Читать книгу: «The Blue Zone»
THE BLUE ZONE
Andrew Gross
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Two
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Part Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Part Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Chapter Eighty-Four
Chapter Eighty-Five
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
The manual of WITSEC, the U.S. Marshals agency that oversees the Witness Protection Program, describes three stages of agency involvement.
The Red Zone—when a subject is held in protective custody, while in prison or on trial.
The Green Zone—when that subject, along with his or her family, has been placed in a new identity and location and is living securely in that identity, known only to his WITSEC case agent.
And the Blue Zone—the state most feared, when there is suspicion that a subject’s new identity has been penetrated or blown. When he or she is unaccounted for, is out of contact with the case agent, or has fled the safety of the program. When there is no official knowledge of whether that person is dead or alive.
PROLOGUE
It took just minutes for Dr. Emil Varga to reach the old man’s room. He had been in a deep sleep, dreaming of a woman from his days at the university a lifetime ago, but at the sound of the servant’s frantic knocking he quickly threw his wool jacket over his nightshirt and grabbed his bag.
“Please, Doctor,” she said, running upstairs ahead of him, “come quick!”
Varga knew the way. He had been staying in the hacienda for weeks. In fact, the stubborn, unyielding man who had held off death for so long was his only patient these days. Sometimes Varga mused over a brandy at night that his loyal service had hastened his departure from a lengthy and distinguished career.
Was it finally over …?
The doctor paused at the bedroom door. The room was dark, fetid; the arched, shuttered windows held back the onset of dawn. The smell told him all he needed to know. That and the old man’s chest—silent for the first time in weeks. His mouth was open, his head tilted slightly on the pillow. A trickle of yellow drool clotted on his lips.
Slowly Varga stepped up to the large mahogany bed and put his bag on the table. No need for instruments now. In life his patient had been a bull of a man. Varga thought of all the violence he had caused. But now the sharp Indian cheekbones were shrunken and pale. There was something about it that the doctor thought fitting. How could someone who had caused such fear and misery in his life look so frail and withered now?
Varga heard voices from down the hall, shattering the calm of the dawn. Bobi, the old man’s youngest son, ran into the room, still in his bedclothes. He stopped immediately and fixed on the lifeless shape, his eyes wide.
“Is he dead?”
The doctor nodded. “He finally gave up his grip on life. For eighty years he had it by the balls.”
Bobi’s wife, Marguerite, who was carrying the old man’s third grandchild, began to weep in the doorway. The son crept cautiously over to the bed, as if advancing on a slumbering mountain lion that at any moment might spring up in attack. He knelt down and brushed the old man’s face, his tightened, withered cheeks. Then he took his father’s hand, which even now was rough and coarse as a laborer’s hand, and gently kissed it on the knuckles.
“Todas apuestas se terminaron, Papa,” he whispered, gazing into the old man’s deadened eyes.
All bets are off, Father.
Then Bobi rose and nodded. “Thank you, Doctor, for all you’ve done. I’ll make sure word gets to my brothers.”
Varga tried to read what was in the son’s eyes. Grief. Disbelief. His father’s illness had gone on so long, and now the day had finally come.
No, it was more of a question that was written there: For years the old man had held everything together, through the force of his own will.
What would happen now?
Bobi led his wife by the arm and left the room. Varga stepped over to the window. He opened the shutters, letting in the morning light. The dawn had washed over the valley.
The old man owned it all for miles, far past the gates, the grazing lands, the glistening cordillera, three thousand meters high. Two black American SUVs were parked next to the stables. A couple of bodyguards, armed with machine pistols, were lounging on a fence, sipping their coffee, unaware.
“Yes,” Varga muttered, “get word to your brothers.” He turned back to the old man. See, you bastard, even in death you are a dangerous man.
The floodgates were open. The waters would be fierce. Blood never washes away blood.
Except here.
There was a painting over the bed of the Madonna and child in a hand-carved frame that Varga knew had been a gift from a church in Buenaventura, where the old man was born. The doctor wasn’t a religious man, but he crossed himself anyway, lifting up the damp bedsheet and placing it gently over the dead man’s face.
“I hope you are finally at peace, old man, wherever you are.… Because all hell is going to break loose here.”
I don’t know if it’s a dream or if it’s real.
I step off the Second Avenue bus. It’s only a couple of blocks to where I live. I know immediately something is wrong.
Maybe it’s the guy I see stepping away from the storefront, tossing his cigarette onto the sidewalk, following a short distance behind. Maybe it’s the steady clacking of his footsteps on the pavement behind me as I cross over to Twelfth Street.
Normally I wouldn’t turn. I wouldn’t think twice. It’s the East Village. It’s crowded. People are everywhere. It’s just a sound of the city. Happens all the time.
But this time I do turn. I have to. Just enough to glimpse the Hispanic man with his hands in his black leather jacket.
