The Sweeney 02 Page 18

  There was someone in the telephone booth outside 135 Madison. A guy about six feet tall wearing a brown wool coat with a Persian lamb collar. He stepped out as Regan alighted from the cab. He hardly gave Regan a glance. Regan filed a thumbnail description into his memory in the event that he should have any future beyond the next few minutes. As he stepped into the phone booth he picked up the receiver and cupped it to his ear pretending to dial and talk into the phone. In fact, he pulled the transceiver up the front of his coat and pressed the TRANSMIT button. “I’m here. One-thirty-five Madison. Are you receiving?” He pressed CALL.

  The low Italian voice came back. “Right. Now you have to move fast on this one.”

  “No answers until I get a question answered. How did those guys find me at Rockefeller Plaza if they’re not employees of yours?”

  “No questions. Except mine. The big one, Mr. Regan. I take it you got part two of your papers? Answer my question and you get part three and complete the set.”

  “I’m waiting for your question,” Regan said.

  “I said it’s the big one. There’s only one. Where’s the money, where’s the Dibouti money?”

  “You know where it is. It’s here—in the Chemical Bank.” Regan tried a wild guess.

  “Listen, you English bastard. I know it’s in the Chemical Bank. But where? What deposits? Under whose names?” The Italian voice rose, unable to control its anger.

  Regan saw the cab stop at the far side of the junction, twenty yards away. He saw the two black-coated guys get out. Both made off down the side of East Thirty-second Street. Why? he wondered. A back way around to approach the bank?

  “We change the rules, here and now.” Regan spoke into the transceiver. “This time you tell me where part three of my papers are first, then I tell you the account numbers and the names of the corporations that got the Dibouti money.” Regan tried hard to keep some kind of authentic note in his lying voice. “Otherwise, if I tell you what I know, why should I trust you to tell me where my papers are? Over.”

  A long pause, then the soft Italian voice, recovered from its anger. “Okay. I tell you where your papers are, but I have people there at One-thirty-five Madison. So keep your part of the bargain. Your papers are just inside the door of the bank in a wastebasket under the first table...”

  Regan’s eyes were instinctively on the door of the bank— a man, elegantly dressed in a long black leather coat and black leather homburg, parading a very small Pekinese, was pushing open the doors and walking into the bank. The leather coat and hat and dog went no way to disguising the inelegant form of Lieutenant Cassidy.

  Regan threw open the door of the phone booth and made his run for the bank. He didn’t know what to expect. Nothing, or maybe a hail of bullets hammering white cement tracks across the paving in front of him. All he positively knew was that he was in danger, which continued to increase his momentum until the full length of his body hit the front door and he rocketed into the bank.

  He registered the daguerreotypes of the poses-—fifty people swung around and frozen for full seconds as he collided with an aging matron in mink, and they both went down in a sprawling heap of curses and screams. He saw the fractured expressions of bank personnel, statues frozen in the execution of their duty. He saw the uniformed bank security guard swing around to face him over ten feet of pile carpet, no expression on the man’s face except amazement that a body should bullet through the door and hit an old woman amidships. He saw Cassidy turn and give him an instant’s glance but then walk on, heading for the back of the high-ceilinged room. But what he really saw, what froze his gaze and made him focus in on, was a small man sitting behind a long desk who was staring at him just as intensely. On the desk was a discreet bronze plate and the name: A. H. HUTCHINS, CASHIER. The last time that Regan had seen this man was in the lounge of the Aerial Hotel, London Airport—a small man, wearing a particularly bad toupee. But a man fast on his feet. He had disappeared three minutes before Regan had arrested all those others, checked out of the hotel, and vanished. The name on the passport he had left behind was Ricky Rossi.

  How long had Rossi, listed in the information file that Seebohm had assembled as one of the leading Lexington Bank shareholders, been the humble cashier A. H. Hutchins at Chemical Bank, Madison Avenue? And what were the ramifications of his employment? After all, he hardly needed a salary—he was now probably the sole owner of the hundred-million-dollar Dibouti investment. These and other questions crowded Regan’s mind as he disentangled himself from the old woman, got up, and began to race toward Rossi’s desk. Was this really the time and place to grab Rossi? Regan answered himself, yes, as Rossi, seeing Regan and recognizing him, began slowly to rise from his chair. And then Regan saw three things: the horror on Rossi’s face; Seebohm stepping out from an office at the very end of the room, Remington rifle in hand; and Cassidy hurling himself forward for cover behind a desk and pulling out his Magnum. But the shot didn’t come from Cassidy, Seebohm, Regan, or the security man. The shotgun was fired from behind Regan by one of the black-coated men, at Rossi, the last Mafia guy in the long chain that Regan had been duped into identifying.

  Rossi’s head exploded in a lace of blood as his body jerked his feet backward, a broken doll hurled aside by a mad child. The black-coated guy fired a second time, this time blindly at Regan, a third of the shot peppering white-hot metal into Regan’s back and spinning him forward and down. And the reason the shot was off target was that Cassidy had killed the guy a microsecond before he pulled the trigger on Regan. And Seebohm, white-faced, was screaming at Cassidy, “No!” But it was too late.

