And I knew that Truslow was in danger.
It was the juxtaposition.
Vladimir Orlov had warned about hard-line Russians seizing his country. What was it that my British correspondent friend Miles Preston had said about a weak Russia being necessary for a strong Germany? Orlov, who with Harrison Sinclair had tried to save Russia, was dead. A new German leader had been vaulted into power in the wake of a weakened, straitened Russia.
Conspiracy theorists, of whom (as I’ve said) I’m not one, like to write and talk about neo-Nazis, as if all of Germany wanted nothing more than a return to the Third Reich. It’s nonsense, absolute foolishness-the Germans I came to know, eventually to like, during my brief sojourn in Leipzig, were nothing like that. They weren’t Nazis, or brownshirts; they weren’t swastika-wearers, or anything of the sort. They were good, decent, patriotic people, no different in essence from the average Russian, the average American, the average Swede, the average Cambodian.
But the point wasn’t the people, was it?
Germany, man, Miles had said. The wave of the future. We’re about to see a new German dictatorship. And it won’t happen accidentally, Ben. It’s been in the planning for a good long time.
In the planning…
And Toby had warned of an impending assassination plot.
And then a light went on, a flash of illumination in the murky darkness, a brief moment of insight.
It was the picture of the slain Vladimir Orlov that did it. He had talked about the American stock market crash of 1987.
A stock market “crash,” to use your word, is not necessarily a disaster to one who is prepared for it. Very much the opposite; a group of savvy investors can make huge profits in a stock market crash…
Did the Wise Men, I had asked, make money in the stock market collapse?
Certainly, he had replied. Using computerized program trading and fourteen hundred separate trading accounts, calibrating precisely with Tokyo’s Nikkei and pulling the levers at exactly the right time, and with the right velocity, they not only made vast sums of money in the crash, Mr. Ellison, they caused it.
If the Wise Men had caused the significant-yet, at the same time, relatively benign stock market crisis of 1987-
– had they done the same in Germany?
There was, Alex had warned darkly, a cancer of corruption in CIA. A corruption that included gathering and using top-secret economic intelligence from around the world to manipulate stock markets, and thus nations.
Could this be?
And could, therefore, there be a darker motive for Chancellor-elect Vogel’s invitation to Alexander Truslow to visit Germany?
What if there were protests in Bonn against this American spy chief? After all, neo-Nazi demonstrations were in the news constantly. Who would be all that surprised if Alexander Truslow were slain by German “extremists”? It was a perfect, logical plan.
Alex, who must certainly know too much about the Wise Men, about the German stock market crash…
It was nine o’clock in the evening in Washington by the time I reached Miles Preston.
“The German stock market crash?” he echoed gruffly as if I had taken leave of my senses. “Ben, the German crash happened because the Germans finally formed a single, unified stock market, the Deutsche Börse. It couldn’t have happened four years ago. Now tell me: What brings about this interest in the German economy all of a sudden?”
“I can’t say, Miles-”
“But what are you doing? You’re in Europe somewhere, am I right? Where?”
“Let’s just say Europe, and leave it at that.”
“What are you looking into?”
“Sorry.”
“Ben Ellison-we’re friends. Level with me.”
“If I could, I would. But I can’t.”
“Look here-all right, fair enough. If you’re going to stay with it, at least let me help you. I’ll ask around, dig around for you, talk to some friends. Tell me where I can reach you.”
“Can’t-”
“Then you call me-”
“I’ll be in touch, Miles,” I said, and terminated the call.
Only then did I begin to have an inkling.
For a long while I sat there, on the edge of the bed, staring out the window at the elegant view of the Paradeplatz, the buildings glinting in the sunshine, and I was momentarily paralyzed with a great, dull terror.
FORTY-THREE
I didn’t sleep; I couldn’t.
Instead, I placed a call to one of the several lawyers I knew in Zurich, and was fortunate enough to find him in town, and in his office. John Knapp was an attorney specializing in corporate law-the only practice duller than patent law, which pleased me. He had been living in Zurich, working for an outpost of a prestigious American law firm, for five years or so. He also knew more about the Swiss banking system than anyone I knew, having studied at the University of Zurich and supervised quite a few less-than-reputable secret transactions for some of his clients. Knapp and I had known each other since law school, where we were in the same year and section, and we occasionally played squash together. I suspected that deep down he disliked me as much as I disliked him, but our business dealings frequently brought us together, and so we both faked an easygoing, boisterous comradeship so integral to male friendships.
I left a note for the sleeping Molly, telling her I’d be back in an hour or two. Then, in front of the hotel I got into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the Kronenhalle on Ramistrasse.
John Knapp was a short, slim man with a terminal case of short man’s disease. Like a chihuahua trying to menace a Saint Bernard, he swaggered and affected imperious gestures that were faintly ridiculous, cartoonlike. He had small brown eyes and close-cropped brown hair speckled with gray, cut in bangs that made him look like a dissolute monk. After all this time in Zurich, he’d begun to take on the local coloration and dress like a Swiss banker, he wore an English-tailored blue suit and burgundy-striped shirt that probably came from Charvet in Paris; certainly his woven silk cuff links did. He’d arrived fifteen minutes late-almost certainly a deliberate power move. This was a guy who’d read all the books on power and success and how to do a power lunch and how to get a corner office.
The bar at the Kronenhalle was so crowded I could barely squeeze through to get a seat. But the patrons were clearly the right sort of people, the Zurich glitterati. Knapp, who liked high living, collected places like this. He regularly skied at St. Moritz and Gstaad.
“Jesus, what happened to your hands?” he asked as he shook my bandaged right hand a little too firmly and saw me wince.
“Bad manicure,” I said.
His look of horror transformed instantly into one of exaggerated hilarity. “You sure it’s not paper cuts from your exciting life of thumbing through patent applications?”
I smiled, tempted to unleash my arsenal of put-downs (corporate lawyers are especially vulnerable, I’ve learned), but said nothing. It’s important to keep in mind, I think, that a bore is someone who talks when you want him to listen. And in any case, within a moment he’d forgotten all about the bandaged hands.
After we’d gotten through the preliminaries, he asked, “So what the hell brings you to Z-town?”
I was drinking a Scotch; he made a point of ordering a kirschwasser in Schweitzerdeutsch, the Swiss dialect of German.
“This time, I’m afraid, I’m going to have to be a little circumspect,” I said. “Business.”
“Ah-ha,” he said significantly. No doubt he’d heard from one or another of our mutual friends that I’d done time in the Agency. Probably he thought that was the key to my legal success (and, of course, he wouldn’t be so far off). In any case, I figured that with Knapp it was better to be mysterious than to give a bland cover tale.