Jesus, Kate, try being a little paranoid, girl.…
Except this time I’m not being paranoid. This time the guy keeps following me.
I turn on Twelfth. It’s darker there, less traffic. A few people are talking out on their stoop. A young couple making out in the shadows. The guy’s still on me. I still hear his footsteps close behind.
Pick up your pace, I tell myself. You live only a few blocks away.
I tell myself that this can’t be happening. If you’re going to wake up, Kate, now’s the time! But I don’t wake up. This time it’s real. This time I’m holding a secret important enough to get myself killed.
I cross the street, quickening my pace. My heart’s starting to race. His footsteps are knifing through me now. I catch a glimpse of him in the reflection of a store window. The dark mustache and short, wiry hair.
My heart’s slamming back and forth off my ribs now.
There’s a market where I sometimes buy groceries. I run in. There are people there. For a second I feel safe. I take a basket, hide between the aisles, throw in things I pretend I need. But all the while I’m just waiting. Praying he’s passing by.
I pay. I smile a little nervously at Ingrid, the checkout girl, who knows me. I have this eerie premonition. What if she’s the last person to see me alive?
Back outside, I feel relief for a second. The guy must be gone. No sign. But then I freeze. He’s still there. Leaning aimlessly against a parked car on the other side of the street, talking into a phone. His eyes slowly drift to mine.…
Shit, Kate, what the hell do you do now?
Now I run. An indistinguishable pace at first, then faster. I hear the frantic rhythm of quickening footsteps on the pavement—but this time they’re mine.
I grope in my bag for my phone. Maybe I should call Greg. I want to tell him I love him. But I know the time—it’s the middle of his shift. All I’d get is his voice mail. He’s on rounds.
Maybe I should call 911 or stop and scream. Kate, do something—now!
My building’s just a half a block away. I can see it now. The green canopy. 445 East Seventh. I fumble for my keys. My hands are shaking. Please, just a few yards more …
The last few feet I take at a full-out run. I jam my key into the outer lock, praying it turns—and it does! I hurl open the heavy glass doors. I take one last glance behind. The man who was following me has pulled up a few doorways down. I hear the door to the building close behind me, the lock mercifully engaging.
I’m safe now. I feel my chest virtually implode with relief. It’s over now, Kate. Thank God.
For the first time, I feel my sweater clinging to me, drenched in a clammy sweat. This has got to end. You’ve got to go to someone, Kate. I’m so relieved I actually start to cry.
But go to whom?
The police? They’ve been lying to me from the beginning. My closest friend? She’s fighting for her life in Bellevue Hospital. That’s surely no dream.
My family? Your family is gone, Kate. Forever.
It was too late for any of that now.
I step into the elevator and press the button for my floor. Seven. It’s one of those heavy industrial types, clattering like a train as it passes every floor. All I want is just to get into my apartment and shut the door.
On seven the elevator rattles to a stop. It’s over now. I’m safe. I fling open the metal grating, grasp my keys, push open the heavy outer door.
There are two men standing in my way.
I try to scream, but for what? No one will hear me. I step back. My blood goes cold. All I can do is look silently into their eyes.
I know they’re here to kill me.
What I don’t know is if they’re from my father, the Colombians, or the FBI.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Gold was up 2 percent the morning Benjamin Raab’s life began to fall apart.
He was leaning back at his desk, looking down on Forty-seventh Street, in the lavish comfort of his office high above the Avenue of the Americas, the phone crooked in his neck.
“I’m waiting, Raj.…”
Raab had a spot gold contract he was holding for two thousand pounds. Over a million dollars. The Indians were his biggest customers, one of the largest exporters of jewelry in the world. Two percent. Raab checked the Quotron screen. That was thirty thousand dollars. Before lunch.
“Raj, c’mon,” Raab prodded. “My daughter’s getting married this afternoon. I’d like to make it if I can.…”
“Katie’s getting married?” The Indian seemed to be hurt. “Ben, you never said—”
“It’s just an expression, Raj. If Kate was getting married, you’d be there. But, Raj, c’mon … we’re talking gold here—not pastrami. It doesn’t go bad.”
This was what Raab did. He moved gold. He’d owned his own trading company near New York’s diamond district for twenty years. Years ago he had started out buying inventory from the mom-and-pop jewelers who were going out of business. Now he supplied gold to half the dealers on the Street. As well as to some of the largest exporters of jewelry across the globe.
Everyone in the trade knew him. He could hardly grab a turkey club at the Gotham Deli down the street without one of the pushy, heavyset Hasids squeezing next to him in the booth with the news of some dazzling new stone they were peddling. (Though they always chided that as a Sephardi he wasn’t even one of their own.) Or one of the young Puerto Rican runners who delivered the contracts, thanking him for the flowers he’d sent to their wedding. Or the Chinese, looking to hedge some dollars against a currency play. Or the Australians, tantalizing him with uncut blocks of industrial-quality stones.
