Well that was the trifecta,” Tommy Cleary shouted as we came down the West Side Highway. “Russian gun moll disappears with the diamond, you get spattered in the face with wood chips, and the NYPD wants your head on a platter, which, knowing your boss, they will probably get.”
The canvas convertible top snapped and rippled in the wind, but Tommy didn’t really have to yell. He was just in a bad mood.
“I’m telling you, amigo,” he said, stabbing a finger the size of a bratwurst at me, “I hope you’re not counting on moving to a bigger office any time soon. My advice: Check the fine print on your employment contract.”
What was really making Tommy mad was that I hadn’t said a word about the $10,000 paint job on his 1957 Cadillac Eldorado. It had taken him months to locate a body shop that could recreate the original Dakota Red. They’d done the upholstery too and enameled the dash. A company in San Diego had cast a reproduction eighteen-inch Brougham steering wheel—add four grand just for that.
“And before I forget,” he added, “your trashed face? That is not a hero look. It’s a loser look.”
Tommy was a former federal prosecutor now attached to our unit. He specialized in supplying the dense legal reasoning that gave our bosses in Washington cover when we did something embarrassing. So he was mad about that too. I wasn’t the only one who was going to have a busy day.
I saw Tommy check his appearance in the rearview. He had recently traded in his dreadlocks for a close-to-the-head redesign, dyed blonde. Surprisingly, it made him look fiercer, even with the lilac bowling shirt that billowed against his black skin.
“I thought this operation was supposed to be planned to the nth degree,” he said.
“I’m not the one who suddenly moved it up.”
Tommy snorted.
“Be sure to mention that. We’ll see where it gets you. Veteran field agent with full control on the ground and big-time resources messed up because the operation was advanced.” He raised a hand and let it fall heavily on the steering wheel. “I’ll try to think of something nice to say at the funeral.”
It was going to be a long morning.
We hit a dip in the road. The Caddy sank and then rose again like a fairground ride. It was sprung too soft for a car that weighed more than two tons. I knew better than to open my mouth about it. One word and Tommy would start telling me about the Hydra-Matic transmission and the 364-cubic-inch engine.
Powerful gusts buffeted the car and lashed the Hudson River into whitecaps. Across the river a hydrofoil pulled away from the ferry terminal and dashed downriver for the Battery, slamming and shuddering through the waves. People save on their income tax by living in New Jersey. This morning they were going to pay for it.
“And another thing,” Tommy said as we shot through the amber light at Fifty-Seventh Street. “The pink that showed up last night? I can feel the headache coming on already.”
So could I.
The target of our operation was a hood named Sergei Lime. That’s who Lily worked for. Lime had deep roots in Russian organized crime. With an American father, he had dual citizenship, and at the moment was living in New York. What caused my bosses worry were Lime’s ties to an American billionaire named Harry Nash.
Nash and Lime were both connected to a hedge fund from which Nash had recently bought a diamond. A fantastically rare and previously unknown jewel, and—here’s where the problem was coming from—also a pink.
Normally, no problem. The investigation of one target leads to another. You look for the links between them. Lime was a known criminal. He and Nash had business ties. A pink diamond shows up in an operation against Lime. Nash has a pink diamond too. Maybe more than a coincidence. So we open a file on Nash, tap his phone, and rummage through his bank accounts. However, we didn’t. The reason we didn’t was that Nash was running for office.
The Oval Office.
We got off the highway at Forty-Fourth Street. Tommy shoehorned the Caddy into a no-parking zone between two NYPD patrol cars. He slapped a piece of cardboard onto the dash and we climbed out. The sign said UNITED STATES TREASURY—OFFICIAL BUSINESS. But that wouldn’t stop a New York cop from writing a ticket. What stopped them was that back in his twenties, before his left knee blew out and he went to law school, Tommy had been a New York Jet, and at a flyweight 205 pounds, the fastest and meanest linebacker in the NFL. In New York City, where people rank you by the damage you can do, Tommy had more fans than Joe Namath. Every cop in the city knew what kind of car he drove. Tommy could park in Times Square, catch a show, and go for a late dinner; the Caddy would be waiting there when he got back.
The diner was full of cops, as usual. Tommy waded through the tables, slapping hands, until we reached the corner banquette.
“Let’s put Nash aside for now,” he said, sliding onto the seat and opening his briefcase. “Let’s talk about your friend Lily.” He found the file and was slipping on his half-moon reading glasses when the waitress arrived with coffee.
We gave her our orders, and when she left, Tommy resumed.
“Liliana Petrovna Ostrokhova, aka Slav Lily. At age seventeen, goes to work at Russgem, Russian state diamond conglomerate. Trains as a diamond sorter in Mirny, Siberia, grading rough diamonds from the Siberian mines. After some personal adventures we won’t get into here, transfers to St. Petersburg for advanced training in polishing. Moves to Antwerp office, which is where she gets busted.” Tommy glanced at me over his glasses. “By you.”
He returned to the file.
“A year later she arrives in the United States and sets up as an independent diamond trader.”
He closed the folder as a week’s supply of protein and carbohydrates arrived in the form of scrambled eggs, breakfast steak, hash browns, pancakes, toast. Bagel on the side. Four little plastic tubs of peanut butter beside the bagel. Even the cops at the next table were impressed.
