The art market reminded Dyson of Wall Street, where the rules applied only when you weren’t a member of the club. The philanthropist Norton Simon had once admitted he owned a bronze of the god Shiva smuggled from India. In fact, most of the Asian art he bought was smuggled. Even Boston’s august Museum of Fine Arts had once been caught red-handed with a stolen Raphael that the museum director claimed he had bought in Genoa.
Embittered was not how Dyson thought of himself. He was liberated. The requirements of vengeance clarified everything.
Malcolm Dyson had been labeled quite a few things before he escaped the clutches of U.S. law enforcement after the great insider-trading scandal, but the most popular seemed to be “the largest tax evader in the nation’s history.” This was not true. He personally knew of several famous, even legendary, titans of business, household names, who had evaded far more taxes than he’d ever tried to do.
In any case, he had been indicted on no fewer than fifty-one counts of tax evasion, tax fraud, and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. All his U.S. assets were frozen. There were extensive negotiations with the SEC and the Justice Department. He was looking at several years in prison even in the best of circumstances, and that was unacceptable. Had his former friend Warren Elkind not cooperated with the Justice Department to entrap him, none of this would have happened. They’d never have had the proof necessary to indict.
While the negotiations dragged on, Dyson made a business trip to Switzerland with his wife, Alexandra. They decided not to return. The Swiss government refused all American requests to extradite him. Their logic was unimpeachable: under Swiss law, Dyson had been charged with “fiscal violations,” which were not extraditable offenses. Was it a coincidence that Dyson also happened to be the largest corporate taxpayer in Switzerland?
Shortly afterward, he went to the bureau of vital statistics in Madrid, took an oath to the Spanish king, and renounced his U.S. citizenship. Now a citizen of Spain resident in Geneva, he never traveled by commercial airliner, because he feared bounty hunters. A very rich man in his position was easy prey. They would kidnap you and then demand a billion dollars or else they’d turn you over to the U.S. government. The U.S. Marshals Service was always trying to ensnare him. He traveled only by private jet.
Now, however, he didn’t particularly care whether the bounty hunters came after him. The light had gone out of his life. They had murdered his wife and daughter, and they had put him in a wheelchair, and they would pay dearly.
Dyson sat at his immense desk in his electric wheelchair, a small bald man with liver-spotted head and liver-spotted hands and eyes of gray steel, smoking a Macanudo. The door opened, and Martin Lomax entered. Tall, thin, balding, Lomax was colorless and faithful.
Lomax sat in his customary white-upholstered chair beside the desk and drew his ballpoint pen and pad of paper like a gun from a holster.
“I want to make sure,” Dyson said methodically to his assistant, “that we are entirely out of the stock market.”
Lomax looked up, puzzled, realizing that this was a question, not an instruction. He glanced at his wristwatch to check the date. “Yes,” he said, “we are. As of three days ago, actually.”
“And the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank? No change in its policy?”
“Correct. The Fed will no longer bail out banks. Our intelligence is good on this. Washington calls it ‘banking reform’-let the large depositors go down when a bank fails. Banks are getting too fast and loose anyway. Teach ’em a lesson.”
“All right.” Dyson whirred his wheelchair to one side and peered sadly out the floor-to-ceiling window at the rain. “Because our Prince of Darkness has gone to work.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Paul O. Morrison, deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, hurtled down a narrow corridor toward a conference room where some twenty-five people had been hastily assembled. In one hand was a manila folder containing a small stack of computer printouts, in the other a half-full mug of cold black coffee that sloshed onto the gray wall-to-wall carpeting as he ran.
He entered the conference room and could immediately sense the tension. Muttering an apology for his tardiness, he set down his mug on the large, gleaming mahogany table and looked around with a worried expression.
Morrison was small and thin, with heavy black-framed glasses and a sallow complexion. Forgoing any opening statement-they knew why they were here-he launched right in: “Um, I’ve got the complete transcript here.”
He handed the pile of printouts to the director of the Counterterrorism Center, a whippet-thin, athletic-looking, squash-playing man in his mid-fifties, Hoyt Phillips (Yale ’61), who took one and passed it on. Morrison waited as the transcripts made their way around the table.
The reaction was swift yet subdued: murmurings of amazement, the occasional whisper, and then a grave silence. He waited, his stomach queasy with acid, until everyone had finished reading.
The Counterterrorism Center-the existence of which was until recently one of the CIA’s closely held secrets-was founded in 1986 to deal with the government’s embarrassing inability to handle the steadily worsening plague of international terrorism.
The idea behind the center was simple: to give the dozen or so agencies in the U.S. government concerned with terrorism-from the FBI to the State Department, from the Pentagon to the Secret Service-one centralized location into which intelligence from around the world could be funneled, and where all terrorism-fighting efforts could be coordinated.
For years the CIA had resisted the notion. It ran against the very culture of the Agency, whose gentlemen spies much preferred fighting the Soviet menace to soiling their hands with terrorists.
Also, the CIA’s leadership never much liked the idea of sharing “product” with its siblings in the intelligence community. And in order for such a center to work, it would have to allow collectors-the people in the field who gather the information-to mingle with the analysts. That simply had never been done. The CIA almost always keeps a Chinese Wall between its analysts and its operators, so as not to taint the product. The folks in the trench coats, it was always believed, should do their spying without any sense of the larger picture, or at least without any agenda or bias. Leave the political bias to the desk jockeys.
But Director of Central Intelligence William Casey did not share this concern. He ordered the establishment of an interagency “fusion center” where specially chosen representatives of the intelligence community-eighteen or nineteen intelligence officers from the NSA, the FBI, INR (the State Department’s intelligence arm), the DIA, and other agencies-are detailed full-time. Although they work at CIA headquarters, their salaries are paid on a nonreimbursable basis by their home departments.
Until the spring of 1994, the twenty-five or so staff members of the center worked in an overcrowded warren of desks and partitions on the sixth floor of the CIA headquarters’ original building. Thereafter, they were located in a more spacious, much more modern area in the new building next door. But it was hardly sleek or impressive; no one who has ever been inside CIA headquarters would call the place sleek.
Anything that happens in the world that is in any way related to terrorism will flash across the computer terminals in the center. Armed with secure communications and other secure links to the NSA and other intelligence agencies, the Counterterrorism Center’s staff are charged with ensuring cooperation among the various agencies, putting out intelligence products (while protecting sources and methods), and quelling the disputes over credit that are so rife in government bureaucracies.