The offices of Bainc Príobháideach overlooked the picturesque gorge that wound through the middle of Luxembourg City. The Alzette meandered past the old breweries, converted now to restaurants, five hundred feet below. Beyond the high span of the Pont Rouge, the towers of the European Court of Justice and the other institutions of the European Union climbed out of the forest of Kirchberg. In the reception area, Kinsella gazed at the skyline through a wide picture window. She perched on an ultramodern couch that looked as though it had been designed by a toddler with a very thick crayon. Above her, a sketch of a medieval cathedral seemed lonely in the center of the wall. She twisted to examine the signature. Jesus, it’s a Warhol, she thought. There sure is plenty of money in private banking. Then she whispered, “Dirty money.”
“There’s no other kind, darling. After all, laundering it to make it clean is a crime.” A tall man in a silvery gray suit crossed the reception with his hands held out before him, going in early for the shake. “Dermot McCarthy. This is my shop. They told me two of you were coming. But there’s only you? Well, you must be Special Agent Kinsella.” He had a rising and falling Irish accent that seemed designed to remind you that his native country was a land of peaks and glens.
“Is it that obvious that I’m Irish?” Kinsella accepted his hand.
“It’s obvious that you’re the one of the two named Noelle. Where’s your colleague, William?”
Waiting outside in case you try to run. “Sightseeing.”
He led her down a silent corridor and into a big office. The furniture might have been rescued from a palace in some fallen Central European empire. He settled behind the gilt desk, crossed his leg, and steepled his fingers. His eyes were comfy in the hammocks of gray skin slung beneath them. He gestured to the chair across the desk.
Kinsella sat. A tumbler of whisky was ready for her. Beside the glass lay a red binder.
“I’d have just as soon sent you the material by Federal Express.” McCarthy tipped his head toward the binder. “It’s all in there.”
“The dirty money?” Kinsella reached for the binder and opened it.
“Well, you have to allow me to keep a few secrets. Dirty money’s like a dirty mind. We are all in possession, but some of us prefer to maintain a little mystery.”
Kinsella scanned the first of the two dozen sheets of paper in the binder. She came across the identity page of a passport. “This is Nabil Allaf?”
“The account holder’s passport details and a copy of his passport. The rest of it is mostly documents that are required of us by Luxembourg banking laws. You won’t find much of interest there. Toward the end is a record of transactions. Beyond that, we haven’t had much contact with Mister Allaf. People don’t come to a private bank in Luxembourg to chat and swap photos of their kids.”
The passport page showed a Syrian travel document in Arabic, French, and English. The photo was of a blank-faced man in his early fifties with pale skin and a trim goatee overlaying a fleshy jaw. “He gives his occupation as ‘government employee,’” Kinsella said. “The Syrian government?”
“I believe that’s correct, but now that you mention it, I can’t be sure. Nonetheless, his place of residence is Damascus, and when there was an actual government there to employ people, it was, indeed, the Syrian government. In the current situation—well, I couldn’t say exactly who or what is the operative administration there.”
She flipped to the last page. “Didn’t you wonder why a Syrian government employee would be depositing amounts greater than two hundred thousand dollars every month for—for six months.”
The teeth McCarthy flashed were the brown of old ivory. “Noelle, darlin’, I agreed to give you this information as part of an arrangement that your colleague Special Agent Haddad made between me and the United States tax authorities. It’s already more than I actually have to do to help you. So I’ll ask you to be patient with an old private banker—with the emphasis on ‘private.’ I’m breaking the habit of a lifetime here.”
“So you just don’t ask questions. That it?”
“You develop a sense of people in this trade.” McCarthy pursed his lips against his steepled fingers. “I’ve had men come in here carrying sacks of dollars and reeking of the cocaine cartels. I’ve turned them away. Even when they threatened me with physical violence. I don’t seek trouble, you see. But unless there’s something about them that sets my antennas jumping, I provide them with my bank’s services.”
“Did Nabil Allaf not set your antennas jumping?”
“Nothing about the initial deposit made me suspicious.”
“Except that it was a Syrian government employee who deposited—” She glanced at the papers. “Two hundred and forty-two thousand dollars. Do you know how much a Syrian government employee makes?”
