'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  Amber had wakened his long-dead spirit.

  “You know Boyko will be watching us,” Amber said.

  “So be it,” Tolkachevsky responded.

  “We may not live through this,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m here against my will, you know.”

  “Who isn’t? Life is hard,” he answered cynically. “I’m sure you had no choice. For me, it is too late. A deal with the devil. Conflict diamonds, blood diamonds, they argue about what to call them. Hrgggh,” he guffawed. “I never should have; no one in Antwerp should ever touch one uncertified African diamond. High white but stained with innocent blood.”

  “You compromised to save your children, the boys.”

  “To what avail? Look at what it has gotten me. I loved them, my flesh and blood. They are still running around with women, drinking and gambling, and who knows what else they do in those nightclubs. They have made the wrong choice. So did I. Now I have to make my peace.”

  The words sent a shudder through her body.

  “Yes,” said Tolkachevsky. “I want you to understand. You have been my friend. I haven’t done too much good in my life. Let me help you now. You stuck by me when those bastards at KoeffieBloehm stripped my status.” Not satisfied with the quality of the batches they were offering him, he had turned down two offers, a taboo in that unforgiving world. KoeffieBloehm took away his status as a “viewer” at their London-based Central Merchandising Organization offices, a major blow to his business.

  Amber pointed to the four trunks on the floor. Boyko’s gems.

  “You’re an opportunity,” Amber answered in an exhausted monotone. “Don’t feel obligated.”

  They sat in silence.

  The door opened. It was Jules Schulem, Tolkachevsky’s chief cutter, with a problem. Tolkachevsky excused himself, his age apparent as he struggled up from his desk. When he stepped out into the hallway, the door failed to close all the way. Amber overheard the hushed conversation.

  “How could this happen yet again?” Tolkachevsky whispered. “I thought that once we had discovered this flaw we would never have another problem.”

  “An aberration. Our new scaifes were calibrated wrong at the factory; the electronic controls were off by one-thousandth of a millimeter on the girdle, so all of the gems came out a facet short. We had to repeat the alterations we used in the past shipments, put cuts between the facets to increase their number, adding to the ‘fire’ of the stones.”

  Through the crack in the door, Amber saw Tolkachevsky’s wrinkled hand as it held the gem against the light. He put a loupe to his eye.

  “Acch! Still near-perfect,” he whispered. “They’ll still sell. Chrysanthemums. Soon, no one will want to buy any other.”

  Every diamond his firm had polished for MecaMines was quirky. But strangely beautiful.

  When he returned to his office, Amber stood up.

  “What’s wrong?” Tolkachevsky asked.

  She told him about her son’s captivity, her plan.

  “Joseph dos Sampas. PFLEC,” he rasped. He looked at her. “Please, wait here.”

  He left his office, returned minutes later with a large white envelope and poured its contents on the dark wooden desk. A pile of diamonds glittered under the lamplight.

  “You’ll need these. A hundred perfect one carat stones. There are more where these came from,” he said. “Use these for half payment. Tell dos Sampas you’ll give him the other half when he hands your son over to you.” Since she hadn’t been able to figure out how to safely skim Boyko’s gems, she was astounded. Only Tolkachevsky had the opportunity to make some of the gems disappear. These were safe, above and beyond her scheduled delivery.

  “Thank you so much. I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she told him. “Cover for me if you hear from Boyko.”

  Boyko had her trapped as long as he had Tony, but no one in his operation knew of her safe house, an apartment in the old section near the diamond exchange in Antwerp. And she had a trump. She knew enough about his act to see him hung.

