“No alias credit cards, please, no draws on your existing banks and if you haven’t already left your current residences and offices, do so now, when this briefing ends. No bullshit, folks, there are no heroes in this movie. These movements will be coordinated by Tommy Arden in Support.
“Now let me come back to where I started, which is the good news. Everyone will be taken care of. There will be jobs in the system for anyone who wants them. You are all under cover, and I remind you that the secrecy agreements you signed are absolute, permanent and enforceable by U.S. criminal courts. Those who prefer to retire will get generous termination and relocation assistance. There will also be special ‘hazardous duty’ bonuses for everyone on the staff. They will be substantial. God knows, you have earned them. Okay? Tommy Arden will be setting up a special HR ‘help desk’ to take care of the details.”
Arden, sitting in the back, hadn’t heard a word of this until now. But he stood up and waved his hand so everyone could see him.
Gertz looked around the room. People were dazed, basically, trying to take it all in. The circus was pulling down the tents and leaving town.
“Any questions?” he asked.
Before any of the bewildered employees had chance to raise their hands, Gertz was already moving away from the podium.
“Let’s do it!” he said, with his fist raised in the air.
The applause was tentative at first, and then it petered out. They walked out, in silence and submission.
Ted Yazdi was waiting that night at his friend’s house in Bethesda. It was a too-comfortable suburb, oversized homes set back in the trees. The houses were aglow from external lights that beamed up the pillars and porticos; the trees were alight, too, their branches illuminated by spots and floodlights. These people spent more on landscaping in a year than the average family did on food and shelter. Yazdi’s rendezvous rested atop a green hill, across a moat traversed by a stone bridge. In the garage was a Lexus hybrid SUV with a sticker on the rear bumper that admonished: remember darfur.
Yazdi was sitting in the garden out back, fingering his BlackBerry and sucking down a Diet Pepsi. It was about 10:20 when Gertz arrived, escorted by one of the Secret Service agents on duty.
“You’re late,” said Yazdi.
“I had to fly across the country. Thunderstorms. I’m sorry.”
“So fucking what? Not my problem. You’re late, and you requested this meeting. That pisses me off. What’s going on?”
Gertz surveyed the garden. It was a cool night, with a harbinger of fall in the air. The nearest house was a quarter mile away, and Secret Service agents were guarding the perimeter. Still, it was out in the open, not a good place for a sensitive conversation.
“Shouldn’t we go inside?” asked Gertz. “Somewhere more secure.”
“I like it here. I was inside at ten, but now I’m outside. Let’s forget about the seating chart and do our business. I have to get up early tomorrow to help the president open a wind farm in Okla-fuckinghoma. So what’s this ‘trouble’ that you needed to see me about? It better be important.”
Gertz was on his back foot. He had gotten off to a bad start. He needed to frighten the chief of staff enough to take action, but not so much that he panicked him into doing something that would make the situation worse.
“We have hit an iceberg, Mr. Yazdi. We are taking on water. I want permission from you and the president to close down the operation.”
“Close down Operation Pax? The friendship payments, the whole thing? The president loves that stuff.”
“I’m sorry. I know you were excited about those special activities. But they have become too risky.”
“Risky for who? Not the president. And what’s this iceberg you’re talking about? I don’t see any freaking iceberg. It sounds to me like you’re covering something up. You’d better explain what’s going on. Take it slower this time.”
“You know about out security problem. I’ve briefed you on it before. You know that we have lost four officers. We nearly lost a fifth one the other day in Islamabad. It has gotten too dangerous out there. More people are going to get killed and the whole thing is going to blow.”
“Whose fault is that? Not mine. Why is all this bad shit happening?”
“People have gotten hold of our address book, Mr. Yazdi. They know where we are. They’re coming after us.”
“But I thought you had that contained. We put out your total-denial, piss-off statement about Tawhid, and it worked, right? That’s what you told me. So what’s the squawk now? I never thought of you as the ‘cold feet’ type, but maybe I was wrong.”
Gertz’s soft sell wasn’t working. Yazdi was too cranked up. He would have to try a different approach.
“Look, Mr. Yazdi, it’s not just the attacks on our officers. That’s part of the problem. But people are going to find the money trail if we don’t shut things down quickly.”
“What money trail? I thought you said there wouldn’t be any trail. That was the pitch. This would be self-funding and self-liquidating. I don’t know how many times I heard that from you. Was that bullshit?”
“That was the truth. We were self-funding, but now it’s time to liquidate. That’s what I’m telling you, Mr. Yazdi. We need to shut the operation down, bring everyone home. Turn off the money machine. In the process, we need to build a cover story to explain why billions of dollars have been bouncing around the world like Ping-Pong balls. And why people have been making fortunes trading on inside information.”
“Too much detail. Just liquidate it. This is your problem, not mine.”
“Just a heads-up, Mr. Yazdi: Our hub is in London. The British will take it down. It will look like a fraud investigation. We will keep it far away from you and the president, I promise you.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? ‘Far away from you and the president.’ We don’t have anything to do with this. What the fuck are you talking about? This is your mess. That’s the deal.”
Yazdi almost shouted these last words. Gertz put his finger to his lips, to get him to shush. He had him now.
“The president authorized these programs, Mr. Yazdi. There’s a trail of authorities and permissions. Even where there were no formal presidential orders, there were subsequent memoranda for the file, and legal opinions. We don’t do things on our own, Mr. Yazdi, as you well know. What’s important is that this documentation should never, ever become public.”
Yazdi stood up angrily, walked a few paces toward the house and then paused, weighing his options. He returned to his chair in the garden and wagged his finger at the intelligence officer.
“You are a cocksucker, Gertz. Don’t ever threaten me or the president, ever. It won’t work. Stop this bullshit right now and tell me how you’re going to solve this.”
Gertz’s manner sweetened, now that he had his man locked up.
“I promise you there won’t be any connection, if we do this right. No fingerprints. Clean as a whistle. But I need a free hand to close this down, quickly and efficiently, and do what I think is necessary. Do I have your authority? And I don’t just mean now, but a year from now, if it takes that long. It will be complicated if you say no, because I’ve already started.”
The chief of staff looked tired and deflated, a balloon that had lost its air and gone soft and rubbery around the edges. Gertz had scared him, and he was a man who made his living giving other people heartburn.
“Sure,” said Yazdi. “What the fuck? Just make it go away.”
33
Thomas Perkins referred to the fraud investigation as “the witch hunt.” From the first morning when the Metropolitan Police arrived in Mayfair Place with warrants and summonses, the campaign was conducted as much by insinuation and whisper as by hard evidence that could be put before the prosecutors and magistrates. Across Mayfair, people seemed to know that Perkins’s firm was in trouble before they had any inkling why. A small crowd formed in Stratton Street behind the yellow tape in the first minutes after the fraud squad ascended the elevators. Where had they come from? How did they know?