Seven Grams of Lead (22 page)

“The blogger is bluffing,” Canning wrote in an encrypted text message to Dr. Simon Wade, the former Special Ops shrink who operated the interrogation and detention facility known as Black Islands.

Now—
finally
—Canning could traffic his E-bomb.

Lamont engaged a
strong wind in a tug-of-war over a door before exiting 26 Federal Plaza. Hurrying into the night, he was belted by a cold sheet of rain. His lone defense, a
Daily News
, turned to pulp. He hadn’t looked at the sports section yet, but he’d read enough of the rest of the paper to determine there was no mention of his activity in Harlem the night before last. Good. No sense sending millions of New Yorkers into a panic over an assassination ring.

His overcoat was soaked through before he reached the end of the block, a wind tunnel lined by monolithic office towers. He forded the traffic jam on Broadway in order to take the shortest route to Kennedy’s. Tires spinning in both directions sprayed rainwater onto the parts of his suit that had somehow remained dry.

Entering the dark tavern, he was enveloped by toasty air and the pleasing aroma of steak and ale. If not for the neon brewery promotions tucked into the front window and a few modern conveniences behind the bar, James Joyce might well have entered and settled onto a barstool here without blinking. The usual postwork crush of Wall Streeters had dwindled to a smattering of patrons enjoying late dinners at elegant mahogany tables and drinks along the vast, copper-surfaced bar.

Gene Garrison, a member of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, waited in a high-backed booth offering privacy as well as a view of the entire establishment. “Joint” referred to agents, investigators, analysts, and various specialists from other law enforcement and intelligence agencies who worked alongside Bureau agents at 100 FBI field offices nationwide. Garrison had been the CIA station chief in Amsterdam before joining New York’s JTTF office—the nation’s first, established by the Bureau in 1980 in collaboration with the NYPD. He stood as Lamont approached, reaching out not just to shake hands but to clasp Lamont by the shoulders without regard to the dripping fabric.

“Corky, you’re a hero,” Garrison said. “You’ve earned any drink you’d like.”

Indicating the tumbler already on the table, Lamont told the waitress, “Whatever he’s having, please.” Based on Garrison’s reputation, it would be the finest single-malt scotch Lamont had ever had.

Lamont peeled off his overcoat, dropped it onto the sturdy brass hook branching from the booth’s frame, and sank onto the leather bench, all the while studying the man across the table for a clue: Why would the star JTTF agent invite a rank-and-file rookie for drinks? FBI agents didn’t drink on duty, and technically they were always on duty. Lamont had plans to return to the office tonight. Was this some kind of test?

In appearance Garrison was the prototypical middle-aged man. His height was average, his weight about right, and his dark brown hair had a moderate amount of gray. Other than the custom-tailored suit, there was nothing to mark him as either management or a member of the graveyard shift, no fierce look of determination, no aquiline nose, no Rolex.

They finished two rounds, mostly with Garrison asking about Lamont’s college pitching career and brief dalliance with the Houston Astros. Unsure why they were talking baseball, Lamont answered self-consciously.

Finally, the spy said, “Your captive has to escape.”

Lamont hoped he’d misunderstood. “Unless the marshals missed a jackhammer when they strip-searched him, I don’t see how that’s going to happen.”

“We’ll need to come up with something plausible, for the record.” Garrison signaled the waitress for another round. “Really, we’ll put him in WitSec.”

The rock anthem that had been playing in Lamont’s
head in the two days since Ronny Brackman’s capture: It jerked to a halt. Despite murdering Peretti and O’Clair and nearly shooting Lamont’s head off in the bodega, Ralph Brackman’s twin brother stood to get a fresh identity, a house, and a new car—likely a Lincoln Navigator, the runaway favorite of cooperators entering witness protection. With a decent lawyer, he might also bag a numbered bank account with a balance in the mid–six figures.

“I understand the pros of going after the bigger fish, but putting this guy in WitSec is wrong,” Lamont said.

“You’ve got to realize that he’s just a murder weapon in the grand scheme of things,” said Garrison.

“Except they don’t come any worse.” Lamont fought to keep the vitriol out of his voice. “Putting away guys like him is the reason I signed with the Bureau instead of the Astros.”

