Family Ties (John Taylor Book 5)

by Travis Starnes

  “On the move,” Taylor said.

  Whitaker moved to Taylor’s side as he started walking forward, her left arm hooked through his right, leaning in close. For all intents and purposes, they looked like a couple in love, out for a stroll. It was harder to walk this way and wouldn’t have worked if the target had been moving fast. Thankfully, the woman was walking at a normal speed, never looking around to see if she was being followed.

  Not a hardened criminal at all, Taylor thought. She was comfortable in the routine of whatever she did for Graf. The precautions of the burner phone and two call setup were almost certainly something mandated by Graf. She did them because she was told to, but she didn’t go one step beyond that. She hadn’t looked around at the cafe and had chosen a seat that left one direction unobserved, as opposed to keeping her back to the cafe itself so she could see anyone looking in at her.

  She walked like a normal person, back to the office. No sense of urgency. No looking around for anyone following her. She was used to the trip to the cafe for her clandestine calls. Comfortable. Taylor was certain he was right, and she was a money person of some time. A professional feeling safe in the functions of their office. It’s easy for white-collar criminals to justify breaking the law. It’s just a piece of paper, they think. It wasn’t like they were holding a gun on anyone.

  They followed her for two blocks to a tall office building, an awning stretching out onto the sidewalk. Taylor slowed down. This was the hard part. They couldn’t just walk in right behind her, get in the elevator with the woman, and follow her up. She might not be looking for threats, but even a civilian would notice that.

  They needed her in the elevator before they went inside, assuming the woman didn’t work on the first floor. They’d have to find out what kind of people worked here and do research on them. It would probably extend how long they needed to stay in hiding since they’d have to independently find out who the woman was. Maybe they’d stake out the closest parking garage and building front, find out if she had a car and a license plate they could trace.

  Taylor and Whitaker slowly walked towards the awning, giving the woman time. There wasn’t a doorman, which was good. They didn’t need someone paying attention to their snooping. Their luck continued when they got inside the building. There wasn’t a reception or security desk that some buildings have, with helpful guards taking down names and observing faces. There were also no ground floor offices.

  Instead, there was a bank of five elevators in the middle of a polished but empty lobby, one facing the front door and the other four in pairs of two facing each other. On the side of the left-hand bank was a large black sign in a silver frame with white, stick-on letters helpfully telling them which businesses were on what floors.

  Taylor’s luck held yet again. There were all kinds of businesses listed. Lawyers, an IT company, an employment placement company. On the fifth floor was a CPA, who happened to be the only company listed that had anything to do with money.

  “We don’t know if she’s actually Graf’s money person. Even if she is, we don’t know if that’s her day job.”

  “True, but I think that’s her. She could be one of the lawyers, but I don’t think so. Look at the calls. Calls from the trust followed by calls to Graf or calls from Graf followed by calls to the Trust. Think about the woman we were following. Unobservant living her life, comfortable in the world around her. A citizen. She isn’t a middle man for orders. She didn’t call Graf and say, ‘the Trust wants you to kill Fredrick Wissler’.”

  “Why not. Maybe Graf wanted deniability.”

  “Graf’s already doing enough that deniability wouldn’t matter. The Trust, on the other hand, would want deniability. The fewer people that know about the specific tasks they ask Graf to do, the better. No, orders would have been given to Graf by the Trust themselves. So why does Graf need to call this woman, and why would she then need to call the trust if it wasn’t for orders?”

  “To take care of payments?”

  “Yep. Reviving money from the Trust, laundering it, and passing it on to Graf. Not even a real crime, she’d probably rationalize to herself. The Trust is old money with lots of connections to powerful people. Graf is an upstanding member of law enforcement. She knows what she’s doing is illegal, but it’s one of those illegal things that someone like her could explain away as just getting around red tape.”

  “A lawyer could still do all that.”

  “Yeah, but I think it’s the CPA. Let's go upstairs and see. If we’re wrong, we can say sorry and excuse ourselves.”

  “People talk. We might overplay our hands going into the wrong business.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think people talk to others in the same building that much. Plus, they’re not on the same floor. The CPA is on the floor with the IT people, who look to take up most of the floor. What else do we have? We’re here, let's go and see.”

  Taylor headed to the elevators and pressed the up bottom. Whitaker followed, not precisely agreeing with his plan but not fighting it either. They were the only ones in the car as they rode up to the fifth floor, where the CPA was located.

  In a very German way, the floor was logically laid out, making it easy to find the suite they were looking for. The office itself was small, a suite designed for a sole proprietor. The door from the hallway entered into a small waiting area with a receptionist. Next to her desk was a door that probably led to the banker's office.

