The Russian Heist, page 7
Upclose,smilingnervously,perspirationleakingfromhispores,hefired a last volley while his hands fumbled in the satchel: “Frick even refused to reconcileinoldagewhentheywereapairof ParkAvenuemillionaires.”He tookinthebeamingdean’shappy,homunculusfaceandsawhisfateetched there.
“‘Tellhim,’ said Frick to Carnegie’s messenger,” Macbride finished with a wan hopelessness, “‘I’ll see him in hell where we are both surely going.’” “You don’t say.”
Macbride saw a breech and bulled through. “Yes, well, good evening, dean.”
“I am sorry to say we won’t be requiring your services next semester, professor.”
Macbride heard the words, halted in his progress.
Fired.Thes’sresonatinglikepoisoninhisearfromatinydropper,death by millimeters and fractions.
“—as-needed basis, as you know . . . despite your much-valued service—”
Take thy beak from out mine heart.
Hurried footsteps tock-tockedbehind him on the faux travertine floor.
“I say, pro-FES-sor Mac-BRIDE, I say, I have papers for you to sign!”
But Macbride, long experienced with dissatisfied wives and students, clamped his hat on his pate and was already down the staircase en route to thesideexit.Hewouldfrontthewrathof naturebycirclingtheentirebuilding to get to his rattle-trap Volvo before he would sign a single paper for thisbureaucraticwretchnippingathisheels.“Onesimplyknows,”hemuttered, confused and fearful as the abyss opened before him.
It made small difference now. Let the wind flay the skin from his battered hide and disembowel him if it could. He thought of Guadeloupe, wherefrondsof palmtreeswaftedgentlybythewarmblueshore.Hissacking by the little dean broke something in him, finally. His utilitarian shield wasalreadyriddledwithgashesandholes—alamebeasttoofarbehindthe herd. He could not ford the river with it any longer: too many crocodiles. Rebelliouswordsanddefianttonesheshouldhaveusedcametomind.His wives never lost their tongues when it came time for the Big Geteven. Not evenaphrasetothrowinthelittleworm’sface,noborrowedgrandeur,not so much as a whimper of protest much less a grand non serviam.
The truth was bitter. Macbride would have begged him on his knees for the chance to serve in this shabby heaven rather than reign in hell, and he knew it in the deepest cockles of his heart. He reviled his doppelgänger for cowardice, his ever-faithful whipping boy for self-abuse—or would a last-second bootlicking save him from financial chaos? He looked back at the building—an impregnable fortress with its drawbridge lashed behind the portcullis.
“Acta non verba,” said Macbride, gaining a little courage, isolated and weary beneath the vast star-studded night.Deeds not words. Then,I need a drink.
The hot, needle spray of the shower head blasted away the rest of his Wing Ding memories and its squalid aftermath like so much water circling the drain. He washed his chest and face and tried to avoid the tender places where tissue and muscle throbbed beneath the dark patches. Still wet, he threw on a frayed and seamsplit terrycloth robe from a hook behind the door.
He brewed a cup of scalding mint tea and gave Tod his supper from a can of whitefish and shrimp. The label portrayed a piratical, chops-licking alley cat on this so-called “seafood feast.” The scratching of nails on linoleum signaled the cat’s awakening. Always hungry, he came hustling from one of his naptime hideout spots as soon as he heard the top peeled back.Macbridewatchedhimnipahollowshrimptailfromtheglutinousdebris in his bowl. Tod growled with happiness.
“There,there,oldboy,”Macbridesaidwithastrokeof hisfur.Thelimp tail shot up with pornographic fidelity. He had saved him from vicious little boys trying to dock his tail with a paring knife. When one of the boys’ fathers came by in his pickup truck and demanded the cat back, Macbride stood firm and refused. He would not surrender the kitten—no, not on his life! Theman,asteelworkerfromthelooksof him,staredwithmalevolence and his big fists were wrecking balls. Macbride refused to be goaded into a fight with the brute. When he thought of the gun rack in the back of the driver’s seat, his legs trembled all over again.
He sipped the tea and looked out the window at the brittle flakes floating past the window in a horizontal stream. Where was his life going?
Bobbi’swomanlycurvesbeckoned.Hehadbeencelibatesolongthatthe recollection of his sexless life made him feel utterly woebegone. Smitty, with his bobbing dingus, obviously knew nothing of celibacy. Life was so unfair. He didn’t want to think of their stable-like mating.
