morris nodded in agreement. “You don’t notice
it at first. He smiles when he talks to you - he smiled when he
shook my hand - but his eyes… they look right through you in a way
that makes you feel invisible. But then, when someone has as much
money as he’s supposed to have, most people probably are only too
glad if he looks at them at all. I noticed, though; which, when you
think about it, only makes me worse. I was as eager as anyone else
to get what I could from him, or rather from the organization he
controls, because, of course, I never did any business directly
with him. He left that sort of thing to other people, Americans
mainly, who worked for one of his subsidiaries.”

Burdick started making notes again.
“Americans. Can you give me names?”

“Sure, but it won’t do much good. They didn’t
do anything criminal, they didn’t break any laws. They acted just
like any other interest that has business before the Congress. They
made their case for legislation, and I listened. They didn’t come
with envelopes stuffed with cash. It isn’t what any one of them
did; it’s the connections that exist among them all, the way that
all these supposedly separate entities are held together at the
top: like puppets on a string, and the string held by one man, but
the string all tangled up, twisted in a dozen different directions.
Here, let me show you what I mean.”

Morris took Burdick’s notebook and quickly
drew a parallel set of boxes connected by two different lines.

“You have a company operating in the United
States. It’s a subsidiary of another company with headquarters in
Great Britain, which in turn is a subsidiary of a company owned, or
apparently owned, by a company in Bahrain, a company in which a
controlling interest is owned by - you guessed it - a certain
French investment firm. Then another American company, controlled
by another company based overseas, and that company in turn is….You
get the idea. Add to that the ability to move money from one
company to the next, from one country to another, and to do it
endlessly, back and forth, move it electronically at the speed of
light. - No one can trace it, no one can keep up; no one can
measure how much influence it is buying and what the people who
control it are going to do next. All you can know is that whoever
sits on top of all this, whoever is in control, can do damn near
anything he wants - bring an economy to its knees if that serves
his purposes.”

Morris was breathing hard. Beads of
perspiration had started to form on his forehead. He leaned back
and shook his head, his eyes full of regret at what he had done.
“Jean de la Valette, that’s the Frenchman’s name. Maybe the most
powerful man in the world and there aren’t six people in this
country who even know he exists. Even the people who head the
companies he controls don’t know anything about him. They report to
other people, who don’t know much more themselves. A European
financial consortium, that’s the phrase you’ll hear; a group of
institutions that contribute to the efficiency of the financial
markets. What could be less threatening than something that sounds
as dull as that? The country is being sold right in front of us,
and we’re too damn blind to see it. And I get to go to my grave
knowing I helped.”

Morris scratched the back of his head. A look
of discouragement swept over his eyes. “I’m not sure there’s a
difference, but I didn’t think I was selling out my country. I
thought I was doing myself a favor, and while I didn’t kid myself
and think what I was doing was honest, I didn’t think it was going
to hurt anyone else. Some people were going to make a lot of money;
some people always do. And this time I was going to be one of them.
And then, when I found out what they were really up to, it was too
late. But Constable - he knew what was going on and it didn’t stop
him.”

Morris rolled his shoulders forward until he
was hunched over the table. His jaw moved slowly side to side as he
reconsidered the judgment which just the moment before had uttered
with such certain. “Maybe he had to do it; maybe he had to buy her
off.” Morris leaned back again, stroking his chin. “The one thing
you always knew about those two was that whatever kept them
together, it wasn’t love.”

Burdick put down his pen. There was a
question he still had to ask, a question he would not have thought
of had Morris not already seemed to answer it the day before. “How
serious were you when you suggested that Constable did not die of a
heart attack, that he was murdered? All the reports say -”

“Screw the reports. That stuff is all rigged.
They’d never let out that he was murdered. That’s all the country
would be talking about: Who murdered Robert Constable and why? You
think the Kennedy assassination led to conspiracy theories? What do
you think would happen with something like this? I read the papers,
I see what’s on television. There are already hints - rumors,
according to the cable tabloid networks - that someone might have
been there with him the night he died. Died of a heart attack while
getting laid, that’s what they keep insinuating.”