The Flinck Connection (Book 4) (Genevieve Lenard) (18 page)

“What’s up, girlfriend?” She pulled Colin’s chair closer and sat down next to me. “Ooh, chocolates! Can I have some?” She immediately started searching through the colourfully wrapped pralines.

“Why do you even ask?”

Her eyes widened when she saw a specific wrapping. “To be polite. But I knew you would say yes. You don’t like chocolates.”

“That’s only partially true. I do like chocolate, but not these.”

“You’re such a snob.” She sat back and bit half of the praline. Some of the liqueur centre dripped on her fingers and she sucked it off. “Hmm. These are really good.”

I wasn’t going to get into another debate about chocolate. The last time we had been in a restaurant, Francine had taken great offence when I had pointed out that normal milk chocolate often contained sixty or more insect fragments per hundred grams, the majority being cockroach fragments. She’d avoided me for two days after that.

“The Foundation’s finances.” I pointed to the monitors. “I’ve seen the finances of Rousseau & Rousseau’s clients, so I know the average annual donations given to charities. Very few individuals would donate substantial amounts. Usually the amounts are just enough to impress their peers.”

“Or for a tax deduction.” She put the other half of the chocolate in her mouth.

“That too. These donations to the Libreville Dignity Foundation were made by individuals and companies. I haven’t looked into the companies yet, so I can’t say whether those were legitimate donations or not.”

“How big were these donations?”

“Hundreds of thousands, millions and in one case seven million euro.”

“Oh, my God. That’s lots of money. What did the charity do with it?”

“See that?” I highlighted an amount. “This was transferred to an offshore account.”

Francine leaned back, her eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me. Samoa?”

“Yes. So far, I’ve isolated thirteen account numbers that had frequent transactions to and from the Foundation’s account. It includes the accounts I had before. But I have no names for the owners of those accounts. There’s another thing.”

“What?” she asked when I took too long changing
windows. I opened the statement I was looking for.

“What do you see?” It had taken a Mozart minuet before my mind had registered what was now on the screen. I highlighted the key numbers to help Francine.

She jumped out of her chair, her hand on her mouth.

“Oh, my God.” She repeated this phrase a few times as she stared at the screen. “How did we not see this before?”

“It’s hidden in a sub-account, made to look unimportant. It’s made to look like anything but a transaction.”

She shook her index finger at the monitor. “Eighty-nine million euro is not unimportant.”

“That’s true. I looked at it and all that money came from those thirteen accounts. These were the files that were deleted from the Foundation’s financial folders. They left no trace of the sub-account and its transactions.”

“I’m going to find out who owns those accounts.” Her lips were set in determined lines. “I need to list their names.”

Her statement reminded me that I had made a list of the people who had made donations to The Foundation. In the more benign income and expenses columns of the Foundations spreadsheets, the donors’ names were listed next to the amounts. I grabbed the notepad lying in front of my keyboard and paged through it.

“What? What are you looking for?” Francine leaned closer to look at my notes. I moved away from her and tilted my notepad to afford only me a view.

“I recognise some of the names.” My voice tapered off as I got the two different pages I was looking for. My memory was serving me well. “Here they are. Francois Bonhomme, Gilles Comtois, Serge Perreault and Thierry St Martin. All of them have donated significant amounts to the Foundation and they have also been Minister Savreux’s guests. It doesn’t mean they own one of the thirteen accounts, but it is worth looking into.”

“Those guys had kinky sex in Savreux office? Definitely not a coincidence. I wonder if Savreux was blackmailing them. Or it could’ve been the price they had to pay for their fetish.”

“I find that hard to believe. Who would pay four hundred thousand dollars for a sexual fantasy?”

“Plenty of men. If they have that kind of money.” A deep frown appeared on her face. “Please, please, please tell me none of those girls were underage.”

“I don’t believe so. There were a few who looked in their early twenties, but most women looked older.”

“Makeup can do that, you know.”

“I was looking at their nonverbal cues, Francine. Those women wanted to be there. Their motivation might have been money and not pleasure, but not once did I notice cues that were worrisome. A few were less than pleased with the way the men looked, but never indicated the desire to leave. They also didn’t appear under the influence of a narcotic.” I didn’t think I could have watched such footage.

“Did you watch all of those videos closely?”

“No, I didn’t, but I didn’t need to. The time before they started doing anything sexual was enough to get an accurate reading on both parties.”

She exhaled loudly and stared at the monitors again. “Okay. If you are sure.”

“I’m sure.” I found it fascinating that someone with morals and ethics as dubious as Minister Savreux’s could play host to sexual fantasies without any underaged girls. This dichotomy was what made us such as psychological beings an interesting study.

“Wait. I’ve seen those account numbers before.” Francine leaned forward to get a closer look at the thirteen numbers from the sub-account. After a few seconds, she turned her head and smiled at me. “Look at us, you remember names and I remember account numbers I’ve seen before. Aren’t we just a sexy memory bank?”

Countless times I didn’t know how to respond to something Francine had said. It was better to stay on topic. “Where did you see those account numbers before?”

“I’ll show you.” She got up. “Give me a sec. I need to get my laptop. I’ll be back in a flash.”

I watch her run out of my viewing room on ten-centimetre-high heels. Even running, Francine looked elegant and would attract the attention of every man she passed. She must have left her laptop in the conference room since it took her much longer than a ‘flash’ to be back.

“Got it. Look here.” She walked back into my room with long strides, sat down and frowned at my desk. She moved the tray with snacks out of the way and put her laptop there. “These are the numbers from the wine cellar files and those Word tables. There are amazing amounts.”

