Once they got to their room, Malone ordered two Bloody Mary’s from room service. They had had salads for lunch, and he was starting to get hungry.
“Well, except for the swimsuit, that wasn’t very productive,” Malone said.
“We’ll see. I’ve got the name of the bank.”
Galway fired up her laptop and took it out on the lanai to settle in one of the cushioned wrought iron chairs. After room service arrived, Oak took the two glasses out to join her.
“Okay, the last account is now zeroed out. A draft was issued. The time and date stamp correspond to when she was in Caribbean Regional.”
“So we know where it’s lodged.”
“For the time being, anyway. She moves money around like the Harlem Globetrotters pass a basketball.”
“Anything we can do?”
“I’ll check in a minute. If she’s using an alias, it may be problematic.”
“She thinks she’s intelligent,” Oak said, “and maybe she is. But common sense isn’t her forte. She flew here and checked in as Alicia. She can’t imagine that anyone would track her. I’d bet that’s the only passport she has. She’d use it for ID at the bank.”
“All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
It took forty minutes, and Malone was thinking they ought to break for dinner when Bobbi said, “Got it!”
“You’re a doll.”
“Well, I just hooked her name up with an account number. I have to let my software figure out the password.”
That took another twenty minutes.
“The account has 66.5 million. Hell, the bank fees were $167.000!”
“Sounds about right,” Malone said. “You’ve got all the numbers and passwords we need, right?”
“I do.”
“And we can get in there any time?”
“Yes, but if she moves it. . . .”
Oak said, “She made the effort to fly here and manually pull the drafts to break the transfer trail, right?”
“I think so, yes.”
“So she’ll believe it’s safe as hell. That’s the way she thinks. We’ll let her go on believing that.”
“I hope you’re correct.”
“At least until we get dinner. And maybe a short sail? Try out that new suit?”
*
Hampstead called the Chair after darkness settled over the island. It was so peaceful, a mild salt-laden breeze ruffling the drapes at either side of the door opened to the lanai. Alicia felt totally relaxed. Her day had gone so well, even shopping for new clothes in unfamiliar stores. She always enjoyed being in control, of course, but never before had she realized such complete control of her life. And of other lives.
“Hello, May. How are we doing?”
We. Like before.
“Quite well,” she said. “I tracked down Malone’s account and recovered the assets.”
She still didn’t know why she had lied about Malone’s having stolen the millions. Perhaps because he had so frightened her with that phone call. Perhaps to shift the purpose of clearing the accounts away from her. It didn’t matter.
She heard a long sigh. “All of it?”
“Yes. Sixty-six plus.”
“You’re unbelievable. World class.”
“We should meet,” she said.
‘How soon can you set up new accounts and redistribute the cash?”
‘It’s safe where it is.”
“I’m going to need some cash soon, May.”
“Let me know what you want, and I’ll arrange it.”
He was quiet now, as if he’d just realized that she was going to dole out what she wanted to, when she wanted to do it. Control.
“Sure,” he said. “We need to get together. Rekindle some of that old fire.”
Yes!
“That would be nice, Chair.”
“Where are you?”
“Antigua.”
But only because that was where her bank was located.
“Ah, and you don’t want to come back to the mainland. Look, let’s meet in Charlotte Amalie. You go on over there and check into a hotel under some other name. They won’t ask for a passport ID. It’s going to take me awhile to get down there, but I keep a boat in the marina. Let’s meet on Friday morning. I’ll call you and tell you how to find the boat.”
The day after tomorrow. The U.S. Virgin Islands were a United States territory, and she would have to use her passport to enter the territory. But there were no law enforcement agencies looking for her as far as she knew. Unless Malone had done something, filed a complaint, turned her in to someone. She would check tonight.
“You live on a boat?”
“Only part of the time because I’m so busy with other priorities. You’re not going to find a direct flight, but it’s only 300 miles. Charter a boat.”
