“At the time Schrade had no choice but to pay up. He was moving enormous amounts of money, and they were the only ones who could handle it. But it burned him up. Schrade hated the Russians, even though he’d made a lot of money out of corrupt Russians over the years. He never forgave them for dividing Germany after World War Two. That decision had ruined a huge family manufacturing business by splitting it in half. Spying against them was his revenge.”
Strand paused. “Wolf has a whole philosophy of revenge,” he said. “He’s a believer.”
Mara still hadn’t moved. Water was dripping from her body, from her hair, puddling on the tile floor.
“About this time my people learned that Schrade had had enough of shoveling money out to the Russians. To avoid the high laundering premiums, Schrade went to a great deal of time and expense to design and put in motion his own complex laundering operation that cut them out. We had an informant inside and followed the entire development.
“My immediate superior in the FIS at this time was a man named Bill Howard. He came up with a scheme to get Schrade to cooperate with us as a high-level informant. He drew up a secret engagement advance, proposing that we offer Schrade a negative incentive: The FIS would confront Schrade and show him that we knew all about his criminal connections with the Russians, the Chinese, Italians, the Yakuza, Uzbekistanis, Ukrainians. All of them. We’d show him we knew about his money laundering operation, inside out. We’d tell him that we’d overlook all of this-all of it-in exchange for information about his worldwide criminal associations. We would present him with a want list, and he would be expected to fill it. If he didn’t cooperate, we would arrange to have his criminal involvement exposed.
“The legality of Howard’s proposal was highly questionable, but the payoff was enticing. If Schrade was successful at fulfilling this list, we would have the most in-depth picture of global organized crime that any governmental agency had ever had. In the end someone in the FIS decided to take the risk. But it was a ‘shrouded’ operation-an FIS secret. Howard got the green light.”
Mara was now sitting on the foot of the bed, the towel tied around her chest. He was reminded of the first time he had seen her, drying herself with a towel after getting out of the pool at the River Oaks Swimming Club. He leaned a shoulder against the window frame, facing her, and went on.
“I had a problem with it. It had nothing to do with the morality of what we were doing. Intelligence services cozy up to the worst people in the world. Always have; always will. Sometimes intelligence services get what they need by making compromises that would seem abhorrent in another context. There’s no way around that. That’s just the way it is. In Schrade’s case, I was faced with other factors.
“First of all, every intelligence officer knows going into an operation like this that if it all unravels somehow, the lowest man in the pecking order is always the one who hangs. That was me. If the operation ever blew up in our faces, it would be a disaster for me personally. The legality of what we were doing would be challenged, and I would catch the full brunt of the investigation. I was very much at risk and knew it. So I had to assess that.
“Also troubling was the prospect of working with Wolfram Schrade. I detested the man. I’d learned too much about him when he was spying on the Russians for us.”
Strand stopped, thinking of Schrade. “He was internationally powerful, but wielded all of his influence from behind the scenes. Shunned publicity. Reclusive. You never saw his name in The Wall Street Journal or U.S. News amp; World Report or Fortune. You never heard his name in the news at all. If his legitimate business involvements were buried in secrecy, his illegitimate relationships were hidden even deeper. Almost even beyond rumor.
“I was assigned to work with him because he was a passionate art collector and had a scholarly hunger for knowledge about it. Read constantly. Studied. That was our connection. Much of our communication occurred in that context. It was an efficient and useful cover. Unfortunately, Schrade pursued art as ruthlessly as he pursued everything else. It wasn’t a pretty thing to see, and I hated that he was even remotely involved in something that meant so much to me.”
Strand twisted his shoulders against the window frame, trying to alleviate the growing tension.
“What troubled me the most about what we were about to do was that we were turning a blind eye on too much crime. Considering the amount-and type-of criminal enterprises Schrade was involved in, by giving him a free hand, regardless of the kind of information he was feeding to us, I thought we were dangerously close to becoming part of the problem instead of part of the solution. I didn’t like it at all.”
Mara sat straight backed as a sphinx and just as silent, watching him. He could hardly blame her. God only knew what he would say next, where this was taking him and, by extension, her too.
He shook his head and looked outside again. Her total focus on him was understandable, but it was also disconcerting.
“God help me, I went ahead with it.”
CHAPTER 16
VIENNA
“You know how much Harry hated Wolfram Schrade,” Ariana said. “You must’ve known.”
“Sure.”
“He was never comfortable having to launder for him.”
“Nobody was asking him to be comfortable with it.”
She threw him an amused look. He could barely hide his intolerance of Strand, who had never been enough of a team player in his opinion. Howard used to keep a firmer grip on his biases. Things changed. Ariana ignored his testiness.
“It’s too late to talk about scruples, too late to claim we had any”-she shook her head, remembering-“but Harry came the closest of any of us to agonizing over what we did for Schrade.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, Bill, it’s true. Harry never believed in the ‘percentages’ argument, that official explanation that we all pretended was a genuine justification. Help one murderer kill a few people and use the information he gives us to prevent ten murderers from killing hundreds of people.”
“Well, he may not have believed it, but he bloody well spent nearly twenty years doing just exactly that,” Howard said.
“Maybe, but he paid a terrible price.”
“We all do. That’s the cost of fighting a war. You sacrifice the few to save the many. The concept is as old as civilization.”
“See,” she said. “You have it all worked out, a little moral formula that sums it all up neatly so that we don’t have to confront the terrible things that we do. If someone asks us how we could do such things, if, in the middle of the night, we ask ourselves how we could have done such things, we immediately hold up the formula, like a talisman. It makes everything justifiable, helps us look at ourselves in the mirror without turning away in shame.” She stopped. “Harry refused to do that.”
“Christ, you sound like you want to canonize him.”
“I am just trying to help you understand what I am about to tell you, Bill. It may be more complex than it first appears to you.”
In a way, she sympathized with Bill Howard. He had not advanced in the FIS the way he had wanted. He would end his career as a station chief, and although that in itself was an admirable accomplishment and Vienna was a plum assignment, it was not as good as having a headquarters position with division-level responsibilities in Washington. That was what Howard wanted and had wanted for a long time and would never get. Now this scandal. It had happened on his watch, and Howard knew that it had destroyed even the slightest little ray of hope that he might have been able to keep alive that maybe, someday, he would be called out of the dubious shadows and into the respectable light of a Washington directorate office.