Masquerade (6 page)

Maynard's food arrived, and so did the undersecretary. Clare Edward sat, and they exchanged the usual pleasantries. As soon as the waiter left, the undersecretary got down to business. Already he looked rushed and tired, and it was only 8:00
A.M.

“What's this about, Lucas?”

“Up all night again?” Maynard smiled.

Undersecretary Clare Edward liked the ladies, especially the ones who worked for him. He'd learned it was a simple matter to transfer their idolization from office to bed. The challenge was less, but the variety plentiful, and the physical results the same. If they protested, he transferred them to another department, with a little bonus or promotion to keep them quiet. He was a damn fool, Maynard reflected, but then, his ego had always been bigger than even Bob Packwood's.

The undersecretary grinned and straightened his rep tie. “You know how it is.”

Maynard tried the oatmeal. It was blazing hot. “How's everything at State?”

“The same.” Undersecretary Edward had silver hair, lively blue eyes, and a Cabo San Lucas tan. He was in his late fifties, looked in his forties, and ate and rutted like a dysfunctional teenager. He ordered black coffee, prune juice, and danish.

Maynard tried his steaming oatmeal again. He said casually, “Anything new on the college girl missing in Guatemala?”

Undersecretary Edward looked suspicious. “The senator from Virginia's adventurous daughter? No, she seems to have simply disappeared. The current Guatemalan dictator—our friend, politically speaking, of course—denies knowing anything about it. Why?”

The oatmeal was still too damn hot. Well, Maynard would eat just the fruit. With this diet, he'd be down another ten
pounds in a month. That was good. Once thin and wiry, he'd grown heavy with the years, and that extra weight had contributed to his diabetes.

“I was remembering another senator's missing daughter.” Maynard watched with pleasure as the undersecretary grimaced.

He and Clare had been assigned to West Berlin right after the wall went up in 1961. In those days, Clare had been a Langley agent, too. True to form, he'd spent the summer chasing a senator's teenage daughter. Desperate to impress her, he'd invited her along to photograph an arms plant in East Berlin. The Soviets had caught them. One of Maynard's people had spotted the “arrest.” Because of Maynard's intervention, the pair had been merely tossed into cells, where they'd spent the night listening to the screams of the tortured.

As the new station chief, Maynard had gone straight to the top. He'd called the girl's father and the White House. President Kennedy had picked up his red telephone and spoken directly to Nikita Khrushchev. The next day, the couple had been exchanged on Glienicker Bridge for two KGB spooks.

“East Berlin. Yes.” The undersecretary looked balefully at Maynard. “That was a long time ago, Lucas, but I haven't forgotten. I owe you. What do you want?”

The waiter arrived with the undersecretary's breakfast. Maynard studied the elegant room once more for Company tagalongs. It still looked clean. Maynard spoke quietly, with the measured tones of someone who thought before he opened his mouth:

“Do you also recall the surprising turnaround of OMNI-American Savings & Loan a few years ago?” In 1990 the S&L giant had been collapsing under the weight of junk bonds and too many shaky real estate loans. Then a sudden infusion of cash had skyrocketed it back into the black.

The undersecretary toyed with his danish.
“Surprising
is hardly the word. Astonishing, I'd say. Not to mention totally unexpected and impossible.”

Since liberal Texas and Arizona real estate laws had allowed risky S&L lending practices, OMNI-American had
offered loans without down payments, financed precarious development schemes, and bought junk bonds and preferred stock in troubled real estate investment firms like Southmark Corporation of Dallas.

Maynard lowered his voice and dropped his bomb. “The turnaround was funded by old Iran-contra money. Illegal, and some would say immoral, as all hell.”

The undersecretary bit into his danish. He dusted his mouth with his linen napkin. He adjusted his tie. He stared off as if he'd just spotted Shangri-la. He smiled, and Maynard knew the undersecretary was considering the power of such information, if he played it right, and he always played it right. That's why Clare Edward had risen to be an Undersecretary of State.

“You have documentary evidence, Lucas?” the undersecretary asked quietly.

“Of course.”