“I don’t know what kind of employee he was. As I’m sure you’re aware, governments don’t just pay people to issue driver’s licenses and sweep the streets. Maybe he had a more lucrative role.”
“As I mentioned, I didn’t meet your man.”
“So you didn’t have an opportunity to use your antennas?”
The Irishman smiled thinly and was quiet.
“How did the guy open the account? Over the phone?” Kinsella read through the pages of forms filled out by Allaf. The handwriting was fluid and extroverted, leaning to the right in old-fashioned copperplate.
“The account was opened over the phone. You’re correct there.”
Kinsella raised her eyes. She had heard the overly deliberate phrasing that meant McCarthy was trying to be cagey. “Someone else opened the account? Not Allaf himself?”
McCarthy lowered his hands to his lap and licked his lips. If he’d signed up a new account based on a phone call from someone who didn’t even pretend to be the account holder, the ICE agent would need to dig deeper. The Irishman didn’t appreciate that. He looked at her with the face of a child disappointed to have forgotten to lie. “It was not the account holder himself who opened the account.”
“Who was it?”
“An assistant to Mister Allaf.”
“Name?”
“I don’t recall, I’m afraid.”
“Another Syrian?”
“Perhaps.” He glanced toward a photo in a frame across his desk. It showed McCarthy with a young man who wore a Rutgers University T-shirt and baseball cap. He had the same nose and eyes as the banker. Kinsella figured it was his son.
She laid the binder on the desk. “Look at that handwriting,” she said.
“What of it?”
“That’s the hand of a native English speaker. It’s completely fluent.” Then she let her head angle a little to the left as she glared at McCarthy. “You made a deal with my colleague Special Agent Haddad. But you didn’t make a deal with me. I’m just about ready to rip up that deal.”
“You’re going a little far, aren’t you?”
“You’re not going far enough. The person who set up the account for Allaf was Syrian?”
McCarthy decided to give up something more. Kinsella saw it in the businesslike way he answered her. “No. The accent. The vocabulary.”
“What accent?”
“American.”
“American like me, or American like John Wayne?”
“It’s a while since I saw his movies—”
Kinsella jabbed a finger at the handwriting on the form. “From the voice, I assume you could also tell us something about the age of the person. This isn’t a young guy’s handwriting.”
“Not John Wayne’s accent, but not yours either,” McCarthy said. “You’re from the New York area, right? I’d say the accent was Southern. Fairly formal. Male. Deep voiced. As you’ve observed from the handwriting, if indeed it was the man on the phone who filled in those forms, he was an older man. I’d say older than me. Perhaps even in his sixties.”
Kinsella took back the binder. She flipped to the last page and turned it around to show McCarthy. “These are transfers made in the last year. They’re mostly to Asia, by the looks of it. But these here”—she jabbed with her freckled index finger—“are to the United States. Here, here, and here. To an account at EWYK. What’s EWYK?”
McCarthy’s eyes flickered toward the photo of the kid in the Rutgers gear. His sing-song accent was suddenly flat and tense. “It’s a private securities trading company.”
“Where?”
“The money transferred to this firm in New York City—what’s it for?”
“To make a trade. An equity trade, most likely.”
“On the stock exchange?”
“Not necessarily. EWYK are involved in private equity placements too.”
“You’re going to help me find out.”
“If I called, they wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“You want one of my New York agents to go to them? Ask them questions? Tell them we got most of the story from our friend McCarthy at Bainc Príobháideach, but we just need to confirm a couple details with them?”
“Don’t do that.” He lifted his hand from the desk to his throat. He left the outline of his palm in sweat on the desk blotter. “They’re not good people.”
“They’re stock brokers. How scary can they be?”
“EWYK stands for Eat What You Kill. That could be boastful, macho shite. But they have a reputation for being nastier than the average Wall Street hooligan.”
“Did you send some instructions to EWYK along with the money? Did Allaf give you any special instructions to pass on?”
McCarthy dropped his head. “He’s certainly a scary bastard.”
“Allaf?”
“I told you, I never talked to Allaf.”
“The man on the phone?”
