“It was Marc.”
“Okay, fine. So Marc goes to woo them. Maybe you go too. Doesn’t matter. They seem impressed by your passion and presentation. They claim to love your idea of advanced, cutting-edge treatments for refugees and the poverty-stricken. They offer to make WorldCures a sizable donation, probably in chunks. Like Hoffer said: It begins with a cause — and you had a great cause. The Kasselton Foundation was going to help you save lives. So, of course, WorldCures took the money. Who wouldn’t? None of you knew it was connected to Oleg Ragoravich via back channels and shell companies. And even if you did suspect, well, so what? Ragoravich is just a businessman. How he makes his money isn’t your concern. And hey, better he donates his money to a worthwhile cause like WorldCures than using it to, I don’t know, spread his corruption or buy another megapalace. There’s a lot of ways to justify it. And again, you’re just nonprofit employees looking to do good. So you take the money. Maybe a million dollars to start. My God, you think, the patients you can save with that. And you do. You save lives. You develop new medical technologies and techniques. It’s great. And then, a few months later maybe, the Kasselton Foundation comes to you again. They want to make another donation because they realize WorldCures has a lot of needs. You need to hire staff. You need trucks and drivers and construction workers and paper clips and beds and medical equipment and whatever else. And guess who has vendors for you to use?”
“The Kasselton Foundation,” Maggie says to keep things moving.
“Precisely.”
“Straight-up money laundering,” Maggie says. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“Nothing straight-up about it. But yes. Money laundering seems complicated, but I’m going to make it very simple in this case. Let’s say I’m a criminal. I donate my ill-gotten money into a nonprofit. The nonprofit uses my donation to purchase legitimate goods and services from a company owned or controlled by me. Period, the end. I also overcharge. I mean, who would notice? Maybe the truck rental is normally a thousand dollars. Your charity will get invoiced for five thousand dollars. The point is, my money gets laundered — it came back to me via a respected nonprofit — and you, the altruistic charity, still get a lot of money via my donations. It’s why you look past it — it’s in your interest to do so. Yeah, sure, you may think that price seems too high for a truck rental, but so what? You aren’t footing the bill. You are making out. If someone else is also making out, that’s not your concern. It’s a win-win, if you think of it that way.”
“And this is what you claim happened with WorldCures?”
“Yes. And I don’t claim it. You know it.”
“Do me a favor, Charles. Don’t tell me what I know.”
He puts up his hands in mock surrender. “You’re right,” he says. “And it doesn’t matter. I’m not here to prosecute anyone for that. For what it’s worth, I don’t think any of you three did know at first. You, Trace, Marc — you’re physicians. Healers. You don’t do the books. When you got the first check, the Kasselton Foundation probably insisted you hire one of their own under the pretense of making sure their money was spent in a proper way. So I think for a while, yeah, like I said, this kind of corruption grows slowly. You may have had some inklings which you subconsciously ignored. Doesn’t matter if you did.”
“So where do you fit into this, Charles?”
“What about me?”
“You said it wasn’t a coincidence I was chosen to do Oleg’s surgery.”
“Right.”
“It also wasn’t a coincidence you were at the house for Oleg’s party.”
Lockwood grins in the dark. “Didn’t you say it was a ball?” His hand goes up. “Kidding, kidding. Just looking to add a bit of levity here.”
“Yeah, pretty hilarious.”
“I’m trying, Maggie, because this story is grim, and it gets grimmer.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe there’s hope at the end of this too.”
“Hope how?” Maggie thinks about what she heard before she fell asleep, about Trace searching for Marc. She knows, of course, that it’s impossible. But the fact that he would voice that...“And what did you mean about Trace searching for Marc?”
He takes a few moments. His hand is on his chin. Exhaustion emanates from every part of his body. “Let me tell it my way, okay?”
She doesn’t reply. She just waits.
“You want to know why I was at Oleg’s, but you’ve probably figured it out by now.”
“You’re investigating him.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re, what, undercover?”
“That makes it sound sexier than it is. But yes. I am a physician from a rich, well-connected family. It’s easy to pass me off as a ne’er-do-well who relishes the Russian party life. Do you know that was the first time Oleg Ragoravich has had any kind of event in the past three years? He’s been ultra-secretive about his movements. He’ll show up somewhere, like in Dubai, but he never lets anyone know ahead of time. I’ve been on this case for the past two years, and I’ve still never seen him in person. Not even at that crazy ball.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Not sure. There are rumors of bad health. There are rumors he pissed off some powerful people and fears assassination attempts.” Then: “Can I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“When did Marc give you my number?”
“He didn’t.”
“How did you get it?”
Maggie wants to get information, not give it. “Maybe we could start with how you knew Marc.”
Charles nods — this is going to be a bit more give-and-take than he’d expected.
“Marc realized that they were in way over their heads with no way out.”
“Because of the money laundering?”
“That was part of it, but do you want to know a hard truth?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think Marc cared all that much about the laundering. I don’t think any of you did. All three of you are brilliant surgeons and researchers. You all also have, sorry, a bit of a god complex. Sure, Marc wanted to save lives and all that. But I also know he — and let’s be honest, you and Trace too — have the surgeon’s ego. You are ends-justify-means types. A lot of do-gooders are. That’s just a fact. So my guess is, if it was simple money laundering, Marc would have used all the justifications I just gave you and looked the other way.”
“You’re saying it didn’t stay that way?”
Charles smiles but there is no joy in it. “Nothing ever stays stagnant in life. The world is in constant motion. Corruption, like everything else, either gets worse or it gets better.”
“And this got worse?”
“Very much so.”
“How?”
Charles shakes off her question. “The point is, Marc wanted out. So did Trace. They asked for a face-to-face with Ragoravich. Oleg loved doctors. He thought they could help him. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he chose to sink his fangs into WorldCures of all charities. From day one, he saw the potential for more than just cleaning his money.”
“Potential how?”
Once again, Lockwood shakes off her question.
“Stop doing that,” Maggie says.
“Sorry, but you have to let me tell it my way, okay?”
She gives him a reluctant suit-yourself-continue gesture with both hands.
“So Marc and Trace are flown in to Ragoravich’s palace. They tell Oleg that they’re grateful and appreciative, but they plan on leaving WorldCures Alliance, and they wanted Oleg to be the first to know. Ragoravich shakes their hands and thanks them for their time. Then they got back on the helicopter with some other visitor. An overweight bald man. That’s how they described him. We still don’t know who he was. They flew the helicopter over an abandoned iron ore or salt mine, something like that, and Oleg’s men threw the bald guy out. Just like that. No warning. Not a word said. Right in front of Marc and Trace.”