"It's overseas -- Pakistan. They say it's very important."

In the hours that led to last Friday's closing of our cover story, correspondents Jonathan Beaty and Sam Gwynne were holed up in an office, still tracing the weird contours of one of the world's most baroque financial schemes -- a Washington-to-Abu Dhabi intrigue that matches John le Carre's imagination for espionage, Frederick Forsyth's for terrorism and Oliver Stone's for greed. In this week's story, Jonathan and Sam have uncovered how the Bank of Credit & Commerce International used a "black network" of terrorists and self-appointed spies to serve as a one-stop shopping center for criminals, corrupt leaders and official intelligence agencies around the world. "The story at the outset was aconspiratorialist's dream," says Gwynne. "Almost all the wild things that were said back in February turned out to be true."

Because the black network stops at nothing, not even murder, to further the bank's aims, a large part of the team's work was persuading their sources to talk and finding ruses to communicate with safety. "Everybody we talked to was afraid of being killed," says Gwynne. In hotels from Washington to Abu Dhabi, Beaty often had to leave his room in the early morning to return calls from telephone booths. He persuaded several sources to meet him on neutral ground in Casablanca, and learned more details there while dining on fish and rice in a Bedouin's tent. Beaty came right up against the sinister underside of the story when a man from the black network invited himself into Beaty's hotel room in Abu Dhabi and threatened to kill him.

Another challenge was "having to socialize with oil-rich Arabs in a style to which they had become accustomed," says Beaty. So there were late-night visits to nightclubs in Casablanca and purchases of exotic foods from Los Angeles to London. Once, a defector from the black network who was being interviewed in New York where he was in hiding turned to Beaty for a little spending money. "I gave him the last $100 out of my pocket," he says, "and he tipped the waitress $50."

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