Stolen Prey

lounging about theoffice, and after work, in bars. Turicek would propose a method, Kline would shoot it down; if he couldn’t shoot it down, it was listed as a possibility. Sanderson had to be brought in because there was no way she wouldn’t know what was happening, and the two men were pleased to learn of her animal-rescue dreams.
    T HE PROBLEM was moving the stolen money into a form they could use, and could get at. Turicek knew a man who knew a man who’d once led a raid on an American prepaid credit-card company, stealing some thirty-two million dollars over a weekend. They’d hacked into the company and changed the withdrawal limit on the cards to the highest level allowed, which was nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars, and when the limit was reached, simply did an automatic refill.
    They then used hundreds of zombie cards, and after business hours on a Friday, began the withdrawals.
    “A cool deal,” Turicek said, “but the problem is, you need a major gang to pull it off. To get that money over the weekend, they had to make thirty-two thousand withdrawals. How would the four of us do that? They used hundreds of people. We’ve got four.”
    He brought in Albitis, whom he’d met at a job in Ukraine. She had some experience in moving money around the Middle East, from accounts in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan through Israeli banks, which was not commonly done. She also had an acquisitive streak. When Turicek called her and mentioned an amount, she started a list, headed by names like Malibu and Le Marais, like Porsche and Mercedes and Harry Winston and Cartier.
    A LBITIS WAS THEIR PROFESSIONAL , the one who knew how to do it.
    She told them, “Stealing this money is like kidnapping. The big problem is, collecting the take—where the money goes from legal to illegal. Somebody has to be there, with his hand out, and that’s where you will get caught. If you try to take this money in cash, people will notice. Bank tellers notice you if you take twenty-five hundred in cash. If we steal twenty million, as you say we can, and we put it in a bank, or lots of banks, and then if we withdraw twenty-five hundred each time, we’d have to go to a bank eight thousand times to get the money out. And we’d be on camera. And even if you got it, what would you do with it? If you want to buy a million-dollar house, you can’t show up with a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills. They’d call the FBI.”
    “So what do we do?” Sanderson asked.
    “We funnel the money into a few big accounts that look like businesses, and we use those accounts to buy gold.”
    “Gold?”
    Minnesotans don’t know gold
, Albitis thought.
    Albitis was a little impatient, explaining the fundamentals. “Look. We take the money out of this bank account, twenty million dollars, which I’ll only believe when I see it.”
    “You’ll see it,” Turicek said.
    “Okay. When we get it, we have to move it. Move it fast. We send it through a line of accounts we’ve set up in advance. Onshore banks, offshore banks, Lebanese banks. From there, we send it to Wells Fargo, to some made-up account. Syrian InvestmentsLimited, International Marketing of Lebanon. The problem is, the FBI can walk right down that chain. The longer we make the chain, the longer it will take them to do it, but they can do it.”
    “If we make the chain too long, wouldn’t it take us a long time to get the money to Wells Fargo?” Kline had asked.
    Albitis poked a finger at him. “Don’t interrupt—but you are correct. So we send the money to Florida, then jump to the Caymans, then to Lebanon, then back to the U.S., to the fake account. With the right banks, we can do that in four days, and it will take the FBI two weeks to walk down it. But, in the end, we can’t take the money as a check, because we still have to cash it, and nobody is going to cash a check for twenty million dollars. Nobody. Or even twenty checks for a million each. They’re going to want to see all kinds of ID and background details and fingerprints. They’ll take pictures, they’ll record serial numbers, they’ll inform the feds. There just isn’t a convenient way to get twenty million dollars in cash.”
    “What difference does gold make?” Sanderson asked.
    “Okay. Gold. All kinds of people buy it and move it around for their own reasons, a lot of them legitimate. Like making gold jewelry. Women in India keep their wealth hanging around their necks and wrists. People in the United