by Glenn, Roy
“Hello, Jacara. What brings you to Nassau?” CeCe asked as her blood boiled and her eyes narrowed.
“Well,” Jacara began. “I needed a change of scenery. I never was one to stay in any one place for very long. Freeport was starting to get a little old. So I thought I’d come here and check things out.”
“Really.”
“Well—truth be told, they hired a new singer to do the show, so I knew it was time for me to move on.”
“You got fired,” CeCe said bluntly.
“Yeah,” Jacara giggled a little. “So I’m gonna relax for a few days then see if I can get a gig somewhere on the island.”
“Good luck finding work,” CeCe said and started to walk away with Michelle. Then she stopped and stepped toward Jacara. “Stay away from my man,” CeCe said softly with her finger in Jacara’s face. “Come on, Michelle.”
“Bye,” Michelle said and waved to Jacara.
Jacara stood there and watched as CeCe walked away with Michelle. She started to go back to her hotel, pack her things and head back to Vegas. But she wasn’t going to leave the island without at least seeing Mike Black.
CHAPTER TEN
Vienna, Austria
It was Friday night in Vienna. Monika Wynn dressed entirely in black, sat in her perch watching and waiting for her opportunity to move. She had been in Vienna for two weeks, taking in the sights and stalking her prey. Art and culture have a long tradition in Vienna, including theater, opera, classical music and fine arts. Although she was there on business, Monika was determined to take in as much as she could. She visited The Hofburg and viewed the imperial jewels of the Habsburg dynasty and The Sisi Museum devoted to Empress Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie of Austria. Directly opposite the Hofburg was the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which housed many paintings by old masters along with ancient and classical artifacts.
She always wanted to try Wiener Schnitzel, a cutlet of veal that is pounded flat, coated in flour, egg and breadcrumbs, and fried in clarified butter. It was available in almost every restaurant that served Viennese cuisine. Monika also tried Tafelspitz, very lean boiled beef, which is traditionally served with Geröstete Erdäpfel, which was boiled potatoes mashed and horseradish sauce.
While she was there Monika went to the opera, mainly because it was there, she had never been to one and she had absolutely nothing to do that night. Classical concerts are performed featuring popular highlights of Viennese music, particularly the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Strauss.
Monika thoroughly enjoyed her stay in Vienna, but now it was time to get back to work. Armed with more than enough C-4 to get the job done and an SIG 556 autoloading rifle, which fired 223 caliber shells from its 30-shot detachable box magazine.
It was one of her favorite weapons because it had a flip-up front combat sight, which was adjustable for windage and elevation and it weighed less than seven pounds. She hoped she wouldn’t have to use it. If everything went as planned, Monika would only need to fire a maximum of four shots from her Beretta 92F 9-millimeter pistol. If she had to break out the SIG then something went terribly wrong with her plan.
It was eleven fifteen when two men came out of the house and walked by the car. When they were out of sight, Monika made her move. She jumped down from the tree she’d been watching from and made her to way to the wall. Once Monika had made it over the wall, she hit the dirt and watched until the two men came back around. After they passed and went back inside, she got up and moved toward the car. As quickly as she could, she attached C-4 to the gas tank, along with a remote detonator and returned to her perch.
It would be another hour before they came back out to check the grounds. Monika took out her binoculars and watched the house. He was still in his study, sitting at his desk and she hoped he would stay there. When the two men came out, Monika took out the detonator and watched as the men approached the car. When they were close enough to it, she triggered the device and the car exploded. The force of the blast took out the two men instantly. Monika picked up her binoculars and looked in the study. “Right where I need them to be,” she said and jumped down from the tree.
Once she hit the ground she looked at her watch, and set the timer. Earlier in the week, she had tested police response time by calling and saying that a car was on fire. The fire department arrived in four minutes and thirty seconds; the police arrived two minutes later.
Monika rappelled the wall, made her way to the house and entered through the back door. As she expected, the ground floor was empty. She moved carefully toward the steps and went up to the second level. Monika could hear them talking as she approached the study.
Both men were startled when Monika entered the room with her Beretta raised. She fired two shots and two bodies dropped. She walked up and fired two more shots, one each to the chest, before moving to the safe. Monika applied a light dusting of powder to the keypad to see which numbers had been pushed to open the safe. “Three, six, seven, nine,” she said and quickly attached a device to the keypad on the safe and programmed it to cycle through combinations using those numbers to open the safe.
Monika went to the window and looked out at the burning car. She could hear the sound of sirens in the background. She went back to the safe. It only had one number, a six, and she was running out of time. “Come on, hurry up.”
The timer read four minutes and the sound of the sirens was getting louder. Even though she had a plan to get out safely, Monika didn’t want to have to shoot her way out of there, but she was ready if she had to. She went back to the window in time to see the fire trucks arrive. They quickly went to work on the burning car as two police cars pulled up. She checked her timer. Right on time. Monika went back to the safe.