  And then all hell broke loose. The bank security guy, his gun on Cassidy, fired two wild shots that blew in a plate-glass partition window that Cassidy was framed against. Then Seebohm was firing over the security guy’s head, screaming every kind of obscenity at him and waving his police ID, but the guy panicked, knowing for sure the unthinkable had happened, a bank heist was going on, then realizing it wasn’t.

  Then there was a teller with a small-caliber pistol firing warning shots at the ceiling, but they could hardly be heard because alarm bells were going, and each of the two dozen women in the room was screaming and some of the men also as they charged and collided with each other attempting to find a safe exit from the room.

  Regan was on the floor, peppered in shot and wet with blood all the way down his back and legs. And suddenly Cassidy was on top of him, and he seemed to be trying to strangle him but he wasn’t. He was ripping the Sanyo transceiver out from Regan’s coat pocket and hurling it across the room. And Regan wondered, the moment the transceiver hit the wall, whether the detonator inside it was triggered by radio control at exactly the moment it hit the wall, or whether the shock of impact accidentally triggered it. Whatever the explanation, as it struck the wall the receiver went off with an explosion that blew everybody off their feet and shattered out every window in the bank.

  He tasted the nausea of morphine. He couldn’t understand why he was strapped to a padded board, and then slowly from the confusion of awakening consciousness he salvaged some of his images and memories. He remembered dimly being tied to the board, and it being propped up at an angle of forty-five degrees against the wall of the operating theater, and two doctors, one digging out the pieces of shot in his back and legs, the other pulling the tiny deep wounds together with delicate stitches, while an anesthetist kept him groggy and a nurse mopped away blood and debris. And he seemed to remember that the operation went on for a long time. Then some orderlies came and took the board, and he was still strapped to it, and put it on a bed in a small cubicle and pulled a sheet over him. A severe-looking male nurse of around sixty was left mounting guard on his needs. He came out of a fog of morphine and complained about the lights, the light intensity. The nurse said he would do something about it and went off.

  And then Regan was left alone for eternity. But somehow eternity ended, and the door opened and in came Captain Seebohm and a tall,
elegantly dressed man smelling of Brut and high-polished shoes. He was wearing expensive handmade spectacles which covered a pair of dead eyes.

  Seebohm sat down on a chair. The man stood.

  Seebohm coughed as if calling on the assembled’s attention, which he had anyway, except that Regan was weak and knew he had options, the ability to drift away if he felt any of the Captain’s explanation tiresome, lying, or redundant.

  “This is Mr. Holman,” Seebohm said flatly, as if it was an invidious task to introduce Regan to this man. “Mr. Holman and I are here to acquaint you with a number of facts which we feel you should know, and then obtain your agreement to our mutual confidentiality.” He turned to the tall man. “Are you going to kick off, sir?”

  The tall man considered, then shook his head. “You press on, Captain Seebohm. You know what he already knows of the background.”

  “Just one second,” Regan said, his voice hard and guttural and dry with drugs. “Introduce your friend. Tell me what Mr. Holman does for a living.”

  “I’m not at liberty to divulge Mr. Holman’s—”

  “I am,” Regan snapped. “I know. I worked it out. There was only one organization of professional murderers who could have killed Cohen and Rossi and Galliano. The CIA. I know it. Now I want you to tell me why!”

  Seebohm looked awkward, then looked relieved as he decided a major hurdle was in fact over. He drew up his chair, made an effort, and modified his stern expression. “We want to tell you the story about the Dibouti money. I’ll try to keep it brief. I’ll start at the beginning, because we now have a beginning.” He relaxed into his best bedside manner. “Eighteen months ago, Major Holman of the CIA found that arms, tanks, guns, rockets, a whole range of military aid being sent by the U.S. to Dibouti, North Africa, was not getting to its destination. The Minister of Finance, Dr. Barundi, and the Dibouti President, Kofe Okani, were arranging for the stuff to be taken off one ship and putting it on other ships, destination Libya. I think you may know that Libya is a country that is not exactly a friend of the U.S. These two men were doing this for money, money that would end up in secret bank accounts in Switzerland. A helluva lot of money. The Libyans paid them a hundred million dollars. It was a nice caper, but there was a problem. Major Holman was on to them. When three Dibouti agents of Barundi hit Switzerland to start to make arrangements to secretly bank the money when it arrived from Dibouti, Holman arranged their assassinations...”

  Seebohm turned to Holman with an expression that seemed to ask whether he was going too far. Holman was looking at Regan impassively and made no comment.

  “Kofe Okani was no fool,” Seebohm continued. “He had a hundred million dollars to bank, and the CIA hanging around making sure he couldn’t bank it. He’d spent time as a student and hustler in New York. He realized there was one organization that might outflank the CIA—the Mafia. He made contact. They were interested. A team was gotten together and flew to Germany. So far so good.”

  Regan nodded. He was resigned to waiting patiently for the information he didn’t know.

