The Prince of Risk (29 page)

T
hey arrived in two cars, quietly and without pretense. Alex rode in the first with her colleague from MI5, Colonel Charles Graves. Three officers followed in the car behind. A second team had assembled in London outside the offices of GRAIL. It would be a synchronized entry.

“All right then,” said Graves. “Shall we?” He was blond, blue-eyed, and sandy-haired, handsome except for his permanent frown.

“Let’s go earn our beer,” said Alex.

“Guinness, I hope?”

“Bud.”

“Crikey.” Graves called his counterpart in London. “We’re a go.” He turned into the drive and accelerated up a long driveway. Trees shaded the path. There was a pasture with horses and a pond with a dock and rowboat. They rounded the bend and Major James Salt’s home came into view. It was a modest Georgian country house, a fat square slab of pale sandstone. The Bennett sisters would call it a big step up. Mr. Darcy would consider it a bigger step down. The road widened as it entered a crushed-gravel forecourt. Graves stopped the car next to a wheezing fountain and climbed out. Alex beat him to the door by a step.

“By all means,” said Graves, motioning to the doorbell.

“You’re too kind.” A call to the house ten minutes earlier had established that Salt’s wife was at home. Five’s dossier on Salt said the wife was not involved in his activities. Alex punched it with her index finger.

Inside, footsteps approached. A stout, matronly woman with messy ginger hair and a cleaning dress opened the door. “Yes?”

Graves gave his work name and presented matching credentials. “We have a warrant that allows us to search the premises. Any interference will be regarded as a crime against the Crown. We would, however, welcome your help.”

“Is this about James?”

“I’m afraid we can’t answer any questions, ma’am. Now, if you’ll be so kind.”

Mrs. Salt stood aside to let the search party enter. “Where is he?” she asked. “I keep calling and he’s not answering.”

“In custody,” said Graves.

“But he’s a hero,” Mrs. Salt protested.

“Not today,” said Alex.

Mrs. Salt caught the American accent and took a closer look at Alex. Her mouth tightened in distaste at the sight of her swollen eye. “You all right?”

“Fine.”

“Why is there blood on your trousers then?”

Alex glanced at her slacks and noted a patch of crusted blood on her knee, visible despite the dark wool. Graves had provided a fresh blouse. There hadn’t been time to pop by Selfridges for a new suit. “Accident.”

“Is it James?”

Alex glared at the woman. Mrs. Salt was an accomplice by association. She merited no sympathy. Alex brushed past her into the small, musty foyer. There was a grandfather clock and a throw rug and a tapestry on the wall that was not quite from Bayonne. But the home was immaculate. The major might be broke, but the missus had her pride.

Graves offered a rare smile. “Might we inquire where your husband’s office is?”

“Upstairs. Second door on the left. Clean it up while you’re there. He won’t let me touch a thing. He’s retired, you know. He sold his business a few months ago.”

Alex started up the stairs, Graves and two more officers close behind. One stayed with Mrs. Salt. Behind them, they heard the woman inquiring in increasingly desperate tones, “What have you done with him? Why isn’t he answering?”

Alex opened the door to Salt’s office.

It was a room from the nineteenth century, all dark wood and heavy furniture, with grimy oils of British sailing ships covering the walls and velvet curtains obscuring a view to the back garden. An oak desk with feet of lion paws held pride of place. A new Mac sat on the desk, and near it an ashtray overflowing with cigar butts. Papers covered every other square inch of the surface, with several stacks piled taller than Alex.

“Do you mind?” she asked, pulling out the chair.

“Be my guest,” said Graves.

“This may take a while.” Alex sat and opened the first folder she saw. It was a personnel file, and clipped to the paperwork was a color photograph of a handsome soldier in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. She recognized him at once. It was Luc Lambert, a.k.a. Randall Shepherd. “Then again, maybe not.”

In the end it took two hours.

Major James Salt was as meticulous in his cataloguing of information pertaining to the project he had named Excelsior as he was careless in keeping it secret. Alex divided the information into three stacks: Personnel, Materiel, and Logistics.

