The book slid back into place. The agent probably turned away because his words were harder to make out.
“What’s she doing moving that kind of money around?
Yesterday? What about before that?”
Kip stealthily got to her feet. He’d moved several feet away and his back was to her. She pressed her ear to the opening.
“Nothing? Where did yesterday’s go? Oh.” His chuckle was mirthless. “Well that will get us a warrant. I don’t like it, though.
Something’s hinky.”
Kip’s pounding heart was making it harder and harder to hear.
“Find a judge—good luck on getting quick action. Hey, I know she was, but have you ever worked with anyone here? If SFI builds a case against you your butt is busted. Judges aren’t going to jump through hoops to sign anything on some flimsy circumstantial evidence. We should pull back, get some real evidence and then move. And be prepared to be met with very clever resistance every step of the way from the staff here too.”
He was pacing now, his voice low and intense. “This is your deal. I don’t know what Sterling ever did to you, but frankly I had other things to do this morning. That string of bank robberies in 129
Oregon is trending this direction. Those guys use guns, so yeah, I think that’s a higher priority. No. No. Is that an order or your advice?”
He listened a few moments more, then angrily stabbed at his phone. Whirling around to pace back to the bookshelf Kip finally saw his face—she may have met with him once or twice on a case. He hadn’t done anything memorable for her to recall. So an unknown, and therefore unlikely to be any kind of ally.
“This is bullshit,” he muttered. He straightened his shoulders and returned to Mercedes’ office. Now his voice was unmistakable.
“I don’t suppose you’d provide us with copies of the corporate filings for your Bahamas branch, now would you? A corporation your boss formed six weeks ago, and transferred one and a half million dollars in company funds to yesterday?”
There was a brief silence, then one of the SFI lawyers said,
“If you had a warrant I would act on your request.”
There were a few more verbal parries, then the deep-voiced officer took charge of the other one with, “We’ll be back with a warrant. This is your notice that there is an official investigation pending.”
“There wasn’t before this? This was a fishing expedition?”
The lawyer’s tone was scathing. “So noted.”
The door had closed behind the agents for ten seconds before Mercedes burst out with, “What was that all about?”
The lawyer almost simultaneously said, “Do you know anything about this?”
“I’m as confused as you are,” Mercedes said.
“Wait.” That must have been one of the other lawyers. “The guy was in there a while. It might not be safe to talk here.”
“Quite right. Let’s go into my office for a bit. Mercedes, lock the door.”
“Okay. I need to lock Tam’s private files. I was working on them earlier.”
Mercedes was at the bookcase in moments, gesturing her to come outside. She pushed the case closed and opened the door 130
of a little cabinet on a middle shelf. It turned out to be hiding the keypad on the office side of the bookcase. She pressed the buttons quickly. Still saying nothing, she gave Kip a wide-eyed look of inquiry.
Suspecting that Mercedes probably knew a lot more than she was saying, it welled up in her that there was only one thing to tell Mercedes—the most likely truth. Mercedes wouldn’t want to hear her doubts, and there was no time for them. She put her mouth close to Mercedes’ ear and whispered, “She’s being set up.
Vernon Markoff maybe.”
Mercedes pulled back to give her a steady look of comprehension before hurrying to join the people waiting in her office. A short minute later they were gone and the office door pinged as the keypad locked it.
Great. She was out of the file area, moving up in the world, but locked in the office. It was a very nice office, but the locked door was a problem. She could, however, make a phone call.
Tam answered on the second ring. “What’s up?”
“I’m locked in your office.”
“Just when I thought this morning couldn’t get any weirder.
How did that happen?”
Kip explained as succinctly as she could, but when she got to the agent’s phone call and that the investigation into Tam had reached official status, Tam interrupted.
“An anonymous tip, and I moved a million and a half offshore the same day? Did I tie fireworks to it and take out an ad in the New York Post at the same time?” She gave an unamused, scorn-filled laugh. “Come on, Kip. Damn it, I have an account in the Maldives which nobody is ever going to find. I could have moved that money and made it look like I actually used it to pay my taxes and been living in Sao Paolo before anyone could prove that’s not what I did.”
“Why do you have an account in the Maldives?”
Tam muttered something at another driver and Kip realized she was in her car. “I should have known that’s what you’d focus on. I’ll tell you—do you have any aspirin? My head is splitting.
131
Never mind. Here’s the thing. We’ve got two hackers-for-hire as potential perps and a connection to Markoff to discover. This guy is good, and if we don’t look now, pull records now, there won’t be records to pull. I waste time talking to the FBI today and I’m probably cooked. Cooked because one of my own best agents has all the building blocks of a pretty good case against me.”
“I’m sorry.” What else could she say? “Tell me the truth—
would you have respected any other course of action on my part?”
There was a long silence.
“I have such a headache,” Tam finally said. “Meet me at the juice place down the street in five, can you do that?”
“I’m locked in your office.”
Tam told her the keypad code. “Mercedes is one smart cookie.
If you weren’t working with me you’d still be there when she got back. If you were, I’d get you out.”
Kip tiptoed through Mercedes’ office to the door. “One last question?”
“What?”
“You’re a big deal executive. Why on earth don’t you have a private exit?”
“I have Mercedes, smarter than I am in lots of ways and better than a pit bull.”
Kip snickered. “Okay, I see your point. Five minutes at the juice place? Make it closer to ten.”
She listened at the door, heard nothing, then keyed in the code. The hallway beyond was empty so she slipped out, keyed the code again and walked briskly toward the stairs. She hurried down two flights, keyed her way out of the stairwell and was quickly at her desk.
Unlocking her file cabinet she squeezed all the papers she’d originally received from Tam into her satchel along with her laptop. She presented herself at Emilio’s door.
He looked up from his e-mail with a puzzled expression. “I was starting to worry.”
“I’m not feeling well,” Kip said, aware that she was flushed, 132
but otherwise didn’t look the least bit under the weather.
“Have you seen your mail? There’s some kind of freak-out about agents and Tam—”
“I’ve gone home sick,” Kip said.
Emilio cocked his head. “I see.”
She started to turn away, but he said her name.
“You’re okay, right?”
She prayed she was telling the truth. “I will be.”
In the elevator she could only marvel at the trust everyone seemed to have for each other, trust that she couldn’t find. Emilio in her, Mercedes in Tam—even the agent on his phone had first turned to trust of past experience in the face of new, unsettling information. Though they were often quick to act and lacking in cybercrime subtleties, she could count on most FBI types to crave answers and justice as much as she did. It had been a welcome reminder, too, that whatever information they’d been fed by a tipster about Tamara Sterling, it didn’t command the kind of resources that would be devoted to armed bank robberies and other violent crime. At least that’s what she told herself, even as she expected an agent to intercept her at any moment as she exited the elevator on the main floor.