The undersecretary studied Maynard's plain linen banker's suit, white cotton shirt, simple blue tie. Maynard wore no rings. His watch was a Timex. He looked far from rich. Still, looks were deceiving, especially among Company officers after Aldrich (“Rick”) Ames's activities for the KGB were uncovered, and the undersecretary was well aware of this.

“You've been digging into this on your own?” the undersecretary probed.

“You could say that.”

Clare leaned forward. “I need something to give the secretary and the President. Something concrete. You've got to give me something, or they'll laugh in my face.”

“I know. Here's a beginning: BCCI.”

The undersecretary blanched even through his tan. BCCI—Bank of Credit and Commerce International—had been the globe's largest, most reliable vehicle for the no-questions-asked movement of capital. It had merely been following in the tradition of a few free-wheeling predecessors, notably Schroder Trust and Nugan Hand Bank. But even in the most pragmatic circles, BCCI still evoked embarrassment for its excesses and for the colleagues who'd helped it, both intentionally and inadvertently.

Maynard said, “You know, of course, Langley deposited tens of millions in the contras' BCCI accounts.”

“That was against the law. Criminal behavior.”

Maynard continued in his low voice, “Just to make sure we both understand what we're talking about, I'll remind you BCCI accepted without question sacks of our cash—Langley cash—and transferred the money wherever we asked.”

“Which laundered it.”

“And BCCI had no tax men or currency export-control officers looking over our shoulders. Under those conditions, would you be surprised if a few agents, while they were sending covert tens of millions around the world, skimmed off a million here and there, and then opened numbered accounts for themselves?”

The undersecretary exhaled and sat back.

Maynard allowed himself to smile. “I also direct information about the sudden expansion of another U.S.-based corporation—Nonpareil International Insurance.”

The undersecretary checked the room. At last his gaze returned to Maynard. “Funded by stolen Iran-contra money?”

“Yes.”

Avarice darkened the undersecretary's tan face. For money and for power. “What's it going to cost me, Lucas?”

“My immunity, that's all. What I've told you is just the tip of an iceberg. I have enough evidence to explode the filthiest scandal the United States has ever seen. Compared to this, BCCI, Irangate, Iraqgate, and Watergate were trial balloons.”

Undersecretary Edward drank his black coffee, and Maynard sat back and let him turn the proposition over in his mind, looking for hidden dangers, unspoken angles. It was all a matter of balancing risk against potential gain.

At last the equation seemed to come out in Lucas Maynard's favor, not that the undersecretary would let him see that too clearly.

“You've got to give me more,” the undersecretary demanded. “Something to prove to the secretary and the President you've got the goods. That's the only way you'll get immunity.”

“Check out a BCCI account under the name
Samuel Trooper
.
It's in the investigation files. Follow the account long enough one way, and you'll see the initial deposits came from missile sales to Iran. Follow it the other way—I warn you, it won't be easy—and you'll find the account grew to $50 million, more or less, which was cashed out in November 1990.”

“And?” Clare Edward prompted.

“The money dropped out of sight. What can you buy with $50 million without someone asking questions?”

“What?”

“The health of a loser S&L like OMNI-American. And I have the paper trail that proves it.”

Again the undersecretary surveyed the room. He lowered his head and contemplated Maynard, who gazed steadily back.

“Tell me, Lucas,” the undersecretary said, “why is it you need immunity? You didn't skim a few million here and there for yourself, did you, my old friend?”

Maynard showed no emotion. “What I did or didn't do won't help you. If you want the goods, you've got to play my game. If you try to go around me, I'll go somewhere else. I'm the only one with documentation. The only one. This is a steal for you, you know that. If you turn over what I have, you get to be a hero.”

“And you, my clever friend, get to while away your retirement years on some tropical isle with your cash and no one breathing down your neck. Hell, you'll probably even get to keep your pension.”

“Do you want to play, Clare?”

“Wouldn't miss it for the world,” the undersecretary said.

“Then follow up the Samuel Trooper information I've given you, check out anything else you think you need to.”

“Where do I contact you?” the undersecretary asked.