Personnel contained dossiers on every one of the thirty mercenaries—twenty-two men and eight women—who were originally to take part in the coming action. Each dossier held a photograph, a handwritten employment application, medical records, an employment contract, and a reference to a bank where all fees were to be wired. Each member was to be paid $200,000 up front with a further $800,000 upon completion of the assignment. Graves was quick to point out that such salaries were far above normal compensation and hinted at an assignment with abnormally high risk.

“For that money, I give ’em fifty-fifty odds of getting back,” he said. “It’s their last payday and they know it. Make it out alive and retire to a white sand beach far, far away.”

“Twenty-four shooters earning a million apiece,” said Alex. “And it was supposed to be thirty. Who’s got that kind of dough?”

“Want my answer?” said Graves. “State-sponsored.”

Alex nodded. But which state? Only a rogue nation would go outside its own intelligence bureau to mount such a large operation.

One personnel dossier especially interested her. It belonged to an Alexander “Sandy” Beaufoy, age forty, former lieutenant in the South African Army and, like Lambert and Salt, a participant in the ill-fated Comoros coup. Under the section marked “Past Experience,” she noted that Beaufoy’s nickname was Skinner. It was Beaufoy who had sent Salt the ominous message stating “The Eagle Has Landed.
Gott mitt uns
” and with whom Salt had spoken for fourteen minutes shortly after GRAIL had alerted him to Alex’s visit.

It was imperative to ping the phone.

Materiel provided a combined how-to manual and road map of international arms smuggling. There were names of dealers, ports of loading and unloading, false bills of lading, contacts at three U.S. ports of entry, including JFK, Philadelphia Port Authority, and Houston. The list of weapons purchased corresponded to a T with the armaments found at Windermere. Except for one difference: there was more than three times the amount.

Last, and to Alex’s mind most important, came Logistics. The stack held flight details to and from Namibia, then onward to Caracas via Angola (which she noted was a former Portuguese territory). There were names of contact people at each stop, including phone numbers and e-mail addresses. There were names of hotels, along with confirmation numbers and prepaid vouchers. Alex was especially interested in the hotel in Mexico City where two nights earlier twelve rooms had been reserved under the name Excelsior Holdings. There was the name of the transportation company contracted to pick up “a party of twenty-five” from Benito Juárez International Airport, including details of the arriving flight. There was even the name of one General Jaime Fortuno of the Mexican Federales, who had agreed to meet the passengers and ease their passage through immigration, along with the general’s banking details. A handwritten note on top of Fortuno’s file stated, “Paid $10,000 cash. 15 July.”

The funding, it seemed, was unlimited. But the trail ended there. There was no further mention of Excelsior or of the Bank of Vaduz. Nothing at all to lead them to Salt’s “old friend.”

Alex was frustrated. She had all the evidence any prosecutor would need to put away the bad guys for a hundred life sentences after the fact. But the trove of information brought her no closer to the essentials of the plot: where, when, how. Like all her fellow agents, she was conscious of the FBI’s less-than-stellar record at stopping acts of terror before they occurred. When she’d assumed command of CT-26, she’d sworn that she would be the one to spot the attack
before,
and not the one who responded
after.
Yet once again she, and by extension the Bureau, found herself facing a brick wall. She needed actionable intelligence to get her people in place to foil the attack.

“You missed these,” said Graves, dropping another stack of folders on the desk. “Fell behind the radiator.”

“What are they?”

“Something you’ll find interesting.”

Alex picked up the folder. “Arrivals/USA.” She looked at Graves. “Salt knew all along.”

She opened the folder and read. Three groups. The first entering through Matamoros. The second via an oil rig off the Gulf Coast. And the third through Canada. All under the guise of being corporate employees. All slated for arrival in the greater New York metropolitan area yesterday evening.

The Eagle Has Landed.
Gott mitt uns.

