Stalking Moon

by Неизвестный

  “You know what I want?” I asked him.

  “Gonna take a while. But when you called last night, I started crunching the financial data. I used the IRS databases, some from the Justice Department, other stuff that I've collected on my own. Here's where we are so far.”

  He handed me a list of fifteen countries, eleven of which were printed in a purple font, one in yellow, and the other three in red.

  “Purple means they're clear. Yellow means not likely, but the data's not all in. Red means I've found at least one of your names, and the computers are looking for more names, plus getting me details of the accounts in the one name identified.”

  I'd faxed him a copy of the newspaper photo of the groundbreaking at Zamora's maquiladora. He spread it on top of one of the laptop keyboards.

  “Major financial players. Zamora and Garza.”

  “Medina?”

  “Nothing yet. As expected, nothing for Xochitl, whose real name, by the way, is Svetlana Peshkova. From a small village in the Caucasus, with known ties to Chechnya rebels, according to Russian Intel files.”

  “I thought she was Albanian.”

  “Laura, there's a lot of people here using fake IDs.”

  “Kinda like you and me,” I said.

  “Right. Okay. These other two people in the newspaper photo were harder to identity. I had to scan their faces, digitally enhance them, then run them through the face identification software and compare them to officials in the Zedillo government. This one's name is Carlos Ibarra. Ministry of Tourism. This other one is more interesting. Luis Ocampo. He was once in the Public Ministry, which operates under the Office of the Attorney General. Medina's inner circle. Ocampo was bounced when Fox got elected and appointed a new public security chief. Alejandro Gertz Manero. Manero cleaned house with a vengeance.”

  “I don't really want all this detail.”

  “Okay. Let's switch to the offshore bank accounts. Here's a summary of money trails for Ocampo, Zamora, and Garza, who, by the way, was once a major player in the Mexican drag cartel headed by El Chapo. Real name, Joaquin Guzman, who made major headlines a year ago when he bought his way out of Puente Grande prison. Toughest in all of Mexico.”

  “Don, way too many details I'm not interested in.”

  “Believe me, you want to know about El Chapo. Along with some of his top lieutenants, he's wanted by the US feds. Warrants have been issued. If El Chapo or any of his guys are found and arrested, they could be extradited across the border. Guess who's in charge of the task force, waiting to process the extradition?”

  “Michael Dance.”

  “Bingo bongo.”

  He pushed off from the laptop, gliding his chair across the room to a stack of bound documents with red covers.

  “I'm assembling all the backup data. You'll get summary printouts. Each folder is for a different country.”

  “What are we looking at?”

  “Well. There's the usual suspects of offshore secret banking accounts. Bahamas, Caymans, Panama, a lot of little Caribbean islands that have tighter morals and are really not worth looking at. Then there's Lebanon, Israel, Russia, and Liechtenstein. But I struck gold when I started looking at banks on Niue and other Pacific Island accounts. Major tax havens. But last year the US government declared sanctions against transfers of money to Niue.”

  “Please, Don. Skip the lectures, okay? I don't have time.”

  “You'll never succeed in a government job.”

  “Thank God for that,” I said.

  “But you need to know this much. There's an agency called the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering. FATE It's an inter-governmental group, develops and promotes policies to defeat money laundering schemes. Not just in the US, but internationally. As far as we're concerned, FATF is the group that sets up money laundering counter-measures in non-member countries. So. Niue. This dinky island money laundering paradise. Nobody can move money in, and it's getting increasingly difficult to move money out. So that's what I looked at. Not what might have gone in, but what's going out.”

  “And that's how you came up with this list of players?”

  “Yup, But. . . ”

  “You've got one hell of a lot of buts today, Don.”

  “One last thing. A lot of Mexicans working in the US send money home to their families. Conservative estimate, six billion a year. One of my sidelines in this office is to see if any of the drug cartels are trying to expand into this money transfer business. Take it over, take a percentage, whatever. So when I cross-reference every bit of financial stuff I've got here from all these sources, this name wins the lottery.”

  “Garza.”

  “I'd guess that he's really Zamora's man.”

  “But that doesn't mean that Zamora is involved.”

  “Doesn't mean he isn't. Mexican drug cartels have many layers of cutouts to protect the top players.”

  “But no direct connection to Zamora?”

  “No.”

  “Medina?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “And Michael Dance? How does he fit into this nasty business?”

  “You'll have to ask him yourself.”

  “Why me?”

  “He's powerful, Laura.”

  “What about Jake Nasso? Taá Wheatley?”

  “Just haven't had time to get to them. I thought the Mexicans were most important, so I ran all their data first.”

  “Well, I'm going to have to talk to Dance.”

  “You're going to brace an Assistant US Attorney?”

  “Today,” I said. “You just keep working on the rest of the financial data.”

  “When are you meeting him?”

  “His birthday party. Tonight, at his house down in Tubac.”

  “Seeing as how you escaped from his custody, I don't think a birthday present would be appropriate.”

  “I'm bringing him a big cake,” I said. “He just won't like what pops out of it.”

  “Well, it's going to rain down there. Don't get wet.”

