Stolen Prey

14

Kristina Sanderson had left her car down the block and walked to the apartment, to see why the cops had blocked it off. But in her heart, she knew. “I live here,” she told one of the uniformed cops, who’d used their squad cars to block the street. “What’s happening?”

“We’re looking for a couple of people,” a cop said. “You’ll have to wait awhile. If you have some shopping to do…”

Instead of shopping, she drifted to the side of the street with a cluster of other rubberneckers, including two that she recognized as other residents of the apartment building. They nodded to each other, agreed that they hadn’t heard anything. The manager, Pat, walked out the front door with a police officer and talked to him for a moment. At one point, Pat looked across the street and saw them, and Kristina waved and Pat raised a hand, then held up a finger-one minute? — and went back inside.

A minute or two later, a tall, well-dressed man came out with Pat, looked across the street at them, and then started toward them. He could be a police officer, she thought, but he didn’t look the part. She’d known a number of plainclothes cops, and even dated one. They generally wore jackets and pants that would not be a great loss should they get torn, vomited on, or grass-stained.

This man wore a suit that was in an entirely different league; he looked like a banker, she thought, and an athlete. One of the bankers from the top floor, with a particularly well-developed mean streak. He said, “Hello, Miz Sanderson? I’m Lucas Davenport.”

They moved away from the crowd to talk, and Davenport asked her about Kline, about whether she’d seen him doing unauthorized programming while working in the secure area. She denied seeing anything like it, and internally, she fought down the rising panic. They were, she thought, really and truly fucked. She was going to prison.

Sanderson was a guilty woman, Lucas thought, more scared and less curious than she should have been. She knew what was going on: she knew about the theft, and what the Mexicans had wanted.

Lucas said to her, finally, “I have no idea whether you had any part in the transfer of funds out of the Polaris bank accounts-”

“That’s ridiculous,” she sputtered, “I don’t even get traffic tickets.”

She was lying, Lucas thought. He plied on. “If you do know about it, there’s no way we can protect you against these drug people. They have very good intelligence about what’s going on with the bank, and if they think you have their money … you’ve seen what happened to that family out in Wayzata, mother, father, both kids. Kristina, you’ve got to talk to me. You really do. This is your life we’re talking about.”

“I don’t know anything,” she wailed, and she thought about the pile of gold at Mom’s, and Lucas saw it in her eyes.

Edie Albitis overnighted the last of the packages and walked away from the FedEx store, got a cab to EWR-said to the driver, “EWR,” and he said, “Okay”-and not until she’d settled back in the cab did she consider how much of her life had come to be dominated by three-letter airport designations: LAX, MIA, ORD, MSP, PHX, DEN, SFO, ATL, LGA, MCO, DFW.

Yesterday she’d gone from LAX to ORD to LGA, and now from EWR to MSP; that is, from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York’s LaGuardia airport, and now she’d be traveling from EWR in New Jersey to Minneapolis-St. Paul.

With any luck, from there it’d be from MSP to CDG, Charles de Gaulle outside Paris, or AMS, Schiphol International at Amsterdam, and from there into the apartments of any of a number of eastern European cities. Once she was there, once she was moving by train and car, it’d take the Stasi to sniff her out, and there was no Stasi, not anymore, not since East Germany ran off the rails.

She was not a sentimental woman, and she shed no tears for the Stasi, the East German State Security.

The ride from Manhattan to EWR took the best part of an hour, traffic stacked up around some kind of a strike, with honking car horns and screaming cops, a strike leader with a bullhorn leading chants that had something to do with hotel rooms and bedbugs. All the time her Somali driver chanted along with unusual tunes from the car radio.

Ten minutes out of the airport, she took a call from Turicek, who said, “Edie, the cops are all over us. They’ve been asking about me, they’ve interviewed Jacob, and they’ll get to Kristina sooner or later.”

“How? How’d they do this?” she asked.

“Jacob. We think they just asked around Polaris, who did it, and the Polaris people blamed Jacob,” Turicek said.

“They got that right,” Albitis said.

