With his hands in his pockets Strand stood in front of Mara.
“The strategy that Romy devised was sophisticated and knotted. She had a lot of advantages. Aside from being brilliant, she was in a pivotal position inside the organization. She knew intimately how it worked and why it worked that way. The plan involved half a dozen people, all of them the very best at what they did. We all considered the risks. The weak spots in the scheme were examined and corrected. We worked at it until we were all exhausted, until we all agreed we couldn’t do anything else to improve it. Then we went ahead with it. And it worked.
“We ran this thing for six months before I stopped it. It could have gone on much longer, some of them thought a lot longer, but I wanted to pull out of it while we still knew we were a long way from being discovered.”
“You mean discovered by Schrade, or by the people you worked for?”
“Either.”
“So, you and… your ‘cell,’ your people, were hiding this from the government, from FIS? This Howard, he didn’t even know?”
“That’s right.”
“Harry-you really thought you could get by with this?”
“That’s right. We had every reason to believe we would. At worst, if it was discovered, we thought it would be so far down the road, and so much more laundered cash would have passed through the system behind it, that the whole thing would be impossible to sort out. The key was stopping early, letting subsequent business flow over it, bury it. Every year that passed made us feel even more secure and convinced us that we had been successful.”
Mara saw it coming. “But it didn’t work out that way,” she said.
Strand shook his head. “For nearly a year I’ve thought Romy’s death was an accident. Last night I found out that it wasn’t.”
He told her what had happened with the videotape in her VCR.
“Oh… oh…”
He told her who Dennis Clymer was and what had happened to him. He saw her brace her back against the door frame.
Then he told her about Meret.
She gasped, a burst of breath that sounded as if she had been hit in the stomach. Her knees bent slowly and ever so slightly; Strand thought she was going to sink to the floor, but she didn’t. Her arms crossed slowly over her abdomen, and she held herself, her shoulders slumped forward.
“Good God, Harry,” she said hoarsely. “What… what have you done?”
Strand stepped toward her, but she quickly raised one hand, palm out, stopping him.
“No, don’t… I’ve got to think…” Her expression betrayed her inability to absorb everything she had heard. “Meret is dead?”
Strand nodded. He wanted to go to her and put his arms around her and talk it out with her, even if it took all day or several days or a week. Whatever it took. But that was impossible. He could feel sweat on his forehead. He could feel his nerves slowly beginning to throb, his adrenaline going to work.
“Mara, listen to me. There’s a lot more you need to know, but we don’t have the time for that right now,” he said. “We’ve got to leave here-”
“‘We’?”
He spoke very deliberately. “That’s right. For now, for the next twenty-four hours, you’ve got to stay with me. I can’t be sure you’re safe unless you’re with me.”
“Why wouldn’t I be safe? I’m not involved here.”
“If you’re involved with me, you’re involved with Schrade. I’m sorry, Mara, but that’s the way it is.”
He could see her thinking about this, thinking, he guessed, about Meret.
“The point is,” he went on, “if you want, I can help you get away from all of this later. Right now we have to take care of right now. Okay?”
She nodded. She understood, and she believed him. Her face had changed, and he could see her mind beginning to grapple with the present reality, connecting to the moment.
“Yeah,” she said, looking around. “Okay.” She straightened up. “I’ll throw some things in a suitcase. I’ll pack some things.” She turned away from him and started across the room.
U.S. EMBASSY, VIENNA
“Well, for openers, it’s a hell of a lot more money than Schrade told us they’d taken,” Howard said. Today the air conditioning was freezing, even for him. He was drumming the eraser end of the pencil on the notepad. “Well, hell, Gene, it’s got to be hundreds of millions. I don’t even believe this. No wonder Schrade didn’t tell us the whole truth on this. I mean, there’s a difference between being embezzled and being buggered. Schrade was buggered.”
Howard listened and shrugged against the frigid air. Shit, he was going to get pneumonia.
“Yeah, damn right,” he said. “That woman was not only a financial genius, but gutsy to the point of insanity. She must’ve been damn sure of herself. You just don’t do something like this unless you think you’ve got it sewed up-tight. Hell, she knew everything from the inside. I mean, it was like stealing from your mother. Schrade wasn’t double-checking on her, of all people.”
He listened. He nodded.
“Yeah, and listen, I’ve got to admit, Gene, Harry might’ve been hard to handle, might’ve been a wild card sometimes, but he was always careful, methodical. He could throw in some surprises, but he never did anything half-assed. When he set up something you knew it was going to work. He was brilliant in that way. I’ll give him that. Hell, maybe we can’t get the money.”
Howard suddenly picked up the notepad and threw it at the plate-glass window. When the engineers looked around at the noise, he hugged himself and scowled at them and pointed his thumb upward and jacked it up and down. One of the engineers got up from his chair as though it were a big chore and walked to the wall and diddled with the thermostat. Howard didn’t believe it. The guy just pretended to diddle with it. Shit.
“Yeah, well, she’d heard that Schrade had left us, but she obviously doesn’t know why.”
He listened.
“I don’t know. It’s discouraging as hell. I mean, it took us four months to get you people over there to agree to do this, a couple of months to agree on how, and then eight months for training and planning, and just when we get ready to put it into gear Schrade decides to wade in and start killing off everybody.” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t know why the hell he waited so long. It’s been eighteen months, you’d’ve thought he would’ve gone on a rampage when he discovered it. I guess he didn’t want to do anything until his accountants had picked the bones of this thing clean.”
He listened.
“You know what, to tell you the truth, now that we’ve got a better idea of how much money was involved in that scheme, I’m surprised that Schrade didn’t do more than just accuse us of double-crossing him and break off our deal. I’m thinking maybe he decided, Don’t get mad, get even.”
He listened.
“What I’m saying is, we know he’s working with the French, the Germans.” He hesitated a beat. “Gene, I’m convinced every operation he was involved in with us has been compromised. He’s spilled his guts about us to his new partners. I know, I fought that theory myself”-he shook his head-“but that was before I had a grip on how much money was involved here. Look, we’ve had our own financial people looking into this from the first day Schrade came to us boiling mad. After all this time they hadn’t figured out that the numbers were this big. Even so, we thought they were big enough to justify this operation if the end results ended in a forfeiture situation. But now we know that this is an incredible amount of money. And I think Schrade will go to incredible lengths to get even for having had it stolen from him.”
CHAPTER 18
They threw some clothes into a few suitcases and left Sallustiano in a cab that took them to Piazza Esquilino, where Strand rented a car using one of the forged passports. Since the car was leased on the spur of the moment, it would be clean of any electronic surveillance. As for human surveillance, Strand had not stopped watching for it for a second from the moment they stepped out of Mara’s villa.