“You have to protect me.”
“You have to help us get to him. That’s the only protection you get. When we take him out of circulation, you’re safe.”
The Irishman’s tanned skin paled. Kinsella moved forward on her seat. They were coming to it. “The day he sent me instructions to wire the money and the trading instructions to New York,” McCarthy said, “that same day he told me over the phone to go to my office window and watch the bus stop.”
Kinsella stood and crossed the room. From the window, she looked over the entrance of an underground parking lot. On the street, a group of commuters waited under the canopy of the bus stop in the light rain. “And?”
“I didn’t see who did it.” McCarthy put his hands over his face. “My secretary went under a bus. One moment, she was waiting at the stop. Then her arms flew up as she fell forward. She was dead by the time I got down there.”
“Her death was a warning?”
“Bloody Christ, she was a mother of three. Couldn’t they have thought of an easier way to put the wind up me?”
Kinsella watched the street. She felt heat prickling at her scalp. Was it just the story McCarthy told? Or was she being observed from out there? She turned to him. “What were the trading instructions?”
His hands were back on the table, focusing, putting aside his secretary’s death. “The instructions were to make a short sale.”
“A trade that profits when the stock goes down? What stock?”
“More than one. There was a list.” McCarthy trembled and his voice wavered. He knew he was about to take this whole thing up a notch.
Kinsella felt it. She figured out why. “Was Darien on the list?”
“Darien was on the list. You’re right there. Then Theander. Jansen Trapp, Morota. And Wolfwagen.”
“Add up those companies and all the different brands they control, you’ve got enough new cars to tie up every road in Europe and North America.”
Kinsella saw that McCarthy had put two and two together when the Darien cars crashed a day ago. He didn’t know where this was going, but he was alert enough to figure out that it might involve a repeat on a grander scale. “Call the brokers,” she said.
McCarthy twisted his mouth. He picked up the phone and hit the speed dial. Kinsella came to the desk and leaned over it. It rang once before someone picked up.
“Michael, hey, it’s Dermot McCarthy at Bainc Príobháideach in Luxembourg.” He listened to a few curt words down the line. Then he recited a string of numbers, covering his mouth and the handset with his palm. He pulled away his hand and licked his lips before he spoke to the man on the other end of the phone. “Michael, I’m going to have to ask you to listen to me very well just now. Will you do that for me? I know the market’s open, but if you don’t pay attention and help me out, you and I will be finished with trading and quite possibly might be facing considerable legal difficulties. Do you understand? I’m going to put you on speakerphone.” McCarthy pressed a button and set down the handset. The background clamor of a Wall Street trading room filtered through the speaker on the phone. “I’m here with an agent from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Michael.”
Someone called out a trade close to the other end of the line. But the man stayed quiet.
“Agent Kinsella, we’re on the line with Michael Herrera at EWYK. He’s the equity products trading manager. Are you there, Michael?”
“What do you want?” Herrera’s voice was pure concentration, as though his entire personality had been reduced like a sauce over heat to the essence that allowed him to do business.
“Well, now, we have a bit of a situation, and all,” McCarthy stammered.
“What do you want?” The intonation was absolutely identical the second time Herrera spoke.
Kinsella kept her eyes on McCarthy. “This is Special Agent Noelle Kinsella. Mister Herrera, I’m an agent in the New York field office. I can have agents come to your premises in New York, or you can help us on the phone.”
“What part of ‘what do you want’ do you guys not understand?”
The smartest people were the ones who knew how to give up what a government agent needed, without rolling over completely. Just keep the Feds from coming through the door—that was the smart guy’s rule. Because when an agent arrived on your premises, you couldn’t tell who’d open their mouth when they shouldn’t or what the government might stumble upon.
“We are tracking an account at Bainc Príobháideach here in Luxembourg that is connected to the Darien crash. That account was used to transfer financing to EWYK.”
“McCarthy, send me the account number and the transfer details by e-mail,” Herrera said.
McCarthy figured he might be off the hook. His accent took on its charming, Irish breeziness once more. “I’ll be happy to—”
“Do it now.”