“Maybe. What about the Institute?”
“I’m afraid that’s all over.”
“They’ll wonder why I disappeared.”
“None of the Institute’s accounts have been affected, have they?”
“No, of course not.”
“So they’ll hire a new information manager, and life goes on. The new manager can’t find the old accounts, right?”
“No, they won’t find them.”
Alicia had erased the SD-6 file after printing it out.
“But,” she said, “Malone threatened to do something about those foreign audits not agreeing with the Institute’s.”
“Not our problem now, May. If it happens, it’ll take Paxton down. Besides, we may find Malone before that happens.”
She couldn’t find Malone. She didn’t know how the Chair or November would do it.
Chapter Eighteen – Thursday, June 27
Galway had awakened early, slipped quietly out of bed, donned her new swimsuit that she thought might be a little skimpy, and gone down to the pool to swim fifty laps. It was a summer practice she had followed at home in Alexandria and allowed to lapse since meeting up with Oak. Then she stretched out in a chaise lounge with a tall cranberry juice the attendant brought and let the warming sun come up to dry her.
Beat the hell out of sitting in her cubicle poring over conflicting reports out of Israel and the Gaza Strip.
She was smitten. Almost laughed when she thought of the word. This thing with Oak wasn’t going away, not like she’d been afraid it would. She’d been ready to tell herself it was only the heat of the moment, love in wartime, Casablanca, tension, stress. It would ebb, and she would be cautious about commitment.
And in the heat of the moment, she’d quit her job.
And in the heat of the moment, she’d scrambled into bed.
Nothing was resolved yet. They were practically in the same room as the quarry. Some murderous son of a bitch was probably still looking for them. She didn’t know if Patrick was hooked into this scam somehow, but was beginning to think he had to have some link. There was an arrest warrant out for Oak. There was no solid evidence that she could see to link Patrick or Dinmore or Dixon to the secret accounts. Mears maybe, if that four million showed up in some of his personal accounts.
The hell of it was, in the digital age, there were no fingerprints. She and Oak couldn’t tie Lani Dixon or Jim Mears to a particular set of accounts. They seemed to fit into the plot as a matter of information gathering by Lani or stock purchase recommendations by Mears, but that was completely speculative. They could tell someone at the FBI that the Institute was covering up some unsavory activities, but the FBI wouldn’t have probable cause to barge in on the Institute. It was frustrating as hell.
Seemed like the pot should boil over soon.
And yet.
And yet, Malone took time out to go sailing. They’d stayed out until almost dark yesterday. The man didn’t get rattled about much.
Bobbi felt pretty good about herself and about Oak. She was smiling when she fell asleep.
*
Malone found her out by the pool. She looked damned good on the chaise loung
e sound asleep with a smile on her face and her auburn hair spread out on the small pillow. He’d have to convince her to let it grow out some. The suit she’d bought arced high on the side of her hips and dipped between her full breasts. It was an off-white in color setting off the tan she’d begun to accumulate.
He hated to wake her, but he did. Squatting down next to her, he gently shook her wrist and she opened one eye.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“Sorry to disturb you.”
“I’ve figured out something,” she said.
“Want to share it?”
“Yes. I love you.”
Well, make my day, Eastwood. My year. My life.
“I am so happy to hear that, Bobbi. I love you.”
“We’ll make this work.”
“We will.”
“Do we have to watch Alicia shop today?” she asked.
“There’s a bit of a problem there.”
She sat up. “Such as?”
“Alicia seems to be gone”
“What?”
“I went by her room first thing. They were cleaning it. So I called the desk and asked to be connected to her room. I was told she had already checked out.”
“Do we know when?”
“Early is all I know. It’s barely eight o’clock now.”
Bobbi stood up, and the two of them returned to the room. She looked awfully good this morning, but he managed to control himself while she opened up her laptop and started checking airline reservations systems. He pulled a chair close to her and watched the screen.
