Authors: Andrew Gross
Reckless (19 page)
That was when the army sent him home with a full discharge, and he came back to a town of rubble and zero prospects, bad as anything he had seen over there, and he spent all of six days there, Desiree off in Utah somewhere, before signing up for two years with Global Threat Management, making five times what he did for Uncle Sam.
And got a bona fide, free license to use his skills.
They played a game when they went out on a field trip, beyond the Green Zone. They called it Tin Can. Try to knock one off the fence with their M4s. Except the “can” was more likely an old man who popped his head up watering his plants or boys playing cards on a rooftop as their armored convoy sped by.
O’Toole kept looking at the girl across from him. She kept texting, as if she didn’t even notice him.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Like shooting a tin can off a fence in a dusty field.
The train slowed, approaching his destination.
“Greenwich,”
the conductor announced over the loudspeaker.
“Greenwich. Old Greenwich will be next.”
O’Toole stood up. He took one last look at the texting girl, who, he decided, didn’t look like Desiree at all. He stood in the line of passengers waiting to disembark.
The door opened.
O’Toole crossed onto the platform. The exiting passengers funneled down into the station. O’Toole continued along the track.
The man he was looking for was reading a magazine, hair smoothed back, wearing wire-rim glasses, waiting on a bench on the northbound side.
O’Toole took a seat next to him. He glanced at his watch. “Right on time.”
“If you can’t trust Metro-North, who can you trust?” the man replied.
“Always a good question. I ask myself that a lot.”
“Well, in your case,” the man said, “I’m afraid you have to trust me.” He closed what he was reading, the
Economist,
and removed an eight-by-eleven manila envelope from the pages. He slid it along the concrete bench to O’Toole.
“We have another job for you.” O’Toole opened the envelope. “I want him to become disinterested in our affairs.”
There was a series of photos inside. On top, a man he might characterize as rugged, handsome, opening the door to an office building. The next was a not-so-bad-looking chick with short, dark hair getting out of a Prius.
The third was a kid in an oversize hockey jersey. O’Toole noticed he clearly had something wrong with him.
Retard,
he thought.
What did they call them? Down syndrome or something.
He flipped back to the first photo. Hauck. An ex-cop. “You want him dead?”
“What I want is for him to be no longer engaged in our affairs.” His contact took off his glasses and started to clean them. “What you do is your business. I always trust the judgment of my people on the ground.”
O’Toole slipped the photos back inside the envelope. “Sounds reasonable.”
His contact stood up.
“You know, I was thinking,” O’Toole said. “See that guy over there?” A man on the other side of the platform, reading a newspaper, waiting for a train.
“The one in the suit?”
“If a twister hadn’t leveled my town when I was a kid, that might’ve been me, waiting for that train. Coming home from work. Someone waiting for me with a beer. Maybe a kid. Who knows”—O’Toole raised his shades and grinned at him—“I might’ve even been like you.”
“No.” The man in the wire-rims rolled up his magazine and tapped O’Toole’s knee. “You would never have been like me. Just make sure he’s clear of our affairs. Whatever you decide, make it something he’ll clearly understand.”
“You know, we had a saying over there…” O’Toole squinted back at him. “‘The unwanted, doing the unthinkable—for the ungrateful.’”
“Really.” The man in the glasses smiled. He dropped another envelope on his lap. This time a fat one. “I think you’ll find us grateful. As usual. Next train back’s at five thirty-two.”
He walked off, leaving O’Toole on the platform. He tapped the thick envelope against his knee and studied the man on the other side of the track.
Yeah,
he thought, laughing to himself; his contact was right. That was never in the cards. He rubbed the back of his neck. Where his panther was. Shiva. The tattoo had kept him safe through five tours to the Sandbox. The tip of her long, bright claw reaching onto his neck.
If he had ever been worth saving, the statute of limitations had long run out. The pieces of his soul had scattered across the globe. Like an F5 blowing into town. Leveling most everything. Scattering the rest.
He reached back and reknotted his thick, red-brown hair.
