Foley sighed and shook his head. “Most of our wealthy clients just don’t understand our obligations under the Patriot Act. I assume you explained everything to him.”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“He went postal,” Kayla said.

“I don’t understand.”

“First, he tried what amounted to blackmail. Very cleverly done, but still blackmail.”

Foley’s mouth opened. He shook his head sharply, then picked up his desk pen. “Explain.”

“Remember that land I own out toward Wickenburg?”

“Sure do. Did you decide to sell it like I advised?”

Kayla told herself that Foley didn’t mean to sound patronizing. And if she repeated it often enough, she might believe it. “The deal just closed this morning.”

“Good. Small ranches are sentimental holes in all but the wealthiest purses. You don’t have a big one. What’d you get for it?”

“Twenty-five thousand an acre.”

“Yowsa,” Foley said, fiddling with the pen. “That’s a great price. Did you go with Charlotte Welmann?”

Kayla nodded. She’d taken Foley’s recommendation because she didn’t know any local Realtors and hadn’t wanted the hassle of selling Dry Valley by herself. “Charlotte started with a high price because she wasn’t sure what the market would be.” Kayla grimaced. “The place sold in a day.”

“Huh. Guess you should have asked more.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Who bought it?”

“Charlotte told me the buyer was an out-of-town investor who was quietly buying up ground for a large development. I was required to sign a confidentiality agreement, promising not to reveal the sale. The buyer’s agent said his client was worried that other landowners would hear about my sale and start jacking up their prices.”

Foley nodded. “That’s pretty standard. So what does all this have to do with your, ah, blackmail problem?”

“About an hour after I signed the agreement and picked up the escrow check, I learned the identity of the buyer. Andre Bertone.”

Foley’s blond eyebrows lifted. “Well, that’s a little weird, but I don’t see-”

Kayla cut across his words. “Bertone told me if I didn’t deposit his twenty-two-million-dollar check without questions, he’d see that I got in trouble with the bank and the federal government over the Dry Valley sale.”

Reaching into her valise, she pulled out the check and shoved it across the desk to her boss. Then she rubbed her fingers over her skirt, trying to remove even the feel of the transaction.

Foley picked up the check and looked at it silently. It appeared to be just what she’d said it was.

Twenty-two million bucks.

“Okay, let me get this straight,” he said finally. “You think that one of our best clients spent a quarter of a million dollars on a scheme to compromise you, and potentially the bank as well.”

She nodded. Foley might be a pretty boy, but he was a damned shrewd banker.

He looked at the check again. “Have you verified that the funds are present in the account?”

Kayla shook her head. “I didn’t want to do anything that looked like I was agreeing to Bertone’s demands. That seemed to me like a one-way ticket to federal prison.”

Thoughtfully Foley slid the check in small circles on the polished surface of the desk. Then he pushed the check back to her. “If this all happened the way you say it did, you’ve done nothing wrong. The bank will back you two hundred percent.”

She let out a long breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that.”

“Be serious, Kayla.” He leaned forward and grinned. “I always take care of the people who take care of me.”

The remark made her uneasy, but she let it pass. She didn’t like a lot of what Foley said. “So what do we do-call the FBI?”

He leaned back. “No. That’s the last thing we do. The Bertones have been very good customers of American Southwest. This may all be some extraordinary coincidence, or, more likely, a cascade of misunderstandings. Andre is an international financial force. This may simply be the way they do business in his banking circles. We need to explore a little more, find out exactly what’s going on. If we don’t like what we find, we’ll file an SAR.”

“But-”

“So process this check,” he said, pushing it back to her, “just to keep Andre happy, while I figure out exactly what we ought to do.”

Kayla’s stomach felt hollow. “Isn’t that a bit risky?” Especially for me.

“Not if we can figure a way of covering the transaction for the moment. Is this an account you’ve handled before?”

“I told you that it wasn’t. If I’d qualified this account previously, there wouldn’t be any question about the transaction.”

He frowned, looking at the check again. Twenty-two million. “Yeah, I guess you did mention that. So we can’t clean it up that way.”

