but she couldn’t dredge up a name though she thought it would be in her best interest if she could.
One of the men at her table looked up, and did a double take, and said something in rapid-fire Spanish to the other adviser.
It was too fast for Lorraine but she did catch the name, Senor Octavio, and it came to her that he was Miguel Octavio, Venezuela’s richest man, and one of the most reclusive multibillionaires in the world — even more so than Howard Hughes had been. His was oil money, of course, but the fact he was here like this was nothing short of extraordinary, and she’d had the thought that only something very important could have brought him out in public.
“Do either of you recognize the two men with Senor Octavio?” she’d asked, and the two advisers looked at her with genuine fear in their eyes, and told her no, that they were strangers to them. Of course she hadn’t believed them.
And it might have ended there, nothing more than a curiosity except that the obsequious maitre d’ led Octavio and his companions to a window table, passing within a couple of feet from where Lorraine was seated. They were talking, in accented English, their voices low but not so low that she couldn’t guess that at least one of the men was an Arab speaker, and hear the initials UAEIBC mentioned, and her stomach had done a flip flop.
Lunch had been made difficult for her because she wanted to get back to the embassy and start working out what connection Octavio had made or was making with the United Arab Emirates International Bank of Commerce, which had been long suspected of funding a number of terrorist groups, including al-Quaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, and the lesser known group Islamic Jihad and their front cells and ancillary organizations — or at least funneling money from various Islamic fund-raising organizations into the groups. The bank had no direct connection with the UAE government in Dubai, but its books and client list were more closely held than any offshore bank in the world.
None of that had been proven yet, but consensus among top-ranking people in U.S. and British intelligence services compared the UAE bank with the Luxembourg-registered Bank of Credit and Commerce that had been funded by the government of Pakistan, likely through its intelligence service the ISI. The BCCI, which had collapsed in the nineties, had engaged in money laundering, bribery, and tax evasion, plus supporting some of the same terrorist organizations that the commercial bank in the UAE was supporting now. The BCCI had even dealt in arms trafficking, as well as brokering the sale of nuclear technologies. In the end the BCCI had collapsed under its own weight, its officers walking away with $20 billion that had never been accounted for.
That afternoon she’d set her assistant chief of station Donald Morton to the task of finding out everything he could on Octavio’s financial connections outside of Venezuela. Don was a Harvard MBA, and had been sent to Caracas to keep his ear to the ground in the oil ministry. Because Venezuela was the fourth largest supplier to the U.S., keeping track down here was of vital importance.
“I want his background as well,” Lorraine had ordered. She was finally on the hunt of something worthwhile and she’d already begun to love it. That trait in her had been the reason the CIA had snapped her up from her small, but exclusive, law practice in Beverly Hills fourteen years ago.
“Family history, education, stuff like that?” Morton had asked. “Just Google him, no need to use up our resources.”
“I want his real background.”
“Ah, a skeptic among us,” he said. Although he was barely out of his twenties he was a portly man who in a business suit could pass for what most people pictured a banker or Fortune 500 looked like. But he was a lot smarter than most of that type. “I have a friend in the DI at Langley who owes me a favor, I’ll get her started.” The DI was the Company’s Directorate of Intelligence, where all sorts of research was conducted on, among other things, international economic activities and the people involved.
“But quietly,” Lorraine had cautioned him. “I want this as low-key as possible, because this guy carries a lot of weight around here, and it would be too bad if we tipped something nasty over and word got back to him, we could all be in some deep shit.”
The first surprise had been how open the facts of his background were. What Don’s friend in the DI had dug up on the oil billionaire exactly matched what was published on Wikipedia: his family was old money, able to trace their lineage back to the early Spanish sugarcane and tobacco fields, and, of course, oil. Octavio the younger had been educated at Oxford, specializing in international business and law, spending his vacations skiing in Switzerland and Austria, gambling in Monaco and Las Vegas, and romancing his way across Europe, his photographs on the front pages of tabloids everywhere. Until he turned twenty-five when he practically disappeared.
“Except in the business world,” Morton had reported. “Miguel Octavio set out to become the richest man in the world, but very quietly, because some of his business deals were too sweet to be one hundred percent legit.”
That had been two months ago when Don laid a thick file on her desk.
“Give me a couple of for instances,” Lorraine had prompted.
“He’s either the shrewdest or the luckiest man in the world, or — and this one’s my best guess — he has had a whole lot of insider info. He was in on the dot-com boom in the States in a big way, investing in everything from Microsoft to Google, and sticking with them, but he also spread a couple hundred million in a bunch of other IPOs that went ballistic, and then sold them at the peak, before they crashed. And he walked away with his first billion.”
“A few moves like those would have made him a smart investor,” Lorraine agreed. “Did he ever fail?”
“Not once, and it was more than a few calls. More like three dozen.”
“Any common thread?”
“Threads,” Morton said. “And it’s all in the file. Primarily three major U.S. banks where he has close personal friends on the boards of directors. They couldn’t directly profit from what they knew, and more important when they knew what they did, but Octavio sure as hell could and did.”
“Any of that money make it back to his pals?” Lorraine asked.
“Yeah, but that’s the slick part. The guy bet the entire billion — or at least most of it — in the U.S. housing boom, the bulk of it in Florida and California, through Anne Marie Marinaccio.”
“The FBI wants her.”
“That’s the even more interesting part,” Morton said. “Marinaccio bailed when the housing market started heading south, and she took a few billions of her investors’ money with her where she set up shop in Dubai under what’s called the Marinaccio Group. Lots of derivatives, most of which she managed to dump in time. But the curious part is that Octavio bailed at the same time Marinaccio did. Pulling out more than two billion which was legit on the surface.”
“What about these days? Either of them been hurt by the recession?”
“I don’t know yet about Marinaccio, although there’ve been rumors about her oil investments, especially in Iraq, getting shaky, but Octavio is apparently in great shape.”
“So why is he involved with the UAEIBC?” Lorraine had asked, and now heading out to the airport she remembered that question and Don’s answer with perfect clarity.
“I’m working on that part, but it’s almost certain that the Marinaccio Group is heavily involved in the bank, and of course Octavio and Marinaccio had a fabulously successful financial relationship. So there’s that, along with their shared interest in oil, and one other intriguing tidbit that I’m still trying to run down.”
“Intrigue me.”
“The Marinaccio Group has it’s own security division, headed by Gunther Wolfhardt, ex-East German Stasi. Rumors are that Wolfhardt might have been somehow involved with the heart attack of one of Marinaccio’s rivals, and the terrorist bombing of another’s office buildings. In each case Marinaccio came out on top financially. And there are other rumors.”
“If all that’s true, it means Marinaccio is a ruthless bitch who’ll stop at literally nothing to protect her investments.”
“That would be to Miguel Octavio’s best interests as well.”
“Keep digging,” she ordered.
Last week Don had connected the Marinaccio Group with at least one probable assassination and one likely bombing as well as a direct connection with several of the UAEIBC-supported terrorist organizations, and a rumor floating around that al-Quaeda was planning another spectacular strike somewhere in the U.S.
Marinaccio equaled oil interests, equaled terrorism and terrorists, equaled Octavio. And then Hutchinson Island happened. Make nuclear-generated electricity unpalatable, and oil and natural gas would be ready and able
