by Jeff Buick
She sat on the side of their bed and stared ahead. Her eyes were drawn to the night table and she opened the drawer and opened the book on Picasso to page 108. A four-by-six photograph of Alan on a street corner stared back at her. It was her favorite picture of him. Every part of him was laughing, especially his eyes. The background looked European, but she had never asked him where the photo was taken. She just loved the man in the moment. It was her private piece of him, and she cherished it. She tucked the photo back in the book and closed the drawer. At least she still had him, she thought. How bad can life really be when you have the person you love?
Not bad, she decided as she slipped under the covers. She was asleep in seconds.
CHAPTER NINE
A light rain had settled in, and the lower mainland was awash in clouds and mist. It was beautiful but depressing, a week from the start of October and already the wet winter weather was settling in. Vancouver was like Seattle, wonderful when the clouds cleared, sunlight-deprived when they settled on the mountains surrounding the city. Edward Brand buttoned his coat against the wet cold that penetrated right into his bones. He was tired of the rain and wanted to leave. But plans were plans, not to be messed with. He was in the Canadian city for at least another week. He sipped his tea and leaned on the railing, watching the small craft navigate a misty English Bay.
The front doorbell sounded, and Brand walked to the door and opened it. Tony Stevens was folding his umbrella as he waited under the portico. Brand waved Stevens into the house and sat in the living room near the wood-burning fireplace. Flames were licking at the birch logs, and an occasional snap broke the silence in the room. Stevens sat on the couch across from Brand. The room was rustic, with open rough-hewn beams and native Haida Indian art on the pine furniture. The acrid smell of smoke commingled with the salt air, and the mixture was somehow pleasant.
“We have a problem,” Edward Brand said.
“So I gathered from your message,” Stevens said, brushing an errant drop of water off his trouser leg.
“We have a leak in New York.”
“Who?” Stevens asked, leaning forward.
Brand took a small sip of tea and asked, “You want a beer?”
Stevens nodded. “Sure.”
Brand disappeared into the kitchen and returned a minute later with two beers. “Canadian. Much better than most of our American beer. Five percent alcohol as well. Only takes a few before you start to feel them.”
“I like Canadian beer,” Stevens said, accepting the bottle from Brand. He wanted to know what was going on in New York but waited. Edward Brand would offer the information when he was ready.
“I have a source inside the Bureau,” Brand said. “I’ve had this person on the payroll for six years now. To date it’s been nothing but a monthly output of cash with nothing to show in return. But that just changed. They’ve given me the name of the FBI agent who managed to worm her way into your organization.”
Tony Stevens felt a trickle of sweat run down his side. The room was warm, but not overly so. “Who is it, Edward?”
“What worries me more than who it is, is how did she get inside? That definitely worries me, Tony.”
“I can see why,” Stevens said, now sweating profusely. Where was Brand going with this? He had been in charge of the New York operation, and it had come off without a hitch. And the longer Brand continued to be elusive, the more worried Tony was getting. “You going to tell me who it is?”
“Sure,” Brand said, taking a long drink of beer and running his free hand through his dark hair. “It’s Alicia Walker.”
Tony was mute. He had allowed Alicia to get close to the operation, although he had been careful to keep some distance between her and the day-to-day setup. In retrospect it wasn’t that difficult to believe she was FBI. Her appearance at just the right time, her interest in how he spent his days, and more than anything else, her elusive nature when he tried to find out who she was and what made her tick. Stevens rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. Edward Brand was staring at the fireplace, but Tony knew the man’s mind was focused on the problem. Brand was not a man you wanted to piss off. He had personally seen the results of Edward Brand’s anger once, and didn’t care to go there again. The man had barely resembled a human being when Brand was finished with him. Alive, but for what? Broken beyond repair. Tony briefly wondered if the guy who had crossed Brand was still alive. He doubted it.
Tony swallowed and said, “Where do we go from here, Edward?”
Brand was silent for the better part of a minute, then said, “Tony, this is a major problem. Not just with this Walker person. I’m not at all happy with you. The rules are very clear. Nobody gets in once the con is on. Nobody sees inside our operation or inside our heads once we’re up and moving. Nobody.” He slowly turned his head and faced his visitor, his gray eyes cold and penetrating. “Where do we go? Good question.”
“Jesus, Edward, it was a one-time thing. It’ll never happen again. I swear.” He was shaking now and concentrated on keeping his beer steady. He swallowed heavily, his throat dry.
“You’re a good guy, Tony, but business is business,” Edward said. He remained motionless, and the room was absolutely quiet. A log shifted slightly in the fireplace and a few sparks shot up the flue. “I tell you what,” Brand finally said. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“What sort of deal?”
“We need to take care of the problem we’ve got in New York. She’s a very real threat to our safety. You take care of her, and everything’s fine.”
“Kill her?” Tony asked.
“Seems almost barbaric when you just come right out and say it,” Brand said, finishing his beer. “Another beer?”
Tony shook his head. “I didn’t sign on to kill people.”
