The sectary said something in German that Taylor didn’t recognize, but that was said in a ‘May I help you’ kind of tone. Whitaker started to step up to her, probably to see if she spoke English when she was surprised. Taylor pointed at a photo on the wall showing the woman they’d seen at the cafe shaking hands at some kind of event and then walked straight to the door into the inner office, reaching for the doorknob.
The sectary clearly didn’t appreciate that. Taylor assumed she was saying something like ‘you can’t go in there’ or the like, her voice agitated. Taylor ignored her and pushed the door open. Inside, the office wasn’t much larger than the reception area.
At the desk sat the woman from the cafe. She looked up as Taylor, followed by the secretary and Whitaker, filed into her office. The secretary was going a mile a minute, alternating between yelling at Taylor and talking to her boss, probably explaining the situation.
“Do you speak English?”
“Yes,” the woman said, holding up a hand to quiet her secretary. “What’s this about?”
“It’s about that phone call you just took from Kriminalhauptkommissar Graf. It’s probably best if you ask your assistant to step outside and let us talk. I’m sure you’d agree we don’t want to have a big hoopla over your call.”
“I’m not sure what ‘hoopla’ means, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The secretary had stopped yelling but was still standing in the door, probably waiting on the okay from her boss to call the police.
“I think you do. He’s the man that calls you on the disposable cell phone you have, and then calls you again five minutes later when you’re down at the cafe. Considering you just took such a call, I’m pretty sure you remember.”
She said something to her secretary, who looked annoyed and closed the door softly. Taylor hadn’t heard the word for police, one of the few German words he knew which, along with the secretary's reaction, probably meant the cops weren’t on their way.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want information on what you’ve been doing for Herr Graf. I know you’ve been handling payments from the trust to him and distributing it to both Graf and his agents. I want to know all the payments made in the past three months and any records of who you paid money out to.”
“All of my records are confidential.”
“These aren’t legal payments. We know what the Trust was paying Graf to do, and we know who Graf had you pay money out to. You’re the middle woman in a criminal enterprise that includes multiple murders. We aren’t the police, and if you help us, we won’t feel the need to include your name in the information we hand over to them.”
Whitaker looked over at Taylor, surprised. She’d controlled the look, but he knew her well enough to know what she was thinking. While he believed her when she said she needed to reevaluate how she thought about doing everything by the book, he knew that offering to look the other way on one member of a criminal conspiracy was alarming to her.
For Taylor, he didn’t care. This woman was just a facilitator and probably only did it out of some kind of connection to Graf himself. She didn’t operate in a way that would suggest she regularly took part in criminal enterprises. Despite what he had just said, he still stood by his words to Whitaker earlier. This wasn’t a middle woman in a string of orders to murder people. This was a functionary, making money moved from one place to another. Sure, it was illegal, but Taylor had no problem looking the other way if it got him what he needed.
When she paused, looking at the door leading out to the reception area, Taylor said, “I want you to understand that so far, we are doing this the nice way. One way or another, though, we’re going to find out what we need to know.”
To make his point, Taylor pulled the gun he had hidden under his shirt, holding it at his side. He knew Whitaker didn’t like it when Taylor pushed the envelope, questioning criminals, but he didn’t feel bad about threatening the woman. She may not be like some of the criminals he’d dealt with over the past several years, but she was a criminal. While he might have had no qualms about letting her get away with her illegal activity, he also didn’t feel the need to treat the woman by the letter of the law.
That went doubly now, considering Whitaker and Taylor were outside the law themselves.
The banker looked past Taylor and Whitaker again towards the door before looking back at Taylor, her brow creased with worry.
“I only handle payments,” she finally said after one last look to the door. “I don’t know what Herr Graf is actually doing.”
“You must have some idea,” Whitaker said, ignoring Taylor’s threats. “You’re too smart to see whose paying him and who he’s paying, all requiring phone calls outside the office, and not figure it out.”
“It’s easy if you don’t want to know. Of course, I know it’s illegal, but beyond that …”
“How about you tell us what you do know,” Taylor said.
“Torsten contacted me five years ago. He knew about some trouble I’d been in around the time and made it clear he could make my life difficult if I didn’t help him out with something. He said he was going to be getting payments from an organization that he needed to be untraceable, and he’d need to make payments out to contractors from time to time that needed the same thing.”
“Did he tell you who these people were? Either the people paying him or the people he was paying?”
“No, but it wasn’t hard
