whisper, for her to call him: an equally urgent demand, for a way to contact her. For what? Far better left in the past, a successfully – and properly – lost secret. He had to decide what to do with all the personal material, once he’d resolved the more important problem.
Carver straightened from the box but paused, uncertainly, before taking out the photographs and putting them into his briefcase. He secured it and rang for a security official to complete the necessary double locking and let him out of the vault. It was the vice president in charge of the division who responded, a young, fair-haired man.
As they went through the procedure, the man said: ‘I was not being intentionally awkward earlier, Mr Carver. I was strictly following regulations.’
‘You should always do that,’ said Carver.
‘We value your business, here at the bank.’
There’d probably been some rebuke. ‘That’s good to hear.’
‘Is there anything else I can do?’
‘Nothing, thank you.’
The man smiled. ‘Just one more regulation. You need to sign yourself out on the register against the box number.’
It was not until he was bending over the bound book that the idea came to Carver and he covered the quick examination by pretending to fumble with the pen.
‘It’s ten forty-five,’ offered the young man, for the required departure time.
Carver nodded, intent upon George Northcote’s signature at the bottom of the preceding page. George Northcote’s departure from the safe-deposit vault was timed at eleven-fifty-five and dated five days earlier, the day he’d had lunch at the Harvard Club with a person or persons designated in his diary as S-B.
Alice said: ‘It’s been longer before, but this seems the longest.’
Carver said: ‘It’s been a lifetime, in days.’
They stood strangely awkward in front of each other. Carver reached out and she came to him and they kissed and held each other for several moments before separating again.
‘There’s coffee. Or do you want something else?’
It still wasn’t noon but Carver said: ‘Something else?’.
’I mixed some, just in case.’ She poured the Martinis straight, without ice. As she handed him his drink she said: ‘You found anything?’
She had to be kept out of it: kept out and kept safe. He was the only person capable of sorting everything out: of keeping everyone safe. Carver shook his head. ‘Nothing that properly helps. But you told me you knew what it was all about.’
Now Alice shook her head. ‘I’m only guessing what it’s all about. I think I know how it works.’
Carver sat, drink in hand, waiting. He had to get everything there was to get from her. And then work from that foundation.
‘You’re going to be angry. Disappointed in me. Please don’t be.’ She drank, deeply, the Martini made more for her benefit than for his.
It was an attitude, a meekness, Carver hadn’t known in Alice before. ‘Why don’t you just tell me?’
She’d rehearsed it, several different ways, but the admission of her hacking still came disjointedly and when she had finished Alice wasn’t sure that she’d explained it as fully or as understandably as she’d intended.
Carver remained unspeaking for several minutes, his own Martini untouched. Then, quiet-voiced, he said: ‘For two days, longer, you’ve been hacking into their systems… into IRS records… company registrations… not just here in America… in other countries, too…?’
‘Yes,’ she confessed, simply.
Carver shook his head, in genuine disbelief, his thoughts still coming out in bursts. ‘I can’t begin to guess… no one can… how many laws you’ve broken. Not just broken here… broken internationally…’
‘No one will ever find out… can ever find out,’ she insisted. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
Carver wasn’t angry. Disappointed, either. And although he’d said it, as if it was his major fear, he wasn’t thinking of the law, either. ‘What if they detected you… the people who did what they did to George?’
‘I told you how I’ve made sure they can’t.’
‘One hundred and one per cent, no-possibility-of-being-wrong sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I’ve read, heard, that it’s possible for hackers to be caught… that there are devices.’
‘I didn’t use my own terminal, here. I used the double cutout of a computer cafe. And someone else’s system, further to hide myself.’
Carver didn’t properly understand what she was telling him but he thought – because it was what he wanted to think – that maybe it would be OK. It sounded as if she knew what she was doing. Kids of fifteen had got in and out of the Pentagon and NASA systems without being detected. ‘No more. Promise me – give me your word and mean it – that you won’t do any more.’
‘I promise.’
‘Mean it this time,’ he insisted. ‘Not like before.’
Alice didn’t want to stop. There really wasn’t a chance of her ever being discovered and to prove she’d guessed the scam correctly she needed to get into one of the systems so far denying her entry. ‘I won’t do it again.’
‘So what is it?’ he finally demanded.
‘Money laundering, pure and simple. But absolutely brilliant.’
‘Show me.’
She did, literally, leading him to her desk, upon which she had all the computer printouts sequentially arranged country by country, America dominant with Grand Cayman at the very pinnacle. ‘We’ll go left to right, read it like a book, which I think we can,’ she declared. ‘What we’re looking at is a global shell game, things being moved so far so fast there’s no chance to see which cup the pea’s under. We start with five organized-crime – Mafia – offshore companies, out of reach and out of sight of any law, criminal or civil. Into them we have to channel – also out of reach and out of sight – all the illegal proceeds of every crime the Families commit: drugs, pornography, prostitution, loan sharking, protection, the lot. And if my theory is right it is a lot. Billions of dollars. You with me so far…?’
Carver nodded, pouring fresh drinks for them both, following the electronic footsteps through the printouts.
‘Here’s how they do it,’ Alice picked up. ‘Mulder Inc., Encomp and Innsflow International establish dozens of subsidiaries, here in America, state by state, internationally, country by country. The trick – and I think initially it’s a quite legal trick – is trading only between each other, state by state and country by country. But never through their own subsidiaries. Mulder switches through Encomp, Encomp through Mulder and each through Innsflow. To do that, they need a conduit, again quite simply a very efficient, internationally established import-export organization. Which they’ve done with BHYF and NOXT, whose records and near-incalculable profits are also, ultimately, lost in the golden sand of the Cayman Islands, using the same shell-game technique. By constantly juggling the deals they avoid the legal requirement, particularly necessary in England, to record the tradings as a “related-party transaction”. Isn’t that brilliant?’
The missing parts of his jigsaw, identified Carver, excitement moving through him: and interlocking perfectly with the handwritten, incomplete calculations from Northcote’s night-stand. ‘Offshore is tax evasion and avoidance but they don’t care about paying tax!’
‘Not in the process,’ smiled Alice. ‘Virtually everything Mulder, Encomp and Innsflow – and their subsidiaries – trade in is consumer-orientated, cash-orientated…’ She smiled again. ‘And all sharing two remarkable similarities. There are sky-high supply costs which continue to soar all the way along the state-by-state, country-by-country supply route. And matchingly high management, building and plant maintenance and depreciation costs.’
‘To account for the dirty money being pumped in?’ anticipated Carver.
‘Exactly,’ said Alice. ‘The genuine cost of what they’re moving between subsidiaries and states and countries has to be a fraction of what the books show, on every record I’ve managed to get into. Take blank videos, for instance: they start off charging one dollar each for bulk orders of up to ten thousand cassettes. By the time it passes through BHYF or NOXT, it’s up to seven dollars, sometimes even ten. No bona fide business could afford to
