Stolen Prey (4 page)

“And it wasn’t us,” Turicek said again. He turned to her, worried. Sanderson suffered from a range of mild psychological disorders, and he considered her fragile. She didn’t use meds, and the bank put up with her occasional acting-out because she was also obsessive-compulsive when it came to the neatness of numbers. If a number was out of place, Sanderson could sense it and push it back where it belonged.

That made her an excellent programmer and an asset for a bank. But still, she was a head case, and, at times, delicate. “One thing I learned in Russia is, if you didn’t do it, you didn’t do it,” Turicek said, pressing the case. “You’re not responsible for what other people do. You can’t be. If you are, there’s no end to the chain of responsibility, so then nobody winds up being responsible.”

“I don’t need a philosophical disquisition. I was a philosophy major for three semesters,” Sanderson snapped.

“We need to be calm,” Turicek said. “We keep working, we keep our heads down. We know nothing.
We know nothing.
”

“What about the ‘We’re coming’? If they get to us? Eyeballs gouged out and cut throats? No thank you.
No thank you
!”

Turicek dropped his voice. “Twenty million,” he said. “Twenty million dollars.”

That stopped her. Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “More like twenty-two, now. We need to call Edie: it’s time to get out.”

“How much more is in the system?” Turicek asked.

“Two million. Not enough to risk moving. Time to finish the harvest,” she said.

“I agree. You go see Jacob, I’ll call Edie.”

E
DIE
A
LBITIS
freaked when she heard. She was standing on the Vegas strip, outside Treasure Island; it was 105 degrees and an obscenely fat woman was rolling down the sidewalk toward her, carrying a small dog and wearing what looked like a tutu. “I’m the one who’s dangling in the wind out here,” she said into her cell phone, one eye on the fat woman. She didn’t want to get run down. “The banks have about a million pictures of me.”

“But they don’t know it,” Turicek said in his most comforting tone. “In every one, you look like the Sultaness of Istanbul.”

Albitis was wearing a
hijab
, a traditional Arabic woman’s robe, and, though even most conservative Arab states allowed an uncovered face, she also wore a
niqab
, or veil. These were somewhat culturally uncomfortable for a woman who’d danced both topless and bottomless, sometimes simultaneously, in both Moscow and New York; whose parents were Jews now living in Tel Aviv, which was where she picked up her Arabic; and who was blond, to boot. But, if you were doing major money laundering through America’s finest banks, it was best to show as little skin as possible when you were setting up the accounts.

She did speak Arabic well enough to fake her way past North African Arabs, or Iranians, who got most of their Arabic from the Koran, but if she ran into a Jordanian, or a Lebanese, or an Iraqi, she could be in trouble. Of course, most Arabs working in American banks seemed to be Jordanians, Lebanese, or Iraqis. That was just the way of the world, she thought: set up to fuck with you. “Who the hell did it? This killing?”

“The police don’t know. They’re investigating,” Turicek said.

“Ah, God. It’ll take me a week to clear out the accounts.”

“No, no. We’re going to leave it,” Turicek said. “Kristina is correct: there’s not enough for the risk involved. What if we just buy what we’ve already got online, and collect what we’ve already paid for?”

Albitis thought about it for a moment, then said, “If I run, I can do it in three or four working days.”

“Then do that. Are we still solid with the dealers?”

“Yes. They won’t ask any questions as long as the wires keep coming,” Albitis said. “But they won’t ship the gold until they clear the transfers. That’s a full day, sometimes. They know that when the gold is gone, it’s gone.”

“I can’t leave here right now,” Turicek said. “Not with these murders. We need to be really quiet. I doubt they’ll even talk to us, but if they do show up, we all need to be here.”

“Shit. Why’d this have to happen right now? Another week…” Albitis pulled at her lip, through the veil. “All right, listen: let me think about this. I don’t know if I can widen out the number of dealers, so I’m going to have to make up some bullshit story and sell it to the ones we’ve got. Some reason to jack up the purchases. There are not that many goddamn Arab women
running out the door with a quarter million in gold. You know what I’m saying?”

“I know what you’re saying, but what
I’m
saying is, we might not have a choice,” Turicek said.

