The School of Turin

by Dale Nelson

  Viktor reached into his pocket and handed Jack his phone. Jack grabbed it with his off hand and set it in his lap. He never took his eyes off Viktor.

  “Now get out.”

  “What, here?”

  “Viktor, I like you, but I’m getting really tired of answering obvious questions. Please get out. This is not personal. Tell your boss I’m going to honor my commitment, but I’ve got something I need to take care of first, and no one tells me what I can and can’t do. He should think hard about retaliation. Like you said, some people push back.”

  Numbly, Viktor climbed out of the car. “Where do you think you’re going?” Viktor was stalling with an obvious throwaway question, trying to think of his next move and how much of a chance he was willing to take.

  “Wherever the hell I want,” Jack said, not giving him the opportunity. “Tell him I’ll be back in two days.”

  “He’s going to kill you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Not as long as he needs me,” Jack said, and he was gone. He was doing a hundred and twenty before Viktor could even load the words for a response.

  Eight

  Katrina Danzig hated Florida in general, but Miami proper was a bespoke hell tailored to the exact specification of her sins. She could choose any number of things that she uniquely despised about the place, but each and every one of them was multiplied tenfold by the constant, pervasive, and unrelenting heat. There wasn’t a day that went by that Special Agent Danzig didn’t miss her office in Manhattan’s lower west side or her sliver of a row house she owned in Brooklyn. She was renting it out in hopes that she’d be able to one day return. But would she? On the government’s dime, it was hard to say.

  Her penance, a slow and inexorable descent into the bowels of obscurity, was beginning its third interminable year.

  Three years in this tropical blast furnace.

  Three years running down money laundering operations in the Caribbean, which on the surface sounded exotic and interesting, until one realized that it was just forensic accounting. Chasing criminals on spreadsheets.

  That’s how Danzig got her start in the bureau, so she was right back where she started.

  International Finance degree from Columbia followed by a Columbia MBA, two years in the Financial District negotiating international banking deals, and she realized that she was young and bored and wanted to do something more with her life than make money for richer people. September 11th happened while she was in grad school, and it affected her deeply. She was in New York at the time, and she still felt the shock, the horror, and the sadness of that day, and was poignantly reminded of it every year. Danzig volunteered for recovery work in the aftermath, tried to work with small businesses, help them get back up and running, but she always knew that she needed more, to do something. The military felt like a waste—what was she going to do? Be a finance officer? Then a grad school friend reached out. He’d gone into the FBI after earning his MBA, said the bureau was always looking for smart grads to bolster the ranks of their financial crimes teams. Also, he said, with the full focus on rolling up terror networks, they really needed people who understood international finance.

  Katrina joined and never looked back. For the first few years, she was based out of the New York City office and was using her financial background to chase down terrorist money laundering operations. Danzig became an expert in illicit banking, and her team’s work was instrumental in the US Government pressuring the Swiss and other global financial hubs to change their stance on not taking sides in the Global War on Terror. Or at least not getting in America’s way, after the FBI showed the rivers of dark money flowing through their banking systems.

  Danzig became a rising star in the bureau and was on a lot of people’s lists.

  That’s how she got into jewels.

  After five years chasing terror funds, it was time for a new assignment. She was approached by Kurt Sinclair, an agent several years her senior who had just returned from a counterterrorism stint in Afghanistan. Sinclair knew her by reputation and had actually been a consumer of some of her work on the terror funding group. Sinclair told her that he was taking on a new role within the bureau’s Gem and Jewelry Program and he wanted her on it.

  Danzig initially turned him down, jewels didn’t sound like her thing. Not when she’d been making a name for herself chasing terrorists. But Sinclair was persistent, and he invited her to dinner at his home. Kurt’s wife was also an agent, and Danzig suspected that this was part of a ploy to convince her to reconsider it. Kurt and Becky admitted as much over pre-dinner cocktails, but they urged her to hear him out. Gems, Kurt said, were the new dark money. Precious stones had no serial numbers, and bad guys in every walk of life, every illicit industry, and every sector of crime trafficked in them because it was nearly impossible to trace them to a point of origin. Worse, many of those gems ultimately ended up back in legitimate channels and in the hands of consumers.

