The Color Of Night (17 page)

“Jesus Christ,” she said, turning and taking his face with both hands and returning his kiss. “I don’t believe we did it. I don’t believe it!”

Strand sat down and looked across the table at Ariana Kiriasis, who had put her hand flat on her chest as if to still her pounding heart. He grinned at her. She still smelled of her own seductive mixture of smoke and perfume.

“You’ve got a hell of a memory,” he said. “It’s been five years at least since we’ve used that. I thought it was a long shot.”

Ariana was still shaking her head, smiling in relief and disbelief. “I wasn’t sure I’d got all the signals straight. When you mentioned Madame Sosotris, the ‘famous clairvoyant,’ my God, I almost fell over.”

“I saw the recognition in your face. I just wasn’t sure you’d remember the details.”

“My God, yes, of course I remembered, I just hadn’t expected it.” She was laughing.

When they’d first begun working together they had devised a method of secretly arranging meetings when they were in the presence of others. Strand would mention Madame Sosotris, a Greek character from T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land.
Ariana would confirm that she was ready for him to go ahead by referring to the woman’s illness, also mentioned in the poem. The city, place, and time of their next meeting would be the next city, place, and time mentioned by Strand in the subsequent conversation, though these details would be interwoven into varying contexts.

“I didn’t know if you were free to leave Vienna,” he said. “I didn’t know your arrangements with Howard.”

She told him again, this time in more detail, of her failure to hear from Corsier and of her subsequent approach to Howard, and then of her debriefing.

“I was getting depressed,” she said, reaching for her cigarette pack on the table, “and afraid. Howard wasn’t inspiring much confidence.” She offered one to Strand, who shook his head. She lighted her cigarette and went on. “When Bill dropped me off after our meeting at the Central, we made arrangements to meet again tomorrow morning. But I went straight inside, packed my things, and took a late train out of Vienna.”

“You’re ruined with them now, you know.”

“I don’t give a damn. I don’t trust them,” she said, blowing smoke up into the darkness of the restaurant. “I didn’t like it, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I didn’t even know you were alive. He didn’t tell me whom we were going to meet—I was stunned to see you. I was so damned relieved. To tell you the truth, I thought they would protect me, but I thought they would seize my accounts, and I would end up serving some time in prison. Harry, I don’t know what you have on your mind, but whatever it is I’m going to take my chances with you.”

“You didn’t think you could hide from Schrade?”

“I did, but I didn’t think I could stand the strain of having to live that way for the rest of my life.”

Strand understood that. He had done his share of thinking about that, too.

“How did Howard take our conversation?”

“He was angry. Very angry.”

“They’re in a messy spot. It’s not the first time.”

Their dinner came, and they ate for a few minutes.

“He said you were with a woman.” Ariana wiped her mouth with her napkin, a slight smile remaining on her lips.

Strand nodded.

“You know her… well?”

“She’s not involved.”

“And she’s beautiful.”

“I think so.”

“You, of all men, would know. You have her tucked away?”

“Yeah.”

“How is she taking all this?”

“She knows that Schrade knows about her. She’s afraid, but she’ll deal with it. She’s gutsy.”

“Then she’s in for the duration.”

Strand nodded. Ariana couldn’t wait any longer.

“Okay, Harry, what was Bill talking about?”

He told her. Everything. In detail, from the strange appearance of the videotape of Romy’s death up to the present moment. She listened, stunned, mesmerized, her own anguish rekindled and intensified as she grasped a new understanding of the dimension of hatred they were dealing with and of the immediacy of its threat.

Without speaking, she reached for the bottle of wine and poured some more into both their glasses. Her hand trembled. Her face was drawn. As she sipped her wine her eyes remained on him across the rim of the glass. When she spoke she had to clear her throat.

“What do you want to do?” she asked. “What do we have to do?”