“I didn’t sign you on to do stupid things,” Brand shot back, his voice threatening. “My offer is non-negotiable. Take care of her, Tony, and you’re off the hook.”
Tony Stevens leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. The room was warm, the fireplace soothing, the mountains outside almost ethereal, shrouded in mist. A beautiful day in a beautiful city. He felt cold and sick to his stomach.
“Okay,” he said, his voice just a wisp. “Okay, Edward. I’ll take care of it.”
“Good choice, Tony,” Brand said, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Very good choice.”
CHAPTER TEN
Jamie Holland was a good kid who’d made a couple of dumb choices. Since he was old enough to tap out a few strokes on a keyboard, he had been working with computers in one form or another. Unfortunately for him, he’d made the mistake of getting caught while poking into a handful of restricted corporate and government mainframes. In the last year, he had been cutting code for the San Francisco police while working off his community-service hours for hacking into the Department of Defense’s computer. In addition to writing programs, he had been Sam Morel’s best asset in pulling information off computer hard drives that had been wiped clean.
Sam Morel had called him late Friday night and asked if he could come in over the weekend and spend a few hours working on a handful of systems that had just come on the black market. Sam suspected the computers had been used by a company called NewPro before it had abruptly disappeared, taking a lot of investors’ money. Sam had the six computers and one server set up in a small room down the hall from his office in Central District. Weekends were good for him, and Jamie had agreed to come in.
Jamie arrived at the police precinct at just after ten Saturday morning. He found Sam in his office, drinking coffee and scouring the contents of a thick red file. Sam grinned when Jamie arrived.
“You’re up early,” he said. “Didn’t expect you until noon.”
“Police work comes before sleep,” Jamie said with a smirk. He dropped into the chair facing Sam and propped his feet on the cop’s desk. Jamie’s relationship with Sam was more like father-son than anything else, and he was probably the only person on the planet w
ho could do that and get away with it. Jamie had bright, eager eyes and long hair that hung just past his shoulders. He was thin, skinny almost, and wore baggy clothes that made him look a bit like a walking laundry line. He hadn’t shaved for a week and a scraggly goatee was starting to show.
“What’s with the fuzz?” Sam said, rubbing his own freshly shaven chin.
“That’s not fuzz,” Jamie said. “It’s a chick magnet. Girls love it.”
“Sure. You ready to have a look at these computers?”
“Yeah. Where are they?”
“A few doors down. Close to the coffee station,” Sam said, getting up and heading for the door. Jamie was only twenty-two, but he liked his caffeine. “One of my guys on the street got these six in and shipped them over. Like I told you on the phone, he thinks they came from NewPro.”
“The company that folded and stole all that money. I read about it in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago.”
“Two weeks almost to the day. Tough to keep the lid on a multimillion-dollar swindle,” Sam said, unlocking the door and switching on the light. Sitting on a table inside the small windowless room were six desktop computers, one monitor, a laser printer and a single server. Cables and USB plugs were piled neatly on one edge of the table. “They’re all yours.”
Jamie didn’t answer. He sat in the solitary swivel chair and attached the power cords to the first system and hooked it into the monitor and printer. Windows XP appeared on the screen, and once the operating system had finished loading, he got to work.
The hard drives inside the Pentium-based systems are simply a stack of discs, separated from each other by scant millimeters. While they spin at ten thousand revolutions a minute, an arm similar to that on a record player records files on the disc. These files are recorded to the disc in clusters, which might be located anywhere on the drive. The system then indexes the clusters so it can locate them later when the user requests that file. If the last portion of a file being saved doesn’t take up all the space in a cluster, some slack space is left over. To a forensic specialist, that slack space is like gold, waiting to be mined.
Jamie knew that while the File Allocation Table, or FAT as it’s often referred to, keeps track of exactly where the clusters are found on the drive, it ignores the slack space. He also knew that wiping a drive clean or overwriting files does not actually delete the previous data from the drive, but simply writes new data overtop of the old. While overwriting the data on a hard drive appears to erase it, that is not the way it works. Portions of the data still exist, a detail most users don’t realize. That happens because the computer automatically archives the files while the user is working on them. It writes that information to the slack space on the drive. Those two simple details, archiving files and writing them to the slack space, are unknown to ninety-nine percent of computer users. That is where a forensic specialist can trip the criminal up every time. Jamie Holland knew how to exploit those details.
Jamie had encryption-cracking software with him, but that process was long and arduous. In fact, depending on the encryption level, cracking the code on the files was almost impossible. Rather than scanning the surface of the disc for remnants of encrypted files, he dug into the slack space, looking for chunks of the same files that had been dumped before being encrypted. He found them. He downloaded piece after piece, amazed at the incompetence of whoever had erased the hard drives. They had run three separate overwrites, the first a series of zeros, the second a series of ones, and the final overwrite a random selection of numbers from two to nine. All well and good, but not good enough.
