Innocent as Sin sk-3

by Elizabeth Lowell

  He hauled Kayla out the restaurant’s side door and onto an escalator headed for the second floor of the shopping mall. He made sure that he was standing between her and any view of the parking lot. He wasn’t going to expose her until he was sure Gabriel and the two Galils were out of the game.

  “What was that all about?” Kayla asked under her breath.

  “Faroe didn’t want us in the parking lot right now,” Rand said.

  The escalator gave him a clear, gliding view of the parking lot in front. The place was alive with squad cars.

  “Now that’s sweet,” Rand said, grinning.

  “I can’t see.”

  He leaned aside.

  Kayla saw five white Chandler squad cars pulled up at odd angles around the tired-looking Chevrolet van she’d seen in Guadalupe. Officers swarmed around the van, which was parked with its rear cargo door pointed in the direction of the restaurant’s front door. Three officers had opened the cargo doors and were leaning in to examine the interior of the van.

  Two men were facedown on the asphalt, their hands cuffed behind them.

  “Is it-” she began.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, glancing around while he appeared to be nuzzling her hair. “Hell’s angel was flying too close to the ground. Crash and burn, you bastard.”

  An officer emerged from the cargo area carrying a lethal-looking long gun with a sniper’s scope on it.

  “One of the guys on the ground, the skinny one-” she began.

  “Yeah,” Rand said. “Say buh-bye, darling. He’s going down, big-time.”

  “Is that one of the guns we saw in Guadalupe?” Kayla asked very quietly.

  “I’d bet on it.” Then, “End of the ride. Watch your step.”

  She walked off the escalator, but all she could concentrate on was her memory of the parking lot with its silent show-and-tell. “You were right. About the gun slits.”

  “Sure was.”

  “Don’t sound so cheerful. I was the target, wasn’t I.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Rand said. “But if it was Bertone on the other end of Foley’s wire, he must have been shitting green lizards.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you, you clever little banker lady, have the key to his millions. If he kills you, he kills himself. But he didn’t know that when he pointed his skinny death angel at you and told him to pull the trigger.”

  Her mouth flattened. “Now what?”

  “Tell me you didn’t forget Bertone’s password.”

  “I didn’t.”

  He let out a breath. “Good.”

  “Just because my hips swing when I walk, I’m not stupid. And I sure don’t have a little black book of passwords.”

  “Dang.” He smiled slowly. “Here I was getting all hard just thinking about it.”

  She gave him a look as he hustled her past windows full of things with price tags and blank faces. “Are we going somewhere in particular?”

  “No. We’re waiting for Bertone to get in touch with his inner password.”

  “What about my naughty pink thingy?”

  “I’ll get in touch with that.”

  52

  Chandler Mall

  Sunday

  11:40 A.M. MST

  Lane walked eagerly next to his dad as they strolled toward the gang of squad cars blocking the parking lane in the crowded mall lot.

  “This is a classic example of a felony takedown,” Faroe said. “Watch and learn.”

  “Beats hell out of the Krebs cycle,” Lane said, peering at the milling officers.

  “Gotta watch that adrenaline. It’s witchy stuff. Just remember, your mother as a judge has done more to leave the world a better place than she found it than I have hanging with St. Kilda.”

  “Then why isn’t she still a judge?”

  “Ask her.”

  “I did.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “To ask you,” Lane said.

  “Sometimes good doesn’t get the job done. Then St. Kilda does. We’re the guys in the gray hats.”

  “Look at that gun! What kind is that?”

  “Ease back,” Faroe said quietly. “The cops have things under control, but they’re still full of adrenaline and their guns are full of bullets. Give them plenty of room and don’t do anything sudden.”

  One of the cops who was leaning out over the hood of his squad car with a shotgun at the ready glanced up at them and said flatly, “Stay back. This is a crime scene.”

  Faroe stood with his hands out at his sides, palms open.

  Lane imitated him.

  The cop nodded.

  “I’m just worried about my car, Officer,” Faroe said. “I don’t want any buckshot holes in it.”

  “Your car’s fine, sir. Just stay back out of the way.”

  “Yessir,” Faroe said.

  He drew Lane back behind a red Ford pickup, where they could watch without making anyone nervous.

  “The nice thing about Arizona cops,” Faroe said, “is they’re used to dealing with armed suspects and felony takedowns.”

  “You mean that open-carry law that Mom is always rolling her eyes over?”

  “Yeah. Note how the cops all pulled in from separate directions, but left firing lanes open in case the mopes in the van tried anything. Good technique.”

  Lane watched the officers unload two heavy-caliber automatic weapons and a half-dozen magazines of ammunition from the van.

  “Why didn’t the dudes fight back?” he asked. “Look at the firepower they had. Those things are more than a match for shotguns, aren’t they?”

  “The mopes on the ground are pros, just like the cops,” Faroe said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “They survived a felony takedown.”

  “Huh?”

  Faroe put his hand on Lane’s shoulder and continued teaching his son the things that someday might help him to survive when others died.

