Stolen Prey

9

Uno and Tres were freaked, not so much about the death of Dos-that was going to happen, sooner or later, to all of them, and probably sooner than later, part of the business-as the morra who shot him. She’d done it as well as either of them might have, had come out of nowhere, like a vision behind the muzzle blast of the Federale, when they’d been caught cold, and Dos had been shot….

She’d known the Big Voice and they’d said to each other, as they sped away, heading for the Rosedale mall, their bailout site, “The Big Voice is everywhere. Did you see this morra with the baby gun, she goes boom…”

She’d given them one hour to get rid of the car. That wouldn’t be a problem, they’d worked it out in advance. But did you see her with the baby gun…?

At the mall they found a space in a thickly occupied corner of the parking lot between Macy’s and JCPenney. They had a box of Handi Wipes and used them to wipe the plastic surfaces of the car, everything they could reach, although they knew there’d probably be a few prints remaining when they finished. Still, no reason to make it easy for the gringo cops.

When they finished, they got out and began wiping the exterior door handles and under the back hatch release; that done, they got back in the car and turned it on, and found a radio station that played Mexican music and sat and waited.

They’d taken less than fifteen minutes to drive to the mall, and they’d waited almost another fifteen, passing on a number of shoppers who came and went, until Uno said, “There. That one.”

Ferat Chakkour came out of the shopping center twirling his car keys on his index finger. He worked in one of the Rosedale kiosks, selling oversized soft pretzels, for which he made seven dollars an hour. Which was okay. The job brought in extra money, on top of money sent by his parents back in Egypt, while he studied advertising and business management at Metro State.

He was a happy enough young man until he stepped around the corner of his four-year-old Subaru and popped the door. Immediately, a thin young brown-skinned man was behind him, with a handgun, and he said, with a Latino accent, “Give me the keys.”

Then another brown-skinned man came around the nose of the car and said, “The keys,” and he also had a gun.

Chakkour handed over the keys and said, “Let me go,” but the smaller of the two men backed away from him and said, “Get in the backseat. We will let you go, but we need your car for a while. Get in or I will shoot.”

Chakkour got in without a struggle: for one thing, he hoped he might get the car back.

Once in the car, Tres told him to slide across, then Tres got in beside him with the handgun pointed at Chakkour’s stomach.

Uno got the bags from the Tahoe, threw them in the trunk of the Subaru, and they headed out of the parking lot and onto I-35W north. Chakkour began pleading: “Don’t hurt me. I’m like you, I come from another country, I come from Egypt, my family sent me here to work to get an education…. I’m brown like you, we’re brothers….”

Tres laughed and said, “I think you are even browner. But you are like a terrorist, huh? Like an Arab terrorist.”

Chakkour picked up on the joke and got the two Mexicans talking, and twenty miles north, they took an exit, chosen just at random, drove four miles and then took a side road, and another mile, and another side road. No houses around. Uno stopped and said, “We leave you here. When you walk to a house, you don’t tell anybody who took you. We need one hour. One hour, and you never see us again.”

“Okay. Okay.”

Tres got out first, and Chakkour scrambled out after him and moved to the side of the road. Tres said, “Good-bye,” and shot Chakkour in the heart, and when he’d fallen, put a shot in his head.

Some red-winged blackbirds startled out of a cattail swamp in the ditch and flew away, but the Mexicans could see or hear nothing else but the breeze; this was in the best part of Minnesota’s August, with the roadsides turning golden brown, and the wind carrying the scent of ripening grain.

“In the weeds,” Uno said, getting out of the car.

They took Chakkour’s wallet, with his driver’s license, then picked him up by the hands and feet and threw him back into a tall stand of reeds. The body disappeared as effectively as if it’d been thrown into quicksand.

“So. We have a car. Now we need a house,” Uno said. “We need to talk to Big Voice.”

They got back in the car and turned around and headed back out toward the interstate. On the way, Uno looked at the photo on Chakkour’s driver’s license. “He’s the right age, the picture, it could almost be me.”

