The Enemy Inside (41 page)

“I don’t have anything to hide. And besides, he came all this way,” I tell her.

She looks at me, smiles pleasantly, and tells me there may be some confidential matters that require discussion.

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” I say. “Until I talk to my client, the only thing I’m prepared to talk about are the ground rules, in particular where he and I can meet and where we can have absolute confidence that what we say to each other is confidential.”

Parish and her boss probably see this as an opportunity to take my deposition, to find out whatever they can about what I know.

“I understand you brought some kind of a noise generator with you.”

“I did.”

“Why would you do that?” she asks.

“For the same reason you use parabolic mics or worse, their laser cousins. You want to listen in and I don’t want you to.”

“I’m an attorney,” she says. “I understand the sanctity of the attorney-client privilege.”

“In that case, I’m sure you can understand the practical need to protect it, particularly when we consider the stakes involved in this case.”

She looks at me, little slits for eyes. “So what do you propose?” she says.

“I’d like to talk to my client outside under the open sky. I assume he has seen daylight recently?”

“He gets exercise four times a week, outside in the recreation area,” says the supervisor.

“Would that be the concrete pit?” I say.

He just looks at me.

“Then I assume it is. Let’s hope the sunlight doesn’t blind him. I believe you have an outdoor exercise track, surrounding a field.” I know they do because I have seen it from the satellite photo on Google Earth. “I want to meet him there. Alone. No guards. No mics, just him and me.”

“This is a maximum security prison,” says the supervisor. “The people in this institution are highly dangerous.”

“I don’t doubt it for a minute. But if you’re talking about Mr. Betz, I’ll take my chances. You know as well as I do he represents no danger at all, at least not to me.”

Parish, Yasuda, and the supervisor huddle at the other side of the table with their backs to me. When they turn around, Parish tells me they want to go in the other room and talk. What they want to do is stall for time until they can come up with some method to give me what I want and still listen in.

“Take it or leave it,” I tell them. “I either talk to him now or else I walk. If I do, you can tell Senator Grimes for me that all bets are off.”

“What do you mean?” says Parish.

“Just tell her, she’ll know.”

They look at each other. The supervisor shrugs, nods. “All right,” she says. “It’ll take us a few minutes to move him.”

“Please don’t take too long. I’d rather not have to leave.”

“Give us ten minutes,” says the supervisor.

I’m standing alone on the grass infield in the center of the fading green oval, some of it dirt, surrounded by the dusty track when I see him. He is hooded in black and manacled, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. His hands are held to his side by a waist chain. For some reason they haven’t bothered to put the ankle chains on. Probably because they know that Betz is going nowhere.

He is accompanied by three guards who shuttle him along like a blind man. With the hood over his head, he is exactly that. They shuffle along slowly, covering the seventy-five yards or so to where I’m standing.

Betz appears to be very slight of build. It’s hard to tell in the jumpsuit. But he’s not very tall, maybe five foot seven. Walking, he looks a little knock-kneed as if perhaps they’re holding him up.

When they reach me I hear him breathing heavily through the hood. One of the guards tells Betz he may want to close his eyes for the sunlight. It is one of those brilliant Colorado days, blue skies and not a cloud overhead.

“Do you mind if he borrows one of your hats?” I ask them.

“Sure,” says one of the guards. “He can use mine.” He asks Betz if he’s OK.

“Is that you, Walter?”

“It is.”

“I’m all right.”

“You might want to close your eyes. We’re gonna take the hood off.”

“OK.”

They pull the hood from his head. His hands in pure reflex try to come up to shade his eyes, but the waist chain won’t allow it. Betz squints, closes his eyes, and tries to look down toward the ground.

The guard puts the baseball cap on Betz’s head and pulls the visor down low on his forehead to shade his eyes. “You OK?”

“Good. I’m fine. Thanks for the hat,” he says.

“It’s OK.” The guard looks at me. “He’s all yours. Do yourself a favor. Don’t wander too far. Guards up in the towers.” He gestures toward one of them with his head. “They will use deadly force if you get anywhere near the fence.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

The guards leave us.

