Worrell was five minutes early arriving at the National Cathedral on Massachusetts Avenue. He entered casually, looked around the nearly empty shrine, and sat in a pew off to one side near the rear of the church. Two minutes later two Secret Service agents entered. They walked to the front of the cathedral, circled around the outside of the rows of pews, and came back past Worrell. They never looked directly at him. One of them stepped outside, and a moment later Claude Hooker entered. He sat behind Worrell.
“Good afternoon,” he said, his voice almost indiscernible.
“Hi, Claude. Got a problem?”
It was a natural question. Hooker and Worrell never met unless there was a problem.
“No,” Hooker said coldly, “you do.”
Worrell turned sideways in the pew and leaned an elbow on its back. He looked straight at the ferret-faced National Security Adviser. “With whom?” he asked.
“I’m not exactly sure. My information came from Maraganset’s office.”
“Maraganset! Maraganset’s an impotent pussy waiting to retire. I don’t do business with Maraganset.”
“My informant is in his office.”
“What’s this about?”
“I assume you’re aware that this hotshot lawyer Vail has become Assistant A.G.”
“I’ve heard the talk.”
“It isn’t talk anymore. That bitch Azimour told the whole world. Vail brought his own team with him, young hotshots, bunch of goddamn pit bulls.”
“Isn’t that what they’re supposed to be?”
“Not when you’re on the end that gets bit.”
“What’s the point here, Claude?”
“One of Vail’s people made an inquiry about the projects.”
“The Vietnam projects?”
Hooker nodded.
“Christ, that was thirty years ago.”
“It might just as well have been yesterday. He got a list of all the liaison officers, and his big interest was Phantom. They gave him Grimes’s name.”
Worrell resituated himself on the hard wooden pew. “So? He’s a dottering old fool. He’s got a sieve for a brain.”
“David, Vail’s after Engstrom. He’s already got their bank records and searched that compound out in Montana.”
Worrell said nothing. He stared at Hooker and waited for him to go on.
“That government witness who was taken out a couple of weeks ago in Ohio? He was a former member of the Sanctuary.”
“ISL wasn’t involved in that.”
“It could be.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was a professional hit. Hardistan and Vail seem to think the shooter is one of Engstrom’s old boys.”
“Now listen—”
“No, you listen. Let’s just say he’s right. Let’s just say that you have somebody on your books who was with Engstrom over there. Let’s just suppose Engstrom used this actor for the job in Ohio. And let’s suppose the FBI nails him…”
“Impossible. There aren’t any records and you know it.”
“I’m just saying—”
“There’s no goddamn way to track back.”
Hooker folded his arms across his chest, stared at Worrell, and said nothing.
“Listen to me, Claude. Let’s just say I do have this actor under contract. I wouldn’t know how to find him. I don’t know what he calls himself now, where he lives, what his cover is. I’d make contact through a series of shielded phone calls and computer mail. You really think a bunch of hotshot young lawyers can find him?”
“Hardistan might.”
“Then tell the son of a bitch not to.”
“Nobody but the Man tells Hardistan what to do, and I would prefer not to discuss this with the President. Don’t you get it, David, the actor can be a threat to me, but he’s a much bigger threat to you as long as he’s on the loose.”
“What the hell are you suggesting, Claude?”
Hooker shrugged. “Perhaps he’s outlived his purpose.”
Worrell turned his back on Hooker. He stretched his arms out on the back of the pew and looked toward the altar.
“You know how long I’d stay in business if I took out one of my own people? All my actors would vanish overnight. I’ve lasted thirty-five years because they trust me and my clients trust me.”
“This has the potential to be a disaster for you. If this shooter happens to get caught and makes a deal—”
“You listen to me,” Worrell said, cutting him off, “I had a man who died in Iraq with all his fingernails and toenails ripped out. He bit off his tongue and bled to death rather than give anything up. Get the point, Claude?”
“You need to get him off your books.”
“There aren’t any fucking books.”
“Then you better get word to this actor of yours that he’s hot. Tell him to go deep and stay deep.”
“I can try that.”
“Do better than try,” Hooker said nastily.
Worrell didn’t answer. He hated to be strong-armed by government suits, and Hooker was one of the most oppressive. When they needed ISL, they were glad to put the national security in Worrell’s hands. Now Hooker was concerned about his own skin. The existence of ISL and its mission would make Watergate look like a cheating scandal at a local kindergarten. But… if ISL went down, the NSA and the CIA would both go down with it. Possibly even the entire administration.
“Has this person ever been involved in any of our operations?”
“Shit, Claude, you know the goddamn rules. You put the money in the bank, I get the job done, no fucking questions asked.”
“Then I’ll put it this way. I’ll cover my end, you better damn well take care of yours.”
“Now what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
He waited for an answer. When it was not forthcoming, he turned in his seat. Hooker was walking out the door.
