Innocent as Sin (5 page)

North of Seattle
Friday
9:44
A.M. PST

A
ndre Bertone,” Rand said, handing Faroe a mug of black tea. “You’re sure?”

“As sure as anyone can be in this business,” Faroe said. “He’s kept the identity for five years. Something of a record for him.”

“Sounds more French than Russian. Possibly Argentine.”

“It’s the name on his UN passport. He was Nicolas Gregori, aka the Siberian, when he killed Reed. Two weeks later Andre Bertone appeared with a cover story that went back to his mother’s milk.”

“Busy boy.” Rand poured his own tea.

“Oh, yeah. Bertone started out life as Victor Krout, a Siberian-born Russian. He was trained in the usual black arts at KGBU in Moscow. He speaks six languages, flies helos and airplanes, and practices tradecraft like a deep-cover agent.”

“Is he?”

“Doubt it,” Faroe said, yawning and stretching. “The Russians want Bertone’s ass. Something about unpaid taxes.”

“Bet it’s more like unpaid kickbacks.”

Faroe shrugged. “In some countries, kickbacks are just another name for taxes.”

“What’s a former KGB agent doing with a United Nations passport?”

“Ask Libya. Money and guns is my guess.”

“The creds must come in handy for a globe-trotting international gunrunner,” Rand said.

“Supposedly he’s not a gunrunner anymore,” Faroe said. “Now he has a bunch of shell companies and old friends standing between him and the obvious dirty stuff. The new and improved Andre Bertone is a respected and respectable international commodities broker. Oil, coltan, diamonds, timber, whatever one African backwater wants to sell and some first-world country wants to buy.”

Sipping at the strong, murky tea he loved, Rand paced over to the window and stared out. The bright interval of sun had passed. The sky was slate gray and the wind had increased, whipping the daffodils and turning the unsecured rotor of the waiting helicopter.

Faroe fought back another yawn. He’d been pulling twenty-hour days over Bertone.

“I want to read everything you have on him,” Rand said.

“Okay, with the usual reservations.”

“The ones that require me to cut out my tongue before talking, my fingers before typing, and my eyes before seeing?” Rand asked dryly.

“You remember. I’m touched.”

“Who’s the client?”

“An African nation that used the Siberian, got double-crossed, discovered it after the fact, and double-crossed the oil cartel Bertone fronts for in retaliation. Now the cartel is trying to start a
civil war so that they’ll get oil concessions from the new government. If the oil-backed rebels get enough arms, they’ll win. But they won’t get arms if they don’t get the money to pay.”

“You’re giving me a headache.”

“Get used to it,” Faroe said.

“Do you trust your Camgerian interface?”

Faroe’s smile was slow and cold. “You haven’t lost a step, have you?”

“I lost a twin. Does that count?” Rand made an abrupt gesture. “Who’s the interface?”

“A man called John Neto. He was born in Africa and educated at the London School of Economics. Someday he’s going to run that oil-rich little country. Right now he’s head of the Camgerian national intelligence service—all three employees. He has a fine jugular instinct and the patience of a leopard. Best of all, he hates the ground Bertone walks on. He’s been tracking him for years.”

“So why does this Neto need St. Kilda?”

“The U.S. government won’t cooperate with him.”

“Gee, that sounds familiar,” Rand said. “So they stonewalled him same as they did me?”

“Yeah. And then they told Neto that he couldn’t come to the U.S. and present evidence against Andre Bertone.”

“Why?”

“‘Not in the interests of the U.S. at this time.’ Visa denied.”

Rand made a disgusted sound. “Same shit, different year.” He took a swallow of hot, bitter, aromatic tea. “So St. Kilda has suddenly become an agent for a foreign power? Even if it’s a tiny African nation that has had more names in twenty years than Andre Bertone, it’s still a little dicey, isn’t it?”

“Only if we’re pursuing another nation’s political interests. We aren’t.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“Neto’s government has issued a murder warrant for Krout, aka Bertone, which makes this a criminal inquiry,” Faroe said.

“Steele is skating on a thin edge.”

“Actually it’s Grace, and she assured us it’s a defensible position. She also assured us that we’d all be a lot happier if we nailed Bertone in such a way that no one would want to make a federal case of it.”

Rand thought about it, whistled, and said, “That’s some woman you married.”

Faroe grinned the grin of a well-satisfied male.

Sun fought to pierce the clouds, failed, and sulked. Rand watched the small skirmish overhead and thought hard. “What do you want from me?”

“You’re the one man we know who has seen the Siberian close enough to identify him. If you can verify that Bertone is the Siberian by another name, St. Kilda can chip away at his UN creds. At least that’s what the brains of the outfit both say.”

