Joseph Finder - Power Play

"You telling me you don't really care one way or another if something happens to any of those guys? Sorry, I don't believe you."

"Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see anyone get hurt. But it's not like any of them are friends of mine. They may be worth more, but their lives aren't worth any more than mine."

"You'd care if something happened to your girlfriend."

"She's a friend. Not a girlfriend." I hesitated. "Yeah, I'd care if anything happened to her. I'll admit that. But I'm cooperating. I want this to be over. I just want to go home."

"Well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Anything could happen."

"Like I said, I'm cooperating."

His pewter eyes had become dull, opaque, as if someone had switched off a light. "Sounds to me like maybe we're on the same side here."

He didn't mean it, and I knew better than to agree. "I don't know about that," I said. "But I get it that you're not kidding around. So I'll do whatever I can to help you get what you want."

"That's what I like to hear."

"So what are you gonna do?"

"What am I gonna do?"

"Half a billion dollars, huh? That's a shitload of money. What are you gonna do with it?"

His stare pierced through me as if he had X-ray vision and was examining my insides to see what made me tick. "Don't worry. I'll figure something out."

"Half a billion dollars," I said. "Man. Know what I'd do? If it was me?"

A long pause. "Let's hear it."

"I'd take off to some country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S."

"What, Namibia? Northern Cyprus? Yemen? No thanks."

So he had looked into it. Most people wouldn't know the right countries unless they were serious.

"There's other places," I said.

"Such as?"

Was he still sizing me up, or did he really want to know? "Costa Rica, I think," I said.

"Forget it. That's like trying to disappear in Beverly Hills."

"There's this place in Central America, between Panama and Colombia I think it is, where there's no government. Ten thousand square miles of real outlaw country. Like the Wild West in the old days. Kit Carson stuff."

"You're talking about the Dariйn Gap." He nodded: You couldn't tell him anything. "No roads. Mostly jungle. Full of Africanized honeybees. I hate bees."

"There's gotta be decent countries in the world that haven't signed extradition treaties-"

"Signing an extradition treaty is one thing. Enforcing it's another. Plus, there's a difference between extradition and deportation, buddy. Sure there's plenty of decent places. You can get lost in Belize or Panama. The Cubans won't deport you to the U.S. if you know who to pay off. Cartagena's not bad, either."

"You've done your homework."

"Always. I hope you learn that sooner rather than later."

"Sounds to me like you've been planning this for a while."

A slow, lethal grin. He said nothing.

"I hope you've taken precautions to cover the money trail, too," I said. "You steal half a billion dollars from one of the world's biggest corporations, you're gonna have an awful lot of people trying to track it down. Track you down."

"Let 'em hunt all they want. Once it moves offshore, it disappears."

"You know, our bank's not going to authorize a transfer of five hundred million dollars to the Cayman Islands or whatever. That'll just raise all kind of red flags."

"Actually, I was thinking Kazakhstan."

"Kazakhstan? That sounds even more suspicious."

"Sure. Unless you know how often Hammond wires money to a company in Kazakhstan."

"Huh?"

"It's all there on the Internet. On some-what is it?-Form 8-K on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Seems Boeing buys their titanium from Russia, so you guys buy it from Kazakhstan. One of the largest titanium producers in the world."

"That right?" I'd never heard this. I wondered if he was making it up; I didn't think he was.

"Titanium prices keep skyrocketing, so you guys like to stockpile it. Hammond's got a ten-year contract with some company in Kazakhstan, name I can't remember, for over a billion dollars. So every year you wire hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Bank of Kazakhstan."

"We wire money to Kazakhstan, huh?"

"Not directly. To their correspondent bank in New York. Deutsche Bank."

"How do you know all this?"

"Like you said, Jake, I do my homework. So let's say I set up a shell company in Bermuda or the British Virgin Islands or the Seychelles and gave it the name of some made-up titanium export firm in Kazakhstan, right? Your bank wires it to this fake company that has an account at Deutsche Bank in New York-they're not going to know any better."

"I thought the Germans cooperate with the U.S. on money laundering."

"Oh, sure. But Deutsche Bank isn't going to have it for more than a second or two before it goes to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. And from there-well, just take it from me. I got this all figured out."

He really did. He wasn't making it up-he seemed to know too many details. "I'm impressed."

"Never underestimate me, buddy. Now, a couple of questions for you."

I nodded.

"That lady CEO," Russell said. "Cheryl Tobin. Most of these guys don't like her, huh?"

"I like her okay." What did he care?

"Well, you're low on the totem pole." A sly smile. "I'm talking about the senior guys."

"Most don't," I admitted.

"How come? Because she's a bitch?"

I paused for a second. Some guys use "bitch" interchangeably for "woman." Men like Russell, I figured. I wasn't going to teach him manners. "Yeah, they're probably not comfortable having a woman in charge. But the fact is, like it or not, she's the boss."

"Boss may not always be right, but she's still the boss, that it?"

"Like that."

He shook his head. "I think it's because they don't want her investigating them. They're scared she might find something. Like a bribe, maybe."

"News to me." Had Slattery told him about the internal corporate investigation? Or someone else-his inside source? "Wouldn't surprise me, though. She's a real stickler for rules."

"They'd love to get rid of her."

"Maybe, some of them. But the board of directors hired her. Not them."

"And she doesn't have the power to fire any of them, does she?"

"Never heard that before."

"There's a lot about your company I know."

"I can see that." And I wondered how.

"She's holding out on me."

"That's her job. Someone has to, and she runs the company. But she'll come around."

"Maybe I don't need her."

"Maybe you do. That's the thing, Russell. You gotta keep your options open. Anyone who has signing authority is someone you might need around. The point is for you to get your money. Not prune the deadwood."

"But she doesn't have signing authority, does she?"

"That's way above my pay grade, Russell."

"Interesting, isn't it?"

"If true. You get all this from Ron Slattery?"

"I have my sources." He winked. "Gotta know who I need to keep alive."

"You never know who you might need."

"Only need one."

I shook my head. "Don't assume that. The amount you're talking, the bank's probably going to require the authorization of two corporate officers. That means user IDs and passwords and who knows what else."

"Once I get the user IDs and the passwords, I don't need 'em anymore."

"Russell," I said, "let's be honest: You're talking about shooting someone to put the fear of God into the rest of us, right? But the thing is, you don't know which names the bank has on their list. What if they insist on a callback?"

"A callback?"

"A phone call to verify the transaction."

"Not going to happen that way. It's all going to be done over the Internet."

"Right, but look at it this way. A request for half a billion dollars e-mailed from some computer outside the country-that's bound to raise all kinds of questions at the bank."