T
he man in the Burberry raincoat turned up his collar against the drizzle as he stepped out of the office building onto Madison Avenue. He chatted for a second with a woman—maybe a coworker—who waved good-bye and headed north.
Thibault started walking the other way to the south.
Across the street, Hauck followed, several paces behind.
He had left the office early, telling Brooke he had some errands to attend to. He felt a little out of practice at what he was doing. He hadn’t done this kind of thing in years.
On Fifty-fourth, Thibault stopped in front of a store window, seeming to admire a tie. Then he continued, taking a call on his cell. On Fifty-third Street he made a right, heading west. Hauck crossed after him, hunching into his jacket against the rain, twenty yards behind.
Tall, swarthy, with thick, black hair that came over his collar, Thibault cut a commanding presence. It wasn’t hard to see why women might be drawn to him. Halfway down the block he veered into a recessed courtyard set between two larger buildings. It looked like a restaurant. He opened the glass doors and went inside.
The place was called Alto. Hauck had heard of it. Italian, fancy. The kind of place his boss, Foley, was always trying to drag him to. Annie would have been impressed.
He went up to the door, and through the glass, he saw Thibault remove his coat and hand it to a pretty hostess. It looked as if they were familiar with him there. He seemed to recognize someone at the bar and went straight up to him.
Hauck waited as Thibault greeted the man and took a seat, and then stepped in.
“Dining with us tonight?” The hostess, a twentysomething gal in a sexy black dress, smiled from behind a counter.
Hauck smiled back. “Just meeting a friend at the bar.”
Thibault was seated at the far end of the crowded bar. His friend, who was Mediterranean looking, wore a nicely tailored sport jacket and open white shirt.
Hauck found a nook at the opposite end. The female bartender came up and he ordered a beer. Something Belgian. Palm. For the occasion. Through the maze of shifting bodies and faces, he watched them.
The two appeared to be friends. Even over the loud din, Hauck occasionally heard Thibault’s deep-throated laugh. He’d gotten a drink—it looked like vodka—and he shifted the stool around and sat, his back to Hauck, chatting with his friend. They clinked glasses, Thibault patting him affectionately on the shoulder.
Hauck knew he was crossing the line. He had resolved not to accelerate the situation but to find out whatever he could, and at the same time, he knew this would send Foley off the deep end. But Thibault was clearly concealing something, and whatever it was, Hauck felt certain it led back to Glassman and Donovan. On his cell, he snapped a photo of them through the crowd. When the time came, maybe he’d have something he could give to Naomi or Chrisafoulis.
With a cherry on top.
Thibault signaled for another drink. When he turned, there was a moment when it was almost as if the man’s eyes shifted down the bar and, through the crowd of faces, locked directly on Hauck. Their gazes met momentarily.
Hauck took a sip and glanced away. A shiver traveled down his spine.
Don’t be careless. Whatever you do.
A moment later the hostess came up and told them their table was ready. Thibault threw out some bills, signaled for the drinks to be sent directly. He let his companion proceed first, with a pat to his back, then followed as the hostess led them both upstairs.
Hauck watched them disappear, then slipped out of his spot at the bar and went over to where Thibault had been sitting. The female bartender tried to clear off his space. Hauck reached for the empty glass.
“Mind if I take this?” He winked. “Souvenir.”
The bartender hesitated at first, her eyes darting past Hauck, maybe to search out someone in charge, not sure.
Hauck put a fifty on the bar. “This ought to cover, right?”
Her eyes grew wide, and she started clearing off the remaining glasses and napkins, raking in the bill. She nodded. “Ought to cover it just fine.”
T
homas Keaton, secretary of the treasury, to whom the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence reported, was able to spare Naomi and Rob Whyte, her boss, just ten minutes. That was all. He had a meeting at the AG’s office. Naomi and Rob literally rushed over to the main building, making some last-second copies, files in hand. She had shared what she knew with her boss, and he decided it was worth the call.