PEAKVIEW, MONTANA, WEDNESDAY 4:14 P.M., MST
The tellers in the bank eyed Flaherty curiously when he pulled a chair up to the front of the bank lobby, turned it around, and sat on it backward, his arms folded across the top. He stared at the interior of the room. To his left was a small entranceway and the reception desk, followed by a long counter with two tellers’ windows. Next to the counter was a small conference room, then the safe deposit boxes and the shiny steel vault behind a metal gate. To his right was a small sitting alcove, the manager’s office, a small loan office, and a teller’s window that also served the drive-in window. A small entranceway served the rear door, which faced him in the far right corner of the large room. The combination storage room and employees’ lounge occupied most of the rear wall of the bank and was adjacent to the vault. The room was spacious but compact, softly lit and user friendly, or at least it had been until three months before when it had been relieved of $229,000 by a swift and efficient crew of thieves.
What made the event unique was that at the same moment and with the same precision, anonymity, and M.O., two other banks in the small statewide chain had also been robbed. They were all within seventy-five miles of each other in the western part of the state, and were all in an arc within a hundred miles of Missoula.
According to Geoff Isaac, the three robberies had been carried out with ingenious planning and military precision, not a difficult task since all three banks followed exactly the same procedures every day. At eight-thirty the manager arrived, entered through the rear door, and turned off the alarm. At eight-forty the vault lock popped. At 8:45 the six-person staff arrived at the rear door and were admitted by the manager. The three tellers signed off on their money trays and the banks opened at precisely nine a.m.
Isaac was particularly frustrated, since all three of the heists had occurred in his district. All were in small towns, the vaults in each bank were fat with payroll money, and the thieves had not uttered a single word while they pillaged the three institutions of almost a million dollars.
Adding to the unique quality of these thre
e simultaneous events was the fact that the three banks were exactly alike. They had all been built from the same set of plans: free-standing, one-story structures, surrounded on three sides by small, landscaped parking lots, and on the fourth by the drive-in window. They were satellite branches of the chain’s main bank in Helena, and the pride and joy of the Montana Trust and Security’s board of directors, which not only had saved a lot of money by using the same plans, but felt it gave its customers a sense of “family” no matter what branch they visited.
“Kind of like depositing your money at a Holiday Inn,” was the way Isaac sardonically put it when he described the thefts to Meyer and Flaherty.
Now, as Meyer was scrutinizing the deposit records on the bank’s computer, Flaherty eyeballed the interior and played back the robbery in his head as Isaac had described it.
“On a Friday morning in November, the manager of the bank in Peakview, population 5,600, arrives as usual. As he opens the door, he gets shoved inside the bank. He gets a brief glimpse of his attacker in a mirror. Black ski cap with holes cut for the eyes and dark coveralls, that’s all he remembers. Duct tape is wrapped around his eyes and mouth. He hears what he thinks are two silenced shots and hears glass and metal hit the floor. His hands are taped behind him and he’s led to a windowless storage room in the rear of the bank, shoved down on the floor and locked in. He hears no conversation, although he does hear the vault lock open. During the next ten minutes his other employees are also taped and locked in the room. Nobody can talk, nobody can see. Then they hear an explosion outside the bank. They’re all terrified. Five minutes later there’s a second explosion, this one closer. It’s another fifteen minutes before anybody realizes the bank isn’t open yet. The police ultimately break in and find the employees. None of them are hurt, none of them have any idea how many robbers there were. Both of the video surveillance cameras are shot out. The vault is empty. And nobody—nobody—sees the thieves leave the banks.”
“Nobody saw the perps vacate the banks?” Flaherty had asked Isaac with surprise.
“In Milltown we got a lady who says there were two guys in suits standing near the rear entrance to the bank about nine, and in Wild Bank a janitor says he saw a guy in work clothes walking across the parking lot about that time. But none of them were carrying anything and the descriptions of the three men were useless.
“This happened in Peakview, Wild Bank, and Milltown at the same time with the same results. All three had received large payrolls the night before. Three bank jobs and nobody saw the perps. In all three towns, nobody saw them leave. Not one witness.”
“Why?” Meyer asked.
“Because at five to nine an empty storefront was blown up two blocks from each of the banks,” Isaac answered. “Brilliant. Small towns, big explosions two blocks from the bank, who’s looking at a bank that isn’t open yet? Then at one minute to nine a stolen van blows up in each bank’s parking lot. The police forces, such as they are, are busy dealing with two explosions. At Milltown, nobody even noticed the bank wasn’t open until nine-twenty.”
“Like a magician using misdirection,” Meyer said. “You look at his right hand while his left is doing the tricks.”
“Exactly,” Isaac said. “By the time the police got their wits together, the perps had fifteen, twenty minutes’ head start on them.”
“What was the take?” Flaherty asked.
“They took Peakview for $229,000, Wild Bank for $306,500, and Milltown was the biggest hit of the three—$383,500. Total take: $919,000.”
“Bet it killed them that they didn’t break a million,” was Meyer’s response.
Flaherty visualized the manager opening the door, turning off the alarm, and suddenly being shoved inside. His mouth, eyes, and hands are duct-taped while another member of the gang takes out both surveillance cameras with a silenced handgun. They relieve the manager of the keys to the vault room, put him in storage. They watch the second hand click around the face of the big old Seth Thomas clock above the vault. At eight-forty the buzzer sounds. The vault pops open and they go to work. They leave ones and fives on the floor of the vault. How many perpetrators? Three, four? Flaherty guessed four, two working the vault, two waiting at the door for the rest of the employees.
