August Snow

by Stephen Mack Jones

  Because of the information Skittles had provided that I’d passed on to O’Donnell, Dan and two of his cybercrimes cohorts were able to redirect their infiltration efforts and dig deeper into Titan’s IT systems. What they found was what Skittles had suspected: there was seriously encrypted code running deep in the bowels of Titan’s system with Ukrainian and Romanian digital fingerprints all over it. Fingerprints that had been seen in bits and pieces in the IT systems of small private wealth management firms in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Nashville.

  “A few of these fingerprints first appeared in 2006 at some of the bigger Wall Street investment firms,” Dan said.

  “The 2008 financial collapse wasn’t exclusively tied to an over-leveraged mortgage market, Mr. Snow,” O’Donnell said. “In the wreckage the Bureau started finding bits of coding shrapnel from very organized foreign hacking nests. It took us five years to fit the pieces of shrapnel together. It’s only been this past year we’ve been able to create a partial picture of who, what, when, where and why.” O’Donnell leaned forward and folded her hands on a pile of papers on her desk. “If you think Americans were panicked by the financial carnage we brought on ourselves in 2008, just think how they would react knowing our banking system collapsed in part because of well-organized, well-funded hacking cells out of Chechnya, Bulgaria, and possibly state-sponsored Iran.”

  While O’Donnell persisted in scaring the economic bejeezus out of me, I thought of the decades of money my mom had tithed to the Catholic Church and how much of that ended up in the pockets of crooked priests and the Mafia.

  “We now believe,” Dan chimed in, “that 2008 was something of a stress-test through the establishment of well-seeded shell and shelf corporations by these hackers. A way to determine the amount of infiltration a banking system could take before the intrusion became detectable. I don’t think they expected the system to crash as badly as it did. In fact, I don’t think they tried to crash it at all. I think they were just looking for banks they could turn.”

  “With the end game being?” I said.

  “Using medium and small banks to nest offshore money in the world’s largest economy. Hiding in plain sight,” O’Donnell said. “You name it. Drug money, terrorist money, gun running, extortion and illegal gambling profits. All of it housed and protected for nominal fees, dues, and percentages. America’s the new offshore, Mr. Snow. No more midnight dead drops in bus station bathrooms. No more undocumented shipping containers arriving in Port Everglades or Savannah. You need money to blow up a bridge, church, synagogue, mosque, office building, or federal building? You want to launder a hundred mil in drug money? Just head to your local mom-and-pop pretend bank. All banks are nothing more than giant washing machines, Mr. Snow. But now there’s a fifty/fifty chance Granny Sinclair’s financial bloomers are churning in the same dirty water as money from the Italian mob, the Albanian mob, the Jamaican mob, Chechen separatists, al Qaeda, Islamic State and God-only-knows who else.”

  We all sat quietly for a moment. O’Donnell and Dan Cicatello were looking at me, watching me take in their download.

  “What’s any of this got to do with Eleanor Paget’s death?” I finally said.

  O’Donnell’s brow furrowed. “Absolutely nothing. Save for the fact that your investigation into her death has made a lot of people at Titan very nervous. The phone chatter is the most we’ve heard since this investigation started three years ago in Boston.”

  “What phone chatter?”

  “Accelerated acquisition schedules. Suspicious executive shuffles. Nothing illegal, but all since you’ve stuck your nose in this whole business.”

  “Each private wealth management bank that’s been turned has employed a consultant or consultants,” Dan said. “Nothing unusual considering most financial consulting firms and hedge fund companies out there are cloaked in secrecy. But this is different. We haven’t been able to ascertain who these consultants are or flow chart where they stand in the overall management structure. What we are beginning to see are some of the same acquisition patterns.”

  “This is the closest we’ve been to finding the consultant,” O’Donnell said. “Which brings us to you, Mr. Snow.”

  O’Donnell gave Dan a look. Dan stood, shook my hand and said it was nice to meet me. Then he left the room, closing the door behind him.

