The Sleeper Page 22

  It was a scene I’d seen more times than I remembered in those months when I lived here in 1992 and 1993. I used to run by the reservoir. But I never saw it quite like this before, knowing for sure how easy it would be for all this life to end. Didn’t they see what happened here on September 11? Didn’t they know the danger? Didn’t they care that it could happen again right now? Or tomorrow? Any time at all? They were beyond caring. They were blessed by forgetfulness, protected by ignorance, which is maybe, just maybe, the greatest blessing.

  In the narrow paths, across the little wooden bridges, in the part of the park called the Ramble, I found Griffin on a bench above the pond, just where he said he’d be. He wore a white short-sleeve shirt with a loose tie; his jacket was beside him and he had a Starbucks cup in his hand. He held another cup out for me.

  “You look like shit,” he said.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “You got a change of clothes? Something besides that T-shirt?”

  “In the backpack. You got something to tell me?”

  “A lot,” he said, watching and waiting while some tourists in Bermuda shorts strolled by speaking Italian. “That sat phone was registered to a Bahamas holding company owned by a Cayman Island company—”

  “Give me the name of the man.”

  Griffin nodded. “Uh-hunh. Ryan Handal. Mean anything to you?”

  “Nothing. Who the fuck is he? Where is he?”

  “You can look him up in The New York Times. There’s an interesting article about him.”

  “Does it give his address?”

  “Yeah. It does.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Where are any of them? Gone. Dust. Nothing but bits of jewelry and teeth.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m saying that Ryan Handal is one of the three thousand.”

  “One of the three thousand killed in the Trade Center?”

  Griffin nodded.

  I sat back on the bench and watched an old man throwing a stick into the pond so his black Labrador would swim out and retrieve it. “Is that why I drove twenty-one hours to get here? Is that the end of the story?”

  “It’s a start,” said Griffin. “Just a start. There’s more but we don’t know for sure what it means. And there’s none of it that you’re supposed to hear, not from me, not from anybody.” Griffin took a sip of his coffee and watched the Labrador shaking the pond off his back. Griffin pulled a printed page from the Times Web site out of his pocket. There was no picture, just a headline: ALWAYS READY TO HELP.

  “Some men are known for what they say, and some for what they do,” says Victoria Bernstein, who worked as Ryan Handal’s assistant at Nova Ventures for six months. “Mr. Handal was a doer. He loved his work, but more than that, he loved to help people.”

  Handal, 53, was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States in 1989. “He told me he lost all his family, and almost everything he had in the civil war in his country,” said Ms. Bernstein. Like many immigrants, he saw the United States as a land where he could build a new life, and through hard work and shrewd investments, he did. In the early 1990s, Handal established himself as one of New York’s most successful, if least known, investors in advanced medical technologies.

  One of the first to recognize the potential demand for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other capital-intensive diagnostic equipment, Handal established a leasing company, ScanTech, in 1990 and took it public two years later. By the end of the decade he was a major investor, through his offshore holding company, Nova Enterprises, in the health and biotech areas. According to Ms. Bernstein, he was also a generous donor to medical charities. “He gave for research on multiple sclerosis and bone diseases. He was always ready to help, always ready to send a check,” said Ms. Bernstein, “but he never wanted his name on any of it. ‘The point is to do good for the people who need it,’ he would say, ‘not to do good for my ego.’ ”

  On the morning of Sept. 11, Ms. Bernstein remembers, Mr. Handal had just returned to New York after a business trip to Las Vegas. “He called me on Monday and told me he was back in the city, and that he would be in the office early.” Ms. Bernstein said she had a dental appointment and wouldn’t be in until the afternoon. “He said not to worry, and to take the day off. He was just going to make a few calls. I got out of the dentist’s about 9:30. We knew by then what had happened, but I couldn’t get near the Trade Center. I tried to call, but there was no answer. When I got home, I had a message on my machine.”

  Like so many messages that were left that morning, this one was brief and poignant. “It’s over,” said Mr. Handal. “I think it’s over. God save us. And God Bless America.”

  I handed the page back to Griffin. “The sniper’s phone belonged to this guy?”

  “To his company. Yeah.”

  “And the number I gave you?”

  Griffin smiled. “To the cell phone of a V. Bernstein.”

  “What does she have to say?”

  “Not much. She was in her sixties and after last September she decided to retire up in Maine. Last month she slipped on some rocks at the beach—hit her head and drowned.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.” Griffin tossed his unfinished coffee out on the ground and put the empty cup back in the sack. “No, I’m not kidding.”

  “We’re close, ain’t we?”

  Griffin nodded his head real slowly, like he was afraid to be too sure. “And you haven’t heard the best yet,” he said. “The obit makes it sound like Handal bet on a growing industry and won, but that’s only one of the ways he made money. Some of his biggest hits came from shorting stocks.”

  “Which means…”

  “Basically it means he bet on stocks going down. And if they did, the difference between the loan he got to pay for the stock and the price it actually sold for went into his pocket. A bank was left holding the stock, which he had put up as collateral, and he was left holding the money. He did that for most of the last ten years, and won real big on a couple of health and insurance stocks. All told, about fifty million dollars.”

