“I don’t believe in magic.” She smiled ruefully. “I’m too practical. I told you, Madame Sosotris never made anything happen for me.”
“Magic hasn’t got anything to do with it,” Strand said. “Cold, hard reality will make him disappear.”
“Disappear. You make it sound easy.”
“No, it sure as hell won’t be easy. Let me give you some additional background. After we broke up our operation and we all scattered in different directions, Schrade continued working with the FIS for another three and a half years. Then he abruptly cut it off. The FIS claims it doesn’t know why.”
“That’s right. Howard wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Here’s what I think happened. About eighteen months ago Schrade discovered the money was missing. I can’t imagine what must have gone wrong. I don’t know. But he went crazy, thought the FIS was in on the scam, and broke off his longtime arrangement with them. I don’t have any doubt that he probably went to work with someone else, the Germans, the British, the French. Maybe all three of them. In the meantime, he put his best computer and accounting brains to work trying to find out where it all went. They discovered who before they discovered how. The first thing he did was find Romy and me. He killed her.
“No one else died. Why did he wait another year before coming after the rest of us?” He stopped. “I didn’t even suspect Schrade in Romy’s death. That’s incredible, I know. I just didn’t.”
Ariana hadn’t moved. She didn’t respond.
“After killing Romy in an initial burst of anger,” Strand went on, “Schrade realized it was a terrible mistake. He may never get the money if he kills all of us. In fact, he probably killed his best prospect for ever getting it all back. He spent the next year trying to track it all down.”
Strand stopped and sipped his wine.
Ariana slowly shook her head. “You lost me,” she said.
“The fact of the matter is, he can’t get it back. Any of it. It’s impossible. When Schrade finally realized that, he turned his attention to dealing with the rest of us. He’s swinging his scythe in a wider arc. Anyone near me, he kills. Anything I own, he destroys.”
“Is that true? The money can’t be recovered?”
“In a sense, yes,” he said. “It’s gone.”
CHAPTER 22
“Explain it to me,” Ariana said bluntly, lighting another cigarette. “Where the hell is my money coming from?”
Strand nodded. There was no reason to keep it to himself any longer, nothing to be gained from it, nothing to be lost by it. He was the only one left who knew how it had been done.
“The money we stole from Schrade was money that was in the process of being laundered, money that was being ‘streamed’ through a byzantine scheme of ‘filters,’ fake companies, banks, investment programs, markets, commodities, everything. Romy’s job, as it had been for nearly four years, was to determine at what point Schrade’s dirty money had passed through enough ‘filter entities’ to keep it from getting traced back to Schrade’s enterprises. When it was clean, she had to move it into the mainstream.
“The dirty money was passing through the ‘stream’ at an erratic rate, but it was averaging about forty-four million a month. Romy’s plan was to divert a portion of this money in midstream and move it into another set of filters that ultimately spat out the clean money into our own legitimate entities. Romy and Clymer got together and created a… I don’t know, a financial labyrinth, a highly complex web of legal mechanisms. They worked furiously for nearly a month on it, after Romy had already spent over a month designing the concept. It was all done by computer and then backed up by tons of forged paperwork. That’s what you and Claude were shuttling back and forth to Dennis Clymer.
“When the money came out of our filters, we had the problem of isolating it.”
“Isolating it?”
“From Schrade. I wanted to make sure that if he ever discovered what we’d done, he could never actually get his hands on the money we’d taken away from him. Six hundred and two million…”
Ariana’s mouth dropped open, an involuntary hiss of astonishment escaping her throat. She had never known the exact amount. She had only calculated backward from her own income. It had not come up to $602 million.
“My God,” she said, “my God.”
“Well, that’s a big hit,” Strand acknowledged. “I knew how Wolf would react to that. He’d easily spend that much, and more, to get it back. Even if he couldn’t get it back, he wouldn’t want us to have it, either. The thought of having that kind of money stolen from him would be intolerable. Especially considering who was responsible for it.
“I wanted the money to be integrated into a legitimate legal framework subject to U.S. laws. I didn’t trust an EU country to resist the kind of pressure that Schrade was capable of putting on them if it eventually came to that.”
He paused for a drink and looked out the window. Lake Geneva reflected the lights of the city around the harbor, a double image of the glitter and fantasy of a Swiss dream. He turned back, looking first into his wineglass for a moment and then at Ariana.
“What did you do with it?” she asked.
“I told Clymer to open lots of accounts in various banks in Zurich and here in Geneva. Out of those accounts I arranged for us to begin receiving payments in equal amounts, an arbitrary figure I came up with to provide us incomes up until we stopped the operation. These payments were sent to our private accounts, your Cyprus account, Romy and me in our bank in Vienna, then Houston, Claude’s bank here in Geneva, and Clymer’s own bank in San Francisco.
“When it was all over, when we shut down the operation, we had taken a total of six hundred and two million from Schrade. I instructed Clymer to take twenty percent of the total. That came to one hundred and twenty million. I had him split it four ways and open four accounts at four separate banks in Zurich. That put thirty million in each of our four accounts. I say four because Romy and I shared a single account. I instructed the banks not to touch the principal. Every month I had them send to each of our private accounts the interest off the thirty million principal.”
Ariana was listening closely, nodding. “That’s right. I’ve been getting one million two hundred thousand every year.”
“That’s our hazard pay,” Strand said.
“So,” Ariana said, her glass paused halfway to her lips, “what happened to the other eighty percent, the four hundred and eighty-two million?”
“I set up a series of charitable trusts that established and administered schools and hospitals in the very countries where Schrade’s drug and arms business have caused so much miserable hell.”
He looked out at Lake Geneva again, this time focusing on the darkness rather than the lights.
“As each of us dies,” he said, turning back to her, “the principal that’s been throwing off the interest from our four accounts reverts back to the original amount until, when the last of us dies, the entire six hundred and two million will be back together again. Managed correctly, that money can do a lot of good in perpetuity. Romy and I spent a lot of time and thought researching this, putting it together. The trusts are sound. All the legal strings have been neatly tied. The trusts can’t be dismantled, not by anyone, not at any time. Everything’s in place… to stay.”
Strand drank some of the Bordeaux. It was very good. He let it stay in his mouth a moment, then swallowed it. A smile slowly softened Ariana’s mouth and eyes.
“This is some kind of atonement, is that it, Harry?”
“I didn’t put a name on it,” he said, shifting in his seat. “I just did it. I did have thoughts of poetic justice.”
“Schrade can’t get to this?”
“It’s way past him now. It’s gone.”
Ariana shook her head. “My God. You get away with over half a billion dollars… and you give it all
