CHAPTER 15
W as Fitzhugh a competent guy?” Zink asked Matson as he bent a pizza box and stuffed it into a trash can in the windowless, timeless debriefing room. Zink had learned over the years that pizza to a snitch was like a warm bottle to a baby.
“When I first met him,” Matson said, “I thought he was just a pipsqueak. But I found out real fast that he sure knew his business. Like perfection in motion. A guy like that could make a fortune in the States. Not like Burch, but still a lot of money. Say you want to set up a corporation in California. You know what you have to go through? How much you got to spend on lawyers and accountants? Sure, you could buy one of those do-it-yourself kits. But you know you’re gonna get sued. Everybody gets sued. You think the one-size-fits-all is gonna protect you?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Damn right. So you gotta start with a slick lawyer like Burch. A guy that creates the strategy. And he’s gonna charge a bundle. You know what his hourly rate is? You got any idea? Eight hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour. You know what that is a minute?”
“No.”
“I figured it out. Fourteen dollars and fifty-eight cents. One minute. But you’re not paying for a couple of minutes. You’re paying for hours and hours and hours. Burch’s like a quarterback who calls his own plays and can throw the long bomb. The guy you pay to see. Fitzhugh? He’s more like a small running back that eats up the field, two, three yards at a time. Bang, bang, bang.”
Matson took a last bite of pizza, then leaned back in his chair. His eyes glazed over for a few moments, then he shook his head and blinked hard. “The whole thing was such an adrenaline rush, I sometimes wonder if I really got into it for the money in the first place.
“We flew on a turbo-prop to Guernsey in the Channel Islands. The whole thing was right out of a movie. Pin- striped suits and black briefcases; even the women. As we circled over the English Channel to land you could see the coast of France. Like a knife edge.
“The island’s outlying areas were as open and green as fairways, but St. Peter Port was all granite buildings and narrow cobblestone streets. Little wind tunnels. Right in the middle and sitting high up like a fortress was the Old Government House Hotel where we stayed.
“After we checked in, Fitzhugh took me to a firm of solicitors and introduced me to a partner, Charles LaFleur. Looked like Fitzhugh’s twin, but twenty years older.
“LaFleur had three binders lying on his desk. The incorporation papers for companies he’d already set up. Azul Limited in Panama, Blau Anstalt in Liechtenstein, and Cobalt Partners in Guernsey. They were just empty shells waiting to be filled.
“Each one was already staffed with fake directors. They call them nominees. For Cobalt Partners, they were bartenders on Sark, another one of the islands. The nominees don’t make any decisions, they just sign papers that LaFleur puts in front of them. No questions asked. Open bank accounts. Transfer money. They don’t know why they’re signing or who the real owners are.
“It’s all a game of just pretend. But if you don’t play it, you can’t operate out there.
“LaFleur said that for extra insulation-that’s exactly what he called it, insulation-he wanted to put Fitzhugh down as the real owner.
“Right away my antennae went up and locked on. Fitzhugh had said that the offshore world was about trust, and I didn’t know these guys from Adam.
“I realized right then that I needed to control at least part of it myself. I knew it was a risk to have my name on anything, but I told them I wanted Cobalt Partners for my own.
“Fitzhugh jerked back and looked at me like I just put a gun to my head. But we both knew he had no choice but to go along. After all, he’s the one who said I was the pope.
“But from the moment we walked out of there, and as much as I refused to think about it, I knew I was eventually going to get scalded.”
Zink rose from behind the desk and walked to a file cabinet. He returned with a stack of bank account records. He laid them out in front of Matson.
“Whose idea was it to set up the Cobalt bank account at Barclays in London?”
“Mine. I like the city and I was thinking I might want to…” Matson’s face reddened as his voice faded.
“Hook up with a woman there?”
Matson drew back. “How the devil did you know about her?”
“I asked you a yes or no question about whether you met anyone else in London”-Zink smiled-“and you answered with ‘not really.’”
“She was a helluva lot more than just a hookup. She’s the most amazing woman I ever met. I really wanted to get back there to see her again before Granger needed me in the States, but we got stuck overnight in Guernsey because LaFleur had to redo the Cobalt Partners paperwork and get the nominees to sign off.
“Fitzhugh took me to dinner at this little restaurant called The Best End, right on the bay at the northern edge of St. Peter Port.
“After two glasses of wine, I loosen up a little and I put it to Fitzhugh straight: ‘What’s your angle?’
“He just deflected the question back. ‘I assume it’s the same as yours.’
“I pushed a little harder and said, ‘But you don’t look like a guy who’s doing what you’re doing.’
“Then he sat up and took on a tone like he was on the witness stand. ‘I do nothing other than establish and manage companies and bank accounts. I’ve done my due diligence. I have no reason to believe that the underlying SatTek transactions don’t serve legitimate business purposes. And, more importantly, neither does anyone at the Southeastern Fraud Squad or Scotland Yard.’
“I sort of raised my eyebrows and asked, ‘Aren’t you supposed to wink now?’
“Then he smiled his first smile in the two days I’d been with him, and said. ‘You just missed it.’
“‘Did I miss LaFleur’s wink, too?’
“And he deadpanned back, ‘Apparently.’
“That little back-and-forth changed our whole relationship. From then on, we were like partners.
“After dinner, he led me through the center of town past international banks like Barclays, HSBC, and UBS, and past law firms like LaFleur’s that handle the offshore tax-dodging of companies like ExxonMobil and Halliburton.
“But he didn’t do it to impress me or prove to me that I was in good company. It was more like he had turned into my tutor and wanted me to understand how things really worked out there, and why they worked that way.
“He stopped at the front steps when we got back to the Old Government House, and then turned toward me. I could tell that this was what he’d been leading up to. His voice got real intense.
“‘Not a hundred million dollars,’ he said, ‘but a hundred billion dollars have collected on an island the size of a ten pence. And it’s all because people here know how not to ask one too many questions. What you call deniability in the States has been perfected into an art on Guernsey. While American students are taught the Bill of Rights and the Constitution-the fixed law-here they absorb the science of legal relativity. Illegal? Says who? By whose rules? By what right?’
“Then he smiled again. ‘And everyone learns to wink before they can even say mama.’”
CHAPTER 16
I thought your pal in Washington told you to fold your hands and sit patiently on the sidelines,” Hector “Viz” McBride spoke into his two-way outside of Matson’s forested Saratoga home just before daybreak.
Hector McBride was ready to jump on Matson’s tail. McBride was a big man. The biggest man nobody ever saw. Around Gage’s office he was simply referred to as Viz, short for the Invisible Man.
“He knew that wouldn’t happen,” Gage answered from where he was parked a half mile away.