“We are all brown together,” Tres said, and then he giggled. “All brown brothers.”

“What a moron,” Uno said in English. Then back to Spanish: “Brown brothers.”

At the hotel, Martinez went first to Rivera’s room, for which he’d given her a key. She knew the St. Paul police would eventually show up, so she went quickly to his suitcase, opened it, pulled up a seam at the bottom, and slipped out an envelope. She thumbed the flap on the envelope, saw the sheath of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, and put it in her purse. Moving to the closet, she checked his suits, then his shoes, for a second envelope. She eventually found it in a bundle of dirty underwear. Altogether, six thousand dollars.

In her own room, she stashed the money, then undressed, except for her underpants, and pulled on a man’s T-shirt, which she used as a nightgown. Then she lay on the floor, her hands at her sides, her eyes closed, in a yoga position called the Corpse Pose. The pose was useful for eliminating tension. Breathing through her nose only, willing her breathing to slow, and then her mind, then letting go even of her will, she felt herself clearing….

Martinez had been born in the same kind of village that had given birth to Uno, Dos, and Tres. She had no more hope than they had, no more possibilities, but something primal, something in her soul, kept her going to school when most everybody else had given up. She learned very early, though, that while she was smarter than most men, men were stronger.

That was a very simple equation where she came from: you could be a young Einstein, but that wouldn’t keep you from getting beaten bloody, or worse, if you said something unwise to the wrong narco. She learned to keep her head down.

When her father went to the U.S. to work, her mother moved them to a slum in Ciudad Juarez. Drugs were everywhere, and gangs. She got back into school, drawn by one belief: that if you could graduate, you would “have it made.” She worked, kept her head down, a pretty young woman who was raped one Friday night by a low-ranking narco named Bueno Suerte, and then, for a while, was passed around the gang, beaten regularly, raped even more often.

Still, she was good at math, at numbers, at bookkeeping, and a year before she graduated, went to work as an accountant of sorts, for a mid-level marijuana exporter, a fat man named Chanos. While Chanos raped her occasionally, he protected her from anyone of lower rank. Sometime after she started with Chanos, she confessed to Bueno Suerte that she desperately missed his attentions. She would like to slip back in his bed, but if Chanos or anybody else found out…

Bueno Suerte was transfixed by the possibility of putting the horns on Chanos, and they conspired to meet one night when Chanos was traveling. She went to Bueno Suerte’s bed, and when he was done with her, and asleep, she took a hammer out of her purse and smashed his head with it. She was told later that someone had hit the boy twenty or thirty times with a pipe, or something, and that his head had looked like a pizza. She didn’t remember hitting him that often, but she did remember how purely wonderful it felt, as she did it.

She stayed with Chanos, and did well enough that the narco had a word with the school principal, and when graduation day came, she walked across the stage with the few of her schoolmates who’d gotten that far, and got the precious paper.

Later that year, Chanos committed suicide by cutting off his own head and putting it on his chest, and she was inherited by the new boss. Seven years later, when she was twenty-five, a narco named Cabeza de Madera, a member of the Criminales, suggested that she might have another potential. She listened to his suggestion and applied for a job as a clerk with the Federales. The skids had been greased, and she got the job, a short, quiet, pretty, head-down young woman.

Two years after that, at the suggestion of the Big Voice-Cabeza de Madera had had an unfortunate encounter with un bate de beisbol-she took some law enforcement courses, learned to shoot a pistol, and became, in name only, a policewoman. In reality, she was a secretary and a bookkeeper, paid a little better than the other female secretaries and bookkeepers.

She’d become a person of some value to the narcos, a chunky, humble, almost unnoticeable spy at the center of a Federale headquarters. And she continued taking classes, increasing her value to the Federales. She moved into a decent apartment, went to better restaurants, even signed up at a health club, where she did the stair-climber, became an exerciser-dancer, and went to yoga classes.

