Boxing the Octopus, page 16
“So that’s what you wanted to talk about. What sharp eyes you have.”
“The lines are longer, and some of the regular customers aren’t looking too good,” continued Cragg. “There have been more seizures.”
They moved into the heart of the tunnel, fish on all sides, kelp overhead, Oscar at his perch standing watch. The Doctor craned his neck and stared at the creature for a long minute, like a reverent at the feet of the Buddha. When he turned his attention back to Cragg he looked almost serene.
“Seizures.” He repeated the word slowly, as if saying it aloud gave it power. “How do you know that?”
“I read the local paper,” replied Cragg. “Maybe you should get a subscription yourself. Even in a city that considers recreational drug use an inalienable right, a sudden spike in emergency room visits gets reported in the police blotter.”
“You’re practically an amateur sleuth,” said the Doctor. “I thought I was just talking to a fisherman.”
“You’re not talking to me,” said Cragg. “You’re talking to the pier. You’re talking to your business partners. The consortium.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now? I always liked syndicate better. Or maybe cartel, no, that’s taken. How about cabal—”
“—is there something wrong with the drug?”
“Drugs,” said the Doctor. “Plural, there’s more than one drug in circulation. I’m…we…we’re testing a bunch of different formulations. And no, there’s nothing wrong. Everything’s going according to plan.”
“Whose plan?”
“There you go, getting suspicious again.” The Doctor shook his head sadly, leaning against the side of the tank. “Don’t pirates have a code? A tacit agreement to not fuck each other?”
“You know, I was thinking about that just the other day.” Cragg paused as an eel almost eight feet long navigated its way through the kelp. The Doctor was standing with his back to the glass, so the eel seemed to emerge from the kelp and swim right into the Doctor’s ear, taking up residence in the contours of his brain. “Problem is, you and your foreign friends aren’t pirates. I thought you were businessmen.”
“And…”
“…now I’m wondering if we’re really in the same business.” Cragg let that sit as he turned and continued down the tunnel.
The Doctor didn’t say anything. He pushed off the wall to follow the flickering navigation lights toward the end of the conveyor. Cragg led as they ascended a short stairway to another room filled with cylindrical tanks. It was the last exhibit before the gift shop and the exit onto the pier.
All the tanks were filled with jellyfish. Purple-striped jellies were on the left, their bells pink and diaphanous, undulating in the half-light like a swarm of nightmares looking for a host.
On the right were moon jellies, fifteen inches across. Lit from below, moon jellies were blue and white, pulsating and drifting in an aimless quest to find a way out. Their tentacles were short and stringy, more like cilia, their bodies wholly translucent. No matter how many times Cragg came into this chamber, he marveled how something so fragile could be such a perfect predator. This room was always quiet, even when tourists crowded the floor and the lights were on. There was something about the movement of jellyfish that triggered a primal instinct to remain still and not make too much noise.
The Doctor stood in front of the moon jellies and studied them for a moment, neither man speaking. Then he turned and crossed his arms over his chest.
“You know how much it costs to launch a new drug, Cragg?” He held up a hand and stopped himself. “Never mind, you know how long it takes? Twelve years on average, with all the red tape and regulations. Then only ten percent will make it past clinical trials to human testing. After that, only one in five get past the bureaucrats at the FDA.”
“And you’re not a patient man, are you, Doctor?”
“Guess how many people are going to die from Alzheimer’s in that time frame, in the U.S. alone? Maybe millions, not counting those undiagnosed.” As the Doctor shifted against the tank, his arms gesticulating, the moon jellies drifted in the background. Though they didn’t have eyes, jellies responded to vibrations and were attracted by his manic energy.
“Don’t think I’m not interested in your little project. As a man getting on in years, I truly am.” Cragg scratched at his chin. “But the mercenary in me has to ask, how much are you saving your colleagues by bending the rules?”