Half an hour later, she told him, “She doesn’t have a reservation under her name for any of the commercial airlines serving Antigua. None of the large hotels on the island show her as a guest. I suppose there’s a fair number of small hotels and motels not in the system.”
“We could probably get her back fairly quickly if we raided her account.”
“And move the money where, Oak?”
“My Cayman account would work. Temporarily,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be saddled with all of that cash. Hell, I couldn’t spend it all in this lifetime.”
“Not unless you had my help.” She grinned at him.
He thought about it for a few minutes. “My gut tells me she’s not going back to the States, not with the funds she got. I still think she’s going to hook up with someone that we want to meet. And that’s going to be somewhere local. Otherwise, she’d have booked a flight to Europe, South America, Africa, who knows.”
“That could be some of the other islands, you think?”
“Best guess, yeah. She could charter a boat, find a short hop airplane.”
Bobbi pulled up lists on the screen, and the two of them started making phone calls.
Malone found it on his fifth call.
“Yes, we’ve missed contact with a friend in Antigua, and I wonder if you contracted a charter with Ms. Alicia Hampstead . . . you did . . . to where, please . . . all right, I need the same deal.”
He dug out his credit card, gave all the info to the woman on the other end, and then closed his cell phone.
Bobbi had stopped her calling to watch him.
“She chartered a seaplane out of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and she’s headed for Charlotte Amalie. We’ll have a plane here in about three hours.”
“How big are these planes?”
“I don’t know. Big enough to get us there.”
“Little airplanes make me nervous,” she said.
“It’s okay. They can land on the ocean.”
While Bobbi showered, Malone started packing. Since they weren’t traveling by regularly scheduled airline, he thought he’d try to get his Glock through. He ejected the magazine and packed it and the pistol in a pair of jeans, then into the case. Checking the charge on his cell phone, he thought of a call he should make.
It took a few minutes to track the man down.
“This is Detective Aaron Ford.”
“Good morning. Malone here.”
“Well, well. And where are you, Mr. Malone?”
“Like I told you earlier, negotiating a contract.”
“In Washington?”
“Oh, no. We’re in the Caribbean.”
“I see. Detective Amber Chu checked your house, and Detective Milner checked Ms. Galway’s condo. Couldn’t find either of you. Couldn’t find anywhere that you’d left the country, either.”
“On some cases, Detective, one has to be stealthy.”
“Where in the Caribbean?”
“Wouldn’t matter because we’re about to move on, but I don’t know where yet. Reason I called, I was thinking about Conrad Sherry. I think Detective Milner probably mentioned our suspicions to you when you talked to him.”
Ford thought about that, and then said, “Yeah, he did. Alexandria PD got Sherry’s fingerprints from the military and matched a couple to the front door of the condo as well as to the light bulb for the outside fixture.”
“That’s what we were thinking,” Malone said.
The bathroom door opened and Bobbi stood there naked, drying herself with a fluffy towel. Gave him a quizzical smile. He liked it all.
He continued, using Ford’s name for Bobbi’s benefit. “Detective Ford, did you compare prints from Dixon’s front door to Sherry? You see, Sherry is a former high school lineman, and he’s used to barging straight ahead. He did that at Galway’s place. At my house, he tried for the back door. I still picture him from the surveillance video. A real hulk.”
Again, the silence. “The ME fixed the time of death at three o’clock, give or take a couple hours. No reason you couldn’t have gone back to her house.”
“That’s why you issued the arrest warrant?”
“You know about that? You’re now a fugitive, also.”
“I don’t feel like one, Detective. You’re working from a pretty slim theory. Please check the front door fingerprints. I’ll talk to you later.” He clicked off.
“Was that wise?” Bobbi asked. “He probably captured your cell number.”
“That’s okay. It’s a big Caribbean. My, you’re gorgeous.”
She smiled. “We’re supposed to be catching an airplane.”
“That’s my fault entirely.”
