The night drive from Paris took five hours in the rain. We hardly spoke.
“You own stock in Great Pipe,” I said when we were near the coast.
“There, was that so hard?” she said coldly. “Really, Alex. You sulk like a child.”
“It didn’t occur to you to tell me? After the meeting with Fonseca?”
“Yes, it occurred to me,” she said in the same cold voice. “But common sense prevailed.”
A semi blazing with lights hurtled out of the rain and almost blew us off the road.
“You knew I’d find out about the pipe,” I said. “And if I could tie the pink to it, you’d make a windfall.”
“God, Alex,” she shook her head. “Sergei Lime raped me. He brutalized me and tried to ruin me. Any money I can make from him, I will. I didn’t even know where we were going until we got to the Chicapa. He wanted my opinion on the rough. I made him pay in stock.”
“It’s a scam, Lily. Somebody, somehow, is going to get ripped off.”
“Diamonds are diamonds!” she shouted. “Somebody always gets ripped off. We polish that away and make them sparkle. Nash and Lime are going to make a lot of money? Fine! So is Lily!”
The storm was still lashing the port when we arrived. We drove down through the gray stone streets of Saint-Malo and parked behind the hotel. Inside, the light from old-fashioned storm lanterns filled the bar with a silky, orange glow. I got us espresso and a small carafe of marc. We took a table by the window.
I drank the espresso and poured us each a shot of marc, a spirit distilled from the dregs of the wine-making process. It’s not for everybody, but on a cold, wet night it goes down like a lit fuse.
Lily stared out unseeingly at the driving rain, occupied with her fury.
“Stop fuming,” I said irritably. I was tired too. “Let’s just execute the plan. It’s a good one.”
She turned from the window. “It’s a risky, stupid, insane plan. The whole point of that island is bank secrecy. That’s what it exists for. A plan that involves stealing those secrets and examining accounts connected to a man on his way to becoming the most powerful man in the world—I don’t call that a great idea.”
She glared at me, tipped another shot of marc into her glass, and tossed it down.
“Too bad,” I said harshly, “because here we are. Somebody’s yanking us around. They’re yanking you and they’re yanking me, and while they were warming up they slapped an innocent kid so far out of her world I doubt she’ll ever get all the way back.”
Lily poured herself another shot. She filled my glass too and wrapped my hand around it, which is when I realized that I was shaking.
“Is it Bolt pulling the strings,” I said, “or Nash? I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. So we’re going over to that island. We’re going to steal secrets and spread alarm and dismay. Because guess what. I fucking feel like it.”
Fifteen minutes later a woman in a denim jacket came into the bar and looked around. She caught my eye and nodded. Lily and I got up and put on our coats and headed out into the rain.
The big white ferries that run out to the Channel Islands were tied up in their berths waiting for the morning tourists. We followed a stone quay to an anchorage in the oldest part of the harbor, where an eclectic fleet of bateaux touristiques heeled before the driving wind. We stopped at an old trawler with a high bow and a rounded wheelhouse topped with a sign that identified the boat as CHANNEL ISLAND CHARTERS.
In the dim light of the wheelhouse the captain stared at his instruments, ignoring us. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a bottle of clear liquid on the ledge in front of the wheel. I hoped it wasn’t marc.
Lily and I crossed onto the heaving boat. The woman untied the lines from the bollards on the quay and leapt on board. The skipper spun the wheel and we motored out of the harbor.
Past the breakwater, the boat met the full force of the gale. The wind charged out of the English Channel, driving six-foot waves. The boat reared and plunged as it struggled through the wild sea.
The 10,000-ton ferries of the Condor line make the crossing from Saint-Malo to Saint Helier in twenty-five minutes, but it took us a couple of hours to beat our way across. A gray pre-dawn light was seeping into the sky when the lights of Jersey twinkled into view. The seas dropped as the skipper brought us into the lee of the island. The harbor appeared, packed with the kind of yachts that have room on the afterdeck for the owner’s helicopter.
