The picture was emerging for Malone.
“So,” Bobbi said, “I went back to last year’s audit for the Institute. On revenue, there was 8.3 million from membership dues, 11.4 million from the fund drive, 5.6 million of investment income, and 10.6 million in federal match money, which matches the amount raised in the fund drive from the previous year.”
“Almost 36 million if my internal calculator is working correctly. I may have to change careers.”
“On the expenditure side, staff salaries, consultant contracts, and administration expenses ran 4.7 million. Added to the investment fund was 5 million. Donations to worthy causes amounted to 26.2 million. That is, of course, what the membership believes.”
Malone said, “If the pattern you’ve identified is true for all organizations, 13.1 million dollars went missing. And ten million was taxpayer funds. Shit, someone’s ripping off Joe Citizen.”
“Your math works just like mine, Oak. This is shaping up as a major scam.”
Malone thought about it for a couple minutes. “Here’s an angle, Bobbi. Bribery plays a major role in most of those countries. You don’t think the billions of dollars the U.S. gives to Egypt, for example, goes right to the people, do you?”
“No. There is a lot of siphoning at the top. But do you think the Institute is spending exactly half of its recorded donations on bribes?”
“Exactly half, isn’t it? No, that’s too convenient and way too coincidental. So, maybe some of it goes into the back pockets of friends and foes, but I’m inclined to agree with you. Someone, somewhere, is benefitting from the Institute’s activities.”
“I would bet,” Galway said, “that the recipient charities are not wise to the ruse. If they get a half million, that’s all they know.”
“Now,” Oak said, “How the hell did we get here? How do we tie the Institute for International Stability to the three names Dinmore gave me? Those three people are simply members, as far as we know. It was practically the only thing we found in common among them. How does it relate to Dinmore’s murder and the attempts on me?”
“For one, Oak, it’s a secret worth keeping. Greed always is. If the Institute is operating the way we think it is, and someone is afraid you’ll figure it out, he doesn’t want you around.”
Malone didn’t want to jump to conclusions that might not really be there. He was bothered by the lack of linkage between Mears, Dixon, Corridan and Dinmore to this Institute. He told Galway as much.
“Then we just have to ask more questions of the right people,” she said.
“We go to the Senator?”
“Oh, hell no! We go ask Jeffrey Paxton.”
“Who the hell is Paxton?”
“Executive Director of the Institute. You’d think he might know something about the money.”
“Geez. Do I have to give you another pay raise, already?”
“Let’s wait and see.”
“I don’t think a phone call will do it,” Malone said. “He might be the kind to hang up on me.”
“You want me to make airline reservations?”
“I’ll do that. You’re not a secretary.”
Her smile told him he was on the right track.
“While you’re doing that,” she said, “I’ll see what I can find out about Jim Mears’ brokerage accounts.”
His landline phone rang on the desk. Someone who didn’t know his cell number.
Bobbi handed him the phone and he spent some time talking to a man named Jorge in Costa Rica who thought one of his employees was stealing him blind. They agreed to discuss it further in July.
When he hung up, Galway raised an eyebrow.
“Future business. All I’ve made on the present project is five grand.”
Chapter Eleven – Thursday, June 20
At 3:20 in the afternoon of the 20th, Abdul Wahhab stood on the north sidewalk of Al Markhiya Street and gazed around. Down the street to his right were the placid waters of the Persian Gulf. Two supertankers moved southward far out in the Gulf. To the north was the tower belonging to the Sidra Medical and Research Center, and beyond that, the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology. To his left oblique in the near distance he could see the top floors of the Ministry of Labor. The whole complex was in a near park-like setting of grass and trees and sidewalks. It was quite beautiful, he thought, and once again was struck by how clean the city was.
Up the street to his left was the imposing high rise of the main branch of the Commercial Bank. A stream of people flowed in and out of the building pursuing their personal or corporate banking needs. The people were of all shapes and sizes, and Wahhab could not be certain that he spotted the right person entering the building, but while he was dressed like other men, he appeared bulkier than most.
Wahhab knew that this would not be as powerful or impressive as, say, the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, but it should capture attention.
He was probably accurate in his assessment of the bulky man because two minutes later, a dull boom rolled across Al Markhiya Street, followed by an instant’s flash of orange-red flame bursting through doors and windows, then gushes of roiling black smoke. Windows shattered as high as the fourth floor and broken glass arced outward from the building and rained down on the concrete and hapless bystanders.
Pedestrians went down by the dozens, voluntarily or not. Alarms began to racket, screams rose in the air.
He was far enough away that he only felt the concussive passage of air brushing against his face.
So.
He would go to Bijab and make the final payment, then catch an airplane back to Riyadh.
He assumed that Bijab would then use his cell phone to call the television news and claim responsibility for the attack against the Jews protecting the Emir.
Wahhab really wished that Bijab would come up with a name for his group, perhaps in honor of the idiot who strapped a bomb to his chest and walked into the bank thinking of his martyrdom and the hosts of virgins awaiting him.
