Wash it all away

I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. Yeah, it was a nice comfortable bed and I felt like I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a month. I remember waking up during the night and crying some more and then going back to sleep. It seems like such a huge betrayal that Dag died believing he’d inadvertently killed Simon and here he was just hiding out. I’m trying to be rational and it just isn’t working. I don’t trust him.

9:30 a.m.

What is worse, I don’t know what Dag saw in him. It has to be more than just being college friends. I mean look at all the crap Simon did to him. He slept with his wife and then married her after Dag divorced her. He can’t be clean. There is too much money involved. Dag distributed $2 billion in assets to charities over Thanksgiving weekend. But Simon isn’t hurting for cash right now. He blew up his own plane and was able to get from Cuba to Croatia with new ID and no financial hardship. Angel owns this villa (read that “mansion”) and I’m sure she’s got a couple of million stashed away for “retirement.”

I finally hauled my ass out of bed about 8:30. I considered calling Cinnamon, but either she is in bed or thinking about who she’s going to get there. I took a shower and stood wrapped in a towel looking out at the sea. I can see the ferry dock from here. A ferry came in while I was watching and I could see people getting off the ferry.

My mind kept playing tricks on me. I kept thinking I could see people getting off the boat that I knew. I saw a guy with a cane and a limp and thought Silas was there for a minute. I’d have sworn that I saw Cinnamon, Goeff Gilliam, Brenda, Bradley, Oksamma, Ray Hawkins, and one time even Dag. I’ll be seeing ghosts till the day I die I suppose.

But now I’ve got to go face the Devil and the Angel. If I don’t go down, I’ll never get any coffee.

2:00 p.m.

Coffee wasn’t all that bad. When I got downstairs, Angel was the only one there. Simon was staying on the third floor and decided it was best to stay out of sight for a while. Apparently my warning was being considered. What he could do about it, though, I really didn’t know. I had no intention of getting between him and whoever Brenda was sending after him. I figured it was no one that I’d know, so what good was I really. If I’d had Angel’s phone number I could have saved myself a trip and a lot of sleepless hours.

How could I have been so stupid as to think that just because I managed to hid out in the Condo for a few days, Brenda and her executive groupies would consider me any kind of a threat. I assessed the sum of what I knew and what I figured they knew about me.

First, they knew that Angel gave the thumb drive to Dag and that I probably had it. They’d ransacked my office when I disappeared. They didn’t find it or me.

They knew that a man named James Whitcomb had camped out at the Condo for a few days. I’d given Davy a bath when I left, but I was pretty sure that no one knew that I was James Whitcomb.

They knew (or I assumed they knew) that James Whitcomb had done business with Angel and then disappeared a few days after she did.

Finally, they knew Angel had this property in Croatia.

It really wasn’t much to go on. Frankly, I’d seen to it that Silas knew more than that. As far as I could figure, none of the Committee knew anything about me being with Angel now, or that I was James Whitcomb.

I was going to book a flight home and send the original thumb drive to Brenda’s address. That would wipe my name off their list of naughty and nice permanently.

Angel had coffee ready in a flash when I came downstairs. She has this great machine that you punch a button on, it grinds the coffee, and it brews a beautiful cup of rich black joe. I gotta get me one of those. She said in the U.S. they cost about $1500!

Maybe I should just hire the barista at Tovoni’s coffee shop to hand deliver a cup every day!

I asked Angel what she was going to do, and she almost started to cry. She said she’d been up half the night with Simon trying to convince him that they needed to run, but he was adamant that he’d done the wrong thing by coming to her and had placed them both in danger. Until he could be certain they were out of danger, he was staying put. If they ran, it would be obvious having a 5’9” man with a 6’ beautiful blonde running around the world. They could be spotted anywhere. I could sympathize a little. Simon had eight powerful enemies and probably more knowledge about what was happening in their world than anyone else. I bet Silas wished he had Simon on the witness stand instead of just having a disk full of names and accounts.

“Angel,” I said, out of the blue, “I want to know more about your business. You had FinCEN from the FBI hanging around your shop before you left. They were watching everybody who came in or out. What is it you really do?”

“Finance Crimes Enforcement? They’re always hanging around. They’ve been trying to pin a money laundering scheme on me for months. I’m not worried about them unless they send in the VICE squad. Now that would be embarrassing.”

“But you are, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Laundering money? No. I don’t think so. There is nothing illegal about hiding your money. I function a lot more like a bank than a money launderer. Any cash transaction of more than $5,000 I dutifully report on my little form. They know I can’t possibly handle the kind of cash that they want to investigate.”

“What about these?” I asked tossing one of my cash cards on the table in front of her.