  “We’re going after terrorists,” Kurt told her. “We’re going after the mob, Chinese triads, Russian mafia, if you name a crime syndicate or terror group, they traffic in this stuff, and we’re going after every one of them.”

  Danzig was hooked. Those were heady times, and they did good work.

  Kurt and Becky both took to mentoring Katrina, particularly Becky, who taught her about being a successful woman in male-dominated law enforcement. When it was time for Kurt to take a posting at the US Embassy in the Netherlands as the Legal Attaché, or LEGAT, he took her with him and set up a counter-trafficking task force. The group worked with INTERPOL and numerous national and multi-national law enforcement agencies in Europe to smash gem smuggling networks. That’s when she first heard about an enigmatic American thief operating in Europe.

  A EUROPOL colleague had gotten word from an informant that there was a string of relatively low-level jewelry thefts happening in the Riviera. The store owners didn’t want to report it to the police because they were afraid it would hurt their business with the high rollers. They were small scores and typically not the kind of thing that would pop up on EUROPOL or INTERPOL’s radar, at least not until someone said they were actually connected. Further, the rumor was, the perpetrator was an American.

  According to Danzig’s connection, the source was pissed that this guy was taking all of his trade.

  The source identified the thief as “Jack Burdette.”

  Danzig hated him immediately.

  The idea that an American citizen would be involved with the kinds of groups she was chasing was nauseating to her, an anathema. But Burdette was also a ghost, as elusive as he was skilled. She worked, on and off, for several years trying to get a bead, but no one at EUROPOL, INTERPOL, or any of their member nations had even the ghost of a solid lead. They had as many different descriptions of what he looked like as they had tips on jobs he’d allegedly pulled.

  What shocked her, though, was that her EUROPOL colleague actually knew the thief.

  Giovanni Castro. Castro was an officer with Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, a paramilitary police force charged with protecting Italy’s financial and commercial security, which often found them going up against organized crime activities. He was currently serving a tour as a liaison officer to EUROPOL. Early in his career, Castro was an officer in the Polizia di Stato, Italy’s national state police force. He was undercover in the Italian city of Turin in the mid-nineties when he met a young American thief named Jack Burdette. Since then, he’d tried to stay on top of Burdette’s movements in Europe. Castro said Jack disappeared for a few years and then resurfaced in 2003 or so.

  Castro was undercover for over a year, and his investigation ultimately led to dismantling the notorious gang known as the School of Turin. Burdette, he explained, escaped just before the noose closed around Niccolò Bartolo and his School of Turin. He said the Italian authorities weren’t interested in a low-level American and felt that pursuing him would be more trouble than it was worth. But Castro could at least provide a defin
itive, if not dated, description of Burdette, and that helped them triangulate him.

  What made Burdette so elusive was that he never went after big scores. Typically, nothing over half a million at a time. They’d learned this from their French informant, who’d been competing against Burdette for some time and knew him by reputation. Most professional thieves were in it to make as much as they could as fast as they could. Burdette, by contrast, took small to medium scores. She started by trying to get a list of the jewelry thefts that met his profile and then worked with her EUROPOL liaisons to get the local police reports. It was grueling and tedious, but eventually a pattern did emerge. Most of the jobs Danzig believed that she could attribute to him were such that the national law enforcement agencies wouldn’t mount much of an investigation to close it once the insurance settlement arrived.

  Burdette only went in when the places were closed and never worked with weapons. She’d learned this from the informant as well, but her subsequent investigation corroborated it.