In its secret bank accounts, the island of Jersey holds more wealth than some of the first-world countries nearby. Trillions of dollars flow through Jersey’s opaque financial structure. A dependency of the British crown, but not part of the United Kingdom, the island is a tax haven.
A winking blue light appeared to port. The captain throttled back and docked at a concrete jetty. I arranged for him to take us off again at eleven. If we weren’t through by then, we’d be in jail.
Lily and I climbed into a blue Vauxhall idling on the road.
“Jolly good,” the driver said when we got in, an idiotic phrase, even for a recognition code.
“You say the target documents are in Lime’s name?” said Lily.
“Yes. The Russians left him as front man. He was the figure known to investors and the banking people.”
The Vauxhall whisked us up a hill to a sprawling old inn. The gale was blowing itself out at last, and a shaft of dawn light caught the white gables on the front of the hotel.
“Eight forty-five,” I told the driver, and we went inside.
The large parcel from DeLucca was waiting at the desk. We checked in and went upstairs. They’d given us a corner room with big sash windows looking across the strait to the coast of France. Lily disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door. I called down to the desk for an iron and ironing board, unpacked the parcel, and spent half an hour taking every crease out of the charcoal gray suit and the pale blue dress shirt. I used the steamer to take the wrinkles out of a dark silk tie.
I went through the laborious procedures for logging into the dark-net mailbox set up by Patrick Ho. There was one message from him, with the alphanumeric formula I’d asked for. He’d hacked into Lime’s laptop and logged the keystrokes when Lime accessed accounts. The code changed every day, and Patrick had cracked the date-based formula that changed it.
An hour after Lily went into the bathroom she came out again, this time as an ash-blonde killer in a black Balenciaga dress that stopped just above the knees. I’d been with her when she bought that dress in Paris.
She was wearing contacts that made her eyes look bloodshot. When it came time to depose witnesses to the crime that we were planning to commit, all they’d remember about Lily would be those bloodshot eyes. And maybe the diamond ring—a twenty-carat, top-color white in an emerald cut. When your associates are diamond thieves, you can afford the best.
She sat down at a desk by the windows. I snapped open the tiny plastic case that DeLucca had included, found the tweezers, and spent the next ten minutes carefully applying Lime’s prints to Lily’s fingers. Even in a strong light it would be impossible to detect the synthetic skin that carried the prints.
The driver dropped us two blocks from our destination. I told him where to wait for us.
Like a lot of other tourist destinations, Saint Helier’s small downtown was crammed with the things that day-trippers like to buy—alcohol, T-shirts, and the lethal sweets that conduct a war of attrition on British teeth. But the people who bring the real business to the Channel Islands don’t come over on the French ferries or the hydrofoil from Dover. They arrive in private jets that make the flight from London in twenty-five minutes. There are no T-shirts for sale in the buildings that house the bankers, lawyers, and accountants these people come to see.
The Channel Islands Directorate of Companies is located in a four-story glass-and-steel office block. Within fifteen minutes of entering we were sitting in front of a portly man in a navy chalk-stripe suit. He wore a gold signet ring on his right pinkie, the finger he was now running through one document after another. He kept shooting covert glances at Lily’s spectacularly bloodshot eyes.
“Most irregular,” he would murmur every sixty seconds, in case we’d forgotten he’d just said it. But he was a civil servant, and a civil servant loves a piece of paper. To the rest of the world it is a tiresome document; to him, a pearl to be threaded lovingly onto the necklace of plausibility we needed him to accept. The forger in Paris had done well: company minutes on the letterhead of First Partners. A letter from a Wall Street law firm introducing me as Lily’s attorney. Notarized copy of Mrs. Nina Lime’s power of attorney to act for her husband. That one carried the bright red wax seal of a notary “in and for the City of London, by Royal Authority duly appointed,” as it said in huge gothic capitals across the top. The pinkie with the gold ring caressed the seal with particular affection.
“Most irregular,” he murmured again, but you could see that he was in a rapture over the stack of documents.
He nodded and peered at me once more through his rimless spectacles.