He forced his thoughts to Shrivastava, a guaranteed anaphrodisiac. He looked at the phone in its cradle still semaphoring its single red pulse. He thought better with Debussy. La fille aux cheveux de lin’s saccharine chords smoothed out the short day’s wrinkles. Something else tickled in his brain: Hope. What summoned this will-o-the-wisp to his desperate mind? Was he thinking of hope the way the dying thought of a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed Jesus at the end of the tunnel? Was this merely agitated brain cells twitching their last in self-defense before the light faded? And wherefrom this ticket out of the Slough of Despond? Wherefrom a way back to warmth and light—perhaps even a woman’s touch?
Why not, his mind said, at least, consider it?It, the unnamable, unthinkable deed. But as an intellectual idea merely, what harm could it do? Of course, nothing more than that . . .
Macbride enumerated the deficits, bank account depleted, savings nil, credit zilch, all cards maxed—thanks to his splurge in the Wing Ding. The challenges were equally grim,obtain more underpaid teaching assignments in other community colleges—force himself into a selling demeanor, print up hiscurriculum vitaelike yard sale flyers and carry them about—smile, grovel, lie. Add hundreds of miles more to his already exhausting itinerary to scratch out a penurious living. The thought sickened him.
He saw himself competing for road space at breakneck speeds in winter gales while eighteen-wheelers guided by amphetamine-laced rednecks played tag with his clapped-out Volvo on icy freeways. Then to find spaces in frozen tundras of college parking lots between classes, hurry to get into the classroom by the scheduled time, cram a stale sandwich from a vendingmachine,hangyourcoatinaspacedesignatedforadjunctfacultywhich amounted to a broom closet’s width and the single ancient computer and a printer that never worked. Don’t forget the time to prepare your lecture notes, to Xerox, to make those transparencies that melted inside the infernal machine—
He stopped pacing. The law of diminishing returns squared off against Occam’s razor. He was barely making ends meet with his current load (sans one)atcampusesacrossthestateandintoPennsylvania.Hehadbeendoing thisdrudgeryforninelongyearsatbeggar’swages,andallitmeantonlyone thing, an existence that was harried, fraught with worry, and shabby to the core. How long before he must face the expense of a new car or his body’s healthwouldrevoltandbreakdown?Asingletrafficaccidentcouldruinhim.
He wanted to cry out to the stone-faced Doomsters above that he had other needs as well—how to satisfy those? Without a primer, he thought morosely, he wouldn’t even be able to recall how to have sex anyway—does her leg go there, my leg go here?It had been so long since Siobhan . . .
No, no, no, by God! It simply cannot go on like this—
You can’t do it.
Do what? Who said that?
Or—
He could choose the simpler path.
Hestoodonhismentalfjord,giddywithfearandexcitement.Helooked
downfromagreatdizzyingheight—andponderedhisKierkegaardianleap. Do it.
Do what?
“The heist, ignoranus.”
“The word is ignoramus, Smith, you ghastly cretin.”
“I meant ‘ignoranus’ because you’re stupid and you’re an asshole,” said
phantom-Smith right back, mocking him for all the catastrophes and failures of his life. “All right,” Macbride said, exasperated by the cruel whispers. “All right, just stop badgering me.”
“All right,what, Pro-fes-sor Mac-bride?” Shrivastava suddenly jumped up to replace Smith as his devil’s advocate.
“I’ll do it,” Macbride said.
His heartbeat wildly under the stars. He was exhilarated, terrified, but very much alive.
Then a sobering reality washed over him. At once his carpe diemexuberance vanished. He felt he was being watched by someone with a mocking leer. Like those Norwegian tales of a certain gnomic creature, a bodiless headonapairof feetthatscuttledoutof sightjustattheverymomentyou turned your head to catch it watching you.
Chapter 7
Thursday: Alex Gumataotao
“Just what you’d expect from a Russian bank only four years old,” Alex said. He turned out to be a mercurial godsend. What had stymied Harry and had him adjusting his bifocals and muttering to himself was nothing to AlexGumataotao.BornintheSolomons,hewasachattering,wheat-haired, blue-eyed fragment of history, the seed of an English bo’s’n who, along with other scrofulous and scorbutic wiry little men, once climbed the mizzen for her Majesty’s Royal Navy, and afterwards (Dame Fortune colluding) climbed aboard as many island women as possible from one South Seas archipelago to the other stretching from the Polynesians to the Marquesas.
