the only account at FBS related to Alphabet Capital is the one before you. You are shooting blanks, sir.”
Perkins turned to his lawyer.
“This is a joke. Honestly. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a serious goddamned menace.”
“Serious it is. You are quite right there, Mr. Perkins. And I would advise you to consult with the most serious legal representation as to your situation. We will be making a presentation soon to the director of public prosecutions as to the proper disposition of these facts-yes, I would underline that word, ‘facts’-by the crown prosecutors. It will require a most sober judgment on your part.”
“Sobriety isn’t my strong suit, normally, but I’ll work on it. Now I want to ask you a question, Mr. Crane. Is that allowed?”
“Of course. This is an informal interview. You can ask whatever you like. That doesn’t mean we will answer.”
“Who’s your informant? It’s obvious that you have a snitch who’s telling you all of this nonsense: trades, information, bank deposits. So who’s your source? And I don’t mean the poor dope at the Bank of England. I mean the person who put you on to him.”
“That question is out of order, obviously. You can’t expect me to answer it.”
“No. But I would expect you to know the informant’s identity. If you were doing your job properly, that is. But I would bet my last dollar that you don’t know, in this case. You have an anonymous tipster who’s sending you all these shit sheets. And maybe you have someone from the ‘Foreign Office,’ meaning MI6, who’s whispering in your ear that it’s legitimate. But you yourself don’t really know. Am I right?”
Crane didn’t answer. But there was just a touch of red on his pasty, pallid, high-born cheeks-the “tell” that the British have been unable to hide since the days of Jane Austen. They blush, the British. That is one of their few national weaknesses.
“Nonsense,” said the fraud chief. “Sheer poppycock.”
The “informal” interview was over. Crane and his accountant packed up their kit of exhibits and left the building. Perkins huddled in his office with Tarullo, who was furious that he knew so little about the case and the activities that underlaid it. But on that, Perkins wouldn’t budge. He had done nothing wrong, he kept repeating, and that was all there was to say about it.
“Ask them in Washington about Anthony Cronin,” Perkins told his lawyer. “He’s the person who got me into this. Agency business, don’t breathe a word, special financial relationship. That’s where you have to begin, Vince. Start shaking that tree, and see what falls down. Cronin. C-RO-N-I-N. He works out of an office in New York on Fifth Avenue, next to the Apple store. He’s a member of the Athenian Club. At least that’s where I met him once. Brown hair, six feet, gym rat, stars in his eyes. CIA standard issue. Find him and maybe you can graymail me out of this mess.”
“You are an asshole, Peabody, really you are. Why didn’t you tell me this a year ago, before you were up to your eyeballs in shit?”
Perkins removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Retrospective analysis is not a useful guide to current problems. It’s a mistake to worry about ‘sunk cost.’ That’s what we taught our economics students. If they didn’t listen, we told them to pursue another course of study. Law, for example. Do me a favor: Find Cronin, then we’ll have something to work with.”
“Any other names?”
Perkins thought about Sophie Marx and the implicit pact they had made to help each other escape their situations.
“No,” he answered. “Just find Cronin.”
Perkins’s bad day wasn’t over yet. Late in the afternoon, as he was trying to negotiate a line of credit from some wealthy Saudi clients that would allow him to keep Alphabet Capital afloat, he received a visit from the senior Metropolitan Police constable who was heading the delegation that had invaded his workspace these past three days. Tarullo was down the hall, trying to fend off private litigants who were already preparing civil suits against Perkins. He raced back to Perkins’s office when the chief constable arrived.
The chief constable, followed by two of his officers, entered Perkins’s magnificent workspace. It was a glorious summer afternoon; the streets outside the local pubs were already filling with young people ready to drink away the summer’s night. Across Piccadilly at the Ritz, they were finishing up with afternoon tea, tidying up the scones and jam and cucumber sandwiches.
The policeman looked sheepish, like a doctor who was about to perform a procedure that wasn’t very dignified for the patient or himself.
“I must inform you that you are under arrest, Mr. Perkins. The Serious Fraud Office, in conjunction with my superiors in Scotland Yard and the crown prosecutors, have determined that there is a serious risk of flight in your case if you are allowed to remain at liberty. So I am afraid that we must take you into custody now.”
The two policemen stepped forward. They weren’t embarrassed in the slightest. They liked the idea of arresting a billionaire and frog-walking him down to the squad car.
“I object,” said Tarullo. “Mr. Perkins is a U.S. citizen. I demand that the U.S. Embassy be informed.”
Perkins laughed at this mention of the embassy, the first good laugh he’d had in three days. He put up his hand for Tarullo to be quiet.
“If you are prepared to come with us voluntarily, Mr. Perkins, I am willing to waive the usual formalities of handcuffs and the like. And we can take you down the freight elevator to the parking garage in the basement, where we have a car waiting. There won’t be any unpleasantness with the media that way.”
“I’ll come voluntarily,” Perkins said quickly.
“Wait a minute,” said Tarullo, repeating once more, “I object, goddamn it.”
“Shut up, Vince. A British jail is probably the safest place I could be right now. It will give me a chance to do some thinking.”
He walked toward the constable, his arms outstretched.
“Take me. I’m yours,” said Perkins with almost a laugh. There was something liberating about the act of surrender.
The two British cops were on either side of him now, grasping his arms. Perkins nodded to the constable, and they began walking out the door of the office, onto the trading floor. Most of the traders had gone home, but the ones that were left watched this little “perp walk” in astonished silence. What on earth had this brilliant man, seemingly impervious to bad fortune, done to bring about such a sudden and devastating reversal?
Perkins strode toward the back elevator, accompanied by his three escorts in their constabulary blue. As he passed the desks, he waved to several of his longtime employees. Though he had made them tens of millions of dollars over the years, they did not wave back.
35
Joseph Sabah’s dog, Emile, needed a walk. That was what got them out of the ivy-covered house in Waterloo in the first place. When the miniature poodle finally woke up from the drugs that had been shot into him, he did his business on the rug in the hallway. A security officer proposed to take Emile out for a quick walk, but his owner, Mr. Sabah, insisted on coming along, too, claiming that they would torture the dog if he wasn’t present. Soon a small delegation had emerged from the house into the backyard.
The poodle inevitably started barking. That attracted the attention of the neighbors, who weren’t used to a dog on the property. One of them, evidently a busybody, called the police to report that there were strange people in the house next door and that the quiet couple who usually lived there had disappeared several days before. The cops might have ignored the call, but for that.
A blue-striped Belgian police car arrived at the door. The CIA officer from Brussels station had to show his embassy ID and do some fast talking to convince the gendarme that a ring of kidnappers hadn’t taken over the house, which was, in fact, precisely what had happened.
Sabah was quickly bundled upstairs when the doorbell rang. Major Kirby stuck a towel in his mouth as a
