Make Them Sorry

by Sam Hawken

  “Maybe you need to bounce it off someone. Hit me.”

  She looked Amos in the face. He had icy blue eyes. “I’m looking for a woman who has people after her. Who want to kill her. They tried once already and they’ll try again if they find her. So I need to get there first.”

  Amos’s eyebrows went up again. “Okay, that’s not what I expected.”

  “I have special problems,” Camaro said.

  “You a cop? I wouldn’t figure you for a cop.”

  “No, I’m not a cop. And I’m not a secretary or the lady who works in the cubicle next to the watercooler, okay? I saw this place and I thought maybe I could put it all together, you know? Drink. Think. You know how it is.”

  “I do. Familiar surroundings help people work things out.”

  Camaro stiffened. Her beer was halfway to her lips. She put it down. “Familiar surroundings,” she said.

  “Sure. If you like this kind of place, you want to be where you feel comfortable.”

  “People always stay close to the things they know,” Camaro said. She was barely aware of Amos now. “You knock on doors and there they are.”

  “You want something to eat? We got a guy who can grill you a burger.”

  “No,” Camaro said. She went for her wallet and spilled bills onto the bar. “Keep the change.”

  Amos swept the money into his hand. “You got what you need?”

  Camaro didn’t answer. She went straight for the door.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  SHE WAITED, REFRESHING the movie subreddit every few minutes, waiting for someone to respond. The sun was low, and the palm trees on Ocean Drive threw long shadows onto the beach. When dusk fell, all the hotels and historical buildings along the water came alive with lights. They transformed into new shapes, luminous creatures deep beneath the surface of the sea.

  The reply came. It was one word: “Privately.”

  The sender had a throwaway account on the site, but all accounts on Reddit were ultimately throwaway. Faith sent a private message with a Skype address for them to contact. The address itself was routed through another anonymizer, and had no direct connection to her anywhere. They could look, but they wouldn’t find.

  It took another hour and a half for the Skype call to come. Outside it was dark. Faith had only the desk lamp burning. She was surrounded by shadows. She had a piece of masking tape over the camera on her laptop, even though the call was voice only. She answered. “I’m here.”

  “To whom am I speaking?”

  The man’s voice had a rich accent, redolent with the sound of wealth and breeding. Faith felt herself gravitate toward his tone, but stopped herself. “It doesn’t matter who I am. Besides, I think you already know.”

  “I know of you, but I don’t know you. You have precisely one minute to make your case to me. After that one minute is up, I will end this call and you will be cut off from further communication. I will then have people find you and kill you. Do you understand this?”

  Faith forced firmness into her tone. “Yes, I understand. Should I start?”

  “The timer is running.”

  “You don’t know me, or what I do, but it’s pretty simple: I look for problems in people’s accounts. M&I Bank and Trust needed an independent auditor for a tax inquiry. They hired me and a few others. They came and went and never saw anything, but I found you. Large cash deposits to a corporate account with no other activity. No payroll. No insurance. No taxes. The bank took those deposits and put them in the laundry before they sent them on to accounts outside the country.”

  “You followed all of this?” the man asked.

  “Yes. I saw where the money went, and I saw who controlled the cash. I found you, Señor Lorca.”

  Lorca laughed softly. “They call me El General here in Colombia.”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know. The only important thing is you have money and I want some of it. One million dollars and everything I found out about your cash flow disappears. Unless someone goes looking for it, you’re safe again. But I’d recommend changing banks.”

  “Is this because you gave information on my dealings to the FBI?”

  Faith caught her breath. “Let’s talk about our deal.”

  “But we have no deal. You want a million dollars to hide the things you found. That is fair. A million dollars is nothing to me. However, you haven’t told me anything about the second part of your offer, and your time is almost up.”

  “Someone’s skimming your accounts,” Faith said.

  “Who?”

  “That’s what the other million dollars is for. You pay me and I’ll give you everything you need to find them. It’s solid evidence. It’ll stand up in court.”

  “Courts are an inconvenience. I would rather deal with problems directly. As we are doing now.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” Faith said. “You need to make up your mind soon. No more than a couple of days. This information is hot, and there are people looking into it.”

  “Your FBI. Your DEA.”

  “Yes. They already know some things, and if they get to me before we make a deal, I’ll have to make a deal with them instead.”

  She heard nothing on the other end of the line. Then she heard a musing sound. “I see your conundrum,” Lorca said.

  “Do we have an agreement?”

  “You offered forty-eight hours to respond to your initial communication. I will take the rest now. You’ll know my answer by tomorrow. And my answer, señorita, is final. There will be no more bargaining once it is given. This thing you say you will do for me, you will do. I have no patience for people who do not keep their word.”

  Faith’s hands shook. She knotted them together. Her words caught in her throat.

  “Are you there?”

  Faith coughed. “I can wait. And I’ll do what I say I will.”

  “Then it will be tomorrow. Shall I contact you the same way?”

  “No,” Faith said too sharply. “I mean, no, I’ll send you another account to contact. We’ll communicate the same way. Once we have a deal, I’ll provide you with account numbers and the amounts to deposit. When the deposits are confirmed, I’ll send you the information in an encrypted file. After that you’ll never hear from me again.”

