Lust, Money & Murder (15 page)

He offered her a seat in a comfortable leather chair, then hobbled on his cane to his antique desk and sat down, grimacing as he did so. His aging frame looked emaciated, his three-piece suit hanging from his limbs. Elaine noticed that there were tremors in his hands.

He opened the desk drawer and popped a couple of tablets into his mouth. “Parkinson’s Disease,” he explained, swallowing the tablets dry. He motioned to her. “So, I imagine you’re pretty curious about this new project I want you to work on...”

“To say the least,” Elaine said.

“You’ve been checking a lot of these fakes. As I’m sure you noticed, whoever is making them is getting better and better at it.”

“Yes, I noticed.” She decided to focus her mind on the task at hand. “From what I know, the Giori printing presses are very complicated—there’s a learning curve to master using them correctly.”

“That’s right. But it looks like the criminals recently made a major breakthrough.”

“How’s that?”

Lassiter pointed to the map on his wall with the pins in it. “Three weeks ago, in San Remo, Italy, a young woman took fifty thousand fake U.S. dollars into a casino and changed it into chips. All of the money— we’re talking five hundred of the counterfeit banknotes—passed right through the verifier at the casino’s currency exchange, completely undetected.”

“How were the fakes discovered?” Elaine said, fascinated.

“Someone at the casino’s home office in Marseilles examined a few of the notes very carefully. He noticed some fine discrepancies and sent one to the Secret Service for verification.”

“And the girl?”

Lassiter shrugged. “Gone missing. Some Italian hooker. She’s probably dead now.” He looked evenly at Elaine. “You realize what all this means?”

“Yes. It means banks and currency exchanges can’t tell these fakes from real U.S. currency.”

“Exactly. Which as you can imagine, is a goddam serious problem.”

“I’ll say.”

“The Secret Service’s solution is to try and physically track down the Giori machine. If you ask me, that entire approach is wrong, and it’s wasting valuable time. Nick LaGrange has thrown a further wrench into the works. Who knows where the goddam machine is hidden or how long it could take to find it? It could be sitting in the finance ministry of some government that’s hostile to the United States—in the Middle East, South America, Asia...anywhere!”

“True,” Elaine said.

“From my point of view a much smarter and more efficient approach would simply be to update the software in the currency verifying machines all over the world so that they detect the bills from
that
particular printing press and keep those fakes out of circulation. It’s just a matter of sending out updated detection software, which is easy. The problem with this phantom Giori press would be solved like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Game over.”

“It sounds like a good plan.”

“I’m glad you think so,” he said, smiling. “Because you’re the one in charge of it.”

“Me?” she said, taken aback.

“Yes, you. Who else knows more about these particular fakes than you do? You’ve been studying their details for a year now, and you’ve seen more of them than anyone else. You have a strong background in intaglio printing, plus—”

“But I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“I’ll be personally supervising you. You’ll have access to all the resources you need, I’ll see to it. Our top programmer, our top covert feature designer, and the engineers at KBA Giori, in Wurzburg, if you need them.”

Elaine was flabbergasted.

“But still—”

“Besides,” he said, “I don’t trust anyone else to take this on.” He motioned to the walls as if they had ears. “Everyone around here has got too much political baggage. I want someone from the outside, someone I can trust.”

“I—I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything, Elaine. Just get to work.”

The old man turned sideways in his chair, to a huge safe that was built into the wall. After entering a code into a keypad, he leaned forward and dialed in a combination, blocking her view so she could not see. He opened the safe and pulled out a plastic bag and pushed it across his desk to her.

It was full of $100 bills. There were sticky notes attached to all of them.

“That bag contains every fake that has surfaced anywhere in the world and has been traced to the Giori machine. Time, date, and place found. Some of them you’ve checked already.”

Elaine looked at them—there were several hundred banknotes.

“What you need to do is go through every one of those bills and find the common defects they have compared to real American currency. Defects that you think will be most likely to remain in the bills no matter how much the criminals fine-tune the printing process and plates. Then, you’ll work with the software folks here to find a way to detect those defects with currency verifying machines, and then we’ll send out the software updates to all the global banks to end this goddam problem once and for all. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” Elaine said. It was a tremendous amount of work. It would take months.

“You can set up shop in the office next to mine,” he said, indicating a door to the right. “It’s unoccupied at the moment. Whatever equipment you need—microscopes, scanners, or whatever—we’ll have it all brought up here.” He motioned to the bills. “Every night, those will be locked up in my safe, along with all the notes and other materials from the project until you’re finished. I want this kept absolutely top secret.”

Elaine nodded.

He folded his trembling hands on his desk. “Any questions?”

CHAPTER 2.2

Elaine dove into the project, working days, nights, and weekends. To be close to the office and to prevent her from “wasting time” looking for an apartment, Lassiter rented a modest suite for her at a hotel a few metro stations away. Elaine never went there except to collapse into the bed or wake up and shower.

Lassiter drove her relentlessly. A perfectionist with little patience for mistakes, he was not an easy man to work for.

Her office on the third floor of the Treasury Building soon looked like the quarters of some demented terrorist determined to bring down the American financial system. It was packed with strange-looking equipment, the ornate walls covered with her family-tree style interconnection diagrams and greatly magnified sections of fake $100 notes. One day there were so many half-full coffee cups lying around that it reminded her—painfully—of Nick’s office.