Just as she got there, the last number appeared on the screen and she opened the safe. Monika made digital photographs of all the documents and transmitted them to Travis. On her way out, she closed the safe, and removed her device. Then, Monika wiped the powder off of the keyboard, picked up her shells and went back to the window. Two more police cars had arrived and two officers were approaching the house. Monika went down the steps and quietly moved to the window by the front door. When the doorbell rang, Monika took out her detonator and pushed the trigger.
Another car parked outside of the compound blew up. When the police ran away from the door and moved toward the second burning vehicle, Monika ran out the back door and returned to her hotel.
Early that next morning, Monika was on the first flight to New York. She then caught a flight to Miami and then to her final destination; Nassau. When Monika arrived in Nassau, Black had a car waiting to bring her to his house. CeCe opened the door when she got there.
“Hey, Monika. Come on in.”
“How you doing Cee?” Monika asked.
“Let’s see, my ankles are swollen, I have a pain in my chest where the baby is pushing against my ribs with his foot, and I gotta go to the bathroom every 45 minutes. The doctor says the baby is resting right on top of my bladder. But at least I’m not vomiting every day, all day any more. Just when Mike is around.”
“You still can’t stand the smell of him?” Monika asked as CeCe showed her in.
“If he gets too close—my stomach turns. I’ll tell you one thing, Monika, I ain’t never doing this to my body ever again,” CeCe said.
Monika had become a frequent visitor to the Yellow Rose. When she first started coming to the house, CeCe didn’t like her spending so much time with Black until Monika was able to assuage her fears.
“I wanna make sure that you know that there is nothing going on between me and Black and there never will be,” Monika told CeCe on one of her visits. “As much as we joke and kid around, I understand that you don’t shit where you eat.” From that day, Monika was a welcomed visitor.
“Have a seat and I’ll get Mike. Can I get you anything?” CeCe asked as she walked away.
“I’m fine, thanks,” she replied and made herself comfortable in the living room.
>
CeCe went upstairs and went to their bedroom. “Monika is downstairs, Mike.”
“All right.”
CeCe sat down on the bed as Black went to the safe to get Monika’s money. “You’ll never guess who I saw while I was at the bazaar with Michelle yesterday.”
“Who’s that, Cee?”
“Your friend Jacara.”
Black’s head snapped around. “Here?”
CeCe smiled. She had known him long enough to know from the look on his face and the way his eyes narrowed that he had no idea she was in Nassau and she was pretty sure that he didn’t invite her.
“I forgot to tell you last night when you came in.” she hadn’t actually forgotten to tell him about Jacara. She was tired from being out all day and had gone to bed before Black got home. She started to tell him then, but CeCe wanted to see how he reacted to the news.
“You talk to her?”
“For a minute,” CeCe said.
“She say what she was doin’ here?”
“She got fired and she’s here looking for work.”
“They fired Jacara?”
“Hired someone younger, she said,” CeCe told Black as he came and sat down on the bed next to her.
“Before you ask, no, I didn’t know she was here. No, you don’t have anything to worry about, and no, I’m not gonna give her a job.”
“I know,” CeCe said and kissed him on the cheek. “But thank you for telling me. I know you don’t want her. I know if you wanted to be with her, you’d be with her, but you’re not,” CeCe said, more because she needed to remind herself. “You’re here with me, in our house.” CeCe put her hands on her stomach. “And this is our baby and you have made me so happy.” Black kissed CeCe softly on the lips and put his hand on top of hers. CeCe smiled. “But I did tell her to stay away from my man.”
“You did?” Black laughed.
“I sure did. And you should have seen the look on her face when she saw me and saw I was pregnant. I thought her eyes were gonna pop out her head.” CeCe laughed. “Now go on. Monika’s waiting for you.”
Black kissed her on the cheek this time and stood up. He walked away thinking that even though things were as good as they could possibly get, there was something that felt wrong about it. Deep inside he felt like his entire life was a betrayal of Cassandra’s memory. Black went down the steps and forced those thoughts to the back of his mind.
Monika looked up and smiled as Black came in the room carrying a fat envelope for her. “Evening, Monika. How was your flight?”
“Long.”
“Let’s talk outside.”
“Don’t we always?” Monika said and followed Black out to the pool. As a rule, he never discussed business in the house.
“Any problems?”
“I told you, the flight was long.”
“You gonna stay here tonight?” Black asked.
“Is Bernadette cooking?” Monika asked referring to the woman CeCe had hired to keep the house clean when it got to be too much for her. Then they discovered she could cook.
“Everyday,” Black replied and sat down at the table by the pool.
“Then I’m staying,” Monika said. She took out her laptop and called Travis and told him to transmit the documents to her.
Black handed her the envelope and she put it away. Her objective was Otto Steinhof. He had approached Black’s business partner, Congressman Martin Marshall about making some discreet transactions in Eastern Europe. Martin convinced Black and he brought in Wei Jiang, a Chinese business with Yakuza ties, to invest a million dollars a piece in the venture. Things went very well for a while, then Steinhof disappeared just before the FBI indicted him.
