The Deal (47 page)

“The what situation?”

“The banker and the termination agreement and the cash that almost landed me in jail?”

L shook his head.

“Of course, right.”

I moved to the glass again. Hilary continued to talk on the phone, only now she was looking around the warehouse between glances up at the office. Something felt wrong.

“How long has Hilary worked for you?” I changed directions.

“Almost ten years. Why?”

“She runs dispatch. Always knows where your trucks are, right?”

“Always.”

Why was she staring up at me? Had she read about my father? Did she know from the paper I was missing his funeral? Fuck! Was I just being a paranoid lunatic?

“Why are you asking about Hilary?”

Suddenly her eyes settled on someone, or something, down below and she hung up the phone. She started walking. I looked in the direction she was headed. An officer in blues was navigating the bustling warehouse toward her.

“No,” I whispered to myself. How the fuck would she know?

I heard L stand up. He moved next to me at the window. I pointed at the glass.

“How the fuck would—”

Hilary. Dispatch.

“Does Hilary use scanners to do her job? You know, listen to the cops and firemen to determine what activity may cause her trucks traffic?”

“Constantly.”

Of course she did. That’s how she knew the tunnels were about to close, unlike someone like me who wouldn’t have known until after they had.

I looked at my watch. 10:23

“I’m not at the funeral. Morante must have bailed and put a look out for me over the frequency.”

“Who must have bailed?”

“Hilary saw me in your office and called it in. Which means—”

The detective couldn’t be far behind.

“Jonah, maybe you’re jumping the gun here.”

Hilary and the cop met in the center of the warehouse. In unison they looked up at the office.

We barreled down the stairs. I led. We hit the bottom and I headed toward the front door.

“Jonah!”

I stopped dead.

“He may have a friend waiting out front,” L said.

“Don’t we have to go past the cop to get out back?”

“This way.”

Briefcase swinging I followed L down a narrow, dingy hall past some back offices I had never seen before. I could feel ghosts of big-haired secretaries and men in gray flannel suits. Dull brown and yellow vinyl tiling covered the floor. At the end we entered a storage room. I took the lead again.

“Just go straight,” L advised.

We started bobbing and weaving through all kinds of boxes and equipment.

“Don’t forget—” I started, “You need to send the last two documents.”

“Then burn it all. I got it.”

“I need you to play stupid to all of this, not just the contracts,” I went on, my words as quick as my steps. “A million people are going to have questions, L, and they’re going to come to you. You have to pretend that you’re as confused as they are. Trust me, it won’t be long until the thugs and cops trying to find me turn into the FBI and CIA. The less anyone knows the better. You understand what I’m saying here?”

“Got it. What about this cop? What do I say when he asks why you were here?”

“Tell him I was too distraught to go to the funeral. Tell him I asked you to meet me here, then you talked me into going, and I took off in a hurry to catch the end.”

We continued through the metal and cardboard jungle.

“You see that red door at the end? Under the exit sign?” L pointed, “It’s a fire door.”

“I see it. Won’t the alarm sound?”

“Uh-uh. Needs to be fixed.”

As we got close, something dawned on me.

“This is probably the last time I’m ever going to see you, L,” I blurted out. “I can’t ever come back here. And I’m just basing that on the crimes I haven’t even committed yet.”

I didn’t hear L’s feet moving with mine anymore. I stopped and turned around.

“Don’t say that, Jonah”

“I mean it, man. What do you think I need all of that crap for?” I asked, pointing to my briefcase.

L glanced back toward where we’d run from.

“I figured you just needed to lay low for a while. I mean does anyone even know if—”

“I hoped to have more time to tell you. I’m sorry.”

“Jonah there has to be a way.”

“Trust me, L. There isn’t. My staying keeps anyone I care about in danger. Making sure you’re all safe is part of making this all right.”

I opened my arms, silently instructing L to give me a hug. He was pissed, devastated, and rightly so. What I was doing was completely unfair and I knew that. But I didn’t have a choice.

He hesitated.