All of this taught her one great lesson: money was everything. Everything. Safety, privilege, a roof over your head, good clothes, decent food.

With the payments from the Criminales, she could even have afforded a car, although she wasn’t allowed to buy one-her Federale pay wouldn’t support it, and the purchase of a car might be looked upon with suspicion. Still, she took driving lessons and was eventually approved to drive government cars.

And one day, the Big Voice said to her, “There is an inspector, named Rivera. You know him. He is an unhappy man, we hear, with a loveless marriage….”

She allowed herself to be seduced. The sex meant nothing to her-she’d become numb to it as a teenager. Rivera, as it turned out, was an intelligent man, but harsh, and sometimes foolish. He deluded himself into believing that she loved him, or at least regarded him with great fondness. In fact, she disliked him, and that feeling grew over the years.

She had no trouble concealing that from Rivera. He believed, with great certainty, that women admired him without reservation. By the time she killed him, she was very, very tired of Rivera’s whole act.

In her room, Martinez sat up and let her eyes and mind readjust to the world. Five minutes later, she was reporting to the Big Voice. He said, “I will talk with the others. We did not see this possibility, though the death of Rivera had been expected for some time. But not by our hand.”

“A decision was required,” Martinez said. “I felt for some time that I was coming to the end with David. He had much guilt about me, and about his wife.”

“If it was going to end, then, better to have saved the children,” Big Voice said. “So: we will consult, and I will call back.”

When she hung up, she worried: Big Voice had not been approving. Had, in fact, seemed a bit chilly. Had she miscalculated? She had felt that she was coming to an end with Rivera. Was she coming to an end with the Criminales, as well?

Ivan Turicek drove to St. Paul, turned north on I-35E, then exited to an office that he’d rented in St. Paul under a phony name. He’d been willing to do that because he never expected to see the landlord a second time, and he planned to sterilize the place when he left it. It was a package drop, pure and simple. A dozen deliveries were coming that morning, another dozen in the afternoon.

There’d been no questions at the bank, nobody snooping around, but the cops were moving. Kristina had friends at Polaris, and on Friday afternoon had arranged to bump into them at their regular lunch spot, sat with them, and all the talk was of accountants looking at the computer system.

So the cops had gotten that far. Taking the step to Hennepin would be difficult, but not impossible. In the meantime, the gold harvest was under way.

The instructions on the FedEx boxes simply said to leave the boxes outside the door if there was no answer. There’d be no answer, but Turicek would be waiting behind the door for the FedEx man to leave. Four of the boxes were coming in First Overnight, eight more Priority Overnight.

Twelve more should arrive in the afternoon on Standard Overnight, Saturday delivery. Albitis was shipping them with a variety of priorities, hoping that they’d be delivered by different FedEx men, in separate vans, to confuse the issue of how many boxes were suddenly arriving at a place that had never before gotten any. None of them would require a signature.

Turicek was moving early in the day because he didn’t know where he’d fall on the FedEx delivery list. At the office complex, he parked in the lot, down a bit from the office, and spent a few minutes watching. The only activity was at a carpet place, where a couple of people came and went. Turicek sighed, got out of the car with his briefcase, and walked over to the office and let himself in. Waiting for the handcuffs, but they never came.

The office smelled like carpet cleaner and contained a cheap wooden desk, three inexpensive chairs, an old computer with a keyboard that Turicek got at a rehab store, and a TV set that sat on a built-in bookcase shelf. Whiteboards hung on two walls, with phony scrawled appointments they changed every time somebody was able to stop by. That was usually at night to avoid contact with other tenants.

There was no telephone.

Turicek locked the door, pulled on a pair of cotton gloves, and took a seat at the computer. The computer contained no files, but it was hooked into the Internet, paid through the same dead-end account that paid the condo rent. Turicek signed on and began looking for news on the murders in Wayzata: there was a lot of it, but everything he found he’d already seen. The cops were still focusing on Sunnie Software.