  The sectary said something in German that Taylor didn’t recognize, but that was said in a ‘May I help you’ kind of tone. Whitaker started to step up to her, probably to see if she spoke English when she was surprised. Taylor pointed at a photo on the wall showing the woman they’d seen at the cafe shaking hands at some kind of event and then walked straight to the door into the inner office, reaching for the doorknob.

  The sectary clearly didn’t appreciate that. Taylor assumed she was saying something like ‘you can’t go in there’ or the like, her voice agitated. Taylor ignored her and pushed the door open. Inside, the office wasn’t much larger than the reception area.

  At the desk sat the woman from the cafe. She looked up as Taylor, followed by the secretary and Whitaker, filed into her office. The secretary was going a mile a minute, alternating between yelling at Taylor and talking to her boss, probably explaining the situation.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Yes,” the woman said, holding up a hand to quiet her secretary. “What’s this about?”

  “It’s about that phone call you just took from Kriminalhauptkommissar Graf. It’s probably best if you ask your assistant to step outside and let us talk. I’m sure you’d agree we don’t want to have a big hoopla over your call.”

  “I’m not sure what ‘hoopla’ means, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The secretary had stopped yelling but was still standing in the door, probably waiting on the okay from her boss to call the police.

  “I think you do. He’s the man that calls you on the disposable cell phone you have, and then calls you again five minutes later when you’re down at the cafe. Considering you just took such a call, I’m pretty sure you remember.”

  She said something to her secretary, who looked annoyed and closed the door softly. Taylor hadn’t heard the word for police, one of the few German words he knew which, along with the secretary's reaction, probably meant the cops weren’t on their way.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I want information on what you’ve been doing for Herr Graf. I know you’ve been handling payments from the trust to him and distributing it to both Graf and his agents. I want to know all the payments made in the past three months and any records of who you paid money out to.”

  “All of my records are confidential.”

  “These aren’t legal payments. We know what the Trust was paying Graf to do, and we know who Graf had you pay money out to. You’re the middle woman in a criminal enterprise that includes multip
le murders. We aren’t the police, and if you help us, we won’t feel the need to include your name in the information we hand over to them.”

  Whitaker looked over at Taylor, surprised. She’d controlled the look, but he knew her well enough to know what she was thinking. While he believed her when she said she needed to reevaluate how she thought about doing everything by the book, he knew that offering to look the other way on one member of a criminal conspiracy was alarming to her.

  For Taylor, he didn’t care. This woman was just a facilitator and probably only did it out of some kind of connection to Graf himself. She didn’t operate in a way that would suggest she regularly took part in criminal enterprises. Despite what he had just said, he still stood by his words to Whitaker earlier. This wasn’t a middle woman in a string of orders to murder people. This was a functionary, making money moved from one place to another. Sure, it was illegal, but Taylor had no problem looking the other way if it got him what he needed.

  When she paused, looking at the door leading out to the reception area, Taylor said, “I want you to understand that so far, we are doing this the nice way. One way or another, though, we’re going to find out what we need to know.”

  To make his point, Taylor pulled the gun he had hidden under his shirt, holding it at his side. He knew Whitaker didn’t like it when Taylor pushed the envelope, questioning criminals, but he didn’t feel bad about threatening the woman. She may not be like some of the criminals he’d dealt with over the past several years, but she was a criminal. While he might have had no qualms about letting her get away with her illegal activity, he also didn’t feel the need to treat the woman by the letter of the law.

  That went doubly now, considering Whitaker and Taylor were outside the law themselves.

  The banker looked past Taylor and Whitaker again towards the door before looking back at Taylor, her brow creased with worry.

  “I only handle payments,” she finally said after one last look to the door. “I don’t know what Herr Graf is actually doing.”

  “You must have some idea,” Whitaker said, ignoring Taylor’s threats. “You’re too smart to see whose paying him and who he’s paying, all requiring phone calls outside the office, and not figure it out.”

  “It’s easy if you don’t want to know. Of course, I know it’s illegal, but beyond that …”

  “How about you tell us what you do know,” Taylor said.

  “Torsten contacted me five years ago. He knew about some trouble I’d been in around the time and made it clear he could make my life difficult if I didn’t help him out with something. He said he was going to be getting payments from an organization that he needed to be untraceable, and he’d need to make payments out to contractors from time to time that needed the same thing.”

  “Did he tell you who these people were? Either the people paying him or the people he was paying?”

  “No, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. The Trust just transferred money to accounts I set up as the collection point for Graf’s payments without trying to hide who they were. I hadn’t heard about them, but I looked them up once. As for the people he was paying, no. That tended to be paid out in cash.”

  “How would that work?” Whitaker asked. “How would he receive the payments?”