  Don't get wet, I thought. Don't get water. Don't get the water man.

  “Trucks,” I said excitedly. “Godammit, how could I be so stupid.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Can you hack into the Border Patrol's satellite imaging programs?”

  “I can arrange it. What do you need?”

  I told him, he made three phone calls, and we waited until one of the laptops pinged. He made another phone call and held the cell phone out to me.

  “Tell him what you want.”

  “The Nogales border crossing,” I said.

  Nobody answered, but I watched images flicking across the laptop screen.

  “Not the main crossing,” I said. “Switch to the newer one, where the trucks go.”

  A high shot appeared on the laptop covering an area of at least fifty square miles.

  “Tighten in,” I said. “North of the truck crossing, tighter, tighter. . . there. Just leave that up for a while. And thanks, whoever you are.”

  “Laura, what am I looking at?” Don said.

  “Trucks. Hundreds of trucks.”

  “So?”

  “There's a new border agreement for long-haul truckers. Cruzadores, they're called. Crossers. Before the US signed this agreement, the Mexican cruzadores had to park their rigs in these lots and wait to transfer the goods to another truck. Now they just stay there a few hours until all their paperwork is checked. They can take the cargo directly to US cities. It's all sealed electronically, so the trucks can pass with a minimum of hassle by US Customs.”

  “I don't get it.”

  “Most of these trucks are bringing goods out of Mexico. But one of the things they need desperately in Nogales is good water. So some of these trucks are certified as empty when they cross north to pick up cargos of bottled water.”

  “And even the empty trucks are electronically sealed?” Don said excitedly.

  “Right.”

  “But they'r
e not? What are they bringing in? Narcotics?”

  “In a diesel semi-trailer? Nobody would take a chance loading something that big with narcotics. No. They're smuggling people.”

  “Human cargo.”

  “Women.”

  “Somebody's paid money,” Don said, already working at another laptop. “Bribes to tamper with the process of electronic sealing.”

  “The women are put inside, then the truck is sealed. US Customs must have a database of all cruzadores that have the necessary papers. All the trucks, with license plates, plus all the international paperwork.”

  “I'm on it,” Don said.

  “How long will it take?”

  “In one sense, not long. It's just a matter of money. Like the satellite images. Once I find a hacker who has up-to-date copies of the Customs database, I can get listings of whatever trucks you want. But that's the easy part. What trucking company? What dates? If you don't give me some specific filters, I could be crunching that database forever without knowing what I was looking at.”

  I wrote out a name and a date.

  “Look for this,” I said.

  “Where will you be?”

  “I'll wait outside.”

  A wedding was taking place in the grassy main square of the Lodge, with a chuppa positioned in front of the wall behind the swimming pool. The ceremony had just finished, and the bride and groom were kissing to wild hoots and applause.

  The bride wore a white wedding gown, off the shoulders, and the groom grinned proudly in a traditional tuxedo. With a shock I realized the bride was Joanna, who worked the front desk.

  “Laura?”

  One of the guests stood in front of me, wearing a powder blue two-piece periwinkle dress, holding a champagne flute. She pulled off her sunglasses and I saw it was Donna, one of the servers at the restaurant.

  “Laura?” she said again. “Is that really you?”

  I shrank back against a sumac, nodding. The eighty or ninety guests were all dressed so well, they were so elegant, so perfect that I felt sloppy and out of place.

  “Hi, Donna,” I said.

  “Are you staying here? I didn't see your name on the guest list for breakfast.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I'm just visiting a friend. In room nineteen.”

  “Isn't this grand, this wedding? Don't they look happy?”

  “Grand,” I said. “Um, look, I've got to leave. Nice to see you, Donna.”

  “Okay. Sorry to bother you.”

  “It's not a bother.”

  But she stepped away from me, put her sunglasses on, and turned back to the party. I stared at the party, the bride, fascinated by the happiness of the wedding, wondering what it would be like to get married again.

  A fantasy, I thought.

  I went back to Don's room just as paper finished chugging out of his printer.

  “You'll love this,” he said.

  I read what he'd found.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Going to a dinner party,” I said.

  Don frowned at my wrinkled jeans and yellow tee.

  “You'd better dress up.”

  “No time,” I said. “Besides, I won't be staying there very long.”

  35

  Driving into Tubac after sunset, I saw the first monsoon of the summer working its rainy way up from Nogales. Still forty miles away, the monsoon dominated the southwestern sky. Dark, gunmetal-black clouds, webbed with yellowish-white veins of lightning.

  South of the Tubac art colony, Dance's house stood off-road from US 19. After two miles of a smoothly graded dirt road, I crossed over a cattle guard and onto a paved surface. His entire property was surrounded by high fencing, with video cameras stationed every hundred feet. Double-parked cars filled his circular driveway. I parked my rented Ford Escort between a Ferrari and a Lamborghini.

  The house looked glass-sheeted and framed in steel, much of which had rusted to a burnished yellow color. The front door stood open. Live jazz came from a central room, which was surrounded by a three-story atrium walled on two sides entirely with glass. One wall looked east, where the sky was still clear and spectacularly cobalt blue. The other wall directly faced the monsoon, already much closer, although I couldn't tell if it would move west of the house or flood us with rain.