Killing time…

The first spate of the FedEx packages arrived an hour later. Turicek had been pacing back and forth between the front window blinds and the computer, saw the truck pull in. The driver knocked, perfunctorily, and started dropping the packages outside the door. He made two trips, and when he put his truck in gear after the last one, Turicek opened the door and scooped up the packages.

The biggest of the boxes looked like it might contain books, but was too light-it was a cube eighteen inches or so on each side, and weighed 9.6 pounds, according to the label. Everybody knew that gold was heavy, so they wanted boxes that felt light. Turicek took a box cutter out of his pocket and slashed the box open. Inside were wads of newspaper-the Los Angeles Times-and six rolls of American Eagle gold coins wrapped in flexible plastic tubes, taped on the ends.

He shook the coins out of one of the taped tubes onto the desktop. Twenty coins in each roll, each an ounce of gold, one hundred twenty coins in all. That morning, each coin was worth about sixteen hundred dollars. Together, they were worth a little less than $200,000, give or take.

He looked at the coins for a moment, thinking how useless and ridiculous gold was, except for the two things it did. The first was to store value, the second was to look good around the necks of rich women. In some places, as in the Middle East and India, both of those things. He picked up one of the coins, carried it to the window, and looked at it in a pencil-thin beam of light. The gold shimmered, and the eagle looked alive. He shook his head and began opening the other packages.

In the course of the morning, the rest of the packages showed up in a second delivery. Twelve in all, with a hundred to a hundred and fifty coins in each.

All together, by the end of the morning, he had two and a half million dollars in gold in the car, repacked into the three smallest of the delivery boxes-almost a hundred pounds in all.

Not enough: it was coming in too slowly. If the cops had gotten to Polaris, they’d eventually track the cash into the buying accounts. But they’d have a way to go before they could do that-a lot of wire transfers in and out of Cayman Island banks, and then back to the U.S. That would take some time. Turicek was sure they had another two days, but after that…

Turicek was hypersensitive about surveillance, and so when he called Albitis, he called her on a disposable phone. She answered on the same kind of phone, standing outside a gold shop in Duarte, California.

She said, “Yes?” and Turicek asked, “How’s it going?”

“Fast, but risky. I committed fifty thousand to Clark Lewis at Venice City and he tried to bullshit me a little. He’s getting curious. I put him off by saying my folks in Syria were moving money,” she said.

“I like that. I like the Syria story,” Turicek said.

“So do I. Lots of people trying to get their money out of Syria,” Albitis said. “Did you get today’s deliveries?”

“Yeah, the morning boxes are all here. We’re at what, nineteen?”

“A little more than that,” Albitis said. “We’ll be close to the end. It’ll take another three days to get the last of it. As soon as I’ve arranged the Vegas wires, I’m flying to New York, and I should put the rest of the money down in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Then I’m back to Vegas for the pickup and ship, and then back to New York for the pickup there. How are we doing on time? Have you heard anything?”

“Yeah, and it’s not good. The cops are at Polaris,” Turicek said. “You’ve got to hurry.”

“I’m hurrying-I’m hurrying,” she said. “We’re doing it way too fast as it is. I’m getting scared. You gotta tell me if anything happens. I don’t want to ditch three million, but I’ll do it if it means we don’t get busted.”

“Absolutely. I will tell you the instant I hear,” Turicek said.

“And, Ivan-don’t run on me. I know you’re thinking about it, but honest to God, if you dump me, I’ll tell the fuckin’ Vory that you’ve got twenty million in gold and no protection. They’ll cut you up like fish bait.”

“I’m not running-”

“But you’ve thought about it,” Albitis said.

“I thought about it, but I’m not running,” Turicek admitted. “I’ve done the numbers, and I wouldn’t make it.”

“That’s right: you wouldn’t,” Albitis said. “So keep talking to me. Call me every hour.”

“I’ll call you … but I’ll tell you, you’d be less frightened if you could see the gold we’ve got here, all together,” Turicek said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Sixteen hundred dollars for every single coin, and we’ve got a river of them. It’s like a pile of oyster shells.”