  The woman paused, clearly not wanting to discuss her illegal activities. It was one thing to sell out Graf, it was another to implicate herself in direct criminal acts. Taylor tapped his gun to his leg, loud enough to get her attention. She glanced at the weapon and then back up at Whitaker.

  “I would arrange to get money out of one of the holding accounts, and he would send someone by to pick up an envelope.”

  “When you said holding accounts, is that all you did? Take the money in and then pass it directly to him?” Taylor asked.

  “Only if it was for cash, which wouldn’t be reported by the people getting it, so it didn’t matter how the money tracked back. For the money that I transferred to Herr Graf, I would put it through a series of holding companies before the final company paid him as an investor in that company.”

  “Do you have records of payments from the trust or any of these payments to Graf that weren’t cash?” Whitaker asked.

  After another look at Taylor’s gun, she said, “Yes.”

  “Show them to me,” Whitaker said.

  Whitaker went around the desk and stood behind the woman as she brought up various documents showing what she’d just explained. Whitaker had the woman pull up all the documents and then step away from the computer. Taylor couldn’t see what she was doing but assumed she was repeating what she’d done for the video, sending copies of everything to herself.

  The banker didn’t look happy, since there was enough there to put her in real trouble if it got out. She kept glancing at Taylor who stood passively, staring back. When Whitaker finished, Taylor holstered his weapon.

  Once they were out of the offices and back at the elevator, Taylor asked, “Did you get it?”

  “Yes. I haven’t worked on white-collar crimes much, but it seemed like enough to prove illegal payments to Graf.”

  “Maybe. Let’s go back to the hotel, and I’ll call Joe, see what he thinks.”

  They stepped out of the elevator into the lobby and froze. On either said of the door were armed police officers in tactical gear, with more by the lobby out of view from inside the elevator.

  “Shit,” Taylor said as both he and Whitaker put their hands above their heads.

  Chapter 13

  As soon as they were out of the elevator, the officers started yelling ‘hands up.’ Of course, Taylor and Whitaker’s hands were already up, but that wasn’t uncommon. People build up a lot of adrenaline during intense situations, which takedowns usually are. He’d seen it before when working with law enforcement. The suspect would be prone on the ground, and the cops keep yelling for them to ‘get down’ or their hands already up, and the cops keep yelling ‘hands up.’

  Taylor curses himself for not being more careful. The woman upstairs must have told her secretary to call the police while she kept them busy. It was a dumb mistake, and both he and Whitaker knew better. He had been distracted by focusing on getting the information they needed and took the woman’s placid nature at face value. It was a rookie mistake. He only hoped they had enough information to at least place doubt in everything that had happened and get off the hook.

  Two of the officers holstered their weapons and moved to take the pair into custody. Taylor was turned around and shoved hard against the outside wall of the elevator, his arms yanked behind him. His head was turned with his cheek pressed against the wall so that he could see Whitaker going through the same thing.

  Out of habit, Taylor turned his wrists as the cuffs were applied and pulled down so that the wider part of them plus some meat of the base of the hand would be against the turning side of the cuffs. This allowed him to rotate his wrists once they were double-locked and have a bit more room. While he hadn’t been in trouble before, he’d had a buddy in the service who had been in a lot of trouble before enlisting. They’d messed around with stuff like handcuffs and other things his buddy had learned. He’d been warned that an observant officer, or one who followed strict procedure, would double-check the room in the cuffs before double locking them and get rid of the extra room.

  The guy cuffing him didn’t. He just hastily slapped on the cuffs and double locked them. Either German procedure was different, or the adrenaline of the situation had him making mistakes.

  Taylor looked at the officer's badges to see if this was whatever the German equivalent of SWAT was, but he didn’t know enough about the structure of the German police force to work out what the patches on their uniforms meant. In big cities, at least in America, tactical response teams tended to have their own chains of command, which meant they wouldn’t be directly under the control of Graf.

  That hope was dashed once they were marched out of the office lobby. Standing next to a large police van stood
Graf, looking exceptionally pleased with himself. He didn’t say anything to the pair as they were loaded onto the van, handcuffs secured to the benches that ran along its walls. Two officers followed them, one sitting next to each of them after Taylor and Whitaker were secured.

  They rode in silence. Graf wasn’t in the front of the van, and the officers that were guarding them didn’t seem inclined to talk. Taylor didn’t waste his breath, trying to explain to them that Graf was dirty. For one, they would have heard all kinds of stories from prisoners in the past and wouldn’t have had any reason to believe anything Taylor said. They’d just chalk it up to another criminal desperate to talk their way out of trouble.

  Even if they had listened to Taylor, these weren’t the people that could do anything. He needed to talk to a prosecutor, or better yet, Whitaker needed to get in touch with Joe Solomon. What they really needed was someone high enough to countermand anything Graf ordered.