by Glenn Smith
Gina looked at Flint. Before deciding, he wanted to know more about Hilda Ferguson. Murphy said that he had put her name into the mix with his people the previous day after Harry’s comment to Ava. Now Murphy dialed his phone, asked someone about Hilary or Hilda and Karbouski, listened for several minutes, hung up, said what he had just heard.
“Seems that Hilary lived with Karbouski in Europe and came with him to the United States. She supposedly married a man named Ferguson, but divorced him and kept the name. That was her cover story after some government agency—not the one I work for—gave her a new identity as Hilda Ferguson. There is one more tidbit. Hilda is paid routinely by an account that Zeta has traced to the angel trumpet group here in Naples.
“So,” Gina thought out loud, “Zeta was right that it is all connected?”
“Yes,” Murphy replied. “The way it looks, Bahaar used the angel trumpet society to get Ava out of Austin to Italy. Hilda recruited Stevenson Karbouski to run Ava off the road to scare her. He meant to kill Flint as a convincer for Ava, but Flint’s little Miata was safer in a crash that Karbouski counted on.”
“Makes sense,” Flint said. “The explosion at the House of the Vetti was meant for Ava to feel she had a really close call. And Karbouski intended to shoot me as a further convincer and to get me out of the way. He had not counted on Mary taking Ava’s place. And he especially didn’t know she was a crack shot with a pistol.”
“What you have said is what the Central Intelligence Agency’s analysts think,” Murphy noted “and so do I.”
Ava interjected, “Bahaar ended up having to improvise because Flint kept getting in the way. Mo lured me to Athens. He had Flint abducted at the hotel to clear the way for me to hypnotize Pagana. If Flint had not captured them, his men at the Parthenon probably would have called me on Bahaar’s phone with a threat to kill Flint if I did not do as Bahaar wanted. Instead, Bahaar left the hotel where he had me hypnotizing Pagana because one of his guys called to tell him they had lost control of Flint.”
“What Mo also didn’t count on,” Flint added, looking at Ava, “was your hypnotizing Pagana to not have sex with the Latin American geologists. Getting her to say that she had was brilliant. If Mo had known she had not, he’d still be alive—and we would not be.”
Gina’s landline phone rang. Everyone refreshed their beverages while she took the call which was brief.
“An angel trumpet member has phoned,” she said, “to tell me that Hilda Ferguson has assassinated the head of the angel trumpet society. Seems she arrived from the States last night and shot him at his home this morning. The Naples police have arrested her.”
Murphy looked at Ava. “Does that implicate Fred for talking you into accepting Hilda as a patient?”
Ava replied without hesitation. “No, I think not. Hilda told me in our first conversation that she had heard about me from Fred and from her retiring psychiatrist. I asked Fred about her when I saw him at his next appointment. He said he had met her but did not know anything about her. I didn’t have the impression that he was advocating for my taking her on. My decision to work with her was based on my colleague’s recommendation.”
At that moment, Gina’s cell phone sounded. She spoke in Italian briefly.
“This is Father Ron Shannon,” she told everyone. “He wants Flint to know that the Holy Father is grateful for the, how do you say in English, heads up. Oh—also, Flint, he wants to know if you have heard a singer named Stephanie Saxon? She performs in Austin and sometimes in South America with a super guitar player named Nelson Norwood.”
Flint was near Gina so he simply raised his voice and replied directly. “Yes, Father Ron, I know Stephanie and Nelson. Stephanie sings Texas two-step music in places where I go in Austin. I’ll bet Stephanie and Nelson will be onstage at Austin City Limits this year. And by the way, thanks so much for your help yesterday. Give me a call next time you are back home in Texas.”
Laura and Fred got dressed and breakfasted while Ava had one more session with Pagana—to be sure there were no post traumatic stress symptoms or other unwanted after affects. Flint and Mary said goodbye to Murphy and Gina, headed to the airport to preflight the Sabreliner. At 1:00 P.M., Mary was in the left seat, Flint in the right. Fred’s seat back was reclined, his eyes closed. Ava and Laura sat facing each other talking. Mary asked Flint to navigate and talk to air traffic control.
They had a headwind, landed for fuel twice— at Tenerife and at Santo Domingo. From the Canary Islands on, at Mary’s request, she and Flint traded jobs—she took the radio and Flint did the flying. She was repairing nicely, but holding the control yoke continuously tired her because the muscles in her left arm were still healing.
At 8:13 P.M. Mary told Austin tower that Sabreliner Four Six Texas Tango was at the outer marker inbound. At 8:15 Flint turned off the active runway to taxi. Tower directed Four Six Tango to “contact ground one two one point niner.” The ATC voice added, “welcome home, ma’am.” Ten minutes later Flint shut the engines down in front of the hanger where Mary housed her plane.
Flint, Fred, and Mary had autos at the airport. Laura drove Fred’s car to his apartment, checked his food supply and programmed her number into his phone. Ava drove Mary’s car to Mary’s apartment and made sure her refrigerator had enough food and water. Flint picked Laura up at Fred’s place, then stopped for Ava at Mary’s. He drove each to her respective residence.