“And you are Mister…”
“Griffon,” I said, sliding across the engraved card that identified me as a managing partner in the law firm Ames, Ames, Lowenthal, and Griffon, whose letter he already had.
“Ah, yes,” he said, inspecting the card and then clipping it to the impressive pile with a satisfied flourish, as if he had just squeezed a final dab of icing onto the decoration of a splendid cake. He cocked his head at the paperwork, then looked at me.
“Still,” he said, “strange that we didn’t have your name in the file.”
“Most irregular,” I said.
The rest went quickly. He buzzed for his secretary. The young man came through the door carrying a small black device with a keypad. The code was the crucial, final step to access the records we wanted to inspect. Lily punched it in. The man took the device back, entered a code of his own, waited for a number to appear, and scribbled it in a log beside the date.
He opened the top drawer of his desk, took out a thin, purple file stamped in gold with the crest of the Channel Islands, and placed it in front of Lily. She opened it. We were sitting side by side, and bent over the contents as if we knew what we would find there and were only verifying it for the legal purposes that our documents stipulated.
At first glance it was a straightforward corporate document. The charter for First Partners gave its incorporation date in Jersey, followed by a dozen paragraphs of legal boilerplate that described the company’s business. An addendum showed the redistribution of Lime’s original block of shares when he’d been forced to divest. That’s the point when Nash bought into the fund. Oligarchs took most of what Lime had owned, Nash a smaller chunk, and Lime retained a sliver.
But then I noticed a second addendum. Dated the same day Nash bought in. It was only a single page, but my amazement deepened as I read. In a few terse paragraphs it established a trading committee of the board with the sole and unrestricted right to buy and sell assets for the fund.
The trading committee’s decisions were not reviewable by the board. That was surprising enough. But even more astounding was the degree of independence the committee had. The board could not dismiss or replace committee members without the consent of the committee itself. It was the supreme government of one of the richest asset pools on earth, and it had only two members.
Nash and Lime.
Stunned, I read it again.
Nash would have the real control. That meant he’d sold the diamond to himself, and probably authorized its purchase too. Only Nash had the financial star power to extract that kind of deal from the oligarchs. Only Nash could deliver the payback they’d have wanted in return. A paycheck presumably to be cashed when he won the presidency.
I scanned the pages with my phone and returned the file.
“That trading committee,” I said when we got to the street. “Why would the large shareholders ever agree to such an arrangement?”
“I’ve heard of such structures in Russia,” Lily said. “It lets the oligarchs pack the board with respectable names without the risk that they will actually try to run the company.”
“But Lime got the fund listed in London. The British would never allow such an arrangement.”
“They wouldn’t know about it,” Lily said. “They wouldn’t have been shown the addendum that makes the trading committee independent. They’d assume the committee was controlled by the board.”
“And the large shareholders,” I said, because I understood it now, “they’d know Nash wouldn’t cheat them.”
“Exactly. They’re not men that people cheat.”
“And Lime is just the signature Nash hides behind.”
The second part of our operation would be trickier than the first. Men guard money more carefully then documents.
“The bank is going to find it strange when we show up in person,” Lily said.
“They launder money for a living, Lily. Their clients are gangsters and oligarchs and hedge fund billionaires. I doubt there’s very much that they find strange. It’s a numbered account. Neither Nash nor Lime have ever set foot on the island. Their fingerprints were digitally scanned. The protocol requires only one set of prints for access.”
“But I am manifestly not Sergei Lime.”
“We’re not saying you are. You’re his wife. The fingerprints and the code are all we need. The bank is required to give access to a person with those fingerprints and the right code.”
“And they have never met Lime.”
“Lily, it wouldn’t matter. We’re not saying you’re Lime.”
Five minutes after leaving the registry we turned onto Bath Street, a pedestrian mall lined with identical nineteenth-century houses. I found a luggage store and bought a small, wheeled suitcase.
“In case we need it for documents,” I said, in reply to Lily’s questioning look.
Only a small brass plaque with a single word identified the Canning Bank, but that one word said everything the people who worked behind the lacquered black door wanted you to know: PRIVATE.
