by Tim Tigner
63
More Heat
Western Nevada
VIC WOULD HAVE LIKED to order a beer with his lunch but resisted the urge. He wasn’t really a drinker, and that would be a legitimate firing offense. Unlike the illegitimate one on his horizon, he noted with a shake of his head.
The bastards on the upper floors of the Hoover Building weren’t just setting him up to be a scapegoat. They were working him hard first. He felt like an ox who was plowing a field knowing that he’d end the day as dinner.
Unless he solved the case.
The waitress brought his burrito and Vic immediately began basting it with hot sauce. Every exposed bit of tortilla and cheese got a good shellacking.
Vic had always enjoyed a bit of spice, but the new job in Nevada had upped his consumption considerably. It clearly stimulated the same part of his brain that many tickled with chocolate. Unfortunately, his chosen emotional fix also aggravated his stomach. Still, Vic couldn’t resist. He kept bottles of both hot sauce and antacid in his car. The fire and the extinguisher.
As he picked up his fork, Peter Olivo slid into the booth across from him.
“Hey, you made it after all. Sorry, I went ahead.” Vic gestured toward the burrito.
“No worries. I don’t have time to eat. You sounded like you were in desperate need of some release, so I violated a few speed limits. Why don’t you unload as much as you can in ten minutes?”
Peter was a buddy from the Sacramento office. A Hazardous Materials Expert rather than a Special Agent, he was visiting to consult on a Reno case.
Vic pushed his plate aside. He’d have the waitress reheat it once his colleague left. “I’m about to get fired.”
“The mass kidnap case?”
“Right. It’s likely to take months if not years to solve. But I’ll burn up within a week.”
“Burn up?”
“From all the heat. Forty people are out a couple of million each. Most are New York big shots. One is the fricking governor of Florida.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen him on the news. He’s doing a good job leveraging both the anti-crime and the heroic victim angles.” Peter was studying Vic’s plate as he spoke. “You aiming to go out on a disability discharge?”
Vic smiled despite himself. “I like this kind of heat.”
“Good luck with that.”
Vic shrugged.
“So what’s a win?” Peter asked. “What makes you a bull rather than a scapegoat?”
“Finding the money. In public the victims all talk about justice, but in private they’re all fuming over the financial loss. Can’t say that I blame them. Someone took two million dollars of my money, I’d be all over it.”
“So find the money.”
Vic fought back a smart-aleck retort. Peter was there to help, and it was a reasonable if unsophisticated suggestion. “You ever try to track cryptocurrency?”
“Not my shtick.”
“The short of it is, you can’t.”
Peter leaned back and frowned. “How’s that possible, given all the subpoena and computing power at our command?”
“I asked the same question. Franklin in cybercrimes gave me this analogy. He said we have the power to observe the cryptocurrency universe, but only at the macro level. He likened it to looking at a piggy bank that’s always shaking. We can see coins going in, and coins coming out, but connecting the two is impossible.”
“Because it’s an enormous piggy bank.”
“Exactly.”
“What about the human aspect?”
“Of the eight suspects, four are dead and two disappeared at Heathrow. Probably.”
“Probably?”
“We’re not entirely sure it was them rather than another couple pretending to be them. The video is inconclusive.”
“In any case, that still leaves two of the eight alive and in the U.S., right?”
“Yeah, a man and a woman. But I’m not convinced they were in on it. I’ve been in contact with him, and he—”
“What? Why didn’t you start with that?” Peter interjected.
“He says the other two kidnapped her, so he’s tracking her down.”
“I’m confused. Why is it unclear if they were in on it?”
“That’s a longer story than you have time for. In a word: conflicting testimony.”
“But he’s your only real lead?”
“My only short-term lead. And he’s ex-CIA.”
“And you’re current FBI. If you want to stay that way, focus on him. Make him your win.”
“That’s what the Hoover Building has in mind. But it probably doesn’t get the money back or render justice.”
“Still, it saves your career, right? You don’t need an actual victory. Just something that looks enough like one to move the mass kidnap case off the front burner.”
“You sound like my boss would if he ever said what was really on his mind.”
“Good. If I’ve got the two of you aligned, I’ll consider my job done. Gotta run.”
Peter slid out of the booth but looked back at the table. “Seriously. That hot sauce. I don’t know.”
64
Sandcastle
Florida
UNFORTUNATELY, the Beachline Expressway, which ran past Orlando International Airport and eastward to the Space Coast, didn’t have rest stops. Since Lily preferred to stay on the highway, I dropped her at the airport exit with thanks and best wishes. Given the volume of rush-hour traffic, we were confident that she could easily find a safe ride. “What do I owe you for gas?” she asked.
“Gas is on me, but if you could spare a few hairpins I’d be obliged.”
She gave me an uncomfortable look.
“It’s not a fetish. Just something I need for an upcoming project.”
Her face rebounded a bit, but retained a skeptical tinge. Nonetheless, she pulled two bobby pins from a side pocket on her pack. I tucked them away, and we said our goodbyes.