But where were they staying? She shuffled through the papers looking for any mention of a safe house, a place where the group would hole up and get their bearings prior to the attack. There was nothing about Windermere or anywhere else. She took that to mean one thing: the operation had a contact already in place in America.

It was as she reread the papers that she caught the name. The address for the drop-off in Matamoros belonged to a large supermarket chain called Pecos. The oil rig was owned by Noble Energy. And the drop-off in Canada was at the Silicon Solutions plant in Kitchener-Waterloo.

Pecos. Noble Energy. Silicon Solutions.

Alex dropped the file onto the desk. “Oh, no.”

“What is it?” asked Graves.

“He was right,” she said.

“Who?”

“Bobby.”

“H
ello, Marv.”

Astor poked his head out of the elevator and peered around the landing.
“Marv?”

He saw no one. For once, Shank wasn’t there to greet him.

Astor entered his office. The trading floor was surprisingly quiet. No one glanced up as he passed the desk. Even Longfellow and Goodchild had their faces buried in their computer screens. The calm disturbed him. It was like the silence before an execution. He reached his office and looked inside. No Shank there, either. Conference room one was packed with lawyers. They were sharply dressed, straight-backed, and disciplined to look at. He recognized Frank Arcano from Skadden, who would be leading the charge to grant him more time to meet the margin requirements. They were the good lawyers.

Conference room two was packed with more lawyers. They wore baggy suits and had their neckties undone and shaggy haircuts. He didn’t recognize any of them and he knew they hailed from the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the body that regulated foreign currency transactions. They were the bad lawyers.

He craned his head toward conference room three. He half expected to see a camera crew from CNBC setting up camp and the Money Honey herself getting made up in preparation for an interview with the latest victim of Wall Street hubris. Enter Robert Astor. Thankfully, conference room three was empty.

Astor retraced his steps toward the reception desk. He knocked at the CFO’s door, then opened it. The boss didn’t require an invitation. Marv Shank sat across the desk from Mandy Price.

“Look who decided to come to his own funeral,” said Shank.

“Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Astor pulled up a chair. “What have we got?”

“Per your instructions, we’re liquidating all equities in Comstock Astor showing a profit,” said Price. “So far we’ve sold a hundred million.”

“That’s a start.”

“We have another five hundred million in equities that are more or less where we bought them.”

“And the rest?”

“Losers.”

“At the moment,” said Astor.

“That’s all that matters today,” said Shank.

Astor buried his head in his hands. “The goddamned position.”

“And our contact?”

“Lee? He says wait till Friday.”

“There’s still Reventlow,” said Shank. “You call him?”

“The ball’s in his court.”

Shank looked at Astor with disgust. He started to speak, then settled for shaking his head and sighing.

The clock on the wall read 2:40. Astor was not optimistic.

He returned to his office. He sat down and darkened the blinds. His arm ached. He opened his drawer and took out the bottle of painkillers his doctor had prescribed. He shook one loose, then thought better of it, if only because he needed to have his wits about him.

Closing his eyes, he once more ran through everything he knew about his father’s special project.

In early July, Edward Astor was tipped to some type of imminent plot by Palantir. The plot involved at least seven companies that were now or had been owned by a private equity firm. Each company was a client of Britium’s and used the Empire Platform to manage its products. The industries included computers, software, satellites, engineering, and energy.

Astor concluded that it was their common tie to Britium that had most frightened his father and that his visit to Britium’s CEO was for the sole purpose of confirming or disproving Palantir’s accusations. He further concluded that since his father had inquired about whether Britium was in place before July 2011—the time of the Flash Crash—he had viewed Empire as responsible. Astor’s own experience with the elevator in his home testified to the fact that Empire was vulnerable to hacking. If systems controlling the New York Stock Exchange and his own home could be hacked, then so could any other system that relied on the Empire Platform, including the FBI’s and the CIA’s. No wonder his father had convinced Charles Hughes and Martin Gelman to join him in waking the president.

According to Palantir,
“They were getting desperate.”

