One Minute Out

I should ease into this, but sometimes I don’t filter myself well. “You say you got involved in all this when your sister was kidnapped. But that’s not what happened, is it? Your sister got involved in all this when you used her to help you investigate the Consortium.”

I can hear her on the verge of crying when she answers. “Yes. Yes. This is all my fault.”

I sigh again. She’s going to tell me about it. She needs to tell me about it, so all I can do is stay vigilant while we talk.

Talyssa says, “I spent two years digging into the ways transnational crime launders money through European banks. I worked with police organizations around the EU and, with the help of some friends in Liechtenstein, in Switzerland, and in Portugal, I began to put together a picture of something massive. Different shadowy companies I was finding in my research, companies that didn’t seem to have any connection between one another, all seemed to be following the same set of practices. Their offshore corporations were set up the same, their capital purchases, their investments—the ones I could see, anyway—were nearly identical.”

I scan my cameras, then the alleys below. “Sorry, Talyssa . . . you’re losing me.”

She sniffs hard. “We dug into a corporation registered in the Cayman Islands that made large deposits into an account in Germany. I find out the corporation has investments around the world, small percentages of aboveboard companies. Restaurants, shipping, computer applications, whatever. But then I find another corporation making deposits into another account at the same bank, this one registered in Singapore, and it has virtually the same holdings. A third and a fourth concern, these with transactions into and out of other accounts, do exactly the same. Over time I started looking for little tip-offs, and I was able to identify over one hundred forty concerns, all around the world, acting in concert.”

She’s forgotten that I knock heads for a living. “So . . . what are you saying?”

“It’s simple, Harry. If one organization purchases a million dollars’ worth of common stock in Siemens, the other one hundred thirty-nine do the same. There are some variances, but there is a definite pattern.”

“Okay, I’m tracking, but I don’t know the relevance of it.”

“It means there is a process in place, and there is someone overseeing the financial end of a massive amount of shell corporations.”

“Right . . . like a consortium.”

“Exactly like a consortium. A collection of concerns, each individually worth something below the threshold of an amount that would generate much interest from banking investigators. But together they value billions of dollars.”

I’m with her now. “And whatever they were doing, you think it was illicit.”

“Clearly. I presented my theory to my employers but was told I was venturing out of bounds of my mandate. They told me to get back to doing what I was being paid to do. Instead I began researching this consortium alone. Six weeks ago I tracked an airplane owned by a company tied to the group to Bucharest, my hometown. I thought that, just maybe, this would be the break I was looking for. I didn’t tell a soul in my office, I only contacted local immigration officials there. I found that the men on board the plane were in town for a week of meetings with a hotel and restaurant chain.”

“Who were they?”

“I didn’t know any names. Corporations and individuals can shield that easily. The flight itself originated in Budapest, but that doesn’t mean anything. The businessmen could have been having meetings there. It landed in London and Barcelona, as well. Whoever was on board, all I knew was that they managed money illegitimately. I took them for white-collar criminals. Boring illicit finance and tax evasion, maybe some associations to accountants who worked more directly with organized crime. I didn’t think these people were dangerous. I mean . . . I just assumed they were wealthy bankers laundering money.”

I look down over the narrow passageways to the north below me as I say, “Rich people can be assholes, too.”

“I know.” She hesitates a moment. Then, “Roxana . . . you’ve seen the picture. She was . . . is . . . beautiful. She’s also charming, irresistible to men. I used to be so jealous of her growing up; even with our age difference she always got all the attention.” She’s crying again, but keeping it together. “You know what my mother said to us?”

“What’s that?”

“She would tell her friends, in front of us, ‘Talyssa is the smart one. Roxana is the pretty one.’ It used to upset us both.”

“I get it.” I’m sensing Talyssa wasn’t just jealous of her sister growing up, but she retains some of that jealousy even now. I wonder if the sister felt the same way, but jealous of Talyssa’s intellect.

But it’s time to get to the hard stuff. I say, “So . . . how did Roxana get involved in all this?”

Through tears she says, “The best, most exclusive nightclub in the city is owned by the hotel group the bankers were flying in to meet with. It’s in a factory building near where they were staying, and it was no big leap to assume those rich bankers on the flight would go there. The afternoon the plane landed I called Roxana from The Hague, told her I was working on an investigation with Europol, and I asked her to go to the club to help me.”

“And she just did it?”

Talyssa sighs. “Roxana looked up to me. She would do anything I asked. I knew that when I called her.”

“So you two were close?”

Another pause, and I can feel the weight behind it. She says, “No. We weren’t. We’ve had a strained relationship for a long time. I could tell she agreed to go spy on the bankers only because it was her sister who asked her to do so. She wanted to impress me. To please me. And I knew she would react that way.”

“So she went to the nightclub?”

“That evening. And, just like I’d hoped, she met a group of wealthy men who’d flown in that day; they said they were looking to buy hotels and restaurants around Bucharest.”

“Where were they from?”

She replies immediately. “The head of the group, the one in charge . . . he was American. He told her his name was Tom, and he had her sit next to him at his table. He came on to Roxana that night, but she played cool, rejected his advances. She called me at four a.m., said she’d agreed to meet him the next night at a restaurant with a girlfriend of hers. She didn’t know if she should go; she worried about how far this could lead.” A pause. “But I encouraged her. I wanted names, specifics.”

I point out the obvious now. “She was your agent. You were her handler.”

Talyssa sounds like she’s about to break down now. “Exactly.”