“Give me a fucking hug. I won’t be able to leave if you don’t.”

We embraced like the brothers we had spent our whole lives becoming.

“Get the door alarm fixed,” I said, hoping to hear his laugh one last time. “The fire marshal will write you up in a second for that shit.”

“There must be some way.”

We broke apart.

“It’s past that, L. Someone tried to cut my balls off. Now they deserve everything they’ve got coming.”

The door closed behind me. I had no sense of where I was. Puddles in the uneven cobblestone flipped hints of light down the dark alley. To my left, past the buildings, I saw cars flowing. Same to my right, only in this direction I saw something thirty feet above running parallel to the street. It was the rusted out foundation of the abandoned High Line, an elevated freight train last used in 1980. I raced toward it.

Within seconds I could see the weeds germinating from the structure. I knew I was on Washington, meaning I had correctly chosen the street behind L’s warehouse. I turned right. I ran north.

Chapter 48

I walked into my apartment and locked the door behind me. I dropped my briefcase. Neo was next door playing at crazy animal lady’s apartment. The space was quiet, different without him, always was. All I could hear were the faint sounds of the city outside. I rushed toward my study. The sound of my heels on the hardwood floor echoed loudly.

I sat down behind my desk. The room was dark, all the stained, wooden venetian blinds closed. I switched on the lamp next to my computer. I logged onto the Internet and clicked my way to the Salton Lynear Bank Web site. I typed in my username and password. Within seconds I was inside the account being used for the Prevkos deal. I looked to see if Larionov had successfully made the wire transfer. He hadn’t.

I dropped my fist onto my desktop.

“Fuck.”

The plan was to make sure the funds moved quickly and rested at the Federal Reserve, the middleman for all domestic and international transfers, for as little time as possible. Someone seeing this much money, unexpectedly, was sure to throw up a red flag. Because PCBL transfers big numbers electronically every day, the Fed has an understanding to keep our funds moving as expeditiously as possible, something I was counting on. I looked at a green, Tiffany four leaf clover paperweight on my desktop then back at the screen as if hoping the funds would have arrived while my head was down. They hadn’t, which meant I had to anxiously sit and wait.

I looked up over the monitor at the opposite wall. Not just the wall, but the books lining it. It had been so long since I had noticed them, if I ever really had at all. I looked back at the screen. Still nothing. I looked again at the books. Slowly, without ever altering my stare, I rose to my feet and walked over to them.

I lightly ran my fingers across the spines that were facing out. They were all different widths, colors, textures. I was concentrating on them. Not the individual titles, just them, the books, as a whole. My eyes started to drift. I let my body follow.

I left the study. From room to room I made sure to notice all I had so often forgotten to recognize. I looked at everything, really looked. The artwork I had paid through the nose for. The framed photographs, some of friends, some of my father and me. Fresh flowers I had delivered each week but never really saw. I grazed them with my fingers, releasing their sweet perfume into the air.

I walked into the dining room I had never used. When I bought the place I used to tell myself how wonderful it would be to entertain. How nice it would be once I settled down for my girlfriend, wife, whoever, and I to enjoy elegant dinners with other couples. I used to close my eyes and see sleek flatware and china underneath simple, contemporary candelabras that fell perfectly in line with the apartment’s décor. I would see earth-tone napkins, bottles of red and white wine, and trays of savory, tantalizing food. And I would see it all surrounded by beautiful, intelligent, interesting people all enraptured by my incredible, dark-haired girl’s story as I just stared at her with the rest of them. It would never happen.

I reacquainted myself with the long, rectangular table’s smooth, shiny wooden surface as I walked alongside of it. I laughed. I had paid almost twenty grand for it, including the surrounding chairs. Right then and there, standing in a room that signified possibilities, it dawned on me. Nothing I had worked so hard for all of these years means shit when the most important things in life are out of order.

