The Devil on Chardonnay (8 page)

“Ah, Miss Prescott.  Thank you so much for coming,” Ferguson said, wiping his hands and rushing to meet her.  “I was on my way to meet you, and the Joint Staff went into special session and called me.  Please forgive me for asking you to take a taxi.”

“It’s quite alright, general.  I was flattered by the appreciative glances of yet another Nigerian taxi driver.”  She set her briefcase down and surveyed the room. 

Introductions were made.  Joe and two other lieutenant colonels were in uniform. Boyd was not because his hair was now longer and not within standards.  Pamela was “read in” to their project, meaning that she knew what was involved and acknowledged that it was classified and signed a statement as such. 

“We were here all weekend,” Ferguson said, sitting after collecting the security paperwork and nodding at the food packaging stuffed into the wastebaskets.  “We’re on a short schedule, and we’ve hit a dead end.  Boyd and Joe have just come back from East Africa with some very disturbing findings.  Joe, could you show Miss Prescott what we’re up against?”

Joe plugged in his computer and activated the flat-screen on the wall.  He gave a slight wink at Boyd as the first picture came up.  It was the picture the World Health Organization had sent them.  Joe’s dry commentary quickly told the story of Ebola, the frantic radio transmission and the fire, and their visit to the island.

“I’ve seen autopsies before, gentlemen,” Pamela said icily as the picture of the charred skull was replaced by the open chest and the bullet holes.  Her initial irritation at having to endure what she thought was a boyish prank dissolved into interest as the show continued.  She nodded her appreciation of the situation as Boyd related the events in Paris with Henri. 

“The Director’s office sent me the files on the Planters National Bank.  I went over them on the plane. Pretty straightforward stuff,” she said, opening her briefcase.  “Could you load this for me?”  She handed Joe a flash drive. 

“Planters National is a small regional bank with a dozen branches in South Carolina and Georgia.  Total assets last year were $2.2 billion.”

“A billion dollars?  That’s small?”  Boyd broke in.

Joe, too, looked curious.

Pamela furrowed her brow and looked at Boyd, then Joe and Ferguson.  She seemed to be weighing a sarcastic response, then lay the remote control on her briefcase.

“You guys are not, uh, familiar with the banking industry, I take it.  Shall I start with something a bit more basic?”

“A billion dollars seems to be quite a lot of money,” Ferguson said. “You might characterize this bank in comparison with other regional banks and go on from there.  If we need any remedial work we can get it later.”

Even a mediocre general can control a meeting, Boyd thought.

“Yes, well, the bank is a small player in the Southeast, maybe 20th.  By contrast, Bank of America, headquartered in Charlotte, has $2 trillion in total assets, third in the nation.” 

Looking around at the room she added, “Assets include all their deposits. That isn’t all their money.  Planters National is traded on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange, so they’re also overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Directors own 20 percent of the stock, which is a lot for a bank holding company of their size.  Their last audit was squeaky clean, and their profit and loss statement corresponds well with the shareholder’s report.”

She paused. They all stared blankly at the screen. 

“You’re wondering how we get them to tell us where that money came from,” she said, putting the remote control back on the desk. 

“Yes, that’s why we called on the FBI,” Ferguson retorted.

“It’s not that easy.  They’re just a bank – a well capitalized, honestly run, regional bank.  There are no signs of fraud, though this is just a preliminary report.  If you have some indication, we could begin a full scale audit.  The question of whether the bank is involved in those cash transfers as an agent or as a principal cannot be answered from information available publicly.”

“Can’t we just subpoena their records?”  Joe asked.

“Sure, we can go to the U.S. Attorney and show him our information, and he could ask for their records.  You’d get 10 gigabytes of data.  Then what?”

The officers had a pretty good idea who might have to sort through that 10 gigabytes of data.  They were silent.

“So?”  Ferguson, as usual, jumped right in.

“That means it’s their business,” she snapped.  “What a bank is, and who owns it, and who makes how much from it, is public.  Individual services for a client are not.  We can ask them, of course.  If they are in a mood to cooperate with the government, they can tell us.  If they even know.  A wire transfer of less than a million dollars, and now almost half a year ago, is going to be like a needle in a haystack, even for a small bank like this.”

