CHAPTER 17
Until now Mara’s eyes had never left him, not even for a second, not even a glance away. As Strand moved from the window and began pacing, she got up from the bed and walked to the closet, tossing her towel over the back of a chair. She slipped on her dressing gown, tying the sash as she walked to the French doors to look outside. Strand stopped pacing and looked at her. She had folded her arms, and the light coming in from the balcony struck her across her chest and fell the full length of her to the floor. Her face was in the shadow.
He felt so terribly bad for her. He had presented himself to her as being stable and reliable and, if complex, at least straightforward. Strand knew very well how he came across to most people, and he had always used that knowledge to his advantage. If things had been different, she might never have known at all about the man within the man, even if she had lived with him for the rest of their lives.
All of this ran through Strand’s mind as he paused before going on. He wanted her to put his deception into its proper context. Time, he knew, was growing short, but he needed to set things right between them if he could. He realized that whatever he salvaged out of this mess he salvaged for them, not just for himself. If he was going to have anything to live for when all of this was over, he had to redeem himself to Mara Song.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
There was a moment of silence as she continued looking out over the balcony. The peacock nearby cried several times, a wild, otherworldly sound.
“I don’t have any idea how to answer such a question,” she said.
“I know this sounds bizarre…”
She nodded. “Yes, exactly. Bizarre.” Her eyes were focused on the palms in the garden. “I want you to get to the point, Harry. You said something horrible had happened. I need for you to get to the point of all this.” She paused. “Then I’ll tell you if I’m all right.”
Strand took a few steps, to the edge of the sunlight on the stone floor.
“Schrade, of course, accepted our offer. Soon the arrangement was working perfectly. Schrade was productive and had no scruples whatsoever about betraying the people he worked with, always shrewd and careful to cover his tracks. He was brilliant at it.”
Mara turned around, her back leaning against the hinged edge of the French doors.
“You should know that the FIS is strictly an intelligence organization-it has no prosecutive role at all. It doesn’t get involved with covert action. It gathers intelligence. That’s all it does. This intelligence is passed on to policy makers. They use it however they want, whatever suits their purpose. Usually it gets caught up in politics. Intelligence is power, and power is the ultimate political tool. An intelligence organization is its government’s fly on the wall. The fly’s job is to observe and then report what it saw. It may witness all manner of crime and treachery, but it never gets involved, not even to prevent something horrible.
“Anyway, Schrade’s illicit profits were laundered by several money managers who worked for him. One of these was a woman named Rosemarie Bienert. Her history with Schrade was… complicated. She was brilliant, held university degrees in international economics and finance. He called her Marie. I called her Romy.”
Mara reacted briefly in surprise. Suddenly, unexpectedly, taking Strand aback, her eyes glistened with tears. He quickly looked away from her and then went on.
“I’d actually met Romy while Schrade was spying on the Russians for us. I was his case officer, and Schrade was such an arrogant bastard that he often demanded I go to him in secret at his villa on Schwanenwerder, an island in the Havel River in the Nikolassee district of Berlin. I saw Romy there many times and got to know her.
“When FIS took me off the Soviet project, the abrupt interruption of my meetings with Schrade forced Romy and me to acknowledge how strongly we felt about each other. We arranged our first secret meeting in Geneva.”
The memory of that rendezvous was still so vivid and provocative that it actually disrupted Strand’s train of thought. How he would have liked to dwell on it, to have had the time to indulge himself with the intense remembrance of it. But he didn’t.
“For nearly a year I evaluated the prospect of an intelligence operation focusing on international crime. It was a hectic time for me. There were long, intense periods when the days and nights ran together. During all of this Romy and I would steal as many days together as we could manage, meeting at some out-of-the-way hotel or isolated cottage in Geneva, Lake Como, Paris, London, wherever we felt we could successfully elude Schrade and the FIS for a few days.”
Strand ran his fingers through his hair and turned to look out the window. Over the Tiber a flock of birds wheeled in a moire of light and shadow, a living, shifting Escher pattern.
“When the criminal intelligence operation began, Schrade thought he’d landed in paradise. We watched in silence while he unabashedly went about making deals to smuggle illegal arms and illegal aliens all over the world, watched as he bought and sold drugs from Mexico to Macao, watched as he rubbed shoulders with terrorists, watched as his illegal profits soared. While we watched we listened. We listened while he eagerly betrayed to us all of these associations from which he had profited so richly. He was very thorough about it, very matter-of-fact. He had no compunction, and apparently no fear, about playing both sides to his own benefit.
“This went on for nearly a year,” he said, glancing at his watch. He was taking too long. His neck and shoulders were aching with the tension of trying to remain calm in the face of the dazzling flight of time.
“Now that Romy and I were out of Schrade’s orbit we could see each other more easily, though we were still scrupulous about concealing our affair from both sides.”
Strand rubbed his face with his hands. “I’ve got to cut this short,” he said.
She didn’t react, and he went on.
“At the same time all of this was going on, the intelligence community was going through a sea change as the cold war ground to a halt. Internal blunders and scandals became public, and certain important people were calling for radical changes. All of us on the front lines knew there was going to be downsizing, some of us were going to be brought in and forced into early retirement. Romy and I decided that when that happened to me, she was going to break with Schrade and go with me.”
Strand hesitated only slightly before plunging on. “One day I told Romy that before they shut us down I wanted to do some damage to Schrade. I wanted to hurt him, and I wanted it to be serious. I knew that Schrade didn’t have any nerve endings at all unless they were connected to art or to money. I went with the money. Over the next several months we talked constantly about how to embezzle the money Romy was laundering for him. All forms of money are vulnerable to theft, but the most vulnerable is cash. Illicit cash is the most vulnerable of all. The people who have it, and need to launder it, usually possess ludicrously large amounts of it. And because of this they have to turn to unorthodox methods to move it. The same technology and the expertise required to steal from legitimate banks and institutions work just as well when they’re turned around and applied in the other direction. Schrade was vulnerable.
“Eventually Romy designed an astonishingly complex system to divert some of the money she was laundering for Schrade, which the FIS was allowing him to launder in exchange for his skills in providing us with information.” He hesitated. “Actually, she was able to divert huge amounts of it. Hundreds of millions.”
“Oh, God.” Mara gaped at him.
The Roman sunlight was creeping across the floor between them, receding toward the balcony, less and less of it as it steadily escaped through the French doors. Soon it would be visible only on the sill, and then it would vanish.