My strides picked up as I passed through the living room on my way back to the study. I sat back down at my desk and glanced at the monitor. The funds had arrived. Nine hundred sixty-nine million, six hundred thirty-one thousand, eight hundred nineteen dollars and eleven cents had jumped the Arctic and Atlantic oceans in a single bound. And it was right at my fingertips.

React.

My fingers began bouncing all over the keypad. As I had mentioned to Larionov, the plan was to move the funds into different, dedicated escrow accounts. I intended on staying true to part of the plan, moving the funds elsewhere. But that was as far as my honesty went. The account where the funds would be traveling wasn’t an escrow account at all. That account wasn’t even with the same bank.

I set the funds up to be transferred. The account they would be traveling to was #099-224581-7721 at SNPB, Swiss Nation Partners Bank. The name on the account was Stan Gray. He was dead on earth, but at this point in time there was one place he was still very much alive—within the confines of the global banking network. Once all of the necessary codes, passwords, and information had been entered into the appropriate fields, I sent the money on its way.

I opened the browser again. I put the two windows side by side with each taking half the screen. With the second one, the one on the right, I clicked my way to the SNPB Web site and logged on as my father. I entered his account and waited. Once the funds showed up, without hesitation, I prepared the account to send the money on its way once again. I typed in the desired account number and routing sequence, then confirmed the transaction.

I turned my attention back to the Salton Lynear Bank Web site window on the left. I went up to the address line and typed in the same SNPB address as in the window on the right, only with the suffix “.it” as opposed to “.com.” It was the Italian SNPB Web site. I clicked on “client access.” I typed in the appropriate information and within seconds was looking at my father’s private Italian account, the first of two different accounts he kept overseas. Both accounts were with the same bank. This was why he used a Swiss bank in the States. Private Swiss bank accounts, which are actually within the borders of Switzerland, are the most secure bank accounts in the world. Because of this, they have unbelievably strict policies regarding their access. They will only accept wire transfers from subsidiaries of their own organization and absolutely no transfers with outside banks. I know, then why send it to Italy instead of Switzerland since it’s coming from the same bank? This is where it gets tricky. Because some countries, such as America, are restricted with their use of encryption, banks in Switzerland will not allow Internet banking to be done for clients in those countries. They are simply concerned that the information being transferred isn’t secure enough. But, banks in Italy don’t have such tight policies. And they don’t have heavy encryption restrictions of their own, therefore banks in Switzerland are fine to allow Internet banking for clients in Italy. Hence the chain: U.S. to Italy to Switzerland. That’s why once the Internet took off, and my father didn’t need to physically travel to Switzerland any more to access his account, he opened the account in Italy to serve as the middleman.

It wasn’t long until the funds showed up in Europe. Once they did, I kept at it and immediately set the money up for the last leg of the day’s journey. I entered in all of the appropriate destination information, confirmed the transaction, and once again sent it on its way.

I looked back to the screen on the right. I went to the address line and entered in the same SNPB information, only this time with the suffix “.ch,” Switzerland. I logged on for the last time, only this time as “Leo 2235778.” Another measure of security within the Swiss banking system is the ability to have a nameless, though coded and numbered account, better for anonymity. It was indeed my father’s account. Leo was my mother’s birth sign.

The money arrived.

It had traveled over 10,000 miles in only seventeen minutes.

Chapter 49

At two twenty-five p.m., after coming up through the Chrysler Center’s service entrance, I stood at Carolyn’s desk. I was dressed for success, polished as usual. She looked up.

“Jonah! Where have you been? What happened?”

Without answering her I placed the medium-sized TUMI bag I had with me under her desk, forcing her to move her legs.

“What is that?”

I turned to her and leaned in so as not to have to speak too loud.

“How’d everything go? We all set?”

“Yeah,” she nodded, “we’re all set.”

“Good girl.”

“Jonah, what is that?” she asked, nervously through her teeth.

She pointed to the TUMI bag with her eyes.

I carefully glanced around.

“I’ll tell you, but only if you promise me you won’t open it until you get home tonight.”

She nodded.

I leaned down, over her, in order to whisper into her ear.