The Doctor quieted his movements, a sardonic smile on his face. One of the largest of the jellies drifted upward, moving past his shoulder and behind his head. In the dim light, it glowed an unearthly white.
“You want to know what business I’m in?” he asked. “I’m in the business of saving the world.” The Doctor leaned back against the glass, and as the bell of the creature expanded, it resembled a halo.
Cragg didn’t say anything.
“You’re welcome,” said the Doctor. “Tell that to your money-laundering friends.”
Cragg considered the man in front of him and couldn’t decide if he was an actor or a zealot. In the end, it didn’t really matter.
“It occurred to me that a suspicious man might think the money isn’t changing hands in an equitable manner,” said Cragg soothingly. “Because these drug companies, I seem to recall you telling me, they spend billions on drug testing, isn’t that right? Billions, with a B?”
“Finally,” said the Doctor. “A negotiation I can handle, but an interrogation? Kiss my ass.”
“The question stands.”
“Am I talking to you,” asked the Doctor mildly, “or the cabal?”
“Consortium.”
“Whatever.”
“I believe it’s just you and me here.” Cragg made of show of looking around the empty room. “Unless you count the jellies.”
“I’m paying you for your pets,” said the Doctor. “And for violating about a dozen animal protection laws, I suppose.”
“You said it yourself, nobody likes bureaucrats.”
“Plus, you get a share of the overall operation, like the other partners.”
“But I seem to know more about it than they do,” said Cragg. “Since I heard you were coming to town, I’ve been doing my homework. Like you said, I’ve got sharp eyes. Which is why we’re standing here, alone.” Nonchalantly, Cragg dropped his right hand to his belt, resting it on the hilt of a knife the Doctor hadn’t noticed before. Cragg’s thumb stroked the handle with a restless malice, the lines on his face jagged with intent.
The Doctor laughed abruptly, then caught himself. “You can be a threat or an ally. Not both.”
Cragg moved his hand away from his belt. “So, what’s the deal?”
“I’ll make you a rich man,” said the Doctor, “but I need more time. That means we did not have this conversation, and make sure you’re not talking in your sleep or bragging in any bars. Until the next field test is completed, pretend you’ve had your tongue cut out.”
“Who would I tell,” asked Cragg, “besides you? If the rest of the partners get wind of this, I’m the one who’ll walk the plank. You’ll be off in China, or wherever the hell you’re off to next.”
“Okay,” said the Doctor. “But there’s one more thing.”
Cragg waited for the question that he knew would circle back at him like a boomerang.
“The armored car,” said the Doctor. The moon jellies rose as a swarm, as if coming to eavesdrop on their conversation. “Because somebody got greedy, we’ve got unwanted attention.” The Doctor raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Tell me you’ve got a name.”
“I’ve got better than that, I’ve got one of the rogues who did it.” Cragg kept his face impassive but felt the tide shift, deep in his gut. The implacable undertow of what he’d known all along. He was going to have to kill Lou.
“I’m impressed,” said the Doctor. “He give up the money?”
“Not yet.”
“His partners?”
“Not likely.” Cragg shook his head.
“You get rough?”
“Tried to feed him to a shark.”
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. “That’s pretty good.”
“Seemed like a fine idea at the time.” Cragg visualized a new task in front of him. Take a skiff from the pier out to the ship, slice Lou’s throat and throw the damn fool overboard before things got even messier.
“I want to talk to him,” said the Doctor.
“I’ll arrange it.” I’ll say he drowned trying to escape.
“You understand that if you fuck me,” said the Doctor, “you screw yourself.”
“That did seem to be the basis of our conversation.” Cragg cocked his head to one side. “You know much about ships?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“But you know that a ship needs an anchor.” Cragg held up his hands and interlocked the fingers. “Without an anchor, you’re adrift, vulnerable, and then the only way to stay clear of trouble is to keep moving.”
“Okay.”