She was a neat and orderly person, but there was no time to tidy it up.

“You can clean up the mess later,” Lassiter would scold, “when this goddam project is finished.”

Her days became an endless blur. All the data was kept on a secure data key the size of a salt shaker, which they appropriately called, “the salt shaker.” Coming into work, Lassiter taking the bills and salt shaker out of his safe, going to her office, endlessly comparing the notes to each other with all her technological aids, going back to Lassiter’s office each evening, returning the fake bills and the salt shaker to the safe, and going back to the hotel. Her vision seemed blurry most of the time, her eyes bloodshot, her neck and back aching from bending to look through microscope lenses all day. She welcomed the exhaustion.

She worked Monday through Saturday. On Sundays, she took the day off.

She slept all day and treated herself to room service.

Otherwise, she survived on a diet of caffeine and fast food. She lost five pounds the first month.

She thought of Nick often. By the end of October, she still hadn’t said a word to Lassiter about him—she was afraid to speak of Nick. Lassiter had given her strict orders not to have any further contact with him, or anyone else in the Secret Service. Elaine was registered at the hotel under a false name provided by Lassiter, and he had given her a new secure cellphone and number to use. She was sure the old man had taken these precautions so that Nick could not contact her, but he never said as much. She had a distinct feeling that he knew there had been more than a friendship between the two of them.

A week before Thanksgiving, Elaine finally got the nerve to ask him about Nick. Lassiter was in her office. He was sitting at her light table, with his back to her, peering through a loupe, going over some of the common defects she had found in the fakes.

“LaGrange?” he said, not moving his head. “I heard he was arrested a few weeks ago.”

Elaine felt a sharp pang in her chest. “Is he...in jail?”

Lassiter turned around and glanced at her. “From what I understand, he’s being held by Interpol in Brussels. When they’re done interrogating him, he’ll be sent to one of the CIA centers and then...I don’t know. He’ll eventually face a civil trial here in the States.”

“So I guess they caught him accepting a bribe or something...”

“I suppose,” Lassiter said vaguely. “I only know he was arrested.”

Elaine felt sick. An image flashed before her—her father, standing on the other side of the glass in the prison visitor’s room, his face sallow, dark circles under his eyes. Nick would probably be in captivity the rest of his life, unless he could somehow escape.

She told herself she would put Nick LaGrange out of her mind, once and for all.

* * *

Gene Lassiter entered the lobby of the hotel about 3 pm, as he did each and every day.

“Anything for me?” he said to the manager on duty.

“Another one of these,” the man said, discreetly handing over an envelope.

Written across the front in handwriting that Lassiter recognized were the words DELIVER TO ROOM 628. PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.

It was the third one that had been received.

Later that night, Lassiter sat down in the den of his comfortable Georgetown home, the fire crackling in front of him. Leaning his cane against the couch, he pulled the envelope from his suit pocket. He tore it open and he began to read.

Dear Elaine...

There was only one heartfelt-written paragraph, and then Nick’s signature.

How touching
, Lassiter thought.

He tossed it into the fire.

Sipping his brandy, he watched the flames transform it into smoke and ashes.

CHAPTER 2.3

By the beginning of December, Elaine had found 75 different printing defects the fake notes had in common. All of the discrepancies were microscopic and could not be seen with the naked eye. Finding them was a frustrating process, as new fake notes rolled in every few days, most of them continuing to be found in Russia and Eastern Europe. Often, the defects common to all the previous notes disappeared in the newer notes. The criminals continued to learn, steadily improving the quality of their counterfeits.

Christmas and New Year’s Day came and went.

* * *

In mid January, Elaine had narrowed down the defect list to ten errors, ten that currency verifying machines could easily detect if the software were upgraded. Lassiter called in several experts, including an engineer from KBA Giori. A great debate ensued as to which of the ten errors were most likely to persist as the criminals increased the quality of the banknotes.

Finally, after a week of heated discussion, the three key defects were settled on. 1) a missing spot in one of the zeros in the “100” symbols microprinted along the security thread, 2) on the front side of the note, an error in the shape of the blob of light reflected in the pupil of Ben Franklin’s eye, and 3) on the back of the note, an out-of-position D—off by only one engraving line—in the phrase IN GOD WE TRUST.

Elaine immediately began working with Treasury’s top programmer to modify the verification software to search for bills with these three errors and reject the banknote if one or more of them were present.

By the end of January, software was perfected and thoroughly tested. The 300-odd counterfeits collected were run over and over through a verifying machine with the new software, and it caught every one of them. Flawlessly.

The programmer spent two weeks cleverly disguising this new code so that if the criminals ever got hold of it, it would take years to figure out the three defects it was searching for.

* * *

When the software was ready and deemed perfect, Lassiter took Elaine out to Citronelle for a celebration. It was considered by many to be the best restaurant in Washington.

“Elaine, you did an absolutely fantastic job on this project,” he said, toasting her jovially with champagne. “You can look forward to a long and fruitful career at Treasury.”

“Thank you,” she said wearily.

He chuckled with satisfaction. “I would give anything to see the look on these bastards’ faces when they casually drop off another load of their damn fakes at their local bank, and the machines kick it all back and set off alarms. They’re going to shit their pants. They’ll spend the next few months scratching their heads, trying to figure out what happened.”