“You don't. I'll contact you.”

Across the elegant dining room, a young woman in a gray business suit studied the
Wall Street Journal
while she finished her breakfast. She appeared not to notice the departure of the two older men who'd been talking so intently.

About five minutes later, she signaled the waiter. He brought her bill on a silver tray. As she turned over the bill, she palmed the tiny recording device he'd hidden underneath. She paid with cash and left.

Chapter 6

Eight miles northwest of the Hay-Adams Hotel where Lucas Maynard and Undersecretary Clare Edward had breakfasted, Hughes Bremner spoke heatedly into his specially encrypted telephone.

“No! Not too fast! You buy francs too fast, and everyone from Tokyo to London will get suspicious. Stick to the plan or you'll blow the transaction!” He listened. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and cold. “You'll get your $5 million, Crowther. But for now, go slow and steady. Monday we blitz them. Remember your $5 million. It'll steady your nerve!”

Hughes Bremner hung up and glanced down at the papers on his desk. His austere office was on the choice seventh floor of the great, sprawling CIA complex in Langley, Virginia. He should do some work, but instead he paced across the room. He was distracted and irritated. He gazed out his windows to the sea of green forest that covered Virginia's undulating hills. Contemplating the virgin countryside usually soothed him.

Hughes Bremner was a powerful man—the head of Mustang, the CIA's most secret, most elite team. Under earlier code names, Mustang's directive had been to contain and destroy the forces of communism. Now that the political world had turned upside down, the team had two new directives: First, to keep the lid on the transitional, post–cold war world, and second, to stop any superpower from emerging to rival the United States.

Being chief of Mustang and its predecessors was a prized
career spot, and Hughes Bremner, who had held the position for nearly fifteen years, never underrated it. Yet he'd once had higher ambitions. He'd hungered to be Deputy Director for Operations, the DDO: To lead the CIA's entire espionage division, direct all spy stations abroad, oversee the gathering of all foreign and domestic intelligence, and orchestrate its myriad covert actions, particularly in this exciting era when new allegiances, even countries, died and were reborn overnight.

Back in the 1950s at the beginning of his CIA career, Hughes Bremner's rise to DDO and ultimately to the top slot itself—DCI, Director of Central Intelligence—had seemed inevitable. This was due not only to his excellent record and to his having the right kind of character, but also because he came from the right stock. He and his wife, Barbara (“Bunny”) Hartford Bremner, both did.

In the old days that had mattered.

In fact, according to a painting in his den at home, Bremner looked very much like the founder of his family's fortune—his great-great-great grandfather, the first Hughes Bremner. Both had gray, wispy hair and aristocratic English faces with hollow cheeks, pale blue eyes, and long, thin noses. Their gazes were remarkably alike, too—impenetrable and chilly as a coastal fog.

Hughes Bremner took pride in his lineage, but he kept his great-great-great grandfather's source of wealth to himself. The old man had been a “blackbirder,” importing Africans as slaves to the New World. Bunny Bremner, too, had a so-called colorful forebear—a gold manipulator, who'd grown rich wiping out the savings of early nineteenth-century Americans, much like the corporate raiders and junk-bond salesmen of the late twentieth century.

A knock at the door interrupted his thoughts. He turned, but nothing in his stern demeanor showed his eagerness.

“Come.”

Yes, it was the young woman he'd sent to the Hay-Adams Hotel. She was new to the Company and anxious to prove her worth. She'd jumped at the chance to impress the mighty Bremner by bugging the meeting Lucas Maynard had arranged with Undersecretary Clare Edward.

“I paid one of the waiters fifty dollars to attach the recorder to Mr. Maynard's oatmeal bowl.” She was cool, calm, impeccably trained. “Said I was a private investigator. Showed him my cover license. He asked no questions.”

“Good. Did you listen to the tape?”

She straightened indignantly. “Of course not, sir.”

Bremner smiled graciously and praised her. Once she was out the door, he touched the recorder's tiny play-back button.

In his opulent office at the Department of State, Undersecretary Clare Edward sat down in his high-backed, wine-colored leather chair and dialed the head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.