I pressed the bell.
The door was opened by an ancient, shrunken man with skin like parchment. He wore striped trousers and a black tailcoat and shuffled ahead of us across the worn slate tiles to a door that had been paneled to match the oak wainscoting of the entrance hall. He pressed a plastic card to a panel. The door flew open to reveal a twenty-first century interior humming with the quiet, well-oiled sense of urgency that rich people like to see in those who handle their money. A brisk young woman with black-framed glasses that made her look like an owl took my card and disappeared. She was back in a moment, and ushered us into a small conference room. A tall, fair-haired man in his forties was waiting to show us what a distant smile looked like.
“Mr. Griffon,” he said, very smoothly for a man who hadn’t known until that second that such a person existed and was struggling to master himself at the sight of Lily’s bloodred eyes. He gave us another glimpse of small, even teeth.
“Giles Canning,” he put out his slender hand. Lily ignored it and muttered something in Russian. Canning darted his eyes at me. “What can I do for you, Mister, er,” he checked my card again, “Griffon.”
He had a high forehead as smooth as a pressed white handkerchief. It didn’t look as if a wrinkle had ever strayed across it.
He pulled out a chair and held it for Lily. I sat down beside her, and Giles Canning slid in behind his silver MacBook.
“We’re here to inspect the accounts held under nominee Sergei Lime. My client, Mrs. Nina Lime, is his proxy and code holder. The fingerprints you have on file are hers,” I told him. “We took the opportunity because my client was here anyway on other banking business.”
Other banking business had been Tommy’s idea. “Make sure that’s the first thing you say,” he’d insisted on the phone when I’d talked to him from Gaborone. “It’s the only thing they really care about—that you might take your dirty cash somewhere else to clean it. Once you say that, he won’t be able to think about anything else.”
“I see,” said Canning, his fingers chattering briefly at the keyboard.
Owl Glasses sprinted in with a tray. On it were three Wedgwood demitasses of espresso. She dealt them out as smartly as a dealer at a blackjack table.
“We also need to make a withdrawal of $5 million,” I said.
“I see,” said Canning again. His face remained unruffled, as did Lily’s, so good for them. They were both hearing about it for the first time.
Canning looked intently at the screen and then at me, confirming that I matched the photo of J. P. Griffon III that Patrick Ho had uploaded onto the law firm’s website when he hacked into it at exactly 10:00 A.M. Jersey time.
A good con depends on providing the mark with distractions that make it harder for him to focus on the essential bullshit, which in this case was that someone would walk in off the street and demand to inspect accounts so secret that whoever owned them had set them up at great expense in a jurisdiction whose sole business was providing that secrecy. Part of the distraction we provided was Lily’s appearance, her fabulous dress and frightening eyes. And the ring. It was spraying high-priced photons around like machine-gun fire.
“I’m not quite sure I understand,” Canning said. “You can review all the accounts online.”
“My client needs to have the actual bank ledger entries, not the simplified version you provide online. She needs to see the full details of the sending and receiving entities for every transfer.”
“I see,” said Canning, leaning back and tapping a pencil against his teeth. He would assume that we suspected malfeasance by some of our associates, a reasonable suspicion for clients of super-secret banks. That by itself would make us more credible.
On Canning’s side, he had time. We did not, as I learned when I unscrambled a coded text from Patrick Ho. The civil servant at the registry office must have tipped First Partners that the charters had been viewed. Patrick reported that a Gulfstream registered to First Partners had left London at 9:55 A.M. It was now 10:20. Assuming a flight time of thirty-five minutes from London to Jersey, and another half hour to clear immigration and get from the airport to Saint Helier, we had forty minutes to get what we needed.
No doubt First Partners had been calling the bank too. But the bank’s phones, including Canning’s own cell phone, had all been routed to a recording that apologized for the temporary technical problems, and asked the caller to try again later.
“We’re ready to proceed immediately,” I said sharply.
“Of course,” said Canning. “I’ll have the check drawn up.”
“Cash,” I said.
