Stolen Prey

Listen, when I get to the airport, I’m going to throw this phone away,” she said. “I’ll get another one at the airport, if I can. But if you get an unknown number coming in tonight, answer it.”
    “Okay, but—”
    “I’ll pick up the packages if it looks okay, and I’ll get tomorrow’s,” Albitis said. “Can you get to Kristina?”
    “I think so. She should be coming in,” Turicek said. “There’sbeen nobody here at work, so they haven’t bugged us, I don’t think.”
    “They’ll figure out the gold, sooner or later, and come looking for it. So tell Kristina that I’m taking it out of her mom’s place. I’ll rent a van and drive down to Iowa, or to Wisconsin. Once it’s safely stashed, we can figure out our next move.”
    “I’ll tell Kristina. Call me when you get in.”
    S ANDERSON WOULDN’T move from her insistence that she knew nothing, and the SWAT team’s search of the apartment building came up empty, so Lucas headed back to the office. He was confused: he knew why the Mexicans had gone after Sanderson, but where had they gone? And why had they gone? They’d casually walked in the front door, like a couple of tourists, so why had they apparently fled out the back like a couple of hunted killers?
    There was an answer to that question, but he didn’t know what it was.
    Sandy was waiting at the office and asked, “What happened?”
    “Aw, it was a clusterfuck. Wait for me, I’ve got to go talk to Shaffer.”
    He’d called Shaffer after the SWAT team had begun its search, and though Shaffer was miffed by not hearing about it sooner, he relaxed when Lucas told him that nothing would be found.
    “I can’t tell you what happened,” he now said, as he leaned against Shaffer’s doorjamb.
    “What are the chances, really, that they were the guys we’re looking for? Our Mexicans?”
    “About ninety-eight percent,” Lucas said. “They were looking for Sanderson, and they took off. They got warned, somehow. Maybe they saw me running up the steps…. Anyway, we’re no closer than we were before.”
    “Well, we know they’re still here, anyway,” Shaffer said. “We’ve still got a shot at finding them.”
    Lucas nodded. “So what did ICE find at Sunnie?”
    “Ah—the shadow books. About a year after Brooks set up Sunnie, when they were struggling, he made a whole replicated set of books for a fake company called Bois Brule, which did the same thing Sunnie did—sold foreign language software, but a lot more successfully than Sunnie. Money would come in, in all kinds of amounts, but all on big recognized credit cards, VISA and MasterCard. The VISA and MasterCard banks would collect the payments and credit Bois Brule’s account with Polaris. They needed the Bois Brule system to make sure that whoever owed them actually paid.”
    “I’m not sure I see it yet,” Lucas said.
    “Okay. They sell a kilo of cocaine, collect, say, twenty K. They get it in cash. Eventually, they have this huge bundle of dollars, and no way to deposit it. You can’t show up at a bank with thirty million in ten-dollar bills without somebody getting suspicious. Not even in Mexico,” Shaffer said. “If nothing else, it’d be considered rude.”
    “Okay…”
    “So what they do, they have a hundred people each with a hundred credit cards. Those people charge twenty-five hundred bucks each, every month, on every card, and buy bank drafts with cash to pay off the accounts. VISA collects the cash andcredits Bois Brule. Now the money is in the bank system, and goes all over the place, and pays for all kinds of stuff. Real estate, gold, whatever…”
    “And the DEA guys have broken it out?”
    Shaffer nodded. “Some of it, anyway. They’re over at Sunnie peeing themselves, out of pure excitement. They might be able to claw back six months of it, or a year, even. But after a while, with these kinds of deals, records get lost, accounts get closed and confused, companies turn out not to exist anymore … at least, that’s what O’Brien says.”
    “Hmm. Well, better them than me. I’ll stick to murder and theft,” Lucas said.
    B ACK AT HIS OFFICE , Lucas said to Sandy, “All right: the Syrian woman.”
    “You heard the biggest part of it: that she exists,” Sandy said. “Everybody who cooperated with me—not all of them cooperated, but of the ones who did, I couldn’t find any buying pattern. I can’t figure out where she’ll show up next. All I could think of is that you get ahold