commissioner at the Colombian consulate. I met her at a business function and we chatted. She flirted with me in a nice, shy kind of way. I asked her if she was gay. She is. So I talked about you and told her she should contact you. I know how private you are and I’m sorry if you think I was being indiscreet, but Ava, this is a wonderful young woman. She’s beautiful, tall, graceful, and smart. Don’t be surprised if she contacts you. And don’t worry, I’ll take care of Derek. Love, Mimi
Ava sighed. The last thing she needed was for her personal life to get in the way of business. She lay on the bed and tried to nap, but her mind was racing. Uncle’s information about Jackie Leung had caught her off guard, and now as she digested it she felt surprise and a touch of alarm. She had been threatened before by people she had rousted, but it had always amounted to nothing. She wondered if this could be different.
Leung’s case had been a nothing job, a simple matter of the active partner in a business trying to move the company’s assets before the passive partner, the investor, caught on. She had cornered Leung in Ho Chi Minh and forced him to give everything back. That had meant keeping him locked in a hotel room for most of a day and dunking his head in the toilet every hour or so. She was new at the game then, less sure of herself and less sure about what tactics would work. When he finally capitulated, they drove in his car to the bank to make the money transfer. Just outside the bank he said he needed to get some papers from the trunk, and then he charged at her with a crowbar.
Ava had broken his arm and his nose. She took him to a hospital to get patched up and then drove back to the bank to conclude the business. When they returned to his car, she locked him in the trunk. She had no idea how long it took for someone to find him.
She thought she had handled Leung with only as much force as was needed. If he hadn’t attacked her he wouldn’t have been hurt at all, except for his ego and his wallet. Just as she was wondering what part of the ordeal had made him angry enough to pay people to come after her, her phone rang.
“This is an interesting account,” Johnny said.
She noticed he was using his cellphone. “What did you find?”
“It looks like it was used as a transit account — money in and then, just as quickly, money out.”
“Can you give me the amounts and dates?”
“Do you have a notepad? There’s quite a bit of detail here.”
“In front of me.”
“I’ll give you the deposits first.”
“Go ahead.”
There were fifteen deposits, all of them less than $5 million, just as Louis Marx had described. The dates were random. In one week three deposits had been made and there was a gap of close to three weeks between two others. The very first deposit was for $4 million, Ava saw. Marx had said that Cousins fronted $2 million. That meant that the $2 million Cousins was supposed to have put in the account was never deposited. As Johnny gave her the deposit amounts, Ava kept a running tally. They totalled $58 million, a bit more than Chang had said.
“What a strange pattern,” Ava said.
“The withdrawals are even weirder,” Johnny said.
“How so?”
“The day after each of these cheques was cleared, a wire was sent to Costa Rica for almost that exact same amount.”
“Costa Rica? That’s hardly an offshore haven.”
“I know, and what’s stranger still is that the money was sent to six different banks and to fifteen different individuals. Crazy, huh?”
“Give me the details,” she said.
As she copied the names and the amounts withdrawn, a pattern began to emerge. “Johnny, those wires weren’t the only withdrawals, right?”
“No. Every time a wire was sent, money was transferred on the same day to another Toronto Commonwealth account.”
“Jim Cousins’ personal account?”
“Yep.”
“And if I’m doing my numbers correctly, it looks like it was for three percent of every deposit.”
“More like three and a half.”
“A commission?”
“Why not?”
“For laundering money?”
“That’s a logical conclusion.”
“So, Johnny, why didn’t alarms go off at the bank?”
“Read the list I just gave you. Six banks. Fifteen people. Costa Rica. How does that fit any money-laundering profile you’ve ever encountered?”
She read the names Johnny had given her. Wilma Castro Hernandez. Maria Rodriguez. Jose Villanueva. And so on. “It doesn’t.”
“Exactly. So the bank wouldn’t have picked up on anything.”
“So we’re either dealing with a very sophisticated money-laundering operation or something entirely different. How about Cousins’ account?”
“Closed about two weeks ago.”
“How long was it open?”
“About six months.”
“Was there ever two million in it?”
“Not until these transfers started, and it didn’t get to two million until they came to an end. And then, of course, the account was closed and the money was moved out.”
“Where did Cousins send it?”
“Jersey.”
“New Jersey?”
“You should be so lucky. Jersey in the Channel Islands. Although…”
“Did you find something?” she urged.
“There are some attachments to the Jersey wire transfer file. Give me a minute.”
Please be good to me, she thought.
“If this guy Cousins is trying to hide money he must be an amateur,” Johnny said when he came back on the line. “Two days after his money went to Jersey he must have tried to do something with the account there, because we got a request from the bank to reconfirm the account holder’s status with us.”
“And?”
“They provided us with a copy of his passport and, believe it or not, his Kelowna address and a forwarding address in the U.S.”
“I love you, Johnny Yan,” she said.
“And so you should. This is going to cost you a dinner,” he said, and then gave her Cousins’ San Francisco address.
Ava hung up, hardly believing her luck.
She went online and found the building, an apartment/hotel with units available for rent by the week and month. She checked the time. It was mid-morning on the U.S. west coast. She dialled the number on the website. A pleasant, young-sounding woman confirmed that there were vacant apartments. Ava gave the woman her name and asked if she could stop by to see them the following day. That wouldn’t be a problem, she was told.
“And by the way,” Ava said, “I have a work colleague named Jim Cousins who said he was moving into the building. Is he in residence yet?”
“He is, indeed,” the woman said.
Ava emailed her travel agent and asked her to book a seat on the first flight out of Manila to San Francisco. She would call Uncle in the morning. She just wasn’t sure how much she was going to tell him.