*
The first thing Galway said when they boarded the 757 in San Francisco was “First class, Oak?”
“Business class,” he told her.
“Why?”
“Because I have long legs and it’s a long flight.”
And he could afford it, she surmised.
He gave her the window seat and they settled into the leather. They were traveling under their own names, she because she didn’t have alternate ID and Oak because he’d checked through his Sig Sauer and it needed to match his permits. If Big Brother was still tracking him, he’d said, he didn’t mind Big Brother knowing he was going back to D.C.
Bobbi had worked late, combing data bases and breaking a password here and there. She’d printed out a large amount of information but had also backed up most of what she had on a flash drive which was now in Oak’s gun safe. To preserve evidence, just in case. She had also made copies of her spreadsheet covering the Institute donations as well as copies of the foreign charitable organizations’ reports. She had made a bunch of hard copies.
Malone had opened the other safe and retrieved some cash, giving her a thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds. “For incidental expenses,” he’d told her.
He filled his wallet, too, as well as a folded sheaf for his pocket, and it didn’t seem to diminish the stacks of currency in the safe by much.
While Bobbi worked on her laptop at the desk, Oak had slept in the big chair. She’d realized that, no matter what he said about the guy named Sherry making himself absent, Oak wasn’t taking any chances. He was sticking close to the monitors and the motion detector alerts. The Labrador retriever had stopped by around 11:00 and peed on a hackberry bush.
Bobbi had found it surprisingly comforting to have Oak so near at hand. He was a solid presence, and she became more and more convinced she’d made the right decision to leave the Agency. Exactly what the future looked like wasn’t very clear, and might even be chaotic, but it was probably
going to be better than the past. She’d found herself thinking about Oak as more than a friend, and that also felt like a betrayal of Bob. She fought to keep that emotional conflict submerged. It wasn’t something she could talk to Oak about.
Once the plane was in the air and they’d been served orange juice and coffee, she opened her tote bag and began feeding paper to Oak.
“First, I’ve got three years of transactions in both of Mears’ brokerage accounts.”
“You’re a wizard,” Malone said.
“No, but I’m persistent. I had to tap into a lot of Phoenix brokerages before his name popped up. For all I know, there are other accounts.”
Oak rifled slowly through the pages, studying the entries, pausing now and then to muse slowly over one transaction or another.
Finally, he said, “This explains his academic interests.”
“It does, kind of. Almost all of his investments are in foreign stocks and bonds. He seems to have a lot of knowledge about Australian, Chinese, South Korean, Japanese, German, French, and British corporate enterprises.”
“What are the totals, Bobbi?”
“The one account has around $480,000 and the other $735,000. Over the three years of history that I got, he’s increased his values by fifty-six percent. That’s strictly through trades and investment income, which he rolls over. I didn’t see any large deposits of new cash, so he’s damned good at what he’s doing. It’s not haphazard. He seems to be careful about incurring too many commissions for the brokerage.”
“So maybe this is his retirement program?”
“Possible,” she said. “His checking account has about $15,000, his savings account another $15,000. There is a joint money market account with his wife that holds nearly a million dollars. It has a steady, monthly deposit of six thousand dollars, and that’s likely to come out of his paycheck from the dealership. There’s also a 401k account.”
Oak grinned at her. “You explored all over the place.”
“I’ve got to live up to my salary, right?”
“Okay, this is good. We know ol’ Jim has a talent beyond operating an auto dealership. Maybe on our way back, we’ll stop in Phoenix and you can buy your car there based on his promise to me. He can afford to go way under invoice.”
Bobbi and Oak had both driven to the airport, and Bobbi had turned her rental in, thinking she’d buy a car when they got back to Sausalito.
“I was thinking Honda or Toyota.”
“How about a ’98 Silverado?”
“It’s all dented up.”
“You’re a perfectionist.”
“On some things,” she admitted.
“What else is in that big bag?”
“Here.” She gave him the slim biographies she’d printed out. “That’s everything I could find about the staff at the Institute. There aren’t many people employed directly, but they do hire foreign consultants from time to time. I guess that’s to take care of the overseas end of the mission, smoothing feathers and making donations.”
“Jeffrey Paxton.”
“He’s the executive director. It looks like he’s got a great background working in fund-raising endeavors and managing not-for-profit organizations. Worked in Boston and New York City. He was hired by the Institute seven years ago.”
“Walter Deaver.”
“He’s the investment manager, hired three years ago after his predecessor resigned or retired. The predecessor had a disastrous period during the Wall Street meltdown. Deaver’s three years have averaged 6.9 percent return on investment, which is good. The Institute is a 501(c)3 non-profit so it doesn’t pay taxes on its income.”
“But it gets our taxes to give away around the world,” Malone said. “That tends to piss me off.”
“I agree.”
“Alicia Hampstead.”
“She’s the information manager, and I found out she’s a former Idaho teacher. She runs the computer operations.”
“That would be keeping track of the membership, dues, and the like?”