I reach into my pocket, take out the white noise generator, and turn it on. It emits a low audible hum.

“What is that?” says Betz.

I explain it to him. He looks at the device, then back at me. I’m not sure he believes me.

“Sorry we had to meet out here under these circumstances. But I needed to get you away from the buildings where we could talk in private. You are Rubin Betz?”

“Last time I looked,” he says. “Course that was a while ago.” His face is gaunt, pale, lines etched under his eyes. For a man who is supposed to be forty-six, Betz could pass for sixty.

“My name is Paul Madriani. I’m a lawyer. I was sent here to represent you. Did anyone tell you I was coming?”

“Yeah, they told me. Who hired you?” he says.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure myself. I’m not going to lie to you. For all I know, it may be the same people who put you in this place.”

“Then why should I trust you?” he says.

“You don’t have to. Just hear me out. I think I know what’s happening. You’ve been in here now for what, almost two years?”

He nods.

“Things have happened that you may not know about. Do you ever get any visitors?”

He shakes his head. His eyes never leave me.

“So in that time you’ve had no visitors at all?”

“My lawyer,” he says. “But he’s dead. They told me he died in an accident. That was right after they put me in here. You tend to lose track of time.”

“Then Olinda Serna never came to visit you?”

He looks at me but doesn’t say anything.

“Did you know she was dead?”

By the expression on his face, the look in his eyes, I can tell that he didn’t. “According to the police report it was an accident. But it wasn’t. She was murdered.”

“I need to sit down,” he says.

Whatever little energy he had seems to abandon him with this news. There’re a couple of benches out near the edge of the track. We move toward one of them and sit.

“How did she die?”

“Automobile collision and fire. It was all very carefully staged.”

“When?”

“About two months ago, not too far from San Diego, in California.”

He starts to cough, turns his head away from me, and for a moment seems to collect himself. When he looks back at me he has teared up.

“I take it you knew her pretty well?”

“We were lovers. We had been living together for quite a while. We kept it quiet, mostly for her career.”

“Why didn’t she come to visit you here?”

“She couldn’t.”

“Because of her career?”

“That and the fact that it was dangerous. Though staying away didn’t save her, as you can see. She wanted to come visit. I told her not to. I’m sure people around her thought she was nothing but a flaming ball of ambition. That she just used people and moved on. But she didn’t. She wasn’t that way at all. She had a chip on her shoulder—Olinda against the world. She had a hard outer veneer, but once you cracked through it there was a big-hearted, generous person inside. To those in need. The kind of person who would take in stray dogs and cats, if you know what I mean. I know because I was one of them. When I got bounced from a job all my friends dropped me like I had leprosy. But not Olinda. She kept me going. Used her connections to give me a new start. You never know who your real friends are until you’re down, when you need them. We had some good times,” he says. “Is that what you came here to tell me? That she’s dead?”

“No. I came here to try and get you out, if I can.”

He shoots me a look as if trying to read my mind. “Why would you do that?”

I turn to look at him. “Do you want to stay here?”

“What, do you think I’m crazy? I don’t have a choice. I leave here and the same people who got to her are gonna kill me. Who are you anyway?”

“I told you. My name is Paul Madriani. I’m a law—”

“No. I mean how did you get involved?”

“A long story.” I tell him about the case, Alex and the collision in the desert. The fact that Ives was unconscious, an intended victim who escaped. I explain about the
Washington Gravesite,
the story they were working on, the PEPs, the politically exposed deposit holders at Gruber Bank. Then the name of the old Swiss banker, Simon Korff, and the fact that he was killed as well.

“Korff saw you, Serna, and Senator Maya Grimes at Gruber Bank. He told me that you and Serna acted as financial go-betweens for some powerful people in Washington. He told me there were boatloads of cash. Now the people who killed Serna and the banker are tidying up the remaining loose ends. Because of what I know, I am on their clean-up list along with a few of my close friends and associates with whom I’ve shared the news.”