  Now she had to take a commercial flight from Antwerp to Cabinda and rent a car for the fifty mile ride south to Presqu’ile de Banana to meet with dos Sampas.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Vienna, Virginia

  Maran’s flight from New York City landed at Reagan National Airport in D.C. at 10:15 A.M. the day after the massacre on 47th Street. Outside the terminal, the Nigerian who picked him up in a Mercedes SUV taxi was upbeat, cracking jokes. They passed a big sedan with a bumper sticker: “Valentine Happens!” The cab driver chuckled. “President Valentine’s election campaign owes $15 million, so when she gets that 3 A.M. call on the red phone, it’s a collection agency. But she still says, ‘I’ll fix the economy.’”

  Maran forced a smile, not bothering to share the fact that he was also Nigerian by birth. Twenty minutes later, he sat in Room 200 in the modern building on Chain Bridge Road, Vienna, Virginia, an office that struck dread in every Big-Bank officer in the country. To be summoned there meant an inquiry that could lead to huge fines for breaches of the Bank Secrecy Act, the spear-point of the anti-money laundering crusade.

  The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, located at 2070 Chain Bridge Road, was set up as part of the Treasury Department to supervise the Cash Transaction Reporting requirements for account deposits and withdrawals of more than $10,000. It put the much needed teeth in the Bank Secrecy Act used to combat the massive money laundering operations that supported the international drug cartels and their connections to terrorism. FINCEN maintained Level-Five Security. All doors to all sections of the building were locked, watched by CCTV cameras and armed guards. A bevy of air conditioned rooms honeycombed the large building, off limits to almost everyone. These were the rooms from which the financial techie gophers operated their supercomputers.

  As Maran sat in the waiting room, he reviewed his options. He needed help from these people to track the money, and he needed to stay clear of the mess he left behind in New York City at Dolitz’s. The last thing he needed was the interference that would come if he were to become a person of interest in an FBI investigation.

  Jack Connell, Deputy Director at Treasury’s FINCEN, was one of the friends that Cole Martin had promised Maran he’d enlist. Connell came into his role from Naval Operations where he first met Martin, who had been serving as lead science and policy advisor to the top naval officer at the Pentagon.

  Dressed in a non-descript gray herringbone tweed sports jacket, his girth stretched the buttons that held the jacket closed. He never unbuttoned it. He wore a blue oxford shirt with button-down collar wings and a dark striped tie. Connell’s voice was as quiet as his clothes. Maran had sworn him to secrecy.

  “I took the liberty to have one of our key men in to meet with us.”

  Maran’s eyebrows arched.

  “He can be trusted,” Connell assured him as he ran a hand over his cropped, nearly-shaved yellow hair. “Khyam al-Sayegh, a techno-geek of the first order. He specializes in data mining, tracking ties between international money laundering and Islamist terrorism.”

  Five minutes later, the three men were down the hall. Jack Connell wanted Maran to see the operation.

  “I think if you know what we do here, you’ll see how we can help,” Connell said. He pointed to a bank of tape drives. “Information comes in from our center in Detroit, fed into those mainframes, then we merge-and-match it with FINCEN’s database of cash transactions. Our specialists work twenty-four-seven to prowl through it, looking for patterns of unusual financial transactions; then they can build a diagram of illegal activity. In some cases, they work on an investigation for the Treasury Department, or it might be one of the more than six thousand requests that come in every year from different law enforcement and intel agencies. The basis of FINCEN’s research is the set theory of Venn diagrams. They isolate those overlapping circles that indicate relationships.”

  “Right. I’m glad you understand,”
Maran smiled. “So what is it that you look for?” Maran asked.

  “Say research begins with the names of five individuals suspected by Customs of money laundering. We check those names in the database, then we cross check the data and find matches with a company under investigation for drug dealing. As the search broadens, FINCEN links the original five individuals to a dozen more, adding maybe ten times as many companies, a lot of them, perhaps, fictive.”

  “So if I give you a firm name, bank accounts, account numbers, you can track the money to other banks, other accounts?”

  “That’s where Khyam comes in. The Venn guru, an Iraqi dissenter who escaped death from Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime.

  “Speaking of the devil,” Connell smiled.

