St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

bring in the rest of the high-powered executives, it shouldn’t take a whole day. Everyone is in town. I checked. So where the hell is my boss?”
    She took several long, slow, deep breaths, willing her nerves to settle. Foley might be slick as snot, but he wasn’t a fool. Neither were his bosses. They would understand that she was innocent.
    Wouldn’t they?
    She closed her eyes and gripped her desk until her fingers ached. She was the lowest creature on this particular food chain. If anyone was eaten, it would be her.
    God, how could this have happened?
    Silently she rehearsed the facts she’d have to retell over and over again before this mess was cleared up. And while she did, she prayed she wouldn’t have to give her frail explanations to some cold-eyed federal agent.
    Part of her wanted to grab her backpack and passport and get on a plane.
    Part of her wanted to scream.
    Most of her wanted to kill Bertone and dance at his funeral.
    Automatically she checked her phone for voice mails, hoping that one from Foley would be there, telling her everything had been handled.
    Nothing.
    She checked her e-mails again.
    Nothing.
    Grimly she stared at the screen.
    This is all a bad dream, right? It isn’t real.
    It can’t be.
    She typed her way into the bank’s master database. With shaking fingers she called up the Bank of Aruba correspondent account she had established at Foley’s instruction. The screen flashed into focus, then blinked, as if updating itself.
    Forty-five million, five hundred thousand dollars.
    Air left her lungs in a rush. “That can’t be. The check was only for twenty-two million.”
    With a growing sense of sickness, she scanned down to the banker’s code authorizing the second deposit.
    It was hers.
    No! I didn’t make a second deposit.
    She refreshed the screen once, twice, three times. Nothing changed except the speed of her heartbeat.
    Not a bad dream after all.
    Just a bad reality.
    Someone was using her bank code to make unauthorized deposits into the Aruban correspondent account that she had created.
    Damn it, Foley. You said you would help.
    She hit her e-mail button one last time.
    Nothing new.
    And there was nothing she could do about it right now except trust Foley to get off his ass while she went to the Fast Draw paint-off and smiled so that her picture could be taken with her equally smiling blackmailers.

16
    Castillo del Cielo
Saturday
5:30 P.M. MST
    T he tape securing the recorder to the small of Rand’s back itched like fire ants. The nearly invisible wire that served as a microphone tweaked his chest hair when he moved a certain way.
    “Stop scratching. It blows out the microphone.”
    Faroe’s voice came from the earphones of the fake iPod that Rand wore. When the Bertones had turned down an offer from The World in One Hour to film the contest as a human interest piece, Faroe had wired Rand for sound and given him a special camera. It had been prepared by St. Kilda technicians and was capable of shooting through the compound lens, as any other camera would.
    But this particular camera came equipped with another internal hard drive and lens. The second lens took its images through a pinhole disguised as a USB cable port on the side of the camera and sent the results to a memory stick. The second camera’s field of view was at precisely ninety degrees to the normal lens.
    All Rand had to do to take photos from the second lens was todepress a disguised second shutter release and remember to keep his finger away from the USB port.
    “Damn wire is plucking me bald,” Rand said under his breath.
    “Wait until I pull off the tape—you’ll scream like a girl. You see Bertone yet?”
    “No, but his wife is all over the place like a rash.”
    “Don’t scratch her either.”
    Rand laughed silently. Faroe’s acid comments were the only thing amusing about the Fast Draw. As far as Rand was concerned, the contest was an absurd pursuit for adults who lived in a world overflowing with violence. The fact that the party was paid for by the man who had armed most of the African continent just added to the absurdity.
    But at least Rand was used to painting in the field. He was a plein air artist in the original sense of the word. Not every invited artist at the party was. After the invention of good color film, many painters chose to work from photos rather than from field studies. The fact that someone painted excellent landscapes didn’t mean that he or she routinely