“Controlling interest in fifty companies—just unbelievable!” Despite himself, he was impressed by the audacity of these thieves. Brigands after hisownheart,Annie suspected.Sheknewmostof Alex’spersonalhistory, some of which was public record.
Alex shook his head in mock disbelief, as if these machinations of the banking world were a blot on the escutcheon of humanity instead of business practices rarified to meet the times. Spend thousands of hours training your mind to count cards at a blackjack table—theft or ingenuity?
Sherefocusedonhisexplanation.Hehadlosthersomewherebackthere with his analogy to US hedge funds.
“Hard-currency transactions make check-kiting look like child’s play,” he said. “But it’s the same old cowboy mentality.”
She couldn’t equate the staid image of bankers with “cowboys,” however,fromherbrief exposureingirlhoodtoZaneGrey.Butonethinggratified immensely; he and Harry were a team, so much so that she felt left outof theboys’club.Likenow—thetwoof thembuzzingconspiratorially like blood brothers. What a quirky May-December marriage between formal bureau rectitude and hacker panache, she thought. It had taken her weeks of attentiveness to thaw Harry, but Alex managed it in on the ride back from the airport, which was just as long as it took him to sit down at Harry’s terminal and show him why he was stuck behind Absolutbank’s firewall.
“Totally criminal banks,” Alex laughed in his sing-song English. He ticked a fingernail against Harry’s screen. “China, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, India—most places of the world. You think BONY cares where its fees come from?” BONY, Bank of New York, eleventh largest in the world.
He gave them a crash course in EFTDs, although she had heard it years agowhenNewYorkfirstbroughthimintocrackcodes.Alexlovedtoplay at professors with a bunch of bureau types standing around taking notes, asking him detailed questions. He was good, she knew. His gregariousness and his virile battering of the keyboard while his headphones thumped some sort of pirated British rock or underground bands with names like AcidPornowasmoreconcessionthanknocktothecomputer-geekstereotype, but Alex could have been a jewel in any academic department. She knew he had done a brief stint at MIT before his trouble, before the FBI got its hands on him, but he refused to discipline himself to organizational life of any sort. He complained about being “traded like a baseball card,” when she called him last week, but he knew he had brought this on himself. Help us or go to the slammerwas the FBI’s unsubtle message regarding his sealed indictment.
Deep down, that might be what attracted her to him—she who was, in his word, so smittenwith rulebooks and finding order in her messy life.
Just to be sure New York had full cognizance, she called headquarters to get Alex’s brief for service verbatim from her supervisor. “He’s just a hiredgunforHarry,”andthemessagewasclearinthesubtextaswell:Make sure he’s not a loose cannon. White-hat hackers like Alex were a confidentiality risk, no matter how many NDAs they were forced to sign. New York said it was up to her to decide where the need-to-know line was drawn. She would have preferred Alex on contract as before, something to bind him with hoops because, to Alex, a line on paper or in the sand was just that.
“The golden child of banking,” he said. Harry looked at her over his shoulder: Let him crow awhile. “BONY takes its commissions as a registrar for these hundreds of transactions and counts its fees later.” Alex sounded as if he sat on the board and owned stock options.
Harry was modestly fluent in cyberspeak, but the professional hackers in China and Russia, not to mention the freelancers peddlers of ransomware were advancing like tsunamis against the world’s computer securitysystems.Shehadtheautodidact’shungertolearnandherownpenchant to get to the heart of the mystery, any mystery. It was a zeal which alienated some colleagues, and made even her edgy at times, but once she had it, it drove her with a voracious hunger. Harry grudgingly conceded she was no slouch once she had the bit in her teeth. But she envied them their ease with Alex’s alphabet soup of acronyms that meant little to her. She hadoncegrabbedAlexbyhisearsbackinNewYorkandshookhisblonde head; her face thrust into his, she said, “Slow down, Alex. I can’t follow you.” SWIFT, NEWEX, ADRs—the two of them rattled off their lingua franca. It was like overhearing a conversation between two Alzheimer’s patients in the terminal stages.