As Garrison would have read in Lamont’s FD-302, the assassin, born Ronald Anthony Brackman, had been a low-ranking Army specialist who was one infraction away from dishonorable discharge when he faked his own death after an Iraqi rocket turned the rest of his Gulf War unit to ash. Deserting the Army, as well as a wife and twin toddlers, he assumed a new identity and signed on with a South African private military company for five times what the United States had paid him. “Sociopath with violent tendencies” played better in the mercenary community than
in the Army. In three years, he built up enough of a reputation to strike out on his own as an assassin.

Garrison leaned forward, lowering his voice to little more than a whisper. “The beauty of a WitSec with a guy like this is that he’ll quickly get sick of sitting in the sun and begin sniffing around for his next illicit action fix. Which is why we’ll have the U.S. Marshals keep their eyes on them. It’s just a matter of time until he’ll be in the dark hole where he belongs.”

“What if he likes the sun and his government windfall?” Lamont asked.

“Sometimes, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Marshals Service, the guy’s former employers, knowing their secrets are at stake, learn of his whereabouts and send another assassin after him. Do you know the official term for that?”

“What?”

“Karma.”

Lamont laughed. He was mollified but far from sold. “Who’s the bigger fish?”

“That’s the question.” Garrison sipped his whiskey. “According to his attorney, the hit man will give us the details of the offshore bank account where eighty grand was wired within an hour of his job uptown the other night.”

“His bank account info? That’s it?”

“There’s no reason to think there’s anything more to be had. He’s a cutout. Intelligence operatives—or even two-bit gangsters—would be foolish to entrust
their identities, much less a shred of actionable intel, to a psychopath like Brackman. And I would’ve bet he was a psycho even if I hadn’t read your excellent three-oh-two. The honorable assassin doesn’t exist outside of the movies.”

“What good is knowing where he banks if we don’t know the bigger fish’s BIC?” Lamont meant the business identifier code. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication assigned a unique BIC to each institution that transferred funds. For the offshore banker, divulging Brackman’s employer’s BIC would be career suicide, if not actual suicide.

“We need that BIC,” Garrison said. “Without it, we won’t see so much as a ripple from the bigger fish.”

“So then what’s the play? Can Justice put the squeeze on the bank?”

“In theory, yes, but secrecy is the lifeblood of off-shore banks. So in practice, we don’t waste our time trying to do this by the books.”

By
we
, Lamont realized, Garrison didn’t mean the Bureau. This explained why Garrison hadn’t approached someone more senior, like Musseridge, or Phelps, the special agent in charge of the JTTF.

“What do you have in mind?” Lamont asked.

Garrison grinned. “Step one is for us to have a late-night meeting in a dark tavern. As you may have noticed, the Bureau is somewhat straitlaced when
the means
can’t be justified in a courtroom.
The ends
don’t matter under American jurisprudence. Tainted evidence would cause your entire case to be tossed out of court.”

“Along with my career. What’s step two?”

Garrison sat back. “You find out why the Joint Terrorism Task Force includes officers from intelligence agencies unencumbered by such restrictions.”

Squeezed high into
the eastern Pyrenees is Andorra, a country the size of New Orleans known for its skiing, shopping, and offshore banks. This evening, as he had after work almost every day for the past twenty-eight years, Óscar Lasuén hefted his considerable bulk onto a barstool at the Salvia d’Or, a restaurant in Andorra’s capital city, Andorra la Vella. As usual, Lasuén ordered a Crema Catalana, no doubt the first of several, the regimen that made his return home bearable, although his interaction with his wife had dwindled to little more than her terse reporting of the leftovers he might microwave himself for dinner.

The Salvia d’Or, built from smoke-blackened stones held in place by dark wood beams and lit only
by candles, looked much the same as when it first opened in 1701. In all the years since, the tavern had probably never been graced by a young woman as beautiful as the French tourist who happened onto the stool beside Lasuén’s. Brushing snowflakes from her golden hair, she turned and asked him, in broken Catalan, if he knew anything about Andorra. Lasuén, who considered himself something of a raconteur as well as an amateur historian, told of the extraordinary soap opera that comprised the tiny nation’s seven centuries of joint rule by France and Spain. The young woman, a language student, stumbled over words here and there. Lasuén happily translated into French.