I’ve been lucky, Raab always said. He had a wife who adored him, three beautiful children who made him proud. His house in Larchmont (a whole lot more than just a house) that overlooked the Long Island Sound, and the Ferrari 585, which Raab once raced at Lime Rock and had its own special place in the five-car garage. Not to mention the box at Yankee Stadium and the Knicks tickets, on the floor of the Garden, just behind the bench.
Betsy, his assistant for over twenty years, stepped in carrying a chef’s salad on a plate along with a cloth napkin, Raab’s best defense against his proclivity for leaving grease stains on his Hermès ties. She rolled her eyes. “Raji, still …?”
Benjamin shrugged, drawing her eye to his notepad where he had already written down the outcome: $648.50. He knew that his buyer was going to take it. Raj always did. They’d been doing this little dance for years. But did he always have to play out the drama so long?
“Okay, my friend.” The Indian buyer sighed at last in surrender. “We consider it a deal.”
“Whew, Raj.” Raab exhaled in mock relief. “The Financial Times is outside waiting on the exclusive.”
The Indian laughed, too, and they closed out the deal: $648.50, just as he’d written down.
Betsy smiled—“He says that every time, doesn’t he?”—trading the handwritten contract for two glossy travel brochures that she placed next to his plate.
Raab tucked the napkin into the collar of his Thomas Pink striped shirt. “Fifteen years.”
All one had to do was step into Raab’s crowded office and it was impossible not to notice the walls and credenzas crammed with pictures of Sharon, his wife, and his children—Kate, the oldest, who had graduated from Brown; Emily, who was sixteen, and nationally ranked at squash; and Justin, two years younger—and all the fabulous family trips they’d taken over the years.
The villa in Tuscany. Kenya on safari. Skiing at Courchevel in the French Alps. Ben in his driver’s suit with Richard Petty at the Porsche rally school.
And that’s what he was doing over lunch, mapping out their next big trip—the best one yet. Machu Picchu. The Andes. Then on a fantastic walking tour of Patagonia. Their twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up. Patagonia had always been one of Sharon’s dreams.
“My next life”—Betsy grinned as she shut the office door—“I’m making sure I come back as one of your kids.”
“Next life,” Raab called after her, “I am, too.”
Suddenly a loud crash came from the outer office. At first Raab thought it was an explosion or a break-in. He thought about triggering the alarm. Sharp, unfamiliar voices were barking commands.
Betsy rushed back in, a look of panic on her face. A step behind, two men in suits and navy windbreakers pushed through the door.
“Benjamin Raab?”
“Yes …” He stood up and faced the tall, balding man who had addressed him, who seemed to be in charge. “You can’t just barge in here like this. What the hell’s going on …?”
“What’s going on, Mr. Raab”—the man tossed a folded document onto the desk—“is that we have a warrant from a federal judge for your arrest.”
“Arrest …?” Suddenly people in FBI jackets were everywhere. His staff was being rounded up and told to vacate. “What the hell for?”
“For money laundering, aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government,” the agent read off. “How’s that, Mr. Raab? The contents of this office are being impounded as material evidence in this case.”
“What?”
Before he could utter another word, the second agent, a young Hispanic, spun Raab around, forcing his arms roughly behind him, and slapped a set of handcuffs on his wrists, his whole office looking on.
“This is crazy!” Raab twisted, trying to look the agent in the face.
“Sure it is,” the Hispanic agent chortled. He lifted the travel brochures out of Raab’s hands. “Too bad.” He winked, tossing them back onto the desk. “Seemed like one helluva trip.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Check these babies out,” Kate Raab muttered, peering into the high-powered Siemens microscope.
Tina O’Hearn, her lab partner, leaned over the scope. “Whoa!”
In the gleaming luminescence of the high-resolution lens, two brightly magnified cells sharpened into view. One was the lymphocyte, the defective white blood cell with a ring of hairy particles protruding from its membrane. The other cell was thinner, squiggle-shaped, and had a large white dot in the center.
“That’s the Alpha-boy,” Kate said, slowly adjusting the magnification. “We call them Tristan and Isolde. Packer’s name for them.” She picked up a tiny metal probe off the counter. “Now check this out.…”
As Kate prodded, Tristan nudged its way toward the denser lymphocyte. The defective cell resisted, but the squiggle cell kept coming back, as if searching out a weakness in the lymphocyte’s membrane. As if attacking.
“Seems more like Nick and Jessica,” Tina giggled, bent over the lens.
“Watch.”
As if on cue, the squiggle cell seemed to probe the hairy borders of the white blood cell, until in front of their eyes the attacking membrane seemed to penetrate the border of its prey and they merged into a single, larger cell with a white dot in the center.
Tina looked up. “Ouch!”