“A customer list might be enough,” Joe said.  “I’d recognize any major viral research or pharmaceutical companies.”

“They’ve broken no laws?”

“Murder, times two.  At least,” Boyd said.

“Murder is not a crime a bank can commit.  A customer list goes into the area of their proprietary interest.  We’d have to show the U.S. Attorney that a crime has been or is being committed.” 

Pamela sat back, seeming confident the next step would take this investigation into someone else’s arena, leaving her to either play a peripheral role or bow out altogether.  

”Miss Prescott, this is a matter of national security,” Ferguson said. “I explained that to the Director.  We need to get to who sent that money, and we need to do it now, and we need to do it without them knowing we’re looking.  Now, how can we do that?” 

Ferguson had pulled the general officer’s favorite trick; they must learn it charm school right after their promotion is announced.  Challenge.  Push.  Break down the façade, then skewer the responsible officer in front of their peers.  Humiliate.  Create a reputation that makes people wet their pants at the mere thought of not having a complete answer.  It didn’t work with Pamela Prescott.

“You can’t force them to tell you their private business unless there is some evidence a crime has been committed.  You can ask!” 

The rising crescendo of anger left the room in silence as her final word reverberated.  Not content to leave it at that she stood and faced the general. 

“You guys have me in here on some sort of half-baked scheme that has nothing to do with bank fraud, which is my field.  You should just go down to Charleston and ask the banker who sent that money to Paris.  If he knows, and isn’t involved, he’ll tell you.  Why would a bank be into something this weird anyway?  You don’t need me.” 

She held her ground, standing at the head of the conference room table red-faced and glaring at Ferguson.

Boyd suppressed a grin as he stole a glance at Joe.  It was fun to watch someone take on a general. Being only a captain, he’d never seen that before.  He noticed that Pamela was a robust girl, and the top button on the worsted wool suit she wore was under some tension, like the middle button on a man’s sport coat when the belly gets out of hand. 

Ferguson stood, his height immediately dominating. 

“No need to get excited here Miss Prescott.  Perhaps we’ve all had enough today.  I have to go back to the Pentagon.   Let’s break for today and we’ll pick this back up tomorrow.” 

He didn’t wait for an answer.  He walked to the door, opened it, turned and added, “Right after lunch.”

When the door closed the silence lasted a full minute.  Each seemed to be listening to be sure he was gone.

“Well,” Joe said, packing up, smiling.  “See you guys tomorrow.”

“Two years in Oklahoma,” Pamela erupted, as she threw the remaining papers and her flash drive into the briefcase and slammed it shut.  “The heart of the ignorance belt. Bad food, bad hotels, hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and I catch the slickest thief in the 10th Federal Reserve District.”  She slammed her chair back under the table.  “I get home and the telephone rings.  Ah, I think, someone calling me with a word of thanks, an ‘attagirl.’ ” 

The officers sat in awe.  The force of her anger animated her features, giving an intensity of feeling to what had seemed a mask when she first arrived.  

“But no!  Your general, living up to the worst of the military stereotypes, a pea-brained martinet, somehow gets my number and gets me sent to Washington in August.  Great!”

She scanned the room as if she expected one of the surprised officers to respond.

“How about a drink?”  Boyd asked.

“Yes.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Black Ops, Off the Books

“Double Jack Daniel’s, on the rocks, water by,” Pamela said, not waiting for the waitress to speak, slamming her briefcase into the booth in the bar atop the Sheraton hotel overlooking the runways at Reagan National Airport.

“Bud.  Longneck if you have one,” Boyd said, amused at her anger and her coping mechanisms.

“That man, the sheer arrogance,” she said as she slid her briefcase to the back.  “The most intensely unpleasant person I’ve ever met.  Who does he think he is?”

“My boss,” Boyd said quietly, sliding in across from her.  He looked out at an American 737 on final, approaching from the east, appreciating its controlled descent to touch down with a burst of smoke as all the tires hit the runway at the middle of the dense white stripes.  “Navy landing,” he added, nodding at the plane.

