Innocent as Sin

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Fine,” Foley said angrily. “As usual you have the upper hand. What’s your plan?”

  Bertone lowered the pistol, engaged the safety, and slipped the weapon back into his belt.

  “We must find Kayla,” Bertone said matter-of-factly. “I sent a man to the apartment she rented. No one was there. He went to the ranch she just sold. No one was there.”

  “Beautiful,” Foley said sarcastically.

  “She’s a young woman of limited means and less imagination. She’s probably still somewhere in Phoenix. Call in any markers you may have with the personnel department or whatever it’s called nowadays.”

  “Human Resources,” Foley said. “It’s the weekend, but I can get to her files. I have remote access to the corporate computer.”

  “Find out whatever you can, her extracurricular activities, friends, boyfriends. We will find her.”

  “And then what?”

  “Give her to Gabriel, of course.”

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Foley said. “At least, none has ever picked her up at work or taken her out to lunch. She has some friends in the private bank division. I can get you a list of names.”

  “Call them yourself,” Bertone said.

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to be too closely—”

  “You’re already in over your head,” Bertone cut in. “Unless you want to take the responsibility for my correspondent account, find Kayla Shaw.”

  32

  Royal Palms

  Saturday

  9:35 P.M. MST

  Then Steve Foley,” Kayla said to Grace, “told me to open a correspondent account with the transmitting overseas bank and deposit Bertone’s check while Steve went to the CEO for advice on the Bertone account.”

  “Did you?” Grace asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Friday.”

  “What did the bank’s CEO say?” Faroe asked.

  “I haven’t heard from Foley. Not one damn word.” The look on Kayla’s face said she was scared.

  And angry.

  “How long does it usually take for Mr. Foley to reach the CEO?” Grace asked.

  “A phone call. At most, maybe an hour or two of phone tag. Foley is a golden boy at the bank.”

  Grace nodded, sipped lemonade, and said, “Tell me more about this correspondent account. How is it different from an ordinary account?”

  Rand chewed a mouthful of cold cuts and listened. Grace had been a federal judge. She knew how to cut to the heart of the matter, but she could do it without pain if she liked the person.

  So far, she’d been kid-gentle with Kayla.

  He didn’t know if that was good or bad. All he knew was that he’d warned Kayla. After that, the choices she made were hers. She was a woman fully grown.

  And his palms itched for the feel of her skin.

  “I’m no expert on correspondent accounts,” Kayla said slowly. “My expertise is domestic rather than international banking.”

  Grace waited.

  “Usually,” Kayla said, “correspondent accounts are arranged on a bank-to-bank basis. Someone on the sixth floor had to walk me through the process.”

  “Why did your boss ask you to do something out of your usual area?” Faroe asked.

  “Steve said that using a correspondent account would subject our bank to slightly different rules. In effect, it would shift responsibility for knowing about the customer’s background from us to the transmitting institution. We could cash Bertone’s check and still…” Kayla’s mouth flattened.

  “Have a defensible position if the feds came calling?” Grace suggested.

  “That’s my take,” Kayla agreed. “But I’m small change in the banking world. What I see might not be what I think I see.”

  “I think you have excellent vision,” Grace said.

  “Whatever. The account worked. Too well, if you ask me.”

  “Meaning?” Faroe said.

  Kayla’s slender hand became a fist around the silver dollar. “When I checked the account yesterday afternoon, it had almost doubled since I deposited the first check.”

  Grace and Faroe looked at each other.

  “How much money are we talking about?” Grace asked.

  Kayla hesitated, then opened her palm. The silver dollar gleamed. “I’m not sure our ‘prenup’ covers information that specific.”

  Grace laughed.

  “How about if we tell you?” Faroe said.

  “Excuse me?” Kayla said.

  Faroe went to the table that held the scrambled fax machine. He flipped through papers until he found what he wanted. “According to our figures, Bertone has transferred two separate sums to your bank. The transmitting bank was the Bank of Aruba on the island of Aruba. Total deposits were slightly less than forty-two million bucks, U.S.”

