“For what?” I said.
He paused for ten, fifteen seconds. “I’m sure you know about that ‘missing’ two-point-six trillion dollars that an auditor discovered at the Pentagon a few years ago?”
I nodded. I remembered reading about it, then kicking it around with some friends. The story didn’t get the kind of play in the so-called mainstream media you’d have expected. Maybe Americans had gotten blasé about corruption, but it’s not like we’re Somalia. Maybe such a sum of money was just too big to conceive of, like the weight of planet Earth.
“That’s what happens when you have a government agency with a budget of three-quarters of a trillion dollars and barely any internal controls,” he said.
“The money was never found, right?”
He shrugged. “Not my concern, and not my point. I’m just saying that the Pentagon is a black hole. Everyone inside the intelligence community knows that.”
“How would you know? You’re not on the inside.”
He tipped his head to one side. “It’s all in how you define the term. A half century of CIA proprietaries might argue with you.”
“What, so Batten Schechter is a CIA front?”
He shook his head. “CIA? Please. Have you seen how far down they are on the org chart these days? Somewhere just below the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CIA used to run the intelligence community. Now they report to the director of national intelligence, and the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone-”
“All right, then what the hell are you?”
“A middleman, nothing more. A conduit. Just a lawyer who’s helping make sure that no one ‘misplaces’ three trillion dollars again.”
“Could you possibly be any more vague?”
“Let me get a bit more specific. Who paid your salary when you worked for the DOD in Washington?”
“Black budget,” I said. That was the top-secret funding, buried in the U.S. government budget, for clandestine operations and classified research and weapons research, and so on. All the stuff that officially doesn’t exist. It’s so well hidden in the tangled mess of a budget that no one’s ever sure how much there is or what it’s paying for.
“Bingo.”
“‘Mercury’ refers to U.S. black-budget funding?”
“Close enough for government work, as they say. Any idea how big the black budget is?”
“Sixty billion dollars or so.”
He snorted. “Sure. If you believe what you read in the Washington Post. Let’s just say that’s the figure that’s leaked for public consumption.”
“So you’re…” and I stopped.
Suddenly it all seemed clear. “You’re telling me that Marshall Marcus has been investing and managing the black budget of the United States? Sorry, I don’t buy it.”
“Not all of it, by any means. But a good healthy chunk.”
“How much are we talking?”
“It’s not important how much. Quite a few years ago some very wise men took a look at the ebbs and flows of defense spending and realized that we were putting our national security at the mercy of public whims and political fads. One year it’s ‘kill all the terrorists,’ the next it’s ‘why are we violating civil liberties?’ We lurch from Cold War to ‘peace dividend.’ Look at how the CIA was gutted in the 1990s-by both Republican and Democratic presidents. Then 9/11 happens, and everyone’s outraged-Where was the CIA? How could this have happened? Well, you eviscerated the CIA, folks, that’s what happened.”
“And…?”
“So the decision was reached at a very high level to set aside funds from the fat years to take care of the lean years.”
“And give it to Marshall Marcus to invest.”
He nodded. “A few hundred million here, a billion or two there, and pretty soon Marshall had quadrupled our covert funds.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “And now it’s all gone. Talk about a black hole. Doesn’t sound like you did a whole lot better than the green eyeshades at the Pentagon.”
“Fair enough. But no one expected Marshall to be targeted the way he was.”
“So Alexa’s kidnappers aren’t after money at all, are they? ‘Mercury in the raw’-that refers to the investment records?”
“Let’s be clear. They want some of our most sensitive operational secrets. This is a direct assault on American national security protocols. And frankly it wouldn’t surprise me if Putin’s people have a hand in this.”
“So you think it’s the Russians?”
“Absolutely.”
That would explain why the kidnapper was Russian. Tolya had said members of the Sova gang were often hired by Russian oligarchs. But now I wondered whether the Russian government might instead be behind it all.
“You’re given access to security-classified information above top secret?”
“Look, it’s no longer possible for the Pentagon to sluice money directly into false-front entities like they used to. You know all those anti-money-laundering laws aimed at global terror-they just give far too many bureaucrats in too many countries around the world the ability to do track-backs. Private funding has to originate in the private sector or else it’s going to be unearthed by some corporate auditor running the financials.”
“I get that. So what?”
“If the wrong people got hold of the transfer codes, they’d be able to identify all sorts of cutaways and shell companies-and figure out who’s doing what for us where. To hand all that over would be nothing less than a body blow to our national security. I can’t allow it. And if Marshall were in his right mind, he wouldn’t either.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”
“Believe me,” Schechter said, “nothing would make me happier than if you could find Alexa Marcus and somehow free her. But that’s just about impossible now, from everything I’m told. We don’t have the names of her captors. We don’t have the slightest idea where she is.”
I didn’t correct him. “Are we done here?”
“Not quite. You’ve seen some highly classified files, and I want your assurance that it goes no further. Do we have an understanding?”
“I really don’t care what’s in your files. My only interest is in finding Marshall Marcus’s daughter. And as long as you stay out of my way, then yes, we have an understanding.”
My head began thudding again as I got to my feet. I turned and walked out the door. His goons attempted to block my way, but I pushed past them. They scowled at me menacingly. I smiled back.
“Nick,” Schechter called out.
I stopped. “Yes?”
“I know you’ll do the right thing.”
“Oh,” I said, “you can count on it.”
72.
It was almost ten thirty by the time I returned to Mr. Derderian’s van. I powered on my BlackBerry and it began to load up e-mails and emitted a voice-mail-alert sound.
One of the calls was from Mo Gandle, the PI in New Jersey looking into Belinda Marcus’s past.
I listened to his message with astonishment. Her employment as a call girl was by far the least interesting part of her history.
I was about to call him back when I noticed that four of the calls I’d received were from Moscow. I checked my watch. It was twenty minutes past six in the morning, Moscow time. Far too early to call. He would certainly be asleep.
So I called and woke him up.
“I’ve been leaving messages for you,” he said.
“I was temporarily offline,” I said. “Do you have names for me?”
“Yes, Nicholas, I do. I didn’t think it prudent to leave this information on your voice mail.”
“Let me pull over and get something to write with.”
“Surely you can remember one name.”
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
Then he told me.
IT WAS too late to catch a shuttle flight from Boston to New York’s LaGuardia Airport.