‘I am beginning, gentlemen, to feel almost as sorry for myself and ourselves as I am for those unfortunates in Santorini.’ The ‘gentlemen’ he was addressing were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Hollison of the FBI, John Heiman, the Defence Secretary, and Sir John Travers, the British Ambassador, ‘I suppose I should, in all decency, apologize for bringing you all together at this unearthly hour of the morning, but, frankly, I have no decency left in me. I’m right at the undisputed top of my self-pity list.’ He rifled some papers on his desk. ‘Admiral Hawkins and his men are sitting on top of a ticking time-bomb and it seems that nature and circumstances are conspiring to thwart their every attempt to rid themselves of this canker in their midst. With his latest report I had thought that I had reached the ultimate nadir. Inevitably, I was wrong.’ He looked sorrowfully at the deputy head of the FBI. ‘You had no right to do this to me, Richard.’
‘I am sorry about that, Mr President,’ Hollison may well have meant what he said but the sorrow was completely
masked by the expression and tone of bitter anger. ‘It’s not just bad news or damnably bad news, it’s shattering news. Shattering for you, shattering for me, most of all shattering for the General. I still can hardly bring myself to believe it.’
‘I might be prepared to believe it,’ Sir John Travers said, ‘and might well be prepared to be shattered along with the rest of you. If, that is, I had the slightest idea what you are talking about.’
‘And / am sorry about that,’ the President said. ‘We have not really been remiss, there just hasn’t been time yet. Richard, the Ambassador has not yet read the relevant documents. Could you put him in the picture, please?’
‘That shouldn’t take too long. It’s a most damnably ugly picture, Sir John, because it reflects badly — just how, badly it’s only now beginning to dawn on me — on both Americans in general and the Pentagon in particular.
‘The central figure in the scenario, of whom you have of course heard, is a certain Adamantios Spyros Andropulos who is rapidly emerging as an international criminal of staggering proportions. As you know, he is at present being held aboard the frigate Ariadne. He is an exceptionally wealthy man — I’m talking merely of hundreds of millions of dollars, it could be billions for all I so far know — and he has money, laundered money under false names, hidden away in various deposit accounts all over the world. Marcos of the Philippines and Duvalier of Haiti are, or were, rather good at this sort of thing, but they’re being found out, they should have employed a real expert like Andropulos.’
‘He can’t be all that expert, Richard,’ Sir John said. ‘You’ve found out about him.’
‘A chance in a million, a break that comes to a law agency once in a lifetime. In any but the most exceptional and extraordinary circumstances he would have taken the secret to the grave with him. And I didn’t find out about him — there is no possible way I ever could have done — and no credit
whatsoever attaches to us. That he was found out is due entirely to two things — an extraordinary stroke of luck and an extraordinary degree of astuteness by those aboard the Ariadne. I have, incidentally, have had cause to revise my earlier – and I must admit prejudiced and biased opinion of Admiral Hawkins. He insists that none of the credit belongs to him but to the captain and two of his officers aboard the Ariadne. It takes quite a man to insist on that sort of thing.
‘Among his apparently countless worldwide deposits Andropulos had tucked away eighteen million dollars in a Washington bank through an intermediary or nominee by the name of George Skepertzis. This nominee had transferred over a million dollars apiece to the accounts of two men registered in the bank as Thomas Thompson and Kyriakos Katzanevakis. The names, inevitably, are fictitious — no such people exist. The only bank clerk who could identify all three men, inasmuch as he was the person who had handled all three accounts, had left the bank. We tracked him down — he was understandably a bit upset about being dragged out of his bed at midnight — and showed him a group of photographs. Two of them he recognized immediately but none of the photographs remotely resembled the man going by the name of George Skepertzis.
‘But he was able to give us some additional — and very valuable — information about Skepertzis, who seemed to have taken him into some limited degree of confidence. No reason why he shouldn’t, of course — Skepertzis has — had — every reason to believe that his tracks were completely covered. This was approximately two months ago. He wanted to know about the banking facilities in certain specified towns in the United States and Mexico. The bank clerk — his name is Bradshaw – gave him what information he could. It took Bradshaw about a week to find out the details Skepertzis wanted. I should imagine that he was well rewarded for his labours although, of course, Bradshaw didn’t say so. There
were no criminal charges that we could have laid against him for that — not that we would, even if we could have.
‘Bradshaw provided our agent with the names and addresses of the banks concerned. We checked those against two lists regarding Andropulos’s banking activities that we had just received from the Ariadne and Greek Intelligence -a third, if you count Interpol. Skepertzis had made enquiries about banks in five cities and, lo and behold and to nobody’s surprise, all five also appeared on the lists concerning Andropulos.
‘We instituted immediate enquiries. Bankers — especially senior banking officials – have profound objections to being woken in the middle of the night but among our eight thousand FBI agents in those United States we have some very tough and persistent individuals who are also very good at putting the fear of God into even the most law-abiding citizens. And we have some very good friends in Mexico. It turns out that friend Skepertzis has bank accounts in all five cities. All under his own name.’
‘You’re ahead of me here,’ the President said. ‘This is news to me. When did you find this out?’
‘Just over half an hour ago. I’m sorry, Mr President, but there just hasn’t been the time to confirm everything and tell you until now. In two of those banks — in Mexico City and San Diego – we struck gold. In each of those banks close on three-quarters of a million dollars have been transferred to the accounts of a certain Thomas Thompson and a certain Kyriakos Katzanevakis. It’s a measure of those two gentlemen’s belief in their immunity to investigation that they hadn’t even bothered to change their names. Not that that would have mattered in the long run — not after we had got around to circulating photographs. One final point of interest. Two weeks ago the bank in Mexico City received a draft of two million dollars in favour of George Skepertzis from a reputable or supposedly reputable, bank in Damascus, Syria.’
A week later exactly the same amount was transferred to a certain Philip Trypanis in Greece. We have the name of the Athens bank and have asked Greek Intelligence to find out who or what Trypanis is or for whom he is fronting. A cent gets a hundred dollars that it is a pal of Andropulos.’
A silence ensued, a silence that was long and profound and more than a little gloomy. It was the President himself who finally broke it.
‘A stirring tale, is it not, Sir John?’
‘Stirring, indeed. Richard had the right term for it- shattering.’
‘But – well, have you no questions?’
‘No.’
The President looked at him in near disbelief. ‘Not even one little question?’
‘Not even one, Mr President.’
‘But surely you must want to know the identities of Thompson and Katzanevakis?’
‘I don’t want to know. If we must refer to them at all I’d rather just refer to them as the general and the admiral.’ He looked at Hollison. ‘That would be about right, Richard?’
‘I’m afraid so. A general and an admiral. Your Admiral Hawkins, Sir John, is smarter than your average bear.’
‘I would agree. But you have to be fair to yourselves. He had access to information that you hadn’t had until now. I, too, have an advantage that you people lack. You’re deep in the middle of the wood. I’m on the outside looking in.
‘Two things, gentlemen. As ,a representative of Her Majesty’s Government I am bound to report any developments of significance to the Foreign Office and Cabinet. But if I specifically lack certain information, such as specific names, then I can’t very well report them, can I? We ambassadors have the power to exercise a very wide range of discretion. In this particular instance, I choose to exercise that discretion.