The data began to materialize. Hidden inside the chunks of data were numerous references to Mexico, the Mexican banking system and a series of numbers. He had no idea if they were account numbers, but given the scope of the con, he suspected they were. The guys running the scam needed somewhere to dump the money. He spent the better part of four hours on the computers, then shut the power off and went in search of Sam Morel. Jamie found him hunched over his computer. Morel looked up as Jamie entered.
“Well?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes.
“It’s definitely NewPro. I found their name on lots of documents. There was quite a bit of data left on the discs,” Jamie said, handing Morel a CD and about fifteen pages of paper. Ninety-eight percent is boring—ordering paper and files for the office and paying the telephone bills, but the other two percent is more than a little interesting.”
“What?” Morel asked leaning forward.
“Mexico is mentioned more than a few times. And three Mexican banks.”
“Which ones?”
Jamie glanced at a sheet of paper. “Banco de Mexicali, Union Federali and Mexico Uno,” he said. “All based out of Mexico City.”
“Anything else. Like any way of linking the numbers to the banks?”
Jamie shook his head. “If you’re looking for the name of a bank followed by a transit number and the account, no. Nothing even remotely close. Look here, I’ll show you.” He flipped one of the pages around so Sam was looking at it right side up. “This starts halfway through a sentence. ‘. . . need to ensure funds are in place at Banco Mexicali for further expansion of the eastern . . .’ That’s typical. There isn’t one place where the name of a bank and a series of numbers are together.”
Sam scrutinized the page, top to bottom. When he was finished he took off his reading glasses and set them on the desk. “At least we know the banks they were using,” he said. “We can try talking with them.”
Jamie stashed his gear in a small nylon backpack. “That’s everything on the hard drives, Sam,” he said. “Thanks for letting me work off some of my community service on that. It was kind of fun.”
“Useful too,” Sam said, smiling. “Now get out of here. It’s Saturday. Go out and chase some girls.”
Jamie grinned. “Excellent idea. I’ll tell them the cops said it was okay.” He slung the backpack over his shoulder and disappeared into the hallway.
Sam Morel leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Mexico. Why Mexico? The days of Mexico being a country where an American on the run could find safe passage were long gone. The two governments cooperated on almost all levels, and the Mexican banks were not the place to deposit millions of dollars in ill-gotten funds. They tended to listen to the American authorities and seize assets. They did it quickly and with great zeal. Especially since they got to keep the money. No, something wasn’t right. Even with the White Collar Crime Investigation Team, or WCCIT, in place and functioning at a high level in the Caribbean, that was still the best place to launder money. Europe was easy to hide money once it was legitimate, but depositing two hundred million American dollars without the proper paper trail was impossible. What were Edward Brand and his crew up to? Sam Morel didn’t have an answer.
The money was out there somewhere. Two hundred million dollars. So was Edward Brand. What was his real name? Where was he from, and how did he manage to assemble the team to pull off such a caper? Who had financed the eight million in upfront money? Where were Brand and his co-conspirators now?
So many questions. So few answers.
He wished the answers would start to come. To date the FBI had been either reluctant to dole out information, or they didn’t have much. He suspected the latter. He had spoken with Hawkins and Abrams five times since they had visited Alan and Taylor on the fifteenth. Five times in eight days. Each time it was the same story. They had squat. Edward Brand was not his real name, and they had absolutely no idea who he was. Their computers were chock-a-block full of names and faces, but they had yet to find a match. The same with Brand’s two accomplices from San Francisco who had helped him run the office and set up the scam. One thing Hawkins and Abrams had been able to do was ascertain that the three men were the key players and the rest of the office staff were innocent dupes who signed on to work a few months for a company destined to disappear.
The corporate papers for NewPro were registe
red with a lawyer’s office in San Mateo. The name searches were properly filed, the name duly registered with the State of California, complete with the board of directors’ signatures. Every t crossed. Every i dotted. Every piece of information in the lawyer’s files was falsified. The local agents were convinced the lawyer was just another pawn Brand had played in the con. Although the lawyer hadn’t invested directly in NewPro, he was owed over eighty thousand dollars in legal fees. Money that would never be paid.
As cons went, or corporate fraud for that matter, the NewPro scam was incredible. It was larger than any single scam he had ever seen, and they had been smart to target private investors instead of banks and major corporations. Getting semi-rich people mad was bad, but pissing off a bank or a large corporation was downright stupid. They had teeth. If their teeth weren’t big enough they bought bigger teeth. They often operated below the radar. That was something they didn’t tell their shareholders at the AGMs. But the people Brand had targeted with his NewPro scam weren’t in a position to go after him. Every one of them had invested in one of two ways—a couple of million, which was pocket change and not worth chasing, or everything they owned, which meant they had no resources left to use in the hunt.
Brilliant. Simply brilliant. But those weren’t the words he’d use to describe it to Alan Bestwick and Taylor Simons. He picked up the phone and dialed the number for the local Bureau office. Hawkins and Abrams would be interested in what Jamie had dredged up off the computers. Keeping the FBI in the loop was a good idea.