“Which means the chain that secures the anchor is your lifeline.” Cragg pulled his fingers apart, his knuckles cracking audibly. “So, if there’s even a chance that there are any weak links in your chain—”
“—you get rid of them.” The Doctor’s smile was warm but his eyes looked as cold as the jellyfish behind him. “And you think we have a weak link.”
“Maybe more than one. A consortium is just a bureaucracy by another name, wouldn’t you agree?”
The Doctor turned to the jellyfish as if looking for advice. “You know much about drug testing?”
“Does drinking till you pass out count as testing?”
“Afraid not.” The Doctor turned around. “If a new drug has the potential to cure something serious—a horrible, incurable disease—but the tests show a probability that five percent of the patients will die from side effects, what do you do? By the time that drug is distributed globally, that five percent could translate to hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe more.”
“Tell me, Doctor.” Cragg smiled ruefully. “What do you do?”
“You play the odds.” The Doctor gestured expansively around the room. “And focus on the greater good.”
“Was I questioning your motives, Doctor?”
“So we’re on the same side.”
“Sure,” said Cragg. “Who doesn’t want save the world?”
43
Cape just wanted to save his client from any more heartbreak.
He also wanted to procrastinate and avoid talking to her until he knew what the hell he was talking about.
The cross he found might have belonged to her boyfriend, or it might belong to someone else. A wayward monk with a passion for scuba. Perhaps one of the sea lions converted to Catholicism after learning it was permissible to eat fish during Lent. Or maybe Cape was too chicken to bring Vera more questions but no answers.
He decided to visit the Sloth.
A short drive over steep hills, west on Geary until he reached Thirty-Fourth Street. Linda answered the door before Cape could even knock.
She was probably a head shorter than Cape, her true height a mystery because of the tornado of hair swirling in all directions, giving her a presence that far exceeded her stature. As far as Cape was concerned, Linda was ten feet tall.
She was the best reporter he’d ever known, and also the only person—besides himself—who could talk to Sloth and make sense of the responses. Sloth lived somewhere on the spectrum between autism and ALS, blessed with an uncanny ability to spot patterns in data as fast as any computer, but severely limited in his ability to move beyond a twitch of a finger or blink of an eye.
“It’s been a while.” Linda turned from the door before it was fully open, heading into the interior of the house. “I worried you might be dead.”
“I worry about that myself.” Cape shut the door and followed, noting the back of her hair seemed to be keeping an eye on him with every bouncing step. “But if I was dead, I doubt I’d be in San Francisco.”
Linda laughed. “This city may look like heaven—”
“—but we’ve both lived here long enough to know better.”
Linda glanced over her shoulder as they entered the living room. Sloth sat at his command center, a curved array of computer screens and hardware that would make the NSA envious.
Sloth was the most unimposing figure imaginable, a rotund man of slight stature with thinning hair, a gentle smile, and watery eyes behind wire glasses. His right hand twitched as Cape crossed the threshold, and the screens lit up with welcoming type.
DID YOU TAKE YOUR SHOES OFF?
Cape looked down at the spotless rug, then at Linda’s bare feet. “Sorry.”
GOOD TO SEE YOU.
“Nice to be seen.” Cape slipped out of his shoes and crossed the room, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “Thanks for looking into my puzzle.”
“It’s more a maze than a puzzle.” Linda stood a few paces away, never venturing too close to the terminals. One of the quirks of her relationship with Sloth was her healthy paranoia about electromagnetic radiation, in all its forms. Cape was surprised she didn’t wrap herself in aluminum foil as soon as she stepped out of the shower. “You’re practically Theseus in the center of the labyrinth.”
“Sounds like a lot of bull,” said Cape.
Linda groaned. “A dollar for the pun fund.” She held out her right hand until Cape took a single from his pocket and laid it on her open palm. “Next one will cost you five.” She nodded toward the computers. “Now pay attention.”