When she inquired about the Salvia d’Or’s
escudella
, a traditional Catalan soup known for its
pilota,
a giant meatball spiced with garlic, Lasuén invited her to join him for a bowl. She hesitated in accepting, agreeing only after extracting a promise from Lasuén that they not speak a word of French.

They dined at a cozy corner table, three courses and too many glasses of Crema Catalana to count. Afterward, she invited him for a nightcap at her hotel, which was just down the block. He said he would love to, but he couldn’t. Perhaps, taking into account the prurient stares from the crowd of regulars who knew him, he feared repercussions. Whatever the case, it was a crying shame, thought Max Qualls, the CIA case officer feigning interest in a
trinxat
of bacon,
cabbage, and potato at a table in the opposite corner. Óscar Lasuén was the chief private banking officer at the Banca Privada d’Andorra, and he aspired to succeed the bank’s longtime chairman, his father-in-law. The woman he’d spurned was in fact French, but no tourist. She was a hooker named Dorothée, in town on business. Qualls had hired Dorothée with the objective of generating Lasuén’s willingness to do anything to prevent his father-in-law from receiving the X-rated video covertly shot in her hotel room. Qualls wouldn’t have asked Lasuén for much more than a BIC.

Now Qualls’s colleague from Langley, Wendy Kammeyer, something of a wild card, would have to get the BIC the hard way.

Kammeyer took the train from Barcelona to Zaragoza, where she put on a platinum blond wig, extra layers of makeup, and the sort of parka and stretch pants worn only by Olympic skiers or amateurs who never leave the lodge. The most important part of her costume would be noticed by no one, a pair of contact lenses that transformed her gray irises to a dull blue. She’d heard that the lenses cost $250,000. Each.

In Zaragoza, using a Spanish passport and a Visa card with the name Penélope Piera, she bought a bus ticket to Andorra la Vella. During the four-hour ascent,
she tried to ignore the spectacle of snow-laden peaks in order to learn the part of Piera, mistress in need of a discreet bank account for her generous cash allowance. Kammeyer had been an actress before being drawn to clandestine service by the opportunity to lose herself in roles twenty-four hours a day. The summer after graduating from Vassar, she had played Minnie Mouse aboard a Disney cruise ship. She went on to receive a decent
Village Voice
review for her turn as the cold and calculating Martha in an off-Broadway production of Albee’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
She created a character combining elements of the two for her role this evening in Andorra la Vella.

The six-story mirrored-glass Banca Privada d’Andorra was on the corner of a dense commercial block nestled into the base of a mountain. The building reminded Kammeyer of a D-cell battery. It shone with distended reflections of the trio of Gothic buildings across the street. She entered the lobby, fifteen minutes late for her five o’clock appointment with private banking officer Xavier Belmonte. She’d let the time lapse, in keeping with her character, deliberating on the purchase of a silk scarf in one of Andorra’s incredible array of duty-free shops—the tiny country had 2,000 in total, one for every four of its citizens.

If not for the PC tower and chip-thin flat-screen monitor in Belmonte’s office, Kammeyer might have believed she’d stepped through a wormhole in time
to the House of Rothschild in its heyday. Dropping into the wing chair in front of the red-leather-topped Louis XV desk, she said, in the Catalan of a native Barcelonan, “I totally love your décor.”

“Gràcies, senyora,”
Belmonte said, his reserve suggesting that he’d had nothing to do with it.

His charcoal business suit revealed a broad-boned athlete gone soft. He had a small chin, a slit for a mouth, and sunken cheeks offset by a bulbous nose. His smooth skin was either olive to begin with or had recently taken some sun. His prematurely gray hair and thick, steel-rimmed glasses would have made it hard for Kammeyer to guess his ethnicity if she hadn’t read the standard cradle-to-today dossier on the Marseille native. He switched to his mother tongue, which Kammeyer also understood, to relay her request of a
café crème
over the intercom.

After inquiring about her trip up to the city and her shopping experience, Belmonte deftly segued to her banking needs, beginning by proposing she open what the bank termed an Advisory Account. “We make our skills available to any client who wishes us to actively participate in the management of her assets,” he said. “Our top-rated team of advisers is at your service.” The leading alternative was the so-called Custody Account, “for clients who prefer to manage their assets directly and make their own investment decisions.”