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Insurers had similar problems. Market researchers hungered after precise data on individuals. So did fund raisers. Special- ized address lists found a thriving market. Journalists would pay for subscription lists, and a quick sneak call to a databank could dredge up painful rumors that governments and compa- nies suppressed.
Private security agencies were at home in the data demi- monde. Since the collapse of the Cold War intelligence apparats, there were legions of aging, demobilized spooks scrabbling out a living in the private sector. A shielded phone line to the havens-was a boon for a private investigator.
Even computer-dating services kicked in their bit.
The havens were bootstrapping their way up to Big Brother status, trading for scattered bits of information, then collating it and selling it back-as a new and sinister whole.
They made a business of abstracting, condensing, index- ing, and verifying-like any other modern commercial database.
Except, of course, that the pirates were carnivorous. They ate other databases when they could, blithely ignoring copyrights and simply storing everything they could filch. This didn't require state-of-the-art computer expertise. Just memory by the ton, and plenty of cast-iron gall.
Unlike old-fashioned smugglers, the haven pirates never had to physically touch their booty. Data had no substance.
EFT Commerzbank, for instance, was a legitimate corpora- tion in Luxembourg. Its illegal nerve centers were safely stowed away in Turkish Cyprus. The same went for the
Singaporeans-, they had the dignified cover of an address in
Bencoolen Street, while the machinery hummed merrily in
Nauru, a sovereign Pacific Island nation with a population of
12,000. For their part, the Grenadians simply brazened it out.
All three groups were monetary banks as well. This was handy for laundering client funds, and a ready source of necessary bribes. Since the invention of electronic funds trans- fer, money itself had become just another form of data. Their host governments were not inclined to quibble.
So, Laura thought, the basic principles of operation were clear enough. But they created, not solidarity, but bitter rivalry.
Names were freely exchanged during the more heated mo- ments. The ancestral lineage of the havens saddled them with an unhelpful and sometimes embarrassing heritage. During occasional bursts of frankness, whole whale-pods of these large and awkward facts surfaced and blew steam, while
Laura marveled.
The EFT Commerzbank, she learned, drew its roots mainly from the old heroin networks of the south of France, and from the Corsican Black Hand. After the Abolition, these clunky gutter operations had been modernized by former French spooks from
"La Piscine," the legendary Corsican school for paramilitary saboteurs. These right-wing commandos, tradi- tionally the rogue elephants of European espionage, drifted quite naturally into a life of crime once the French govern- ment had cut off their paychecks.
Additional muscle came from a minor galaxy of French right-wing action groups, who abandoned their old careers of bombing trains and burning synagogues, to join the data game. Further allies came from the criminal families of the
European Turkish minority, accomplished heroin smugglers who maintained an unholy linkage with the Turkish fascist underground.
All this had been poured into Luxembourg and allowed to set for twenty years, like some kind of horrible aspic. By now a kind of crust of respectability had formed, and the EFT
Commerzbank was making some attempt to disown its past.
The others refused to make it easy for them. Egged on by
Winston Stubbs, who remembered the event, Monsieur
Karageorgiu was forced to admit that a member of the Turkish
"Gray Wolves" had once shot a pope.
Karageorgiu defended the Wolves by insisting that the action was "business." He claimed it was a revenge opera- tion, recompense for a sting by the Vatican's corrupt Banco
Ambrosiano. The Ambrosiano, he explained, had been one of
Europe's first truly "underground" banks, before the present system had settled. Standards had been different then-back in the rough-and-tumble glory days of Italian terrorism.
Besides, Karageorgiu pointed out smoothly, the Turkish gunman had only wounded Pope John Paul II. No worse than a kneecapping, really. Unlike the Sicilian Mafia-who were so a
Pope John Paul I stone dead.
Laura believed very little of this-she noticed Ms. Emer- son smiling quietly to herself-but it was clear that the other pirates had few doubts. The story fit precisely into the folk mythos of their enterprise. They shook their heads over it with a kind of rueful nostalgia. Even Mr. Shaw looked vaguely impressed.
The Islamic Bank's antecedents were similarly mixed. Triad syndicates were a major factor. Besides being criminal broth- erhoods, the Triads had always had a political side, ever since their ancient origins as anti-Manchu rebels in seventeenth- century China.
The Triads had whiled away the centuries in prostitution, gambling, and drugs, with occasional breaks for revolution, such as the Chinese Republic of 1912. But their ranks had swollen drastically after the People's Republic had absorbed
Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many diehard capitalists had fled to
Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, where the oil money still ran fast and deep. There they prospered, selling rifles and shoulder-launched rockets to Kurdish separatists and Afghani mujahideen, whose bloody acres abounded, in poppies and ca
According to Karageorgiu, the Triad secret societies had never forgotten the Opium Wars of the 1840s, in which the
British had deliberately and cynically hooked the Chinese populace on black opium. The Triads, he alleged, had delib- erately promoted heroin use in the West in an attempt to rot
Western morale.
Mr. Shaw acknowledged that such an action would only have been simple justice, but he denied the allegation. Be- sides, he pointed out, heroin was now out of favor in the
West. The drug-using populace had dwindled with the aging of the population, and modern users were more sophisticated.
They preferred untraceable neurochemicals to crude vegetable extracts. These very neurochemicals now boiled out of the high-tech drug vats of the Caribbean.
This accusation wounded Winston Stubbs. The Rastafarian underground had never favored "steel drugs." The substances they made were sacramental, like communion wine, meant to assist in "i-tal meditation."
Karageorgiu scoffed at this. He knew the real sources of the Grenadian syndicate and recited them with relish. Cocaine- crazed Colombians cruising the streets of Miami in armored vans crammed with Kalashnikovs. Degraded Cuban boat- lifters, speckled with prison tattoos, who would kill for a cigarette. Redneck American swindlers like "Big Bobby"
Vesco, who had specialized in the sucker's shell game with a series of offshore fronts.
Winston Stubbs heard the man out peaceably, trying to defuse Laura's horror with skeptical brow wrinkling and little pitying shakes of his head. But he bristled at this last remark.
Mr. Robert Vesco, he said indignantly, had at one point owned the government of Costa Rica. And in the legendary
LOS scam, Vesco had liberated $60 million of illegally in- vested CIA retirement funds. This action showed that Vesco's heart was righteous. There was no shame in having him as forefather. The man was a duppy conqueror.
After the second day's negotiations broke up, Laura shakily joined Debra Emerson out on the seaside verandah for a private conference. "Well," said Emerson cheerfully. "This has certainly cleared the air."