“Steinhof was a fraud. That’s why he was struggling to meet the seven million in redemptions he promised us. It was all a giant Ponzi scheme,” Martin told Black. “He was paying those big returns with money he took from separate investors. He kept it going with money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned.”
“I know what a Ponzi scheme is Martin,” Black said.
Otto Steinhof had enticed Martin and other investors by offering short-term returns on their investments. Steinhof’s system collapsed because the earnings were less than the payments to investors. For the system to work it requires a consistent flow of money from new investors. Steinhof also spent a lot of money for personal expenses, instead of engaging in any legitimate investment activity. When it became difficult to recruit new investors and Martin and a number of other investors asked to cash out, Steinhof cut his loses and disappeared.
Black told Wei Jiang about the scheme and promised make it right. “I brought you in. This is my responsibility.”
“I knew that I would not have to remind you,” Jiang said and ended the call. It took a while to find him and a couple more weeks to get Monika in place, but it was taken care of.
“By the way, some of the information you sent to Travis were Steinhof’s account codes,” Black said as he looked over the documents that Monika had photographed from the safe. One in particular caught his eye. “You know what Travis did with them.”
“How much did he net?”
“Little over three quarters of a million,” Black said. Steinhof had another account that had over four million dollars in it. Black claimed that to repay Martin and Jiang and cover Monika’s expenses.
“He said to drop by when you get back to New York. He’s got something for you.” Travis gave Black the customary twenty percent and promised to give Monika thirty percent, which still netted him more then three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Travis was quickly finding out that this was a whole lot easier and a whole lot more profitable than walking in a bank with a gun. He was able to make that money sitting in his living room in his bathrobe.
“When’s the last time you been to New York?” Monika asked.
“It’s been a minute,” Black said and continued looking over the documents.
“Maybe you should think about payin’ a visit. You know, see how things are going.” Monika had heard some things and didn’t like what she was hearing.
“I have confidence in Nick. He’s got to handle things for himself. Besides,” Black said barely looking up from the documents. “I got too much going on down here with the expansion and Cee being sick all the damn time.”
Monika had known Black long enough to know that she should drop it. “So, what’s Bernadette cooking?”
“I don’t know. Copy these to a flash drive and we’ll go see.”
Early the next morning Black rang the bell at the bungalow he rented for Meka. “It’s Mike.”
“Just a minute.”
It wasn’t long before Meka opened the door, dressed only in a big tee shirt. Over the last few months that they’d been working together, Black and Meka had gotten very comfortable working together. She too was a frequent visitor to the Yellow Rose and just like Monika, Meka loved Bernadette’s cooking. She had dinner with Black, CeCe and Michelle many times. Her and CeCe had become good friends and shopping buddies. Michelle even called her Auntie Meka.
“Kind of early for you, ain’t it?”
Black stepped inside and smelled something he hadn’t smelled in years. “Are you smokin’ weed, Meka?”
Meka looked at Black like he was her father and had just caught her with the blunt in her mouth. “Yes.”
“I didn’t know you smoked. All this time and you never mentioned it.”
“I heard though the grapevine that drugs are a big Mike Black no, no. The word is that you can’t be involved in drugs and work for you.”
“I got a problem with selling cocaine,” Black said and thought for a second. “Which made it ironic that I fell in love with and eventually married a cocaine dealer. But anyway, I consider smokin’ weed a harmless vice. I used to smoke. Used to smoke a lot.”
Meka went in the kitchen, opened the oven and took out the ash tray with the blunt. She hid it there when the doorbell rang. S
he came back in the living room and lit up. “Wanna hit?”
“I haven’t smoked in years, but you go ahead,” Black said since she had fired up the blunt already. “Anyway, I got something I want you to look at. If it’s what I think it is, I think we can make some money with it,” Black said and handed Meka the travel drive that Monika copied the stolen documents on. Meka put the drive in one of the four laptops she had set up in the dinning room and looked at the documents. Her smile got bigger as she looked over each one.
“Where did you get these?”
“That’s a need to know.”
“You’ve got the EU Industrial Orders Report, Belgium Business Climate Report and the Germany Business Climate Report. These are due out next week. This is like gold.” Meka got up and headed for the door. “You got to go,” she said excitedly. “I need to study these and form a plan to capitalize on this information. Call me or come by tomorrow,” she said and rushed him out the door.
The following afternoon, Black returned to Meka’s bungalow. She let him in and rushed right back to her laptops. He came and sat down at the table with her. Meka was still wearing the same big tee shirt she had on the last time he saw her and her eyes were red. “Been blazin’ weed all day, Meka?”
“No—well—yes, but that’s not why my eyes are red. I’ve been up all night. I had to read over all those reports you dropped in my lap. I had to research some things and come up with the correct strategy to capitalize. Then I started trading on the Tokyo and Shanghai exchanges the minute they opened. The Nikkei and the SSE are both up,” Meka said referring to the Japanese and Chinese stock markets. “By the time the markets opened in Europe I was well on my way to us having our best day ever!” Meka shouted.
“What does that mean in dollars?”
