Turicek opened the door and scooped up the packages.
The biggest of the boxes looked like it might contain books, but was too light-it was a cube eighteen inches or so on each side, and weighed 9.6 pounds, according to the label. Everybody knew that gold was heavy, so they wanted boxes that felt light. Turicek took a box cutter out of his pocket and slashed the box open. Inside were wads of newspaper-the
He shook the coins out of one of the taped tubes onto the desktop. Twenty coins in each roll, each an ounce of gold, one hundred twenty coins in all. That morning, each coin was worth about sixteen hundred dollars. Together, they were worth a little less than $200,000, give or take.
He looked at the coins for a moment, thinking how useless and ridiculous gold was, except for the two things it did. The first was to store value, the second was to look good around the necks of rich women. In some places, as in the Middle East and India, both of those things. He picked up one of the coins, carried it to the window, and looked at it in a pencil-thin beam of light. The gold shimmered, and the eagle looked alive. He shook his head and began opening the other packages.
In the course of the morning, the rest of the packages showed up in a second delivery. Twelve in all, with a hundred to a hundred and fifty coins in each.
All together, by the end of the morning, he had two and a half million dollars in gold in the car, repacked into the three smallest of the delivery boxes-almost a hundred pounds in all.
Not enough: it was coming in too slowly. If the cops had gotten to Polaris, they’d eventually track the cash into the buying accounts. But they’d have a way to go before they could do that-a lot of wire transfers in and out of Cayman Island banks, and then back to the U.S. That would take some time. Turicek was sure they had another two days, but after that…
Turicek was hypersensitive about surveillance, and so when he called Albitis, he called her on a disposable phone. She answered on the same kind of phone, standing outside a gold shop in Duarte, California.
She said, “Yes?” and Turicek asked, “How’s it going?”
“Fast, but risky. I committed fifty thousand to Clark Lewis at Venice City and he tried to bullshit me a little. He’s getting curious. I put him off by saying my folks in Syria were moving money,” she said.
“I like that. I like the Syria story,” Turicek said.
“So do I. Lots of people trying to get their money out of Syria,” Albitis said. “Did you get today’s deliveries?”
“Yeah, the morning boxes are all here. We’re at what, nineteen?”
“A little more than that,” Albitis said. “We’ll be close to the end. It’ll take another three days to get the last of it. As soon as I’ve arranged the Vegas wires, I’m flying to New York, and I should put the rest of the money down in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Then I’m back to Vegas for the pickup and ship, and then back to New York for the pickup there. How are we doing on time? Have you heard anything?”
“Yeah, and it’s not good. The cops are at Polaris,” Turicek said. “You’ve got to hurry.”
“I’m hurrying-I’m hurrying,” she said. “We’re doing it way too fast as it is. I’m getting scared. You gotta tell me if anything happens. I don’t want to ditch three million, but I’ll do it if it means we don’t get busted.”
“Absolutely. I will tell you the instant I hear,” Turicek said.
“And, Ivan-don’t run on me. I know you’re thinking about it, but honest to God, if you dump me, I’ll tell the fuckin’ Vory that you’ve got twenty million in gold and no protection. They’ll cut you up like fish bait.”
“I’m not running-”
“But you’ve thought about it,” Albitis said.
“I thought about it, but I’m not running,” Turicek admitted. “I’ve done the numbers, and I wouldn’t make it.”
“That’s right: you wouldn’t,” Albitis said. “So keep talking to me. Call me every hour.”
“I’ll call you … but I’ll tell you, you’d be less frightened if you could see the gold we’ve got here, all together,” Turicek said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Sixteen hundred dollars for every single coin, and we’ve got a river of them. It’s like a pile of oyster shells.”
“Sixteen-twelve an hour ago,” Albitis said. “And going nowhere but up. I’m moving as fast as I can.”
“Keep moving,” Turicek said. “Keep it coming.”
Lucas sat outside the Nunez house, watching Morris direct traffic, until the medical examiner’s people moved Rivera’s body out. Sandy called to say that the Brownsville cops had come through, had jacked up the answering service for the ReCap guy. Nunez was supposedly in Atlanta, Georgia, buying old tires, but nobody answered his cell phone.
If he was a bad guy, Lucas thought, looking at his watch as he talked to Sandy, and if the shooters had called home, and if Nunez had been tipped … He could already be in the air, on the way to Mexico.
“See if you can get a license tag for him. Call Atlanta, see if they can find him.”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” she said. He could hear her typing on her keyboard. “Atlanta’s got … uh, better’n five million people in the metro area.”
“So we need to get lucky,” Lucas said.
He had little faith in luck.
As Rivera’s body was wheeled out of the house, strapped to a gurney, inside a black plastic body bag, the crime-scene boss walked over to say to Lucas and Morris, “We got something in the basement.”
“Like what?” Morris asked.
“We think it’s blood.”
They followed him inside and down the stairs into what amounted to a hollow concrete cube with gray- painted walls. A furnace and water heater stood in one corner, with a stack of furnace filters and a circle of dusty hoses. The basement was almost too clean, particularly the floor. “Bernie noticed how clean the floor was, so we started looking around. We think we’ve got blood here.” He pointed at a dark speck on one of the walls. “And over here, on the water heater. You can see the color of it against the white.”
Lucas squatted to look at the water heater. The spatters, if that’s what they were, were small: smaller than a black ant, close to the size and color of a flea.
“Looks like blood to me,” Lucas said. He looked at the opposite wall, which was eight or ten feet away. “If blood was getting spattered that far … I bet it was Pruess. I bet they brought him down here and went to work on him.”
“We oughta know, ninety percent, in an hour or so,” the crime-scene boss said.
“It was him,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, I’d like to get my hands on those little fuckers.”
“We know that they’re little?”
“That’s what I was told,” Lucas said. “Three of them. Two now.”
“At least he got one,” Morris said.
Lucas nodded but said, “One-for-one isn’t the kind of ratio we want. We’ve really got to be careful with these guys.”
Back upstairs, he looked at the entryway, where Rivera had gone down, and shook his head. Something was nagging at him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it….
He was still trying to figure it out when Bone, the banker, called: “This ICE you sent over, she thinks she’s found a back door into our computer system, but she’s afraid it’s booby-trapped.”
“I’ll be there,” Lucas said.
He’d told Morris about the DEA accountants and the possibility of pulling information out of the bank computers, and Morris had asked to be kept current: “But I don’t know shit about computers. I’ll leave it to you guys.”
So Lucas told him he was leaving, and why, and drove across town, in heavy afternoon traffic, and into Minneapolis’s loop. He found a space in the bank’s parking structure and took the elevator to the systems center. A guard took his ID, made a call, and let him in.
ICE was sitting on an office chair in one corner, with six regular employees scattered around the room,