“Love hurts, huh? That’s a progenitive stem-cell line,” Kate explained, looking up from the scope. “The white one’s a lymphoblast—what Packer calls the ‘killer leukocyte.’ It’s the pathogenic agent of leukemia. Next week, we see what happens in a plasma solution similar to the bloodstream. I get to record the results.”
“You do this all day?” Tina scrunched up her face.
Kate chuckled. Welcome to life in the petri dish. “All year.”
For the past eight months, Kate had been working as a lab researcher for Dr. Grant Packer, up at Albert Einstein Medical College in the Bronx, whose work in cytogenetic leukemia was starting to make noise in medical circles. She’d won a fellowship out of Brown, where she and Tina had been lab partners her senior year.
Kate was always smart—just not “geeky” smart, she always maintained. She was twenty-three. She liked to have fun—hit the new restaurants, go to clubs. Since she’d been twelve, she could beat most guys down the hill on a snowboard. She had a boyfriend, Greg, who was a second-year resident at NYU Medical School. She just spent the majority of her day leaning over a microscope, recording data or transcribing it onto digital files, but she and Greg always joked—when they actually saw each other—that one lab rat in their relationship was enough. Still, Kate loved the work. Packer was starting to turn some heads, and Kate had to admit it was the coolest option she’d had for a while.
Besides, her real claim to distinction, she figured, was no doubt being the only person she knew who could recite Cleary’s Ten Stages of Cellular Development and had a tattoo of a double helix on her butt.
“Leukoscopophy,” Kate explained. “Pretty cool the first time you see it. Try watching it a thousand times. Now check out what happens.”
They leaned back over the double scope. There was only one cell left—larger, squiggle-shaped Tristan. The defective lymphoblast had virtually disappeared.
Tina whistled, impressed. “If that happens in a living model, there’s got to be a Nobel Prize in this.”
“In ten years, maybe. Personally, I was just hoping for a graduate dissertation.” Kate grinned.
At that moment her cell phone started to vibrate. She thought it might be Greg, who loved to e-mail her funny photos from rounds, but when she checked out the screen, she shook her head and flipped the phone back into her lab coat.
“If it’s not one thing it’s a mother …” she sighed.
Kate led Tina into the library, with about a thousand recorded iterations of the stem-cell line on digital film. “My life’s work!” She introduced her to Max, Packer’s baby, the cytogenetic scope worth over $2 million, which separated chromosomes in the cells and made the whole thing possible. “You’ll feel like you’re dating it before the month is through.”
Tina looked it over with a shrug of mock approval. “I’ve done worse.”
That was when Kate’s cell phone sounded again. She flipped it out. Her mom again. This time there was a text message coming in.
KATE, SOMETHING’S HAPPENED. CALL HOME QUICK!
Kate stared. She’d never gotten a message like that before. She didn’t like the sound of those words. Her mind flashed through the possibilities—and all of them were bad.
“Tina, sorry, but I gotta call home.”
“No sweat. I’ll just start the small talk rolling with Max.”
With a jitter of nerves, Kate punched in the speed dial of her parents’ home in Larchmont. Her mom picked up on the first ring. Kate could hear the alarm in her voice.
“Kate, it’s your father.…”
Something bad had happened. A tremor of dread flashed through her. Her dad had never been sick. He was in perfect shape. He could probably take Em at squash on a good day.
“What’s happened, Mom? Is he okay?”
“I don’t know.… His secretary just called in. Your father’s been arrested, Kate. He’s been arrested by the FBI!”
CHAPTER THREE
They took the cuffs off Raab inside FBI headquarters at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, leading him into a stark, narrow room with a wooden table and metal chairs and a couple of dog-eared Wanted posters tacked to a bulletin board on the wall.
He sat there staring up at a small mirror that he knew was the two-way kind, like on some police drama on TV. He knew what he had to tell them. He’d rehearsed it over and over. That this was all some kind of crazy mistake. He was just a businessman. He’d never done anything wrong in his entire life.
After about twenty minutes, the door opened. Raab stood up. The same two agents who had arrested him stepped in, trailed by a thin young man in a gray suit and short, close-cropped hair, who placed a briefcase on the table.
“I’m Special Agent in Charge Booth,” announced the tall, balding agent. “You’ve already met Special Agent Ruiz. This is Mr. Nardozzi. He’s a U.S. Attorney with the Justice Department who’s familiar with your case.”
“My case …?” Raab forced a hesitant smile, eyeing their thick files a little warily, not believing he was hearing that word.
“What we’re going to do is ask you a few questions, Mr. Raab,” the Hispanic agent, Ruiz, began. “Please sit back down. I can assure you this will go a lot easier if we can count on your full cooperation and you simply answer truthfully and succinctly to the best of your knowledge.”
“Of course.” Raab nodded, sitting back down.