  “Sounds big to me.”

  “Nothing compared to what he would have made if he’d lived. A little over a year ago he started shorting a lot of insurance stocks, and even stocks in areas where he never was active before, like airlines. And all of the stocks bottomed after September eleventh. Just dropped through the floor. If he’d cashed in at the end of September and early October, like he was supposed to, he would have collected about three hundred and fifty million dollars.”

  “But he was dead.”

  “Yeah. He was dead.”

  “So, what are you saying?”

  “Some of those trades drew attention after September eleven. Do you remember the stories?”

  “I saw a couple of headlines, but I was busy with other things.”

  “Yeah, well, there were calls for an investigation because it looked like somebody made a hell of a lot of money out of the tragedy—somebody who might have known what was coming. Then they found out the biggest investor was Handal and he was killed in his office on the ninety-third floor of the north tower, and that was the end of their investigation.”

  “But not yours.”

  “No. Handal’s estate collected on most of those trades. The charity he set up, the La Merced Foundation, pulled in almost three hundred million dollars. And when you look at it closely, La Merced is kind of a strange thing. It’s really a one-man show run by Handal’s executor, a lawyer named José Oriente.”

  “So Handal’s dead. What do we do?”

  “We do Oriente. He came to the United States from Panama about the same time as Handal, and he was just about as successful. Oriente is real low profile in public, but high profile with the people who count. He’s been invited to Kennebunkport by the President’s father.”

  “Maybe I’m just more tired than I thought, Griffin. Where’s the Qaeda connection? Where’s th
e jihad connection? I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t know. But there’s something here. Can’t you smell it? All that money that went into the second-wave attacks—the ones you helped us stop—where did it come from? I think a lot of it came from La Merced’s pot of gold. But the more I look into it, the more stone walls I run into. This Oriente has so many friends you wouldn’t believe it. He’s a big campaign contributor. Both parties. Nobody in the government wants to touch him. Nobody even wants him talked to. You go through channels and every channel is blocked.”

  “So here I am.”

  “Uh-hunh.”

  “To get around the channels.”

  “That’s right. Who better?” Griffin smiled and shook his head. “The Agency knows I’m thinking about leaving; they don’t like that, and they don’t trust me. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m sure as hell not supposed to be talking to you. But I know one thing: there were eleven men in Kansas who snatched your daughter and would have killed her—and killed you—and killed Betsy if they could—and they wanted to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. There was a voice that guided them, and it came to them over a phone from Handal’s company and the number belonged to Handal’s assistant. Since there’s nothing left of Mr. Handal but the dust at Ground Zero and nothing left of Ms. Bernstein but the ashes at her crematorium, it seems to me that Oriente—the head of the foundation and the executor of the Handal estate—is the guy to talk to. But nobody wants me to do that, and nobody will do it for me. What do we do? What do you do?” He stared at the pond for inspiration. “The first thing you can do is change your shirt and put on a tie if you’ve got one.” Griffin looked at his watch. “Oriente is supposed to be at a breakfast over at Sixty-sixth and Park this morning. I figure he’ll be coming out of the building in about thirty minutes. Just about enough time for us to walk there.”

  “A breakfast at the Council?”

  “You know the place. You worked there as a gofer in 1992 when you were banging that woman researcher, right?”

  “I know the place,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, we’re not going inside. We’re going to stand back and watch.”

  The morning got warmer by the minute as we walked through the park past the rowboats and the pavilion and halfway down through the mall under the enormous elms.

  “Where does the money go?”

  “From La Merced?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Medical research and soup kitchens and summer camps for inner-city kids, that sort of thing.”

  “A one-man United Way.”

  “Except for the religious part. All the groups that get money from La Merced are religious groups.”

  “What kind of religion?”

  “Christian, Jewish, Muslim. They’re what you call faith-based charities. Doesn’t seem to make much difference which faiths.”

  “Big ones?”

  Griffin smiled. “Not so big you’ve ever heard of them. And every one pretty fundamentalist.”

  “What’s the thing you’re not telling me?”

  “Rehab centers. La Merced gives a lot of money to rehab centers for drug addicts and small-time dealers. There’s one group called Resurrection House that’s pretty big in the Midwest. It starts working with inmates in state prisons, then brings them together in halfway houses when they get out. And it gets most of its money from La Merced.”

  “It works with gang members?”

  “You could say that. Six of them are lying unclaimed in the Ark City morgue right now.”

  Chapter 36

  Black limousines lined up on Park Avenue and around the block on Sixty-sixth. Drivers waited beside them, or on the corner, many of them with their jackets off and their ties loosened.

  “No Secret Service,” said Griffin. “No government heavies here today.”

  Men in suits and women in business clothes started coming out the front door. I recognized Tom Brokaw from the Nightly News, and a couple of other faces I’d seen on TV. I saw Jeb Carlton, who was at the Council when I worked there, but I didn’t think he’d see me, and didn’t think he’d recognize me if he did. And then I saw Chantal. She was still tall and graceful and as alone-looking as a little girl with no friends on a playground. She was more than ten years older than me, and almost ten years had passed since I’d seen her. She walked right by me and I don’t think she knew I was there. Maybe she thought I was just another one of the drivers. She had some other place to go.