“Both?”

“Steele and Grace.”

“Steele actually listens to her?” Rand asked.

“At the top of his lungs. And vice versa. It’s quite a show.” Faroe looked at his watch. “Ready to meet Neto?”

“I thought he was denied a visa.”

“Here, but not in Victoria, B.C.”

The wind gusted around the cabin. The branches of a fir tree tapped against the glass. It sounded hauntingly like Morse code from a prisoner.

Me.

That’s what I’ve become. Prisoner of the past.

“What the hell,” Rand said, shrugging. “I need to go to Murchie’s anyway. I’m running out of tea.”

“If it goes well in Canada, we’re heading straight to Phoenix. Steele doesn’t like what he’s hearing on the Brazilian grapevine. Neither do I. We could be working on a much shorter clock than Neto believed. Pack your painting gear along with whatever else you think you need,” Faroe said.

“I thought the St. Kilda adage was ‘Pack your weapons and live out of Wal-Mart.’”

“They don’t have the kind of professional painting gear you’ll need if you go to the Fast Draw in Phoenix.”

“Big if.”

“Humor me.”

“The last time I did, Reed died.”

“Wrong,” Faroe said calmly. “I humored Reed and let him follow you around Africa with a rifle. You never had a sense of humor worth mentioning.”

Rand almost snarled, almost smiled. “I’ll need dossiers on this Elena, whoever she is.”

“Bertone’s wife.”

“And the ASB banker, whatever he, she, or it is.”

“She. Kayla Shaw. My computer’s on the helo. You can read dossiers while we fly to Victoria. Get a move on. The film crew will be getting restless.”

Rand blinked. “Film crew? Are they part of the Fast Draw contest?”

“Hell of an idea. I’ll work on it.”

“What does painting have to do with Bertone?”

“It’s all on my computer.”

“Which is on the helo, which is heading for B.C.”

Faroe punched Rand’s shoulder lightly. “You listen good.”

“Too bad I don’t obey worth a damn.”

“We’ll work on that.”

Phoenix
Friday
12:12
P.M. MST

K
ayla was tempted to drive past the freeway turnoff again, but she made herself go to American Southwest Bank instead. More than an hour of roaming Phoenix’s ninety-mile-an-hour freeways was all the time she could afford to work off her anger and fear. She pulled into the employee-of-the-month parking space in front of the glistening steel and copper-colored glass building that housed American Southwest.

“What bullshit,” she said, turning off the engine. “What complete and utter bullshit.”

For the past three weeks she’d enjoyed using the parking space. It wasn’t the gold star in her file that she cared about, it was the chance to walk a quarter mile less in the heels all women employees were required to wear.

And that’s bullshit, too. If heels are so necessary, why don’t men wear the damn things?

She’d take a suit and tie over pantyhose and heels any day.

“No worries,” she told herself as she got out of the car. “After
I talk with Steve Foley, I won’t have to rub up against American Southwest dress codes.”

Or any other business kind.

Wonder how I’ll look in prison orange.

She slammed the car door. The explosive sound was so satisfying she opened the door and slammed it again. Harder.

Okay, tantrum over.

Now think.

Because thinking is the only thing that will keep me out of bright orange. And I look really lame in orange.

She’d always assumed that people who went to prison had it coming. What really burned her was that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Her real estate deal was entirely legal. Any other landowner would have been blameless.

But she was an employee of American Southwest Bank who had, at best, engaged in an unusual private transaction with a very important client. That was a firing offense.

She could live with that.

It was the idea of going to prison for laundering money that spiked her blood pressure.

Automatically she went through the discreet metal detectors, nodded to the guard, and used her electronic passkey on the elevator. Her office wasn’t on the top floor, but Steve Foley’s was. If neckties and ever-shining shoes bothered him, he didn’t show it. He dressed for success, talked for it, breathed for it.

He was the youngest vice president in the bank’s history. He’d been at the bank a year less than Kayla, decades less than many of the other women in her department, yet he’d leapfrogged over them and into the corner office with the ease of a handsome, charming young executive bound for greatness.

It hadn’t hurt that his father was a member of the bank’s board of directors.

Kayla still wasn’t sure if she was more annoyed by the implicit sexism or the explicit nepotism in his rapid promotions. She
was
sure that she’d never cared for Foley, had passed up his offers for a social relationship with bland professional smiles, and had worked hard for every tiny raise she got.

Now she had to tell him she’d screwed up. She wondered if he’d be sympathetic or happy to see her on her knees. Her gut said that sympathy was a long shot.