“And we’re going to be taping this, if that’s okay?” Ruiz said, placing a standard cassette recorder on the table, not even waiting for his response. “It’s for your own protection, too. At any time, if you like, you can request that a lawyer be present.”
“I don’t need a lawyer.” Raab shook his head. “I have nothing to hide.”
“That’s good, Mr. Raab.” Ruiz winked back affably. “These things have a way of always going best when people have nothing to hide.”
The agent removed a stack of papers from the file and ordered them in a certain way on the table. “You’ve heard of a Paz Export Enterprises, Mr. Raab?” he started in, turning the first page.
“Of course,” Raab confirmed. “They’re one of my biggest accounts.”
“And just what is it you do for them?” the FBI agent asked him.
“I purchase gold. On the open market. They’re in the novelty gift business or something. I ship it to an intermediary on their behalf.”
“Argot Manufacturing?” Ruiz interjected, turning over a page from his notes.
“Yes, Argot. Look, if that’s what this is about—”
“And Argot does what with all this gold you purchase?” Ruiz cut him off one more time.
“I don’t know. They’re manufacturers. They turn it into gold plate, or whatever Paz requests.”
“Novelty items,” Ruiz said, cynically, looking up from his notes.
Raab stared back. “What they do with it is their business. I just buy the gold for them.”
“And how long have you been supplying gold to Argot on Paz’s behalf?” Agent in Charge Booth took up the questioning.
“I’m not sure. I’d have to check. Maybe six, eight years …”
“Six to eight years.” The agents glanced at each other. “And in all that time, Mr. Raab, you have no idea what products they make once they receive your gold?”
It had the feel of a rhetorical question. But they seemed to be waiting for an answer. “They make a lot of things.” Raab shrugged. “For different customers. Jewelry. Gold-plated stuff, desk ornaments, paperweights …”
“They consume quite a lot of gold,” Booth said, running his eye down a column of numbers, “for a bunch of desk ornaments and paperweights, wouldn’t you say? Last year over thirty-one hundred pounds. At roughly six hundred forty dollars an ounce, that’s over thirty-one million dollars, Mr. Raab.”
The number took Raab by surprise. He felt a bead of sweat run down his temple. He wet his lips. “I told you, I’m in the transaction business. They give me a contract. All I do is supply the gold. Look, maybe if you tell me what this is about …”
Booth stared back, as if bemused, with a cynical smile, but a smile, it appeared to Raab, that had facts behind it. Ruiz opened his folder and removed some new sheets. Photographs. Black-and-white, eight-by-tens. The shots were all of mundane items. Bookends, paperweights, and some basic tools: hammers, screwdrivers, hoes.
“You recognize any of these items, Mr. Raab?”
For the first time, Raab felt his heart start to accelerate. He warily shook his head. “No.”
“You receive payments from Argot, don’t you, Mr. Raab?” Ruiz took him by surprise. “Kickbacks …”
“Commissions,” Raab corrected him, irritated at his tone.
“In addition to your commissions.” Ruiz kept his eyes on him. He slid another sheet across the table. “Commissions in the commodities market run, what? One and a half, two percent? Yours go as high as six, eight percent, Mr. Raab, isn’t that right?”
Ruiz kept his gaze fixed on him. Raab’s throat suddenly went dry. He became aware he was fiddling with the gold Cartier cuff links Sharon had given him for his fiftieth birthday, and he stopped abruptly. His glance flicked back and forth among the three agents, trying to gauge what was in their minds.
“Like you said, they use a lot of gold,” he answered. “But what they do with it is their business. I just supply the gold.”
“What they do with it”—Agent Booth’s voice grew hard, losing patience—“is they export it, Mr. Raab. These novelty items, as you say, they aren’t made of steel or brass or gold plate. They’re solid bullion, Mr. Raab. They’re painted and anodized to make them look like ordinary items, as I suspect you know. Do you have any idea where these items end up, Mr. Raab?”
“Somewhere in South America, I think.” Raab reached for his voice, which clung deep in his throat. “I told you, I just buy it for them. I’m not sure I understand what’s going on.”
“What’s going on, Mr. Raab”—Booth leveled his eyes at him—“is that you’ve already got one foot in a very deep bucket of shit, and I guess we just want to know, regarding the other, if it’s in or out. You say you’ve worked with Argot for between six and eight years. Do you know who owns the company?”
“Harold Kornreich,” Raab answered more firmly. “I know Harold well.”
“Good. And what about Paz? Do you know who runs that?”
“I think his name is Spessa or something. Victor. I met him a few times.”
“Actually, Victor Spessa, whose real name is Victor Concerga”—Ruiz slid a photo forward—“is merely an operating partner in Paz. The articles of incorporation, which Agent Ruiz is laying out for you, are from a Cayman Islands corporation, BKA Investments, Limited.” Ruiz spread out a few more photos on the table. Surveillance shots. The men looked clearly Hispanic. “Are any of these faces familiar to you, Mr. Raab?”
