Jack took a deep breath. His gaze on both the women, he said, “What are we waiting for? Let’s roll.”
MORNING IN Washington found John Pawnhill eating eggs Benny at an old-school dive west of Dupont Circle. It was the kind of place where the same people came to have breakfast or lunch every day of the week, the kind of place tourists never heard about.
In the booth with him was his laptop, which he had hooked into the Middle Bay Bancorp secure server. It amused him no end that InterPublic Bancorp had hired his firm to perform the due diligence on Middle Bay’s books. Of course, he had envisioned an endgame when, following Caroline Carson’s detailed plan, he had set up the Syrian’s cash flow business, via Gemini Holdings and a host of subsidiaries, through Middle Bay. It was just the kind of bank the Syrian needed in order to keep from being a PEP (a Politically Exposed Person) like Liberia’s Charles Taylor, high-profile targets like deposed heads of states, paramilitary leaders, heads of drug cartels, and arms dealers like Viktor Bout, all powerful and clever individuals who, nevertheless, had eventually been caught. Caroline deemed Middle Bay a perfect target: large enough to have international connections, but small enough to pass under the radar of the various federal task forces involved in ferreting out terrorist and money laundering operations.
Pawnhill, Caroline Carson’s eyes and hands on the ground, hadn’t found the actual work all that difficult—she was the genie who lit his way. The American government’s fractured intelligence structure allowed so much illicit international activity to fall between the cracks that you had to make an egregious mistake to come to its attention.
It was the private sector that gave him the most fits, primarily Safe Banking Systems, a small Long Island company with proprietary software that was incredibly efficient at weeding out international banking transactions like the ones that provided the lifeblood of the Syrian’s organization. God forbid the Feds should start using Safe Banking’s software—he and the Syrian would have to fold their tents and find some other sucker nation through which to siphon illicit transactions.
Popping a bite of eggs Benny into his mouth, he pressed a key on his laptop and the last of the incriminating data on Middle Bay’s servers was deleted. Next, he remotely ran a program Caroline had created that electronically shredded the deleted files, scrambled them, then overwrote the data again and again until there was, literally, nothing left. Finally, returning to the files from the last five years, he satisfied himself that it was as if the accounts he had opened and used had never existed. There was no gap, no scrap of data, not even a single kilobyte out of place. Satisfied at last, he closed all his programs, put the laptop in sleep mode, and slipped it into its case. He snagged the waitress and ordered fresh coffee, then settled himself to finish his breakfast.
His mind was hardly relaxed, however. He was haunted by the possibility that Billy Warren, having discovered the Gemini Holdings accounts, might have hit upon their significance. If he had, Pawnhill thought, surely he’d be smart enough to make electronic copies of the files. And he wouldn’t keep them in his office at Middle Bay. The cops, and then Warren’s family, had all been sifting through his apartment. Nothing had been found, which was a tremendous relief, because with all the activity, Pawnhill had been unable to send a team in to do his own snooping.
He hated loose ends. He also feared them. It was loose ends that invariably tripped you up. He couldn’t afford to be tripped up. He couldn’t afford to allow the Syrian’s dealings to be exposed.
Ever since the Syrian had started preparations for the assassination of President Edward Carson, Pawnhill had been making contingency plans for the day when they might need to pull up stakes and disappear off the American intelligence radar. When the Syrian had seen which way the last U.S. election was going, he had vowed to have the incoming president killed. The last thing he wanted was a moderate president in power. The previous incumbent, surrounded by his bunkered neocons, had exported American aggression into the Islamic world with such a high degree of religious zealousness that his administration had done much of the Syrian’s work for him. He had never had so many recruits clamoring to strap on packets of C4 and blow themselves up in the name of Islam. “A hated America is a weakened America” was a mantra the Syrian often used in his speeches to the new inductees.
It had been a dark day when Edward Carson had been killed in a car accident in Moscow. A random event for which the Syrian’s people could not credibly claim authorship without coming into conflict with the Russian government. So, though the Syrian got what he wanted, he didn’t get it in the way he wanted. There could be no propaganda value attached to President Carson’s death, no righteous revenge that could be claimed, and so a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had slipped through his fingers. Not one to dwell on missed chances, the Syrian had set his sights on other ways of bringing misfortune and disaster to the United States. He had sifted through many schemes, finally selecting one that had a particular appeal to him.
Pawnhill had received an MBA in international accounting from a major American university and then had gained an advanced international finance degree from Oxford. It was at Oxford that he had met the Syrian. Both had been using different names. They had had a brief but intense weeklong affair, after which they had amused themselves by exchanging girlfriends, much as, long ago, kids traded baseball cards.
Through a series of Gemini Holdings’ subsidiaries set up by Caro, Pawnhill had begun to buy up residential mortgages, package them, and sell them to brokerages and other banks, with the promise of ultrahigh yields. The Syrian had directed Pawnhill to accomplish this utilizing the accounts he had set up in Middle Bay Bancorp. The banks and brokerages, in turn, sold these collateralized debt obligations to their clients.
It was astonishing to Pawnhill how quickly these CDOs got snapped up. Everyone involved was so busy making obscene amounts of money that virtually none of the institutions bothered to look inside the CDOs to see that many of the individual mortgages had been obtained from first-time homeowners without even a down payment or a check on whether they would be able to afford the balloon payments five years down the road. The few that did bother to look told their clients that they were buying a basket of mortgages so that if one or two failed it wouldn’t matter. The problem was, when the reckoning came, all the mortgages failed.
By that time, the Syrian and Pawnhill had long since banked their profits, laundering them through the accounts at Middle Bay, and moving them so many times, through Caroline’s maze of offshore accounts and shell companies in various quarters of the world, that they were untraceable.
Even Pawnhill had had no idea of the scope of the calamity the CDO frenzy would cause. In the aftermath, when the American financial system was on the brink of collapse, when the knives had come out and culprits were being hunted, it had been Pawnhill’s job to keep Gemini Holdings and its now nonexistent subsidiaries from being discovered by Safe Banking Systems, a task far more difficult than dealing with the inept probing of the federal authorities. This was where Pawnhill had earned his money. He’d kept the Syrian off the PEP lists and he’d provided Gemini with an impregnable safe harbor. He was just beginning to accept the Syrian’s congratulations on a job well done when he’d become aware of Annika Dementieva.
She was the joker in the deck, an element he could not have accounted for because he had known nothing about her toxic relationship with Xhafa. The partnership had troubled him from the first—adding another personality to the mix was always a risk, and especially one as volatile as Xhafa’s—but the Syrian had brushed aside his objections.
Pawnhill was certain that Dementieva had become aware of the Syrian’s activities through her investigation of Arian Xhafa. But it was only in the last week that he had come upon an ambiguous and seemingly innocuous bit of data. Following it had proved immensely difficult and it had taken him three days to crack. What he discovered had floored him. In some way he could not fathom, Dementieva and Henry Holt Carson were communicating with one another. Curious enough, but what had put the fear of God in him was that the substance of their communication was Middle Bay Bancorp. This intel was so new that he’d not yet had a chance to bring it to the Syrian’s attention. He knew he needed to do so as quickly as possible, but he also knew his boss wouldn’t take it well at all. Therefore, he needed a piece of good news to offset the bad.
He thought for a time while he sipped his coffee, which was black and strong, the way he liked it. The recovery of a copy of the account data from Billy Warren would both appease and please the Syrian. Pawnhill’s discovery of Carson and Dementieva discussing Middle Bay was an extraordinary stroke of luck. But just the fact
