Innocent as Sin

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “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.

  13

  Victoria, B.C.

  Friday

  12:15 P.M. PST

  Rand McCree looked around John Neto’s suite in disbelief. There were TV cameras, lights, a makeup artist, a hair stylist, a continuity person with a clipboard and a frown, the telegenic Brent Thomas with an earnest yet horrified expression on his face, and a black man with a steel-tipped forearm prosthesis talking about war atrocities.

  Everything but a dancing pig.

  He turned on Faroe. “You didn’t say anything about a media circus.”

  “Interview, not a circus,” Faroe said. “The World in One Hour is high-class crap.”

  “Quiet!” someone called out.

  Quietly Rand raised a middle finger. Then he leaned close and murmured in Faroe’s ear. “Just thought I’d let you know—from what I’ve read so far, Kayla Shaw isn’t good for it.”

  “Not a crook?”

  “Not likely. Read between the lines of her dossier. Backpacked all over the world. Younger sister has a Ph.D. in tropical diseases, married to a doctor, both working for Doctors without Borders. Close family until the parents died. Kayla doesn’t gamble, get drunk, do drugs, or hump along the casual sex circuit. Smart, middle-class, hardworking. Somehow Bertone twisted her. It’s how he does business.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Faroe said. “You keep in mind that most white-collar crooks don’t start out to end up felons.”

  “You really think she’s a crook?” Rand asked.

/>   “I’m partial to the Mexican justice system—guilty until proven innocent. Grace feels like you do, if it matters.”

  Rand shrugged. Nothing mattered but getting close enough to Bertone to kill him.

  But he really hated to see an innocent ground to bits by transnational criminals and governments that were rarely better than they had to be to survive.

  “Take a break,” called someone.

  Ted Martin hurried over to Faroe.

  “Okay, is this him?” Martin asked, jerking a thumb at Rand. “The photog you told me about?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, but he’ll have to wait. We’re just getting into it with Neto. Awesome stuff. That pink half-arm on his plum-black body says it all.”

  Rand stared at the man wearing jeans and a silk sweatshirt, rhapsodizing about a black man whose forearm had been hacked off with a machete and replaced by a white man’s prosthesis. Then Rand looked at Faroe and said, “I’ll wait until hell freezes solid.”

  “Okay, can you at least comb him out before we put him on camera?” Martin asked over his shoulder as he hurried back to Neto. “I’ll send over Freddie. She could make a woolly mammoth look good.”

  Faroe snickered.

  Rand said something under his breath and ignored both men. He found an empty chair, booted up Faroe’s computer, and began reading. Neto’s interview made an odd counterpart to the dossiers that clicked by beneath Rand’s fingertips. The Scots-accented English that Neto spoke reminded Rand of his grandfather.

  “How did you come to be in MI-5?” Thomas asked Neto.

  “I was born in Africa, raised there long enough to see the beginnings of the troubles, back when the militias had only machetes.” He raised his artificial hand. “We escaped and made it to Scotland, Glasgow. Strange and wonderful people, the Scots. I came to love their bluntness and pragmatism. That is one of the reasons I sought out St. Kilda Consulting. The island of St. Kilda is—or was—to Scotland what Scotland was to the rest of England, a last frontier.”

  “Have you met Ambassador Steele?” Thomas asked. “His grandfather was the last man to leave St. Kilda when the British forced evacuation of the population and turned the island into a bird sanctuary.”

  “The ambassador and I have had several long conversations,” Neto said, “all in Scots Gaelic. He is one of the few people I have ever met who speaks the mother tongue.”

  Rand paused in his reading. The world was a very odd place when a black man speaking Scots Gaelic—who was also a former British intelligence officer—was presently chief of intelligence of a small African country that was besieged by transnational criminals from Russia, Brazil, Europe, and the UAE. And this man was being interviewed for American TV in a room in British Columbia, Canada, about a murderous Siberian gunrunner presently living the high life of a socialite in Phoenix, Arizona.

  Reed would have laughed his ass off.

  Rand didn’t. A small world wasn’t necessarily a good thing, but it sure was real. Whining about it wouldn’t do anything except waste breath.

  “It was during those conversations that the ambassador provided me with information about the man who is today known as Andre Bertone,” Neto said. “He is the one feeding arms to Uhuru rebels who want to unseat the established government of Camgeria. Thus far they have not been successful, though they have continued to try for many years.”

  “What do the rebels want?” Thomas asked, keeping his face straight despite the inane question. This was a softball interview, designed to make the subject look good, not the reporter.

  “What all barbarians want—conquest, blood, power, wealth. They would replace a thriving black democracy with a dictatorship of violence. All this in the name of righting tribal wrongs that go back hundreds and hundreds of years. I do not want our women and children to be raped and slaughtered in the name of old arguments or new genocides.”

  “What are you doing to prevent it?”

  Neto bowed slightly toward Thomas. “I speak to everyone who will listen about the greed and evil of arms dealers such as Andre Bertone.”

  “The merchant of death.”

  “Yes. He is the one who sold arms to the rebels five years ago. He, or his employees, seek to send hundreds of millions of American dollars in arms to the rebels today. The people funding the rebels are not Camgerians. They are not even Africans.”

