“How would that work?” Whitaker asked. “How would he receive the payments?”
The woman paused, clearly not wanting to discuss her illegal activities. It was one thing to sell out Graf, it was another to implicate herself in direct criminal acts. Taylor tapped his gun to his leg, loud enough to get her attention. She glanced at the weapon and then back up at Whitaker.
“I would arrange to get money out of one of the holding accounts, and he would send someone by to pick up an envelope.”
“When you said holding accounts, is that all you did? Take the money in and then pass it directly to him?” Taylor asked.
“Only if it was for cash, which wouldn’t be reported by the people getting it, so it didn’t matter how the money tracked back. For the money that I transferred to Herr Graf, I would put it through a series of holding companies before the final company paid him as an investor in that company.”
“Do you have records of payments from the trust or any of these payments to Graf that weren’t cash?” Whitaker asked.
After another look at Taylor’s gun, she said, “Yes.”
“Show them to me,” Whitaker said.
Whitaker went around the desk and stood behind the woman as she brought up various documents showing what she’d just explained. Whitaker had the woman pull up all the documents and then step away from the computer. Taylor couldn’t see what she was doing but assumed she was repeating what she’d done for the video, sending copies of everything to herself.
The banker didn’t look happy, since there was enough there to put her in real trouble if it got out. She kept glancing at Taylor who stood passively, staring back. When Whitaker finished, Taylor holstered his weapon.
Once they were out of the offices and back at the elevator, Taylor asked, “Did you get it?”
“Yes. I haven’t worked on white-collar crimes much, but it seemed like enough to prove illegal payments to Graf.”
“Maybe. Let’s go back to the hotel, and I’ll call Joe, see what he thinks.”
They stepped out of the elevator into the lobby and froze. On either said of the door were armed police officers in tactical gear, with more by the lobby out of view from inside the elevator.
“Shit,” Taylor said as both he and Whitaker put their hands above their heads.
Chapter 13
As soon as they were out of the elevator, the officers started yelling ‘hands up.’ Of course, Taylor and Whitaker’s hands were already up, but that wasn’t uncommon. People build up a lot of adrenaline during intense situations, which takedowns usually are. He’d seen it before when working with law enforcement. The suspect would be prone on the ground, and the cops keep yelling for them to ‘get down’ or their hands already up, and the cops keep yelling ‘hands up.’
Taylor curses himself for not being more careful. The woman upstairs must have told her secretary to call the police while she kept them busy. It was a dumb mistake, and both he and Whitaker knew better. He had been distracted by focusing on getting the information they needed and took the woman’s placid nature at face value. It was a rookie mistake. He only hoped they had enough information to at least place doubt in everything that had happened and get off the hook.
Two of the officers holstered their weapons and moved to take the pair into custody. Taylor was turned around and shoved hard against the outside wall of the elevator, his arms yanked behind him. His head was turned with his cheek pressed against the wall so that he could see Whitaker going through the same thing.
Out of habit, Taylor turned his wrists as the cuffs were applied and pulled down so that the wider part of them plus some meat of the base of the hand would be against the turning side of the cuffs. This allowed him to rotate his wrists once they were double-locked and have a bit more room. While he hadn’t been in trouble before, he’d had a buddy in the service who had been in a lot of trouble before enlisting. They’d messed around with stuff like handcuffs and other things his buddy had learned. He’d been warned that an observant officer, or one who followed strict procedure, would double-check the room in the cuffs before double locking them and get rid of the extra room.
The guy cuffing him didn’t. He just hastily slapped on the cuffs and double locked them. Either German procedure was different, or the adrenaline of the situation had him making mistakes.
Taylor looked at the officer's badges to see if this was whatever the German equivalent of SWAT was, but he didn’t know enough about the structure of the German police force to work out what the patches on their uniforms meant. In big cities, at least in America, tactical response teams tended to have their own chains of command, which meant they wouldn’t be directly under the control of Graf.
That hope was dashed once they were marched out of the office lobby. Standing next to a large police van stood Graf, looking exceptionally pleased with himself. He didn’t say anything to the pair as they were loaded onto the van, handcuffs secured to the benches that ran along its walls. Two officers followed them, one sitting next to each of them after Taylor and Whitaker were secured.
They rode in silence. Graf wasn’t in the front of the van, and the officers that were
