Thomas Perry - Blood Money

George saw Jane emerge from the little forest and began to trot awkwardly toward her. Finally, he stepped out of his sandals and went the rest of the way barefoot. He stopped abruptly in front of her. “Jane!” he said. “I can’t believe it!” He hugged her, then held her at arm’s length to look at her in the dim light from his doorway. “Come inside. Is anybody chasing you, or did you get out clean?”

“Nobody’s chasing me,” said Jane. She was already looking over his shoulder for the woman whose voice she had heard. She saw the face in an upper window—a brown, perfect oval, with large black eyes. It turned and disappeared from the window. Jane moved her eyes to the next window and caught a glimpse of a tall, thin shape clothed in a gauzy white nightgown as it passed by. “As far as I know, I’m not being chased, followed, hunted, or watched … until now.”

George feigned disappointment. “Oh, I was hoping to return the favor you did me.”

Jane said, “You’ve been well—other than the appendix?”

“You know about that?” He frowned. “Then the doctor did get himself in trouble. I knew it. American doctors and lawyers are down here all the time hiding money from the IRS. I told him that someday he might have a problem. He wouldn’t believe me.”

“He’s all right now.”

George Hawkes looked at Jane affectionately. “I feel wonderful, since you asked. I feel like I’m in the story about the lion and the mouse. The lion spares the mouse, and later the mouse gnaws the net so the lion can go free.” He bared his teeth and gnawed feverishly. “Ngyah-ngyah-ngyah.”

Jane looked at him through half-lidded eyes.

He said, “You’ve been here for thirty seconds, and already you’ve made my night.”

“I think there was somebody else upstairs who wanted that job,” said Jane. “Who is she?”

“Clara?” His smile returned. “She’s my wife. Local girl.”

“She’s very pretty.”

“Spectacular,” said George. “You should see the kids that woman produces … of course, you will, when they wake up.”

“George,” said Jane. “I’m afraid I won’t be here that long. I came this way because I needed to talk to you with no chance of being overheard or having a call traced.”

He turned to contemplate Jane’s face in the light. “I thought you weren’t in trouble.” He began to pull her toward the house, but she resisted.

“I’m not yet. This is business, and I need to keep it secret. I’d like to be on a plane for home before daylight.” She stared at him. “I’m sure that if you’ve lived up to the agreement we made, your wife hasn’t heard this kind of conversation before.”

When she had met him, George Hawkes had not been his name. He had been a travel agent for money, who specialized in sending it on complicated world tours. He had just managed to leave his building in Los Angeles as the police were coming in the front door, and he had done it masterfully: he had brought with him a suitcase full of his clients’ cash and some enormous checks made out to their Los Angeles company. George’s clients had misinterpreted his escape as an attempt to rob them, and he had come to Jane. She had negotiated a treaty. Under its terms, the clients’ capital would complete its round trip, with George’s regular percentage deducted. George would go out of business, so they wouldn’t worry about his being caught and trading them for a light sentence. They, in return, would never do him harm, search for him, or mention his existence to a third party.

George said, “She doesn’t know where the money came from. She thinks I was the heir to the Wright brothers’ fortune.”

“There’s a Wright brothers’ fortune?”

“How could there not be?”

“I don’t know,” said Jane. “I can do this quickly. I just need a name.”

“A name of what?”

“I need a person who can make some unusual financial transactions for a friend of mine.”

George squinted. “Unusual means illegal. I understand that. But I think I need to narrow it down a bit.”

Jane shrugged. “It has to be somebody who knows his way around, but can also get lawyers and bankers and brokers to cooperate in some moves that might make them curious. In other words, it has to be somebody I can trust absolutely, but nobody else can trust, even a little.”

“What are you paying?”

Jane shrugged again. “I don’t know what the going rate is. He would have to devote himself to this for a few weeks, and at the end of it, he never heard of me or my partner.”

“How much money are you moving?”

“About ten billion dollars.”

George stared at her in silence for a moment. “Ten billion. You have it already?”

She said, “We know where it is. Nobody else does.”

She watched George’s eyes narrow. They burned into her for a few seconds, then turned up toward the window of his house where Jane had seen his wife. He shook his head, and it grew into a shiver. “It’s better if you don’t tell me where it came from. I can’t afford to know that kind of thing anymore.” He sighed, as though he were saying good-bye to something. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The answer would be the same. Henry Ziegler, CPA.”

“Henry Ziegler,” she repeated. “I take it he’s somebody you dealt with in the old days?”

He shook his head. “I was never big enough to be worth his time and trouble, but he was a friend, so he helped me out a few times.” He amended it. “More than a few times.”

Jane couldn’t help looking away from George’s face at his house. It was bigger than the high school she had gone to in Deganawida, New York. The walk she had taken from his front gate had been longer than the distance from the end of the track to the girls’ locker room. “That gives me a new worry. There will be some men who start getting very dangerous the second that the money starts appearing. If he’s that big, they might know him.”

“That’s the way it is when you handle money, love,” said George. “The more there is, the more people there are who have an interest in it. But Henry Ziegler is discreet. Even if he passes on the deal, he’ll never mention it.”

“What is he, anyway?”

“The reason you never heard of him is the same reason he never heard of you: he’s no more interested in getting famous than you are. He’s an accountant. When I met him twenty-five years ago, he was going to law school at night and handling small accounts in the daytime. He wasn’t doing it so he could go argue cases, it was so he couldn’t be called on to testify against any of his clients. So he’s a lawyer, too.”

“Who are his clients?”

“He once told me there are about a hundred. I was one of his first, and he doesn’t forget the people who knew him when times weren’t so good. I’ve known him all this time, but I can’t name any of the others. I just know who they are.”

“Who?”

George looked up through the clear black sky at the stars. “How do I describe them? Picture this: the Mayflower arrives and eighty people step on Plymouth Rock, jump down and kiss the ground—the land of religious freedom! This gives the next guy off the ship a chance to pick their pockets while they’re bent over. He uses the money to buy rum and guns to sell to the Indians. He uses the profits from that to buy a ship so he can get into the slave trade. Four hundred years later, the descendants of this guy are still around. Have they changed? They dress better and have bigger houses. They’ve got a few more last names, because the daughters married too—mostly to people just like them. These are the people who got in at the head of the line. If you wanted to build a railroad, have a war, or buy up land and put suburbs on it, they had the capital. Henry’s clients aren’t the current crop of computer geeks from California or discount-chain rubes from the South, people who love to read their names in the papers. Henry’s clients don’t like to be visible, except when it suits them. That’s what Henry does these days.”