David Duffy - Last to Fold

“Have a drink, Anatoly.” He held out the bottle.

Kosokov shook his head.

“I said, have a drink.” He raised his gun hand.

Kosokov cowered and put the bottle to his lips.

“That’s better,” said the Chekist. “Have another.”

Kosokov did as he was told.

“Good,” said the Chekist. “Now, tell me where you hid the CDs.”

I was moving more slowly than usual at 6:00 A.M., thanks to the vodka that helped ease last night’s pain. Mornings after evenings with Anna are often like that.

It had rained again overnight, and I ran through the warm, wet streets, thinking about my mother and grandfather, Polina, Lachko, and Ratko Risly. By the time I got home I was wishing I’d stayed in bed.

I brought up Ibansk.com while I drank my coffee.

The increasingly secretive, but still globe-trotting, Ratko Risly has been spotted, back in his home base of New York—in strange circumstances. Ivanov’s international network reports Risly was seen just Wednesday with none other than Papa Badger, Iakov Barsukov, father of gangsters and architect of the resurrection of the modern-day Cheka. The meeting resulted in Iakov recuperating in a Manhattan hospital from a bullet wound in the chest. And Ratko? Ibanskians won’t be surprised that no one has heard from him. Ivanov wonders if anyone will, ever again.

Unless I missed my guess, my new friend Petrovin had a direct line to Ivanov. I wondered which one was jumping to conclusions, albeit correct conclusions. More immediately, I wondered whether Lachko and his father were reading Ibansk this morning.

“Ratko’s computer’s online,” Foos said when I stopped by his door a half hour later. “Did its self-wake-up–e-mail–data-processing–more-e-mail thing again this morning. Its new owner also did a full data recovery to see what he’s got. He found the two files that were removed, just like I did.”

“Uh-huh.” No doubt now a clock was ticking somewhere in Lachko’s fake palace. I went to the kitchen to get coffee. Pig Pen called as I passed his office.

“Lucky Russky?”

“Don’t know yet, Pig Pen.”

“Crap shoot. Seven?”

“Later. Maybe.”

“Cheapskate.”

“Don’t give up hope.”

“Cheapskate.”

I took my coffee and the hard drive with Eva’s computer contents back to Foos’s office.

“What’ve you got this time?” he asked.

“Eva Mulholland’s computer. She did a runner from the hospital yesterday. Went straight home, logged on to UnderTable, bought a bunch of ID info, and split.”

“Kid’s got an UnderTable account?”

“I’m guessing she’s using Ratko’s. By the way, all those spreadsheets on Ratko’s computer—seems he’s running a money laundry.”

“I figured that.”

“How the hell—”

“Has to be. Numbers tell stories, just like words. You give the computer to Barsukov?”

“Yeah. His father.”

“Good work. You delivered maybe the best money laundry in history back to the Russian mob. That lady prosecutor should toss your ass in the hoosegow.”

“She would, if she knew. I had my reasons. It was Barsukov’s anyway.”

“Oh. That’s okay, then.”

“You know how it works?”

“Pretty good idea.” He leaned back in his chair, which was hardly big enough to hold his bulk, and put his feet on the desk. He was warming up for one of his professorial lectures on the way the world functions—which, of course, only he understands. Once he gets up a head of steam, he’s hard to stop. On the other hand, he’s rarely wrong. I hoped this would be short.

“Got to thinking yesterday. What would require all those transactions, hundreds every day? I went back to the data. Looks like Rislyakov wrote a program that moves money from overseas banks into U.S. accounts, or from the U.S. banks overseas, every morning, in amounts below the reporting requirements. Before you can say wash and dry, the dough is moved again, in smaller amounts, small enough not to attract attention into new accounts—eight hundred fifty, nine hundred bucks a pop. People go around and withdraw equally small amounts in cash from ATMs and redeposit the bread into other accounts and voilà, clean cash. No trail.”

“That takes a ton of accounts—thousands, more.”

“Sure. Remember all those Social Security numbers he ripped off from T.J. Maxx—maybe a hundred million, right? Not worth jack on the market. Competition’s killed identity theft. Check UnderTable—prices are in the crapper. But put a new name with an existing Social Security number, open a bank account, and you’ve got an untraceable vehicle to move money through. The perfect washing machine. Automate the process and a computer drives the whole thing—orders the electronic transfers and sends out e-mails with instructions for the cash transfers. You recruit the labor and sit back and watch the money move. Even if a courier gets busted, or a bank’s security catches on, the accounts are pure fiction. Nothing to trace. Only a few hundred bucks in them at any given time. The potential loss is next to nothing.”

“Need a lot of people working ATMs.”

“True—but one guy can hit what, six an hour, doing five transactions each. That’s two hundred forty transactions in an eight-hour day. Say the average transfer is eight hundred bucks. Hundred ninety thousand dollars a day. One guy. Hundred guys—nineteen million two. Charge five percent, seven, maybe. Move three, four hundred mil a month. You do the math. Gotta hand it to him. Fucking brilliant.”

“Except he’s dead.”

He shrugged. “So Barsukov doesn’t run one of the hundred best companies to work for. Still a great scheme.”

“Can Barsukov run it without Ratko?”

“It’s automated. The computer’s the main thing. Barsukov’s got that, thanks again to you. It’ll run for a while on its own, but sooner or later, he’s gonna need two pieces that he’s missing.”

“The database—to create new accounts.”

“Very astute. And the code. There’s one piece of the app that’s missing, the one that turns all those numbers into transaction records. I’m assuming that’s one of the files Ratko removed—for security. It’s the right size. The way these things work—”

I held up my free hand. “This is all still guesswork, right?”

“Theory of relativity started out as guesswork.”

“Excuse me, Dr. Einstein. I suppose it’s my job to come up with the empirical proof.”

“You’re the one who wants to impress the hot U.S. attorney.”

“Yeah. Right now, though, I’ve got to find the girl. Promised her father, which was probably a mistake.”

“Given your recent track record and her old man, I’d agree.”

I could’ve thrown my coffee, but he had a point. “I need a list of calls to and from a cell phone. It’s a disposable.” I gave him Petrovin’s number.

“Anybody we know?”

I shook my head. “Russian mystery cop. Working with the hot U.S. attorney. Knows too damned much about me. I need to level the playing field.”

“On it.”

I brought up Eva’s computer and backtracked through her transactions at UnderTable, one of several Web-based identity exchanges in the Badgers’ criminal empire. Used to be, as Foos said, UnderTable and its sister exchanges, Cardshark and ID Warehouse, turned tidy profits. Identity thieves would put the fruits of their labors up for sale, other kinds of crooks would pay the going rate for credit card, bank account, Social Security, and phone numbers, and the Badgers would take a cut of every transaction—eBay for bad guys, complete with its own version of PayPal. But as some wise capitalist once observed, there hasn’t been a business invented yet whose profitability wasn’t eventually eroded by competition. Over time the going rate has declined from thousands to hundreds to tens of dollars. A few years ago, the forty accounts Eva purchased could’ve cost two hundred grand. She probably got them for ten, not that she cared, since, as I suspected, she used Ratko’s account for payment.