  “You’ve thought of everything,” Lorca said.

  “Okay,” Faith said lamely. She smacked herself on the forehead.

  “It’s too bad you didn’t think so thoroughly when you first started this game. It might have kept you from getting hurt.”

  Someone knocked on the door. Faith started. She twisted in her chair. No one called through the closed door. “I have to go,” she said.

  “We’ll speak again soon,” Lorca told her.

  “Yes. Goodbye.”

  She terminated the connection. The knock came again.

  “Who is it?”

  No one replied. Faith rose from the desk and got the gun from the nightstand. She approached the door. There was another knock, softer this time.

  “I don’t want to be bothered!” Faith said.

  Silence. Faith felt the gun waver in her hand. Her palms turned damp. Perspiration rolled down her side beneath her blouse.

  She took a step closer. She looked through the peephole.

  Camaro Espinoza was outside.

  Chapter Fifty

  FAITH OPENED THE door. Camaro didn’t have to speak. Faith let the gun flop to her side. She stepped back. “Come in, I guess.”

  Camaro shut the door behind her, turned the lock, and set the chain. Faith put the gun away. Camaro said, “You know, for a smart girl, you’re pretty stupid.”

  Faith sat on the edge of the nearer bed. She put her face in her hands. Camaro waited and watched. Faith’s shoulders shook up and down, but she made no sound. When she took her hands away, her eyes were wet and red. She had tears on her cheeks. “I had to run,” she said. “I didn’t have any choice.”

  “What did you think was g
oing to happen? The FBI has people who’ll protect you. They have that witness program. You’re safer with them than you are here. It only took me a few hours to find you, and it wasn’t hard.”

  “How did you find me?” Faith asked.

  Camaro walked to the window. Colored lights on the Avalon spilled into the street and painted the asphalt with a glowing brush. Traffic picked up as the hour moved toward dusk, both on the road and on the sidewalks. By the time Camaro landed at the Avalon, there were easily twice as many people as when she started. It would build all night.

  “Those pictures in your apartment. I didn’t think anything about them at the time, but I saw a picture like it in Eduard Serafian’s place. It hadn’t been up as long as the others, so he must have seen yours and decided to get his own. If there was anywhere in Miami you’d go, it’d be here. All I had to do was ask questions.”

  “I have to move,” Faith said.

  “You do,” Camaro agreed. “Eventually someone’s going to figure out the same thing I did. Maybe it’ll take a while, but they’ll keep coming and coming until they find you. Or you go so far away they get tired of chasing you.”

  Camaro looked at the laptop on the desk, and the thick binders of printouts. “Is this the stuff?”

  “That’s everything,” Faith said.

  “Where did you keep it?”

  “A safe-deposit box. But I have backups online.”

  “What are you going to do with all of it?”

  “I’m going to buy my way out,” Faith replied.

  “With the feds?”

  “No.”

  Camaro examined Faith’s face. The ugliness of the bruise around her eye was still there, but she’d regained some of her color. She didn’t shrink from Camaro’s look. Camaro didn’t speak.

  “It’s a better deal,” Faith said to break the silence.

  “How much?”

  “One million for me to make the information disappear. Another million to give up the people stealing from them.”

  “Who’s giving you the money? People at the bank?”

  Faith shrugged. “I don’t know a whole lot. They’re Colombian. Some kind of army. I don’t know how they get their money, but I figure it has to be drugs. The numbers don’t tell me what they sell or how they sell it, but what else could it be? The accounts show me cash coming in. M&I Bank and Trust makes it legitimate. I saw a thing on TV about drug dealers: they have tons of paper money, but they don’t have any way to get rid of it. Do you know the government catches the Mexicans taking tons of cash across the border back into Mexico every year? Like, actual tons. Cash is hard to move, but once you turn it into ones and zeros, it can go anywhere and do anything.”

  “People like this will kill you,” Camaro said.

  “Yeah, I know. But it wasn’t them I had to worry about. It was the bank.”

  “The bank hired the man who attacked you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have a friend who’s really good at figuring things out. He followed Serafian’s tracks. But how did they even know you took what you took?”

  Faith looked at her hands.

  “What did you do?” Camaro pressed.

  “I took money from them,” Faith said.

  “From who? From the bank?”

  “There’s one man who handles accounts for these Colombians, and his name is Lawrence Kaur. His dad founded the bank, and when he died he handed it over to his son. These Colombians have been doing business with the bank forever. Kaur makes sure they’re happy and all the money goes where it’s supposed to go. When I found what I found, I thought about it and…”

  “You held it over his head.”

  Faith lifted her gaze. “Yes.”

  “How did they figure out it was you?”

  “That’s the part I don’t know. I guess I didn’t cover my tracks well enough. When they hired me for an audit, they hired five other forensic accountants to do the same thing. If they worked their way through all six of us, especially after the payment was made, they might have been able to narrow it down. And they did. They found me, and they sent that…animal after me.”

  Camaro paced the room. It was stuffy. She adjusted the thermostat, and the vents blew fresh, cool air. “How much did you take them for? Millions? Like with these Colombian people?”