Now Raab grew truly worried. A trickle of sweat cut a slow, cold path down his back. He picked up the photos, looked at them closely, one by one. He tremulously shook his head. “No.”
“Victor Concerga. Ramón Ramírez. Luis Trujillo,” the lead FBI man said. “These individuals are listed as the key officers of BKA, to whom the simple household products your gold is converted into are consigned. Trujillo,” Ruiz said, pushing across a surveillance shot of a stocky man in a fancy suit climbing into a Mercedes, “is one of the leading money managers for the Mercado family in the Colombian drug cartel.”
“Colombia!” Raab echoed. His eyes bulged wide.
“And just to be clear, Mr. Raab.” Agent Ruiz winked. “We’re not talking the B-school here.”
Raab stared at them, his jaw in his lap.
“The gold you purchase, Mr. Raab, on behalf of Paz, is melted down and cast into ordinary household items, then plated over or painted and shipped back to Colombia, where it is reconstituted into bullion. Paz is just a sham operation. It is one hundred percent owned by the Mercado drug cartel. The money they pay you … for your ‘transactions,’ as you call them, is derived from the business of narcotics distribution. The gold you supply”—the agent widened his eyes—“is how they ship it home.”
“No!” Raab leaped up, this time eyes fiery, defiant. “I have nothing to do with that. I swear. I supply gold. That’s all. I have a contract. This Victor Concerga solicited me, like a lot of people do. If you’re trying to scare me, okay, you got my attention. It’s working! But Colombians … Mercados …” He shook his head. “No way. What the hell do you think is going on here?”
Booth just rubbed his jaw as if he hadn’t heard a word Raab had been saying. “When Mr. Concerga came to you, Mr. Raab, he said he wanted to do exactly what?”
“He said he needed to buy gold. He wanted to convert it into certain items.”
“And how was it that in order to do that he was first introduced to Argot Manufacturing?”
Raab recoiled. He saw it now. Clearly. Where this was starting to lead. Argot was owned by his friend. Harold. He had introduced them.
And for years Raab had been paid handsomely for having set up the deal.
That was when Nardozzi, the Justice Department lawyer, who had to this point remained silent, leaned forward, saying, “You understand the definition of money laundering, don’t you, Mr. Raab?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Raab felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. His face turned totally white.
“I didn’t know anything!” He shook his head. Sweat was suddenly soaking through the back of his shirt. “All right, I … I did take commissions from Argot,” he stammered. “But that was more like a kind of finder’s fee—not a kickback. I was just a go-between. People do it all the time. But I swear, I had no idea what they were doing with the gold. This is crazy.” He searched the agents’ faces for an understanding eye. “I’ve been in business twenty years.…”
“Twenty years.” Ruiz clasped his hands across his stomach, rocking backward. “That’s a number we’re going to be coming back to from time to time. But for now … you say Concerga came to you first?”
“Yes. He said he wanted to manufacture some items of gold.” Raab nodded. “That I would be the broker of record for him, if I could find someone. That it would be very lucrative. I put him in touch with Harold. I never even heard of BKA Investments. Or Trujillo. Harold’s a good man. I’ve known him since we first got into the business. He just needed work.”
“You’re familiar with the RICO statutes, aren’t you, Mr. Raab?” The U.S. Attorney unlatched his case. “Or the Patriot Act?”
“RICO …” The blood drained out of Raab’s face. “That’s for mobsters. The Patriot Act? What the hell do you think I am?”
“The RICO statutes state that all it takes is knowledge of a criminal enterprise or a pattern of involvement in one to constitute a felony, which your brokering of the arrangement between Paz and Argot—not to mention the stream of illicit payments you’ve received from them over a period of years—clearly represented.
“I might also draw your attention to the Patriot Act, Mr. Raab, which makes it illegal since 2001 not to report checks in excess of twenty thousand dollars from any foreign entity.”
“The Patriot Act?” Raab’s knee shot up and down like a jackhammer. “What the hell are you saying here?”
“What we’re saying,” Special Agent Booth cut in, casually scratching at the short orange hairs on the side of his head, “is that you’re pretty much fucked and fried here, Mr. Raab—pardon the French—and what you ought to start thinking about now is how to make this go your way.”
“My way?” Raab felt the heat of the room under his collar. He had a flash of Sharon and the kids. How would they possibly deal with this? How would he even begin to explain …? He felt his head start to spin.
“You don’t exactly look so good, Mr. Raab.” Agent Ruiz pretended to be concerned. He got up and poured him a cup of water.
Raab dropped his forehead into his hands. “I think I need my lawyer now.”
“Oh, you don’t need a lawyer.” Agent in Charge Booth stared wide-eyed. “You need the whole fucking Department of Justice to make this go your way.”
Ruiz came back to the table, pushing the water across to Raab. “Of course, there might be a way this could all work out for you.”