  “To begin with, if you talk about any of this outside of this office, I will have you publically hanged before throwing your corpse in a federal prison,” O’Donnell said calmly. She waited until I nodded that I understood. “Next, I’d like to thank you for your unsolicited help. Your bumbling around has yielded more info than you can possibly imagine. Lastly, I do believe Eleanor Paget was murdered. Just like I believe Mariana Spiegelman was physically assaulted by someone associated with this case.”

  “Why?” I said, already knowing the answer. Sometimes it’s just nice to have your ingenuity confirmed by someone other than yourself.

  “To move her husband out of the CFO position at Titan,” she said, “so Atchison could bring in someone handpicked by the consultant. A nice move to completely control the board of directors and thus the entire bank.”

  I sat quietly for a minute, trying to organize everything O’Donnell had revealed to me in her cramped, seemingly disorganized office. I also tried to figure out what my next move was. Or if there was a next move. I had inadvertently positioned myself between the FBI and mostly invisible bad guys who would kill one woman and put another in the hospital to motivate her husband to quit his job.

  And then there was the Detroit Police Department.

  Even with the department’s endless internecine wars, one thing seemed to unite them in the cause of vendetta: Me.

  Any move I made that shook the DPD tree would come under very special, very heated scrutiny from the department and possibly the mayor since I’d pocketed several million dollars of their money. Prosecution. Jail time. Vindication for the department and the city that had destroyed my career. It was all on the table. And my new amigos at the FBI would simply watch from the sidelines, quietly thankful for my help with their case and eternally grateful I was gone.

  “You need to do something for me,” I finally said.

  O’Donnell said stoically, “Nothing I can do.”

  “Oh, I think when you hear what I’m about to offer, you’ll want to do everything you can to make me happy,” I said. I told her what I was proposing and that I wanted an agreement in writing and signed by her director.

  Gradually, O’Donnell’s impassive face changed. She looked very interested.

  Twenty-four

  There should be a Senate subcommittee investigation into why the FBI’s coffee always tastes like lukewarm ass.

  After choking down two cups of brown sludge at the FBI’s Detroit office I had a signed agreement. It took considerable back-and-forth haggling, including a conference call between O’Donnell’s director in Detroit—a tall, slim guy named Phillips—and their bosses in D.C.

  O’Donnell proved she could be quite persuasive. She was 110 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive with a strawberry-blonde ponytail. And nobody wanted to yank the ponytail.

  “We’ve looked into this Snow guy,” one of her Washington bosses barked through the phone’s speaker. He knew I was in the room and spoke as if he gave a shit. “Ex-marine. Honorable discharge with citations. Good record as a cop—impetuous, but a good cop. Until he sued his department and walked off with twelve mil in city funds. I don’t like cops who sue their own. And a year pretty much off the grid? He sounds troubled, Megan. Conflicted. I don’t like troubled and conflicted people, especially when we have to rely on them.”

  “Sir,” O’Donnell said, “I understand your concerns—and frankly I share some of them. But the fact of the matter is we rely on troubled, conflicted people all the time for information.” O’Donnell’s ice-blue eyes suddenly lifted from the speaker at the center of the conference table and burrowed into me. “Snow seems considerably less trouble
d and conflicted than a lot of people. And my gut tells me he’s solid.”

  I grinned and gave her a thumbs up, which was ignored.

  There was a long pause at the Washington, D.C. end of the line. Then the man said, “It won’t be your gut hangin’ out on this one, Megan. A lot’s riding on what you do in Detroit. You’d better be right about this guy.”

  “He’ll deliver, sir.”

  O’Donnell’s boss here in Detroit—Phillips—ended the conference call by assuring the honchos in D.C. that he’d keep a tight rein on me and the operation. After the call disconnected, Phillips said, “You don’t have to worry about me, Mr. Snow. It’s Special Agent O’Donnell who should give you the heebie-jeebies.”

  “She is pretty scary, isn’t she?” I said.

  “You have no idea,” Phillips said, smiling. He nodded to O’Donnell, shook my hand and left the room.

  When the agreement was emailed to O’Donnell an hour later, I wanted to puke.

  But what else could I do?

