account, twenty million dollars, which I’ll only believe when I see it.”
“You’ll see it,” Turicek said.
“Okay. When we get it, we have to move it. Move it fast. We send it through a line of accounts we’ve set up in advance. Onshore banks, offshore banks, Lebanese banks. From there, we send it to Wells Fargo, to some made-up account. Syrian Investments Limited, International Marketing of Lebanon. The problem is, the FBI can walk right down that chain. The longer we make the chain, the longer it will take them to do it, but they can do it.”
“If we make the chain too long, wouldn’t it take us a long time to get the money to Wells Fargo?” Kline had asked.
Albitis poked a finger at him. “Don’t interrupt-but you are correct. So we send the money to Florida, then jump to the Caymans, then to Lebanon, then back to the U.S., to the fake account. With the right banks, we can do that in four days, and it will take the FBI two weeks to walk down it. But, in the end, we can’t take the money as a check, because we still have to cash it, and nobody is going to cash a check for twenty million dollars. Nobody. Or even twenty checks for a million each. They’re going to want to see all kinds of ID and background details and fingerprints. They’ll take pictures, they’ll record serial numbers, they’ll inform the feds. There just isn’t a convenient way to get twenty million dollars in cash.”
“What difference does gold make?” Sanderson asked.
“Okay. Gold. All kinds of people buy it and move it around for their own reasons, a lot of them legitimate. Like making gold jewelry. Women in India keep their wealth hanging around their necks and wrists. People in the United States put it in their basement because they think the end of the world is coming. People in Russia put it in their basement because the end of the world is already here. The thing about gold coins is, they can’t be tracked. There’s no real paper trail, any more than there is for candy bars. Gold coins have no serial numbers. And, there are gold dealers all over the United States, and everyplace else. If you have the money, they give you the gold. They’re dealers, not banks. When we get the gold, we’ve broken the chain.”
“Gonna be a lot of gold,” Kline said.
Albitis nodded, and her eyes turned up as she ran the numbers. “Mmm … three hundred and sixty kilos of gold, about eight hundred of your pounds, which, right now, is worth a little less than sixty thousand dollars a kilo.”
“But then we’ve got to sell the gold,” Sanderson said. “And we’re stuck with dollars again.”
Albitis shook her head. “No. We’ve got the gold, and our trail goes cold. We’re free of the banking system, and the paperwork. Then we start businesses in, say, Nigeria, or maybe Brazil-”
“I don’t want to go to Nigeria,” Kline said.
“You won’t have to,” Albitis said. “I know the man who’ll set it up. You’ll make up a job with a fancy name, with fancy letterhead paper and business cards-Kline Petroleum Futures, Kline Oil Mobilities. Whatever. You’ll set up a bank account and then start selling the gold through a merchant in Lagos, who will feed dollars into your business account in return for your gold coins, at a slight discount of, say, five percent.”
“So the merchant gets a mil,” Turicek said.
“Correct. We take out twenty million, and nineteen million shows up in our bank accounts, which have no connection whatever to the accounts used to take the original money.”
“But we have to live in Nigeria?” Kline asked. He was stuck on the idea.
“No. No. Listen to me. You can live anywhere you want. Look: we won’t even have to get the gold to Lagos. My guy has contacts here in the U.S. We drop the coins with them, the dollars pop up in the Lagos account.”
“Why couldn’t we do that with cash?” Sanderson asked.
Albitis looked at her as though she were retarded. “We could, if we had the cash. But I keep telling you, it’s
“Okay,” Sanderson said. It’d take a while. “I guess.”
“Anyway, when we’ve moved the gold, you hire some legitimate accountants to repatriate your money,” Albitis said. “In the end, you have several million apparently legitimate dollars in your bank account. You pay whatever taxes you need to pay. The gold disappears into the souks. Nobody ever sees it again, except in rings and bracelets and so on.”
“What soup?” Sanderson asked.
“Soup?” Albitis frowned.
“You said the gold would disappear into the soup.”
“Souk,” Albitis said. “Souk. A market.” She looked at Turicek. “What kind of people are these two? Have they ever been out of Minneapolis?”
Turicek nodded at Kline and said, “Sleepy,” and then at Sanderson and said, “Dopey,” and tapped his own chest. “Grumpy.”
“And I’m Greedy,” Albitis said. “Okay. Now all we need is Snow White.”
Albitis and Turicek were solid with the deal. Sanderson and Kline were a little shaky. Kline had been somewhat satisfied by simply knowing that he
Now, with that family dead out in Wayzata, things looked a little bleaker. Before, Sanderson had mostly thought of ways they could do it; now she began to think of ways they could get caught. Turicek and Albitis could disappear into the former Soviet Union and probably be safe enough. But where would she go? Duluth?
Kline was another problem, she thought. He was erratic, and it was hard to tell what he might do, if the cops came around to talk to him. He had a weird sense of humor, a grotesque sense of humor. If he started trying to play games with the cops … And who knew, maybe he’d find prison
She had to think about all of that.
Lucas copied David Rivera’s LCN files and photos to his computer, then gave the thumb drive to Shaffer to read. Shaffer said he’d put the six LCN mug shots on television that night and ask people to keep an eye out. When Lucas was done with that, he made a few more calls on the case, learned nothing useful, then went home early and collected Letty and a couple of pistols.
Lucas was an excellent shot. Part of that came from being a good athlete, with the kind of long-term training in hockey and basketball that allowed him to quickly grasp the essentials of accurate rifle and pistol work. Just as, in basketball, there had to be an instant of focus before the ball was released, a focus that excluded almost everything but the basket itself, good shooting required that same moment of mental exclusion, that moment when you saw nothing but the target. The athletic background also taught him that patience was needed to get good in any difficult endeavor. He developed the patience.
He wasn’t particularly fond of guns, but he was effective, and he believed that since guns were one of the ubiquitous tools of violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it behooved one to know how to use them.
Weather disagreed; Letty did not.
Letty, in her previous life, had been severely neglected. She’d grown up in an isolated house, far out in the countryside in northwestern Minnesota. She had, at times, literally been required to hunt for her dinner. She also had been a fur trapper, a preteen wandering in rubber boots and a Goodwill parka around the muskrat swamps of northwest Minnesota, trying to make a buck. Then her mother was murdered, and she met Lucas, who eventually adopted her; in the course of that case, Letty had shot a cop. On two different occasions-the same crooked cop. She had no regrets or second thoughts whatsoever.
On this afternoon, they got Lucas’s Colt.45 Gold Cup and Beretta 92F, and drove up to the St. Paul police pistol range in Maplewood, where a half dozen guys were going through annual testing. Lucas had a standing arrangement with the department to use the range, and had gotten a quiet okay to bring Letty along.
On the way up, they talked about her school, and about the Wayzata case, and Lucas gave her the details that he had.
