by Fiona Brand
Fiercely, she stared at Cesar, no longer seeing the brilliant man she’d fallen in love with and married, but the man who was responsible for putting her baby in danger. She had been thirty-four when she had given birth to Rina. She had lived life to the full, but never more so than that first moment she had held her own child in her arms. The thought of all that bright promise, of Rina’s quirky intellect, the fun and the dreaminess being snuffed out, was wrenching.
She couldn’t allow it.
With everything that was in her, she would stop that process, but she was going to need help. Lopez had gone too far, done too much; she was out of her depth.
Cesar’s hand closed on her wrist. She wrenched free.
Something cold and feral flashed in his gaze, and Esther fought down another surge of panic. It was tempting to ignore Cesar, but she couldn’t forget that he had made this deal. He had climbed into bed with the Chavez cartel, and if anything was precious to Cesar, it had always been his own skin. His quick instincts and visceral reactions had made for good business decisions, but right now she was in almost as much danger from him as she was from Lopez.
She clenched her jaw as she rubbed at her wrist, the words she wanted to spit locked at the back of her throat. She would stop this madness, and if she had to lie through her teeth to do it, then that was what she would do. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything. I can’t, it’s too late.”
“Okay.” Some of the feral tension abated. He let out a breath, dug in his pocket and handed her a white linen handkerchief. “I know it doesn’t look good. It’s not what I planned, but I’m handling it.” He turned away. “If I hadn’t signed with Lopez, we would have been out on the street within a week.”
Esther blotted blood from her mouth as he shuffled papers and slipped them back into the manila folder.
Fool. Lopez was the one who had put them there.
Four
Esther locked the door of her office and crossed the room, blind to the morning sun flooding through the French doors and gleaming off the rich hardwood floors. Cesar had finally left for work, an hour later than he usually did, and Tomas had just pulled out of the drive with Rina in the passenger seat. Esther had asked Tomas to take Rina to school on the pretext that she was feeling unwell after slipping on the steps of the pool, the piece of fiction Cesar had devised to explain her split lip and bruised jaw. She had iced her jaw before going to bed, and a few minutes spent applying makeup this morning had hidden most of the damage.
Bending, she opened the doors of an exquisite Louis XV bureau. Reaching inside, she pressed on a section of paneling and a secret drawer at the side of the bureau slid open.
The address book in the drawer wasn’t secret—Cesar knew about it—but it was sensitive and entirely her business. With the media’s interest in Cesar, and now her, it was expedient for the stability of their business that certain details of her past were never revealed to the press, and one relationship in particular.
The book in hand, she walked to the French doors and stared in the direction of the garage, which was partially hidden from her view by a screen of shrubs and palms. Cesar had said he would be out all day, but she didn’t trust that he wouldn’t turn up unexpectedly to check on her.
The previous evening she had convinced him that she was prepared to go along with his partnership with Lopez. By the time she had gone to bed they had reached a fragile accord, but she had no illusions that would last. Cesar had promised to give her breathing space to allow her to “adjust.” The offer had made her skin crawl and she had finally given in to the fact that Cesar was no longer operating in a normal way.
Despite his formidable business talents, Cesar couldn’t work out an equation that to Esther was obvious. She and Lopez existed on different sides of a very stark line; it was a truth that had been acknowledged on a subtle level the first time they had met and that had been reinforced at her dinner table. Lopez could control Cesar—to the extent that he had entrusted him with the bank transfer—but if he didn’t know it already, he would soon know from his research into her background that he would never be able to control her. The second Lopez knew she had unmasked him, it was game over. By her calculations she had bought herself a day, maybe two, three at the most.
When she was satisfied that Cesar had gone, she took a seat behind her desk and flipped through the address book until she found the entry she wanted. It wasn’t the telephone number she was searching for, it was the small color snapshot that slid out from between the pages. Heart pounding at the step she was about to take, she studied the lean, tanned features of a man she had once known very well. As it had turned out, far better than she had ever known Cesar.
Xavier le Clerc was an intellectual, a frighteningly clever man who would have been at the very top of his field in international banking…if he had chosen to stay within the bounds of the law. When he had transgressed more than a decade ago, he hadn’t done it by half measures. A skilled trader of stocks and shares, in a two-pronged assault he had engineered the financial collapse of the Swiss bank that had employed him—a bank he claimed had, in connivance with a former banker and SS officer, illegally transferred money out of the accounts of Jews who had been sent to the death camps.
Hours after the financial disaster had hit the front pages of European newspapers, it had been discovered that an inordinate proportion of the cash and art treasures stored in the bank’s vaults by alleged Nazi war criminals had also been stolen.
Xavier’s actions had caused a furore. A Jew himself, he had been labeled a thief extraordinaire, a Nazi hunter and a revolutionist. Despite the magnitude of what he had done, his crimes had been almost universally applauded, his sense of justice viewed as biblical. Not exactly an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but close enough.
