Black Market

“Why are you doing this to me? You're crazy.”

This was a little better, Carroll thought. He could sense she was melting a little, cracking at the edges.

“Tell me about Jack Jordan down in Colombia. American business accountant. Machine-gu

“I never heard of him.”

Carroll clucked his tongue and slowly shook his head back and forth. He seemed genuinely disappointed. Sitting behind the bare, bleak office desk, he looked like someone whose best friend had just inexplicably lied to him.

“Isabella… Isabella.” He gave an exaggerated sigh. “I don't think you get the total picture. I don't think you really understand.” He stood up, stretched his arms, fought back a yawn. “You see, you no longer exist. You died suddenly this morning. Taxi accident on East Seventieth Street. Nobody bothered to tell you?”

Carroll was feeling dangerously overloaded now. He didn't want to finish this brutal interrogation. He walked out of the questioning room without saying another word.

He'd done his best, he thought as he idly patrolled the long, blurry hallway outside, passing busy secretaries who were tapping away at purring typewriters.

He walked with his head down, talking to no one. Blood pounded furiously in his temples. He was drained and bleached, and his throat was dry. The vision of a cold beer and a shot had rooted itself firmly in his mind, and the image was roaring for attention.

He paused at a water fountain, pressed the button, and let the cold water splash across his face. It was better than nothing. He wiped his puckered lips with the back of his hand, then leaned against the wall. Isabella Marqueza. Green Band. A green ribbon tied neatly, almost cheerfully, around a plastique bomb in a cardboard box.

Questions. Too many disco

Ordinarily Carroll might have felt bad about the harshness of the Marqueza interrogation. Except he kept seeing the creased snapshot faces of the two senselessly murdered little Miller girls. Those two i

He finally trudged back to his office, where Isabella Marqueza was waiting.

She looked like a wilting flower. He'd read in her files that she'd joined a GRU terrorist cell in 1978, after which she'd worked for François Monserrat in South America, then in Montreal and Paris, and finally here in New York. Her supposed weakness was that she had little tolerance for discomfort and pain. She'd never had to suffer any in her life. Carroll considered that momentarily, then moved in for the kill.

An hour and a half later Carroll and Isabella Marqueza were finally begi

“You were François Monserrat's mistress here in New York. Come on. We already know about that. Two summers ago. Right here in Nueva York.”

Isabella Marqueza sat with her head hanging. She wouldn't look up at Carroll for long stretches of time. Dark sweat stains had spread under her arms. Her right leg kept tapping the floor nervously, but she didn't seem aware of it. She looked ill. Carroll decided to keep up his staccato attack. Stage three of his interrogation.

“Who the hell is Monserrat? How does he get his information? How does he get information that no one outside the United States government could possibly get? Who is he? Listen… listen to me very carefully… If you talk to me right now, if you tell me about François Monserrat-just his part in the bombing on Wall Street-if you do that much, I can let you leave here, I promise you. No one will know you were here. Just tell me about the Wall Street bombing. Nothing more than that. Nothing else… What does François Monserrat know about the firebombing?…”

It took thirty minutes more of cajoling, threatening, and screaming at Marqueza, thirty grueling minutes in which Carroll's voice grew hoarse and his face turned red, thirty minutes during which his shirt stuck to his sweaty body. Finally Isabella Marqueza stood up and shouted at him.

“Monserrat had nothing to do with it! He doesn't understand it, either… Nobody understands what the bombing is all about. He's looking for Green Band, too! Monserrat is looking for them, too!”

How do you know that, Isabella? How do you know what Monserrat is doing? You must have seen him!”

The woman clapped her hand across her hollow, darkened eyes. “I haven't seen him! I don't see him. Not ever.”

“Then how do you know?”

“There are telephone messages. There are sometimes whispers in private places. Nobody sees Monserrat.”

“Where is he, Isabella? Is he here in New York? Where the hell is he?

The South American woman shook her head stubbornly. “I don't know that, either.”

“What does Monserrat look like these days?”

“How should I know that? How should I know anything like that? He changes. Monserrat is always changing. Sometimes dark hair, a mustache. Sometimes gray hair. Dark glasses. Sometimes a beard.” She paused. “Monserrat doesn't have a face.”

Now conscious of having said too much, Isabella Marqueza had begun to sob loudly. Carroll sat back and rested his head against the grimy office wall. She didn't know anything more; he was almost certain he'd gone as far with her as he could possibly go.

Nobody had anything concrete about Green Band. Only that wasn't possible. Somebody had to know what the hell Green Band wanted.

But who?

Carroll looked up at the interrogation room ceiling before he shut his sore and heavy eyes.

Faded, yellowing newspapers, at least a dozen different ones dated October 25, 1929, were spread haphazardly across a heavy oak library-style worktable. The thirty- and forty-point headlines were as jarring now as they must have been fifty-odd years before.

WORST STOCK CRASH EVER; 12,894,650-SHARE

DAY SWAMPS MARKET; LEADERS CONFER, FIND

CONDITIONS SOUND.

WALL STREET PANIC! RECORD SELLING OF STOCKS!

HEAVY FALL IN PRICES!

STOCK PRICES SLUMP $14,000,000,000 IN

NATIONWIDE STAMPEDE TO UNLOAD; BANKERS TO

SUPPORT MARKET TODAY.

PRICES OF STOCKS CRASH IN HEAVY LIQUIDATION,

TOTAL DROP OF BILLIONS.

TWO MILLION SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND SHARES

SOLD IN THE FINAL HOUR IN RECORD DECLINE!

MANY INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTS WIPED OUT

COMPLETELY!

WHEAT SMASHED! CHICAGO PIT IN TURMOIL!

HOOVER PROMISES BUSINESS OF THE COUNTRY IS

STILL SOUND AND PROSPEROUS!

Caitlin Dillon finally stood up from the worktable and its musty newspaper clippings. She stretched her arms high over her head and sighed. She was on the fifth floor on 13 Wall Street, with Anton Birnbaum from the New York Stock Exchange Steering Committee.

Anton Birnbaum was one of America 's true financial geniuses, a wizard. If anyone understood that precarious castle of cards called Wall Street, it was Birnbaum. He had started, Caitlin knew, as an insignificant office boy at the age of eleven. Then he'd worked his way up through the market hierarchy to control his own huge investment house. Caitlin respected him more than any other man in the money business. Even at eighty-three his mind remained as sharp as a blade, and a mischievous light still burned in his eyes. She knew that now and then Anton Birnbaum looked her over appraisingly, delighted to be in the company of a young, attractive, and undeniably sharp-witted woman.

Once, there had even been a bizarre rumor on Wall Street that Birnbaum might be having a final fling with Caitlin Dillon. The relentless, often ridiculous gossip on the male-dominated Street was perhaps the most difficult business reality for any woman to face or stomach. If a woman broker or lawyer was seen having drinks or di