Miranda Vaughn Mystery 01.00 - Chasing the Dollar (13 page)

Bill had conveniently ignored that Jake had tracked Cecily down and made the connection.

"Look, I'm only here because I need to get something I lost. Then I'm outta here. I'm starting over. A whole new life. Molly won't have to worry about money for the kids or anything," Bill said.

Jake grabbed his brother-in-law by the shoulders.
"Tell me what's going on."

"
Jake, I can't tell you. Not just because you're FBI, but it's not safe." Bill looked around nervously again and stepped away from Jake. "Look, you shouldn't have come here. You're messing with things you know nothing about."

"
So tell me."

Jake
's quiet, calm voice seemed to steady Bill, and he walked back toward him.

"
You don't want to know," he said quietly, shaking his head.

"
I can help you."

"
Not unless you can break into my old office," Bill said.

"
What happened at Patterson? Why is the third floor empty?"

"
You went there?"

Jake nodded. Bill grabbed his arm.
"Did you find it?"

"
Find what?"

Bill released Jake
's arm and backed away.

"
Nothing. Just forget it."

"
Jesus, Bill, just tell me what sort of trouble you're in. I can help you."

Bill stood still and looked at Jake. The orange light of the security lamp left his eyes in shadows, but I could still see the fear on his face from where I remained hidden.

"I uncovered something. I'm pretty sure it's illegal," he said, his voice lowered, as if he feared being overheard. "I think someone at Patterson Tinker was laundering money. I think it might be that woman who was arrested in California, Miranda Vaughn."

My stomach clenched at the mention of my name and at the accusation. I started to push myself off the wall, but remembered my orders. Taking a deep breath, I watched Jake
's reaction.

"
That's such bullshit, Bill," he said. "What's going on?"

There was a long pause as Bill paced in front of Jake. Finally, he stopped, running a hand through his hair.

"Patterson is into some bad shit," Bill said. "With some bad people. I went along with it, but I'm not taking the fall for everyone. And I'm not going to lose my head over it, either."

Jake crossed his arms.
"What bad people?"

"
Patterson Investment moves money—big money—for bad people. It's become the banker for the world's arms traffickers, narco-terrorists, actual terrorists. Anyone who needs to launder illegal funds."

The words hung in the warm night air, confirming my suspicions about what I saw on the flash drive. In the dark alley, I hugged my arms around me, suddenly chilled in the warm tropic evening.

"Who else is involved with this?" Jake asked.

"
At Patterson? There are a couple guys who know, real higher-ups. But something must have happened because they shut down the energy division on an hour's notice. I need to get back in the building. I left something behind, and if I get it, I can probably save myself," he said, his voice starting to reach peak whine.

"
What do you mean they closed the division? How can they do that?"

Bill continued pacing.
"The energy division was a front. There were a couple guys who researched that sector, but mostly it was used for money laundering."

"
What did you leave at the office?"

"
A small computer drive," Bill said.

In the low light, I saw Jake
's jaw clench. "The drive, what's on it?"

"
Accounts. Pass codes. Names of account holders," Bill said.

"
Where is it?"

Bill stopped and looked around, as if he expected someone to overhear.
"In my office,
twenty-third floor. West wing of the building, corner office. Under the desk, way in the back, I taped a flash drive in the corner. You'll have to crawl all the way under to see it, but it's there." He wiped his face with both hands. "God, I hope it's there."

Jake nodded.
"I'll see what I can find. Then what?"

"
Bring it to me. I'll finish the transactions that are pending, and then I'm done. I'm out of there. I'm not built for this."

"
I can't do that, Bill. I can't help you commit a crime."

Bill grabbed Jake
's arm, and I could see the panic on his face. "You don't understand who you're dealing with," he gasped. "They'll kill me, Jake. But just to make their point, they'll come after everyone I love. They'll go after the kids, after Molly."

He wasn
't faking it. No one was that good an actor. Bill Macias was scared to death.

Jake pulled his arm away and put a hand on Bill
's shoulder. "Calm down. I'm not going to let anything happen to Molly and the kids. Or to you. We'll get you into protective custody."

Bill shook his head.
"I don't know, Jake. I don't think you'll be able to protect me. I've thought about this a long time. How to get out. What I need to do."

"
Bill, don't do anything stupid. I'll get the drive. We'll figure out what to do then. I'll make some calls."

This made Bill look even more uneasy.
"No. No, don't call anyone. Not yet. These people, they have allies everywhere."

Jake shook his head.
"I have someone I trust, who can help you."