“Sixteen-twelve an hour ago,” Albitis said. “And going nowhere but up. I’m moving as fast as I can.”

“Keep moving,” Turicek said. “Keep it coming.”

Lucas sat outside the Nunez house, watching Morris direct traffic, until the medical examiner’s people moved Rivera’s body out. Sandy called to say that the Brownsville cops had come through, had jacked up the answering service for the ReCap guy. Nunez was supposedly in Atlanta, Georgia, buying old tires, but nobody answered his cell phone.

If he was a bad guy, Lucas thought, looking at his watch as he talked to Sandy, and if the shooters had called home, and if Nunez had been tipped … He could already be in the air, on the way to Mexico.

“See if you can get a license tag for him. Call Atlanta, see if they can find him.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” she said. He could hear her typing on her keyboard. “Atlanta’s got … uh, better’n five million people in the metro area.”

“So we need to get lucky,” Lucas said.

He had little faith in luck.

As Rivera’s body was wheeled out of the house, strapped to a gurney, inside a black plastic body bag, the crime-scene boss walked over to say to Lucas and Morris, “We got something in the basement.”

“Like what?” Morris asked.

“We think it’s blood.”

They followed him inside and down the stairs into what amounted to a hollow concrete cube with gray-painted walls. A furnace and water heater stood in one corner, with a stack of furnace filters and a circle of dusty hoses. The basement was almost too clean, particularly the floor. “Bernie noticed how clean the floor was, so we started looking around. We think we’ve got blood here.” He pointed at a dark speck on one of the walls. “And over here, on the water heater. You can see the color of it against the white.”

Lucas squatted to look at the water heater. The spatters, if that’s what they were, were small: smaller than a black ant, close to the size and color of a flea.

“Looks like blood to me,” Lucas said. He looked at the opposite wall, which was eight or ten feet away. “If blood was getting spattered that far … I bet it was Pruess. I bet they brought him down here and went to work on him.”

“We oughta know, ninety percent, in an hour or so,” the crime-scene boss said.

“It was him,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, I’d like to get my hands on those little fuckers.”

“We know that they’re little?”

“That’s what I was told,” Lucas said. “Three of them. Two now.”

“At least he got one,” Morris said.

Lucas nodded but said, “One-for-one isn’t the kind of ratio we want. We’ve really got to be careful with these guys.”

Back upstairs, he looked at the entryway, where Rivera had gone down, and shook his head. Something was nagging at him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it….

He was still trying to figure it out when Bone, the banker, called: “This ICE you sent over, she thinks she’s found a back door into our computer system, but she’s afraid it’s booby-trapped.”

“I’ll be there,” Lucas said.

He’d told Morris about the DEA accountants and the possibility of pulling information out of the bank computers, and Morris had asked to be kept current: “But I don’t know shit about computers. I’ll leave it to you guys.”

So Lucas told him he was leaving, and why, and drove across town, in heavy afternoon traffic, and into Minneapolis’s loop. He found a space in the bank’s parking structure and took the elevator to the systems center. A guard took his ID, made a call, and let him in.

ICE was sitting on an office chair in one corner, with six regular employees scattered around the room, peering at oversized computer screens. Her feet were up on a desk. She was talking on her cell phone when Lucas walked in, said something in it, and rang off. “I heard about the Rivera guy,” she said.

ICE was somewhere in her early thirties, slender, medium height with long legs, blond short-cut hair, tight but not spiky, and the finest pale Scandinavian complexion. Lucas had known her since she was seventeen or eighteen, a girl geek at what was then called the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota; he’d hired her to do some programming at his newly launched Davenport Simulations, the company that made him rich.

“A complete goddamn disaster,” Lucas said, about Rivera. He pulled an office chair around to face her, and asked, “Where’s Bone? And what’d you get?”