She was a little nervous. This was by far the most sensitive investigation of her career. She had looked into some of the notable hedge fund frauds and the possible dealings of an Iranian bank to dump dollars through the Middle East, trying to drive the currency down, but never anything like this. The stock market was down 30 percent since the beginning of March. Two of the world’s largest investment banks had failed. Two more, Citi and Bank of America, had plummeted into single digits. Not to mention Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which were reeling.
And now she could pretty much prove that the deaths of two rogue traders, traders whose losses had sunk their banks, were, in fact, not unrelated incidents but connected.
The whole thing was one large domino effect, and she felt she knew exactly the point where it all started.
At this point, whatever “evidence” she had, at least from a prosecutorial point of view, was, at best, flimsy. No more than a weak connection between a shadowy individual and the traders who had suddenly died. Looking deeper would have to involve other agencies. The FBI, the SEC, the AG’s office, maybe Interpol. They had to find out who Thibault really was. Who his contacts were. Whether there were any deeper involvements with the two dead traders. Whether money had changed hands. And most likely without taking him into custody. The cryptic message delivered to Marty al-Bashir that had sat on her desk without any apparent meaning now tolled in her brain like a warning bell.
The planes are in the air.
The secretary’s office was at a corner of Treasury’s vast limestone building overlooking the Washington Mall. Naomi had never even been to this part of the building before. Timeless portraits of past secretaries and historic figures lined the mahogany-paneled halls. Hamilton. Chase. Morgenthau. Baker.
“Don’t be nervous,” Rob said as they sat outside the suite waiting. “If you happen to be wrong on this, I can always land a job as a regional bank auditor in northern Montana.”
Naomi nodded, adjusting her suit. “Hopefully, you’ll need a secretary there.”
The door opened and Keaton’s secretary came out. “The secretary will see you now.”
Whyte stood up. Let out a breath. “More like a snow blower.”
They stepped into the large, window-lined office. Keaton, in a pinstripe suit and with a shock of white hair, came around to what seemed the mother of all conference tables, and just to add to the effect, the Washington Monument was clearly visible through the window. Naomi swallowed.
No pressure here.
The head of the Treasury had been at Justice, not to mention his highly regarded career as a Wall Street deal maker. Naomi had met him once briefly when he set up their task force and visited them across the street.
“Ms. Blum,” he said, nodding cordially but not shaking her hand. “Rob. I asked Mitch Hastings to sit in, if that’s alright with you?”
It wasn’t meant as a question. Hastings was the no-nonsense chief counsel to the Treasury Department. She had seen him in the background at the hedge fund CEO and auto bailout congressional hearings.
“Of course.” Whyte nodded. “Mitch…” The lawyer smiled back tightly and indifferently.
Naomi bit her bottom lip and took a breath.
Here goes…
“I’m afraid I have to be at the AG’s office in ten minutes.” Keaton glanced at his watch and then at Whyte. “So I’ll ask you to start right in.”
“Mr. Secretary,” Rob said, “Naomi’s come up with a few things. Things we think you ought to be aware of.”
The treasury secretary sat down directly across from her, nodding peremptorily. “
Alright
.”
Two of the most influential figures in the government had their gazes directly on her.
“A few months back”—Naomi cleared her throat and removed a file from out of her bag—“a phone transcript landed on my desk. From the NSA. The text of a call between a well-known Bahraini financial figure, Hassan ibn Hassani, who is suspected of passing funds to certain organizations that appeared on the Terrorist Watch List, and an investment manager in London. A Saudi named Mashhur al-Bashir—Marty al-Bashir, as he’s known in the trade. He’s currently the chief investment officer of the Royal Saudi Partnership.”
Thomas Keaton folded his hands in front of his face. “I’m familiar with his name.”
“The transcript,” Naomi said, her leg racing under the table, “referred to some kind of ‘change in direction’ for their strategy. If al-Bashir was to be involved I can only assume it meant a change in investment policy. Why a Bahraini financier would be discussing this with him, we don’t know. But the conversation concluded with a bit of a concerning statement—‘the planes are in the air.’”
The treasury secretary raised his eyes. His gaze shifted to Naomi’s boss, Whyte. “This conversation was a couple of months back?”