She found Foley behind a clean walnut desk that was decorated with a seldom-used pen set, a never-used baseball autographed by a Diamondbacks reliever who had since been traded to Kansas City, and a booster’s award plaque from the National Rifle Association. Pretty typical of an Arizona executive. He glanced in her direction as she entered and closed the door behind her.

“Hey, Kayla.” He flashed a smile perfect enough to be a news anchor’s. “How’s the best-looking banker in Phoenix?”

Kayla ignored both the smile and the personal remark. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

Foley glanced at the closed door. “That’s what I’m here for.” He gestured to the client chair across the desk from him. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not certain yet,” she said, which was half true. “I just had a meeting with a client. He asked me to deposit a big check for him.”

“Well, that’s what banks are for, isn’t it?” He pointed to the chair. “Sit.”

She was tempted to keep on standing, but she sat down, carefully keeping her knees together, a feat that particular chair made nearly impossible. No doubt that was why Foley had chosen it.

“This is an unusually big check,” Kayla said.

“How big?” Foley asked without looking away from her long legs.

“Twenty-two million dollars.”

He focused on her face. “Not bad, Kayla. Not bad at all. You should be dancing, not frowning. Unless there’s some difficulty with the check?”

“It’s drawn on a Caribbean bank by one of our best clients, Andre Bertone.”

“He’s good for a lot more than twenty-two million,” Foley said, rocking back in his swivel chair. “So what’s the problem?”

“I thought I should run it by you before I cashed the check,” she said carefully. “I’ve never heard of the bank the check is drawn on, and I’ve never seen this account in Mr. Bertone’s records. When I tried to do some fundamental due diligence, Andre and Elena both told me where the money came from was none of my business.”

Foley sighed and shook his head. “Most of our wealthy clients just don’t understand our obligations under the Patriot Act. I assume you explained everything to him.”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“He went postal,” Kayla said.

“I don’t understand.”

“First, he tried what amounted to blackmail. Very cleverly done, but still blackmail.”

Foley’s mouth opened. He shook his head sharply, then picked up his desk pen. “Explain.”

“Remember that land I own out toward Wickenburg?”

“Sure do. Did you decide to sell it like I advised?”

Kayla told herself that Foley didn’t mean to sound patronizing. And if she repeated it often enough, she might believe it. “The deal just closed this morning.”

“Good. Small ranches are sentimental holes in all but the wealthiest purses. You don’t have a big one. What’d you get for it?”

“Twenty-five thousand an acre.”

“Yowsa,” Foley said, fiddling with the pen. “That’s a great price. Did you go with Charlotte Welmann?”

Kayla nodded. She’d taken Foley’s recommendation because she didn’t know any local Realtors and hadn’t wanted the hassle of selling Dry Valley by herself. “Charlotte started with a high price because she wasn’t sure what the market would be.” Kayla grimaced. “The place sold in a day.”

“Huh. Guess you should have asked more.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Who bought it?”

“Charlotte told me the buyer was an out-of-town investor who was quietly buying up ground for a large development. I was required to sign a confidentiality agreement, promising not to reveal the sale. The buyer’s agent said his client was worried that other landowners would hear about my sale and start jacking up their prices.”

Foley nodded. “That’s pretty standard. So what does all this have to do with your, ah, blackmail problem?”

“About an hour after I signed the agreement and picked up the escrow check, I learned the identity of the buyer. Andre Bertone.”

Foley’s blond eyebrows lifted. “Well, that’s a little weird, but I don’t see—”

Kayla cut across his words. “Bertone told me if I didn’t deposit his twenty-two-million-dollar check without questions, he’d see that I got in trouble with the bank and the federal government over the Dry Valley sale.”

Reaching into her valise, she pulled out the check and shoved
it across the desk to her boss. Then she rubbed her fingers over her skirt, trying to remove even the feel of the transaction.

Foley picked up the check and looked at it silently. It appeared to be just what she’d said it was.

Twenty-two million bucks.

“Okay, let me get this straight,” he said finally. “You think that one of our best clients spent a quarter of a million dollars on a scheme to compromise you, and potentially the bank as well.”

She nodded. Foley might be a pretty boy, but he was a damned shrewd banker.

He looked at the check again. “Have you verified that the funds are present in the account?”

Kayla shook her head. “I didn’t want to do anything that looked like I was agreeing to Bertone’s demands. That seemed to me like a one-way ticket to federal prison.”

Thoughtfully Foley slid the check in small circles on the polished surface of the desk. Then he pushed the check back to her. “If this all happened the way you say it did, you’ve done nothing wrong. The bank will back you two hundred percent.”

She let out a long breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that.”