“Cash?” said Canning. “You must be joking. Banks don’t keep that kind of cash around. I’m sure a man such as yourself, Mr. Griffon,” he smiled smoothly, “is well aware of that.”
“Look,” I said, in the tone of a man just able to restrain himself, “you are not most banks. I happen to know something about your business. Very large sums of cash go in and out of here every day, and $5 million is a long way from a very large sum.”
I knew zero about his business, but if people like Nash and Lime were customers he was rinsing cash nonstop.
Lily threw up her hands and erupted in a stream of Russian. I gave Canning a severe look and glanced at my watch. That Gulfstream from London would be landing now.
“We’re ready to proceed with the verification protocols,” I said.
Canning made the helpless gesture of a man who has tried to do the right thing, and having tried, was ready to let it go. He pressed a button and said, “Miss Frith.”
The door opened instantly.
“Please bring in the verification kit,” Canning said.
“And the cash and the accounts,” I reminded him.
The assistant paused in the doorway. Canning waved her away. He leaned back and tapped his teeth with the pencil. I guess that’s what it was there for. “Let’s stay with the formalities for a moment, shall we?”
“No problem,” I said. “But I’m a lawyer, so it’s my job to anticipate problems. We’re all grown-ups here, Mr. Canning. We both understand that unusual banking arrangements are part of modern life.” I drew a folded page from the inside breast pocket of my jacket and flattened it on the table. I turned it so Canning could read it himself. He stopped tapping his teeth and leaned forward. It was the most recent statement of the Canning family’s very private bank account in the Cayman Islands, an account unknown to the tax authorities in London, where the Cannings’ holding company was headquartered.
Canning flushed with anger. “You’re threatening me.”
“You can keep that,” I said. “I have copies.”
His assistant returned with a black numeric pad identical to the one we’d used earlier. She also brought a glass-topped device with fingertips outlined in phosphorescent green. She plugged it into a USB port and handed it to Canning.
“Please print out three months of statements for First Partners,” he snapped at her, “and tell the vault to prepare $5 million in cash. What denominations?” he asked.
“Hundreds,” I said. “Put it in a plain canvas bag.”
I checked my watch. The plane had landed ten minutes ago. They would be clearing immigration. We had twenty minutes left.
Lily made the most of the diamond ring while she placed her fingertips one after the other against the glass. She made sure she twisted her hand this way and that, as if to find exactly the right angle for the fingertip. Canning was used to rich people, but twenty carats still packed a punch. Owl Glasses gaped. The diamond blazed, and the fingerprint device made little beeps as it accepted each successive print. Lily made the last impression with her right index finger, and as she pulled her finger back, I noticed that the print was hanging to her finger by an edge. I reached forward and grabbed her fingers. Lily yanked her hand back reflexively and stared at me. I gripped her fingers tightly and tried to come up with an expression suitable to a lawyer reassuring his client while I stripped off the hanging print and stuck it in my pocket.
When the print check was complete we went through the same code-number protocol we’d performed at the registry. The passing seconds boomed inside my head like a drum. First Lily entered the series of digits. Then Canning punched in his own checking code and waited for the apparatus to generate the authorization. When it did, he handed the gadget to the girl.
“When the cash is ready, take the slip to Fellowes for counter-signature, then bring it back to me.”
“Fellowes?” I said.
“We need two directors to authorize large cash withdrawals.”
Lily shot to her feet and stormed around the small room, delivering a storm of Slavic abuse. Bloodred eyes, heart-stopping Balenciaga dress, twenty-carat bling. As a performance it was over the top. But I had stolen another peek at my watch: ten minutes to go. Lily could leap onto the table and do a Cossack leg-kick for all I cared if it would hurry things along.
Canning’s assistant appeared in the door with a look I didn’t like.
“Mr. Fellowes says he will need to review the account,” she said, her voice a whisper.
“Nyet!” Lily slammed her fist on the table. “Nyet, nyet, nyet!”
This time Canning looked genuinely rattled. “Let me see to this,” he said, closing the door behind him when he left the room. The assistant looked as if the steel gate to the lion cage had just clanged shut with her on the wrong side.
