* * *
Within a few days Gershon had learned from something called the Precious Metals Industry Reporter, an expensive, exclusive wire service he was able to penetrate, that an entity called Nordyne GmbH, new to the precious-metals market and headquartered in Switzerland, had indeed bought over ten thousand troy ounces of platinum from AMPLATS. What was Nordyne, and what did it need all that platinum for?
It turned out that Nordyne didn’t exist before it bought and paid (promptly) for its platinum. It had a website of exquisite beauty and zero information, fronted by one of those logos that are high on style and brilliantly devoid of content. Looking carefully at it, Gershon noted two graceful lines running parallel to each other in the right half of an oval, the other half filled with the company’s motto, which was:
Nordyne:
Facing
The Future
He examined the lines more closely. They resolved themselves in left profiles of generic humans, earnestly (and, he had to admit, brilliantly) scrubbed of distinguishing tribal or ethnic features. Two humans facing the future, what could be more harmless?
Then there was the name. Disambiguated, it meant “northern power,” another meaningless post-industrial trope. Typically corporate, typically opaque, designed not to express but to enable, in the way of letting any potential client project onto the image of a bright future faced squarely behind considerable power.
It also contained links, “Our Philosophy,” “Our Staff,” “Our History,” and “FAQs”; none of them worked. No business publication had covered its founding, which was, for the record, in Lausanne as opposed to Genève, where most of the big, swaggering, sharkish multinational corporations were headquartered. It boasted no staff; there was no preening CEO to pose for business-style photography of plump rich men in suits with smiles showing yellowed teeth. It was registered only as a trademark but not as a corporation, and its stock, if it existed, was privately held. It seemed to have no assets except the money it paid via a Swiss bank. Gershon sniffed the air, as he always did when his hunting instinct was aroused, and he leaned forward to the screen before him and focused his entire thought process on the mystery of Nordyne’s platinum.
He thought, he thought, he thought. If the bad boys of Hezbollah were trying to pick up a small tac nuke, they’d need a great deal of up-front dough, but assembling it out of gold, diamonds, bearer’s bonds, and other forms of wealth might set off alarms all through the intelligence community, and sooner rather than later they’d have a drone-fired Hellfire up their asses. Platinum’s utility, liquidity, and lack of glamour might do the trick, for many reasons. Move the physical stuff to a holding vault and deliver ownership certificates, easily carried, to a middleman, and somehow whoever was selling—Chechen rebels, big players in the game, corrupt or ideological Chinese military, money-hungry Pakis, demented Hindus from the overpopulated subcontinent, maybe even a money-grubbing rump group of ex–South African military—might be able to put a big egg in their basket for scrambling Tel Aviv into fissionable ruin. That was one thesis, but only the most obvious. It had too many flaws. Everybody watched nukes, and it would be hard to move one without every satellite in the heavens sending a flash-coded message to home base. The movement of the weapon—delivery, security, transpo, storage, deployment, tactical initiation—would be intensely fraught, interception-accessible any place along the route, and after all, that was what drones were for. You went anywhere with a tac nuke and you got Hellfire and it was a bad day with temperatures ranging in the ten thousands at blast epicenter. It might not even be American or a Hellfire, as all the players in the nuke game had a vested interest in keeping newbies away from the table.
Ten thousand troy ounces at current market value was about $15.9 million, call it $16 million. That was easily within the budgetary reach of most big InterTer, Inc. operations, from Hezbollah to Al Qaeda to Taliban, but it also X’d out the myriad of smaller wannabe local actors, the MILFs (Moro Islamic Liberation Front), for example. Again, the big guys were watched very carefully by so many players that a $16 million transaction would be noted and acted upon.
Gershon concluded that this was somebody new, not a longtime gamer, somebody with very deep pockets. The attributes—big money, great security, ubiquitous but banal wealth methodology, low profile—suggested something like a onetime high-pub-value hit, a giant stroke that would astound the world. That would mean: first-class operators suddenly disappearing, falling off the grid, as they were absorbed into the new operation. If you had a minimum of $16 mil in play, you probably had more, and that would mean you could get very good guys on your team. Talent, as always, was expensive.