  Before I left O’Donnell’s office, she sighed heavily and said, “You’re in this now, Snow. Up to your eyebrows. If you don’t deliver—”

  “The agreement’s null and void,” I said, tucking my copy into my coat pocket. “I know. Trust me.”

  “I’m hoping I can.”

  The drive home was long and uncomfortable.

  I parked on the street and sat in the car for a minute thinking about what I’d done, then got out and walked to my house.

  Carmela and Sylvia intercepted me on the sidewalk before I reached the house. In addition to their matching purple North Face bubble jackets, they were wearing ugly multi-colored knit hats, which I assumed they had knitted for each other.

  “Afternoon, ladies,” I said with a slight bow.

  “Ooo!” Sylvia cooed. “Mr. Snow!”

  We talked about how cold the day was and the unavoidable imminence of yet another brutal Michigan winter. The few neighbors I had on Markham had carved pumpkins decorating their doorsteps. I doubted there would be many kids in costumes walking around giddy at the prospect of receiving free sugar from neighbors. Not even the Rodriguez boy. Halloween had changed a lot since I was a kid.

  After a while Carmela and Sylvia said they were taking the day to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts. That visit would be followed by chili dogs at American Coney Island, an old haunt for Detroit Water & Sewage Department employees. We wished one another a nice day and Sylvia said she hoped I had a nice visit with my friends.

  “Friends?” I said casually.

  “The ones at your house,” Sylvia said. “Two gentlemen. Nicely dressed. One was a big fellow.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You mean Coltrane and Stitt. We played football together at Wayne State.”

  Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know when to lie.

  As the two ladies strolled away down the street I reached around to find comfort in touching the handle of my Glock.

  A man was watching me through the sliver of front door windows.

  I smiled at him and bounded up the steps.

  The big, squarely built man who opened the door started to say something, but before he could I hit him in the throat with the butt of my gun. He grabbed his throat, made choking noises and stumbled backwards. I dropped him with a left cross to his jaw and a deep, hard punch to his solar plexus. Then I leveled my gun at the well-dressed man sitting casually on my sofa.

  “Move and you’re dead,” I said.

  The man on the sofa smiled at me, put his hands up. “We come in peace, Mr. Snow.”

  While keeping my gun leveled on the man on my sofa, I gave his companion sprawled on the floor a one-hand pat down. He was carrying. I deprived him of his Sig Saur .9mm. He started to move.

  “Stay down,” I said, giving him another left cross to his jaw.

  He stayed down.

  I closed the door, stepped over the big man on the floor and made my way to his boss.

  The front door creaked open again and I heard, “Hey, Mr. Snow—”

  It was Jimmy Radmon.

  He froze mid-sentence after seeing the big man on the floor groaning and me holding my gun on the well-dressed man seated on my sofa.

  “Not now, Jimmy,” I said.

  “Cool,” Radmon said, quickly backing out and closing the door.

  “Stand up, take your coat off,” I said to the man on my sofa. He complied. I had him do a slow 360. Nothing. “Lift your pant legs.” He did. Still nothing.

  “My name is Leslie Brewster.” The man had a slight indeterminate accent. “I have no interest in violence, Mr. Snow. I have every interest in conducting business. Smart, mutually beneficial business.”

  “And him?” I nodded to his gasping business associate on my floor. “He’s your accountant?”

  The man smiled and said, “Personal protection. Detroit can be—how shall I say?—hazardous to one’s health.” The man calling himself Brewster gestured to his companion. “He’s harmless really.”

  “He is now.”

  “May I sit, Mr. Snow?” Brewster said.

  I nodded to the sofa. He sat, crossed his legs and casually brushed an imaginary speck of lint from his well-tailored slacks.

  “So what’s the play?” I said, lowering my weapon but keeping it aimed. Anything I didn’t like, Brewster would get a bullet center mass.

  “You’ve been very busy looking into Ms. Paget’s unfortunate passing,” Brewster said, “which, as I understand it, has been determined by the authorities to be a suicide.”

  “I have an innate distrust of authority,” I said.

