Stolen Prey

States put it in their basement because they think the end of the world is coming. People in Russia put it in their basement because the end of the world is already here. The thing about gold coins is, they can’t be tracked. There’s no real paper trail, any more than there is for candy bars. Gold coins have no serial numbers. And, there are gold dealers all over the United States, and everyplace else. If you have the money, they give you the gold. They’re dealers, not banks. When we get the gold, we’ve broken the chain.”
    “Gonna be a lot of gold,” Kline said.
    Albitis nodded, and her eyes turned up as she ran the numbers. “Mmm … three hundred and sixty kilos of gold, about eight hundred of your pounds, which, right now, is worth a little less than sixty thousand dollars a kilo.”
    “But then we’ve got to sell the gold,” Sanderson said. “And we’re stuck with dollars again.”
    Albitis shook her head. “No. We’ve got the gold, and our trail goes cold. We’re free of the banking system, and the paperwork. Then we start businesses in, say, Nigeria, or maybe Brazil—”
    “I don’t want to go to Nigeria,” Kline said.
    “You won’t have to,” Albitis said. “I know the man who’ll set it up. You’ll make up a job with a fancy name, with fancy letterhead paper and business cards—Kline Petroleum Futures, Kline Oil Mobilities. Whatever. You’ll set up a bank account and then start selling the gold through a merchant in Lagos, who will feed dollars into your business account in return for your gold coins, at a slight discount of, say, five percent.”
    “So the merchant gets a mil,” Turicek said.
    “Correct. We take out twenty million, and nineteen million shows up in our bank accounts, which have no connection whatever to the accounts used to take the original money.”
    “But we have to live in Nigeria?” Kline asked. He was stuck on the idea.
    “No. No. Listen to me. You can live anywhere you want. Look: we won’t even have to get the gold to Lagos. My guy has contacts here in the U.S. We drop the coins with them, the dollars pop up in the Lagos account.”
    “Why couldn’t we do that with cash?” Sanderson asked.
    Albitis looked at her as though she were retarded. “We could,if we had the cash. But I keep telling you, it’s
getting
the cash that’s impossible. It’s getting from a bank account to dollar bills that we can’t do. But we can get from a bank account to gold. A gold dealer is a store. Buying gold is like buying a toaster. There’s no trail. That’s all we’re talking about: killing the trail.”
    “Okay,” Sanderson said. It’d take a while. “I guess.”
    “Anyway, when we’ve moved the gold, you hire some legitimate accountants to repatriate your money,” Albitis said. “In the end, you have several million apparently legitimate dollars in your bank account. You pay whatever taxes you need to pay. The gold disappears into the souks. Nobody ever sees it again, except in rings and bracelets and so on.”
    “What soup?” Sanderson asked.
    “Soup?” Albitis frowned.
    “You said the gold would disappear into the soup.”
    “Souk,” Albitis said. “Souk. A market.” She looked at Turicek. “What kind of people are these two? Have they ever been out of Minneapolis?”
    Turicek nodded at Kline and said, “Sleepy,” and then at Sanderson and said, “Dopey,” and tapped his own chest. “Grumpy.”
    “And I’m Greedy,” Albitis said. “Okay. Now all we need is Snow White.”
    A LBITIS AND T URICEK were solid with the deal. Sanderson and Kline were a little shaky. Kline had been somewhat satisfied by simply knowing that he
could
do it; he didn’t necessarily
need
to do it. The money was attractive, not mandatory. But they were not particularly strong people, and in the end, despite misgivings, they went along.
    Now, with that family dead out in Wayzata, things looked a little bleaker. Before, Sanderson had mostly thought of ways they could do it; now she began to think of ways they could get caught. Turicek and Albitis could disappear into the former Soviet Union and probably be safe enough. But where would she go? Duluth?
    Kline was another problem, she thought. He was erratic, and it was hard to tell what he might do, if the cops came around to talk to him. He had a weird sense of humor, a grotesque sense of humor. If he started trying to play games with the cops … And who knew, maybe he’d find prison
comforting
. He always