"
I don't know," Bill said. "God, I can't believe I envy Ralph and Tim right now. They're spending some time in Club Fed, but when they get out, they'll be rewarded for keeping their traps shut. Stupid, greedy bastards had to have their own side game going on." 

"
Ralph is dead."

Even in the eerie yellow light, I could see the blood drain from Bill
's face at the news. "He's dead? How?"

"
Suicide."

Bill looked around the empty lot again and swallowed hard.

"I gotta get out of Macau," he said, almost as if he was talking to himself. "They're cleaning up all the loose ends. I'm a fucking loose end, Jake."

He started to back away.
"Take care of Lily and Henry, Jake. You gotta promise me that you'll make sure nothing happens to them or Molly, okay? Promise me you'll keep them all safe. And tell them I love them so much."

He kept backing away, and Jake followed.

"Bill, don't leave," Jake said.

"
I gotta think this through," he said, picking up the helmet from the ground. "You don't know who these people are. I need that drive."

"
Then you've got to work with me, Bill. You've got to trust me. Let me talk to some people."

"
No!"

"
If we have the drive, we'd have the leverage."

Bill paused and ran a hand over his face.

"I'm out of here tonight. I'm leaving Macau before they figure out I lost the backup drive," he said.

"
Where are you going?" Jake asked, edging closer to Bill's motorcycle.

"
I've got it all set up. A new life. This is the only way Molly and the kids will be safe," he said. "I just have to make one stop, and I need you to help me. If you do this one thing for me, I'll give you everything. Every name. Everything the FBI needs to make this bust. It will be the biggest case of your career."

"
I really don't care about that, Bill. I just want to make sure you're safe." Jake held up his hands, and Bill nodded.

"
It's the biggest money laundering scheme ever. And I'll tell you every detail," Bill said, as if Jake never spoke. "But I want protection."

Jake nodded.
"I can do that. What do you want?"

"
Meet me in Belize," he said, coming back toward Jake and pulling a card from his pocket. "This is Cecily's number. She'll know how to reach me."

He turned and climbed on the bike, starting it up.

"Fine," Jake said. "I'll be there."

"
Not alone," Bill said. "Bring Miranda Vaughn with you."

The bike roared off, and Jake watched it go. I stayed in the shadows until the bike crossed the empty parking lot and turned onto the frontage road, the lights disappearing as it joined traffic on the busy street.

I stepped out of the alley as Jake turned toward me. Even in the low light, I could see the set of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders.

"
What the hell are you involved in?"

"
I am not involved in any of that," I said.

"
Where's the flash drive?"

I paused. If I shared it, I lost the leverage I had over Bill. But why did Bill want me to go with Jake to
Central America?

"
I know you have it," Jake said.

I briefly thought about whom I
'd rather have on my side—the steely eyed FBI agent who pulled me out of the Patterson office? Or the man who was laundering money for the mob and every other bad guy in the world? I nodded at Jake. There was no going back now.

"
Yes, I have it."

And with that, I kissed off the thirty-seven million dollars I traveled around the world to recover.

There was a long pause and a deadly look in Jake Barnes' eyes.

"
It's time for you to start talking," he said.

Twenty-eight hours after boarding a plane in Macau, I walked out of the airport in
Belize City. My stomach churned from too little sleep and too much adrenaline. It was a long, long series of flights to travel halfway around the globe—made even longer by the fact that the FBI agent at my side was snappish the entire time.

I could understand, from his point of view, why he was angry with me. Sure, I hadn
't shared the fact that I found Bill's flash drive. Or that I had reviewed the files he saved. Or that I had mostly figured out the money-laundering scheme Bill was involved in.

It
's not like I had asked for a partner on this investigation. All I wanted was to get
someone
to transfer thirty-seven million dollars back to the U.S. so I could clear my name and start over. And maybe he could be a little sympathetic about my distrust of government agents, given my recent past.

Throughout the flight, Jake had quietly grilled me on what I knew. When we were able to, I had taken out the laptop and shown him the files on the drive and tried to explain the significance of the long strings of numbers.

Whoever masterminded the scheme was brilliant. The money came in from various banks around the world, concentrated into a stream of millions of dollars that then flowed through various accounts. Fake invoices to and from the shell corporations were issued to provide the thinnest cover for the illegal transactions, and then somewhere in the labyrinth, clean untraceable funds emerged. Then the funds disappeared, back to the parties who set the transfers in motion. Patterson would take a commission for its trouble. Even a small percentage would result in huge profits, if the numbers in the spreadsheet were correct.