  I had no idea how many people were at the party, nor did I recognize anybody. The servers were dressed in rodeo cowboy clothing and extraordinary red boots by Paul Bond, the Nogales boot maker. Some women wore diaphanous sheaths, others strapless gowns, some just jeans and tees. A very mixed crowd, except all of them looked rich.

  “Laura, honey.”

  Jake Nasso pushed a glass of red wine into my hand.

  “What are you doing here, Laura?”

  “I need to talk with Dance.”

  “Don't think he's much in the mood for that.”

  Setting the wineglass on the carpet beside my feet, I hoisted my briefcase a few inches and ducked my head toward it. A young couple tangoed by, the woman kicking the wineglass over without realizing what she'd done. The reddish stain blossomed on the carpet, but Nasso didn't even bother to look at it.

  “He will be.”

  “What have you found out, honey?”

  “I know it all,” I said, looking up at the balcony two floors above the atrium. “I'm going up there. Away from the noise. Tell him to look for me in one of the rooms.”

  “Okay. I'll bring him.”

  “No. Him only. I want to look over that railing and see you standing in the middle of this floor. Stand right on the wine stain, so I can find you. Clear?”

  “You got some plastique in that briefcase?”

  “Just paper.”

  “You don't mind if I have a peeksee?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Nasso was intensely serious, troubled, wary. I saw the stairway up and turned toward it.

  “Tell Dance I'm upstairs.”

  Nasso watched me climb to the second balcony, but when I got to the top floor, he'd disappeared. I opened doors at random. Master bedroom. Guest bedroom. Guest bath. Office. On the wall facing the monsoon. I sat in his antique Eames chair. The desktop was cluttered with documents of all sizes and colors, but I didn't bother to even glance at them. A gold pocket watch sat on a jade stand, next to the hooded green library lamp. I turned it on, walked over to turn off the two floor lamps.

  Thunder echoed in the distance.

  I waited.

  Dance stopped at the doorway, leaning against the jamb, holding a squarish glass of what looked like bourbon. He wore a dark blue blazer over an off-white pleated cotton shirt, the neck band buttoned. Designer jeans tapering into a fabulous pair of boots, the uppers colored dark red with elaborate tooling, the bottoms a faded-leaf yellow. He saw me looking at them and cocked his left leg so that the boot lay against his right knee.

  “Paul Bond. Sharkskin. Fourteen inches long, bulldogging heels.”

  “Boots hurt my feet.”

  “Paul can make you some that feel so good you won't want to take them off.”

  “Pass.”

  He uncocked his leg and went to sit on a leather director's chair. I set my briefcase on top of his desk.

  “Get you something to drink?”

  “Pass.”

  “Right to business, then. What have you got?”

  “The people who run the smuggling ring,” I said as I began pulling out papers.

  “Which one?”

  “The one that made a lot of money for all of you.”

  He grinned.

  “Laura, Laura, Laura. This is so noirish. The monsoon, the rain and the thunder and the lightning and the way you've made things dark. Listen, kid. You're on your way back into one of those dinky little rooms with metal toilets. I'm going back downstairs.”

  A monster clap of thunder rattled the glass window. I could see it shimmer, like being in a window seat on an airplane in bad weather and watch
ing the wingtips wobble up and down. Five streaks of lightning zigzagged a few miles away.

  “I love standing outside in these monsoons. It's like, I mean, did you ever stand right next to a railroad track, let the train rumble by and you want to get as close to the train as you possibly can?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Want to stand out on the deck? Grab hold of the railing when the storm hits? This house is built to stand up to any kind of weather. I'm built that way too.”

  “Can I clear off your desktop?” I asked. “I need a little room.”

  “Don't think so. In fact, let's just stop your dog and pony show before you let the animals out of your bag. I'll get Jake, he'll deal with you.”

  I set the briefcase on the oak parquet floor, extended both my arms straight out, and swept everything except the lamp off the desktop. The pocket watch burst open, shards of glass flying clear across the room.

  “You dumb fuck,” he said, and started to get up.

  “Look at these.”

  I laid out a dozen colored satellite recon photos.

  He hesitated at the door, but couldn't resist coming to look.

  “San Rafael Valley,” I said. Tank trucks. Water trucks.“

  I laid a sheet of paper beside the photos.

  “Smuggling trucks. How many women can you get inside?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let's say, twenty-five women. Packed in, maybe thirty-five. And why not pack them in, just like jamming women into shipping containers. So, thirty-five women. Five trucks a day. We're talking up to a thousand women in a busy week.”

  “So that's how they were smuggled across. Very good, Laura. But these recon photos, I can't see any names on the trucks. Where do they come from?”

  I pushed the paper toward him.

  “Zamora's place. The maquiladora. All but one of the trucks go out with women, only one of them comes back filled with water.”

  “Zamora? I don't believe it.”

  “Forget Zamora. Let's talk about. . . Niue.”

  He blanched, almost staggered. I didn't give him time to recover, didn't give him time to say anything, although his mouth was opening in protest. I took out more paper.