  “Ah, the vagaries of youth,” the man laughed. “Still, you’ve been talking to people at the bank. Chasing shadows. I might understand all this if you were still professionally associated with the police. Or even if you’d maintained a personal or professional relationship with Ms. Paget. But you hadn’t with either. So please help me understand your interest in all of this.”

  “First of all, this is my home, fuck-nuts,” I said. “I don’t have to explain shit to you. You do, however, have to explain why the B and E. Which, by the way, I could shoot you dead in the crack of your ass for and not even get a ticket.”

  Brewster assessed me for a moment. “I’m here to offer you a rather handsome incentive to stop all this silly investigative work of yours. Investigative work, I might add, that skirts the legal lines of intimidation, harassment and impersonation of a police authority.”

  “What can I say,” I replied. “I’m a multitalented guy.”

  Brewster kept his sleepy eyes and smug smile locked on me.

  “Is this the same incentive you offered Eleanor Paget and Aaron Spiegelman?” I said.

  “Miss Paget was a suicide.” Brewster accompanied his statement with a theatrically heavy sigh. “Mr. Spiegelman’s wife? Nothing more than an unfortunate accident.” Brewster paused and assessed me once again. “I have considerable personal interests in the bank. And your skulking around, poking a finger in the eye of people associated with the bank, is affecting those interests. All of the bank’s patrons are nervous, and on their behalf I’m offering you what we believe is quite fair.” He pointed to an expensive aluminum briefcase on the floor by his legs. “We are prepared to offer you a cash incentive to cease and desist with this silly investigation. We will, of course, require certain legal documents to be signed.”

  Brewster’s bodyguard finally stood on wobbly legs, shook his head and glared at me. I pointed my gun at him and said, “Stay, Fido.” He glanced at his boss. Brewster held a palm up.

  “As I said, Mr. Snow,” Brewster continued calmly. “This is a very generous offer. A half-million. We could, of course, pursue legal action. We’d prefer not to. The bank—its customers and employees—have already been through enough.”

  “May I see the money?” I said.

  Brewster grinned widely and brought the suitcase up to his lap. As he unlocked it I strongly suggested he turn it towa
rd me and lift it open from the back. He did. It certainly looked like five hundred thousand dollars, all neatly stacked, wrapped and snuggly fit into the briefcase.

  “This is the best option, Mr. Snow,” Brewster said with a grand gesture of his hands. “Everyone wins.”

  He closed the briefcase.

  “Of course, I—we—need papers signed and—”

  “Take your money and get the fuck out of my house,” I said.

  Brewster gave me a confused look. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me, asswipe.” I brought my gun out to a fully extended firing position. “Get the fuck out of my house. And by the way. My front door? That’s genuine oak with original brass and leaded glass. If you fucked that up getting in here, I will either sue you or put a bullet through your eye. I’m kinda leaning toward the bullet.”

  Slowly, Brewster stood, put on his suit coat, and picked up the briefcase. He gave me a look that suggested I’d made a big mistake and began walking toward the door.

  “My gun,” his bodyguard said with a hoarse voice.

  “Souvenir,” I said, showing him his gun and then laying it on the kitchen island behind me.

  “You can’t—”

  “I can do anything I want in my house, pork chop,” I said. “Including clipping your fucking raisins. Now get out.”

  The bodyguard glared at me before opening the door for his boss. Brewster looked back at me and said, “This is, of course, a mistake, Mr. Snow. Your decision could hurt other patrons. People who don’t deserve such pain.” He smiled a humorless smile and added, “I wonder how Eleanor Paget’s daughter will invest her inheritance? Perhaps I should consult with her.”

  “Go anywhere near Vivian Paget,” I said, taking a step closer to Brewster, “and I will finish you.”

  I followed them out. They got into a black Cadillac Escalade with blacked out windows, which had been parked around the corner.

  Brewster turned to me before climbing into the back seat of the vehicle. He held the briefcase up for me to see, smiled and said, “Last chance, Mr. Snow.”

  “Keep driving until you smell the ocean, asshole,” I said.