“How did you get one of these?” she asked picking it up. “It’s just a cash card. If you don’t put more than $5,000 on it in a cash transaction, then there is nothing stopping you from buying it and using it anyplace in the world. Now, come on. Which shop did you get this one in? It’s one of ours.”

“Yours.” I pulled two more out of my wallet. “You charge a pretty hefty commission to fill one up.”

Angel looked at me strangely and closely. I stared her straight in the eye. She slowly began to grin.

“The little gay college professor? You?” I nodded. “I can’t believe it. You said you could disguise yourself so that we’d never recognize you, but that was incredible. Have you done Cinnamon and Teri yet?” I nodded.

“Let’s get back to the real question, Angel,” I said, turning the conversation back. “You put this in three different transactions and took a 10% commission on the deal. That was a total of $12,000. But you didn’t report it as a single transaction. Isn’t that just a little bit above the law?”

“Well, if you applied it broadly enough. But it still isn’t money laundering.”

“It sure isn’t normally for travel agency services.”

“I handled about $1.5 million a year,” Angel said. Simon got me the business and introduced me to people a long time ago. But there isn’t anything technically illegal about what I do.”

“It’s still too shady,” Simon spoke from the door. “I never should have gotten you into this.” He looked pretty worn this morning and Angel jumped up and kissed him, made coffee and had him at the table with us in no time. “What you have there, Miss Riley, is one of the wonders of the modern world. It isn’t even serious that the transactions are done in small amounts at stores all over the country. There are a lot of men, and a few women, who have no difficulty withdrawing a couple thousand in miscellaneous funds from their checking accounts each week. Their spouses don’t even notice it, probably because they are withdrawing similar amounts. Converting their little stashes to cash cards is also completely legal. Then it is instant cash, anyplace in the world that they want it. So a business executive is on a trip and is gone for two weeks. No wife with him and with sexual harassment suits the way they are, he can’t even look lustfully at the cute marketing director who is on the same trip. Doesn’t dare approach someone on the street because he could be recognized.

“But he can go on-line and pick his favorite escort, have him at his room for the night and gone before he meets his co-workers for breakfast, and pay her with $2,000 that he pulled from the local ATM on the way back to his hotel. There is absolutely no personal information contained on that card. If you have the card and the PIN, you have the money. He paid for his night with an A-class model who will never tell anyone who he is, with money he stuck in his pocket months ago and had converted to plastic in Angel’s little shop. It’s the closest thing America has to anonymous banking.”

“You can’t tell me that Angel brings in $1.5 million a year in money that executives spend on hookers,” I spat. Sorry, Angel, but let’s call it what it is.

“There are a lot of reasons for hiding money,” Simon continued. “Let’s say that you are planning a divorce next year. Washington is a community property state. You’ve been visiting Angel with $2,000 a week for a year before you file. We don’t even have to issue a new card every week. We just keep adding your transactions to the same card. So, you are carrying five additional pieces of plastic in your wallet. It happens that each one of them is worth $20,000 that isn’t going to show up on your balance sheet in divorce court.

“And another thing,” Simon continued, “let’s say you visit Europe once a year and you’d like to move your money into a nice safe Swiss bank account where your children will be able to get hold of it after you die without paying estate taxes on it. If you make transfers from your bank to this new account, there is a record of it and it’s money that your kids will never get. You can’t carry cash out of the country in excess of $10,000 without declaring it, resulting in the same effective search. But you can carry a credit card or cash card from every financial institution in the country and withdraw as much money as you want while you are overseas. The same is true of our little cash cards, but there is no tracking back to your home bank when you withdraw $100k in Switzerland and deposit it in a local bank there.”

“So the difference between this and money-laundering is what?” I asked. “Step one is convert the funds into a negotiable instrument. Taking fifty $20s in and having them give you back ten $100s is the one thing, but you ar having people bring you fifty $100s at a time and giving them back one little plastic $5000 bill. It’s all the same thing.”

“Yeah. If it weren’t so profitable we’d have gotten out of the business a long time ago. 10% commission on the sale plus 10% on withdrawal. For every $100,000 you manage to get out of the country, we get $20,000. Which we have to in turn hide someplace or we’d have to pay a heap of income tax. We choose, instead, to have the money to one of our own foreign bank accounts. Right now, though, all we’re trying to do is retire. It’s the guys that are working on a scale of a hundred to one on what we do that FinCEN is after. It just happens that they are mad at us because I didn’t exactly hand over the data to them that I promised. I gave it to Dag instead, and you broke into it and decided to become a vigilante—go after them yourself. You are way out of your league on this one, babe. I just need to stay holed up until that cop I cut the deal with cools off and uses the data on that disk that you cracked. Please tell me you gave it to Dag’s old friend Silas Grant.”

