by Brad Parks
Thad was lying.
He hadn’t been filing those SARs. It was the easiest way of making sure the boat didn’t get rocked and the golden goose didn’t get slaughtered. And maybe he did it for the family, for all those poor people in Mexico, and for other reasons he considered noble.
It was still illegal, a bald abandonment of their statutory obligation to report suspected fraud.
The question was: What did Mitch do about it?
The bartender was looking his way. Did he want another drink? Mitch shook him off, asked for his tab instead. He was soon wobbling out into the sunshine, feeling sheepish at being half-smashed at quarter after one on a Thursday afternoon.
He drove back home, keeping his Audi’s speedometer below the limit, ignoring how much this frustrated the line of drivers behind him. Mitch often got emotional when he drank, and his feelings were now nearly overwhelming him.
Mostly, he was thinking about his family. Charlie was thirteen, soon to plunge into the crucible of high school. Claire was ten going on twenty-five. They needed a dad who was bringing home a steady paycheck and giving the family stability, not one who was waging some high-minded battle against his employer—potentially losing his job in the process.
And Natalie. Amazing, wonderful Natalie. He thought about their twenty years together. How had he gotten so lucky? She was a wonderful mother, a steadfast partner, and still the most beautiful woman in most any room she walked into. It was one of his greatest sources of satisfaction, knowing his success had enabled her to quit her job and find deep fulfillment as a full-time parent and the engineer of their domestic contentment.
Her Mercedes SUV was parked in the garage when he arrived home. He nearly burst into tears when he saw it, this symbol of everything he feared he’d lose if he fought this.
Still, what alternative did he have?
A person willfully violating this subchapter . . .
He clomped heavily up the steps from the garage, into the main part of the house.
“Hey, hon,” he called out.
“Mitch?” she said, from somewhere on the first floor. He went toward the sound of her voice. They met in the kitchen. She was wearing workout clothes, her tastefully dyed blond hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“What’s going on? Have you been—”
She was about to finish with “drinking” but she didn’t really need to ask, nor did she need to inquire further if it meant something was amiss. Mitch never drank during the workday.
Her mind went to the logical conclusion: “Is this because of the meeting? What happened?”
“Thad lied to me,” he said simply.
Natalie took in a sharp breath, brought her hand to her mouth.
“What are you going to do?” she asked through her fingers.
“I think,” he said ponderously, “I have to blow the whistle.”
* * *
***
Natalie fixed him coffee to sober him up, then left for her usual Thursday afternoon erranding and kid chauffeuring. Mitch sequestered himself in his home office and began giving his wireless Internet server a vigorous workout.
It was easy to say he was going to blow the whistle. Actually doing it was another matter. It wasn’t like there was some brass-plated whistle hanging on a hook by a braided string just inside the front entrance to USB headquarters. Likewise, there wasn’t a placard outside FinCEN’s offices in Virginia with an arrow that said, WHISTLE-BLOWERS LINE UP HERE. There was no instruction manual here. He had to go about this carefully.
He buried himself in whistle-blower laws, reading all the relevant statutes to find out what he could and couldn’t disclose, what he needed to have documented, how to proceed. This soon led to the realization that he would need a lawyer, one who had done this before, one who didn’t have any kind of connection to USB.
And good luck finding one of those in Atlanta. Every big firm he could think of had conflicts. Mitch was even afraid to reach out to any of the lawyers he knew for a referral. The last thing he wanted was to tip off Thad or someone higher up at USB about what was coming. He’d seen how quickly the circle-the-wagons mentality could take hold.
Especially if Thad hadn’t been filing those SARs. At that point, Mitch wouldn’t put anything past him. Including that he’d start destroying evidence the moment he heard FinCEN might be paying a visit.
So Thad had to be careful here. Methodical. No mistakes. It went to one of the first lessons Mitch had learned when he started working in compliance: better to do things right than to do them right away.
When Natalie returned home with the kids, Mitch plastered on a happy face—something he was going to have to get good at—then returned to his office after a family dinner, staring at the computer screen until his eyes blurred.
He considered asking for a personal day on Friday. That way he could make some phone calls, perhaps even convince a lawyer to see him that afternoon.
But no. He didn’t want to give Thad any cause for alarm.
The next morning, Mitch prepared himself to go to work and act like nothing was wrong. His limbs felt heavy as he plodded through his usual morning routine. None of this was going to be easy.
He knew, for starters, he couldn’t go anywhere near the CDC business. As vice president, Thad had high-level access to USB’s in-house computer system. He could virtually look over any of his employees’ shoulders and see what accounts they were accessing, what queries they were making.
So there would be no more SARs, no more checking CDC transactions, nothing suspicious.
Mitch even planned out what he’d say the first time he saw Thad.
He’d keep it casual, lob out a breezy, So I didn’t end up seeing Aurelia at your massage place.
And Thad would say something like, Oh, really? Was she busy?
No, I decided to let Maker’s Mark work out the kinks instead, har, har, har.
Let Thad think he’d won. At least for a little while.