McCarthy spun toward the sleek laptop on the corner of his desk. “Okay, I’m just—ah, I’m not a computer guy, you know?” He fumbled with his index finger on the mouse and pecked at the keys with one hand. “Well, now you should have it.”
An instant, then Herrera was tapping on a keyboard. “I’m looking at the account. Account in the name of Allaf, first name Nabil. Resident of Luxembourg, collateral certified with Bainc Príobháideach.”
Kinsella glanced at McCarthy. “Resident of Luxembourg?”
McCarthy shook his head. “It’s a service we—Sometimes our clients need to—You know?”
A tax scam. “Continue, Mister Herrera.”
“The account was set up last year. There were a lot of initial trades. Then it went fairly quiet. In March we set up a series of positions on the instructions of Mister McCarthy.”
“Short sales of car stocks. I’m sending you the list now.”
“You’re being very helpful. We appreciate it.” Kinsella let the meaning of her words sink in. She probably needn’t have bothered. Herrera was telling all this with the expectation that she’d look no closer at EWYK’s overseas clients once she was back in New York. “What happened to the short sale of Darien?”
“We closed it out yesterday.”
“When the Darien cars crashed, Darien stock went down. You bought the stocks at the low price to cover the shares you had sold earlier at a higher price. The difference—the drop in price—was profit.”
“That’s correct.”
She turned McCarthy’s laptop toward her. The list of car companies sold short with Allaf’s account appeared on the screen. “What was the profit?”
“Darien shares dropped in one day from twelve bucks to two bucks. The account held a short position of a half million shares. The trade cleared five million profit.”
“Didn’t anyone in the market notice you close out the position? Didn’t anyone question that?”
“Are you kidding? They couldn’t get Darien out the door fast enough, and we were buying.”
“What did you do with the proceeds of the trade?”
“We transferred it under instructions from Bainc Príobháideach.”
“The money came back into the account?”
Herrera was quiet a moment. “You need to discuss that with Mister McCarthy.”
Kinsella frowned at McCarthy. The Irishman’s shoulders shrank into chest, and his torso sunk down toward his waistband. He tried to smile. Kinsella had seen dead bodies with more gaiety in their faces.
“There might be another account, see,” McCarthy said. “Well, I say ‘might be.’ Yes, there is another account, in fact.”
“Another account?” She saw the light on the phone go out. Herrera had hung up. “Held by Nabil Allaf?”
McCarthy shook his head. His face blanched to the color of his gray sideburns.
“Who’s the account holder?” Kinsella said.
McCarthy shook his head again.
Kinsella grabbed the photo of the young man from the desk. “This is your son? He’s studying at Rutgers?”
McCarthy murmured something that sounded like “yes,” though his lips were pressed tight.
Kinsella waved the photo in front of his face. “I can make his student visa go away and have him on a plane out of the United States in six hours. You got me? I don’t know what future you have in mind for your boy, but a deportation from the US doesn’t look good on the background check for any job, does it?”
She slammed the framed photo onto the desktop right before McCarthy. “Talk to me.”
“The account.” McCarthy worked hard to get some spit into his mouth. He croaked, “It’s held by a gentleman named Lawton Wyatt.”
“Who’s Wyatt?”
“He’s the man who—” McCarthy shook his head remorsefully.
“Damn it, who’s Lawton Wyatt?”
“The man who set up the first account. The man with the Southern accent.”
Kinsella clicked her tongue. McCarthy had been a bad boy. “When did he open the account?”
“About a half hour after the Darien crashes.”
The first Chinese engineer to die, Gao Rong, worked at Darien. The third one to die told Verrazzano that Gao had made the Dariens crash earlier than they were supposed to. This Lawton Wyatt had moved quickly to take the profit from his short sale of Darien stock. He’d have expected to have more time before the crash happened, but Gao’s move blindsided him. Perhaps using his own name was an error caused by haste. Kinsella had to push McCarthy. “Is the money still in the account? The Wyatt account?”
“Some of it.”
“The rest?”
“I was instructed to use it to purchase Bitcoins.” He choked on the last word before he managed to get it out.
“For what?”
“To send them to another Bitcoin user.”
“Give me the Bitcoin account ID.”