“He said he’d be down when you got here,” she said. She turned back to her desk and tapped a few keys on a keyboard. The computer screen, which had been dark, came up, showing a palm-sized patch of neatly ranked numbers.

“Since you don’t know anything about computers…”

“Though I sold my computer company for eighteen million bucks,” Lucas said.

“Blind luck and perfect timing,” ICE said. “But you never did know shit about computers, so what I’ll say is, see this bunch of green gobbledygook right here?”

“Yeah.”

“What that is, is the beginning of a little programmer’s doily, which, among other things, I think, would allow somebody to call in from the outside and take control of a computer. When he comes in, he’s automatically got root, so he can start moving money around. There are lots of alarms, and when he started messing with money, they should have gone off. So I think they were turned off for this one account.”

“You keep saying ‘I think.’ Is this for sure?”

She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure, but the only way to know for sure is to run the program and see what happens…. And there’s some other stuff in here that looks like it might be parts of a booby trap. That’s why I called it a programmer’s doily-you pull on the wrong string, and the whole doily unravels, and you’ll never figure it out.”

From behind Lucas, Bone said, “The important points are, he had administrator’s privileges, and he had to know enough about the security system to turn off the alarm.”

Lucas swiveled around and, with a question mark in his voice, asked, “Pruess?”

“Not unless he took some serious programming classes somewhere, and then figured out how to get in from a remote terminal. I don’t believe it-there’s nothing on his record that would suggest that he knew anything about programming. He was a sales guy,” Bone said.

“The programming here isn’t particularly hard,” ICE said. “There’s a lot of it-finding this little knot was essentially a problem of finding a needle in a haystack-but the knot itself is pretty simple.”

“To simplify all the techie bullshit,” Lucas said, “you’re telling me that somebody here set up this … doily … and then he could call in from the outside and loot the account.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” ICE said.

“Thank you,” Lucas said. “But what you’ve given us here, I could have figured out myself, eventually, even though I don’t know anything about computers. We need you to give us some details, not this sort of, excuse me, generalized bullshit.”

ICE turned her palms up and said, “We might need a warrant for that. The Bonester is seriously unhappy. He’s dragging his feet.”

Bone said, “Look, we’ll get it done-but I can’t have you setting off some logic bomb that’s going to blow up the bank’s accounts. I’ve got three hundred billion dollars in assets floating around in there. I need to know what’s going to blow if you touch the wrong wire.”

“You’ve got multiple redundancies-” ICE began.

“But there might be multiple bombs,” Bone said. “What’s the point of taking us down, if we go back online in ten minutes? If there’s one bomb, there could be lots of them.”

ICE stuck out a lip and tilted her head: “It’s a thought.”

Lucas asked ICE, “How long would it take you to evaluate the situation? In detail?”

“A day, maybe,” she said. “Depends on how tangled up the knitting gets.”

“Too long, too long,” Lucas said. “They’re killing people every day. You have to move faster.”

Bone said to ICE, “No. No. If you gotta go slow, go slow. And I want my computer security people looking over your shoulder while you’re doing it. I’m not bullshitting you two-”

Lucas interrupted: “Jim. People are being killed-”

Bone said, “Look. Lucas. Ol’ buddy. If she touches off a string of bombs and brings down the bank, Wall Street dumps two thousand points and the economy goes into recession. You’d kill more people than a whole bunch of Mexican gangbangers.”

Lucas grunted, a short laugh, and ICE put on her mildly amused look, but Bone wasn’t laughing. He was snarling: “You think I’m joking? I’m not. This bank crashes, and the first thing everybody thinks is, ‘Terrorists. Gotta get out.’ And they run for the doors. Lucas, I’m not fucking you around here. Miz ICE is wearing a suicide vest, she just doesn’t know it.”

Lucas said, “All right.” To ICE, “Fast as you can, without blowing anything up. These guys, they’re crazy, and they’re going to kill again.”

“Gonna take a lot of high-priced speed,” ICE said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” Lucas said. “I just want to get it done.”