Esther had dated him a few times when she’d worked in Bern. The hours she had spent with Xavier had been challenging and addictive. She had come close to falling in love with him, but when his name had appeared on her list of people to investigate, she had immediately cut all ties. Shortly after the scandal had erupted, her contract had finished and she had returned to the States.
She didn’t know where Xavier lived now. He had gone to ground years ago and, to her knowledge, had never surfaced, but she could still remember the address of his sister in Bern.
Sliding the snapshot back into the address book, she put a call through to the number, not expecting to connect with Eva le Clerc after all these years. When the woman who answered the call confirmed in French that she was Xavier’s sister, Esther’s stomach contracted. It was the point of no return.
Despite the fact that Eva remembered her, she was abrupt and dismissive. “You’re wasting your time. I don’t know where he is. No one does.”
Esther stopped her before she could hang up. “Just tell him I need to talk to him. Urgently.”
There was a bleak silence. “He won’t call you.”
“Just tell him. Please.”
It was close to three-thirty in the afternoon when the phone finally rang. Tomas, who was picking Rina up from school, was due to arrive home any second. Esther picked up the receiver. A premonition prickled along her spine as she waited for the caller to speak.
The voice was male, the French rapid. “A qui appartient l’argent que nous allons valer?”
Whose money are we stealing?
That was Xavier, sharp as a tack. Cut to the chase with no preliminaries. He had always been too clever for everyone, including her. It had taken her hours of frantic thought and discarded plans before she had finally arrived at that particular option: get Rina to safety, steal Lopez’s money, then go to the police. That way she would cut Lopez off at the knees, and she would have the money as a bargaining chip if anything went wrong. She had tossed up going to the police straight off, but if she did that Lopez would have time to get away, and she couldn’t discount the fact that he could have law-enforcement people on his payroll. “You don’t have to know who we’re st
ealing from yet.”
“I’ll find out.”
That was true enough. Once the process was initiated, Xavier would be in control and she would merely be a passenger. The thought made her mouth go dry and her heart pump so hard that for a moment she couldn’t breathe. Xavier would have her cold. He could steal the money himself or expose her.
Either way, she reminded herself, it didn’t matter. All she was doing was improving her and Rina’s odds of physical survival. Lopez was a killer, le Clerc was a thief who lived by his own code; the choice was literally the lesser of two evils. “Okay. The name he uses is Alex Lopez. His real name is Alejandro Chavez. He’s the only son of Marco Chavez, and he’s banking with RCS. I have an account number, and not much else.”
“Chavez. You do like to walk on the wild side.”
“Not by choice.”
“If it’s not your choice then it must be Cesar’s.” There was a brief silence. “You should never have married him.”
For a split second the knowledge of what could have been, and almost had been, hung between them, and with it an unexpected cocktail of emotions she thought she had dealt with years ago. Her options had been cut by Xavier’s choices. He had chosen his path; she had chosen hers. As it turned out, they had both ended up in exactly the same place: on the wrong side of the law. “Will you help me?” Instinctively, she used the personal plea, not one that included Cesar.
There was a pause. She could hear the faint rhythm of his breathing and somewhere farther away the cry of gulls, which meant he lived close to the sea. That fitted with what she remembered about him. Xavier had come from a well-heeled family. His father had been a banker. He had always liked the good things in life, particularly fine art and yachts.
“I’ll think it over. If I decide to take the job, I’ll be in touch.”
“Wait. I need to—” The phone clicked in her ear, followed by the sharp sound of the dial tone.
Hand shaking, Esther put the receiver back in its cradle. She had no idea where Xavier had been calling from. He could be anywhere in the Mediterranean, or even South America. He could be sitting in the Florida Keys or out in San Francisco Bay.
He would be in touch with her.
Her heart was pounding again, her stomach tight. She had to calm down. If Xavier didn’t want the job, he would have said so. The fact that he had contacted her at all and was now taking the time to think over her proposition meant he was considering helping her.
Despite needing his help, hooking up with Xavier in any capacity carried almost as much risk as dealing with Lopez. She had worked with him, dated him, then investigated him. She assumed that he had been attracted to her all those years ago. She also had to consider that he had known all along what her bank had employed her to do and that his interest had been a way of getting an inside track on any investigation. By the time she had reported the anomalies it had been too late, the damage had been done. Still, she couldn’t help thinking that if Xavier had a hankering for revenge, now would be the perfect time to exact it.
An hour later the phone rang again.
“I’ll take the job, but I’m going to need help from you. RCS isn’t top-of-the-line, but they do have dual controls, which means I’m going to have to bring someone else on board.”
Esther’s stomach sank. Most banks operated on a dual-controls system, where one person instigated the transaction, and another authorized and confirmed it. There was also the problem of transferring the funds out of one bank and into another. That transaction would have to go through a clearing bank, which would require more signatures. “Can you do it?”
“At a cost.”
Esther went still inside. He couldn’t have any idea of the enormity of the sum Lopez had in the bank. Then again, if he already had a contact in RCS, maybe he did. The thought was sobering. Despite the fact that Xavier was a thief, she hadn’t expected his motivation to be greed. “What kind of guarantee do I have that you won’t steal it all?”