“Yeah, but … we think they might be watching all of us, and we can’t get to the office. You’ve got to go over there as soon as you get in. The day’s packages are gonna start piling up at the door. If somebody steals one of them…”

“Ah shit, I’m five hours out, if the plane’s on time, and I don’t miss it.”

“That’s gonna have to do,” Turicek said. “You’re the only one we got. The rest of the stuff is stashed. There’s no way they know about the office, but we can’t go there.”

“We’re so close.”

“What’s that crazy sound I’m hearing?”

“Radio. Listen, when I get to the airport, I’m going to throw this phone away,” she said. “I’ll get another one at the airport, if I can. But if you get an unknown number coming in tonight, answer it.”

“Okay, but-”

“I’ll pick up the packages if it looks okay, and I’ll get tomorrow’s,” Albitis said. “Can you get to Kristina?”

“I think so. She should be coming in,” Turicek said. “There’s been nobody here at work, so they haven’t bugged us, I don’t think.”

“They’ll figure out the gold, sooner or later, and come looking for it. So tell Kristina that I’m taking it out of her mom’s place. I’ll rent a van and drive down to Iowa, or to Wisconsin. Once it’s safely stashed, we can figure out our next move.”

“I’ll tell Kristina. Call me when you get in.”

Sanderson wouldn’t move from her insistence that she knew nothing, and the SWAT team’s search of the apartment building came up empty, so Lucas headed back to the office. He was confused: he knew why the Mexicans had gone after Sanderson, but where had they gone? And why had they gone? They’d casually walked in the front door, like a couple of tourists, so why had they apparently fled out the back like a couple of hunted killers?

There was an answer to that question, but he didn’t know what it was.

Sandy was waiting at the office and asked, “What happened?”

“Aw, it was a clusterfuck. Wait for me, I’ve got to go talk to Shaffer.”

He’d called Shaffer after the SWAT team had begun its search, and though Shaffer was miffed by not hearing about it sooner, he relaxed when Lucas told him that nothing would be found.

“I can’t tell you what happened,” he now said, as he leaned against Shaffer’s doorjamb.

“What are the chances, really, that they were the guys we’re looking for? Our Mexicans?”

“About ninety-eight percent,” Lucas said. “They were looking for Sanderson, and they took off. They got warned, somehow. Maybe they saw me running up the steps…. Anyway, we’re no closer than we were before.”

“Well, we know they’re still here, anyway,” Shaffer said. “We’ve still got a shot at finding them.”

Lucas nodded. “So what did ICE find at Sunnie?”

“Ah-the shadow books. About a year after Brooks set up Sunnie, when they were struggling, he made a whole replicated set of books for a fake company called Bois Brule, which did the same thing Sunnie did-sold foreign language software, but a lot more successfully than Sunnie. Money would come in, in all kinds of amounts, but all on big recognized credit cards, VISA and MasterCard. The VISA and MasterCard banks would collect the payments and credit Bois Brule’s account with Polaris. They needed the Bois Brule system to make sure that whoever owed them actually paid.”

“I’m not sure I see it yet,” Lucas said.

“Okay. They sell a kilo of cocaine, collect, say, twenty K. They get it in cash. Eventually, they have this huge bundle of dollars, and no way to deposit it. You can’t show up at a bank with thirty million in ten-dollar bills without somebody getting suspicious. Not even in Mexico,” Shaffer said. “If nothing else, it’d be considered rude.”

“Okay…”

“So what they do, they have a hundred people each with a hundred credit cards. Those people charge twenty-five hundred bucks each, every month, on every card, and buy bank drafts with cash to pay off the accounts. VISA collects the cash and credits Bois Brule. Now the money is in the bank system, and goes all over the place, and pays for all kinds of stuff. Real estate, gold, whatever…”

“And the DEA guys have broken it out?”

Shaffer nodded. “Some of it, anyway. They’re over at Sunnie peeing themselves, out of pure excitement. They might be able to claw back six months of it, or a year, even. But after a while, with these kinds of deals, records get lost, accounts get closed and confused, companies turn out not to exist anymore … at least, that’s what O’Brien says.”

“Hmm. Well, better them than me. I’ll stick to murder and theft,” Lucas said.