She looked up, surprised at seeing an airport so close.

“Navy guys have to land on aircraft carriers, so they train to hit the approach end of the runway with authority.  They can’t afford to have the ground effect float them along for a hundred yards.  They’d drop off the carrier deck.  Air Force guys glide a plane down soft; Navy guys hit the runway.”

“You’re a pilot?”

Their drinks arrived.  Pamela took a gulp of her bourbon, then seemed to remember he was there, and nodded in his direction, “Cheers.”  Then she took another drink.  Her eyes were restlessly searching the room as if something evil might come through the door.

“Cheers,” he responded and took a pull on his longneck.  “I fly the F-16.”

“Is that one of those little planes?”  She took another gulp.  The double bourbon was now mostly ice.

“Single engine fighter.”

“One of those fast ones, like the Hell’s Angels fly?”

“It’s the Blue Angels, the Navy exhibition team. The Air Force exhibition team is the Thunderbirds.”

“How fast?”  She motioned for the waitress.

“Fast.”  He took a draw on his beer, still mostly full.  “I could come up the river here, at sea level, about 900, and it’d break out all these windows.”  He nodded out the floor to ceiling windows overlooking the Potomac River just on the other side of the Reagan National runway.  “If I went up to 35,000 feet, I could make 1,500, and just make a loud noise.”

“Another Jack,” she told the waitress. “And a bud.”  Then, turning to Boyd she added, “This round’s mine.”

“So, does the FBI usually investigate banks?”

“No.  This sleazeball in Oklahoma turned up when the bank examiners did the books at a bank he controlled.  Then the IRS caught him cheating on his taxes, and the Securities and Exchange Commission caught him selling unlicensed securities.”

“They had him, why did they need you?”

“They didn’t have him, couldn’t pin it on him.  They couldn’t find the irrefutable trail of money leading to him.  He was living like a king on the money, trying to spend it all before they sent him away,” she said, beginning to relax. 

The rage was slipping away and now her eyes were mostly on Boyd. She leaned forward on the table, intent, conspiratorial.  “They needed someone to get into his business, to find out how he did it.”

“How did you get him?”  Boyd asked, enjoying the transformation.

“Follow the money.  That’s what I do best.”

“Did you go undercover?”

She paused. 

He waited.

“Sort of.”  She took a sip.  “He had an accomplice, a guy who worked at his bank.  He was the bag man for all this, the enabler.  I got him.  He ratted out the big guy to save his skin.”

A long pause as she looked into the ice in her glass, thoughts elsewhere.

Boyd nodded, silent, watching the agent remember.  He finished his first beer and took a sip of the second. 

“In a case like that, someone always has a record of where the money went.  You just have to find out who it is, and make them give it to you.”

Boyd nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“I tricked him,” she said quietly, looking back into her drink.  “It was a lawyer’s trick.  He had been very careful to act only in his capacity at the bank, taking orders from the bank president and board.  But, in prosecuting a conspiracy, you only have to show he knew the details of the illegal activity.  He revealed to me he knew the location of an off-the-books property, and that tied him to the whole thing.”

“We don’t have time for anything very elaborate.  Someone has Pandora’s Box open and we need to find out who it is.”

“There are constitutional safeguards in this country that protect private citizens from their own government going on a fishing expedition through their financial records.  We could, pretty quick, get the depositor list from Planter’s National.  We could then pick likely candidates to be involved and subpoena their records.  Depending on how many wire transfers they’ve done in the past year, we could probably find who sent the money to Paris.”

“Why didn’t you tell us that this afternoon?”

“General Ferguson was so busy trying to control everything.  You don’t need me.  If the bank would cooperate, you can get what you need from them.”

“What if they’re involved?”

“Then you have to go to court.”

“Two years.”

“At least.”

She twirled her drink again, then finished it and looked up. 

“Your general and the Director seem to have already come to the conclusion that the only way to get the information you need is to resort to dirty tricks, and that’s why they sent for me.”  She paused, looked out the window, then back at her drink.  “Shit!”

“Not your field?”