On the way, Laura tuned the car radio to FM 98.1, “tryin’ ta keep Austin weird,” the DJ said. It was the same station Flint had listened to hanging upside down five days earlier. Johnny Lee and Lane Brody were singing The Yellow Rose of Texas.
“Do y’all know the story of this song?” Laura asked.
“As a Son of the Knights of the Yellow Rose of Texas, I do know the history,” Flint said. “It dates from not long after the battle of San Jacinto in April 1836 and originally celebrated Emily Morgan for helping Sam Houston win Texas independence.”
“Emily was a woman of color,’ Laura added, “who distracted the Mexican general while the Texans attacked and won.”
“What do the Sons of the Knights of the Yellow Rose of Texas do?” Ava asked.
“On April 21, we wear a small yellow rose on our lapels,” Flint replied.
Thursday found Flint Rock checking on Fred and talking to him a long time. Fred showed him his collection of gold coins and of ceramic figures, including a photo of the item he had delivered to Athens on his way to Naples. Then Flint chatted with Mary for two hours. She showed him photographs of three recent oil wells on which she had done the geology work. Then he spoke to Laura when she called him from work in the afternoon.
Flint turned in his rental car, picked up his new Miata, spoke by phone with Ava who was busy seeing clients. Finally he ended up going to see Harry and Zeta at Texas Ranger headquarters.
Harry was rehashing the evidence but not feeling closure. Bahaar and Jafe were shot once each, but the Rome police lab had not reported any gun powder residue on their hands consistent with either of them doing the shooting. As if to underscore Harry’s questions, at mid afternoon Austin time, an hour before Flint parked at Ranger headquarters, Jonathan Temple made one phone call to Gina. It lasted for less than half a minute. Zeta was able to record the call because she had put a tap on Gina’s phone. Temple had told Gina that she had a lot of his money and he wanted it back.
“Remember I told you,” Zeta said to Flint, “that Bahaar had more money in his accounts than a dozen people could spend in several life times?”
“Yes,” Flint said. “I do remember that. Don’t tell me that he has spent it.”
“I don’t think he spent it. But it is gone. All of his accounts are empty as if they never had anything in them. No trace of where it went. What if Temple somehow killed Jafe and Bahaar and then took Bahaar’s money?”
Flint and Harry looked at each other. “You are talking billions, right? That is a lot of money to steal and hide,” Harry observed.
“At first, it seems that way,” Zeta rejoined. But it has recently become as easy and fast and undetectable to steal billions as to steal a dollar.”
“Now you have to explain that,” Flint insisted.
“When you think of money, you think of bills and metal coins—something physical. Until lately that was the right way to think of it.. But now in China or the U. S., a typical employed person spends and saves all of their monthly salary without converting more than 10 percent of it to currency. So it is no longer necessary, in fact not even useful, to print billions and billions that no one needs to see, touch, or store securely.”
“Are you saying,” Harry asked, “that my electronically deposited salary exists only as information, not as money?”
“More and more that is true,” Zeta replied. “The point is, in electronic theft, nothing physical goes anywhere. No bills or bullion shift locations.”
“What,” Flint wondered, “stops a clever hacker from making imaginary deposits to his account that show as real?”
“Good question. All information that travels on the Internet leaves a record of the servers it has travelled through and the accounts it has interacted with. If financial institutions have any suspicion, they trace the routes travelled. If they can’t find a source for a deposit, they will have the account holder who has untraceable deposits investigated for fraud.”
“Zeta, I have to ask,” Harry said. “Is there any way to fool a bank?”
“Several Harry. That I know of. Every financial institution has software filters that monitor all of its information flow. A hacker can change the filter so it will miss seeing some of what shows and see something it expects that isn’t actually there.”
“Ah,” Harry said. “So that a warning flag that should announce a problem doesn’t happen?”
“Yes,” Zeta acknowledged. “Another form of deceiving a bank is to create an imaginary account for the filter to trace a deposit to. The account only appears for the filter to see, and the money it shows having sent for deposit never existed. But it can be withdrawn from the account in which it now shows as a deposit. Suddenly what didn’t exist becomes paper money when it is withdrawn as cash.”
“And if you want to make the trail even harder to follow,” Flint mused, “you physically take the withdrawn paper money to a different bank and deposit the bills into a new account. Right?”
“That is right,” Zeta agreed. “And there are several other tricks that can fool the system from hours to days. I know how to crash filters all the way up to the federal reserve by making a filter search through so many IP addresses that it trips over itself and loses a critical part of its capacity.”
Zeta thought for a moment, then added, “the trickiest part in all of this is for the hacker to leave no trail back to herself.”
“And you know how to do that?” Flint asked.
“I do.”
Flint thought for a moment, then spoke. “Suppose Bahaar’s disappeared money were to show up in a new Vatican bank account with a trail pointing to Temple’s Suriname account? Is that something you can do?”
“It is.”
