“The mechanics of it?” Mills looked at me and shrugged. “One of my teams is down the hall. You can hear it from the horse’s mouth.” We followed Mills out of the alcove, back along the corridor, to the conference room Neary and I had peeked into before. The same three men were there. Mills spoke to all of them.
“Troops, let me tear you away from your labors for a moment. You all know Hoov, from Brill. This is his friend, John,” Mills paused dramatically and looked at me, “Mysterious John. He has some general and very quick questions for you, and then you can get back to the salt mines.” He turned to Neary and me. “Here you have Stan Greer,” he pointed to a pale, thin, bespectacled man with straw-colored hair, wearing a blue plaid shirt, “Charlie Koch,” a heavyset, freckled redhead wearing a Jets sweater, “and Vijay Desai,” a slim, dark Indian man, wearing a bright red sweater over a black shirt. They looked slightly annoyed at the interruption and a little uneasy-in part, no doubt, due to Mills’s introduction. “Mysterious John,” indeed. Mills looked at me.
“Evan has described, generally, what kind of work you’re doing here. But I’d like to get some idea of how you actually go about doing it. Maybe you can start with how you’re organized-who does what?” They looked at Mills and then at each other, uncertain about who should talk. Mills looked bored and gave them no help. Finally, Desai jumped in.
“You know we’re doing balance sheet reconstruction and claims evaluation?” he asked me. I nodded. “The balance sheet work is done by teams of people, all accountants with a lot of audit experience, usually three to six people on a team. We’ve split up the different MWB entities and assigned a set to each team. They work on the balance sheets for their assigned entities, plus they review the work from other teams as a quality check. We’ve got separate groups working the claims. Usually two to four people per team on those.”
“And where do they start, what are they working with?” I asked.
Desai kept talking. “Mainly they’re looking at data from the bank’s general ledger systems and its other record-keeping systems. And at filings MWB made with regulators over the years, with the Fed, the State of New York, the Comptroller of the Currency, and so forth. Ultimately they go back to source documents-account applications, trade tickets, confirmations, loan agreements, statements, correspondence with clients, those sorts of things. We go to the document system for all of that.”
Mills looked at his watch and then at Neary. “Hoov, if there’s nothing else, I’ve got stuff to do, and so do these guys. Unless you want me to start billing you for consulting work.” Subtle as it was, we took that as a hint to go.
Neary and I said our thanks and headed for the elevators. At the door that would take us to the guard station I looked back and saw Mills, standing motionless at the end of the long corridor, watching.
“Kind of an annoying bastard, isn’t he?” I said, as we waited for the elevator.
“Yep,” Neary agreed.
“Not much of a tour, either,” I said.
“Not much,” Neary agreed, “but then, we weren’t paying for his time. Come on, we’ll have a look for your documents.”
It was after five o’clock when we returned to the third floor, and the dim views through the windows had darkened to night. Lights shone in the buildings nearby, and the floor seemed more deserted than ever. I followed Neary to a small office. The dark wood desk was bare except for a PC and a phone. Neary sat behind the desk, switched on the PC, and pulled the keyboard in front of him.
“Pull a chair around,” he said, and I did. He typed quickly, logging into the network and bringing up the browser. When the search-engine page was in the browser window, he sat back and looked at me.
“So this is where we play ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,’ ” he said. I looked back at him, silent. He continued, “I’m doing the driving here,” he pointed to the keyboard, “and if you don’t give me something to search for we’re not going to get very far.”
“You could always let me drive,” I said.
Neary snorted, “That’s not going to happen, John. I’m out on a limb just having you in here, so unless you open up a little, this is where we stop.” We looked at each other in silence. Neary wasn’t trying to strong-arm me, but he wasn’t bullshitting me either. I had a choice to make. I nodded and pulled out my notebook.
“Everything I’m interested in is dated eighteen years ago. Let’s start with letters from Nassouli, with dates in February of that year,” I said. He nodded and started typing. The engine came back with twenty-one documents that met the criteria. I scanned down the results list. None of them were the ones I was looking for. The dates were wrong, and so were the topics. Neary looked at me, and I shook my head.
“We’re zero-for-one,” Neary said.
“Actually zero-for-two,” I said. He shrugged.
“What’s next?” he asked.
“How about letters to Nassouli dated…” I checked my notes again, “March eighth through March fifteenth that year.” This time, the engine found eleven documents. And one of them jumped out at me. Neary saw me staring.
“Something?” he asked. I nodded.
“You going to tell me which one, or do I have to guess?”
“Show me the first five,” I said. He clicked on each one, and each time he did a new window opened with an abstract of the document he’d picked, and an image of the original.
Mine was number three. It was the letter from Pierro to Dias, informing him of the establishment of the credit line. It was identical to the one in the fax. According to the abstract, the original had been found in offsite storage, in files from the correspondent banking department, specifically in the files of its former chief, Alan Burrows.
“Who else requested these?” I asked. Neary pointed and clicked a few times.
“Just the feds, about a year ago. I told you, they want anything involving Nassouli.” We were quiet for a while.
“That it?” he asked. I nodded. “So, two of them we don’t have, and no one besides the feds has accessed the third. Nothing here tells me that this shop was the source of your documents, John. I think you’ve got to look elsewhere.” I put away my notebook and leaned back.
“You guys find documents from Nassouli’s files in offsite storage?” I asked.
“Some, yeah,” Neary answered warily.
“So he didn’t call the offsite stuff back for shredding, huh?”
“No time, I’d guess,” said Neary.
“The documents I’m asking about are pretty old-old enough to have gone to offsite storage. But you didn’t find any of them there. How come?” Neary thought about this, not happy with where I was headed.
“Beats the hell out of me. Could be he never sent them offsite, and they got shredded with the rest of his shit. Could be he didn’t give a damn about them, and tossed them years ago. The MWB people weren’t that good at record-keeping.”
“So I keep hearing. But it could also be the documents were here, and never made it into your system,” I suggested.
“Bullshit,” Neary said. He sighed heavily and shut down the PC. Then he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands across his stomach and looked at me. “What else can I tell you?” he asked. I thought about it for a while, not really sure. The office was silent except for air coming through the ceiling vents in a conspiratorial whisper.
“This and the fourth floor-that’s all that’s left of MWB in New York?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” Neary answered. “Nearly everything else has been cleaned out and sublet.”
“Where was Nassouli’s office?”
“On forty-four, one of the trading floors.”
“Anything left there?”
“Not for long. They signed a sublease on it last week, and construction starts week after next. Equipment and files are long gone. There’s not much left to see, but you can have a look if you want.”
We went to the lobby, switched elevator banks, and rode up to forty-four. Another uniformed guard greeted Neary and buzzed us in. Neary took a big ring of keys from his desk as we passed. We went through a metal door and down a short corridor. This floor was the same shape as the lower ones, but had been built out very differently. A band of small offices ran around the doughnut’s inner edge. They were windowless, but had glass walls that looked out on the rest of the floor. More, larger, offices ran around the outer edge. These also had glass walls, but they had windows as well, and sweeping views of the harbor and the uptown skyline. Sandwiched between the glass offices was the trading floor itself-five rows of long desks, separated by narrow aisles, running down each side of the doughnut.