  “Note the jailhouse tattoos and the iron-pile physiques on those cuffed arms,” Faroe said. “Pros know when to fight and when to fold. It was folding time. If there are six cops here now, there are eighteen more on the way, and the clowns on the ground want to live to fight another day.”

  “How did you get them to send six cops in the first place?” Lane asked. “Mom wasn’t sure the desk sergeant would respond at all.”

  “I made sure that the police got two different calls, both with pretty much the same level of detail,” Faroe said. “A single call about a Mexican in a van brandishing a long gun might have gotten the dispatcher to send a car or two. That would have tempted the bad guys to try something, which would have been messy but would have kept Gabriel off Kayla.”

  “Messy was what Mom was afraid of.”

  Faroe shrugged. He hadn’t been thrilled with the odds, but he hadn’t had a lot of time for finesse. “I made the first call and she made the second. Both of us specified the vehicle and the kinds of weapons, which brought the threat level way up. Then we had Javier Smith-the tall guy pretending to be a gardener-call the cops and give them a heavily accented tip about a gang hit going down in Chandler Mall.”

  “Awesome.” Lane’s eyes were bright with excitement.

  “It got the job done. Cops usually do the right thing if they have enough information at the beginning. It’s only when they start fumbling around in the dark, hunting rattlesnakes with their bare hands, that things go to hell real quick. Today was one of the good days.”

  Lane watched as the cuffed men were levered to their feet.

  “C’mon,” Faroe said. “Recess is over. Time to go back to the Krebs cycle.”

  53

  Chandler Mall

  Sunday

  11:45 A.M. MST

  The instant Foley answered his cell phone, Bertone began talking.

  “I’m four rows down from the restaurant’s front door. White Toyota rental sedan with California plates. You have three minutes t
o find me.”

  Bertone punched out and waited. While he waited, he watched while a former Ukrainian army sniper and his spotter, a Latino gangster named Gabriel, were stuffed into separate squad cars. Bertone wasn’t worried about what they would tell the Chandler Police Department. Both men had already proved their ability to shut up many times.

  And if they did talk, there were always men in prison who were eager to kill. The Ukrainian knew it. Gabriel knew it.

  But the person Bertone really wanted to kill was walking away, laughing with a teenage boy. Bertone didn’t recognize the boy, but he recognized Faroe as a man rumored to be a St. Kilda operative.

  St. Kilda Consulting, which had been hired several months ago by John Neto to get revenge on Andre Bertone.

  It could be simple coincidence.

  Bertone wasn’t going to bet his life on it.

  He was still thinking about the unhappy implications of Faroe’s appearance when Steve Foley knocked on the passenger-side window. Bertone hit the unlock button.

  Foley took one look at Bertone’s face and really wished he could be somewhere else. But he couldn’t, so he slid in.

  “I didn’t hear any shots,” Foley said.

  “Be grateful. If you had, you’d be dead.”

  “Listen, I haven’t done anything but follow your-”

  “Shut it.”

  Foley swallowed hard. On the way from the restaurant to the car, he’d thought about his own situation. He wanted out.

  Alive.

  He was just a banker, no more or less honest than his corporate bosses and his wealthy clients required him to be. The money-laundering laws were flexible. They seemed designed more to shield clever bankers than to prevent illegal or immoral financial transactions. But at the same time, the laws provided steep penalties for bankers and banks that got caught sneaking around them.

  Kayla had been his cover. As long as she was alive and talking, he was on short time as a free man.

  “Did you correct the problem?” Bertone asked coldly.

  Foley reached underneath his shirt and ripped out the wire, transmitter, and tiny microphone. “You know I didn’t.”

  “You told me I would have ready access to that account at any moment. Then you told me weekends weren’t included. Then you tell me that the account has a password, and you don’t know that password. Now tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”

  “I was wrong about the capability of the remote access system,” Foley said quickly. “But I’ll take care of it as soon as I get the password from Kayla. The CHIPS transfers to Romania and the Czech Republic will clear immediately. The Russian transfer will take longer. That’s just the nature of using SWIFT wires-”

  “Your banker’s codes and acronyms don’t impress me,” Bertone cut in. “Do you believe what Kayla told you?”

  “Uh, yeah. Sure. She’s not all that smart. You heard her try to put the arm on me for more money. She believes she’s getting what she wants, so why should she lie to me?”

  “Her new boyfriend. Did he have words with a tall man who was with a teenage boy?”

  Foley blinked. “Yeah, how did you know?”

  “The man is Joe Faroe, probably an agent for St. Kilda Consulting.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “You’ve never heard of a lot of things that can kill you.”

  Foley shifted uncomfortably. “So where does Gabriel come into this? I thought he was supposed to take care of Kayla when she left the restaurant.”

  “The police arrested Gabriel and the Ukrainian before they could get Kayla.”

  “What?” Foley leaned against the dashboard with one hand like he was dizzy. “How?”

  “How doesn’t matter. In the end, the police and St. Kilda did you a favor.”

  Foley looked blank.

  “If she had died without giving up the password, I would have taken great pleasure in killing you myself,” Bertone said matter-of-factly.

  “You’ve lost me, Andre. You’re leaping all over the place.”