“Okay,” he said, pushing aside his plate and pulling his glass over in front of him. “I have some ideas. First, we know the FIS isn’t going to walk away from this. Bill’s talk about this being a stalemate was standard FIS bullshit. They don’t see this as a stalemate at all. They see themselves as having lost. They can’t, and won’t, tolerate that. This is by no means the end of it for them. Plus, as long as Schrade’s alive he’ll be trying to find us. The FIS can’t do anything about him. That’s it. It’s as much a fact as gravity.”

“Harry, before you go any further…” She was hesitant. “Have you considered trading the money for our lives?”

“Who are you going to trust with that kind of arrangement? Wolf? The FIS? The money’s our only protection. Take it away, we’re dead.”

“How in the hell are we going to keep it and live any kind of normal life?”

“We can’t make the money go away, but maybe we can make Schrade and the FIS go away.”

Ariana stared at him blankly. “Oh, I see. You are grasping at straws.”

“No, we can do it.”

Ariana shook her head. “Maybe you can, but I’m not going to be able to help you.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe in magic.” She smiled ruefully. “I’m too practical. I told you, Madame Sosotris never made anything happen for me.”

“Magic hasn’t got anything to do with it,” Strand said. “Cold, hard reality will make him disappear.”

“Disappear. You make it sound easy.”

“No, it sure as hell won’t be easy. Let me give you some additional background. After we broke up our operation and we all scattered in different directions, Schrade continued working with the FIS for another three and a half years. Then he abruptly cut it off. The FIS claims it doesn’t know why.”

“That’s right. Howard wouldn’t talk about it.”

“Here’s what I think happened. About eighteen months ago Schrade discovered the money was missing. I can’t imagine what must have gone wrong. I don’t know. But he went crazy, thought the FIS was in on the scam, and broke off his longtime arrangement with them. I don’t have any doubt that he probably went to work with someone else, the Germans, the British, the French. Maybe all three of them. In the meantime, he put his best computer and accounting brains to work trying to find out where it all went. They discovered who before they discovered how. The first thing he did was find Romy and me. He killed her.

“No one else died. Why did he wait another year before coming after the rest of us?” He stopped. “I didn’t even suspect Schrade in Romy’s death. That’s incredible, I know. I just didn’t.”

Ariana hadn’t moved. She didn’t respond.

“After killing Romy in an initial burst of anger,” Strand went on, “Schrade realized it was a terrible mistake. He may never get the money if he kills all of us. In fact, he probably killed his best prospect for ever getting it all back. He spent the next year trying to track it all down.”

Strand stopped and sipped his wine.

Ariana slowly shook her head. “You lost me,” she said.

“The fact of the matter is, he
can’t
get it back. Any of it. It’s impossible. When Schrade finally realized that, he turned his attention to dealing with the rest of us. He’s swinging his scythe in a wider arc. Anyone near me, he kills. Anything I own, he destroys.”

“Is that true? The money can’t be recovered?”

“In a sense, yes,” he said. “It’s gone.”

“Explain it to me,” Ariana said bluntly, lighting another cigarette. “Where the hell is my money coming from?”

Strand nodded. There was no reason to keep it to himself any longer, nothing to be gained from it, nothing to be lost by it. He was the only one left who knew how it had been done.

“The money we stole from Schrade was money that was in the process of being laundered, money that was being ‘streamed’ through a byzantine scheme of ‘filters,’ fake companies, banks, investment programs, markets, commodities, everything. Romy’s job, as it had been for nearly four years, was to determine at what point Schrade’s dirty money had passed through enough ‘filter entities’ to keep it from getting traced back to Schrade’s enterprises. When it was clean, she had to move it into the mainstream.

“The dirty money was passing through the ‘stream’ at an erratic rate, but it was averaging about forty-four million a month. Romy’s plan was to divert a portion of this money in midstream and move it into another set of filters that ultimately spat out the clean money into our own legitimate entities. Romy and Clymer got together and created a… I don’t know, a financial labyrinth, a highly complex web of legal mechanisms. They worked furiously for nearly a month on it, after Romy had already spent over a month designing the concept. It was all done by computer and then backed up by tons of forged paperwork. That’s what you and Claude were shuttling back and forth to Dennis Clymer.

“When the money came out of our filters, we had the problem of isolating it.”