“Those account copies,” I told her. “Make sure they are the ledger entries showing all the banking details of wires in and out. We need them now.”
She sat at the laptop and typed in a few lines of instructions, and in a moment a printer in the corner began to spit out pages. She handed them to me as they came out. Lily scanned them too. After all, it was supposed to be her husband’s money.
I found what I was looking for, monthly transfers to a bank account in Sag Harbor, a town in eastern Long Island.
The assistant handed me the last page just as Canning returned with an elderly man in a black suit and silver tie. He had piercing blue eyes that glittered through his bushy eyebrows.
“Most irregular,” he muttered, sitting down and taking out a gold-nibbed fountain pen.
“So I keep hearing,” I said in a firm voice, “but sudden unusual transactions are an important part of your business, I believe. Those fees you collect must be for something.”
“No need to shout,” he said. “It’s you we are trying to protect.”
Canning laid a few sheets of paper on the table in front of the older man. The bony fingers placed the gold nib beside the figure and put a tick beside it. I didn’t dare look at my watch. We had less than five minutes to get out of the bank.
I must have made an impatient gesture. The old man raised his head and fixed me with a look of pure malice. He smelled a rat. But the nature of his business gave him no alternative. The very features used to secure his clients’ money compelled him to give it to us.
He paused for a moment. I wondered if he might refuse to sign. But finally he drew a breath, shook his head, and scratched his initials on the form beside Canning’s. I waited while Canning examined the slip one last time. He pressed a button and a porter came in with the money. We transferred it to the suitcase. The partners stood stiffly by the door as we went out. Lily swept by them without a glance.
The black lacquer door had just thudded shut behind us when I saw them. Three gorillas in good suits headed for the bank with purposeful expressions. Poor Canning.
I steered Lily into the first side street.
It was just starting to rain again. The driver with the Vauxhall was waiting where I’d told him to. Lily and I got into the back.
“Jolly good,” he said, and tore away.
“You didn’t say anything about stealing $5 million cash in broad daylight,” she hissed furiously as soon as we were on our way.
“No.”
“And what are we supposed to do with it?” she demanded.
“I guess it’ll have to be handled by the one of us who already has a banker in Luxembourg who lets her in the side door after hours to make large cash deposits.”
That shut her up. She’d thought that was one I didn’t know about.
We were just turning onto the road that led down to the jetty when a Land Rover painted in the yellow-and-green checker pattern of the police went speeding by with its blue light flashing.
The woman in the denim jacket stood on the jetty watching us as we pulled up. She didn’t look any more like a deckhand now than she had before. That denim jacket had come out of a Paris boutique. Otherwise it might have done a better job of concealing the shoulder holster. A contact of mine in French intelligence had arranged the charter, and I guess he was not going to let the story write itself without finding out how it ended.
At the jetty I handed the driver a brown envelope. This time he didn’t say anything. He was in a hurry too.
As soon as we set foot on deck the boat chugged away from the jetty, swung its bow at France, and began to wallow eastward through the chop. The rain picked up.
A squall came ripping off the Channel. The rain flattened into horizontal sheets and rattled like hail. I couldn’t see the port of Saint Helier, but that’s where the next siren came from. It started as a low wail and rose to a scream. The sound carried through the wind, piercing the storm. The coast of France lay dead ahead, a gray mass taking shape across the thrashing sea, and still, through the tumult, that tormented sound rose and fell like a soul in anguish.
I checked my email. One from Tabitha. I opened it, and the tiny dust mote of self-congratulation that I was clutching, the fool’s prize, blew away on the wind. The awful desolation of the siren filled every crevice of my heart. The department’s techs had found a picture from Amy Curtain’s phone that she’d sent to a site in the cloud. Shot inside a bar. They’d had to run it through their enhancing software, but there was no mistaking him among the background figures, standing next to Lime, in the same beige turtleneck, his hair parted neatly on the left, his calm face looking straight at Amy Curtain. The new man in Pierrette’s life, and inescapably in Annie’s too. Tim Vanderloo.