Lust, Money & Murder (11 page)

For Elaine, identifying counterfeits was easy, like working those picture-puzzles that she loved so much as a little girl.
There are ten differences between the girls in these two photographs. Can you find them?

Soon, Nick was funneling all the fakes found by the other agents in the office to Elaine for scrutiny. With time and a lot of practice, she was able to distinguish fakes so quickly that agents at nearby Secret Service field offices— in Moscow, Bucharest, Frankfurt and Rome—began sending her suspicious banknotes to check for fast turnaround. Sending paper money to Washington to be verified through official channels was slow and required a lot of paperwork. By making this unnecessary, she began to develop a reputation for speed and reliability, even gained a little fame around the region.

* * *

A few weeks after she had gotten settled, Nick came excitedly into her office, a piece of paper in his hand.

“Remember the fake we picked up from that undercover operation the first day you were here?”

“Yes...”

“Turns out it matches a couple of others that have surfaced around Eastern Europe. I just got this report from Treasury, and it says these notes may be coming from a genuine KBA Giori printing press.”

That was a bit of a shock. KBA Giori was a company in Germany that made all the intaglio presses used to print U.S. dollars. The machines were manufactured under top secret contract for the American government. From what Elaine knew, the factory in Wurzburg had tighter security than the Pentagon.

“How’s that possible?” Elaine said.

“Well, I’m sure you know Giori makes basically the same machines for virtually every country in the world.”

“Yes...”

Nick shrugged. “Some third world country could have sold one of their machines to a criminal ring. Every Giori press is accounted for, except for one that never made it to Chile about five years ago. Nobody ever figured out what happened to that one.” Nick paused. “This is
big
, Elaine. Maybe the biggest case I’ve ever worked on. My god, if someone actually has their hands on a genuine KBA Giori machine like the ones we have at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and figure how to use it right, they could make a perfect counterfeit, one that’s so good even the Treasury Department wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

“But there were a lot of mistakes in the one I checked.”

“Yeah, but from what I’ve been told, other notes they’ve found are better. Whoever has this machine is on a learning curve, figuring out how to use it as they go along.”

“Can you get me scans of those other notes? I’d like to see them.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Nick said. “Once they go to Treasury, getting them back is like pulling teeth.”

* * *

At the end of the month, when Elaine was doing paperwork, she asked if she could see Nick’s DOPS to get a better feel for how the Sofia office worked.

He frowned at her. Gesturing around his messy office, he said, “You think I do DOPS?”

“I just assumed—”

“I’d rather spend an afternoon at the dentist than fill out those summaries. I’d rather be tied up and forced to listen to the President’s State of the Union address. I’d rather have bamboo shoots—”

“But don’t you have to do DOPS?”

“Well, yeah. Everybody has to do them. Every once in a while my boss in D.C. calls up and chews me out. I lock myself in here for a few hours and make stuff up, fill out as many as I can. It’s pure torture.”

“I’ll be happy to do your DOPS, Nick.”

“You’ll do my DOPS?”

“Yes, I can do them when I do my own. I don’t mind doing DOPS—they make me feel organized.”

He pointed at her. “You’re on, girl!” He nodded slowly, thinking about it. “Yes. Perfect! I can tell my boss we ‘synchronize our DOPS.’ He would like that.” Nick grinned at her. “Sounds kinda kinky, doesn’t it?”

Elaine blushed.

* * *

Elaine soon found that she looked forward to every moment she spent with Nick, and that she felt empty when he was out of the office or away on an assignment.

The highpoint of her week was when Nick would come into her office and say, “Let’s synchronize our DOPS.”

They would pack up their papers and go to an Ethiopian cafe across the street that served delicious coffee, and Elaine would sit there and write all of Nick’s DOPS, with him catering to her every need. He would buy her a double cappuccino and make it just the way she liked it—with one spoon of white sugar stirred in, and a half spoon of demerara sprinkled across the froth.
Lovingly
sprinkled over the froth, she liked to think.

Nick would hover around her. “Can I get you a muffin? A fresh-squeezed orange juice? A thousand dollars in cash?”

They talked a lot during this hour-long ritual and got to know each other better. She didn’t know how Nick felt about it, Elaine relished every second of it.

After three months of working in Bulgaria, she finally admitted it to herself. She was falling madly, hopelessly, unstoppably in love with Nick LaGrange.

CHAPTER 1.13

Nick seemed to know everyone in Sofia, and he took Elaine with him to “make his rounds” at a variety of the city’s seediest clubs and bars, which she found deliciously intriguing. At least at first.

It was clear that Nick had lots of casual girlfriends, the type that hung around bars and lived off the generosity of men they met there, particularly “rich” foreigners.

The third night they were out, two young ladies who clearly knew Nick stopped at their table. One of them had a pageboy haircut, with jet black bangs cut straight across her dark eyes. The other had a thick blonde braid that came down to the crack of her butt, the features of which were so clearly outlined by tight black spandex she could have worked as a live model in an anatomy class.

“Come party with us, Neekie!” the brunette said, her pouty mouth glistening with bright red lipstick, tugging on his leather jacket.

“Can’t you see I’m with a colleague?” Nick said, his face flushed. The way Nick said it, Elaine felt like a piece of office equipment.

The blonde glanced saucily at Elaine with her dark eyes. “You can breeng your colleague, Neekie. We no mind.”

