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“Quinn, what the hell’s going on over there? I just heard some horse shit about a hoax call to a radio show—”
“Mr. Vice President,” said Quinn levelly, “have you a mirror nearby?”
There was a stunned pause.
“Yes, I guess so.”
“If you look in it, you will see the nose on your face, right?”
“Look, what is this? Yeah, okay, I can see the nose on my face.”
“As surely as what you are looking at, Simon Cormack is going to be murdered in twenty-four hours ...”
He let the words sink in to the shocked man sitting on the edge of his bed in Washington.
“... unless ...”
“Okay, Quinn, lay it on the line.”
“Unless I have that package of diamonds, market value two million dollars, here in my hands by sunrise, London time, tomorrow. This call has been taped, for the record. Good day, Mr. Vice President.”
He put the phone down. At the other end, for several minutes the Vice President of the United States of America used language that would have lost him the votes of the Moral Majority, had those good citizens had the opportunity to hear him. When he was done, he called the telephone operator.
“Get me Morton Stannard,” he said. “At his home, wherever. Just get him!”
Andy Laing was surprised to be summoned back to the bank so quickly. The appointment was for 11:00 A.M. and he was there ten minutes early. When he was shown up,
it was not to the office of the internal accountant, but to that of the general manager. The accountant was by the GM’s side. The senior officer gestured Laing to a seat opposite his desk without a word. The man then rose, walked to the window, stared out for a while over the pinnacles of the City, turned and spoke. His tone was grave and frosty.
“Yesterday, Mr. Laing, you came to see my colleague here, having quit Saudi Arabia by whatever means you were able, and made serious allegations concerning the integrity of Mr. Steven Pyle.”
Laing was worried. Mr. Laing? Where was “Andy”? They always first-named each other in the bank, part of the family atmosphere New York insisted on.
“And I brought a mass of computer printout to back up what I had found,” he said carefully, but his stomach was churning. Something was wrong. The general manager waved dismissively at the mention of Laing’s evidence.
“Yesterday I also received a long letter from Steve Pyle. Today I had a lengthy phone call. It is perfectly clear to me, and to the internal accountant here, that you are a rogue, Laing, and an embezzler.”
Laing could not believe his ears. He shot a glance for support at the accountant. The man stared at the ceiling.
“I have the story,” said the GM. “The full story. The real story.”
In case Laing was unfamiliar with it, he told the young man what he now knew to be true. Laing had been embezzling money from a client’s account, the Ministry of Public Works. Not a large amount in Saudi terms, but enough; one percent of every invoice paid out to contractors by the Ministry. Mr. Amin had unfortunately missed spotting the figures but Mr. Al-Haroun had seen the flaws and alerted Mr. Pyle.
The general manager at Riyadh, in an excess of loyalty, had tried to protect Laing’s career by only insisting that every riyal be returned to the Ministry’s account, something that had now been done.
Laing’s response to this extraordinary solidarity from a colleague, and in outrage at losing his money, had been to spend the night in the Jiddah Branch falsifying the records to “prove” that a much larger sum had been embezzled with the cooperation of Steve Pyle himself.
“But the tape I brought back—” protested Laing.
“Forgeries, of course. We have the real records here. This morning I ordered our central computer here to hack into the Riyadh computer and do a check. The real records now lie there, on my desk. They show quite clearly what happened. The one percent you stole has been replaced. No other money is missing. The bank’s reputation in Saudi Arabia has been saved, thank God—or, rather, thank Steve Pyle.”
“But it’s not true,” protested Laing, too shrilly. “The skim Pyle and his unknown associate were perpetrating was ten percent of the Ministry accounts.”
The GM looked stonily at Laing and then at the evidence fresh in from Riyadh.
“Al,” he asked, “do you see any record of ten percent being skimmed?”
The accountant shook his head.