Back at his office, Lucas said to Sandy, “All right: the Syrian woman.”

“You heard the biggest part of it: that she exists,” Sandy said. “Everybody who cooperated with me-not all of them cooperated, but of the ones who did, I couldn’t find any buying pattern. I can’t figure out where she’ll show up next. All I could think of is that you get ahold of all the different police departments, and we get the gold dealers to tip us off, and we get a squad car around to the dealers-”

“To do what? We don’t even know that she’s committing a crime,” Lucas said.

“They could talk to her,” Sandy said. “Get a look at her. Check her ID. Maybe get some fingerprints. Uh, I remember seeing these signs that say you can’t bring more than ten thousand dollars into the U.S. without registering, and she’s got all this money.”

“Okay, there’s something in there,” Lucas said. “Start calling the dealers, see who’ll agree to tip us.”

“I thought we might need your weight behind it.”

“Sandy, I’m a goddamn voice on a telephone,” Lucas said. “So are you. Tell them that you’re Rose Marie, that you’re the public safety commissioner.”

“That’d help my career,” Sandy said.

“Sooo … figure something out,” Lucas said. “We need this woman.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna jack up Turicek. They know we’re coming, so we might as well show up.”

Albitis was about to drop her phone into a trash barrel at EWR, when it rang. Had to be Kline, Turicek, or Sanderson, since they were the only ones with the number for that phone, but when she looked at the screen, it said, “Delta Airlines.”

“Oh, fuck me with a phone pole,” she muttered. A man walking just ahead of her turned and looked at her, bewildered. She punched up the text message that said that her flight had been indefinitely delayed. She kept walking, through security, down to the gate, where a Delta attendant told her that the plane was broken, though she didn’t use that exact word.

“So what are we doing?” Albitis asked.

“We’re bringing another plane in from Atlanta,” the attendant said. “It should be here by eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock? I won’t be in the Twin Cities until midnight,” Albitis said.

“We apologize for any inconvenience….”

Albitis thought the woman sounded insincere, but she turned away and punched up Turicek and told him what had happened. Turicek said, “The cops talked to Kristina. Some of the Mexicans turned up at her apartment. She’s scared shitless.”

“So what do you want to do?” Albitis asked.

“Let me think. I’ll call you.”

Turicek called Sanderson, who was holed up at her apartment, and told her to get down to the bank. “Perfectly safe,” he assured her. “You’re inside your own parking garage, you drive straight to the bank’s parking garage, you call me just before you get here, and I’ll meet you in the garage. But you gotta take over for me. I’m really sick-I say no more.”

She recognized the “say no more.” It was part of a Monty Python sketch that Kline and Turicek, when in nerd mode, could do in endless variations: “Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more.” It meant, in this context, that something was going on but Turicek couldn’t talk about it on the phone.

“I’ll come,” she said. She added, “I don’t want to go to prison.”

Turicek couldn’t think of how to answer, so he said, “Good.”

When Sanderson showed up, an hour later, Turicek took the elevator down to the Skyway and walked over to Macy’s, looking in windows and mirrors for familiar faces. Was he being watched? He had that familiar creepy feeling at the back of his neck, familiar from the old days back in Lithuania, when he was a fifteen-year-old school kid dealing in American cigarettes and British pornography.

In the Macy’s men’s store, he bought a pair of athletic shorts, a T-shirt, a pair of white socks, a black ball cap, and Nike cross-training shoes. He paid and carried the bag back out of the store, went to the office-supply store next door, bought a backpack, the kind kids wore to school. When he walked across the bridge between Macy’s and the IDS Center, he risked a quick glance back and picked up a large man ambling along behind a fat woman, as though he were using her as a blind. He thought he’d seen the face earlier.

They were, he thought, tracking him.

Of course, they hadn’t grown up in Vilnius.

He carried the clothes down to the security center, changed in the men’s room, put his work clothes in the backpack, slipped his arms through it, and pulled the cap down over his eyes. “I’ll be a couple of hours,” he said, quietly, to Sanderson.

“Be careful…”

“If anybody asks, tell them I’m out jogging.”