* * *
***
Mitch backed down his driveway at 7:32 A.M., two minutes after his normal departure. Even with traffic, this usually got him seated at his desk, with his coffee already made, no later than eight o’clock.
He assumed normal speed, not his drunk crawl of the previous day. The interstate was heavy but moving.
Until it wasn’t. It first slowed to a creep. Then, at a bend up ahead, Mitch could see it coming to a total standstill. The radio wasn’t warning of any traffic apocalypse—no overturned tractor trailers or anything. It might have been a just-happened fender bender. Or volume. Normally Mitch might have stuck it out. But he was already too antsy this morning.
At the last possible moment, before a Jersey barrier closed off his options, he decided to go the back way instead. With a sharp tug on his steering wheel, he veered onto the exit ramp.
So did a black Nissan that had been behind him.
Mitch might not have paid attention, except his move had been so erratic, nearly impossible to follow. And yet the Nissan had duplicated it.
Still, it was probably just a driver weighing the same calculus as him—brake lights on the highway or traffic lights on the surface streets?—and making the same call.
Then he got into the right-turn-only lane to head down Spring Street. The Nissan did the same.
No big deal. It was heading downtown, just like Mitch.
Except Spring Street looked awful too. Worse than the highway. And so, again somewhat unpredictably, he swerved out of the lane and continued cutting across town.
The Nissan matched him.
Mitch still might not have thought much of it. It wasn’t possible to see how bad Spring Street was until you were about to make the turn. Anyone looking to avoid the mess would have to bail out last second, just like he had.
But then the Nissan seemed to intentionally fall
back, allowing a few cars to pass in between them. Any appropriately hurried commuter would have stayed glued to Mitch’s bumper, not giving an inch. Was the Nissan trying to make it seem like it wasn’t following Mitch?
He reached Juniper Street, the alternate to his alternate, and took a right. By now, Mitch’s eyes were as much on his rearview mirror as they were on the road ahead of him.
Sure enough, after about ten seconds, Mitch spied the black flash of the Nissan swinging around the corner.
Mitch could feel the paranoia creeping up on him. Three turns, two of them sudden, all of them followed. There was no question in his mind he was being tailed.
But by whom? And why?
It didn’t seem possible Thad knew Mitch was going to blow the whistle. The only person aware of his plan was Natalie, and he couldn’t fathom her saying anything to anyone. Least of all Thad. Natalie didn’t even like Thad, for reasons she had never fully articulated. And, besides, why would she betray her husband?
Did Thad have some way of spying on Mitch’s home computer? Even that stretched credulity. The wireless router was password protected. And while Mitch was no cybersecurity expert, neither was Thad. Except . . . weren’t there viruses that recorded your every keystroke and sent them on to some recipient without your knowledge? Did Thad find a way to get one of those loaded on Mitch’s machine? Sent it in an e-mail that Mitch had unwittingly opened? Did Thad perhaps do that with all his employees, in case he needed to spy on one?
Or, wait. Maybe this had nothing to do with technology. Maybe it was Thad, thinking five or ten steps ahead as usual, being able to read Mitch’s face during that meeting and then guess his intentions coming out of it. Thad intuited that someone who had been insistent enough to fill out a SAR every single business day for the last four years wouldn’t drop the matter that easily.
Still, why have Mitch followed? What would that accomplish?
Unless, of course, Thad didn’t know for sure what Mitch was planning. So it was precautionary. If Mitch went to work, all was well. If Mitch did something out of the ordinary—like, say, drive to a law firm instead of to the office—then Thad would know Mitch planned to escalate the matter.
And here was Mitch, three turns off his usual route.
Damn it. He should have stayed on the highway. So much for letting Thad think he had won.
Now in a frenzy, Mitch felt sweat popping on his brow, his heart beating harder. He was only being further unnerved by having this Nissan behind him, shadowing his every move. Could he speed up? Make a few more desperate turns? Lose the Nissan somehow?
Doubtful. Not in this traffic.
Which opened up another worry: These people—he could see there were two of them, even if he couldn’t make out their faces—were going to make some kind of move on him. Threaten him or rough him up. Or both.
On the right side of Juniper, Mitch saw a bus stop with a few people waiting at it. His pursuers surely wouldn’t risk there being witnesses to whatever they planned to do. Mitch pulled off, just shy of the bus stop, then turned to see how the Nissan countered.
If it pulled in behind him, he was going to jam the gas. Witnesses or no, Mitch didn’t feel like getting his ass kicked.
But the Nissan just kept going.
As it passed, Mitch gawked. He couldn’t really see the driver. The passenger was just sitting there, staring straight ahead.
Mitch had eyes on the guy for maybe four seconds. The man had brown skin and black hair. His facial features were primarily Mesoamerican, with perhaps a hint of Spanish thrown in. He was wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt and had multihued tattoos covering his arms.
He looked, in other words, like every Mexican gangbanger Mitch had ever seen. Exactly the kind of guy who worked for New Colima.
But how would New Colima be aware Mitch existed? Did the cartel have a source at FinCEN? Did it know about the SARs?
