The Fix

by David Baldacci

  “She’s on her way to the airport,” Randall replied.

  “The airport? Why?”

  “She’s heading back to France. The funeral is over and she said she had to get back.”

  “What time is her flight?”

  “I think they board around five-thirty. She’s on Air France.”

  Decker looked at his watch. “Thanks.”

  He clicked off and looked at Jamison. “I think she’s making a run for it.”

  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 questio
n 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?”

  CHAPTER

  52

  “BOY DID I blow that,” said Brown.

  She, Decker, and Jamison were sitting in a conference room at the WFO.

  Bogart, Milligan, and an attorney from the Justice Department were with Natalie in another part of the building going over the preliminary terms of a deal because of her cooperation in the case.

  The woman had broken down in sobs when she’d been taken away from Dulles Airport. And even Decker could tell that this time the tears were real.

  “We got that scenario totally screwed up. She set her own father up,” said Brown. “It never occurred to us. How did you figure that one?”

  “Alex here actually made me think it was possible because of something she said about Anne Berkshire getting Walter Dabney under her thumb. Plus, there was no way someone like Natalie would have been allowed to run up millions in gambling debts. They would have cut her off long before.”

  Brown looked over at Jamison with new respect. “I guess I just assumed that our intel on who was the gambler was true.”

  Jamison said, “Amos and I have a policy of not believing anything unless we know it to be true. And that’s a high bar.” She shot Decker a glance after she said this, but he was lost in thought.

  Brown said, “So Natalie described the guy who approached her. He sounded Russian to her. He made the deal of paying off her debts. It wasn’t like she could really ask her father. She said she owed about three hundred thousand. He might have been able to pay that off, but then she’d have to explain what it was for, and she didn’t want to do that. And she had borrowed the money she gambled with from some not-so-nice people who would have hurt her and her family if she didn’t repay.”

  Jamison said, “So she sets her own father up.”

  Brown said, “She says she didn’t know anything about her dad stealing secrets.”

  “How could she not know?” retorted Jamison. “Where else was he going to get ten million?”

  Brown said, “He might have mortgaged their house, cleaned out his retirement, sold every stock and bond he had. I wonder how they would have reacted if he had done that instead of stealing secrets.”

  Decker interjected, “It was a chance they were willing to take. And if he did do all that, it would make him susceptible to selling secrets down the line. He wouldn’t have had any money left for retirement. So either way, they probably win. It seems that these folks are very patient about how they go about their work. They think long-term. But they didn’t have to worry about that, because he went for the sale-of-secrets route first.”

  “But how do we track down this Russian guy?” asked Jamison. “He’s the only lead we have on this.”

  Decker said, “We have his description and the name he gave Natalie, though it wouldn’t be his real one. They’re circulating that info to all the agencies here and overseas. Maybe something will pop.” He looked at Brown. “You said the money was untraceable?”

  “Now that we know it wasn’t ten million in gambling debts we’re going to take another look at it. But don’t hold out too much hope.”

  “Why not?” asked Jamison.

  “First of all, in the digital age, moving money around the world is a lot easier to do and a lot harder to track. And my guess is that whoever struck the deal with Natalie paid off her debts. The ten mill for the secrets that Dabney stole was probably a sham transaction. We know money did change hands, but we lost it in the digital ether. It could have gone out of one account and bounced around the world before going into another account controlled by the same party. The proof to Dabney that the funds made it to where they were supposed to go would be in the form of Natalie and her family being alive and well.”

  Jamison nodded, obviously disappointed. “That makes sense.”

  “And if Natalie is telling the truth now, it doesn’t seem like she knows anything more that could help us.”

  “So what sort of deal will she get?” Jamison asked Brown.

  She shrugged. “If they believe that she didn’t know what her father was going to do, they might be lenient. There’s no crime in asking your parents to help pay off your debts. And gambling was legal where she did it. If you take the espionage piece out she may be looking at no prison time.”

  “That hardly seems fair for what she did.”

  “She lost her father over this,” said Brown. “She’s going to have to live with that the rest of her life. That might be more punishment than sitting in a prison cell.”

  Decker said, “But what none of this explains is the core issue that began this case for us. Why did Dabney kill Berkshire and then himself? They have to be related to what Natalie did. But how are they connected? If we don’t answer that, we answer nothing. And what the hell is the point of that?”

  He got up and walked out.

  “The man is ticked off,” said Brown.

  Jamison settled her gaze on the other woman. “He doesn’t like bullshit. He likes to cut right through that to get to the truth.” She paused. “How about you?”

  “How about me what?”

  “Do you like bullshit better than the truth?”

  Brown looked at her coolly. “Do I take your aggressive tone to mean that Decker told you what happened between me and Melvin last night? And you’re upset about it?”

  “He did tell me. And I was upset about it. But then you’re both consenting adults, so there you go. No, I was talking about your