Giri Read Free

proclaimed that the banker, who wore the Eton public school tie, was also a member of several prestigious London clubs.
    Of the five men in the banker’s office, only Sparrowhawk was not counting money. He was a mere observer, bored by the long hours of waiting; he spent most of his time at the second floor window, looking out at the Georgetown harbor and the unloading of a cruise liner from Caracas. And when that paled, he returned to his seat to read Poems, Chieflly in the Scottish Dialect, a Robert Burns first edition given to him by his wife as an anniversary gift. Closing the book, Sparrowhawk stood up and placed the book on his chair, then stretched before touching the floor, fingertips on the thick carpet. Not bad for a lad of fifty-five.
    Trevor Wells Sparrowhawk was a stocky, red-faced Englishman whose needle-thin nose jutted out over a thick black mustache, with ends pointed and waxed. His full head of silver hair hid the remains of a right ear mangled in the Belgian Congo by a drugged Simba wielding a panga. His dark gray eyes were narrowed in a squint, suggesting a permanent suspicion of mankind. He wore the SAS lapel pin on his tweed jacket, proudly regarding his service in that elite British commando unit as the most satisfying of his long military career. These days Sparrowhawk lived and worked in America, where he was chief operating officer and a director of Management Systems Consultants, a private intelligence service.
    On one side of the large black oak desk the Caymanian banker and two assistants stopped counting to enter printout totals from individual calculators into a ledger kept by the banker. Opposite them, and with a calculator of his own, sat Constantine Pangalos, a high-powered New York attorney whom Sparrowhawk and two of his agency guards had escorted with the money from New York to St. Petersburg by car and from there by jet to the Cayman Islands. Pangalos was fortyish, a dark and hairy little man, with thick eyebrows over a hooked nose and a decided preference for other men’s wives. Sparrowhawk was convinced that the man’s lechery and abominable table manners would have found him quite at home with Rasputin. Pangalos had once been a noted federal prosecutor, in charge of a task force investigating organized crime. But how he worked for organized crime, for the Paul Molise family of New York. As did Trevor Sparrowhawk.
    Another cruise liner arrived in the harbor. Sparrowhawk heard the three blasts of its deep horn and the answering whistles from the fishing boats.
    “Finished.”
    A tired Pangalos flopped back in his chair and massaged strained eyes with his fingertips. He spoke to Sparrowhawk, whom he disliked—the feeling was mutual—without turning around. “You can call New York now. Tell our friends three days.”
    The Englishman rose from his chair, the Burns poems under one arm. Paul Molise, junior and senior, would be delighted to hear they were getting the eight million back so soon. Washed, of course. This particular laundering scheme was the brainchild of Paul junior, a financial wizard who had graduated from Harvard Business School and was responsible for his family’s move into legitimate investments: nursing homes, shopping centers, savings and loan associations and real estate.
    Management Systems Consultants also laundered its share of dirty money, but that was not its primary function. Under Sparrowhawk’s shrewd direction it gathered information vital to Molise interests. The information came from the police files, congressional committees, corporate board meetings, union bargaining sessions, the IRS, FBI, secret court testimony and the federal witness protection program. It came from former lawmen now on the company payroll, who used their contacts to secure computer tapes, data bank information and copies of memos, dossiers and reports.
    Sparrowhawk had turned Management Systems Consultants into a profitable company. It had legitimate security contracts with