desperately to throw it all over and have a baby. Sometimes she was afraid she might never have a child. She
She had been thinking along these lines ever since that surprising kiss on the Washington – New York plane. It had been quick, casual, yet she had the instinctive feeling she wanted to go beyond that first kiss with Archer Carroll. But where?
What was she thinking of, anyhow?
She hardly knew Carroll. His kiss had been the kiss of a stranger. She wasn't even sure if it had meant anything to him or whether it had been something thrown up by the peculiar circumstances of the flight, his way of relieving tension, and disappointment, and more than a little justified anger.
I don't really know the first thing about him, she thought.
A shuffling noise made her turn, and she saw Carroll in the doorway. She was embarrassed, as if she suspected he'd been standing there, reading her thoughts.
He had his arm in a fresh white sling, and he looked pale. She smiled. She'd already heard about the success of Walter Trentkamp's personal appeal, and she was relieved-decisions made under duress were almost always the wrong ones, she knew. Carroll's impetuousness was part of his charm. But one day, she thought, one day he might run into the kind of serious trouble from which there was no escape.
“I had Michel Chevron all ready to talk about the European black market,” he said.
“Don't keep blaming yourself.”
“Somebody knows all of our moves. Christ, who knows what Michel Chevron could have told me?” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. She was reminded of a restless, agile prizefighter warming up.
“How's the arm? Hurt?”
“Only when I think about Paris.”
“Then don't think.” She slid off the wooden stool. She wanted to go across the room and somehow ease his discomfort, his embarrassment. “I'm glad…”
“Glad?”
She stared at him. Carroll had a vulnerable quality that inspired her to strange sympathies and concerns, but also to anxieties she couldn't quite articulate. He had a lost-boy quality; maybe that was it.
“Glad you didn't get yourself killed,” she said.
There was a breathless silence in the room.
She turned to one of the computer screens, studying the mass of crawling green letters. The spell between them was broken again.
“Another Baader-Meinhof member was shot and killed in Munich.” Caitlin looked up from the screen message. She watched him, wondering again what the kiss on the plane had meant.
Carroll merely nodded. “The West Germans are using Green Band as an excuse to solve their local terrorism problems. The BND is very pragmatic. They're probably the toughest police force in Western Europe.”
Caitlin perched herself atop the high wooden stool again and hugged her knees. Another message started to blip over the nearest computer. She turned to watch the computer screen closely.
And froze.
“Look at this, Arch.”
MOSCOW. THE KGB HAS INTERCEPTED
PYOTR ANDRONOV. IMPORTANT
UNDERWORLD BLACK MARKET SPECIALIST.
ANDRONOV HOLDING U.S. SECURITIES,
PRESUMED STOLEN. ANDRONOV LINKS
STOLEN BONDS TO GREEN BAND.
AMOUNT: ONE MILLION TWO HUNDRED
FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. REFERRED TO
AS “SAMPLES.”
Moments later another equally curious item began to appear on the screen.
The second entry was from the Swiss in Geneva.
INTERPOL. RELIABLE LOCAL INFORMER
HAS REPORTED “FLOODING” OF GENEVA
MARKET WITH STOLEN BOND OFFERS.
SELLER LOOKING FOR “SERIOUS BUYER.”
AMOUNT SUGGESTED AS HIGH AS FIVE TO
TEN MILLION AMERICAN DOLLARS.
SOURCE VERY RELIABLE.
Carroll gnawed at his lip. “I think this might be the moment of truth.”
“Something's definitely happening. But why is it happening all at once like this?”
For the next hour and a half, during which the various screens virtually exploded with new information, as many as a dozen U.S. Army and police officials rushed down to look at the messages inside the crisis room. News was being transmitted from all over the world, all at once.
As bad as it seemed, there was the sense of relief that
ZURICH. PREVALENT RUMORS HERE TONIGHT OF STOLEN U.S. SECURITIES AVAILABLE. VERY LARGE AMOUNTS. HIGH SEVEN-FIGURE THEFT INDICATED BY SOURCES.
LONDON, SCOTLAND YARD. DURING ROUTINE SEARCH IN KENSINGTON, AMERICAN STOCK CERTIFICATES FOUND. SERIAL NUMBERS TO FOLLOW. SUSPECT NOT IN FLAT WITH CACHE. SUSPECT IS JOHN HALL-FRAZIER, A KNOWN FENCE IN EUROPE BOND MARKET. SUSPECT KNOWN TO MICHEL CHEVRON.
BEIRUT. AHMED JARREL ARRESTED THIS EVENING HERE. TRADED THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION… JARREL HAD BEEN ATTEMPTING TO SELL U.S. SECURITIES IN BEIRUT. ASKING PRICE THIRTY-FIVE CENTS ON A DOLLAR VALUE. VERY HIGH-QUALITY BONDS. SOME
Half an hour later, using an ordinary hand calculator, Caitlin added up the amounts indicated on the display screens so far.
The final sum came to just under a hundred million U.S. dollars.
“Samples…”
Next she made a quick printout of the Fortune 500, America 's largest individual corporations, to check against the stolen securities reported thus far.
Nearly all the thefts were in the top one hundred companies. Those reported to date created an unusual, elite universe. Was there a clue or potential lead in that?
Rank in Company Fortune 500-Stockholder Equity
1 Exxon (New York)-$29,443,095,000
2 General Motors (Detroit)-20,766,600,000
3 Mobile (New York)-13,952,000,000
5 International Business Machines (Armonk, N.Y.)-23,219,000,000
6 Texaco (Harrison, N.Y.)-14,726,000,000
8 Standard Oil (Indiana) (Chicago)-12,440,000,000
9 Standard Oil of California (San Francisco)-14,106,000,000
10 General Electric (Fairfield, Conn.)-11,270,000,000
15 U.S. Steel (Pittsburgh)-11,270,000,000
17 Sun (Radnor, Pa.)-5,355,000,000
20 ITT (New York)-6,106,084,000
26 AT &T Technologies (New York)-4,621,300,000
28 Dow Chemical (Midland, Mich.)-5,047,000,000
34 Westinghouse Electric (Pittsburgh)-3,410,300,000
39 Amerada Hess (New York)-2,525,663,000
42 McDonnell Douglas (St. Louis)-2,067,900,000
43 Rockwell International (Pittsburgh)-2,367,300,000
45 Ashland Oil (Russell, Ky.)-1,084,824,000
50 Lockheed (Burbank, Calif.)-826,200,000
52 Monsanto (St. Louis)-3,667,000,000
55 Anheuser-Busch (St. Louis)-1,766,500,000
67 Gulf & Western Industries (New York)-1,893,924,000
69 Bethlehem Steel (Bethlehem, Pa.)-1,313,100,000
77 Texas Instruments (Dallas)-1,202,700,000
84 Digital Equipment (Maynard, Mass.)-3,541,282,000