Getting the gold was the touchy part. There were gold dealers all over the place, and they sold a lot of gold—but they might start to wonder if the amounts got too big. They might wonder about drugs, or spies, or terrorists, or something…. She didn’t need to walk into a dealer’s office and find the FBI waiting for her. “Just routine, ma’am,” they’d say, and then discover a blonde with a shaky passport.

“So we’re getting out,” Turicek said. “Jacob will go along.”

“You’ve got to watch Jacob,” Albitis said.

“I know. We will. Kristina has him under control.”

“They’re both nuts.”

“And I’m watching both of them.”

“Okay. Do that, Ivan. I’ll start right now. I was going to set up four more accounts this afternoon, but I’ll quit and get out of here. Get down to LA, make some pickups, put in some more orders,” Albitis said. “Make up my story.”

“Be careful,” Turicek said. “If you feel anybody is looking at you, quit. Better to take what we’ve got now, than spend the next twenty years in prison. Or have these crazy people come down on us.”

“I thought it was a hedge fund,” Albitis said. “This isn’t something a hedge fund would do.”

“No, it’s more like the fuckin’
Vory
,” Turicek said, and he shuddered as he said it. If they’d stolen from the Russian mob, the mob would want both the money and their heads; or, if forced to choose, just their heads.

“Jesus,” said Albitis. She glanced nervously up and down the street: the fat woman was receding in the distance. Albitis worried about her epithets. Being disguised as an observant Muslim woman was fine for handling bank cameras, but as a natural-born wiseass, she’d never been that good at controlling her language.

Did conservative Arab women walk around blurting out, “Jesus Christ,” or “Holy shit”? She suspected they did not. “All right,” she said. “I’m running.”

W
HILE ALL
that was going on, three Mexican males were checking out of the Wee Blue Inn in West St. Paul, fifteen or twenty minutes apart.

The Wee Blue Inn catered to hasty romances and to men who arrived on foot, who really needed a shower and a few hours’ sleep, a sink to wash their clothes in, and who had no credit card to pay with. Didn’t bother the owner: cash was as good as credit, but you had to have the cash.

The Mexicans had checked in two days before, a half hour apart, small young men—two of them were still teenagers—but with muscles in their arms and faces, no bellies at all; and with hard eyes that reminded the owner of the obsidian-black marbles of his childhood, the ones called peeries.

They checked in a half hour apart, and got separate rooms, but they were together. The owner didn’t ask them any questions. That didn’t seem prudent. An illegal Latino was cleaning up around the place, saw them check in, and told the owner he was going to take the next day or two off.

“I didn’t hire you to take no days off,” the owner said.

“I take them anyway,” the illegal said. “You wanna fire me, so fire me. I’m going.”

He went.

It occurred to the owner that the temporary departure of his wage slave might have something to do with the small men.

Once again, it didn’t seem prudent to ask.

In certain businesses, prudence is mandatory.

P
atrick Brooks had run Sunnie Software out of an office suite in a rehabbed brick warehouse north of Minneapolis’s downtown. Lucas decided to swing by on his way back to the BCA offices to sniff around and get a feel for the Brooks operation.

He left the car on the street and climbed the internal stairs to the third floor; the office was glass and gray carpet, with potted palms sitting around on redbrick room dividers. The place smelled like feminine underarm deodorant and carpet cleaner. A dozen employees were sitting in a low-walled cube farm, each with his or her own computer, but nobody was working. Instead, they’d pulled their chairs into groups of three and four, and were talking about the killings.

A BCA agent named Jones was keeping an eye on them. He spotted Lucas at the door, and as the employees turned to watch, came over and said, “We’re talking to them one at a time. Not seeing much yet.”

Lucas said, “Shaffer says they do Spanish-language software.”

“Yeah. We already talked to the office manager. She said some of the sales are down in the Southwest, but most of them are south of the border—Mexico and Central America. They do some down in South America, Colombia and Venezuela.”

“All drug countries,” Lucas said. “You think they’re running a money laundry?”