But she loved looking at him and she would admit that without reservation. He bristled with life. He was never or seldom unhappy. The past was never prologue to the future. Perhaps that, she envied most. Alex Gumataotao was multiculturalism in a package, encoded for an age of recreational space travel and playing with manufactured bits of light. His skin below his rolled-up shirt sleeves was tinted a deep mahogany. His feathered blond hair was an eyepopping contrast any California surfer would have envied. “No, it isn’t dyed” were the first words out of his mouth to Harry as he met them at the airport—the very same words he greeted her with in New York when they first met.
He was older, leaner in the way a mature manis, a few more crow’s-feet studded his piercing blue eyes and clearly still very much the ebullient rascal she recalled. Bernie Whalen, her partner at the time, mocked her for being so standoffish to his boyish good nature. A fool could see Alex was attracted to her. But her moral sense would not overcome her aloofness. Alex had gone beyond the pale, committed a criminal act, even though she couldunderstandhowsomeonelikehimcouldbetempted.Stealingmoney was effortless, just another high-stakes computer game for him. She saw him as he must have been as a little towheaded boy paddling around his islands in a canoe trailing a string of bright fish attached to a trot line. Harry was surprised at the brazen (another Harry word) financial anglesbeingplayedfromtheothersideof theworld.TheMidwestwasasoft underbelly in the post-Nine Eleven world, ripe for all kinds of mayhem.
“Could easily have been Cincinnati or Rock Springs, Montana —”
“Wyoming,” she said.
“Whatever.”
“Point being,” he resumed, locking in on Harry, “it was bound to happen here. This many billions floating around—money finds its equilibrium like water.”
A tiny sting of jealousy: Harry washermentor. Now Alex, clearly Harry’s superior in cyberspace, had found the role of protégé out of deference to the senior man. She wanted to snatch the pencil he twirled like a cheerleader’s baton and remind him he worked solely at her pleasure.
She noticed another change in Alex since New York. His arms were ropy with new muscle. The boyish physique almost gone, an extra ring around the middle. She was planning to take him out later for sushi, a dish hecouldnevergetenoughof inManhattan,sherecalled.Heclaimeditwas a genetic bequest from a great-great Japanese grandfather. The bland FBI recruitersfoundherexotic,butwhatmusttheyhavethoughtof thisbizarre wunderkindcoming aboard under their auspices? Alex might have been strong-armed into cooperation, but she guessed he still had champagne tastes to go with his beer money. New York intimated he had negotiated a hefty salary for this stint in Ohio. She had a worry he might have come out here for another reason—to see her.
“ADRs are dollar-denominated security, Annie.”
Alex had detected her drifting—a schoolmaster calling a daydreaming student back to the blackboard lesson. “Everybody wants them. They’re pure gold, better than letters of credit.”
FailinginstitutionslikeOneksim,NIKoil,Sobin,SBSAgrodidnotmerit a B2 designation like Credit Suisse. Once a bank had one, however, it was easier to acquire vast sums than it was to get around a bandit barrier in a physical bank waving a gun. He was lapping up credit for months of hard work on Harry’s part. She had liaised briefly with the Manhattan D.A.’s office while tracking her Russian mobs and was familiar with the treasury attaché’soffice,butasheoftendidwithhisroundabout,crypticexplanations, he lost her.
“It’s the designation that fooled you, Harry—I mean no disrespect, of course.
“You’re saying these are all fronts for Russian organized crime?”
“You’rethefuzz.I’mjustaschlubhacker.Drawyourownconclusions.”
After conferring privately with Harry, she decided to bring him all the wayin.Shetoldhimtheimport-exportcompanyHarry’sYoungstownbank dealt with happened to be located in Sharjah, where bank secrecy laws and free trade are a smuggler’s paradise. She and Harry first tried emailing and teleconferencingbetweenNewYorkandOhio,butitwasclearoneof them had to get on a plane. Not all the vermin from Operation Sword had been eradicated. The FBI had known for ten years that Kommerzbank and Nizhegorodets were fronts, satraps of the big banks, but never had a small Midwestern bank gone from the verge of bankruptcy to glorious solvency overnightwithoutasinglenewaccountbeingopened.Itsuggestedanother weed sprouting along the frontier of international corruption.
He aimed a finger at the bank’s reported quarterly earnings. He was actually beaming—a technocratic philosopher, albeit one with a criminal record,inapurblindManichaeanworldwheregoodandevilwerebalanced in the vast cosmic ledger.