“Isolating it?”

“From Schrade. I wanted to make sure that if he ever discovered what we’d done, he could never actually get his hands on the money we’d taken away from him. Six hundred and two million…”

Ariana’s mouth dropped open, an involuntary hiss of astonishment escaping her throat. She had never known the exact amount. She had only calculated backward from her own income. It had
not
come up to $602 million.

“My God,” she said, “my God.”

“Well, that’s a big hit,” Strand acknowledged. “I knew how Wolf would react to that. He’d easily spend that much, and more, to get it back. Even if he couldn’t get it back, he wouldn’t want us to have it, either. The thought of having that kind of money stolen from him would be intolerable. Especially considering who was responsible for it.

“I wanted the money to be integrated into a legitimate legal framework subject to U.S. laws. I didn’t trust an EU country to resist the kind of pressure that Schrade was capable of putting on them if it eventually came to that.”

He paused for a drink and looked out the window. Lake Geneva reflected the lights of the city around the harbor, a double image of the glitter and fantasy of a Swiss dream. He turned back, looking first into his wineglass for a moment and then at Ariana.

“What did you do with it?” she asked.

“I told Clymer to open lots of accounts in various banks in Zurich and here in Geneva. Out of those accounts I arranged for us to begin receiving payments in equal amounts, an arbitrary figure I came up with to provide us incomes up until we stopped the operation. These payments were sent to our private accounts, your Cyprus account, Romy and me in our bank in Vienna, then Houston, Claude’s bank here in Geneva, and Clymer’s own bank in San Francisco.

“When it was all over, when we shut down the operation, we had taken a total of six hundred and two million from Schrade. I instructed Clymer to take twenty percent of the total. That came to one hundred and twenty million. I had him split it four ways and open four accounts at four separate banks in Zurich. That put thirty million in each of our four accounts. I say four because Romy and I shared a single account. I instructed the banks not to touch the principal. Every month I had them send to each of our private accounts the interest off the thirty million principal.”

Ariana was listening closely, nodding. “That’s right. I’ve been getting one million two hundred thousand every year.”

“That’s our hazard pay,” Strand said.

“So,” Ariana said, her glass paused halfway to her lips, “what happened to the other eighty percent, the four hundred and eighty-two million?”

“I set up a series of charitable trusts that established and administered schools and hospitals in the very countries where Schrade’s drug and arms business have caused so much miserable hell.”

He looked out at Lake Geneva again, this time focusing on the darkness rather than the lights.

“As each of us dies,” he said, turning back to her, “the principal that’s been throwing off the interest from our four accounts reverts back to the original amount until, when the last of us dies, the entire six hundred and two million will be back together again. Managed correctly, that money can do a lot of good in perpetuity. Romy and I spent a lot of time and thought researching this, putting it together. The trusts are sound. All the legal strings have been neatly tied. The trusts can’t be dismantled, not by anyone, not at any time. Everything’s in place… to stay.”

Strand drank some of the Bordeaux. It was very good. He let it stay in his mouth a moment, then swallowed it. A smile slowly softened Ariana’s mouth and eyes.

“This is some kind of atonement, is that it, Harry?”

“I didn’t put a name on it,” he said, shifting in his seat. “I just did it. I did have thoughts of poetic justice.”

“Schrade can’t get to this?”

“It’s way past him now. It’s gone.”

Ariana shook her head. “My God. You get away with over half a billion dollars… and you give it all away.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. The crowd in the restaurant had diminished; only a few diners remained, quiet groups, talking softly, intimately.

Ariana ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. She looked tired.

“Okay. Then tell me this,” she said, leaning forward on the table. “How the hell are we going to stay alive? Tell me how reality is going to make Schrade disappear.”

“Yeah.” Strand nodded. “We’ve got to talk about that.” But he was hesitant. “Look, it’s been about three days now since the videotape turned up in Rome. Obviously Schrade knew where I was three days ago. I did everything I could think of to lose his people. I think I’m okay now.” He paused. “What about you?”

She looked at him. “That’s blunt.”