“You don’t have any.”
Her ace in the hole was that she didn’t care if he did take the money. Esther had no interest in it other than removing it from Lopez in order to break his hold over Cesar and shatter his power base. Once she and Rina were safely in hiding, she intended handing the money over to the authorities.
“Relax,” he said smoothly. “It’s information I want, not the money.”
She frowned. “About Lopez?”
“And some of the interesting people he and his father do business with.”
Her fingers tightened on the receiver. “Whatever you’re up to, it can’t impact on this. I have a daughter to protect.”
“Don’t worry, my interest in Lopez is a separate issue. We steal the money, you and your daughter get to safety. Then I get what I want.”
The flatness of the statement sent a small shiver down her spine. He made it sound cut and dried, as if the theft itself was just a detail, when the mere thought of what they had to do made her break out in a cold sweat.
“If we’re going to succeed, I’m going to need you to use that remarkable talent of yours.”
Xavier required information. However, obtaining computer passwords and access codes to Lopez’s accounts was as likely to land her in jail as stealing the money.
Redan Capey Securities wasn’t a bank she had ever worked for, but she knew of it. RCS traded in what she liked to call “the banking twilight zone.” Their rates were cutthroat and they weren’t too choosy about their clientele. Based in the Cayman Islands, they ignored the regulatory procedures in place in Europe and the United States and made their own rules, practicing a policy of nondisclosure, which made them a big favorite with clients who had something to hide.
When she checked with a contact in the business, she discovered that over the last decade RCS had expanded, taking on a more respectable facade. They had branches in London, New York, Florida and, surprise, surprise, San Francisco. Although, the fact that RCS had a branch in San Francisco shouldn’t have been unexpected. It made sense that Lopez would choose a bank—and a banker—that was physically within reach.
The increasing respectability of RCS created difficulties, because that meant stiffer controls, but there was one ray of hope. An ex-colleague worked there. As advantages went, it wasn’t much, because Esther had never been particularly friendly with Dana Jones, but it was going to have to be enough.
The next morning, she dropped Rina off at school, drove home and dressed with care, applying makeup to minimize the split in her lip. Half an hour later, she parked her car just off California Street in the financial district and walked the block to the RCS building.
The bank itself was surprisingly spacious, with a large reception area for clients. The receptionist rang through to Dana’s office, then indicated that Esther take a seat.
What she had to do made her mouth go dry. If RCS practiced conventional banking routines, the passwords and access codes would be changed regularly, perhaps even daily. As efficient as Dana had been when they had worked together in Bern, she had never been able to keep track of the numbers. It was an illegal practice, but Dana used to write the codes down on the back of a business card and slip the card under her keyboard for easy reference.
Her plan was almost ridiculously simple—get into Dana’s office and get a look at the codes—but the number of things that could go wrong were legion. First off, Dana might direct her to an anonymous interview room instead of her office. Secondly, even if she got into Dana’s office, it had been twelve years since they had worked at Bessel Holt. It was a long shot by anyone’s standards that Dana still carried out the same bad practice and hid the access codes beneath her keyboard.
The gleam of a coffee machine in the corner of the reception area released some of her tension. There was a coffee machine. If there hadn’t been coffee, she would have faked a dizzy spell and requested water.
Making a beeline for the machine, Esther half filled a foam cup, not bothering with either sugar or m
ilk, and strolled to the nearest couch.
A woman exited an office, pausing to engage the security lock before she continued on to reception. Esther recognized her almost immediately. Dana was a small, elegant blonde, forty if she was a day, but she looked closer to thirty. When she’d worked with Esther, she had been an established banker, with a solid, although unremarkable, track record. Despite twelve years, she hadn’t progressed in the banking world, slipping sideways and, in Esther’s opinion, down. RCS had always been known as an “untidy” offshore center. They had moved up a few notches, but the preliminary research she had done into their client base had informed her that, respectable facade or not, RCS was still trading on the fringes.
When Dana saw Esther, her expression was surprised but pleased. She had never shown any particular warmth toward Esther in Bern, but Esther was hoping that Dana was still ambitious enough that the carrot of snaring a chunk of Morell investment capital would smooth over the past.
Her own smile felt tight and forced as she rose and shook Dana’s hand. She kept the chat light, and in the vein that she was researching short-term investment opportunities and since she’d heard Dana was with RCS, she’d decided to start here.
Dana’s gaze followed Esther’s hand as she lifted the coffee to her mouth and sipped, or more correctly, she followed the flash of her ring. Esther had worn it for effect. It was a rare pink diamond that matched her Chanel suit, a totally off-the-wall gift Cesar had given her when Rina was born. The ring was four carats and usually resided in a deposit box in the bank, but it was perfect for this. No banker in their right mind would have a discussion in a reception area with a client whose clothing and jewelry alone totaled seven figures. Dana’s career may have flatlined, but she had been trained by the best, and Esther knew that she loved jewelry. If the status value of the ring didn’t get her into Dana’s office, she didn’t know what would.