Who were they? I had no idea. I showed Jake the encrypted files and the backup copy of a computer. I suspected those would provide clues to who was laundering the money, but that would take more technical skills than I possessed.

After I ran through my theories, Jake was mostly silent the rest of the trip, barely even making a sound as he herded me past the baggage carousel to the taxi stand. A cab pulled up to the curb and Jake threw his duffel bag into the trunk then opened the back door for me. As the car pulled away, he gave the driver an address and conversed in easy Spanish.

"
You speak Spanish?" I asked.

"
You're a California native, and you don't?" he countered.

"
Languages have never been my strong suit," I said, defensive. "I'm better with numbers."

I had tried numerous times to learn Spanish, starting in high school. My accent was atrocious, and I could never get past present-tense conversations about libraries. But give me a string of numbers and I could add them up in my head, find the median and the mean, or just memorize them. Numbers were constant and were something I grasped intuitively.

Jake leaned back in the seat and rubbed his face. "When we get to the hotel, I'm calling for backup," he said quietly.

I gave him a sidelong look.
"What's that mean?"

"
We can't do this alone," he said.

"
Maybe we should talk later," I suggested, as the driver caught my eye in the rear view mirror.

Jake nodded and closed his eyes. I thought he might be asleep and studied his face—the way his thick eyelashes rested against his skin contrasted with the dark scruff from two days without shaving, which gave him a dangerous edge. His dark hair was tousled and his clothes wrinkled from traveling. Even scruffy, he had a magnetism that I had to work hard to resist. If only, I thought. If only he weren
't a law enforcement officer and if only he didn't think I was a criminal. If only…

As the car slowed to pull into the drive in front of the hotel, his eyes opened, and I quickly looked away, embarrassed to be caught staring at him. He helped me out and grabbed his bag. I had only my messenger bag that I grabbed when we left the Mandarin two days earlier. I had abandoned my trendy clutch purse for a fabric pouch with a long strap I could wear across my body. My few pieces of clothing were in his duffel bag. My world, though, was on the computer and the drives that I clutched close to me through the various airports on our route.

As I turned to look at the hotel, the ground shifted beneath me, and my vision dimmed around the edges until I was looking through a dark tunnel. A strong arm caught me before I toppled over, and I leaned into Jake's chest. Whether it was the exhaustion or something else, I nearly didn't pull away from his embrace. Jake righted me and took my messenger bag from me.

"
We'll get something to eat after we check in," he said.

I blinked and nodded, steadying myself and following him into the lobby of the mid-level hotel. He set me and the bags on a padded bench in the lobby and went to check us in.

He had booked us two rooms with an adjoining door. Dumping my bag on the queen-sized bed, I went to the window to let in some fresh air. The room was bright and cheery, overlooking a small park two floors below. Our rooms shared a balcony, and I stepped out to take in the view.

The colors below were vivid in the bright sunlight. Lush green grass, brightly colored flowers.  Even the sky was an almost surreal shade of blue with fluffy bright white clouds drifted by, pushed by a soft breeze that made the tropic heat bearable. 

"I'd prefer it if you would stay indoors," Jake said from behind me.

"
Why?"

"
It's safer."

Trying not to think of what the threat would be, I walked back through the sliding glass door to my room, and Jake followed me from the balcony.

"I'll run out and get us something to eat," he said. "I won't be long. Stay in the room."

I bristled at his command, but was too tired to argue.
"Yeah, sure. You don't have to steal my clothes this time."

"
Don't open the door for anyone but me."

I shrugged. It wasn
't like I was expecting company. Jake handed me a stack of my clothing that had been in his bag, along with the few toiletries, closed the adjoining door between the hotel rooms, and I was alone. Jake's absence made me nervous. I was in a new country, on an idiotic mission, and I was running on few hours of sleep and two bags of peanuts. It was hard to believe it had only been a few days since Jake Barnes had pulled me from underneath that desk. It seemed like a lifetime.

After a long, hot shower, I stretched out on the bed in my
Where's Waldo
shirt and closed my eyes.

I
'll get up and do more research
, I thought.
I should see if any of the account numbers on Bill's drive match up with the accounts in the case discovery.

Then I let the exhaustion overtake me like a wave, pinning me to the mattress, and fell into a sweet, black abyss of sleep.

The pounding on the hotel room door jerked me awake in a disorienting rush of adrenaline. I ran to the door and peered through the peephole and saw Jake on the other side. I opened the door and remembered I wasn't wearing pants.

"
Nice look," he said, brushing by me with a fragrant bag of food.

