by Brad Parks
Mitch would be an easy target, sitting in prison. There would be an accident. He would be found hanging in his cell. He would get knifed in the chow line. There were a million ways New Colima could go about it.
And what would the prison care, really? Mitchell Dupree would just be one less felon for the taxpayers to have to worry about feeding.
It was the next day before Mitch was allowed to place his first call from one of the jail’s mid–twentieth century corded pay phones. And he had to make it count. He didn’t call Natalie, or his lawyer, or anyone else who might be friendly to his cause.
He called Thad Reiner.
Mitch knew the man would answer. He’d be too curious not to. Mitch listened, muted, as a recording informed Reiner he was receiving a call from an inmate.
Then, finally, the line was open.
“Who is this?” Thad asked, though he already had to know the answer.
“Hello, Thad,” Mitch said, his voice calm.
“What do you want?”
“I have a message for you and your bosses at New Colima.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Thad said, as smooth as ever.
“Sure, sure. I know you don’t. So just shut up and listen for a second. You got me, okay, Thad? I’ll never be able to explain that account in Jersey. I’m going to jail. You’re staying free. You win. I understand that. But there’s something you need to understand, too.”
Mitch let the pause grow pregnant, then said: “I have the documents. Those SARs? Those deposit slips? I kept hard copies. Every. Single. One. And I’ve hidden them in a place where you’ll never find them.”
There was silence on the other end. But Mitch swore he could hear blood draining from Thad’s face.
Mitch continued, “So here’s how this works. I’m untouchable. You hear that? Totally untouchable. If New Colima comes after me, those documents are going to the feds. If I die in prison, those documents are going to the feds. If something happens to my family, those documents are going to the feds. You tell New Colima that, got it?”
Thad still hadn’t replied. Mitch didn’t care.
He just lowered the phone back into its cradle.
Read on for an excerpt from Brad Parks’s next thriller
THE LAST ACT
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction.
However.
It is inspired—and loosely informed—by the real-life case of Wachovia Bank. Between 2004 and 2007, the bank failed to apply proper money-laundering controls to at least 378 billion dollars’ worth of transfers to and from Mexican casas de cambio, currency exchange houses.
In doing so, Wachovia created what federal authorities later described as an open channel between Mexican drug cartels and the US banking system. Wachovia, which has since been acquired by Wells Fargo, collected billions of dollars in fees for this service.
It is unknown what portion of the casas de cambio money was legitimate and what was illicit drug profits. The US Drug Enforcement Administration only discovered the arrangement by following the paper trail relating to the Sinaloa drug cartel’s purchase of a DC-9 plane that had been seized in Mexico, laden with cocaine. Wachovia eventually paid 160 million dollars to settle a federal investigation into what was then the largest violation of the US Bank Secrecy Act ever uncovered.
As significant as the fine was, it was only a fraction of what Wachovia made off its casas de cambio business. Then there is the larger context: the so-called war on drugs, which the United States has waged since the 1970s.
Largely because of this war, a country founded on principles of freedom and democracy now incarcerates its citizens at a higher rate than Russia and China combined. The vast majority of those offenses are petty, street-level crimes that are, monetarily, many orders of magnitude less than the one committed by Wachovia.
And yet no Wachovia executive faced criminal charges, nor served a single day in prison.
That’s why this is a work of fiction.
Because who could believe something so preposterous?
CHAPTER 1
They confronted him shortly after dark, maybe thirty feet from the safety of his car.
Kris Langetieg—husband, father, affable redhead—had just emerged from a school-board meeting. He was walking head down alongside the lightly trafficked side street where he had parked, eager to get home to his family, distracted enough that he didn’t notice the two men until they were already bracketing him on the narrow sidewalk. One in front, one behind.
Langetieg recognized them immediately. The guys from the cartel. His loafers skidded on a fine layer of West Virginia grit as he came to a halt. A thin summer sweat covered his upper lip.
“Hello again,” one of them said.
The one in front. The one with the gun.
“What do you want?” Langetieg asked, sweat now popping on his brow. “I already told you no.”
“Exactly,” the other one said.
The one behind. The one closing fast.
Langetieg braced himself. He was a big man. Big and soft. Panic seized him.
A man in front. A man behind. A fence to his right. A truck to his left. All the cardinal points blocked, and his car might as well have been in Ohio. Still, if he could get his legs under him, if he could get his arms up, if he could get some breath in his lungs . . .
Then the current entered him: twelve hundred volts of brain-jarring juice, delivered through the wispy tendrils of a police-grade Taser. Langetieg dropped to the ground, his muscles locked in contraction.
The doors of a nearby panel van opened and two more men emerged. Both were Mexican and built like wrestlers, low to the ground and practical. They picked up Langetieg’s helpless bulk and dumped it in the back of the van.
As the van got under way, the wrestlers blindfolded him, bound his wrists and ankles, and stuffed his mouth with a dish towel, securing it in place with another binding. Each task was accomplished with the ruthless efficiency of men who had done this before.