  When her time in Europe had come to a close, she went back to the New York field office, this time to head up the Gem and Jewelry Program’s transnational taskforce. For a time, that meant letting go of her investigation into Gentleman Jack Burdette. She had to shift her attentions elsewhere, but she never forgot him. Meanwhile, Kurt Sinclair became the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco field office. It was about this time that a thief broke the record set by Niccolò Bartolo in 2003 for the largest jewelry heist. A man walked into the Carlton InterContinental Hotel in Cannes early one Sunday morning, the day before the film festival opened, and made off with eighty million dollars in loose stones. That value was quickly raised to one hundred forty-five million once they had a full accounting of what was taken.

  European authorities all assumed that the perpetrators were the Pink Panthers. Though the job didn’t fit their typically audacious profile, two of their number had just broken out of a Swiss prison less than a day’s drive from Cannes two days prior to the theft. But Danzig knew better. There was a panache that was different than the Panther’s usual approach. And when Kurt called her to tell her an informant had a lead that an American hiding out in California might be involved, Danzig knew exactly who it was.

  Unfortunately, Gentleman Jack proved to still be as elusive as she’d always known him to be, and she couldn’t definitively connect him to the crime. Worse, in her blind pursuit of Burdette, she’d overreached, and the investigation fell apart quite publicly. The bureau was embarrassed and lost a lot of face with the state law enforcement agencies they were coordinating with. It was, in particular, a major humiliation for Kurt. Possibly, she’d cost him his chance at being Special Agent in Charge of a major office. Not long after, Danzig was quietly reassigned to the Miami field office, where she returned to her roots as a forensic accountant. The job was absolutely a demotion. All of the good she’d done leading up to that, the reputation she’d built, was wiped away in an instant. To say nothing of possibly capping the career of her friend and mentor.

  Getting shot by a Serbian ex-soldier turned gangster named Milan Radić during that event was probably the thing that saved her career.

  Now, she was chasing drug money and was as far from the front lines in the War on Terror—or any war that mattered—as she could get.

  And she hated Miami.

  Even the criminals down here were batshit crazy.

  Take these idiots she was dealing with now.

  A con man running a Medicare fraud scam for the Russian mob has been skimming for months, and instead of disappearing with that money, he placed a bet on a fixed jai alai match. Which, you can’t fix anymore, and anyone who has spent five minutes with illegal gambling could tell you that. So, when he lost that million, he decided to enlist the help of his two idiot friends to blackmail a retired Columbian drug smuggler to get the money back—only it turned out that he’d been dead for twenty years. This was how Danzig came to be involved.

  It got worse. Two of these idiots were each informing to one of the two local police departments in Miami. The third genius found this out and decided to cover his bets by going to the bureau. He ended up in her lap, and she’s had to deal with it. She gently told the guy, Manny Diaz, that the Columbian was murdered twenty years ago and the person they thought was him was actually Fidel Castro’s favorite hit man, Hector Gonzales.

  This thing went south in all of the ways one could imagine, and now Danzig found herself, through no fault of her own, in the middle of a second scandal. Danzig played this one better, however, and saw it as an opportunity to earn her way out of Miami. The first of the three idiots was a highly skilled money launderer, and he’d created numerous dark money pipelines for the Russians. In exchange for not going to prison pretty much forever, Danzig co-opted him to help her roll up as many of these networks as they could find. It was like the ending of Catch Me if You Can, but so much more bizarre.

  Investigations fell apart all the time, and agents made as many mistakes as they had successes. What Danzig learned, unfortunately, was that all of those sins were forgivable unless the bureau was humiliated. The return to grace was a long road. Danzig could only hope that if she’d wrapped up some mobsters and some drug smugglers that she would earn her a ticket home. She believed her career, much like Kurt Sinclair’s, was prematurely topped out. Danzig would never be a Special Agent in Charge of a field office, would never run one of the fusion centers in DC, or any number of prestigious capstone posts, but if she could at least return to New York and to righteous policing, perhaps that would be enough.

  Danzig’s phone rang—the office line rather than her cell phone. “Danzig,” she said.

  “Katrina Danzig?” the voice asked.

  “Yep,” she said and started skimming email.

  “This is Randall Heidegger. I’m the LEGAT in Paris.”