“Which numbers look the same?” I was losing patience with her explanation.

Using my computer, she scrolled around until she found what she was looking for and pointed at the Foundation’s sub-account. “Look there. On the thirteenth of August 2002, the Foundation received eight hundred and sixty thousand euro from an account with these numbers.” She turned her laptop until I could see the screen, and highlighted a row of numbers. “This Word document has only numbers, but the account number is there and the amount too.”

“It doesn’t mean much.”

“It wouldn’t if it were the only number. But look here.” She showed me on her laptop six more account numbers with corresponding amounts that coincided with those that had given donations to the Foundation. “I’m sure there will be more if I actually start looking for it.”

“The improbability of this being coincidental far outweighs its alternative.” I leaned back in my chair. “We have account numbers.”

“Ooh! This will help. Give me a moment and I will break this code to give us names and more details. I was just about to crack this puppy wide open when Nikki told me you were looking for me.”

Through experience, I had learned not to take any of those words literally. Especially not anything time-related. People said a moment, but it often resulted in many minutes, even hours. I left Francine to work on both computers to solve the code. I drank the last of my coffee and focussed on Mozart’s Violin Concerto in E flat major.

“Who’s your daddy? Huh? Huh?” Francine’s triumphant statement drew me out of the concerto. She had adopted a few words and expressions from Vinnie’s lexicon.

“Did you decode it?” I dropped my feet to the floor. I couldn’t remember folding my legs under me.

“I did. Here.” She pushed her laptop towards me, the rubber feet under it squeaking on my desk. I knew the look I gave her was not friendly when I picked up the laptop and placed it parallel to my keyboard. Francine didn’t say anything about my need to have things in a certain way, at a specific angle. It made her more than merely tolerable as a friend, despite her frequent lapses into irrational theories.

I was impressed with how much she had done in the forty minutes I had been listening to Mozart in my head. The numbers that had previously been in the Word document from Minister Savreux’s wine cellar were now neatly arranged in a spreadsheet. Not only were there dates next to the transactions, but she had also found a way to decode the names.

“All of these transactions were made prior to 1990,” I said.

“Actually all the transactions were between 1983 and 1989.”

“We need to identify this company.” The last forty minutes had not gone to waste. Separate bits of information I had collected were starting to fuse together to create a better view of this case. “Look for international companies in Gabon that would have had this kind of turnover in the years between 1983 and 1989.”

“Gabon?” She pulled her laptop back, put it at a distracting angle and started working. “Well, what do you know? We have fifteen international companies in Gabon that fit that bill.”

She turned her laptop so I could see the screen. I wasn’t surprised when I recognised the third name on the list. “It is Elf. All of this has some connection to Elf.”

“The oil company that no longer exists?”

“It still exists, but merged with another company, putting it under different management and control.” I thought about this some more. “I suppose it could be argued that technically it no longer exists.”

“Um, what do you think Elf has to do with Savreux’s murder and the art in the conference room?”

“I don’t know yet. I have more important questions. Why did Minister Savreux have Elf’s financial data in an encrypted form hidden in his rented wine cellar? Who transferred that money into the thirteen accounts? And who did those accounts belong to? Was it a person working for Elf?”

“Are you sure these financials are Elf’s?”

“It is highly unlikely that it would be any other company’s. Not one of the fourteen other companies on your list ever came up in our investigation. Savreux has a strong connection to
Motte. I have them on video, discussing some plan.” I sucked in a breath. “René Motte worked for Elf from 1983, became head legal advisor in 1985 and left in early 1989.”

“The exact time frame of these encoded finances.”

We fell quiet for a few seconds.

“But that doesn’t help us with knowing who killed Savreux,” Francine said.

“Dukwicz did.” Had she not watched that video?

“I know. I know. What I mean is, who ordered Dukwicz to kill Savreux. And why.”

“We don’t have evidence that is not circumstantial to link all this information.” I closed my eyes and thought about it a little more. When I opened my eyes, Francine was no longer sitting next to me. Colin had taken her place and was eating one of the pastries Nikki had brought. Francine was sitting on Colin’s desk, Vinnie standing in the door and Manny leaning against one of my cabinets. When he saw me looking at him, he straightened.

“Supermodel’s just told us what you two have been up to.” Manny blinked a few times. “Eighty-nine million bloody euro.”

“I need to see the president of Gabon.” I knew she would have answers to some of my questions.

“Whoa there, Doctor Face-reader. Why on Pete’s earth would you want to see the president of Gabon?”

Having spent the last twenty minutes in my head made it difficult to return to communicating with others. It always took me a while to move out of my head into my surroundings. I breathed deeply a few times while doing that. When I knew I would be able to express myself without drawing Manny’s ire, I cleared my throat.

“We know that President Mariam Boussombo is in Strasbourg at the moment. She was one of the biggest supporters of an investigation into Elf’s activities in Gabon and the corruption
surrounding it. All these separate elements indicate that her presence in Strasbourg has something to do with this.” I waved my hand at the monitors. “She’s here to speak at the headquarters of the International Institute of Human Rights, and to speak to the Senate in favour of the No Secrets law. She also has a few meetings with charity organisations, including the Libreville Dignity Foundation. I want to speak to her.”

“And say what, Doc?”

I crossed my arms, realised what I had done and uncrossed them. “Don’t look at me like that, Manny. You know that I can be diplomatic and phrase my questions and statements carefully to not give offense.”

“I know that, but we can’t just knock on the president’s hotel door and have a little natter with her. There is protocol to deal with.”