The Fix

Chapter 51

Natalie Bonfils handed over her passport and ticket as she prepared to board the Air France flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport. It was an A380, a full-length double-decker airliner that would ferry over five hundred passengers across the Atlantic to the French capital, arriving about seven and a half hours after takeoff given the prevailing tailwinds.

She did not make it onto the jetway to the plane.

Two men in suits held up their Bureau shields and barred her way.

“What is going on?” she demanded.

“This way, please, Ms. Bonfils.”

“I’m flying to Paris tonight. My luggage is already on the plane.”

“We had it taken off.”

“How dare you,” she snapped. “Why?”

“This way, please, we don’t want to make a scene.”

Natalie looked around at other passengers gaping at her. She spun around and walked away from the jetway entrance.

Then she saw Decker and Jamison standing next to Bogart and her face turned ugly.

“What the hell are you doing to me!” she exclaimed.

Bogart came forward. “We need to talk to you. Now.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“And I also told you not to leave the area,” retorted Bogart.

“I didn’t know that still applied, since we buried my father.”

“One has nothing to do with the other. It applies until I tell you explicitly that it does not apply.”

She turned to Decker. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”

“We’ve got a space here where we can talk privately,” said Decker.

They led her down an escalator and to a room located across from one of the baggage claims. Milligan and Brown were already there.

“Thanks for the heads-up, Decker,” said Brown as they escorted Natalie in.

“Please take a seat, Ms. Bonfils,” said Bogart.

Natalie sat, folded her arms over her chest, and stared angrily at each of them. “Should I have a lawyer?” she snapped.

“I don’t know,” said Bogart. “Do you think you need one?”

“When the FBI pulls you off a plane it makes you think you do, even if you’ve done nothing wrong.”

“We’re not arresting you, so we haven’t Mirandized you yet. Therefore you’re not entitled to a lawyer being present while we question you. But you can call an attorney and you can also refuse to answer our questions.”

“Just ask your damn questions. Maybe I can still make my flight.”

“That won’t be happening,” replied Bogart firmly. “But we will start asking our questions.”

She scowled at him.

Bogart glanced at Decker, who said, “Why the rush to get back to France? I thought you said you were divorcing your husband.”

“I am. But my kid happens to be there with him. I’m going to get her.”

“And bring her back here?” asked Decker.

“I haven’t decided that yet. I’m sort of in limbo right now. I might live with my mother, at least temporarily. But what does this have to do with why you pulled me off the damn plane?”

“The gambling debts.”

Her features collapsed. “Shit, are you serious? I told you everything I know about them.”

“You want to take a minute and think about that answer?”

She tensed and looked around the table. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Bogart said, “Based on a hunch from my colleague here” — he indicated Decker — “we spoke with the authorities in France. They’ve questioned your husband over this matter already, at our request. We asked them to question your husband again immediately. They did so and we have his answers here.”

He pulled out an electronic notebook.

Decker said, “So, based on that, do you want to rethink your answer?”

Natalie glanced nervously at the notebook. “Why, what did Corbett say?”

Bogart said, “He told us the truth because he was informed that otherwise he could go to prison and lose custody of his daughter.”

Natalie paled but said nothing.

Bogart continued, “He told the French police that the gambling debts weren’t actually his. They were yours.”

“That’s bullshit. He’s lying! I’ve never so much as played the lottery.”

Bogart hit some keys on the notebook, slid it around, and pushed it over to her.

“That’s video feed from a casino in Paris. Hit play.”

When she made no move to do so, Decker reached over and hit the requisite key. The screen came to life, showing the floor of a casino.

Bogart pointed to one section. “You, at the baccarat table.”

Natalie looked up, her face a dark mass of fury.

Bogart said, “We also have you at two other casinos in Paris, another in Aix-les-Bains, one in Cannes, and two in Nice, over a ten-month period.”

Brown looked at Decker and said, “We blew that one. We thought it was Corbett with the problem. Our sources sounded certain.”

Bogart said, “He apparently is a much nicer guy than we’ve been led to believe. He was falling on the sword for his wife and her gambling problems.”

“You don’t know shit about me,” exclaimed Natalie.

Decker leaned forward. “We know enough to put you away for the rest of your life.”

Natalie screamed, “For what? It’s not illegal to gamble in France.”

“No, but it’s illegal to be a coconspirator in espionage,” interjected Brown.

“I knew nothing about that.”

Bogart said, “And I think we can prove otherwise. But once a jury sees what you did, do you really think they’re going to be sympathetic to you? They’re going to see a spoiled little rich girl who lied about everything and put her own daughter in danger because she couldn’t stop rolling the dice. And to get out of this jam she brought her poor, terminally ill father into this whole thing and it cost him everything he had worked his whole life for. And drove him to suicide. You’ll be lucky if you don’t get the death penalty.”

Natalie stared at him wildly for a few seconds and then broke down in tears.

Decker stared at her without a shred of sympathy. “You’ve done the tear duct dance already,” he pointed out. “So don’t waste our time. We want answers, and maybe, just maybe, you can cut a deal.”

Natalie immediately stopped crying and looked up at him. “What do you want to know?”

“How did you run up ten million in gambling debts so fast?”

“Bad luck.”

“No, it wasn’t that,” said Decker. He pulled the notebook back to him. “We got the Sûreté to check on that too. It struck me as odd that someone like you, without any real money, could find her way into games of chance that would allow you to dig such a hole. You were never a high roller. You never went to the private areas of these casinos where the heavy hitters lose a hundred grand on a single roll. And most casinos would have put the kibosh on your gambling long before you got to ten million. Anyone runs up that much in losses, they already know that person’s financials. Casinos are not stupid. They’re in business to make money, not lose it. So there are letters of credit on file, methods of guaranteed repayment locked in to cover losses that large. You didn’t have any of that, so they’d know you could never pay it back. But I just took it for granted that it was true, because that’s what I was told.” He shot a sidelong glance at Brown. “But we finally decided to question that conclusion because it made no sense. And conclusions that make no sense are very often wrong.”

Decker sat back and looked at Natalie. “The French police haven’t gotten back to us yet with the answers to that, but they will. And do you want to know what I think they’ll find?”

Natalie said nothing.

“I think they’ll find you had gambling debts, all right. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Enough to sink you. Enough to scare the shit out of you. But not millions.”

Brown said, “But Decker, we know that ten million dollars was moved from one account to another.”

Decker held up his hand and looked back at Natalie. “And you were approached by someone who was probably watching you the whole time, because of who your father was. And that person made a deal with you. It was your only way out, because I do think you’d borrowed money from some bad dudes to pay those gambling debts. And they would hurt you and your family if you didn’t repay that loan.”

Natalie had turned very pale.

Bogart took up the thread. “That person agreed to take care of your debts if you did something in return. You were to contact your father and sell him this story of millions in gambling debts run up by your French hubby, and you and your family’s life on the line if it weren’t paid. It couldn’t be hundreds of thousands, because your father would probably be able to pay that off himself. But not ten million. So what choice does he have? Where else could he get that kind of money so fast? He couldn’t sell his house or liquidate his other assets in a day or two. There was really only one way. So that was the bait, and he had no choice but to take it.

“Now, if you want to dispute that and come up with an alternate scenario that makes sense, feel free. We’ve got no place else to be.” Decker folded his arms over his chest, sat back, and stared at her expectantly.

A minute of silence ticked by until Natalie said curtly, “What kind of a deal can I get?”