When they finish, one of them uses a remote to trigger the bomb two blocks away. When it goes off, they step outside, pull the getaway car around past the drive-in window, throw the satchels in the trunk, and ease on out. While the town is going crazy, they cruise away, then blow the van they had stolen the night before the same way just to create more confusion.
Very cool.
How about the two guys in suits standing near the back door pointing in the direction of the explosion? How about the guy in work clothes in Milltown walking away from the bank? Were they involved? What did they carry the loot in, garbage bags? Too obvious. Satchels? How big a satchel would it take to haul off $380,000 and change?
Isaac was right, Flaherty decided. These guys were confident and professional.
Ben Meyer and Dermott Flaherty had been collating and cross-matching data on robberies and banks for two weeks, with the help of Hines and Naomi back in Chicago. The FBI files had been thorough and informative—two years of hard digging. But Meyer and Flaherty had decided the Bureau investigations had not been paranoid enough. So they had been playing devil’s advocate. Relying on their experience in the Illinois RICO case, they took two years of FBI investigative work and tossed it like a salad.
In the previous eighteen months there had been seventeen bank robberies, nine solved, and three arrests with trials pending. That left eight unsolved. The three that had been committed the same day at the same time with the same M.O. seemed the most promising, since the banks were all members of the same small statewide chain. The two lawyers had decided to concentrate on them first.
“What we’re looking for is laundering,” Meyer said early on.
“And we’re looking at millions of dollars,” Flaherty said.
“Right. They may have hit some banks outside our zone, and if they’re stealing weapons and selling them, the take could go a lot higher.”
“The biggest bank in this chain is the First Trust and Security in Helena,” Isaac had told them. “It’s the only one that hasn’t been hit.”
“Too big?”
“Bad location. It’s in a three-story building right in the middle of town. A very hard target.”
“You think these three hits were an inside job?” Flaherty asked Isaac.
“I would say so.”
“But they could’ve cased out everything but the information about the payrolls, and that was probably common knowledge in these small towns,” Flaherty said.
“True,” Meyer answered, then smiled. “But let’s assume there is somebody on the inside, just to be perverse.”
“I like that,” Flaherty said.
“Let’s say this inside man planned the operations. The best time to do it, how to do it…”
“Okay.”
“This somebody also feeds them the information on payrolls, etcetera.”
“This somebody could also be laundering the loot through the banks,” Flaherty tossed in.
“That’s good logic,” Meyer said.
“So how does he launder it?”
“If we can figure that out, that somebody could be the link Vail’s looking for.”
Flaherty shrugged. “Cooks the books?” he suggested.
“That’s one possibility. So now we have the somebody plus a very slick accountant. Two moles in the front office.”
That had been two weeks ago.
Flaherty stood up, stretched, and put the chair back in the waiting area. He walked back through the bank and went out the back door. There was a seven- or eight-foot walkway beside the building with shrubs separating it from the drive-through. He went back inside as Meyer left the small conference room where he had been working. He pinched his eyes.
“I’m going blind, Derm,”
he sighed.
“Let’s get out of here,” Flaherty said. “We’ve got a two-hour ride back to Missoula.”
“Can we stop for a decent cup of coffee along the way? Mr. Coffee doesn’t crack it.”
They stopped at a roadside cafe at the edge of the small town. Meyer dumped sugar and cream into his coffee. He was quiet, staring into the cup as he stirred the mix.
“Something’s bugging you,” Flaherty said. “I can always tell when something’s bugging you.”
“They got a nice edge. They got four banks they can work with. They don’t have to move all that dirty money through one little bank.”
“They’ve also got bookkeepers, managers, tellers,” Flaherty said. “I mean, you don’t walk into some little bank in Montana and deposit three hundred grand without raising some eyebrows. Three crews took out a million bucks.”
“That’s right.”
“So…”
“So maybe they pyramid the deposits.”
“What’s that mean?”
“In the seventies and eighties, some banks in Miami needed to launder drug money. We’re talking big money. Millions of dollars. The point is not to wave a flag at the IRS, which requires the bank to report any cash deposit of ten thousand dollars or more, so they came up with this pyramid scheme. The idea was to move these millions through their banks in increments of less than ten thou. They set up dozens and dozens of blind accounts. A computer program automatically sent deposits into these accounts when the big deposits were made.”
“I don’t understand that,” Flaherty said.
“Okay, you have a company—the XYZ company, for the sake of argument. XYZ deposits a hundred thousand dollars cash into the XYZ account but the computer immediately redeposits that hundred thou into eleven other accounts, so instead of showing one account with the big deposit, they had eleven accounts with nine thousand and change in each one. The banks charged the depositors thirty to forty percent for making the deposits. That’s the cost of washing the money. Then XYZ withdraws the small accounts and the money is clean.”
Martin Vail 03 - Reign in Hell Page 36