Raab ran his hands through his hair. He took a gulp of water, cooling his brow. “What way?”
“The way of keeping you out of a federal prison for the next twenty years,” Booth replied without a smile.
Raab felt a pain shoot through his stomach. He took another sip of water, sniffing back a mixture of mucus and hot tears. “How?”
“Concerga, Mr. Raab. Concerga leads to Ramirez and Trujillo. You’ve seen the movies. That’s the way it works here, too. You take us up the ladder, we find a way to make things disappear. Of course, you understand,” the FBI man added, rocking back with an indifferent shrug, “your buddy Harold Kornreich has to go, too.”
Raab stared at him blankly. Harold was a friend. He and Audrey had been to Justin’s bar mitzvah. Their son, Tim, had just been accepted to Middlebury. Raab shook his head. “I’ve known Harold Kornreich twenty years.”
“He’s already history, Mr. Raab,” Booth said with a roll of his eyes. “What you don’t want to happen is for us to pose the same questions to him about you.”
Ruiz maneuvered his chair around the table and pulled it up close to Raab in a chummy sort of way. “You have a nice life, Mr. Raab. What you’ve got to think about now is how you can keep it that way. I saw those pictures in your office. I’m not sure how twenty years in a federal penitentiary would go over with that pretty family of yours.”
“Twenty years!”
Ruiz chuckled. “See, I told you we’d come around to that number again.”
A surge of anger rose in Raab’s chest. He jumped up. This time they let him. He went over to the wall. He started to slam his fist against it, then stopped. He spun back around.
“Why are you doing this to me? All I did was get two people together. Half the people on the fucking Street would have done the same thing. You throw the Patriot Act in my face. You want me to turn on my friends. All I did was buy the gold. What the hell do you think I am?”
They didn’t say anything. They just let Raab slowly come back to the table. His eyes were burning, and he sank into the chair and wiped them with the palms of his hands.
“I need to speak with my lawyer now.”
“You want representation, that’s your decision,” Ruiz replied. “You’re a cooked goose, Mr. Raab, whichever way. Your best bet is to talk to us, try and make this go away. But before you make that call, there’s one last thing you might want to pass along.”
“And what is that?” Raab glared, frustration pulsing through his veins.
The FBI man removed another photo from his file and slid it across the table. “What about this face, Mr. Raab? Does it look familiar to you?”
Raab picked it up. He stared at it, almost deferentially, as the color drained from his face.
Ruiz started laying out a series of photos. Surveillance shots, like before. Except this time they were of him. Along with a short, stocky man with a thin mustache, bald on top. One was through the window of his own office, taken from across the street. Another of the two of them at the China Grill, over lunch. Raab’s heart fell off a cliff.
“Ivan Berroa,” he muttered, staring numbly at the photograph.
“Ivan Berroa.” The FBI man nodded, holding back a smile.
As if on cue, the door to the interrogation room opened and someone new stepped in.
Raab’s eyes stretched wide.
It was the man in the photo. Berroa. Dressed differently from how Raab had ever seen him. Not in a leather jacket and jeans, but in a suit.
Wearing a badge.
“I think you already know Special Agent Esposito, don’t you, Mr. Raab? But should your memory need refreshing, we can always play back the voice recordings of your meetings if you like.”
Raab looked up, his face white. They had him. He was fucked.
“Like we told you at the beginning”—Agent Ruiz started picking up the photos with a coy smile—“these things seem to go best when the person has nothing to hide.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Kate barely caught the 12:10 train at Fordham Road to get back to her parents’ home in Larchmont, squeezing into the last car just as the doors were about to close.
All she’d had time to do was grab a few personal things and leave a cryptic message for Greg on the way: “Something’s happened with Ben. I’m heading up to the house. I’ll let you know when I know more.”
It took until the train pulled away from the station and Kate found herself in the midday emptiness of the car for it to hit her—body-slam her, was more like it—just what her mother had said.
Her father had been arrested by the FBI.
If she hadn’t heard the panic in her voice she would have thought it was some kind of joke. Money laundering. Conspiracy. That was crazy.… Her dad was one of the straightest shooters she knew.
Sure, maybe he might finagle a commission here or there. Or put a family meal on the company tab once in a while. Or fudge his taxes.… Everyone did that.
But RICO statutes … abetting a criminal enterprise … the FBI … This was nuts. She knew her father. She knew what kind of man he was. There was absolutely no possible way.…
Kate bought a ticket from the conductor, then leaned her head against the window, trying to catch her breath.
Reputation was everything to her dad, he always said. His business was based on it. He didn’t have salesmen or some fancy arbitrage program or a back room filled with hustling traders. He had himself. He had his contacts, his years in business. He had his reputation. What else was there beyond his word?
Once, Kate recalled, he had refused to handle a large estate sale—it was well into seven figures—just because the executor had shopped it to a friendly competitor on the Street and Dad didn’t like the appearance that he’d been bidding for the job against his friend.