  “A retarded child could lose you. Obviously St. Kilda has a wire into the bank. Is it you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Bertone said something in Russian, then switched back to English. “You’re too shallow, so I must assume it is Kayla who talks to St. Kilda.”

  Shaking his head again, Foley rubbed his hands against the black jeans. He wasn’t liking anything he was hearing. None of it made sense.

  “Look, I don’t know about this St. Kilda, so how did Kayla?” he asked. “I mean, I suppose she could be some kind of undercover, but it doesn’t make sense. Hell, nothing does. This isn’t my world anymore.”

  “It is now.”

  Foley frowned and rubbed his palms rhythmically across his jeans. “You sure the tall guy wasn’t a fed? That’d make sense.”

  “If federal agents have anything going, I will know it as soon as they do,” Bertone said. He lit a cigar. “St. Kilda Consulting is private.”

  “Private? Like private eyes? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Unfortunately, I am not.” He drew hard and exhaled the same way, filling the car with rich smoke.

  Foley hit the window button. Nothing happened. He looked at the key, but didn’t have enough nerve to reach into Bertone’s space to turn on the windows.

  “St. Kilda Consulting is very sophisticated and well financed.” Bertone blew more smoke and watched Foley squirm. “They have been retained by an African government that is close to being replaced by a rebel insurgency based in a neighboring country.”

  “Who cares?” Foley muttered. “It’s Africa, for chrissake.”

  “Precisely. Such things happen all the time in that part of the world. Unhappily, this potential target for regime change retained a private military and security company to press its interests on the worldwide stage.”

  “Expensive.”

  “A lot cheaper than war, actually. Pity, that. In any case, St. Kilda’s efforts have been quite successful. They are the principal reason I felt compelled to enlist you and your bank in my operation.”

  “Christ,” Foley said, putting his face in his hands. “What have you dragged me into-some kind of international spook party? I want out. I want out now!”

  “There is nothing I would like better than to remove my money from your bank at the speed of light,” Bertone said.

  Foley looked relieved.

  Bertone kept talking. “Then I would be free to kill you.”

  Pallor swept over the banker’s skin.

  “Ah,” Bertone said. “I see I have your full attention. Finally. I have more than a hundred million of my own dollars invested in a game whose stakes you cannot imagine. I have enlisted the assistance of government officials in several countries, including your own. I am in quiet contact with international corporations of a size to make your bank’s entire worth look meager. No doubt people will die before this business is concluded. I assume you would like to avoid being one of the bodies. Correct?”

  Sweat showed on Foley’s forehead. “Shit, yes. I’m in over my head, but I’ve got to keep swimming.”

  “Good, you are beginning to think like a man,” Bertone said.

  “As soon as the mainframe comes online at the bank Monday, I’ll make sure the money gets transferred. Just tell me where to send it.”

  Bertone thought for a long moment, smoking, thinking.

  “Assumptions,” he said quietly. “Assumptions. They are the source of most serious mistakes in life.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Foley asked.

  “You have assumed Kayla Shaw told you the truth. We have recently seen that she is not to be trusted. Why should we do so now?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I take that as agreement,” Bertone said.

  Foley was glad Bertone’s attention had switched to Kayla. “Thinking about it now, she might have been lying,” Foley said.

  “About what?”

&n
bsp; Foley hesitated, thinking fast. “About the reason I couldn’t get access. She said it was because correspondent accounts aren’t configured for remote access transactions. But how does she know that? She isn’t even authorized for remote access.”

  “You think she was trying to mislead you?”

  “Yeah. It’s possible.”

  “To what end?”

  “How the hell would I know? Isn’t that the whole point of lying-to mislead?”

  “Then guess,” Bertone said.

  “Maybe she was trying to buy time.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “If she’s involved with the international PI outfit, or whatever it is, maybe they’re planning something down the line.”

  “Such as?” Bertone questioned, watching the other man closely.

  “Uh…” Foley rubbed his sweaty palms over his jeans. “The feds often try to freeze accounts when they suspect money laundering. Maybe that’s it.”

  Bertone was motionless but for a long exhalation of smoke. “Interesting. Tell me more.”

  “It happened one time, about a year ago. DEA and the IRS traced a Mexican drug lord’s money to an account in our private bank. The first thing I knew of it was when an IRS enforcement agent walked into my office with an order from a federal judge in Tucson, freezing the account.”

  “Go on.”

  “I called the bank’s corporate counsel, and he told me I had no choice but to shut down all access to the account. We ended up sitting on about two million bucks for almost three months while the client’s attorney fought the order in federal court.”

  “Did the client win?”

  “No, but it turned out pretty well for the bank. We had use of the money and never did have to pay the client interest. In the end, the feds took the money and we got a little smack on the wrist for being sloppy.”

  “I find my sympathies are with the client. Were it to happen to me, the banker would suffer a great deal more than a smack on the wrist.” Bertone’s back teeth chewed the end of the cigar.

  “Uh, yeah, of course,” Foley said hurriedly. “But that case taught me to be careful about whose name is on account documents as the banker. I gave your accounts to Kayla because I didn’t want another laundering case tracked back to me.”