Before pulling back onto the highway, I opened the glovebox and slipped three hundred dollars into the envelope containing the rental agreement for my appropriated ride.
My foray into Orlando International Airport was fruitful and quick. I hopped into an almost-returned Ford Focus and pulled away within seconds of putting my Ford Fusion in park.
The point of the switcheroo was to put a few more days on the clock. The rental agency was likely tracking the Fusion by then. Probably as much from confusion as concern. In either case, neither they nor the police would go out after a moving vehicle. Not a rental Ford, anyway. They’d wait until it was parked, which of course it hadn’t been until now. Hopefully the money I left in the glovebox would square things away. No harm, no foul.
Merging back onto the highway a few minutes later, I thought about the obstacles that lay ahead. I’d tipped my hand to Special Agent Link when inquiring about Personal Propulsion Systems. As a result, he might well have arranged to put surveillance on Oz’s home and office.
Going there now would be a calculated risk. But not going also came with a cost. A steep price. It would delay or perhaps even stall my investigation. Since Katya was almost certainly suffering every minute of captivity, I had to gamble.
To improve my odds, I would assume that there were stakeouts and then find my way around them. During that last hour of my marathon cross-country drive, I figured out how.
I decided to hit the house first, then the office.
I knew how to find where Oz and Sabrina lived because it had been a point of contention in their loan discussions with Trey. The banker had asked about size and location and had gotten excited by both answers. The couple lived in a huge place on the beach.
Oz had gone on to dash Trey’s hopes, explaining that their residence was an architectural oddity. A literal castle on the sand that had once belonged to a German brewer and Oxford classmate who had it custom-built as a modern homage to the ancestral home pictured on his beer bottles.
The brewer died in a boat
ing accident shortly before Oz was scheduled to move across the pond. At the funeral, Oz agreed to buy the pink elephant from the estate for a song. Then, rather than use the architectural oddity strictly as his home, he turned the castle into a corporate residence. A home for all the startup’s employees. A salary saver and tax write-off. It was perfect for his purposes, but worthless for Trey’s.
I didn’t have the castle’s address, but figured it couldn’t be hard to find. Rather than drive State Road A1A with my eyes peeled, hoping to get lucky before dark, I inquired at a gas station. “About three miles down on the left, just past the golf course.”
Because of the guns and badges and radios, the laws and procedures and uniforms, law enforcement agencies tend to be fundamentally misunderstood. People forget that police stations are essentially the same as every other organization. They’re staffed with officers and administrators who face dozens of competing professional priorities and plenty of complicating personal issues. Too much work, too little time.
If an FBI office in Nevada asks a Florida police precinct to watch a house or office as part of a robbery investigation, they will likely comply. In a routine way. As time permits. And not with their best guy. This isn’t disrespect, it’s human nature.
The castle house was on the barrier island that protected most of the eastern coast of Florida. The PPS office was on the mainland, across the Intracoastal Waterway, in a commercial zone closer to Cape Canaveral. I’d driven past it earlier without stopping or slowing, taking mental pictures for future reference and comparison. I hadn’t detected a surveillance operation, but that didn’t mean one wasn’t there.
I got the same initial impression of the castle. It almost certainly was not being watched. At least not effectively with a routine operation. The location was too isolated to accommodate anything routine, and the priority was too low for anything extreme. No chance of agents in ghillie suits with night vision goggles and sniper scopes.
The architectural footprint resembled four classic castle turrets all shoved together to create a shape a bit like butterfly wings. The street side of the house had a big central door designed to resemble a drawbridge, and the only windows facing that way were tall and thin, like archer slits. While far from conventional, I thought it was pretty cool.
The castle was three stories tall.
The city provided public beach access parking half a mile down the road. I aimed for it.
Although I doubted that the big bureaucratic wheels at the rental car company had churned through enough checks to spit out a stolen car alert, I decided to err on the side of caution and assume my ride might be towed.
After parking in the darkest available spot, I slipped the Glock into a shoulder holster worn beneath my shirt. During the day it would be obvious, but at night it would pass a casual glance.
I put the car key in my backpack with the MP7 and hid it in the mangroves of a restricted access sand dune. Nobody would be looking that way, much less walking back there at night.
I trotted toward the castle using the firmer sand down by the water as joggers tend to do. Most of the bordering beachfront homes were lit only by the moon. They were probably second or third homes, used by their elite owners only when St. Barts and Saint-Tropez weren’t calling.
The castle came into view—a dark silhouette faintly outlined by the moon. The facade was more or less square in that it was as tall as it was wide. Aside from the fact that there were large cylindrical faux turrets on the left and right, the brewer-built beach house appeared typical on its ocean-facing side. Lots of glass and plenty of balcony. Like the adjacent homes, the castle connected with the beach via an elevated, gated walkway that protected the precious vegetation. Also like its neighbors, it showed no signs of life.
I jogged past without slowing and continued another quarter mile before circling back, as joggers do. This time, I ran along the top edge of the beach, where the sand morphed into sand dune and the mangroves sprouted. I stayed close to them, keeping our shadows and silhouettes intertwined.