  “Who are they?” Thomas asked.

  Rand didn’t need to hear the answer. It was all there in the files on Joe Faroe’s computer. He went back to looking at various pictures of Kayla Shaw. Driver’s license. Employee of the month. Yoga classes three times a week. Regular health-club workouts. Horseback riding. Hiking. Passport up to date. Gave regularly to the SPCA. A stack of long-distance surveillance photos and a few shot so close to her that the photographer must have been within reach.

  Probably Jimmy “Handsome” Hamm with a lapel camera, Rand decided. He’d already read about the St. Kilda employee striking out in his attempts to get Kayla Shaw’s confidence.

  If he can’t do it, why does Faroe’s wife think I can?

  There wasn’t any answer in the photos. Good or bad, all the pictures showed a dark-haired, light-eyed young woman whose cheekbones suggested Scandinavian blood and whose smile was hard to resist. She wasn’t Hollywood gorgeous, but she had a kind of energy and intelligence that intrigued him.

  “…talking about a huge amount of money,” Thomas said.

  “Over two hundred and twenty-five million dollars American,” Neto agreed.

  Rand whistled silently and looked up from the computer. Faroe hadn’t been real definite about the money involved.

  “Where would rebels find that kind of cash?” Thomas asked.

  “Barter, not cash.” Neto leaned back in his chair and massaged his right forearm just above the prosthesis.

  “With what?”

  “Blood diamonds, stolen oil, coltan—”

  “What is coltan?” Thomas asked.

  Rand went back to reading. Unlike the future TV audience, Rand already knew more than he wanted to about the “black stone” that was the basis of modern electronics.

  Yet he couldn’t help listening to the events that had caused his brother’s death.

  “Coltan is mucked out of the ground by independent miners, rebels, and men with legitimate Camgerian licenses,” Neto said. “There was a time in the 1980s and 1990s when coltan was worth nearly as much as solid native copper and was much easier to find. The rebels who confronted the Camgerian government five years ago used coltan to finance the purchase of arms. They bartered sacks full of it for AK-47s.”

  Rand saw the words as a series of pictures, vivid as only a flashback could be.

  Bulging gunny sacks lined up along the dirt runway.

  Sweating black rebels unloading wooden crates of high-tech death.

  A Russian turboprop.

  The Siberian.

  Blood.

  Reed’s blood.

  Everywhere.

  “The guns were stolen or purchased in Eastern Europe, from Soviet, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian arms depots,” Neto said. “Then they were flown south to equatorial Africa and traded for coltan, which could be easily monetized in the world market.”

  “Monetized?” Thomas asked right on cue.

  “Sweat and blood and coltan turned into hard currency,” Neto explained. “Victor Krout, now called Andre Bertone, was one of the leading forces in this illegal trade. He used his ties to the Russian military-industrial establishment to organize what had been random smuggling into a coordinated, very profitable business. I estimate he made one hundred and fifty million dollars over the ten years he was active in the illegal arms trade. Much of that money was wrung from the blood and bones of Camgerians. I will get it back on their behalf. With that money we will dig village wells and vaccinate children, build schools and clinics and hospitals. For millions of Camgerians, that money is the difference between continuing stability and the atrocities of war.”
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br />   “Can you retrieve that money legally, under international law?” Thomas asked.

  Rand’s mouth flattened. If international law worked reliably, St. Kilda would be out of business. Transnational criminals weren’t stupid. Bertone was nothing short of brilliant. Courtroom proof was hard to find when everyone who stepped forward was murdered.

  And that was what Krout/Bertone did.

  “Yes, we will prevail,” Neto said, “but it will be difficult. Bertone, as he is known today, has long since put his disreputable past behind him. Using money gained from bringing war where peace had been, he has become a very wealthy oil broker, a middleman between renegade African regimes and rebel armies on one side and some of the world’s leading oil companies on the other. Bertone has a whole list of former arms clients who are tied to him—rebels who used his weapons to overthrow governments and governments who used Bertone’s arms to suppress rebellions.”

  “You’re saying that money, rather than any kind of idealism or politics, motivated Bertone in the arms trade,” Thomas said.

  “Idealism?” Neto laughed bitterly. “Bertone could not find it in the dictionary. Yet, or perhaps because of that, he has many powerful allies in Africa, Russia, Brazil, France, and even the United States. That is why you had to come to Canada to talk to me. My request for a U.S. visa was turned down.”

  Rand waited for the next, obvious question: Why would the U.S. refuse Neto entrance?

  Instead, Thomas went back to the sexier, safer, far more visual subject of arms, diamonds, oil, and violence. Rand could practically see the montage of film clips that would be used to help the viewer understand that Bertone’s profits could be measured in suffering as well as dollars.

  Faroe gestured to Rand.

  Rand closed the computer and walked to the suite’s small dining area, where a portable fax had been set up. “Scrambled?” he asked Faroe softly.

  “What do you think?”

  “Like eggs at a buffet.”

  Faroe looked at his watch. The fax began spitting out papers. He handed them to Rand and waited for the explosion.

  “Application accepted?” Rand asked in a rising voice. “Invitation included? Frigging parking permit? You mean there really is such a dumb-ass thing as the Fast Draw?”