Black Market

SAALAM: Yeah, I did.

CARROLL: Good. Thank you for your forthrightness. Now, who did you sell the M-23s to? Wait. Before you answer. Remember that I'm the PLO. Don't say anything you'd be afraid to say to a PLO investigator in Beirut.

SAALAM: I don't know who they are.

CARROLL: Oh, Jesus Christ.

SAALAM: No, wait a minute. They knew who I was. They knew everything about me. I never saw nobody, I swear it. I felt like they had set me up.

CARROLL: I love former-inmate sincerity. Unfortunately, I happen to believe you… Because that's what your current roommate, Mr. Rashad, said, too. Please get the hell out of here now… Oh, by the way, Mr. Saalam. We had to rent your apartment up in Yonkers. We rented it to a very nice welfare lady, with these three little kids.

SAALAM: You did what?

CARROLL: We rented the apartment you were selling guns out of. We rented it to a nice lady with a batch of kids. Skoal, brother.

“It's all so incredibly methodical. That's what is so mystifying. They keep evading all contact with this huge international police dragnet. How?”

Caitlin Dillon lit up a cigarette and slowly drew in millions of carcinogens.

She and eighty-three-year-old Anton Birnbaum, both red-eyed and exhausted, sat together on stiff leather Harvard chairs in Birnbaum's Wall Street office. Caitlin was a good six inches taller than the birdlike, deceptively frail financier. Earlier in her career, when she had worked for Birnbaum, he wouldn't walk anywhere on Wall Street with her for that very reason. “Vanity is a living legend,” she'd kidded him once she found out the truth.

Anton Birnbaum rubbed the small of his back as he talked. “Something so very methodical, so carefully orchestrated… something absolutely systematic is happening throughout Western Europe right now.”

Caitlin watched Birnbaum's face with its corrugated lines, which shifted and moved as he spoke. She waited patiently for more to come. It usually did with Anton, who thought much faster than he could now speak.

“There is a book… The Real War, it's called. The book's central thesis is that Germany and Japan have found an eminently reasonable road to further world conquest. Through commerce. That's the real war. As a country, we're losing that war spectacularly, don't you think, Caitlin?”

The former chairman of the venerable investment house, Levitt Birnbaum, was something of a prig, Caitlin knew. He could be savagely impatient with people he didn't like or respect, but he was also undeniably brilliant. Anton Birnbaum had been adviser to presidents, to kings, to multinational corporations such as Fiat, Procter & Gamble, Ford Motor. He had controlled the fate of untold billions of dollars. Anton Birnbaum had also been one of Caitlin's staunchest backers ever since she'd first left the Wharton School. Only as she'd come intimately to know Birnbaum had she begun to understand why.

Caitlin Dillon was a challenging mystery that Birnbaum still hadn't completely solved. She was a natural businessperson, perhaps the most gifted Anton Birnbaum had met. She had the intelligence, the necessary discipline, and the kinds of instincts Birnbaum rarely saw anymore. Yet she seemed to have little interest in actually making money.

She was a confounded mystery in other ways as well. She had been brought up in a small Ohio town, yet she exhibited the most cosmopolitan tastes and opinions. She spoke German and French fluently. She kept surprising Birnbaum with new talents whenever they spent time together.

Of course, her father had been teaching her about the stock market since she had expressed an interest in high school. But there was more to it than early coaching. Caitlin Dillon obviously wanted to be a force on Wall Street. Anton Birnbaum was certain that she wanted to be a legend one day herself. He steadfastly refused ever to say it out loud, even to hint it to his male peers, that the financier's protégée was a woman.

“What do you think is happening in Western Europe? We're having an impossible time piecing it together, Anton. Some very important data are missing. The absolutely essential thread of logic that might explain who they are.” Caitlin stood up and wandered around the old man's office as she talked.

She stopped with her back to the window and looked at the framed photographs on the walls. There was Anton, snapped in the company of the very powerful and famous. Statesmen, controversial industrialists, people from the entertainment industry… there were photos of Konrad Adenauer, Harold MacMillan, and Anwar Sadat. Also Henry Ford and J. Paul Getty. John Ke

Anton Birnbaum scratched the bridge of his blotched and mottled nose as he contemplated his choice of words. He was reminded once again that Caitlin was one of the few people on Wall Street he could really talk to. Complex explanations of his theories and insights were u

“The Europeans simply don't trust us. Which is precisely why they don't talk to us anymore. They believe we have different attitudes, different priorities toward the Middle East, also toward the Soviet bloc. They're certain we're too casual about the dangers of a nuclear war. They don't feel we understand Marxist-Leninist ideology.”

Birnbaum stared directly into Caitlin's deep brown eyes. His own eyes were watering hopelessly behind thick glasses. He reminded Caitlin of Mole in The Wind in the Willows.

“I sound like an alarmist, no? But I feel the intrinsic truth of what I'm saying. Almost prima facie, I feel it. There will be a crash now. I believe there will be a serious crash, possibly another Black Friday. Very, very soon.”

Caitlin sat down on the stiff leather chair.

Another Black Friday, her mind raced. A stock market crash! Her own worst fears had been confirmed by the man she most respected on the Street. Her father's jeremiads twenty years before had finally come home to roost.

Complete collapse; the entire economic system falling. Impossible ideas were formulating in her brain.

She stared at Birnbaum and saw that he was watching her with an expression of vague sorrow. The light from an antique brass lamp turned the lines on his face into deep dark bands.

Complete collapse… The phrase continued to ring. It meant the end of an entire way of life.

And after the failure of an economic system, who would survive? Who would finally crawl out of the rubble and be able to go on? If she had the answer to that, maybe she'd also have the answer to the mystery of Green Band.

Anton Birnbaum spoke again. “As I said, I think we could be in the middle of a war. The money war. The great Third World War we have so long feared-it may already be upon us.”

25

Manhattan

“Goddamn it! Look at this! Look at this now!” The speaker was Walter Trentkamp, and his voice was harsh with disbelief. “Gentlemen, it's happening everywhere!”

Philip Berger, Trentkamp, and General Frederick House were gathered around the computer terminals when Caitlin and Carroll arrived. Several display screens were working simultaneously, rapidly flashing words as well as color graphics.

Berger glaneed up as Caitlin Dillon and Carroll hurried across the crisis room.

“Emergency reports have been coming in for about fifteen, twenty minutes,” he said to the others. “Since three-thirty our time. They've definitely got something hopping. Something's happening all over the world this time.”

Paris, France

At one o'clock Paris time, on December 14, La Compagnie des Agents was suddenly closed by official order of the president of France.

All stock trading was immediately halted on the Bourse.

Bourse officials reluctantly admitted that the market's CAC Index had fallen more than three percent in a single morning.