Stolen Prey

Not worth it, he thought.

He looked down at Kline, now sleeping deeply, said, “Huh,” and headed for the door.

ICE had left Polaris National after she and the security people cleaned the booby traps out of the computer system, and she’d gone back to Sunnie to see if she could find the incoming system.

In the meantime, the DEA agents were trying to track money that, in earlier months and years, had been shipped out of the Bois Brule account … and to find out how it got to Bois Brule.

Not much for Lucas to do but let them work. Still, he was right there, at the hospital, two blocks away…

Lucas walked over to the bank, identified himself to the guard, and got him to call O’Brien in the systems center. Bone actually came to collect him.

“Working late, for a Sunday,” Lucas said, as they went through the big glass doors to the elevator.

“I’m having trouble getting across how serious this is,” Bone said. “We’ll talk about it sometime-but I have to tell you, it’s a hell of a relief to hear that it’s probably an inside job.”

“ICE told you that?”

“Everybody tells me that. It’s somebody in the company, or it’s this guy Kline,” Bone said. “If it were somebody in Russia, or China, which would suggest that we had a major undetected system vulnerability, I’d be sweating bullets.”

“Kline just got jumped by the Mexicans.”

“What!” Bone almost missed a step, caught himself and turned. “Is he dead?”

“No, he managed to get out of it. But he got shot.” He told the story as they went through the door at the bottom of the stairs and started down the hall to Systems.

“How’d they find out about him?” Bone asked.

“Don’t know. ICE said a bunch of people in Systems had been talking about Kline. It’s probably all over the bank by now, and it’s possible that somebody here is monitoring things for this Mexican gang.”

“Ah, Jesus. But you don’t know that.”

“No.”

O’Brien and his accountants were busy with two bank computer-security experts. When O’Brien saw Lucas come in, he broke away and said, “This Bois Brule account is a ghost. The money comes in, but we can’t backtrack it. From here, the money goes out to the Islands, the Caymans, where we’re temporarily bogged down. We won’t get any information from them before tomorrow morning at the earliest.”

Bone said, “We gotta talk,” and pointed them to a cluster of furniture at the end of the room, and they went over and sat down.

Lucas: “What’s up?”

Bone said, “We’ve got a management problem. I don’t care so much about the dope money coming in, or going out, because I understand it now: we were scammed about the source of the money, but all of our systems stayed intact and worked as they’re supposed to. We might figure out some way to do a statistical study of our accounts, to isolate odd behavior, but that’s off in the future. I’m more worried about these hackers-if they attacked one account, they could attack more. We don’t even know for sure that they haven’t. I really need to get them caught.”

“We’re working on it,” Lucas said.

“But not so hard. What you’re really interested in are these killers,” Bone said. “In the meantime, the DEA is up to its ass in killers, and they don’t care that much about individual gangbangers who’ll be dead in a year, anyway. What they want to do is break into the gang’s banks. So they want the banks, you want the killers, and I need to stop the hackers. But I’ll tell you, Lucas, if the BCA catches these killers, you personally won’t have much to do with it. Somebody will see them, somebody will rat them out. It’ll be luck or routine, not brains.”

“Maybe,” Lucas agreed.

“I’ll make it even simpler,” Bone said. “You’ve got three crimes here. First, you’ve got the dopers laundering their money. The DEA’s covering that. Second, you’ve got the killers murdering people. Shaffer’s got that. Third, you’ve got the thieves who took the money out of the bank. Nobody’s interested. But that’s the most important one-I can’t seem to make that sink in. Somebody has to cover it-I mean, like you.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Lucas asked.

“Let the other cops, this Shaffer guy, let them do the routine work,” Bone said. “Let the DEA do the accountancy, you don’t know anything about that anyway. You should be going after the thieves, not the gangbangers.”

“I don’t know any more about them than I do about the shooters,” Lucas said.

Bone disagreed. “Sure you do. They’re thieves. They had to have some access inside the bank, so you do whatever it is you do when you’re looking for any thieves. Look for opportunity, motive, all that shit you see on TV. I can tell you a few things about them-I can tell you what they’re doing right now, for one thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Not the small details, but I can probably get close even to that. At some point, after running through five or six banks, the Caymans, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Panama … at some point, they have to get cash or an equivalent. Gold, silver, diamonds, rare stamps or coins. Probably not silver, come to think of it, because it’d be too big to move. But they’re going to have to get something to break the paper trail, and it’ll have some intrinsic value. Can’t be unique-can’t buy a Picasso, because that would have its own kind of trail. So it’s probably gold, in some form. Coins, ingots, something. Or maybe diamonds, if the paper trail ends in Amsterdam or Tel Aviv. And…”

“And?”

“And they’re buying it right now,” Bone said. “Whatever it is. They know you’re coming after them, they know the Mexicans are out there. They’re moving as fast as they can. But you can’t buy that much coin that fast without somebody noticing. So find those people. Find the people who are selling. You’re looking for somebody, maybe several somebodies, who are selling a lot of gold or diamonds or stamps or coins. You’ve got no time-no time. Once they finish buying whatever it is, they’ll bury it and go back to their day jobs. Nothing’ll move. Then, in a year or two, they’ll find a way to bring the money back in, probably in some other city or some other country, and we’ll never know. And I won’t know whether they can come back to the bank for another round.”

Lucas and O’Brien were sitting back, taking it in. When Bone finished, O’Brien turned to Lucas and said, “He’s right. Finding those gangbangers gonna be mostly a matter of luck, if they haven’t already taken off. As far as we know, they’re driving through Kansas City right now. If they’re still here, you won’t get them … unless….”

He paused, and Lucas prompted him, “Unless…”

“Unless you find a way to suck them in,” O’Brien said. “They went after Kline. If you’d been there, you could have trapped them. If you could get them to come after somebody, if you were ready for that…”

Lucas thought, Hell, if I’d left Shrake and Jenkins on Kline …

Bone said, “Aw, c’mon. He’s not gonna suck them in. They’re not reacting to Lucas-they’re doing what they’re told.”

Lucas nodded. “Probably.”

“So work on the thieves,” Bone said. He was leaning toward Lucas, intent with the sales pitch. “It’s really urgent. I’ll give you every scrap of information we come up with at the bank, I’ll make all of our people available to you, anything you want. Anything. If the BCA needs more budget for overtime, I’ll work that out, make a donation to the state. I need these thieves.”

Lucas said, “I’d really like to get the shooters. But you might be right.”

“If you get them, these fuckin’ thieves, the next time we play basketball-I’ll throw the game to you,” Bone said.

“You’ll be a very old man before that could happen,” Lucas said. But he slapped Bone on the knee and said, “Let me think about it.”

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