  “The deal in Germany was done very quickly. It involved the use of a merchant bank there which had large petrochemical industry customers who were paying deutsche marks for Libyan oil products. The bank kept the deutsche marks. Their customers’ Libyan oil products were paid for with Libyan currency the Libyans had given to Okani. So the Dibouti money ended up in a German bank in deutsche marks. The concept was to first get the money into deutsche marks, then to move it around several banks in Europe, including the Bank of England, and possibly a merchant bank in England, split the sum up among many banks, so that the CIA’s pursuit of the money became more complicated, if not impossible.”

  Regan stopped him. “What d’you mean, ‘CIA pursuit of the money’?”

  Seebohm shot another look to Holman as if for confirmation. “The money Barundi and Okani robbed came from armaments bought by the American taxpayer. It was the CIA’s duty to recover the money.”

  Holman nodded vaguely.

  Seebohm continued. “So they went to London to further the process of splitting up this sum of money before finally funneling it back to Geneva, and what happens? You arrest them. The FBI gives you instructions. You’re to give them the chance to flee to New York, which they take, leaving all the documents in your hands.”

  Regan was already worried. There were so many questions to be asked and answered, he thought he should make some kind of start. “Why aren’t the FBI represented at this meeting?”

  “Later,” Seebohm said.

  Regan didn’t know if he meant the FBI would be arriving later, or an explanation for their absence would be offered later.

  “So you arrive in New York, and within an hour the vital papers have disappeared and you’ve come out with some wild story. And we, of course, conclude that sure, phony offices were set up, but in fact you’ve been gotten at by the Mafia and accepted an offer of a piece of the action.”

  “Fair enough,” Regan said.

  “So now we set you up. We give you Cassidy and Ciales. Their job is to follow you everywhere, find your connection to the Mafia. Meanwhile there’s been a change of plans by the Mafia. They’ve decided to double-cross Barundi and Okani, cut them out, and transfer the money to the States. Things start to hot up.”

  Regan struggled to concentrate, to try and find holes in the story. But it was logical. Seebohm no longer had any need to prevaricate.

  “It was always in the cards. The Africans had intimations of a double cross a week before you arrested the guys in London. In fact, a guy called Eti Awolwe, a cousin of Okani, came to New York expressly to put pressure on a Mafia lawyer, Salvatore Cimini. Cimini found out, panicked, and struck first, and killed Awolwe. You following all this?”

  “Yes,” Regan agreed. “Keep going.”

  “So they get the money to New York, the papers back from you, and then they start to die...”

  “Major Holman’s department?” Regan looked at the CIA man, but he said nothing.

  Seebohm cut across. “They must have been shitting themselves day and night. How could a backward country like Dibouti have an organization of assassins operating in New York and no escape from them? I understand it never occurred to them that they were being liquidated by the CIA.”

  “How d’you know all this?” Regan demanded.

  “Brown continued to talk back in the hospital after his Croton visit.”

  Holman entered the discussion. “So we were removing these people, and one of them, Cohen, whom we dealt with in New Jersey, had all the papers that you brought from London stacked up on the desk in his den. So that’s how we came into possession of your papers. But you were still a suspect.” Holman now hesitated, as if he’d decided he didn’t want to get further involved in telling the story.

  Seebohm took the cue and resumed. “We get the papers from Cohen’s house in New Jersey, but they do not explain some key details. Major omissions are the names of the three New York banks that are to be used in the final processing of this money into a final single account. Cassidy located the first bank, the Lexington. By the time we got there the money had passed on the route to two more unknown banks. We knew there were three banks from your papers, but not their names.”

  Holman stepped in again. “We lose you for a few hours, Mr. Regan, and the next time we pick you up it’s in the process of following one of the last two leads we have. We’re still following Senti. We’ve kept tabs on him since he arrived in New York, but he’s done nothing except hide away in a hotel. And then suddenly he’s dressed as a chauffeur walking into Hannan Mills and you’re about to rendezvous with him, and that makes you real high in the running as a Mafia associate.”

  “We give you one last chance,” Seebohm conceded.

  “And a walkie-talkie.”

  “Your voice on the transceiver?”

  Holman hesitated to admit it, then nodded.

  “And we can trace only one connection,” Seebohm continued, “b
etween the Lexington Bank and Hannan Mills. That’s a man called A. H. Hutchins, on the boards of both establishments. And when we check up the name A. H. Hutchins against lists of all personnel working in banks in New York, we find another A. H. Hutchins working as chief cashier at Chemical Bank, One-thirty-five Madison Avenue.”

  “From descriptions, these Hutchinses are all one and the same. We decide it’s a distinct possibility that One-thirty-five Madison Avenue, the Chemical Bank, is the final destination of the Dibouti money.”

  Seebohm looked at his watch, as if there were other things to be doing more important elsewhere. “So Major Holman sends you to the Chemical Bank.”

  “And you walk in and stop, and then head straight for Hutchins, and suddenly we know you know him, and we’re sure you are a Mafia associate.”

  “So you shoot Hutchins, and me,” Regan said matter-of-factly. He was, in fact, far removed from being unemotional about it. “But Cassidy saves me and also gets rid of the transceiver bomb. Tell me, why did Cassidy suddenly shoot the CIA man?”