“Not at all, my dear. I was about to talk with you about the Three-card Monte.”
Striker nodded. “In that grifter’s card game, the dealer wants you to follow the ace and point it out. But it’s shuffled in with two kings. Through sleight of hand work, the ace is shifted, and the dupe loses his money. Back in my early Navy days, I had a friend who made a lot of money that way. Ended up in the brig.”
“Darn.”
“What is this ‘darn,’ Lexicon?” Spyder raised his brows in question.
“I was at the CIA looking over some information for them last week. I used the metaphor of Monty Hall’s three doors game to explain to them what I saw happening at the crime scene.”
“A car and two goats?”
“Yes, sir.”
“This is very similar. They are built on each other.”
“Yes, but your metaphor is much more elegant.”
Spyder offered me a slight bow of the head. “Here is how they played their game. Barnabas purchases some B99 oil silently financed by Karl Davidson. It is mislabeled as ‘cooking oil’”
“Cooking oil is B100, not yet mixed with alcohol,” I said.
“Correct. This oil is shipped straight down the Mississippi. Cheaper than overland. It was loaded onto a Sylanos ship. This ship goes to Central America, where it is off-loaded, driven across the breadth of the land, then reloaded onto a second ship. The second ship takes the product up to The Grove in California.”
“Barnabas takes the mislabeled cooking oil and says tada! B99?”
“Yes. And each gallon provides a dollar of government subsidies.”
“Paid straight from the IRS,” Striker added. “That’s quite the scam.”
“Indeed, quite the scam if it circulated only once in this way. However, they need not purchase another supply of B99 to mislabel as B100. Once they have started this circuit, there is no reason to stop. The same product just continues to move in a circular pattern.”
“Why go through all of that trouble?” I asked. “With the unloading the ship and driving it across. There’s the Panama Canal.”
“Yes, shipping is Sylanos’s specialty. Corrupt shipping more precisely. Paperwork is the reason. Of course, with this seeming volume of production, the EPA and the IRS are stakeholders in preventing fraud. By shipping the oil in this manner, there would be legitimate documentation that masked the falsified records. Faked invoices and production records looked correct when layered with the port and customs paperwork.”
“Ah,” I said. “I can see how Karl would use his Assembly contacts with all of their law enforcement and judicial members playing their games to keep things running smoothly.”
“Indeed.”
“How did Modesty fit into this picture?” Striker asked.
“Modesty was offered to Barnabas Blackburn as his newest bride. She was seventeen at the time. She escaped and went to the FBI for a walk-up appointment. She had run away barefooted and in a nightdress in the middle of the night. Quite the brave young woman. Because of her appearance at the FBI walk-up and her fancifully strange story about B100 and B99—”
“Which few people would have heard of,” I threw in. “I know I’ve never heard of it anyway.”
Spyder nodded his agreement. “They discounted her tale. Word, though, did reach me. I found her here. One presumes she came to Washington D.C. thinking this would be the place to find safety. From the FBI intake interview back in California, I learned she believed that if Barnabas was arrested, she’d be safe. She felt like she knew too much, and they would chase her down. Along the way, she stopped trusting authorities. The FBI and I determined that you would be a means for her to grow in trust and that we could work with her.”
“I didn’t save her.”
Striker tightened his arm around me.
“Saving her was not your role. I am very pleased that you emerged from such a crime scene whole and seemingly healthy?”
“Yes, sir. The doctor says I’m fine.”
“Well then, we can move forward with our next mystery. Striker says that your parents have shown up hovering over your shoulder as ghosts. Shall we discuss this?”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Striker excused himself and went upstairs.
“You frown,” Spyder said.
“Not having Modesty’s information is a loss to stopping the corruption. But I’ll persevere. We will.”
“No, Lexicon. Any other action on your part would expose too much. It can’t be risked.” He offered me a gracious nod. “Thank you for what you’ve done.”
“You’re welcome. Though, I feel like I failed.”
“This is the beast of our work. We see things and pass them on, and we almost never know what comes of it. It is a difficulty that many professions don’t have. An architect can walk into their completed building. A movie producer can watch their final product on the big screen. We must be contented to know that we did our part, but we are merely components of a whole.”
“Isn’t that a metaphor for human existence?”
“In many ways, it is,” he acknowledged. “Now, tell me how you are.”
“I am living the human condition—we suffer, then we die.”
Spyder threw his head back and laughed. “True. May your suffering be a mere inconvenience. May your death be in the distant future.”
I picked up my mug and held it aloft as a toast. “And to you.”
“Now, to your parents.”
“Mom’s birthday was last week. It seemed that the day before…a couple of days before, my parents arrived with some kind of warning for me.”
“I see.”
“It’s possible this has to do with the area of town where I lived and worked with Destin—Modesty. I passed the site of Dad’s crash. I was staying in a garage apartment just on the other side of the road from the bar where I used to watch Hanasal.”
“Tell me one of these memories.” He flicked