“Can’t tell yet,” Jones said. “If it is, it’s not that big. They only did about two million in sales last year. Brooks took out about two hundred thousand, himself. They got a million-dollar payroll on top of that, they’re paying some stiff rent, they contract for the software, there’re taxes…. There’s not really much left over.”

“Is there any way to verify the sales?” Lucas asked.

“Not really, not if somebody wanted to tinker with the books. It’s all delivered online, there aren’t any physical deliveries.” Jones nodded at the office, and added, “We’ve got all of these people sitting here, they all say they get paid, we know they pay rent on the office space … It’d be a hell of a conspiracy.”

“We’ve got a killing that looks like it’s dope-related, we’ve got people peddling untraceable software in Mexico. It’s gotta be here somewhere,” Lucas said.

Jones shrugged. “You’re welcome to look. I’ll tell you one thing. If it’s a laundry, and they were stealing money, it wasn’t worth it.” Jones had been to the murder house and had seen the damage.

“No, it wasn’t,” Lucas agreed.

“So … Dick and Andi are in the back, doing the interviews,” Jones said. “You want to sit in?”

“Maybe … but you’re done with the office manager?”

“For the time being.”

“Let me talk to her,” Lucas said.

B
ARBARA
P
HILLIPS
was a heavyset blonde in her late forties or early fifties, with an elaborate hairdo, low-cut silky tan blouse,
and seven-inch cleavage. She’d been crying, and had mascara running down her face, with wipe lines trailing off toward her ears. She’d been sitting in her office with two other employees when Jones stuck his head in: “We have another agent who’d like to chat with you,” he said to Phillips.

She nodded and said, “You guys be careful,” to the other employees, and they all shook their heads and trooped out of the room. When Lucas stepped in, Phillips asked, “You think the killers are looking for us?”

Lucas took a chair and said, “I doubt it … unless there’s some reason you think they might be.”

“Mr. Chang, Agent Chang, said they thought maybe a Mexican drug gang did it. What does that have to do with us?”

Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. Can you think of anything at all?”

Tears started running down her face, and she sniffed and wiped the tears away, and said, “Our business is with Mexicans. We
like
Mexicans. Half the people working here are Mexicans, or Panamanians.”

“Liking Mexicans doesn’t mean much to these people, if they’re actually a drug gang,” Lucas said. “Most of the people they murder are Mexicans.”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, her voice rising almost to a wail.

Lucas sat and watched her for a moment, and she gathered herself together and said, “Those poor kids. God, those poor kids. I just hope they didn’t suffer.”

L
UCAS DIDN’T
know how to respond to that, given the truth of the matter, so he said, “Tell me one thing that would let this
business…” He paused, then continued, “What am I asking here?” He scratched his chin. “Tell me one thing that would allow a drug gang to use this business for their own purposes. I’m not asking if they did, just make something up. One possibility.”

She peered at him for a moment, confused, and then sat up, looked at a wall calendar as if it might explain something to her, then looked back and said, “There isn’t any. Not that I can think of. We don’t buy or sell any physical product, so you can’t use us to smuggle anything. There aren’t any trucks, nobody crosses any border. We don’t make that much in profit … and all of our income is recorded because it’s all done with credit cards. So, I don’t know.”

“Is there any way they could use your computer systems for communications of some kind?” Lucas asked. “Or anything like that?”

“Why would they?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of anything that might help,” Lucas said.

Phillips said, “Listen, if they want to communicate, they can buy an encryption package, for a few dollars, that the CIA couldn’t break, and just send e-mails. Why would they go through us?”

Lucas turned his palms up. “Don’t know. Maybe they didn’t. But somewhere, there’s a reason they were killed. Possibly in this company. Did Mr. Brooks speak Spanish?”

“Oh, yes. He was fluent. So was his wife,” Phillips said. “They lived in Argentina for five years, and that’s where Pat got the idea for the company. Everybody’s got computers down there, but it’s
hard to get good software in Spanish. His idea was, get some of these really good, inexpensive, second-level software packages—business software, games, whatever—and translate them into Spanish. That’s what we did. We’d buy the rights, get a contractor to recode in Spanish, and put it online.”

“Then the customers would download it and that’d be the end of it,” Lucas said.

“That’s it,” she said.