the time the third one was printed, the consultant had left. Bright read it all, over a period of three days. Then he made six Xerox copies for the other senior agents in the case. They were now flipping through the pages around the conference table.
'Christ, Mark, this stuff is fantastic!'
'That's what I said.'
'Three hundred million dollars!' another exclaimed. 'Christ, I shop there myself...'
'What's the total involved?' a third asked more soberly.
'I just skimmed through this stuff,' Bright answered, 'but I got close to seven hundred million. Eight shopping malls spread from Fort Worth to Atlanta. The investments go through eleven different corporations, twenty-three banks, and -'
'My life insurance is with this company! They do my IRA, and -'
'The way he set it up, he was the only one who knew. Talk about an artist, this guy was like Leonardo...'
'Sucker got greedy, though. If I read this right, he skimmed off about thirty million... God almighty...'
The plan, as with all great plans, was an elegantly simple one. There were eight real-estate-development projects. In each case the deceased had set up himself as the general partner representing foreign money - invariably described as Persian Gulf oil money or Japanese industrial money, with the funds laundered through an incredible maze of non-American banks. The general partner had used the 'Oil Money' - the term was almost generic in the venture capital field - to purchase land and set the project in motion, then solicited further development funds from limited partners who had no say in the executive management of the individual projects, but whose profits were almost guaranteed by the syndicate's previous performance. Even the one in Fort Worth had made money, despite the recent slowdown in the local oil industry. By the time ground was broken on every project, actual ownership was further disguised by majority investment from banks, insurance companies, and wealthy private investors, with much of the original overseas investment fully recovered and gone back to the Bank of Dubai and numerous others - but with a controlling interest remaining in the project itself. In this way, the overseas investors speedily recouped their initial investment with a tidy profit, and continued to get much of the profits from the project's actual operations, further looking forward to the eventual sale of the project to local interests for more profit still. For each hundred million dollars invested, Bright estimated, one hundred fifty million fully laundered dollars were extracted. And that was the important part. The hundred million put in, and the fifty million profit taken out were as clean as the marble on the Washington Monument,
Except for these computer disks.
'Every one of these projects, and every dime of investment and profits, went through IRS, SEC, and enough lawyers to fill the Pentagon, and
'And he'd be the richest guy in Cody, Wyoming,' Mike Schratz observed. 'But the wrong people got a sniff. I wonder what tipped them off? What did our friends say?'
'They don't know. Just that they pulled the job of killing them all off and making it look like a disappearance. The bosses clearly anticipated losing them and compartmentalized the information. How hard is it to get one of these mutts to take a contract? It's like filling out a girl's dance card at the cotillion.'
'Roger that. Headquarters know about this yet?'
'No, Mike, I wanted you guys to see it first,' Bright said. 'Opinions, gentlemen?'
'If we move fast... we could seize a whole shitload of money... unless they've moved the money on us,' Schratz thought aloud. 'I wonder if they have? As clever as this stuff is... I got a buck says they haven't. Takers?'
'Not from me,' another agent announced. This one was a CPA and a lawyer. 'Why should they bother? This is the closest thing I've ever seen to - hell, it is a perfect plan. I suppose we ought to show some appreciation, what with all the help they're giving our balance-of-payments problem. In any case, folks, this money is exposed. We can bag it all.'
'There's the Bureau's budget for the next two years -'
'And a squadron of fighters for the Air Force. This is big enough to sting them pretty good. Mark, I think you ought to call the Director,' Schratz concluded. There was general agreement. 'Where's Pete today?' Pete Mariano was the special-agent-in-charge of the Mobile Field Office.
'Probably Venice,' an agent said. 'He's going to be pissed he was away for this one.'
Bright closed the ring binder. He was already booked on an early-morning flight to Dulles International Airport.
The C- 141 landed ten minutes early at Howard Field. After the clean, dry air of the Colorado Rockies, and the cleaner, thinner, and drier air of the flight, the damp oven of the Isthmus of Panama was like walking into a door. The soldiers assembled their gear and allowed themselves to be herded off by the loadmaster. They were quiet and serious. The change in climate was a physical sign that playtime was over. The mission had begun. They immediately boarded yet another green bus which took them to some dilapidated barracks on the grounds of Fort Kobbe.
The MH- 53J helicopter landed several hours later at the same field, and was rolled unceremoniously into a hangar, which was surrounded with armed guards. Colonel Johns and the flight crew were taken to nearby quarters and told to stay put.
Another helicopter, this one a Marine CH-53E Super Stallion, lifted off the deck of USS
The van was quite ordinary, looking most of all like a cargo container with wheels, though it was painted in the mottled green camouflage scheme of most military vehicles. That changed rapidly as the communications technicians began erecting various radio antennas, including one four-foot satellite dish. Power cables were run in from a generator vehicle already in place, and the van's air-conditioning systems were turned on to protect the communications gear, rather than the technicians. They wore military-style dress, though none of them were soldiers. All the pieces were now in place.
Or almost all. At Cape Canaveral, a Titan-IIID rocket began its final countdown. Three senior Air Force officers and half a dozen civilians watched the hundred or so technicians go through the procedure. They were unhappy. Their cargo had been bumped at the last minute for this less important one (they thought). The explanation for the change was not to their collective satisfaction, and there weren't enough launch rockets to play this sort of game. But nobody had bothered telling them what the game actually was.
'Tallyho, tallyho. I have eyeballs on target,' Bronco reported. The Eagle bottomed out half a mile astern and slightly below the target. It seemed to be a four-engined Douglas. A DC-4, -6, or -7, a big one-the biggest he'd yet intercepted. Four piston engines and a single rudder made it a Douglas product, certainly older than the man who was now chasing it. Winters saw the blue flames from the exhaust ports on the big radial engines, along with the moonlight shimmering from the propellers. The rest was mainly guesswork.
The flying became harder now. He was closing on the target and had to slough off his airspeed lest he overtake it. Bronco throttled his Pratt Whitney engines back and put on some flaps to increase both lift and drag as he watched his airspeed drop to a scant two-hundred forty knots.
He matched speed when he was a hundred yards aft of the target. The heavy fighter rocked slightly - only the pilot would have noticed - from the larger plane's wake turbulence. Time. He took a deep breath and flexed his fingers once around the stick. Captain Winters switched on his powerful landing lights. They were alert, he saw. The wingtips rocked a second after his lights transfixed the former airliner in the sky.
'Aircraft in view, please identify, over,' he called over the guard frequency.
It started turning - it was a DC-7B, he thought now, the last of the great piston-engine liners, so quickly brushed aside by the advent of the jetliners in the late fifties. The exhaust flames grew brighter as the pilot added power.