“I can’t help you.” He starts to get up from the bench.

“We can help each other.”

“You’re wondering how I stayed alive all this time,” he says.

“You’re holding something they want,” I tell him.

“If you think I’m gonna tell you where it is, you’re wrong.”

“I don’t want to know where it is.”

This gets his attention. “Then what do you want?”

“I want to stay alive. In order to do that I’ve gotta get you out of here.”

“How’s that gonna help you?”

“You have information. They don’t know where it is. That’s why you’re still alive. If I can get you out of here, tuck you away where you’re safe and comfortable,” I tell him, “and I’m the only one who knows where, then I’ll have a piece of your protection. Unless you think you’re better off here?”

He studies me for a moment, a hard direct stare, then says, “Why is it all of a sudden everybody wants me out?”

“Who else?”

“Two days ago they came to me with an offer.”

“Who?”

“A lawyer from the Justice Department. Woman by the name of Parish.”

“Go on.”

“She’s the one told me you were coming. She told me you were going to represent me—that is, if I agreed. She turned off the mic on my side of the glass, told me not to say anything, just listen. She said they were prepared to pay me a lot of money, and let me go.”

“Who was prepared to pay?”

“The government. I’m just telling you what she told me. All they wanted in return was what I’m holding.”

“Bank records?”

He looks at me and winks.

“If you do that and they release you, you’ll be dead in a week,” I tell him.

“Well, at least we agree on that.”

“You don’t have to say anything, but I’m assuming that whatever you have has some kind of a hair trigger on it. Anything happens to you, it goes public?”

“WikiLeaks on steroids,” says Betz. “Their knowledge of that is what keeps me alive. But I’m running out of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t. But then who else do you have? Is there another lawyer you’d like me to contact?”

He shakes his head. “I’m tired and I don’t have much time. I’m gonna have to trust somebody.” Resignation written all over his face. “May as well be you. Besides, what more can they do to me? The fact is,” he says, “I’m dying. They don’t know it yet, but I’m living on borrowed time.”

FIFTY-ONE

I
am guessing that he has kept this secret, the fact that he is dying, to himself for so long that when he is finally able to share it with someone, the dam cracks, and he can’t stop talking.

He tells me that his doctor diagnosed cancer in his pancreas just before sentencing, a short time before he arrived here. There was little they could do to treat it because it had already spread. They told him he had perhaps twelve to eighteen months. He is past that now. Betz has been living in hell. He couldn’t tell authorities for fear that they would make his dying days even more miserable trying to extract the information from him, find out where the banking records were. He refused to give it up because he was bitter and angry. Perhaps that’s the only thing keeping him alive.

“They cheated me out of the money,” he says. “And now they’re getting desperate. I wanted it for my daughter.”

“What money? I don’t understand.”

“The Whistleblower Fund,” he says. “I die in here, my daughter will never see a dime. It’s what the lawyer offered me when she told me you were coming. But they’re lying. I know they are. The minute they get what they want, they’ll leave me here to rot.”

“How much are we talking about?”

“A hundred and ten million dollars. They owe it to me.”

As he says it I nearly fall off the bench.

“You’re telling me that’s what she offered you?”

He nods. “I turned state’s evidence against the Swiss bank I used to work for. The information I gave them resulted in almost five thousand offshore numbered accounts being identified. It’s why they put me in here. They knew if they put me anywhere else where I couldn’t be protected, I’d be labeled as a snitch. I’d be dead in twenty-four hours. The taxes and penalties on the hidden accounts were substantial.”

The Internal Revenue Service pays a reward for information based on a percentage of what they recover in revenue. This is embedded in federal law.

“But that’s only part of it,” says Betz. “The bulk of it is owing from the fines against the bank itself. The bank agreed to pay more than eight hundred million dollars in fines to the US Treasury in order to keep their executives out of prison on charges they conspired with the taxpayers to commit tax evasion. They owe me ten percent of what they recovered.”