The intelligence agencies who fought the war had long known this, and Israel’s EconIntel unit was no different, really, than those fielded by any country, but for one respect: the Israelis had a secret weapon; and its name was Gershon Gold.
Today, which was like every other day, turned out to be the day of COMEX. He selected his markets randomly, off a simple program he had devised that pulled names out of a big hat. It had to be random. It couldn’t be by pattern, because a pattern could be detected, and any savvy programmer counterplaying him could recognize him. Not that there was anywhere on earth an indication that such a counterprogrammer existed, but he wanted to be thorough, careful, diligent, patient. In the long haul, that was how you won.
COMEX was the international commodities exchange, run by the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was a total universe of stuff. Gershon attacked it.
He monitored each commodity’s performance over a week, quickly translating the figures into a line graph. In units of twenty he projected those lines in space, with time (the week) as the horizontal variable and percentage change as the vertical variable. In normal operations the twenty lines should look pretty much the same, because each line reflected the wisdom of the market in representing value over the same period of time, in the same play of psychological and external factors. That is, in normal operating process, if gold went up a bit, so would tin, lemons, pork futures, and magnesium. The twenty lines, though at different value sectors, would pretty much reflect one another. That was defined as normality, especially when Gershon incorporated his proprietary algorithms to factor in weather and other variables not under anyone’s influence.
You could easily engineer a program to certain parameters, and it could mechanistically make this sort of examination and notify its keepers of something unusual, but it really needed a human eye, a human touch, a human instinct to make the final discriminations. That was Gershon.
Twenty by twenty he went, and nowhere was there any indication of abnormality. On and on until he was done and it all seemed okay, and finally it was time to put COMEX down and come up with another market for similar scrutiny.
Except…
He’d noticed a tiny little something, almost, not quite a blip.
It was in a midrange cluster of twenty across the value/time index. He went back and called it up and looked very closely. It seemed fine.
But…
There was one line with a peak just a little bit out of scale with the echoing peaks above and below.
Hmmm.
Is this real? Is it anything? Could it be anything?
He moused to that one line, selected it, and made the others go away.
A single line zagged across the graph.
He checked the legend.
PL.
What the hell was PL? The slightly higher value meant that someone had bought more PL than the market average. He went back through iterations, looking at the performance of PL over the past year, week by week, and in no single week had there been as big a leap.
What was going on with PL?
Actually, better start somewhere else.
What was PL?
It was platinum.
CHAPTER 17
You had to hand it to the Poles: they really knew how to design an ugly building.
In 1936 they had somehow come up with the atrocity of the Stanislav Town Hall, grotesquely angled as if in homage to some science-fiction idea of the future, which climbed cube by severe cube to ultimately a spindly if angular five-story tower, like a child’s ABC-block construction, but great for flying flags of bright national identification. It was a natural for the bloodred swastika flag that had rippled from its top between 1941 and 1944.
“In ’43, they killed twelve thousand Jews in this town. Shot them all. Terrible, terrible,” Reilly said.
Swagger had no comment. There was no comment to be made.
“Then in ’44, when the Russians were pushing the Nazis out of Ukraine, this is where they came to nest as a last stopping point. Groedl’s Reichskommissariat office was here.”
It was near nightfall. They’d returned from Yaremche and were now in Ivano, checked in to the Nadia Hotel, and out for a walk, looking and trying to imagine the Nazi banners, the Kübel and the Horch cars, the ranks of black-uniformed SS creeps, the dowdy civilians of the Reichskommissariat who had administered lebensraum for their leader, all of the theater of history.
“Want to go in?” she said.
“Don’t see no point.”
“I understand. I don’t want to go in, either.”
“We have to go back to Yaremche. Walk that town site more, get up on the mountain trails. You have hiking boots?”
“Yes, and you still have to tell me where she got herself a new rifle.”
“As soon as I know, you’re number one on the list. Dinner?”
“Always.”
They walked the few blocks to what was now Independence Street, which had been Stalin Boulevard, Hitlerstrasse, Warsaw Avenue, and Budapest Utcanev in its time, and found a sidewalk café among the many that had turned the now-pedestrian boulevard so pleasant.
They ate meat, somewhat silently.
“You know what?” said Swagger. “I ain’t got no ideas at all.”
“Let’s do a game called ‘know/assumption,’ okay? What we do know against what we think we know.”
“Sure. Know Mili disappeared in July 1944. Assumption: She was sent to Ukraine on a special mission, according to other sniper Slusskya. Assumption: Guy who sent her had to be this Krulov, Basil, Stalin’s Harry Hopkins, because he had the power. Known: Nothing. All circumstantial. Known: There was a Nazi ambush of partisans in the Carpathians above Yaremche, killing a lot, recovering weapons. Assumption: the partisan unit was betrayed; that’s based on my interp of the Twelfth SS war diary, which documents too big a haul for the meet-up to be by chance. Assumption: Krulov betrayed her. Because he was the only guy capable of betraying her, being the biggest guy on board. He was also the only guy capable of erasing her records in Russia, with the clout to have them erased in Germany, independently of each other. No motive yet. Next assumption: She escaped. Next week or so, nothing. Know: July 26, 1944, day big Russian offensive kicks off. Know: There was an atrocity in Yaremche, one hundred and thirty-five people killed. Assumption: That was retaliation for what we think was an assassination attempt, unsuccessful, on Groedl’s life. Assume Mili was killed or captured and later killed. Know: Germans hit the road, Groedl and the Police Battalion assholes were — okay, here’s something. I got something.”
“Let’s hear.”
“Krulov. Who was he? What happened to him? What would his motive have been? Maybe that’s where we ought to go next. Can Will handle that?”
“I see nothing wrong with that, except that if I give him Krulov to investigate, he will divorce me. He does have a real job, you know.”
“He’s a pro. Won’t faze him in the least.”
“I’ll point that out to him tonight in an e-mail.”
They paid and got up and headed down the street toward the Nadia. The town was pleasant, pinkish Georgian buildings, dapples of light overhanging the street of walkers, the cafés abustle. He thought of beer. Not a good idea. He turned elsewhere in his ruminations.
It was a blur, the rush of darkness, maybe a little noise announcing acceleration, but somehow he picked it up in his peripheral, got a hand on her to pull her back and pivoted, all this in some kind of supertime where he hadn’t been in years, and then the car hit him.