“And so?” Astor said aloud. “Who are ‘they’? What in the world are they planning?”

Astor was sure he possessed all the information he needed to find the answer, yet he felt as far away from understanding the forces he was up against as when he had first decided to look into his father’s cryptic message.

He stood too quickly, knocking his arm against the desk. He clutched his injured limb, grimacing until the pain subsided.

Who?

Astor spun to face the computer. He brought up Google and typed every relevant keyword he could think of into the query bar. First he listed the seven companies whose annual reports he had found in Penelope Evans’s house. To those he added the names of the five private equity firms. Finally he wrote, “Britium.” He hit Return.

He had an answer in .0025 seconds.

The first link was to an article titled “Watersmark Welcomes New Investor.” Astor read on. “Watersmark LLC, the New York–based private equity firm, today announced the sale of a thirty percent stake in the firm to the China Investment Corporation for three billion dollars. Watersmark chairman Duncan Newman stated, ‘We welcome CIC’s participation and look forward to working with them to make exciting investments in the future.’ Newman added that several of the Chinese sovereign wealth fund’s executives would take up residence in Watersmark’s New York office to gain firsthand experience of the private equity business and to offer a Pacific perspective.”

The China Investment Corporation. It couldn’t be.

And then Astor read the last line and the floor dropped from the gallows. “CIC Chairman Magnus Lee commented, ‘Of course, our participation is limited to a minority interest, but we hope to learn very much from our American business partners.’”

Magnus Lee. His special contact. The man whose advice he had summoned to place the biggest investment in his firm’s history.

Astor blinked, not quite believing his eyes—maybe not wanting to believe them. He stood, his feet as heavy as if they were embedded in concrete.

Lee was the connection.

Lee was the man behind his father’s death.

Astor forced himself back to his desk. He landed in his chair with a thud.

The next link read, “Oak Leaf Ventures Sells Twenty-five Percent Stake in Firm to China Investment Corporation.” It went on to say that the CIC would send three of its executives to Oak Leaf’s offices in Chicago. Again Magnus Lee was quoted as being “thrilled” with the investment while pointing out that CIC’s participation would be strictly as a silent partner.

Lies. Lies. More lies.

For ten minutes Astor continued reading link after link.

The China Investment Corporation had invested billions of dollars in each of the private equity firms involved with the corporations his father had been investigating. Lee always made the point that the investments were passive, but in every case the CIC had placed a few executives at the private equity firms as “executives in training.”

Read “spies.”

Astor remembered the Asian man with the keen blue eyes who had tried to kill him yesterday. Eyes the color of Magnus Lee’s.

Astor pulled up Watersmark’s web page. He searched under its list of executives and was not surprised to find a familiar name: “Herbert Hong. PhD Stanford, MIT…born in China.” Hong was one of the CIC execs implanted in Watersmark, who had then gone on to work at Britium.

Suddenly it was clear to him. The CIC used its power as a minority partner in Watersmark and Oak Leaf and all the others to gain influence over certain key companies in the funds’ portfolios—companies involved in critical sectors of the nation’s economy: computers, energy, satellites, missiles. But to what end?

Control.

Until now, Lee’s actions—and by extension his country’s—had been hidden behind the cloak of everyday corporate activity. But Astor knew that time was coming to an end. Lee was no longer content to spy. He had something else in mind. Something terrible was brewing. His father had had knowledge of it and it had cost him his life. Palantir knew it, too.

“They’re getting desperate.”

Lee himself had told him to wait until Friday.

Whatever it was, it was happening now.

Astor took out his phone to call Alex. He’d gone as far as he could. He felt no satisfaction from his efforts, only horror. It was up to the FBI. As he dialed, his secretary’s voice came over the speaker. “Call for you, Bobby. Septimus Reventlow.”

Astor looked at the clock. It was one minute before three. One and a half hours until the funds to meet the margin call were due. One and a half hours to bankruptcy.

Astor hung up the cell and picked up the landline.

“Hello, Septimus.”