Langetieg’s only sustaining hope was that someone saw what had happened; someone who might even recognize that an assistant US attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia was being taken against his will.
He strained to listen for the blare of sirens, the thump of helicopter rotors, some reassuring sound to tell him his captors hadn’t gotten away clean.
But it was a hot summer evening, the kind of night when folks in Martinsburg, West Virginia, were still inside, savoring their air-conditioning. So there was nothing. Just the hum of tires on asphalt, the whoosh of air around molded steel, the churn of pistons taking him farther from any chance of rescue.
For twenty-five minutes, they drove. The ropes bit his skin. The blindfold pressed his eyes. A small corner of the dish towel worked its way farther back in his throat, nauseating him. He willed himself not to puke. He already couldn’t breathe through his mouth; if the vomit plugged his nose, he’d suffocate.
Lying on the floor of the van, he felt every bounce, jolt, and jerk of the vehicle’s suspension. He could guess where they were traveling, albeit only in vague terms: first city streets, then highway, then country roads.
Soon the ride got rougher. The relative hush of the asphalt was replaced by the cacophony of gravel, of tires crunching on small stones, spinning them up to ping off the underside of the vehicle. Next came dirt, which was bumpier than gravel or asphalt, but quieter. The loudest sound was the occasional brushing of weeds against the chassis.
Finally, they stopped. When the doors swung open, Langetieg smelled pine. The wrestlers grabbed him again. No longer paralyzed, Langetieg bucked and thrashed, howling into his muzzle like the wounded animal he was.
It didn’t accomplish much.
“You want to get tased again, homie?” one of the men asked in Spanish-accented English.
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br /> Langetieg sagged. They carried him twenty more feet, then up a small set of steps. He was inside now. The pine scent vanished. Mildew and black mold replaced it.
He was untied one limb at a time, then just as quickly retied, this time to a chair.
Only then did they remove the blindfold. The lead cartel guy stood in front of him, holding a knife.
The gag came off next.
“Wait, wait,” Langetieg said the moment his mouth was free. “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll do—”
“Sorry,” the man said. “Too late.”
CHAPTER 2
I went to the theater that day telling myself this was it.
The last rush from hearing the seats fill up before the show. The last time striding out into the lights and losing myself in a character. The last opportunity to romance an audience.
I had been doing this, at venues both grand and grim, since I was seven years old. It had been a good run. No, a great one: probably better than ninety-nine point nine percent of people who had ever entertained the conceit that they could entertain; certainly better than an undersize, plain-looking, lower-middle-class kid from Hackensack, New Jersey, had a right to hope for.
But it is the one immortal truth of both life and theater that all runs come an end. Usually before the actor wants them to. Whereas I had once been prized for my precocity and small stature, and the ability to play child roles as a teenager and teenage roles as a young adult, I was now just a cautionary tale: the former child Broadway star who had finally grown up.
At twenty-seven, I was too old for kid roles (not to mention too broad in the chest and, lately, too thin in the hairline). At the same time, I was too young to play most character roles. And I was definitely too short to be the leading man.
I could also acknowledge, albeit painfully, that I had taken my talent as far as it could go. Being the pipsqueak who sang his heart out was nice, but it wasn’t the same as possessing the kind of once-in-a-generation gift—Mandy Patinkin’s range, Leslie Odom Jr.’s pipes, Ben Vereen’s feet—that might have kept me perpetually employed on the Great White Way.
Then there were other professional realities. My legendary agent, Al Martelowitz, had finally died this past spring. A week after his funeral, his agency dropped me, citing my paucity of recent revenue production and dim prospects for improving it.
From my inquiries elsewhere, I had learned that the number of elite agents willing to represent me was exactly zero. That effectively consigned me to cattle-call auditions, a process as brutal as it was pointless. Every sign seemed to be pointing toward the exit.
One of my favorite Broadway standards is “Corner of the Sky” from Pippin. It’s about a young prince who laments, “Why do I feel I don’t fit in anywhere I go?” While I had played the role several times—Pippin is short—I had never truly felt his anxiety before now. My corner of the sky had always been under stage lights. I wasn’t sure where I was going to fit in anymore.
So far, my search for a real job had been limited to one cover letter, sent to a former castmate who was now running a nonprofit theater in Arkansas and needed an assistant managing director. But I knew I was soon going to have to stop rubbernecking at the wreckage of my acting career and start adulting. Amanda, my fiancée, was a painter, and a damn good one. She was angling toward a show at the Van Buren Gallery—yes, that Van Buren Gallery.
In the meantime, one of us needed to have a job with a steady paycheck and healthcare. And Amanda couldn’t swing that and stay as productive as she needed to be. It was on me to finally put my college degree, paid for by the spoils of a more lucrative time in my life, to some remunerative use.
So this was it. The final curtain. The last act.
The Sunday matinee of Labor Day weekend was, for reasons both historical and practical, the end of the season for the Morgenthau Playhouse, a summer stock theater in the Catskills that had been surviving primarily on nostalgia for at least a quarter century. I was one of two Actors’ Equity members in the company, which meant the Morgenthau had splashed “ . . . also featuring Tommy Jump!” across its promotional materials.