They finished packing and Oak towed the two cases down to the lobby. Bobbi had reserved the room on his Williamson credit card, but he paid cash checking out. When they reached VC Bird International Airport, he relinquished the rental Chevy, and they walked down to the general aviation section. They had only a half hour wait before Malone saw the seaplane coming in. It landed smoothly on the single runway of the airport and turned off onto the tarmac. The fuselage stood tall over the floats which had landing wheels extended.
“No,” Bobbi said. “That’s a tiny airplane.”
“Nonsense, love. It’s a Cessna 208 Caravan. Seats ten.”
“It’s only got one engine.”
“That’s all it needs. They weren’t going to send a bigger plane for only two passengers.”
“How about one passenger?”
“You hadn’t sailed before, and you liked that.”
The immigration guy barely looked at their passports and checked their names off, and then they met the pilot who loaded the bags on board. “We’re looking at about an hour and a half,” the pilot said.
“Works for us,” Malone said.
The cabin was a bit more spartan than the commercial airliners Bobbi was accustomed to flying. She took a seat midway in the cabin, and Malone sat next to her. He held her hand through the takeoff and the climb to cruising altitude. The vibration was noticeable and the engine roar wasn’t exactly a purr, but he felt the tension leave her hand after ten minutes. She started looking out the window. Not much to see but blue. A few high bright white cumulous clouds in the distance.
She finally looked over at him. “Okay.”
“Adventure everywhere we go, love.”
The landing was more exciting since it was on water. It
was at the west end of Long Bay, and the airplane settled its floats smoothly on the mostly still waters of the harbor. A few little bounces that made Bobbi clench his fingers. Sea spray flashed past the windows. Bobbi’s hand relaxed when the plane settled into a slow taxi toward the ramp. The engine gunned briefly as they came out of the water and rolled to the terminal.
An officer from Border Protection was there to check their passports, and then they were free to join about eight thousand people from the three cruise ships in port. The streets were jammed with colorful cruise wear. The sun was bright, and the air was balmy.
Fortunately, they had only a three block walk along Veterans Drive to the Windward Passage Hotel where Malone had made reservations. The grand old hotel overlooked the harbor as well as the thousands of tourists. And fortunately, the tourists would go back to their accommodations aboard the cruise ships in the evening. Cruise ships tended to dock or moor at a destination during the night so as to turn their passengers loose for the day. They departed for the next stop on the itinerary in the evenings.
“This is, I think, the widest street in the whole city. For the rest, if there were no narrow streets, there wouldn’t be any streets at all.”
“My God, Oak. Look at all the people! I’ve been to Nassau, but this is unbelievable.”
The economy was in the tank, but these people had a few bucks and they were determined to spend it on the trinkets, souvenirs, and especially, the jewelry to be found in hundreds of little shops. For their part, the business owners were determined to take it. It was a comfortable compromise.
“When the ships are in port, a lot of people have to fit into a relatively small place.”
“We’ll never find Alicia.”
That could be a problem.
“I have faith,” is what he said.
With a few extra bills, they were granted a room with a harbor view, but when they tried it, they found that looking down on the populace wasn’t going to tell them much. So they unpacked and Malone switched to a loose shirt that would hide the Glock stuck in his waistband at the back. Then they went back down and out into the sun.
“Alicia still doesn’t know us, so we should be good.”
“Let’s buy some sunglasses anyway.”
They did.
And then they walked, staying on the harbor edge of Veterans Drive clear around the harbor to the east and then south. The street intersected Long Bay Road as they passed Blackbeard’s Castle Resort. A large marina took up space here at the eastern end of Long Bay. Bobbi was forced to pause while Oak surveyed the watercraft. There were beautiful power yachts, 40 feet, 60 feet, and larger, millions invested. Malone was more interested in the sailboats, and there was a wide variety in slips at the piers and moored out in the bay. Boy, what one could do with sixty-six million.
Solid Oak Page 22