  Kayla swallowed hard, then nodded. “I guess you wasted your silver dollar. You don’t need me.”

  All Grace said was, “Is that money still on deposit at your bank?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  “Do you expect more deposits in the future?”

  Kayla hesitated, then sighed. “Yes. Bertone said he’d make more, and quickly.”

  “When did that conversation take place?” Grace asked.

  “Earlier this evening, just before—” Her voice broke at the memory of the shadow man, the garden, the knife.

  “Just before he tried to have you removed from the scene,” Grace said.

  “Just before he tried to have her killed,” Rand muttered.

  “I like her version better,” Kayla said.

  “Putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the oink factor,” Faroe said.

  Kayla made a tight sound that could have been laughter.

  Faroe lowered himself to the couch next to Grace and asked, “On the paperwork that went into creating that new correspondent account, who is the responsible bank employee?”

  Kayla closed her eyes. When she opened them, Faroe was watching her with something close to compassion.

  “Me,” she said bleakly. “My name is on the account. Everything will come back on me. God, I’m so screwed.”

  Faroe glanced at Grace. Both of them looked at the corner of the room, where a very discreet security camera recorded everything that happened.

  The fax whined and spit out sheets of paper.

  Faroe got up and retrieved them. He nodded to Grace. Then he turned to Kayla.

  “If you’d disappeared tonight, like you were supposed to,” Faroe said, “you’d have gone down for money laundering when that bank account was flagged by an auditor.”

  “But you didn’t disappear,” Grace said. “You didn’t hop a plane for Ecuador or Uruguay. You’re still here, still alive. If you let us, we’ll make sure your side of the story gets told.”

  “I could get on a soapbox and sing arias for a grand jury,” Kayla said bitterly, “but that wouldn’t change the fact that it’s my word against my golden-boy boss. Guess who comes out on the losing end of that scenario?”

  “You’re right, Rand,” Faroe said. “She isn’t as innocent as she looks. And thank God for it.”

  “Does that mean she’s off your short list of suspects?” Rand asked.

  “His what?” Kayla asked.

  “My shit list,” Faroe said. “We had to decide if you were a sacrificial lamb or a crooked banker taking bribes to launder millions of dollars in dirty money.”

  Kayla looked from Faroe to Rand.

  “I disagreed all along,” Rand said. “I knew the Siberian—Bertone. No one like you would have willingly gotten in bed with him.”

  “What you’ve told us meshes perfectly with what we already knew,” Grace said.

  “And your mental attitude is solid,” said Faroe. “There aren’t many young women—or men, for that matter—who could keep level with what’s happened in the last forty-eight hours.”

  Kayla lifted her eyebrows.

&nbs
p; And waited.

  Grace smiled.

  Faroe said something under his breath. Then he met Kayla’s cool eyes. “We need you to get inside this mess and shut Bertone down.”

  Kayla flipped the silver dollar. “I thought this covered it.”

  “That’s a bikini. You need a Mustang survival suit.”

  “What does a survival suit cost?”

  “Sign on with St. Kilda Consulting.”

  “Told you,” Rand said.

  Faroe ignored him. “We’ll give you cover, employment, and pay that equals the risk. It’s the same agreement we sign with all our operators.”

  “If you sign on with St. Kilda,” Grace said, “I doubt that American Southwest Bank would ever employ you again.”

  Kayla laughed abruptly. “Ya think?”

  “But part of the deal is that St. Kilda would make sure you had legal coverage for any trouble the bank might want to make,” Grace finished. “Your choice, Kayla.”

  “The bank is the least of my worries,” Kayla said. “Andre Bertone isn’t. What about him?”

  Faroe gave an odd, elegant, exaggerated shrug, the kind Kayla had seen Mexican businessmen make in the middle of negotiations. It was sign language for Que sera, sera.