Like our geriatric audiences would remember that Tommy Jump had played Gavroche in the first Broadway revival of Les Misérables; or that he had been nominated for a Tony Award for his role as smart-mouthed Jackson in the short-lived but critically acclaimed Cherokee Purples, which had the misfortune of debuting in the depths of the Great Recession, when the last thing anyone wanted to see was a show about a family who had left the rat race in order to farm and sell the ultimate organic heirloom tomato.
(Go ahead and laugh. Then remember that the biggest hit of the last decade was a musical about America’s first secretary of the treasury.)
The irony that my swan song was coming in the Morgenthau’s production of Man of La Mancha was not lost on me. I wasn’t Don Quixote. That would have been a little too on the nose. I was Sancho Panza, because the short guy always gets cast as Sancho. I had been tilting at windmills all the same.
Once the overture began, the performance seemed to pass in an eyeblink. Time onstage always seemed to go that way for me. I was soon peeling away my costume, scraping off my makeup, and saying good-bye to fast friends I might never see again. Before I knew it, the stage manager, eager to strike the set, was shooing us out. It was time to confront the rest of my life.
I had just exited the back of the theater, into an afternoon that felt like dog’s breath—the last febrile exhale of a steamy summer—when I heard a man say, “Hey, Tommy.”
Thinking it was someone who wanted me to sign his Playbill, I turned toward the voice, shielding my eyes from the glare of the setting sun. Through my squint, I realized I recognized his face. It was one I hadn’t seen in a long time, one I certainly didn’t expect to be grinning at me outside the Morgenthau Theater.
“Danny?” I said. “Danny Ruiz, is that you? Holy crap, Danny Danger!”
His nickname back in the day. Entirely tongue in cheek.
He chortled. “Long time since anyone’s called me that. I bet no one calls you Slugbomb anymore.”
His pet name for me, also a hundred percent facetious. We had been on the same Little League team, or at least we were when my acting schedule allowed me to play. I hit like a Broadway phenom, which is to say I don’t think I ever got the ball out of the infield.
“No,” I confirmed. “Definitely not.”
“Though I don’t know, maybe they should,” Danny said, shaking my hand and squeezing my biceps at the same time. “You got pretty jacked. What happened to little Tommy Jump?”
“He found the weight room,” I said.
“Damn. What are you benching these days? Like two-fifty?”
“No, no. I try not to get too big. No one wants to hire an actor who can’t put his arms down.”
“Still, you look great.”
“Thanks. You too,” I said. “Damn. How long has it been?”
“If I’m not mistaken, nine years ago.”
Which is when we graduated high school. I was so surprised by his mere presence, it hadn’t yet struck me how out of place it was that he was wearing a suit. On a Sunday. When it was at least ninety degrees.
There was another guy lingering nearby, similarly clad.
“You’re right, you’re right,” I said. “Geez, I can’t believe it. Danny Danger. What are you up to these days?”
“Working for the FBI.”
He delivered the line so straight I laughed. The Danny Ruiz I knew was a slacker who did his homework the period before it was due. He was at least three time zones removed from whatever preconceived notions I had about an FBI agent.
Then I realized he wasn’t joking. In a practiced motion, he drew a wallet out of his back pocket and opened it up, displaying a gold shield.
“Wait, you’re serious?” I asked.
>
“Gotta grow up sometime,” he said with a small shrug, returning his badge to his pocket. “I am now Special Agent Daniel Ruiz. This is Special Agent Rick Gilmartin.”
The other man nodded. He was taller than Danny, over six feet. He had blue eyes and a reserved, disapproving air about him—like I had done something wrong, but regulations forbade him from explaining it to me. Which probably made him just about perfect for the federal government. In his right hand, he clutched a metal briefcase.
“You want to get some coffee or something?” Danny said. “There’s something we’d like to discuss with you.”
At that moment, I got my first shot of nerves. This wasn’t Danny Ruiz, my onetime classmate, who happened to catch me in a show and now wanted to gab. He was acting as a representative of the United States government’s primary law enforcement agency.
“What’s this all about?” I asked in a faltering voice.
“Let’s just get some coffee. There’s a diner up the street.”
He said it in an open, friendly way. He was still smiling.
His partner wasn’t. The man hadn’t spoken a single word.
* * *
***
I knew the diner well because it was the cheapest place in town.
As we walked, Danny filled me in on his life since high school. After graduation, he went into the army—I vaguely remembered as much—where he was quickly disabused of his slacker ways. Then he used the GI Bill to attend John Jay College of Criminal Justice. As a senior, he scored high on some test and was soon being recruited by the FBI. He was now with the unit that investigated money laundering, which was considered highly prestigious.
I listened with half an ear, distracted, nervous, trying to guess which federal statutes I had broken. Had I inadvertently laundered money? What was money laundering anyway?
Danny was yammering on like we were talking over pigs in a blanket at a class reunion. But I imagined this was what FBI agents did. Lure you in. Relax you. Then spring the trap.