  Connell invited Khyam al-Sayegh to sit. He wore dark-rimmed glasses with a trimmed black pencil mustache and a small patch of black on the end of his chin. His suit was the same color as his skin and made of silk. Connell introduced the two men and continued.

  “It’s an expensive and lengthy process,” he explained to Maran. “Too often, by the time the data is input, the perps have flown the coop, but when FINCEN gets a payoff, it can be enormous. Last year, a pair of law enforcement agencies requested information on two individuals who had no apparent affiliation. We soon linked those businesses to $120 million in cash deposited at banks across the country at the rate of $50,000 to $80,000 a day. In months, we closed down a huge international drugs-and-arms-dealing conspiracy.”

  “How do you get the data?” Maran asked.

  “American law requires that a Cash Transaction Report, a CRT, be filed with the IRS for all cash business over $10,000. That applies not just to banks but to all sorts of businesses, from antique dealers to garage owners and dentists,” Connell explained.

  “Guys like Dolitz are limited as to how much money they can take out of the U.S.,” he continued. “They can wire transfer out as much as they want anywhere in the world. When they do, we have a track. Al-Sayegh’s techies can build one of those Venn diagrams of illegal activity, and FINCEN can search every financial transaction in every financial account in the country and produce a hard-copy document to document the suspicious ones.”

  “Great.”

  “These facts are classified, by the way, but if he’s a perp in this thing, we can smoke him.”

  Maran put the Dolitz report in front of Connell. He explained about his eyewitness account of the money trucks and the large bags of cash being counted on tables inside the operation.

  Connell nodded. “It fits. The FBI and CIA already have intel that the South American drug cartel has been looking for something smaller, more valuable than gold to launder their massive cash flow. Look. We are talking billions, being washed. We knock this down, we can seize those assets.”

  “The White House can announce a tax cut,” Maran quipped.

  Al-Sayegh broke into laughter at the joke. “I can install a program to track their money around the world, full circle, right back to them. We do it for the Drug Enforcement Agency and CIA all the time.”

  “How do they recycle the money?” Maran asked.

  “First thing, they move it through several banks. Maybe from the U.S. to Switzerland to Frankfurt to the U.K., through normal trading banks. They have shells, open accounts, to receive wire transfers and personal I.D. numbers. They put it into these normal commercial banks and move it again through some places that are famous for this, like Gibraltar and Cyprus. But we have a little problem. To get into a bank and find out what’s there is impossible without a subpoena. Some wise guys, most of them former CIA, Mossad, KGB, human-source-intel geeks, have been known to find a friend in the bank, some official with access to the computers. Maybe the friend slips them those secret I.D. numbers.”

  “Uh, huh. That sounds expensive.”

  “It can be done for about ten grand.”

  “Interesting. I didn’t know it was so prevalent,” Maran said. He frowned.

  “What makes it tough, these transactions aren’t cash. We need someone to get those secret I.D. numbers.”

  Al-Sayegh turned to Maran.

  “Money laundering is bigger than most people can imagine. Corrupt government officials in Thailand caused the 1997 collapse of the Baht, the Thai currency. They were so involved in drug smuggling and money laundering through the Golden Triangle they took down the country’s largest banks, crushed their own economy and wreaked havoc in markets around the world. You can imagine the impact if that happens to the dollar.”

  “From diamonds?”

  “Fear of deflation spreads like fresh water on a dry blotter. Brings us to those perps, wherever and whoever they are.”

  “One other thing,” Connell added. “Someone here is out to get you. SAWC, CIA, FBI, Treasury, I don’t know who. Maybe all the above. They think you’re the one behind this diamond scam. Watch your back.”

  Connell closed by asking Maran to keep him abreast of his movements.

  Maran had already promised the same privilege to Martin. He had his doubts, but he had to put his faith in the two men who were crucial to his success. He agreed.

