Black Market (7 page)

One possible solution came to mind.

He'd actually seen a New York detective demonstrate this particular approach during a robbery in progress in Manhattan 's Greenwich Village.

Carroll waited for Alvarez to eye-check the FBI agents on the far left. As he did so, Carroll smoothly slid behind a flower-decked wall that concealed him from the drug dealer. He waited a few seconds to see if he'd been missed, then continued hustling down behind the flowered wall, back through the side yard between Alvarez's house and the one next door.

A green watering hose snaked up the walkway to a swimming pool with a floating rubber horse that looked ludicrous to Carroll at that moment. He broke into a run, stopping only when he was back out on the street where the FBI team had parked their cars.

A very disturbing thought entered his mind as he climbed into Sommers's Grand Prix.

He never would have done this if Nora were still alive… Never in a thousand years would he have tried this stunt.

Even as the thought cut deeply, Arch Carroll eased the FBI sedan to the corner, where he made a sweeping right turn, then a quick left onto South Ocean.

A block ahead he saw Diego Alvarez backing into the Cadillac. He was still holding the white-haired cook and screaming wildly at the FBI men, his words lost now in the sea breeze.

Carroll kicked down hard on the accelerator. The sedan twitched from first into third gear. The car licked forward with a screech from the expensive radial tires put on for precisely this kind of breakneck situation.

Don't think about this. Get it over with now.

His gun lay on the car seat beside him.

The speedometer read thirty, forty, fifty. Then the front wheels struck the concrete curb loudly with a jolting crunch. The car's front end leaped at least three feet in the air. All four wheels were off the ground, and the vehicle moved in slow motion, the speed at which a car flies.

Carroll double-pumped the sedan's brakes at the last possible moment.

“
What the hell
-
!
” an FBI man yelled, and dove to one side of the lawn.

“Holy
shit!
” came another high-pitched shout from one of Sommers's men.

Diego Alvarez fired three wild shots at the careening Pontiac. The sedan's windshield shattered, spitting glass fragments into Carroll's face.

The car was back on all four wheels again, bouncing over the lawn and over a red-tiled walkway. Suddenly it was skidding helplessly on the turf.

Carroll's foot stomped down full force against the gas pedal again. Just before contact, he tucked his head down. He held the steering wheel in a viselike grip, held on as tightly as he possibly could.

The bounding FBI car crashed broadside into Diego Alvarez's cherry-red Cadillac. The convertible crumpled. It slid sideways like a hockey puck floating on ice and smashed into the side of the garage.

Half a dozen FBI officers were instantly sprinting across the front lawn. They got there before the two interlocking cars had stopped moving.

Revolvers, riot shotguns, and M-16 rifles were thrust inside the Cadillac's open front windows.

“Don't move, Alvarez. Don't move an inch!” an FBI man screamed. “I said
Don't move!
”

Carroll grunted, then pushed himself painfully out of the wrecked Pontiac. He roared out Diego Alvarez's name, surprised by his own intensity. He was still yelling when he grabbed the shirtless drug dealer out of the hands of the FBI agents, who stared at him with astonishment.

“Arch Carroll, State Department Antiterrorist Division! You have
no rights!
You hear me?… How did you know about Green Band? Who talked to you? You look at me!”

Diego Alvarez said, “Fuck you!” and spat into Carroll's face.

Carroll shuffled a little to his left, then hit the drug dealer with a sharp right hand delivered to the mouth. Alvarez fell to the ground, already out cold.

“Yeah, fuck you, too!” said the former Bronx street kid still lurking somewhere inside Carroll. He wiped the dope dealer's saliva from his cheek.

Clark Sommers's mouth fell open, creating a surprised
O
at the center of his suntanned face.

At the FBI office on Collins Avenue in Miami, Diego Alvarez was taken to a small interrogation room, where he told Carroll everything he knew.

“I don't know who they are, honest, man. Somebody jus' want you down here to Florida,” he said with almost believable sincerity. Because he had been busted with three hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of cocaine, and because his prospects of freedom looked grim, he didn't have much to gain by lying. Carroll studied the man as he spoke.

“I swear it. I don't know nothin' more, man. But I got a feelin' somebody playin' some kind of games wit' you. They set me up, my big mouth. But somebody playin' wit' you…

Somebody jus' want you come here 'stead of someplace else. They playin' wit'
you
, man. They playin' wit' you real good.”

Carroll wanted to put his head down on the interrogation table. He'd been used, and he had no idea why. All he knew was that whoever was doing it was extremely smart. They were sending a message: See, we can manipulate you-any which way we like.