The waitress came back with my yogurt and banged it down in front of me with an expression of disgust. I didn’t like it any better than she did, but I’d promised my daughter to clean up my diet. Unfortunately, she’d translated what I’d hoped was a general, goal-based agreement into specific menu items.
Tommy put his glasses aside, picked up his knife and fork, and began to whittle his way through the food.
“Everybody who reads your report is going to know you’re running that girl. What they’ll also be asking themselves is who else she’s working for. Lime thinks she’s working for him. You think she’s working for you. Anybody else belong on that list?”
He speared a sausage and slathered on hot English mustard.
“Put simply,” he waved the sausage, “was the girl in the middle of a gunfight, stabbing, and general mayhem at a New York City church working for the bad guys, the good guys, and herself?”
I tried to get the waitress’s attention. The yogurt had thickened into a sort of mortar.
“You mean, does she sometimes trade illegal diamonds on her own? She’s a double, Tommy. How did you think that worked? She cooperates because we force her to. Since she’s cut a few corners in her life, and is now working for a crook, maybe we could look the other way if she takes care of herself while she’s at it.”
Tommy immersed himself in his email for a minute. I speared one of his sausages.
In the diamond business it’s easy to slip across the blurry line between the maybe legal and the definitely not. Lily had often slipped across it. One time I was waiting on the other side.
It was at Brussels airport. I let the Belgians grab her when she got off a flight from Banjul, the capital of Gambia, with a box of blood diamonds. The diamonds had originated in Sierra Leone. If you stuck a tap into Sierra Leone and turned it on, that’s what would come out—blood diamonds. Customs officers know that. So Lily had changed the country of origin to Gambia. Official Gambian government export licenses were stamped all over the parcel in bright red ink. She’d paid for those stamps. Her problem was—there aren’t any diamond mines in Gambia. And anyway, we had seeded that parcel with marked stones when it was put together in Sierra Leone.
Here’s how I flipped Slav Lily.
The Belgians waited outside the tiny room. It was one of those airless interrogation spaces designed to make the person being questioned feel trapped. A single table and two chairs. On one side of the table there’s lots of room. On the other—her side—you have to squeeze into a narrow space between the table and the wall. Lily slid into it as carelessly as if it were a sidewalk café downtown in the Grand Place and we were going to have a quick Kir before lunch. She gazed at me from her still, gray eyes, not even blinking as I dealt out onto the table, like a winning hand at cards, the black-and-white eight-by-tens. Each one digitally enhanced and so crisp you could see the straining muscles on the shackled men who worked the diamond digs.
The photos documented the stones’ journey to Freetown, on the Atlantic coast. When I put down the pictures that showed Lily buying the stones from traders in Freetown, and later, in the customs office in Banjul showing the official where to put the phony stamps, she reached out and slid the last two photographs toward her. She cocked her head at the pictures, turning them this way and that, and then fixed me again with her appraising eyes.
“That haircut,” she said. “A disaster, no?”
I thought it looked great. We’d been in that room together for a while. It had started to feel as if some hidden machine was slowly winching us closer together. Every time she opened her lips to draw a breath, I had to drag my eyes away from her mouth. In the tight confines of the room, we were barely murmuring. Both of us glistened with perspiration.
Lily didn’t roll at the first tap. She tried to bluff. Let the Belgians lock her up, she said. It wouldn’t be for long.
But the club I carried wasn’t jail. It was the Dodd-Frank Act, which said that companies doing business in the United States had to know all about their customers. If I reported the blood diamonds, the Treasury would threaten the Antwerp banks the Russians used with exclusion from the US banking system. The banks would drop the Russians in a heartbeat.
By the time we left the airport, Lily was my agent. That’s how I should have left it.
Tommy and I left the diner and drove to Greenwich Village and parked in front of a row of eighteenth-century redbrick townhouses on Clarkson Street. Nothing about the mellow buildings would make you suspect what was inside—a nest of spies, accountants, phone techs, and hackers working for the US Treasury.
“You know that Chuck is going to make you carry the can for this,” Tommy said. “He is going to say that Lily tipped off Lime about you, and that’s why they had a plan in place for her to get away.”
“Lime doesn’t need Lily to warn him about me. I shut down his blood diamonds. I shut down the rough he was stealing from the Russian mines. His Russian partners will eat him alive if he doesn’t find another way to get hold of US dollars. So I think you can bet he knows who I am.”
We got out and headed up the front steps. No sign identified the building, and you didn’t need to knock. The guard had been watching us since we’d parked. He knew us, but he still examined our IDs through the little square of bulletproof glass before he unlocked the heavy door and let us in.
“One more thing,” Tommy said when we reached the stairs. His office was on the top floor, mine in the basement. He checked back along the hall. All the doors were closed. “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” he said in a low voice, “and I’m not giving you advice. But when you play defensive football, you learn how to read a play. Sometimes it’s obvious what’s going on, but sometimes you just get a hunch. Like sixth sense. You know something’s coming and you know where. I’ve got that feeling now, Alex. Somebody’s running a play. And you know what? They’re running it on you.”