CIA Director John Casher’s eyes surveyed the flowchart displayed on the wall-sized monitor at the opposite end of the conference table. He then glanced over at Glenn Pollock, the head of the Analysis and Liaison Division of the Financial Crimes Information Network.
“Does Gage have any idea of what he’s stumbled into?” Casher asked.
“About as much as we do.” Pollock pointed at the flowchart. “We believe that Tai Hing Consulting handled a little over a billion dollars in bribes and kickbacks, mostly for business done by U.S. and EU companies in Sichuan Province.”
“And they weren’t the only ones.”
Pollock shook his head. “They took five percent of whatever passed through their accounts, then transferred—”
“Five? I thought money launderers were still getting seven.”
“That was only step one. Another five percent was taken as the money went through accounts in the Bahamas—but there are some troublesome crossovers.” Pollock paused for a moment. “Really troublesome. For one, Tai Hing operates out of the same address as the front company that paid for the Muslim bombing in Xinjiang nine years ago that led to the arrest of Hani Ibrahim.”
Casher squinted over at Pollock. “Why pick that one to mention?”
“Because we think that Gage is on the prowl for Ibrahim.”
“His idea or someone else’s?”
Pollock shrugged.
“What do you mean by ‘same address’?” Casher asked. “Street number, suite number, what?”
“All of the above. It’s a shell company that’s managed by a British law firm in Hong Kong.”
Casher didn’t break his gaze, but felt himself cringe. The Muslim separatists had made the CIA look like idiots. The wire transfer order that paid for the bomb-making materials used by the terrorists stated on its face that it was in payment for explosives, but to be used in seismic studies to find natural gas deposits. It was like hiding in plain sight.
Casher looked back at the flowchart. “Any of the other companies on that thing operate out of the same place?”
Pollock nodded. “Two we’ve identified so far. Altogether the firm manages the affairs of about a thousand clients.”
“You mean they move money around for about a thousand clients without asking questions.”
“That goes without saying. Lawyers in the firm have come up on a hundred different money laundering investigations. Italian prime ministers. Colombian drug
traffickers. Offshore gambling. The French accused them of handling some of the bribes that Halliburton and KBR paid the Nigerians during the 1990s.”
Casher rose and walked to the monitor, then pointed at three empty boxes and asked, “How long will it take you to fill these in?”
“That’s a problem. Gage’s office has dropped off the Internet grid and the last information that his wife called in was coded somehow.”
“You mean they caught on that we and the Chinese are watching and listening in?”
“It looks like it, but we don’t know what alerted them.”
“Let me get this right,” Casher said, and then held up his right arm high and to the right. “Over here we have some Muslim businesspeople in Boston who sent money to an offshore island, supposedly as a tax dodge.” He raised his left arm. “And over here we have a Hong Kong company that the money passed through and ended up in—”
“That’s not quite right. The account wasn’t in Hong Kong, but in the Caribbean, same as for the Boston people that Ibrahim set up the trust for.”
Casher lowered his arms.
“This bribery scheme isn’t really a Hong Kong operation,” Pollock said. “Except to the extent that the formalities are run out of there. The RAID bribe was drawn from the proceeds of sales of Asian-made memory chips that they negotiated in Dubai—”
“For tax reasons?”
“They deposited the money into accounts in the Caymans because there’s no corporate or income tax. From there, chunks went into Tai Hing and out again to pay the bribes.”
Casher glanced at a stack of binders on the conference table. “Do you have spreadsheets of all of this?”
Pollock walked over, selected one, opened it, and then returned to show it to Casher.
“The first section sorts the transfers first by company,” Pollock said, “then by date, by account, and by amount. The second section sorts first by date.”
Casher knew what he was looking for so he flipped to the date-sorted spreadsheets. He ran his finger down the amount column on the first page, then the second and third, until he got to the end.
“Just what I suspected,” Casher finally said. “The amounts fall as time passes.”
Pollock shook his head. “Can’t be. Investment into China has gone up every year, so kickbacks had to have gone up also.” He turned the spreadsheet pages back and forth from the first to the last, then looked up at Casher. “You’re right. What does it mean?”
“It means that they moved from paying the bribes in dollars to other currencies. It’s the Patriot Act kicking us in the ass. We made it so hard to launder money in dollars that they moved into euros, and dropped off our radar.”