And another time he’d taken back an eight-carat diamond he’d brokered in a private sale after two years. Just because some shyster appraiser the buyer had found later insisted that the stone was a little hazy. A six-figure sale. Hazy? Even Em and Justin told him he was nuts to do it. The stone hadn’t changed! The woman just didn’t want it anymore.
The Metro-North train rattled past the housing projects in the Bronx. Kate sank back in her seat. She was worried for him, what he must be feeling. She closed her eyes.
She was the oldest—by six years. How many times had her father told her what a special bond that created between them? It’s our little secret, pumpkin. They even had their own little private greeting. They had seen it in some movie and it just stuck: a one-fingered wave.
She looked a bit different from the rest of them. She was wide-eyed and pretty, kind of like Natalie Portman, everybody always said. Her hair was shoulder-length and light brown. Everyone else’s was thicker and darker. And those sharp green eyes—where did those come from? Flipped chromosomes, Kate always explained. You know, the dominant-recessive Y … how it skips a generation.
“Pretty,” her dad would tease her. “I just can’t figure out how she got to be so smart.”
Leaning against the glass, Kate thought of how many times he had come through for her.
For all of them.
How he’d leave work early to come home and catch her soccer games in high school, once even hopping a plane a day early from the Orient when her team had made the district finals. Or drive all over the Northeast to Emily’s squash tournaments—she was one of the top-ranked juniors in Westchester County—and coax her back to earth when that famous temper got the best of her after she lost a tough match.
Or how at Brown, after Kate had gotten sick, when she took up crew, he’d drive up on weekends and sit there on the shore and watch her row.
Kate always figured that her dad was such a committed family guy because, truth was, growing up, he’d never had much of one of his own. His mother, Rosa, had come over from Spain when he was a boy. His father had died there, a streetcar accident or something. Kate actually never knew that much about him. And his mother had died young as well, while he was putting himself through NYU. Everyone admired her father. At the club, in his business, their friends—that’s why this didn’t make any sense.
What the hell did you do, Daddy?
Suddenly Kate’s head started to throb. She felt the familiar pressure digging into her eyes, the dryness in her throat, followed by the wave of fatigue.
Shit …
She knew that this might happen. It always came on with stress. It didn’t take but a second to recognize the signs.
She dug through her bag and found her Accu-Chek—her blood monitor. She’d been diagnosed when she was seventeen, her senior year.
Diabetes. Type 1. The real deal.
Kate had gotten a little depressed at first. Her life underwent a radical change. She’d had to drop soccer. She didn’t take her SATs. She had to watch her diet strictly when everyone else was going out for pizza or partying on Saturday nights.
And once she had even fallen into a hypoglycemic coma. She was cramming for a test in the school cafeteria when her fingers began to grow numb and the pen slipped out of her hand. Kate didn’t know what was happening. The dizziness took over. Her body wouldn’t respond. Faces started to look a little gauzy. She tried to scream—What the hell is going on!
Next thing she knew, she was waking up in the hospital two days later, attached to about a dozen monitors and tubes. It had been six years now. In that time she had learned to manage things. She still had to give herself two shots a day.
Kate pressed the Accu-Chek needle into her forefinger. The digital meter read 282. Her norm was around 90. Jesus, she was off the charts.
She dug into her purse and came out with her kit. She always kept a spare in the fridge at the lab. She took out a syringe and the bottle of Humulin. The train car was not crowded; no reason she couldn’t do this right here. She lifted the syringe and pressed it into the insulin, forcing out the air: 18 units. Kate lifted her sweater. It was routine for her. Twice a day for the past six years.
She pressed the needle into the soft part of her belly underneath her rib cage. She gently squeezed.
Those initial worries about what it meant to live with diabetes all seemed like a long time ago now. She had gotten into Brown. She had changed her focus, started thinking about biology. And she started rowing there. Just for exercise at first. Then it created a new sense of discipline in her life. In her junior year—though she was only five feet four and barely 115 pounds—she had placed second in the All-Ivy single sculls.
That’s what their little wave was about. The sign between them. Em’s got that temper, her Dad would always wink and tell her, but you’re the one with the real fight inside.
Kate took a swig of water from a bottle and felt her strength start to return.
The train was approaching Larchmont. It started to slow into the redbrick station.
Kate stuffed her kit back in her bag. She pulled herself up, looped her satchel around her shoulder, and waited at the doors.
She never forgot. Not a single day. Not for an instant:
When she opened her eyes in the hospital after two days in the coma, her father’s had been the first face she saw.
Ben will fix this, Kate knew. Like he always did. He’d handle it. Whatever the hell he had done. She was sure.
Now, her mother … She sighed, spotting the silver Lexus waiting in the turnabout as the train pulled into the station.
That was a totally different deal.
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