Black Market

Actually, Caitlin had met Anton Birnbaum years before, while she was still at Wharton. Her thesis adviser had invited the financier for a guest lecture during her final year. After one of his characteristically iconoclastic talks, Birnbaum had consented to private sessions with a few of the business school's brightest students. One of them turned out to be Caitlin Dillon, about whom Birnbaum later told her adviser: “She is extremely intense, and quite brilliant. Her only flaw is that she is beautiful. I mean that quite seriously. It will be a problem for her on Wall Street. It will be a serious handicap.”

When Caitlin Dillon graduated from Wharton, Anton Birnbaum nevertheless hired her as an assistant at his brokerage firm. Within a year Caitlin was one of his personal assistants. Unlike many of the people he hired, Caitlin would disagree with the great financier when she felt he was off base. Early in 1978 she correctly called the market bottom and then the top right before the bloody October massacre. Anton Birnbaum began to listen even more closely to his young, and still very intense, assistant after that.

During that period, Caitlin also began to make the Wall Street and Washington co

“Anton, who would benefit from a stock market crash right now? Let's make ourselves a complete list, a physical list, as some kind of starting place.”

“All right, let's explore that avenue, then. People who would benefit from a market crash?” Birnbaum took a legal pad and pencil in hand. “A multinational that has a huge discrepancy to hide?”

“That's one. Or the Soviets. They'd possibly benefit-in terms of world prestige, anyway…”

“Then perhaps one of the Third World madmen? I believe Qaddafi is psychologically capable of something like this. Perhaps capable of getting the necessary financing as well.”

Caitlin looked at her watch, a functional, ten-year-old Bulova, a gift from her father one Christmas back home in Ohio. “I don't know what to try next. What are they waiting for? What in God's name happens when the market opens on Monday?”

Birnbaum took off his horn-rimmed eyeglasses and rubbed the bridge of his bulbous nose, which was reddened and deeply indented. “Will the market even open, Caitlin? The French want it to. They're insisting they will open in Paris. I don't know, though. Perhaps it's one of their typical bluffs.”

“Which means the Arabs want their French banks open. Some toady in Paris wants to take advantage of this awful situation-or hopes to get some of the money out before there's a complete panic.”

Birnbaum replaced his glasses and gazed at Caitlin for a moment. Then he gave one of his characteristic shrugs, a huffy gesture of the shoulders that was barely perceptible. “President Kearney is at least talking with the French. They've never appreciated him, though. We haven't been able to placate them since Kissinger.”

“What about London? What about Geneva? How about right here in New York?”

“They're all watching France, I'm afraid. France is threatening to open its market, business as usual on Monday. The French, my dear, are being carefully, carefully orchestrated. But by whom? And for what possible reason? What is coming next?” He placed his fingertips together, making a small cathedral of his ancient hands. He narrowed his eyes and looked thoughtfully at Caitlin.

Caitlin and the old man were quiet for several moments. Over the years they had become comfortable with long periods of silent thought when they were examining a problem together. Caitlin watched as the financier took out a cigar, his only remaining vice, and stroked and lit it methodically.

Within moments the room was filled with a soft blue fog. Birnbaum studied the glowing tip of the cigar, then set it down in a well-worn brass ashtray.

“I'll tell you something, my dear. In all my years on the Street, I have never felt this apprehensive. Not even in October of 1929.”

Bendel's on Fifty-seventh Street had been open all day Sunday for the usual neurotic rush of Christmas shopping. Store sales were dramatically down, however, affected by the Wall Street panic and the financial uncertainty reigning not only in New York, but all across the United States.

François Monserrat entered the very chic and expensive department store at a little past five that evening. Another snowstorm was darkly threatening outside. Winter skies had descended like a heavy curtain over the entire East Coast.

Monserrat was wearing thick wire-rimmed glasses and an unmemorable gray tweed overcoat. He also wore a matching hat and black gloves, all of which created a monochromatic impression. The wire-rimmed glasses magnified his eyes for observers but didn't distort his view of the world. He'd had them especially made by a lens grinder on the rue des Postes in Bizerte, a city in Tunisia.

Monserrat quietly marveled as he got off a crowded elevator onto one of the upper floors. There was nowhere else, no city he knew of, in which one consistently saw quite so many provocative and stu

“I've already experienced it. In Thailand, my dear,” François Monserrat answered with a shy smile and an effete wave of the hand.

The demonstrator smiled back, slinking off politely, but seductively, to try the next customer.

A thick gallery of shoppers hugging glittering shopping bags from other famous department stores moved slowly before Monserrat's wandering eyes. “Winter Wonderland” played gaily from a hidden stereo system. It was taxing and exceedingly difficult to move through the crowd; it was more like visiting a New York disco than a store at Christmastime.

François Monserrat cautiously made his way toward the rear of the store. With some amusement he wondered how Juan Carlos would have reacted to the blatant outrage of capitalism that was Henri Bendel's… In 1979-because his flagrant need for publicity had finally rendered him ineffective-Ilych Sanchez, “Juan Carlos,” had been quietly retired by the Soviet GRU. Carlos had, in fact, been brought to live in the one capital city where he was reasonably safe from political assassination- Moscow itself.

That same year François Monserrat expanded his tight-fisted control of North and South America to include Western Europe. Carlos's protégés, Wadi Haddad and George Habbash, reluctantly came under Monserrat's widening sphere. A completely new philosophy for Soviet terror had begun: strategic and controlled terror; terror more often than not programmed by Moscow 's sophisticated computers.

By its very nature, the world of the terrorist was a foggy, vaporous place, and information had a tendency to be either sketchy or hyperbolic. The sinewy avenues of communication and news were vague at times; at other times they were overloaded with rumor and i

As he strolled through the store, Monserrat reflected on his reputation with a measure of pride. What did it matter if he'd been responsible for this act or that one-when his only real goal, his sole driving force, was the total disruption and eventual fall of the West? A dead Egyptian president. A wounded pope. A few Irish bombs. These amounted to nothing more than a few grains of sand on a beach. What François Monserrat was interested in changing was the direction of the tide itself…