When I neared the castle walkway, I tripped intentionally and dropped to the ground.
65
A Bigger Plan
Florida
I HAD ENJOYED the second epiphany of my investigation shortly after my talk with Vic. Or maybe it was a delusion. When you were thick in the weeds—or mangroves—it was hard to tell.
At the time, I had tried to stifle my enthusiasm. To keep my hopes from reaching breakneck height. But as I climbed the underside of the castle’s elevated walkway, I found myself buoyed by bulletproof logic.
The sequence went like this.
Oz and Sabrina had taken Katya with them. That was risky. Taking a hostage increased the odds of getting caught.
Several hours later, Oz and Sabrina flew from Vegas to London and disappeared. That was risky. Lots of pinch points involved.
Two risky moves that are entirely unnecessary—if your goal is to escape abroad and you’ve got ninety-two million dollars at your disposal.
Why not simply charter a private plane? That would be faster, safer and easier.
Passport control for private jets is a joke. People with that kind of money don’t play by ordinary rules. They pay for privileges. And, of course, the private aviation facilities that count on those exceptionally demanding jet-set consumers have obsequious behavior built into their business models. They bend over backwards to accommodate, then charge through the nose.
So I didn’t believe that Katya had been kidnapped and discarded. And I didn’t believe that Oz and Sabrina had fled the country on a commercial jet. They had a bigger plan in play. I didn’t know what, but I knew where—if not at present then at least in the past.
But I was alone in my thinking.
Oz’s ruse had worked.
I was also alone in my positioning, which at that moment was on the verge of investigating the house where Katya’s kidnappers had lived and schemed.
Vic told me that Oz and Sabrina “left nothing of interest at either location.” I considered that to be a huge clue. A big blinking neon sign. But I had a different perspective from Vic.
Vic assumed that Oz and Sabrina had been in on the kidnap and ransom all along. Under that scenario, of course they would have gotten their affairs in order at home before leaving for good.
But I knew they hadn’t been in cahoots with our kidnappers.
I knew they had simply reacted to an opportunistic score.
And yet they’d cleaned up.
They’d “left nothing of interest at either location.”
How was that possible? And why bother? If you had just stolen ninety-two million dollars, why concern yourself with any of your old stuff—a few prized possessions and pictures aside? You wouldn’t care about your old clothes. You wouldn’t give two shakes about your struggling startup’s modest office. You’d just run far and fast to your new life in the lap of luxury.
But they hadn’t.
They’d grabbed Katya. And they’d made cleanup arrangements. Two very distinct and incongruent acts.
My assumption was that Oz had called home when he was pretending to call 911. He’d ordered the house and office abandoned and arranged the phony Vegas to London flight. Why?
There was one obvious explanation. A simple answer that checked both boxes. Concealment.
But what were they concealing? Not the theft of ninety-two million. That was out in the open. They had to be concealing something else. Something whose value was great enough to keep it at the forefront of their minds even immediately after a vast unplanned fortune fell into their hands.
As I worked my way from the underside of the walkway to the underside of the castle’s big front deck, I didn’t have a detailed hypothesis as to what that competing priority might be. But I had a general idea. And I had hope that I would soon learn more.
My optimism sprang from knowledge that Vic didn’t possess. Knowledge based on my personal experience rather than his bad assumption. I
knew that the home and office cleanup had been quick and cursory, because Oz ordered them at the last minute. As everyone knows, when you rush, things get missed. Little things perhaps, but hopefully enough in this case to indicate intention, direction or destination.
Despite doubting that the house was under surveillance, I didn’t risk going onto the castle’s main deck, which branched out above the mangroves from the second floor. For the same reason, I ignored the balconies attached to the third. I climbed straight to the roof.
If a serious surveillance op was underway, I figured I’d find someone there. So I kept quiet and timed my noisier moves to coincide with the crashing waves.
Nobody was there.
The rooftop was big and flat and presumably leveraged for both private sunbathing and upscale entertaining. Perhaps during rocket launches from the nearby Cape. Given all that, I knew it would be equipped with an access point. An entrance to the castle.
Scrambling over the ledge after an uneventful climb, I quickly spotted a hatch that also served as a skylight—one secondary to a large central glass dome. Sized roughly the same as a conventional door laid flat, the hatch bubbled outward to keep debris from settling.
I crept to the rim and peered inside. Even cupping my hands, I couldn’t see much more than a few stairs. I had a flashlight on my phone, but wasn’t about to employ it.
The hatch lock appeared typical for a house door, except that it wasn’t attached to an external handle. From the outside, it appeared that you simply lifted the door by its rim. Presumably with the assistance of concealed springs.
I was prepared to go to work on the lock with Lily’s bobby pins, but a trial tug eliminated the need. The hatch wasn’t locked. Easy to overlook when you were in a hurry, I assumed. Come to think of it, why would you bother locking up at all if you were leaving for good? Of course it was the police who had been there last. The officer probably left it as he found it.
I raised the skylight just enough to roll over the edge and slip inside. Quietly bracing myself, I settled it back into closed position. Then I palmed my Glock and crept down the stairs.