  What will be, will be.

  “We’ll do everything we can to ensure your safety,” Grace said.

  “As long as it doesn’t interfere with the assignment,” Rand pointed out coldly.

  “Back up,” Faroe said to him. “Kayla isn’t stupid. She knows she’s at risk.” He handed her the papers he’d just pulled out of the fax. “The ambassador agrees. If you want to work for St. Kilda Consulting, we’re yours.”

  “Can you bring Bertone down?” Kayla asked.

  “With you, I’m betting yes. Without you…” Faroe shrugged again.

  Kayla looked at Rand.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and waited.

  “So this was a recruitment from the instant I saw you at the party,” she said to Rand. “You were told to hook me and reel me in so St. Kilda could look me over, decide if they trusted me.”

  “I never lied to you,” Rand said.

  “And if I don’t sign up?”

  “We’ll give you a safe house while we go after Bertone,” Faroe said.

  “But without me, you won’t have as good a chance of getting him.”

  Faroe nodded.

  Oh, well, I guess I never really was cut out to be a banker anyway, Kayla thought. She read the fax pages quickly, then more slowly. With a rather grim smile, she took the pen Faroe offered her.

  Move over, Alice. I’m coming down the rabbit hole.

  She signed and handed the pen back to him.

  “You can keep the silver dollar,” Faroe said to her.

  “I was planning to.”

  33

  Royal Palms

  Saturday

  9:50 P.M. MST

  Faroe shoved an unlabeled DVD into the TV player, handed the controller to Kayla, pointed to the pause button, and said, “Grace and I have to go wrestle with the Krebs cycle. Knock on the door if you have any questions Rand can’t answer.”

  As Faroe and Grace left the room, a Scots-accented voice came from the TV speakers.

  “My name is John Neto. I am an intelligence official employed by the government of Camgeria. My small country is in the heart of the conflict zone of equatorial West Africa.”

  The screen showed a montage of beautiful seacoast, vivid green jungles, wild scrubland, and slender, very dark people who looked into the camera with indifference or hostility.

  “I’ve been there,” Kayla said. “I spent a week trying to get a bus to Niger.”

  “There aren’t any roads from there to Niger,” Rand said.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t speak the language. It took me a week to give up and take a Russian-made passenger plane flown by the most drunken pilot who ever got off the ground. Landing in Niger was…an experience.”

  “What did you think of Camgeria?”

  “Amazing. Appalling. Yet so vivid in spite of the poverty. Smiles everywhere. Kids laughing.”

  “Have you seen it lately?”

  “I read the papers and surf the Net,” Kayla said.

  And even if she hadn’t, the images on the TV in front of her would have told her all she needed to know. Photos, headlines, web site content from Camgeria and other West African nations.

  Armed insurrections, genocides, and refugee camps, all played against a backdrop of green and blue. And red.

  Blood.

  Agony.

  Death.

  Whoever had put the DVD together was a master of the PowerPoint presentation. Kayla felt herself drawn back to her youth, to a time when her world was wide open, when optimism was the rule rather than the exception, when all possibilities were equal. Camgeria had been a kind of paradise then. Now it was a kind of hell.

  Maimed children.

  Starving babies.

  Mothers with empty eyes and breasts.

  “God, such misery,” Kayla said. “What happened?”

  “Andre Bertone.”

  The TV showed a still color photo of a white man standing in the middle of a group of black men. Behind them was a dirt landing strip.

  “East Camgeria?” she asked.

  “You have a good eye.”

  “I spent a lot of time trying to get out of there,” she said dryly.

  A large twin-engine transport plane whose tail numbers had been painted over crouched on the dirt strip, props turning, dirt and grit flying. Shirtless black men carried off armloads of assault rifles from the cargo hold of the aircraft. In the foreground, another group of laborers stacked heavy, lumpy burlap bags.