He walked out in the running gear, and when he hit the door-the first place the watchers could see him-he was running.

Jenkins was up in the public parking ramp where he could watch both Turicek’s car and the street entrance to the bank, and Shrake was loitering in the Skyway. Jenkins had recently bought a chunk of blue goop that came in a plastic egg and was meant to be squeezed, to strengthen hands and forearms. It also had some bubble-gum-like qualities: a pinch of it could be stretched almost indefinitely, into long gummy strings, and doing that was oddly engrossing.

He was pulling out one of his longest strings when Turicek burst through the door and started running down the street. Jenkins shouted into his handset, “Shit, I think he’s running, but I’m not sure it’s him. He’s on the street running south.”

“Watch him,” Shrake called back, and thirty seconds later, Shrake burst onto the same street and looked south, but Turicek was far down the next block, and Shrake couldn’t see him through the people on the street. Jenkins shouted into the handset, “He turned left … he’s gone.”

Shrake ran that way, and Jenkins got the car, and they cruised, looking for a man in running shorts, but they never saw him again. Jenkins called the bank and asked for him, and the woman who answered the phone in the systems division said he’d gone jogging.

“Goddamnit,” Jenkins said. He got on his cell phone and called Lucas. “I got bad news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

Lucas asked, “What happened?”

“Turicek must have spotted us, and then he ran. We never had a chance,” Jenkins said. “He either knew we were here, or he assumed it.”

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said.

“That’s just what I said.” He described the circumstances, and Lucas asked, “You think he’s really jogging?”

“Not unless he’s practicing for the hundred-yard dash. He came out of there like he was being chased by the hound of the coupe de villes,” Jenkins said. “What do you want us to do?”

“Drive around. Hang there. Call the cab companies, see if they picked up a jogger. Quit when it’s quitting time. I mean, I don’t know.”

“All right. I’m sorry, man.”

“Call me if anything changes. Goddamnit, again, we need to know where that guy goes,” Lucas said.

Turicek ran four blocks, swerved into the Pillsbury Center and took the escalators up, watching the doors, then turned and walked quickly down toward the Government Center, ninety percent sure he’d lost the men behind him.

In the Government Center men’s restroom, he changed into his street clothes, put the running clothes in the pack, and called a cab. Five minutes later, he was on his way to St. Paul. There, he directed the cabbie through a couple of back streets to a bar, paid off the cab, walked into the bar and out the back, called another cab. When that cab arrived, he took it to the rental office, picked up the packages, and took them to Sanderson’s mom’s house and stashed them in the closet.

He left the house on foot, called Albitis, told her what he’d done.

“This is the last time I can pull this off-they probably know I was on to them, but they can’t be sure,” Turicek said. “I can’t do it again or they’ll pick me up.”

“Can they know for sure that we took the money?” she asked.

“No. They can believe it, but they can’t know. We’ll have to figure out what to do next-I think we’re going to have to leave the gold for a while. You can get yours, and take off, but the other three of us, we’re going to have to stash our shares and wait for a while.”

“Quite a while. Years,” she said.

“Maybe a couple of years,” Turicek agreed. “We’ll figure something out. Maybe we’ll start a software company and get rich, in quotes.”

“Yeah, well, good luck,” Albitis said. “I’ll see you in Pest. If you need to call me again, I’ll be on the other phone. I’m sitting in the gate here, and I’m throwing this one away.”

When he got off the phone, Turicek called a fourth cab-he’d walked a half-mile from Mom’s, by then-and took it to his apartment. If they picked him up again, so what? He was out of it, now. Albitis would pick up the last shipment, take it to Mom’s. From here on out, it was the daily grind at the bank.

A year, or two … he could handle two years, if he knew he was getting paid a tax-free two and a half million a year to do it.

Boring, but manageable.

He was imagining himself in the new life when he got to his apartment door. He put the key in, pushed it open, and the Mexican hit him in the back. They’d been in the apartment across the hall and they took him down in a heap.