“Be serious, Kayla.” He leaned forward and grinned. “I always take care of the people who take care of me.”

The remark made her uneasy, but she let it pass. She didn’t like a lot of what Foley said. “So what do we do—call the FBI?”

He leaned back. “No. That’s the last thing we do. The Bertones have been very good customers of American Southwest. This may all be some extraordinary coincidence, or, more likely, a cascade of misunderstandings. Andre is an international financial force. This may simply be the way they do business in his banking circles. We need to explore a little more, find out exactly what’s going on. If we don’t like what we find, we’ll file an SAR.”

“But—”

“So process this check,” he said, pushing it back to her, “just to keep Andre happy, while I figure out exactly what we ought to do.”

Kayla’s stomach felt hollow. “Isn’t that a bit risky?”
Especially for me.

“Not if we can figure a way of covering the transaction for the moment. Is this an account you’ve handled before?”

“I told you that it wasn’t. If I’d qualified this account previously, there wouldn’t be any question about the transaction.”

He frowned, looking at the check again. Twenty-two million. “Yeah, I guess you did mention that. So we can’t clean it up that way.”

Clean it up?
Kayla asked silently.
I don’t like the sound of that. But then, I haven’t liked the sound of anything since Elena handed me that check.

The light on one of Foley’s telephones blinked, alerting him to an incoming call. He ignored it.

“What we need to do is find a way of carrying the transaction on our books that won’t put us at risk but will buy us a little time,” he said. He looked at the check again. “Bank of Aruba, Sugar Sands branch…Wait a minute, wait a minute.”

He spun his high-backed executive chair and addressed the flat screen of his desktop computer. His fingers moved rapidly over the keyboard, drilling down through pages and documents.

“There,” he said. “I knew I remembered that name. They have a correspondent banking relation with us. They’ve had it for some months now. That will make things much easier.”

Some of the tension seeped out of Kayla.

The light still blinked on the desk phone.

Foley turned back to her. “Here’s what we do. You call the
Aruba bank. Make sure Andre has the money in the account, then put a hold on the funds and tell them you intend to run the draft through their correspondent account.”

Kayla hesitated. “I don’t know nearly as much as you do about international banking and correspondent accounts, but is it legal? Who’s responsible for knowing the customer?”

Foley kicked back in his chair. “Not us, for damn sure. Our correspondent, aka the Bank of Aruba, Sugar Sands branch, is on the spot for due diligence.”

She looked as doubtful as she felt. “You’re certain?”
It’s my ass on the line.

“Standard operating procedure,” he said. “If anybody challenges us, we simply say we assumed the Aruba bank had done their own due diligence on the account before they let Andre start writing checks of this size.”

“Would it fly?” Kayla asked bluntly.

The telephone light stopped blinking.

“It’s defensible, which is all that matters. By the way, I really like how you wrinkle your nose when you’re thinking hard.”

She barely heard the personal remark. She was focused on legalities. “But pushing it off on the Aruba bank is just a bookkeeping trick, almost under the heading of ‘the dog ate my due diligence.’ How does it get me off the hook?”

Foley laughed. “Sweetie, the bank business is all about bookkeeping tricks. The government makes unenforceable antibusiness regs, and the lawyers find ways around them. Correspondent accounts are a legal superhighway. Nobody ever checks the correspondent accounts, not inside the bank and not at Treasury. Everybody is clean and everybody is happy.”

Kayla wished she was happy about what she was hearing, but she wasn’t. If the feds came down on her, she wanted something more solid than a “defensible” position to shield her.

The telephone light started blinking again, double time. Urgent.

“So move the money and let me take care of the rest,” Foley said. “And if Andre comes up with any more big checks, do the same thing. I’ll keep you posted, but don’t get impatient. It will take time to do the background work and walk it up the line to Operations.”

“You’re asking me to move millions of dollars of uncertain origin into the U.S. banking system,” Kayla said. “That’s called laundering.”

“Not so long as I put a hold on the money.”

“What?”

“I’ll lock down the correspondent account.”

“How will that help?” she asked.

“It will be pretty much like the money never left Aruba. Then, after we investigate and find out that everything is kosher, we release the funds and let Andre Bertone do what he wants.”

“But what if things aren’t kosher?” she asked.

The phone light blinked rapidly.

“I know what I’m doing,” Foley said. “Follow my instructions and I’ll take full responsibility.”

“But—”
My name will still be on the bottom line.

“Unless you have a better solution?” Foley asked impatiently.

Kayla didn’t. She just didn’t like his.

“Cash the check. I’ll put the rest of it in motion,” Foley said.

He turned his back on her and reached for the phone.