Carroll eventually wandered outside the FBI building and leaned heavily against the warm white stucco wall.

He tried to let the Florida sun soothe his weary brain. He thought that Miami might be a better climate for playing Crusader Rabbit than New York.

He was relatively certain about a couple of disturbing things. The Green Band group, whoever they were, knew who he was and that he would be assigned to the investigation. How did they know? What should that tell him about who they might be?… They seemed to want him to know how superior, how well organized, they were. They wanted him to be a little in awe-and frankly, right now he was.

How did they know he'd be assigned to the investigation? Who was trying to send him a cryptic message? Why?

On the plane home, Eastern-the wings of man-Arch Carroll had two beers, then two Irish whiskeys. He could have gone for another two Irish, but he'd promised Walter Trentkamp-promised Uncle Walter something he couldn't quite remember. Finally he slept the rest of the way home to New York.

He had a real nice dream on the flight, too. Carroll dreamed that he quit his job with the DIA's Antiterrorist Division. He and the kids and Nora went to live on the nicest sugar white beach in Florida.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Manhattan

Before break of dawn on Sunday morning, Caitlin Dillon waded through a becalmed river of ice and slush that rose four inches above her ankles. Once she successfully emerged on half-deserted Fifth Avenue, the director of enforcement for the SEC's Division of Trading and Exchange hailed a yellow cab, which ferried her down to the Fourteenth Street Police and National Guard barricades. From there she was transferred by a snazzy police blue-and-white down into the smoldering chaos and confusion of the financial district itself.

The ride went by amazingly fast. There were no working traffic lights below Fourteenth and almost no other traffic on any of the downtown streets.

The sergeant driving the police car was as good-looking as any young actor in a Hollywood cop show. He had long blue-black hair curling over his uniform collar. His name was Signarelli. Caitlin figured he definitely watched “Hill Street Blues.”

“Never seen anything this bad.” The police sergeant revealed a nasal Brooklyn accent when he spoke. His eyes kept darting in and out of the rearview mirror.

“Can't even call in to your normal communications desk. Nerve center they set up is always busy, too. Nobody knows what the army's doing. What the FBI guys are doing, either. It's completely nuts!”

“How would you handle it?” There was nothing patronizing in the question. Caitlin was always curious about the rank and file. That was one reason she made a good boss at the SEC. A second reason was that she was smart, so knowledgeable about Wall Street and the workings of business that most of her associates legitimately held her in awe. “If this was your show, what would you do now, Sergeant?”

“Well… I'd hit every terrorist hangout we know about in the city. We know about a hell of a lot of them, too. I'd blow into their little maggot nests. Arrest everybody in sight. That way we'd sure as hell get some information.”

“Sergeant, I believe that's what teams of detectives have been doing all night. Over sixty separate squads of NYPD detectives. But the maggots are just not cooperating on this one.”

Caitlin arched her eyebrow, then smiled gently at the cop. Predictably, he asked her for a date, and just as predictably, Caitlin turned him down.

With police and army helicopters constantly whirring overhead, Caitlin Dillon stood still and numb on the northwest corner of Broadway and Wall. She allowed her eyes to roam across the most chilling, surreal scene she ever hoped to view in her lifetime.

What appeared to be billions of tons of granite block, shattered glass, and concrete and mortar had crashed down onto Wall Street and Broad Street and Pine and all the narrow, interconnecting alleyways. According to the latest army intelligence estimate, as many as sixty separate plastique bombs had detonated at 6:34 Friday evening. The police theory was that the bombs had been exploded by sophisticated radio signals. The signals could have been transmitted from as far away as ten or twelve miles.

Caitlin craned her neck to gaze up at nearby 6 Wall Street. She winced as she observed the sheared, swinging clumps of wiring: thick elevator cables dangling between the highest floors of the office building. Here and there patches of sky shone through great yawning holes in the building's walls. The overall effect reminded her of a doll house utterly destroyed by a child's temper tantrum.

She stood all alone, shivering and cold, on the stone portal of the New York Stock Exchange. She couldn't stop herself from staring at the abysmal destruction, the incomprehensible damage, on Wall Street. More than anything, she wanted to be sick.

She saw an oil painting, a Yankee sailing clipper, hanging in a distant office with two of the room's walls blown away. It looked absurd. In the foyer of an adjacent building, an overturned copier had collapsed through several floors before striking the unyielding marble in the lobby. She could see the shattered screens of computer terminals and the melted remains of keyboards that reminded her of some nightmare art form. All over the littered, desolate street, police and hospital emergency vehicles were flashing bright red-and-blue distress signals.