  The next morning, after working all night on FINCEN’s supercomputer, al-Sayegh brought the take in to Connell. The merge had uncovered a money trail from a Strategic Solutions International account in Cabinda through a series of private banks to the Dolitz account at First Stone Bank in Manhattan. The name on the transactions was General Erik Vangaler. A quick search revealed a White Paper from The Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. It tied Vangaler to Boyko and his Strategic Solutions International.

  Before sending him the results of al-Sayegh’s search, Connell called Maran on his secure cell phone.

  “These gemstones?”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re not just diamonds.”

  “What are they?”

  “They’re blood diamonds.”

  It was confirmed.

  Cabinda.

  Maran had to get there‌—‌fast.

  THIRTY

  Cabinda

  The small Learjet 23 left Quatro de Fevereiro International in Luanda, Angola, with Maran and two of his tiger teammates, Kurt Tracha and Al Ray Goodwin. Two hours later it landed and taxied to the hangar in the private jet charter section of Cabinda Airport without incident. Maran’s eyes surveyed the area looking for anything he might consider suspicious, a reflex over which he had no control. He felt gratified that his “Walter Q.R. Jackson” credentials included an international airline firearms permit he got by registering as a private investigator. That allowed him to pack his unloaded H&K in a locked gun case within his luggage.

  The men loosened up with relief. The reputation of Cabinda Air, three crashes resulting in forty deaths over the previous five years, hadn’t given them the greatest sense of security, “Two of those crashes were civil war shoot-downs,” Kurt Tracha observed.

  “The war here will never be over,” Maran responded.

  “Why should it be?” quipped Goodwin. “It’s the only growth industry they have, unless you count funeral parlors.”

  “They don’t have funeral parlors,” Tracha chuckled.

  “Well, coffins.”

  “Some growth,” Tracha retorted.

  Although August in this part of Africa usually is one of the coolest and driest times to travel, it was so hot that the heat waves off the tarmac looked to Maran as if he could ride them. Exiting the jet, the men carried backpacks and duffels. Tracha had a camera bag slung over his shoulder, part of the ruse they had planned. Maran carried the “Walter Q.R. Jackson” I.D. card Levine had given him signifying his membership on the board of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. They were fictively in Angola on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund to uncover illegal poaching activities in the region’s national game parks. The Fund was concerned that tens of thousands of elephants and apes were being slaughtered each year for tusks and meat in the Congo Basin by rebels like the Ninjas who had mi
litarized the illegal industry. They were making huge profits on the gruesome business and using them to support their nefarious activities.

  Maran had a letter he had solicited from the WWF confirming his role. The second page included Maran’s agreement that the work was being done pro bono, free, a public service. He planned to keep that page to himself in the realization that it would raise suspicions of his true purpose. Everyone, on the other hand, understood the money motive.

  They walked over to the Customs official who guarded the gate at the exit to the airport foyer. He held out his hand when the men stepped up to his post. Maran tipped him four thousand Congolese Republic Francs, about five dollars. Most major transactions were in U.S. dollars. Maran and his team were going native.

  The man neither searched their luggage nor looked at their passports.

  The first thing Maran did was to go to the men’s room. He used a stall where he unpacked his gun and put it in a holster at the small of his back.

  The airport had more amenities than usual for a third-world country. It was kept active by the large number of oil company executives coming and going to visit Global Coast, Chevron, and other international oil companies that operated the rigs offshore. They waited in the private lounge for Rocky Daniels, an old Army colleague of Tracha’s.

  A white man dressed in khaki pants with a matched safari jacket stopped just off the tarmac.

  “Is this your friend now?” asked Al Ray Goodwin. Maran reached back and checked the gun on his back under his jacket.

  “Rocky Daniels. A Boer.” The term referred to a dumb redneck African-Dutch farmer or a proud Afrikaner, depending on who used it. Tracha meant it as a compliment. Daniels ran Zoo Link West Africa, Inc., out of Cabinda, a provider of rare species to zoos and zoological research institutes.