  “No, no. I only asked for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I wasn’t greedy.”

  “Did you promise them you’d bury the evidence when they paid you?”

  “Yes. I told them, but I didn’t do it. I wanted the insurance. In case anything ever happened.”

  “And it happened,” Camaro said.

  “It happened.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  IGNACIO FINISHED HIS shift after his time at Bamanian’s office. He spent a chunk of his time on the phone talking to an assistant district attorney. The ADA’s name was Norma Singleton. He’d met her once or twice. When he asked her to keep it quiet, she agreed. “But it won’t stay under wraps forever,” she told him. “Eventually someone’s going to notice, and it’ll be your ass. I’m going to plead ignorance.”

  “I have plenty of ass.”

  Singleton didn’t laugh. “You’ll have your warrant by the morning.”

  He left his cubicle, got his hat and jacket, and headed for the door. He heard his desk phone ringing. He stopped and waited. The ringer quieted. The phone in his pocket trilled. The number was listed UNKNOWN. He answered. “Montellano.”

  “Detective, it’s John Mansfield.”

  “Agent Mansfield. What can I do for you? I’m heading out.”

  “Do you mind coming down to my office for a get-together? Only a few people. I think you’ll find it worthwhile.”

  “This time of day, it’ll take me about an hour to get there.”

  “We can wait. See you soon, Detective.”

  Ignacio left the building and went to his car. The interior baked, even in the fading sun. He opened the windows to air out the car while he drove, and when the heat dipped he put them up again and ran the AC. He didn’t listen to the radio. He tried calling Camaro. She didn’t answer. “Where the hell are you?” he asked aloud.

  The FBI’s field office was in Miramar on a well-maintained road lined with greenery and surrounded by grounds, like a college campus. The building itself was a soaring construction, latticed steel and mirrored glass, engineered to seem as if it were blown gently by an offshore breeze. Ignacio had to show his identification at the gate, and again at the door. He asked for directions once he was inside. They sent him to the third floor. He made a wrong turn, and took five minutes to find his way.

  It was a conference area with a long oval table and multiple flat-screen displays. One wall was glass, providing a view of the darkening grounds. Mansfield was waiting in the room along with Pope and a handful of other men and women in business dress. There were introductions all around. Ignacio did his best to commit names to memory.

  “Everyone have a seat and we can get started,” Mansfield said, remaining on his feet. “Unless you need something, Detective? Coffee? Juice? Coke?”

  “No, thank you. I have everything I need.”

  “Detective, everyone in this room represents part of a coordinated task force designed to isolate and destroy certain illegal operations in the United States. Mr. Austin over there is from the U.S. Attorney’s office. They have multiple indictments out for a man named Carlos Lorca Márquez, a Colombian national who has never set foot in the United States and is unlikely to. We also have indictments for major figures in his organization. This is where we want to bring you up to speed.”

  “So it’s all about drug money,” Ignacio said.

  Eyes turned toward Ignacio. He felt himself color. He shifted in his seat. Mansfield nodded. “It is and it isn’t. Are you familiar with Colombia’s problem with right-wing paramilitaries?”

  “I’m not, no.”

  “Most people aren’t. Colombia has been involved in a civil war o
f sorts for fifty years. The FARC are the communist guerrillas who want to overthrow the government, at least technically, but they are generally more interested in producing cocaine and heroin for sale on the international market. The Colombian authorities are with us, working hand in glove with people like Special Agent Pope to execute Plan Colombia, an ongoing operation meant to cripple Colombia’s various drug cartels and related groups from producing the crops they need to stay in business. In a sort of middle ground, you have the paramilitaries. These are people like the AUC, ostensibly dedicated to wiping out the communists, but still dirty. Follow me so far?”

  “Is this where terrorism comes in?”

  “We’ll get to it. I’m going to let Special Agent Pope take over here.”

  Mansfield sat. Pope stood. She had a remote control the size and shape of a pencil, and she directed it at the displays. The screens flashed pictures of hard-looking men, maps of Colombia overlaid with colored zones and columns of numbers. “Everybody talks a good game in Colombia, but it’s really about drugs,” Pope said. “Everything comes back to drugs. Colombia is actually second to Peru these days when it comes to producing cocaine, but they’re not out of the business. And the AUC pledged to demobilize over ten years to end that part of the conflict.”

  She pressed a small button on the remote. A bearded man’s face appeared. He had the dead expression of a convict. When Ignacio looked at him, the man seemed to stare back.

  “This is Lorca. When the AUC agreed to demobilization, that was supposed to be it. The government spent three years helping them shut down and reintegrate into society. The AUC officially disbanded ten years ago, but it was all a smoke screen, because they splintered into new groups. Some of these groups are as strong as the AUC ever was. Lorca’s group is the Black Eagles. They are the worst of the worst.”

  “So this is his money.”

  Pope gave him a flat look. “That’s correct. Some of the accounts we watch are associated with the Black Eagles. Before that the AUC maintained them. Faith Glazer stumbled into it, and she was quick to put two and two together. She started feeding the FBI her information. Which led to my agency and from there to everyone else in this room.”