  “That’s him,” said Griffin.

  A slender man with salt-and-pepper hair, a mostly gray beard, and a suit as elegant as Fred Astaire’s shook hands with a couple of other Council members, then looked over the line of cars and the clusters of chauffeurs. For just a second, he looked straight at me. His eyes were such a pale blue they were almost white. I thought I read recognition in them, but then he turned and went down the line of cars on Park, walking normally away from us until, just on the last couple of steps, he dragged his left foot behind him like he’d had polio, or like the bone in his foot had been broken—like the metatarsal had been cracked with an iron rod, and never been allowed to heal.

  The man’s uniformed driver opened the back door of the big black Mercedes for him to get in, but he put his hands on the roof of the car like he needed to brace himself, or was about to be searched, and he just stood there for a second with his head bent down, thinking. Heat gushed off the hoods of the cars, making a mirage out of the air between us. Then he turned full toward me again, looking straight through the rippling light into my eyes, and he waited.

  I walked down Park along the line of limos until we were close enough to shake hands, but neither of us reached out. “It is time for us to talk in cooler, more civilized surroundings,” he said. He stepped back from the door of the car and gestured toward the leather seats. “Will you join me?”

  “I’ll get in on the other side,” I said, glancing back through the haze of engine-heat toward Griffin, but he was gone.

  “Fulton and Broadway,” Oriente told the driver. “Take us right down the middle of the island.” He turned to me. “We ought to appreciate the full grandeur of this city,” he said.

  “Before you destroy it.”

  “Hah! Is that what you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Destruction is so easy. Salvation is what’s hard. And this is a city, this is a country, this is a world that needs to be saved. Surely you agree. Look up ahead of us, and all around us now.” We were rolling toward the Met Life building. “God made mountains, but men made this skyline. When the clouds roll in and the tops of these buildings disappear, you know, Kurt, there’s no way to know where the hand of man ends and the kingdom of heaven begins. The Tower of Babel was nothing compared to this. But this is not—” He shook his head. “Like Babel, this is not the way of the Lord.”

  We moved from sunlight to dark shadow as we followed the upward swerving tunnel that runs around the side of Grand Central Station.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “A pious man.”

  “In Granada you were a Syrian doctor disguised as a spice merchant. Here you’re a Panamanian lawyer. Who the fuck are you?”

  “Ah, that long afternoon and evening in Granada, when we got to know each other so well. Poor Pilar. She did not understand you as well as I did. And are you forgetting Kenya? You know, I think Cathleen was really quite fond of you. She was such a kind woman, for a spy. Didn’t you think so? I believe she and Mr. Faridoon have gone back to the big hive in London now. Don’t look surprised. You must certainly have guessed. But, you know, bureaucracies are so conservative, they would never have done anything in Somalia, in the end, if you hadn’t—what should I say?—forced the issue? You are a surprising catalyst, Kurt, for so many things.”

  The late-morning sun burst bright through the windshield and lower Manhattan stretched in front of us. We rode in silence for a while before I said, “Yes, we do know each other.”

  He looked straight ahead
and nodded. His face didn’t show emotion, really, just quiet purpose. His expression was efficient. “Of course we do,” he said.

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “To my favorite place in all of New York.”

  “Ground Zero.”

  “Not quite,” he said.

  “And then?”

  “And then we shall see.”

  “We’re just about to end this thing,” I said. “You know it. I know it. Whatever your plans were, they’re finished. You’ve been ID’d. You’ll be arrested. It’s over.”

  “Kurt, maybe you know me. But you don’t know your country. You don’t know this world you live in. Do you hear sirens? Do you see police?”

  “You are never going to threaten me or my family again.”

  “That’s right, Kurt. You know that and I know that, too.”

  “I destroyed the Sword a long time ago.”

  “Yes, I thought that was probably the case. But of course I had to be sure. That clumsy business in your hometown with all the gas—you couldn’t have given me better proof. I knew you would trade me what I wanted if you had it. You wouldn’t have played tricks. You worship your family. You would betray your country for them, your government. Even God. You would have let a hundred thousand children die to save your baby girl, and not think twice, I think. Once, you loved God. Now you love—is it Betsy? Miriam? Tell me something, Kurt, do you love one more than the other? Would you let yourself dare to think about that? But of course if you live long enough, that will change, too. Maybe you’ll come back to God. I think you will.”

  “How long have you been working for Bin Laden? Or is it Saddam? He’s the one who gave us the Sword, isn’t he?”

  We were passing from Soho along the fringes of Chinatown. Oriente watched the crowds of shoppers and tourists and delivery boys and bums and schoolgirls elbowing around each other on the sidewalks. “So many people work with me, and for me, and for the cause of righteousness. Some of them know their roles, some don’t,” he said. “Bin Laden is one player on the board. One player. Saddam is another player. But just one player. And what is so—I want to say sad, but I am not going to patronize you—what is so—frustrating is that you don’t see the big picture, Kurt. Thousands and thousands of people are working for one purpose, and others are helping without knowing it, and one hand guides them all.”