  “Coltan,” Rand said before Kayla could ask. “It’s vital for modern electronics. There’s been a worldwide shortage of coltan for the last decade. Each of those bags holds fifty kilos. That would make them worth about five thousand dollars apiece.”

  Kayla stopped counting bags on the screen when she passed a quarter million dollars.

  The camera zoomed in on the white man.

  “That’s Bertone!” Kayla said.

  “Aka the Siberian,” Rand agreed.

  Bertone was wearing a white expedition suit he’d sweated through at the arms and back. Red dust clung to the wet places. He was smiling.

  “Like a vulture at a carcass,” Rand said.

  “When I was backpacking, we called Bertone’s costume a ‘bwana suit.’ He looks like he was born for it.”

  “A gunrunner in a bwana suit. As far as I know, this is the only photo that shows the Siberian in action.”

  “Why do you call him the Siberian?”

  “A few years ago Bertone, aka Victor Krout, aka a lot of other names, was one of the most successful arms merchants in the world. He imported a quarter million small arms, twenty million rounds of ammunition, at least a million antipersonnel land mines, fifty thousand heavy machine guns, give or take, and numerous military vehicles, including at least a hundred armored personnel carriers and twenty decommissioned Soviet assault helicopters. All of it was used to attack native villages in four separate African countries.”

  “That’s how he made his money? Running guns?” Kayla asked. “According to what he told the bank, he’s an oil broker.”

  “He is, now. Before that he was the gasoline that turned centuries of smoldering ethnic and tribal conflict into a hellfire that killed thousands of innocent people. They’re dead because Bertone poured a flood of modern military weapons into primitive tribal politics.”

  Rand started to say something more, then let John Neto’s voice talk over the savage images.

  “My people have been killing one another for a long time, yes, but Bertone and his ilk made it possible to murder with ruthless modern efficiency. The losses were horrifying. We were a primitive people delivered into the hands of modern warfare, warfare driven by gunrunning opportunists like Andre Bertone.”

  Kayla hit t
he pause button. “I thought diamonds were the bloody item of barter.”

  “Bertone took whatever was offered—exotic hardwoods, illegal ivory, minerals. His favorite was bargeloads of oil siphoned from government pipelines by rebel thieves.” Rand smiled thinly. “He is one smart son of a bitch. When other arms runners demanded cash, he pioneered the barter economy. Really widened the killing field.”

  Before yesterday, Kayla wouldn’t have believed it. Arms dealing in the upper crust of Phoenix? No way. That sort of thing was reserved for third-world outlaws.

  She hit a button on the controller and continued her unhappy education.

  “Bertone has a genius for turning a profit on a transaction with one group of combatants, then reinvesting that profit in more arms, which are then sold to the first customer’s enemies.”

  The picture on the screen changed. No longer a voice-over, the camera pulled back to reveal Brent Thomas and John Neto.

  “Yet today,” Thomas said, “Andre Bertone has UN diplomatic credentials and is a respected international oil dealer.”

  “Yes. Enough money buys respectability. As we speak, Bertone is an intermediary for shiploads of Eastern European weapons that will be paid for with long-term oil concessions the Camgerian rebels will grant to oil companies owned by Brazil and France. Even your own government deals with Bertone for oil.” Neto smiled thinly. “Like gold or diamonds or dollars, oil can be laundered to hide its source. Andre Bertone is brilliant at just that. Oil-hungry governments, or governments wishing to arm the enemy of their enemy, are willing to overlook Camgerian deaths. We are a pawn in the larger global game.

  “And we are being sacrificed.”

  More images of butchery, starvation, disease; vultures thick on the ground.

  Kayla didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to think she lived in a world where war was a commodity like any other.

  And worse, that she’d handled blood money for the bloodiest butcher of all.

  Rand grabbed the controller just before it dropped to the floor. He paused the DVD. “You okay?”

  “No,” she said. “I feel sick. Dirty.”

  “Bertone will do that to anyone with any decency in them.”