“You know Silas?”

“He’s the cop I cut the deal with months ago. I promised to give him evidence of a massive fraud being perpetuated on the American public by Seattle’s top executives.”

“WTF!” I flipped my phone opened and sent a one-hand text message to Silas: “What do you want me to do with Simon Barnett?” I didn’t expect an answer very soon. It was two o’clock in the morning in Seattle.

“So how did you discover this massive fraud?” I asked.

“My wife and I have been spying on each other for years. I bought her the condo up on Lenora years when they first started renovating the area. I knew way back then that she’d been making deals with prominent men all around the region. Sometimes it was just to introduce someone. Sometimes it was a place to hold a private meeting between two parties that couldn’t be seen talking to each other. She always had a supply of hostesses who were happy to dress elegantly and work for “tips.” When I figured out she was pushing the limits on having an operating brothel in Seattle, I stepped in and started enforcing some standards on behavior and conduct. I won’t say that sex never takes place at the Condo, but I used it more as an employment agency. I got beautiful young women in places where they could have one-on-one time with men they would never get to talk to, even if they worked for the same company. Those men, in turn, used their influence to get the women jobs in other companies that were equivalent to what any man with the same education and experience could have gotten. That’s always been the secret. Women get the shaft in the working world before they ever start to work. They get hired at a lower level then men with the same qualifications. And it isn’t because they couldn’t get better, it’s because they’ll settle for less.”

“So you want me to believe that the Condo is just a place where a few lucky young women are given a better chance at good jobs and isn’t a place where rich men go to get laid.”

“That’s a little harsh, Deb,” Angel broke in. “You can’t judge all the girls at the Condo by me. I’m a professional girlfriend, or I was until Simon came along.”

“You didn’t turn amateur, baby,” Simon said, giving her a squeeze. I thought back to my two experiences at the Condo—one as a hostage and one as the de facto manager. I had to admit that even Cinnamon seemed to be happy with what she was doing. Man, I was going to have some long talks with that girl when I got back to town. She couldn’t work for me and at the Condo, too. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket and I walked into the next room to look at it. I had a message from Silas. That was fast!

“Protect him if you can, but don’t risk yourself. We’re pulling them in and have a warrant for BB. Be careful!”

I was flipping the phone closed when I looked out the living room window. Down at the front gate I could see a man looking up at the house. This time I wasn’t imagining everyone I knew getting off the ferry. This time I was sure. Geoff Gilliam was in Croatia.

10:00 p.m.

It took about ten minutes to convince Angel and Simon that things were serious. When I finally told them who it was, Simon was convinced that he had to move. Geoff Gilliam had a reputation as a sadist at the Condo. In my experience, however, he was only a sign that there were thugs around. Both Cinnamon and Teri had confirmed that when he got in private he was all talk and no action. But I’d seen the kind of people he kept around him and I had no doubt that those men wouldn’t hesitate to take any of us out of the picture. Even if he didn’t bring them with me, I had no doubt in the playboy’s ability to hire talent anywhere he wanted to be. He’d probably do it with Angel’s little cash cards.

My counterplot was hatched over dinner. I needed hair dye. Why was I not surprised that Simon just happened to have a men’s hair-color product on hand. Vanity, thy name is middle-aged man!
I got Simon to give me the passport that he’d used to get into the country, and graciously supplied him with James Whitcomb’s in trade. Then I went to work. I gave my short red wig to Angel and had her dye it black and blow dry it. I pulled together the remnants of the beard and eyebrows I used for James Whitcomb and re-applied the fringe of hair that I use for him to my cheeks so that it resembled the full, closely cropped beard that Simon wears. I pulled out my man-suit and padded the old chest again. Then I restyled the now-black wig into a more manly cut. I dressed and looked in the mirror, then glanced at the passport picture. I’d pass.

But when I went downstairs, Simon’s reaction was completely different. He didn’t care about the hair and beard, but he complained that he wasn’t that fat and that my suit looked like I got it out of a second-hand shop (which is true). He disappeared and returned with a different set of clothes from his own wardrobe. These are designer label clothes: shirt with his initials embroidered on the French cuffs, silk tie, and an Armani suit.

I have to say that now that I put it on, I really like it. I may want to keep wearing it for a while. Cinnamon would love this.

Well, I’ve repacked, lightly. I keep leaving clothes behind when I take off. All I have are the essentials that it would take for me to change back to Deb Riley. Since I’ve dyed the red wig, I’m afraid that I can’t pass as Riley Finn again. I’ll have to refurbish that alias when I get home—whenever that is.

Well, it’s time to flee another country. How routine this is becoming. I didn’t even have a chance to decide if I like Croatia.