"
Is that tacos?" I asked, my mouth watering and my half-naked state momentarily forgotten. I grabbed the folded pair of khakis from the bed and slipped them on. According to the bedside clock, I had been asleep for less than an hour.

Jake set the bag on the small table by the window, and I followed like a cartoon dog following a scent trail. My stomach rumbled at the thought of food that hadn
't been packaged by an airline. He slid a stack of napkins toward me and then ripped open the bag to reveal tamales, still steaming in the husks.

"
Oooooh," I murmured, my eyes on the food. I looked up to see him smiling, the first time I'd seen that expression since he learned about Bill's flash drive.

With a shake of his head, he pushed the food toward me.
"I remembered that you had an unnatural affection for Mexican food. Hope these will do."

I nodded and bit into the tamale, the sweet corn dough mingling with the spicy pork filling.

"Hmmm, this is so good," I managed to get out.

Jake watched me eat for another few seconds, raised an eyebrow, and then reached for the tamales. Maybe he
'd never seen a woman actually eat in front of him before. I knew girls who did that. I was never that kind of girl.

After we had wiped out the pile of tamales, Jake leaned back and rested his feet on the bed. He looked as tired as I felt, his eyes shadowed and his face a little pale. I knew he hadn
't slept much more than I had in the past few days.

"
I called the States. Talked to a friend of mine at home."

I put my feet up, too, and leaned back in the chair, waiting to hear the news.

"We have a new plan," he said.

"
We had an old plan?" I asked. "Because I was just kind of winging it at this point."

"
Yeah, I gathered that," he said. "We're going to meet with Bill tomorrow morning and find out what he knows and why he wants to meet here."

"
Do you trust him?"

He paused and looked thoughtful.
"Bill? No, I don't. Why do you think he insisted on meeting here?"

I was pretty sure I knew what Bill wanted. Several of the accounts were in
Belize, including two in my name. If he didn't have the drive with the account numbers and pass codes, he couldn't transfer money out of the accounts. According to the spreadsheets, the balances in the Belize accounts in my name totaled a little more than $10,000. But that information was three weeks old. There could have been transactions after the last update, and if the previous sums were any indication, there could be more money in those accounts.

"
He needs the flash drive to access the accounts," I said.

The drive was the only leverage I had against Bill Macias at this point. If Bill found out that I gave it to the FBI, he
'd have no incentive to do what I needed him to do. I was counting on Bill's greed to help me out—I'd offer him the drive in return for the funds being transferred. What he did with it after that wasn't going to be my concern.

Jake
's expression told me he didn't believe me, or at least thought I was withholding information. He was a perceptive guy.

"
Okay, fine," he said after a pause.

"
Who did you call in the States? The person helping us?" I asked, a feeling of dread seeping into my stomach.

Jake glanced up and looked almost apologetic.
"Matt Reese."

I exhaled as an image of the young prosecutor crossed my mind. The dark haired, reed-thin man in his early thirties, his black-frame glasses giving him a Buddy Holly vibe. I could even hear his voice in my head, calling me a thief and a liar during his closing arguments.

"That guy hates me. Why is helping me?"

Jake shook his head.
"He doesn't hate you."

"
He called me a thief."

"
He was doing his job."

"
He tried to send me to prison for a decade."

Jake bit his lip, and his brow furrowed.
"I told him what's going on, tried to the best of my ability to explain it. I've worked with Matt for several years, and I trust him. And I told him he can trust you."

And I was sure that Matt Reese would put aside the nearly two years he spent prosecuting me, Ralph, and Tim, and embrace me and my investigation of a worldwide money-laundering operation. I reached up and rubbed my forehead and tried to erase the throbbing pain in my temples.

"How do I know I can trust
him
?"

There was a long silence following my question, and I looked up to find Jake staring at me.

"Do you trust me?"

That was a tough question.

"Mostly."

He leaned back in the chair and grinned. Something about his relaxed posture and warm smile broke the tension, and a fraction of the tension in my shoulders gave a little.

"We'll meet with Bill in the morning, hear him out. But I can't let him transfer the funds to some drug cartel."

"
How do you stop him? If we give him the account information, that's what he's going to do. He's too scared of them not to follow his orders."

Jake frowned.
"Yeah, it's a problem."

I didn
't want to leave without getting what I came for. The money in the Patterson accounts might not be the same dollars stolen from the Sahara Fund account, but damn it, those investors deserved to get their money back. And I deserved something, too. Not money. That wasn't what I wanted. Just the ability to get a job. To see my former coworkers on the street and not feel uncomfortable, wondering what they thought of me. Was that too much to ask?