Harry noted that Jonathan Temple had not possessed much money till recently. “His past is shady,” Harry continued. “He lists a geology degree from Anton de Kom University of Suriname, a claim the dean of mining and geological sciences there could not confirm when Zeta checked with him.”
Flint told Harry and Zeta thanks for their extensive help. They told him they were glad he was back in one piece. They all left for their homes. Flint agreed to meet Zeta at the San Marcos Airport Saturday morning for her first hour of flying instruction.
Chapter 18
Friday morning. Flint slept till 9:00 and would have stayed in bed longer if his phone had not rung with Ava’s bright voice wishing him good morning.” Ava had patients booked back to back all day. She called to say thanks for Flint taking the time and risk to help her. He said it was his pleasure.
Flint vacuumed, dusted, showered, dressed in a long sleeved blue shirt, Levi’s, black smooth toed hand-made western boots. A cold front was already announcing itself, so Flint wore his favorite small brimmed felt hat and a French navy surplus top coat that he had modified to car coat length. Never issued, it was new when he bought it online.for almost nothing. He went out phone shopping.
Flint ended up with a new number because his earlier phone and its subscriber identity module (sim) chip had been lost in Rome. His existing electronic phone book was still accessible from where it was stored online. He called a few friends so they could enter his new number into their address books. That was how he came to phone Laura.
“Hey Flint,” she said on the second ring. “I was about to call you.”
“Oh?” he said. “What’s on your mind?”
“How about I buy you a drink at the Driskill? Say 4:00?”
“Sounds good,” he said, “but the drink is on me. You took big chances to help out.”
“It was all very stimulating,” Laura replied. “I like thinking I saved your life, even if I really didn’t. You disarmed that woman with the M-16 before my round touched her. Everything happened so fast that I didn’t realize till the shooting stopped that you would have taken both her beer drinking buddies down before they could shoot you. I do like it though when you tell me I did good.”
“You did more than good,” he told her. “You did very well indeed. I think that you did save my life. I’ll see you in a little while at the Driskill bar.”
The drive from Flint’s house in San Marcos to downtown Austin is half an hour. Flint programmed KVET, 98.1 on the new car’s radio. He heard several country songs, including Waylon Jennings singing a song he wrote: “I’ve seen all the places I want to see / sweet mother Texas / rockabye me.”
Flint parked on the street, used a credit card to make the meter happy. Shana met him as he entered the bar. She was wearing her short cashmere skirt and almost tight matching sweater.
“Hi Mr. Flint,” she said waiting for him to sit. “Miss Laura has been delayed. What would you like to drink while you wait?”
He was saying “unsweet iced tea,” when he felt someone walk up behind him, reach over his shoulder and place a business sized card on the cocktail table. Printed on it was a short statement: “Thanks for being my friend.”
Flint turned around to greet Laura. Ava smiled.
“Laura called me an hour ago,” Ava told him, “said her mother needed her in San Antonio for an emergency meeting of the Daughters of the Texas Revolution—some issue about maintaining the Alamo. The DTR is responsible for its upkeep. She asked if I could meet you in her place. Hope that is okay.”
“Absolutely perfect,” he declared.
Ava ordered tonic water. “I awakened this morning,” she said, “dreaming that Abdu Koreim was explaining things to me. He said that Bahaar had directed Temple to shoot Jafe, which he did. Then Temple executed Bahaar. But, Abdu said, Temple’s ruthless cunning will not save him.”
“Seems it already didn’t,” Flint commented as he handed Ava his new phone. “Ten minutes ago, Zeta forwarded that email from Father Ron Shannon.”
Ava looked at the small screen. “Jonathan Temple has been found hanged with his own belt in the Orange Hotel. He had just today deposited a sizeable amount in the Vatican bank. Gina Francesca Lezioni is co-owner of the account.”
Ava handed the phone back to Flint. “That makes the remainder of what Abdu said in the dream really cogent. He told me that Gina is the new head of the angel trumpeters. He says that you and I—also Murphy, Fred, Laura, Mary, Pagana—are safe. Gina has no quarrel with any of us. She wants vengeance, and will be allowed to have it; however, it will bring her grief instead of happiness.”
Flint looked at Ava. “So what do you think? Does your dream make everything coherent?”
Ava took a sip of her drink, looked far away for a few seconds. “Yes. It does. I should have realized when Gina kept citing Machiavelli that her search for
revenge would justify any action. I haven’t known Abdu to be wrong yet.”
Flint smiled. He saw Ava’s eyes were calm and her face was relaxed. “I hope you tell Abdu next time you communicate with him how much I appreciate his help. It made a big difference.”
“I told him this morning when I phoned him after the dream.” Ava was quiet, then spoke further. “The dream had a conclusion that I haven’t told you yet. Abdu said that I owe you my life. If you had not intervened, Bahaar would have used me, then Jafe would have killed me. Abdu would have tried to prevent it, but couldn’t have without your help. He says your involvement was crucial.”
Ava looked at her watch. “I have to get back for my last appointment of the day.” She pushed her chair back. Flint stood too, hugged Ava tightly. She walked away smiling, tears making her face wet.