Clean it up? Kayla asked silently. I don’t like the sound of that. But then, I haven’t liked the sound of anything since Elena handed me that check.

The light on one of Foley’s telephones blinked, alerting him to an incoming call. He ignored it.

“What we need to do is find a way of carrying the transaction on our books that won’t put us at risk but will buy us a little time,” he said. He looked at the check again. “Bank of Aruba, Sugar Sands branch…Wait a minute, wait a minute.”

He spun his high-backed executive chair and addressed the flat screen of his desktop computer. His fingers moved rapidly over the keyboard, drilling down through pages and documents.

“There,” he said. “I knew I remembered that name. They have a correspondent banking relation with us. They’ve had it for some months now. That will make things much easier.”

Some of the tension seeped out of Kayla.

The light still blinked on the desk phone.

Foley turned back to her. “Here’s what we do. You call the Aruba bank. Make sure Andre has the money in the account, then put a hold on the funds and tell them you intend to run the draft through their correspondent account.”

Kayla hesitated. “I don’t know nearly as much as you do about international banking and correspondent accounts, but is it legal? Who’s responsible for knowing the customer?”

Foley kicked back in his chair. “Not us, for damn sure. Our correspondent, aka the Bank of Aruba, Sugar Sands branch, is on the spot for due diligence.”

She looked as doubtful as she felt. “You’re certain?” It’s my ass on the line.

“Standard operating procedure,” he said. “If anybody challenges us, we simply say we assumed the Aruba bank had done their own due diligence on the account before they let Andre start writing checks of this size.”

“Would it fly?” Kayla asked bluntly.

The telephone light stopped blinking.

“It’s defensible, which is all that matters. By the way, I really like how you wrinkle your nose when you’re thinking hard.”

She barely heard the personal remark. She was focused on legalities. “But pushing it off on the Aruba bank is just a bookkeeping trick, almost under the heading of ‘the dog ate my due diligence.’ How does it get me off the hook?”

Foley laughed. “Sweetie, the bank business is all about bookkeeping tricks. The government makes unenforceable antibusiness regs, and the lawyers find ways around them. Correspondent accounts are a legal superhighway. Nobody ever checks the correspondent accounts, not inside the bank and not at Treasury. Everybody is clean and everybody is happy.”

Kayla wished she was happy about what she was hearing, but she wasn’t. If the feds came down on her, she wanted something more solid than a “defensible” position to shield her.

The telephone light started blinking again, double time. Urgent.

“So move the money and let me take care of the rest,” Foley said. “And if Andre comes up with any more big checks, do the same thing. I’ll keep you posted, but don’t get impatient. It will take time to do the background work and walk it up the line to Operations.”

“You’re asking me to move millions of dollars of uncertain origin into the U.S. banking system,” Kayla said. “That’s called laundering.”

“Not so long as I put a hold on the money.”

“What?”

“I’ll lock down the correspondent account.”

“How will that help?” she asked.

“It will be pretty much like the money never left Aruba. Then, after we investigate and find out that everything is kosher, we release the funds and let Andre Bertone do what he wants.”

“But what if things aren’t kosher?” she asked.

The phone light blinked rapidly.

“I know what I’m doing,” Foley said. “Follow my instructions and I’ll take full responsibility.”

“But-” My name will still be on the bottom line.

“Unless you have a better solution?” Foley asked impatiently.

Kayla didn’t. She just didn’t like his.

“Cash the check. I’ll put the rest of it in motion,” Foley said.

He turned his back on her and reached for the phone.

13

Victoria, B.C.

Friday


12:15 P.M. PST

Rand McCree looked around John Neto’s suite in disbelief. There were TV cameras, lights, a makeup artist, a hair stylist, a continuity person with a clipboard and a frown, the telegenic Brent Thomas with an earnest yet horrified expression on his face, and a black man with a steel-tipped forearm prosthesis talking about war atrocities.

Everything but a dancing pig.

He turned on Faroe. “You didn’t say anything about a media circus.”