Caitlin Dillon could feel a cold dead weight pushing down on her. Her body was numb. Her ears buzzed softly, as if there were a sudden drop in air pressure. She couldn't stop a feeling of nausea, of sudden weakness in her legs. She understood what many of the others still didn't-that an entire way of life had quite possibly been destroyed here on Friday night.

Inside number 13, Caitlin was confronted immediately by noisy squads of secretaries typing frantically in the marble-and-stone entryway corridors. Stock exchange clerks milled around with a kind of busy uselessness, carrying clipboards with a hollow show of self-importance, carting files from one office to another.

Caitlin took in the command post scene and then, as she stepped nimbly around the broken glass and debris that had been shaken loose from the ceiling, she was surrounded by heavily armed policemen who demanded to see her identification.

She smiled to herself as she showed her ID. No one knew who she was; no one recognized her here in the stock exchange foyer.

How very typical that was. Damn it, how typical.

For the past three years the SEC's director of enforcement had been a most unlikely Wall Street figure: Caitlin Dillon was clearly a major force yet a person of supreme mystery to almost everybody around her.

Women in general had only been permitted on the floor of the stock exchange since 1967. Nevertheless the idea hadn't particularly caught on. In fact, in the visitors' gallery of the exchange one infamous sign still retained a position of prominence:

WOMEN MAKE POOR SPECULATORS.

WHEN THROWN UPON THEIR OWN

RESOURCES, THEY ARE COMPARATIVELY

HELPLESS. EXCELLING IN CERTAIN LINES,

THEY ARE FORCED TO TAKE BACKSEATS

IN SPECULATION. WITHOUT THE

ASSISTANCE OF A MAN, A WOMAN ON

WALL STREET IS LIKE A SHIP WITHOUT A

RUDDER.

Caitlin Dillon had actually inherited her job because of her predecessor's bad luck in the shape of a sudden fatal coronary. Caitlin knew that insiders had predicted she wouldn't last two months. They compared the fateful situation with that of a politician's wife taking over for an unexpectedly invalid husband. Caitlin was called by some “the interim enforcer.”

For that reason, and some strong personal ones from her past, she had decided that-for however long she might last in the job-she was going to become the sternest, hardest SEC enforcement officer since Professor James Landis had been doing the hiring himself. What did she possibly have to lose?

She was, therefore, stubbornly serious. Some said Caitlin Dillon was unnecessarily obsessed with white-collar criminal investigations, with skillfully prosecuting malfeasance by senior officers of major American corporations.

“I'll tell you something off the record,” Caitlin had once said to a dear friend, Meg O'Brian, the financial editor of
Newsweek
. “The Ten Most Wanted men in America are all working on Wall Street.”

As the “interim” enforcement officer at the SEC, Caitlin Dillon made a lot of news very fast. The mystery of Caitlin Dillon-how she had surfaced virtually from nowhere-grew each week she held on to the important job. The power brokers on the Street still wanted to replace her, but suddenly they found they couldn't do so very easily. Caitlin was simply too good at what she did. She'd become too visible. She was almost instantly a strong symbol for the disenfranchised in America 's financial system.

At seven forty-five that morning, Caitlin finally reached her office inside 13 Wall. It was respectably large, even elegant. She removed her coat and took a deep breath as she sat down. On her desk lay a damage report prepared for her the previous night. As her eyes scanned the page, she felt a deepening despair at the sheer amount of destruction done:

The Federal Reserve Bank

Salomon Brothers

Bankers Trust

Affiliated Fund

Merrill Lynch

U.S. Trust Corporation

The Depository Trust Company

The list went on to detail fourteen downtown New York buildings that had been partially or completely destroyed.

She closed her eyes and placed her hands on the report. If only it could give her a hint, a clue. Fourteen different buildings in the Wall Street financial district-the whole thing was beyond her, out of control by any measure.

She opened her eyes.

It was the start of the second day of her formal investigation of Green Band, and she knew no more than she'd known before. It was going to be a long, long Sunday.

Arch Carroll strode briskly from a comfortable State Department limousine toward the ominous gray stone entranceway to 13 Wall Street. At least Green Band had left this building mostly intact-a fact that caused him to wonder. If a terrorist cell was going to strike out hard at U.S. capitalism, why wouldn't they destroy the New York Stock Exchange?