Turicek was strong, and he fought back, tried to scream, or shout, but managed nothing but a gargling sound as they rolled across the floor. One of the Mexicans had his arms and legs wrapped around him, while the other one stumbled over them, punching him in the face, then picked up a plaster lamp and whacked Turicek on the forehead and everything went gray. He heard them cursing, heard the door close, knew, vaguely, that he had to resist, but couldn’t make anything work, felt them rolling him, his arms pinned, his hands taped, then his feet.

They picked him up, like a six-foot cigar, slung him over their shoulders, looked out in the hall, and then they were running, away from the entrance to the fire stairs. They went down the stairs, then they were outside and Turicek, coming back now, felt himself folded at the waist, and thrown in the trunk of a car. He heard two doors slam, and the car began rolling.

Turicek could feel himself bleeding, was sick with the impact of the lamp, but knew in a cold corner of his mind, just as Kline had, that he was a dead man, but not for a while-the time it took them to cut him to pieces.

When they’d thrown him in the trunk, they’d folded him at the waist, with his hands behind him. He realized then, cramped as he was, that he could touch the back of his feet, and the tape that bound them together. He tore at the tape, felt fingernails ripping, but caught an edge, and ripped at it frantically, now pulling whole fingernails loose….

As he did it, he thrashed around, and saw a green-white glow, a small T-shaped plastic handle, with a pictogram of a stick-figure man jumping out of the trunk of a car. An emergency trunk release. The Mexicans must not have known it was there.

It was, as bad luck would have it, near his head, not far from his eyes, but he couldn’t lever himself far enough up to catch it with his teeth. So he pulled at the tape, and he thrashed, and tried to turn around, thought he would break his neck, but finally one foot came free, though the other was wedged against something, and it took another ten seconds to wiggle it free, and another long two minutes to turn himself around.

Now he felt hope for the first time. The car suddenly slowed and pitched down, going down a hill, and he got a foot up near the emergency release, cocked himself as best he could: if he kicked it loose, he’d throw his legs over the back of the trunk, and then throw his body backward.

He took a breath, and did it: kicked the release. Nothing happened. He kicked it again, and again, then thought to hook it with his toe, and pulled, and then the trunk popped an inch. He kicked it open, and threw his legs out the back, and heaved himself out of the car.

The car was traveling thirty or forty miles an hour, and he hit with a terrific impact, unable to protect his head, felt and even heard a shoulder break, was clouted in the face, rolled forever and forever, bouncing; it was like being beaten by a bare-knuckle boxer, without defense, simply pounded, until finally … he stopped.

Still alive.

He heard the noise, the screaming noise, looked wildly back and at the very last instant realized that he’d thrown himself into the middle of a freeway ramp, and though he didn’t have time to think it, or to recognize it, a Ford F-150 pickup was twenty feet away, slewing wildly as the driver tried to stop.

Then it hit him.

And Uno looked out the back window and said, “Pinche hijo de…” and said to Tres, “Faster now, faster.”

Virgil Flowers called Lucas and said, “Things are getting interesting.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s a farm here, and your robbers are apparently going in and out of there with their loads of horse shit,” Flowers said. “We can’t figure out why anybody would need so much horse shit, but I’ve got Richie Jones interested. You know Richie?”

“Yeah.” Richie was the sheriff.

“We’re going to take a look at the farm,” Virgil said. “Talk to some people around there. There might be something else going on.”

“Virgil, goddamnit, all I want to do is bust these two. I don’t need a fuckin’ Shakespeare festival.”

“Yeah, well, that’s because you’ve got something to occupy your time up there. I’m just trying to drum up a little business, and Richie’s got to run for reelection this fall.”

“Just get on with it, okay?”

“Maybe,” Flowers said. “I’ll call you. Sometime.”

Lucas heard about Turicek five minutes later, when, still brooding over Flowers’s insubordination, he got a call from the duty officer at the BCA. “We got a woman who’s trying to reach you. She says her name is Kristina Sanderson and it’s an emergency. Sounds like she’s freaking out.”

Lucas thought, Ah, with some satisfaction. She was cracking. He had the call switched through and then Sanderson was screaming at him, “They took Ivan, they, I think he’s going to die, I think, he’s oh, God, he looks like, oh God, he looks like a … like a … a stewed tomato.”