A kaleidoscope of geometric designs blossomed across the screens. Lines flowed as if a subway map was being drawn by a psychopath with a grudge against mass transit. Cape watched as shapes shifted and blurred, new patterns emerging. Streaks of color collided, only to fade and then reappear somewhere else.
“What am I looking at?”
“What we excavated,” said Linda. “The labyrinth.”
“I asked you to look into the armored car.”
“You’re looking outside the armored car—at all the places the money inside the car goes.”
Cape reconsidered the grid as it pulsed and flowed like a circulatory system. Sloth thumbed a touch pad and a world map materialized behind the colored lines. Paths circled major metropolitan areas, then blended and dispersed at port cities before zooming offshore, only to complete the cycle by darting across the ocean to another financial center. Some lines cut through places unidentified by name, outposts in northern Canada, Siberia, and inland China.
“Let’s pretend I’m lost in your maze.” Cape tracked a blue line from central Russia through China, then across the Pacific to San Francisco, where it wrestled with countless other lines in an orgy of color and purpose. “Actually, there’s no need to pretend. I’m lost.”
“Start here.” Linda pointed at a pulsating knot over San Francisco. “Notice how that area is never clear, lines always coming and going?”
“Yup.”
“That’s because we built the map with Pier 39 as the hub. The armored car was collecting money from businesses on the pier, so that’s our starting point.”
Sloth did something to the program, and a spot in San Francisco near the pier glowed. Cape squinted—it was near the financial district, somewhere on California Street. A bright green ribbon emerged from that locus point and split into four, then sixteen, then sixty-four, and ultimately hundreds of lines branching across the globe.
“That’s the bank that contracted the armored car,” said Linda. “And all the paths of its investments—and investors. And that’s why a simple maze turns into a labyrinth. The bank has a highly diversified portfolio.”
“Which bank?”
“The People’s Bank.”
Cape arched an eyebrow. “Kind of a generic name for a global bank.”
“Before the banking crisis it was Commerce Bank of China.” Linda glanced at her notebook. “Then when it moved into business loans, mortgages, and local banking services, it opened a branch in Chinatown and became People’s Bank of China for a while, but that sounded—”
“—too Cultural Revolution?”
Linda nodded. “So now it’s The People’s Bank.”
“But who are the people who run the bank?” Cape tried to pick a single line and follow its course across the screens and around the globe. By the time it split and raced across four compass points, he was lost. He tried again with a different line, ignoring the secondary branches, but only got halfway around the world before losing the thread in the middle of the Mediterranean. Cape stepped closer to the screen and pointed at the rat’s nest of color in the middle of the sea.
“What’s that?”
CYPRUS.
“It looks like a Spirograph doodle.”
Sloth titled his head almost imperceptibly.
HOME TO OFFSHORE BANKS. VERY POPULAR WITH RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS.
“Look at Panama,” said Linda. “Another offshore haven.”
Cape shifted to the western hemisphere and saw a tangle of lines throbbing with potential mischief.
“Ever hear of the Panama Papers?” asked Linda.
Cape shook his head.
“It was big news about a year ago,” Linda replied, “but mostly in the U.K., Iceland, and Eastern Europe. The BBC ran a whole series on it, but it only got covered by business journals in the U.S. for a day or so.”
“So what did I miss?”
“An anonymous source inside one of the largest offshore banking operations, Mossack Fonseca, spilled millions of confidential records onto the internet.”
OVER 11 MILLION RECORDS, NEARLY 2.6 TERABYTES OF DATA.
“But who’s counting?” Cape smiled at Sloth. “And?”
“And it turns out over a hundred world leaders, including the prime minister of Iceland, several Russian oligarchs, and a former prime minister of England apparently had offshore accounts to hide their investments from auditors. Most of the accounts were managed by proxy. In other words, low-profile acquaintances and relatives—a nephew, family friend, in some cases complete strangers—were made signatories on accounts worth millions of dollars.”