Carroll had on a knee-length, black leather topcoat that Nora had given him the Christmas before her death. At the time she'd joked that it made him look like a tough-guy hero in an action movie. The coat was now one of his few personal treasures; that it was a little too tight under the arms didn't matter. There was no way he'd have it altered. He wanted it exactly as it was when Nora had given it to him.

Carroll was smoking a crumpled cigarette. Sometimes on the weekends he wore the coat and smoked crumpled cigarettes when he took Mickey Kevin and Clancy to the New York Knicks or Rangers games. It made both kids laugh hysterically. They told him he was trying to look like Clint Eastwood in the movies. He wasn't, he knew. Clint Eastwood was trying to look like him-like some nihilistic, tough-guy city cop.

Hurrying down the long, echoing corridors, Carroll pulled his way out of the leather coat. For a few hefty strides he left it capelike over his shoulders. Then he folded it over one arm, in the hope that he'd look a little more civilized. There were lots of very straight business people in the hallowed halls of 13 Wall.

Carroll pushed open leather-covered doors into a formal meeting room thick with perspiration and stale tobacco smoke. The room where the New York Stock Exchange professional staff usually met was the size of a large theater.

The scheduled meeting was already in progress. He was late. He was also weary from his flight, and his nerves-kept moderately alert by an infusion of amphetamine-were beginning to complain. He glanced at his watch. There was another long day ahead of him.

Carroll scanned the shadowy room. It was filled with New York City police and U.S. Army personnel, with corporate lawyers and investigators from the major banks and brokerage houses on Wall Street. The only seats left were' way in front.

Carroll groaned and crouched low. He clumsily climbed over gray-and-blue pin-striped legs, and over someone's abundant lap, toward the front row. He thought everybody in the room must be staring at him.

The speaker was saying, “Let me tell you how to make a hell of a lot of money on Wall Street. All you have to do is steal a little from the rich, steal a little from the middle rich, steal a lot from the lower rich…”

Nervous laughter cascaded around the vast meeting room. It was a muted, mirthless outbreak that sounded more like a release of fear than anything else.

The speaker went on: “The Wall Street security system simply
doesn't
work. As you all know, the computer setup here is one of the most antiquated in all of the business world. That's why this disaster could happen.”

Carroll finally found a seat. He lowered himself onto it until only his head peeked above the theater's gray velvet seat back and pressed his knees against the wooden stage in front.

“The computer system on Wall Street is a complete disgrace…”

Carroll looked up and took in the meeting's speaker. Jesus. He was completely taken aback by the sight of Caitlin Dillon on the podium. Her hair, a sleek chestnut-brown color, was bobbed at the shoulders. Long legs, slender waist. Tall-maybe five feet eight. She looked, if anything, even more intriguing than she'd seemed that first night in Washington.

She was staring down at him. Her brown eyes were very calm, measuring everything they saw. Yes, she was staring directly down at Carroll himself.

“Are you expecting trouble during my briefing, Mr. Carroll?” Her eyes had fastened onto his Browning, his beat-up leather shoulder holster. He was suddenly embarrassed by her question and the way his name had sounded through her microphone. Those pale red lips seemed to be lightly mocking him.

Carroll didn't know what to say. He shrugged and tried to sink a little deeper onto his seat. Why didn't he have one of his usual wisecracks to throw back at her?

Caitlin Dillon smoothly switched her attention back to the audience of senior police officers and heavy-duty Wall Street businessmen. Without missing a beat, she resumed her briefing at exactly the point where she had interrupted herself.

“In the past decade,” she said, and her next chart efficiently appeared on the screen at her back, “foreign investment in the United States has skyrocketed. Billions of francs, yen, pesos, and deutsche marks have flowed into our economy to the sum of eighty-five billion dollars. The Midland Bank of England, for instance, took full control of the Crocker National Bank of California. Nippon Kokan purchased half the National Steel Corporation. The list goes on and on.

“At this rate, I'm sorry to say, the Japanese, the Arabs, and the Germans will very soon control our financial destiny.”

As she recited exhaustive facts and numbers that defined the present situation in the financial community, Carroll listened attentively. He also watched attentively. Nothing could have drawn his eyes away from her, short of a second Wall Street bombing raid.

There was a disarming twinkle in her eyes, an unexpected hint of sweetness in her smile. Was it really sweetness, though? Coyness? How could she hold down the job she had if she was shy and retiring and sweet? “Sweet” was not in the Wall Street lexicon.