“I would think so,” Bobbi said. “Plus the budget and expenditure accounts. Plus the mailings, and I’d bet they do a lot of website and e-mail activity. And she’s called information manager rather than data manager, so I suspect she does some research into international incidents. Somehow the Institute has to figure out where to invest their donations and direct their intervention activities.”
“How about Forrest Shackleford?”
“Finance manager. He’d be keeping track of the budget and expenditures, probably working on the fund raising, maybe on membership drives.”
“Dale Trent. What’s he do?”
“Female Dale. She’s the office manager, watching out for the employees and the No. 2 pencils.”
Malone flipped through the rest of the pages quickly, the technical writers, computer specialist, administrative assistants, and lobbyists.
“It’s not a large staff.”
“No, it’s not. Paxton is pretty efficient, I’d think.”
“There are six lobbyists.”
“And all of them are paid very well, Oak. They serve as the Institute’s lifeline into Congress and the federal agencies.”
She sat back and sipped her coffee, which was lukewarm by now. Oak was still holding a sheaf of paper, but he put his head back, thinking.
He was a good thinker she believed. Strategy as well as tactics. At least as far as his work went. He didn’t seem to do as well in his personal life, and that made her a little sad. But then, hell, she didn’t have much to brag about, either.
Bobbi nudged him with her elbow.
“Yo?”
“You aren’t going to confront Patrick, are you?”
He rocked his head a moment. “I need to talk to both him and Lani Dixon.”
“No.”
“Bobbi, how do we learn anything if you’re going to protect him?”
She just couldn’t believe that Patrick would be involved in a scam such as this.
“Bobbi?”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“And ask the hard questions?”
“Damn it! Yes!”
“I can go with that,” he said.
*
New Orleans was soaked with humidity.
Conrad Sherry stepped down from the big Greyhound bus, stiff and sore. Bus seats weren’t designed for his bulk. He started sweating immediately, standing outside the door, waiting for the driver to find his suitcase in the under floor compartment.
When it finally showed up, he tipped the driver a buck and grabbed the case. Inside the station, he headed for the men’s room and relieved himself. He was not only sweaty, but wrinkled and overdue for a change of clothes. He had driven straight through from San Francisco to Houston, ditched the car, and climbed on the bus where he found he couldn’t sleep because of the cramped conditions. Generally, he felt pretty rotten. And he was hungry as hell.
He washed his hands and checked his reflection in the mirror. The pockmarks on his high cheekbones were still prominent, but two days’ growth of beard had softened the lower cheeks, his chin, and the jawline. The bill of the Oakland Raiders baseball cap shadowed his forehead.
He carried his suitcase outside the station and found a mostly deserted space on the sidewalk to make his call to May.
“I’m at the bus station in New Orleans.”
She gave him an address. “It’s about twenty blocks away from where you’re at. Walk there and see the man. He won’t give you his name, but you’re now Dexter Flynn, and you go by Dex. He’ll get some pictures, and you’ll have a driver’s license, passport, a couple membership cards, and three credit cards. The credit cards won’t work. These are first class documents and will cost you eight thousand dollars.”
“Cost me?”
“You’re the one who fucked up,” she said. “Do you have the cash?”
Reluctantly, he said, “I think so. I’ll have to check.”
“You can hit an ATM on your own de
bit card, but only use it once because the BOLO on you has been upgraded to an All Points Bulletin. They’re looking for you all over the country.”
Shit!
“Then stand by for instructions from the Chair.”
She hung up on him.
Jesus. How could this project turn so bad, so quickly? If May hadn’t sent that guy December. . . .
Well, maybe it would have been worse. December was dead, but he himself wasn’t locked up somewhere, handcuffed by the Malone asshole.
Sherry hoped the Chair gave him another shot at Malone.
*
At Dulles International Airport, Malone claimed the two bags they’d checked through and then the Chevy Malibu he’d reserved. Coming back to the Big City, Bobbi had felt compelled to wear a light blue business suit over a white blouse with a lacy neckline that revealed a hint of nice cleavage. She carried her over-sized purse and her tote bag. Oak was dressed in chinos, an ecru sport shirt, and a tan summer weight sport coat. No tie to enhance the sartorial splendor.
He let Bobbi drive, and she found her way along the access road and onto the 267, the Dulles Toll Road. He dug out his cell and called Detective Ford, who was busy doing something important, but called him back ten minutes later.
“Nice of you to call, Mr. Malone.”
“Thought I’d let you know I was back in town in case there’s a hearing scheduled.”
“No hearing, but I’d appreciate your stopping by to sign an affidavit.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I did talk to a Detective Chu from out your way.”
“Competent woman, I think,” Malone said.
“She seemed a little upset with you.”
“I told you she was competent.”
Ford laughed. “Sounds like someone’s not thrilled with you. Did you pin down any names for me?”
“I’ve made some calls,” Malone said, and he had. Anyone he might have suspected from his activities overseas was still incarcerated. Or dead, in two cases. He told Ford about them.
Solid Oak Page 13