But if that was the case, why didn’t it make a move four years ago, when he started filing them? Why follow him today, of all days?
* * *
***
By the time the Nissan was out of view, Mitch’s hands were shaking so badly, he could barely get them to cooperate long enough to take out his phone and dial Natalie.
He was now flashing back to all those articles he had read about New Colima. There was one paragraph, from a piece in The Guardian, that particularly haunted Mitch: “According to Mexican law enforcement, New Colima doesn’t negotiate with business rivals. It beheads them.”
To think something like that was following him? And now Natalie wasn’t answering . . .
He swung a U-turn in the middle of the street and pointed the Audi back toward home, gunning its engine, darting through whatever small gaps in traffic he could find. He kept dialing the whole time.
On his fifth try, she finally answered. Tripping over his words, realizing he sounded hysterical—because he was hysterical—he told her what happened, told to make sure the doors and windows were all locked, told her to call the police if she saw anyone skulking around their place. When school let out, she should pick up the kids and take them straight home. No chances.
She suggested he call the police. But, really, what could he tell them? That a black Nissan sedan—and there were probably ten thousand of those in the greater Atlanta area—had driven behind him for a few blocks? Maybe if he had thought to get a license plate. But it had all happened too fast.
By the time he had turned back around and completed his commute, he was late arriving at his desk. Only by twelve minutes. Still.
He was certain Thad noticed, because their offices were only five doors away and the lights were set on a motion sensor, so you knew when someone was inside.
And because Thad noticed everything.
Mitch spent half an hour making himself do work, checking in on other business. That way if Thad decided to do a virtual shoulder look, he’d see a happy little employee, working far from the area of concern.
At 8:47, Mitch couldn’t stand it anymore. He wanted to force some kind of interaction with Thad, to be able to size him up. Mitch had played enough poker with Thad to know his tells. All it would take was one good look at Thad’s face.
Mitch grabbed his coffee, drained the remaining half of it in one gulp, then rose from his desk. He walked into the hallway.
Thad’s office was now dark.
Mitch already had his mug in his hand. He couldn’t sit back down now. Someone in the cubicle prairies would think the compliance director was losing it.
He continued toward Thad’s office, stopping when he reached the corner. Thad’s administrative assistant sat at a desk opposite his door.
“Hey, where’s Thad?” Mitch asked, as casual as could be.
“He’s up on thirty-five,” the woman said.
Thirty-five. Where the CEO and the other top executives had their offices.
“He said he’d probably be there all morning,” she added. “You want me to let you know when he’s back?”
“No, no, that’s fine,” Mitch said. “I’ll just send him an e-mail.”
He hurried toward the break room, wondering what was happening eight floors above him. Were they right now talking about Mitch? Circling those wagons? Deciding how to destroy the guy who was about to become an existential threat to nearly a billion dollars’ worth of their bottom line?
Let’s fire him for cause right now. Today. That way if he makes a move he’s nothing more than a disgruntled ex-employee. What kind of dirt can we invent on him?
Was there any dirt on him? Suddenly, the lack of annual performance reviews was problematic. There was no record of Thad having done a bad job, but there was no record of him functioning well, either. Thad could fabricate whatever he wanted. Nothing in the official record would contradict him.
Mitch filled his coffee, then retreated to his office f
or more make-work. As the morning wore on, he made three trips to the bathroom, which was in the opposite direction from Thad’s office but at least allowed him to see if the light was on.
Still dark. Every time.
Then, the fourth trip. Eleven thirty-four A.M. Thad was back.
Mitch couldn’t stand it any longer. He completed his journey toward the men’s room, because now he was nervous enough he actually needed to pee. Then, on the way back, he skipped his own office and went straight for the corner.
He paused at Thad’s threshold, hung out for a second. Thad was half-turned away, bent over his phone, unaware he had a visitor. Ordinarily, Mitch wouldn’t have paused. He would have just tapped on the doorframe to get Thad’s attention, then continued in.
It felt like it was already too late for that, so he just said, “Hey.”
This was the first word he had spoken in nearly three hours, and it didn’t come out right. His voice was froggy. He cleared his throat.
Thad looked up.
Mitch trained all his powers of observation on Thad. Was there a narrowing of the eyes? A barely perceptible opening of the mouth? Something to indicate he had spent his morning worrying about this guy, the one who was suddenly standing in front of him?
But Thad returned only a blank stare.
“Hey,” Thad said.
He was looking at Mitch expectantly. Conversational convention dictated that this was where Mitch should declare whatever had brought him in here.
What was Mitch’s line supposed to be? The one he practiced in his mind?
“I just wanted to let you know I . . . I didn’t see Aurelia yesterday,” Mitch said.
More blankness.
“Huh?”
“Your, uh . . . your massage therapist . . . Aurelia.”
“What about her?”
“I, uh, I didn’t end up going to the massage place.”
“Oh,” Mitch said again. “Okay.”
Nothing more.
This was where conversational convention dictated Thad should make a polite inquiry. Except he was just sitting there. Each second of silence—and there were several of them—felt more excruciating than the last.