When he finally got rid of them, he glanced sheepishly at Elaine. “I just hang around with them to keep my ear close to the ground. You pick up a lot of stuff that way.”

“I hope it responds to penicillin,” Elaine said.

Nick smiled.

* * *

The younger Bulgarian women dressed to the nines, in short skirts, high heels, and low-cut blouses. They paid great attention to their hair, makeup, and their hands and feet—half of them wore fake fingernails and had eyelash extensions. It seemed to Elaine all the girls in Sofia were in a life-or-death competition with each other to see who could be the sexiest. There were so many beautiful women that Elaine felt positively plain and ordinary in her boring gray business suits and sensible flats.

One night when she, Nick, and two other agents—both married men—were out at a bar, Elaine made this observation to Nick when a girl walked by with a skirt so short you could see her frilly black stocking tops.

“Life is tough here, Elaine,” he said. “It’s not like in the States, where you have all those systems in place to protect women and give them equal opportunities and all that. Here, women need men to survive, and there aren’t enough good men to go around.” Nick shrugged. “To get a good man, they have to take full advantage of all their assets.”

“And I’ll bet you take full advantage of their assets,” Elaine said.

Nick glanced at the other two agents and grinned. “Well, you know what they say. ‘When in Rome...’“

Elaine wanted to strangle him.

CHAPTER 1.14

By December of that year, Elaine was so bogged down in checking the suspect $100 bills sent in from other offices that she had no time for anything else. Her office walls were covered with huge sheets of paper with hundreds of banknote serial numbers, linked together like huge family trees, showing when and where each note had been found, and the geographical interconnections between them. This helped other agents track down the origin of the counterfeit bills and locate the illegal printing presses. Elaine’s detective work had been partly responsible for two big busts already, one in Romania and another in Chechnya.

“You and I make a great team, Elaine, “Nick often said. “You track ‘em down and I bust ‘em.”

As the Christmas holidays approached, Elaine began to feel depressed— the Christmas season had made her feel down ever since her father died, as she had no family to spend the holidays with.

A week before the break began, Nick came in with a new set of suspect notes for her to check, his leather jacket dusted with snow.

“So, what are you doing for the holidays?” she asked casually. She hoped he might stay around Sofia, and maybe they could spend some time together.

“Oh, probably I’ll go down to Minorca for a little R&R. That’s what I usually do.”

A little R&R
. She wondered which one—or two—of his bar girls he was taking with him.

“And you?” Nick said, smiling politely.

“Oh, I’m thinking of taking a trip with a friend to Rome or Paris.” The vague “friend” part was a lie, an effort to make him jealous.
A pathetic effort,
she thought.

“Sounds good,” he said, unfazed. “But I’d head south if I were you. The winters here are murder.”

When he turned around, Elaine felt like throwing her glass paperweight at him. But she didn’t want him to leave.

“Nick?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“What about those two bills we sent to Treasury that came from the genuine Giori press?

“Oh, those?” he said. “I don’t know what happened, you know how they are. I’ll ask again.”

After he left, she had the distinct feeling he was being evasive.

* * *

She ended up spending the holidays in Paris. She visited the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, and took a riverboat ride on the Seine.

And she was miserable.

CHAPTER 1.15

When Elaine returned to Sofia, her obsession with Nick deepened. When he brushed his arm against her, electricity shot through her whole body. When he left her phone messages, she would play them over and over again in the privacy of her office or living room, where she could relish the sound of his voice. Her emotional state would swing wildly to one extreme or another based on the slightest inflection or look in his eye. She longed for him to take her hand, like he had the first day she had arrived in Sofia.

Elaine could only imagine the shock he would experience if he knew the emotional turmoil he was causing inside her.

She felt like a schoolgirl endlessly pining over a boy who was utterly unaware of her existence.

She hated herself for it, yet she seemed powerless to do anything about it.

You want Nick so badly simply because you can’t have him,
she thought, trying to talk herself out of how she felt.
He’s out of your reach, and that makes him all the more attractive
.
If he was easily available, you wouldn’t be interested.

She didn’t believe a word of it.

* * *

One day she came into Nick’s office and he was so engrossed with something on his computer screen that he didn’t seem to notice.

“Nick?” she said.

“What?” he muttered distractedly.

She gradually came closer, looking over his shoulder. She almost expected to see pornography on the screen.

“Ever been to the Provence region of France?” he said. He was scrolling through a series of small countryside villas.

“No,” Elaine said. “It looks lovely. Are you thinking of taking a vacation there?”

“Yeah. A permanent one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m retiring. And soon.”

Elaine was taken aback. “Aren’t you a little young to retire?”

“Oh, I’ll keep working at something. But something that’s not life-threatening.” He glanced over at her. “I’ve got plenty of money socked away,” he said. “That old Mustang is the only thing I own.”

* * *

Elaine often thought about what Nick had said during the next couple of days, wondering how he had so much money “socked away” that he could retire in his 30s.

One night she had a wonderful dream. She was eating dinner with Nick in a huge, rustic kitchen. The windows were open, the breeze blowing through the room. Fresh vegetables were spread over the table. Outside, she could see rolling, golden hills and poplar trees, like in a Van Gogh painting.

Two children were sitting at the table, a boy and a girl, and both were speaking French. The boy favored Nick. The girl had strawberry blonde hair.