  Danzig’s expression soured. She could immediately picture the guy. He’d be six-one, blond with ice blue eyes. A Yale legacy. He probably rowed and raised greyhounds in his spare time. Wife’s name would be “Muffy” or “Midge.”

  “What can I do for you?” she said and offhandedly hoped that she didn’t sound as disinterested as she was.

  “We just had a jewelry store robbery here at the Hôtel Ritz. High-end place. Cartier, that sort of thing. Thieves made off with about five mil in merchandise. The Paris Police reached out to us to see if we could be of any help. The word is the guy who led the crew is an American.”

  “Wish I could help you, Randall, but I’m not in that game anymore. I do accounting, these days. I can tell you all about the banking system in the Caymans if you’re interested.”

  Randall Heidegger gave her a courtesy laugh on the other end of the phone. It was scripted, diplomatic, and perfectly timed. “Well, I was hoping you might at least be able to point me in the right direction. Surveillance cameras picked up most of the crew. They were wearing masks, but they got shots of three of them outside with exterior cameras. We ran it through our systems and got a hit, a guy named Jack Burdette, flagged as a person of interest by you, for jewelry theft and trafficking. I called the Gem and Jewelry guys to confirm, and they said you were kind of an expert on him, so I thought I’d check.”

  Danzig paused a moment. Then said, “Say that again?” She hadn’t been giving Heidegger her full attention, but it sounded like he said “Jack Burdette.”

  “We’ve got a photo of one of the perpetrators. Computer says it’s a seventy-five percent match to Jack Burdette.”

  “Can you send it to me?”

  “Yeah, right away.” Danzig gave Heidegger her email address and was quiet for a time until her machine dinged, informing her that she had a new email. She opened the attachment. There were four photos of three men standing in an alley behind the hotel. One of them clearly showed Jack Burdette right after he’d removed a face mask.

  “Are these cameras new?” she asked.

  “The police tell me they’d been installed abou
t a year before, but they’re pretty well-concealed.”

  “He’d normally look for that sort of thing.”

  “Unless they had someone on the inside sharing the hotel’s security procedures, I don’t think he’d know about them. We’ve got several interior shots, and his face is always obscured. In fact, there are a couple from the week prior with a man matching his description, but the face is always covered, either by a ball cap or a phone.”

  “That’s him all right.”

  “Is he as good as they say?”

  “He’s better,” she said.

  “Great. Sounds like I’m talking to the right person. What do we do next? How quickly can you get to Paris?”

  A jolt ran through her system. Paris. Hunting Jack Burdette again. This was the phone call she’d been wanting ever since Kurt Sinclair explained the depth and breadth of her failure and how much collateral damage there was. There was one cardinal law in the bureau, something has immutable as gravity and as sacrosanct as Jesus—do not embarrass the FBI. Every other sin short of breaking the law was pardonable. Danzig’s mind immediately went to the possibilities. A chance to redeem herself, get her career back. Then Danzig dialed herself down. The bureau would never let her within a mile of the case. She’d blown that opportunity and got herself exiled to Miami. To say nothing about her caseload here.

  “Look, Randall, I swung at this guy a couple years ago and missed. I’m still digging out of that hole. That’s why I’m stuck down here five feet from the sun going nearsighted on spreadsheets.” Heidegger laughed, but Danzig hadn’t intended that to be a joke. “I don’t think that they’re going to let me take another crack at him.”

  “You’d be surprised at what strings we can pull.”

  “I don’t think you can pull that hard.”

  “First of all, the US Ambassador to France is a woman. She likes the optics of a female agent running point on this. Second, we only have three permanent agents here. I have two assistant attachés, and we’re all working multiple cases. Honestly, with all the CT work going on right now, we’ve more leads than we cover. I’m making up the difference with a fairly large TDY staff. There’s five vagrants here now,” he said, and by the lift in his voice, Danzig could tell that was meant for someone within earshot. “Finally, and probably most importantly, the ambassador owns a winery.”