"Now they're all bitching and moaning about how they can't sleep on the floor," Verne said, shrugging and twitching.
"Tell 'em this ain't the Mandarin Oriental. Who's complaining-the boss lady?"
"Yeah, her. And some of the guys, too."
"Pussies. All right, look. No reason to keep 'em there, with the hard floor. I want 'em going to sleep. There's a room with a big rug, off the main room. The one with all the stuffed deer heads on the wall. The game room."
"I know it."
"Move 'em all in there. Tell 'em to stretch out and go to sleep. Easier to keep watch."
"Okay."
"Close and lock the windows."
"Gotcha," Verne said, and he left.
He folded his legs, leaned back in his chair. "Aren't you the one who told Verne you were going to gouge out his good eye if he touched your girlfriend?"
"She's not my girlfriend."
He surprised me with a half smile. "You do have balls."
"I just didn't like the way he was talking to her."
"So how come you know about the Glock 18?"
"I did a year in the National Guard after high school." When no college would accept me.
"You a gun nut?"
"No. But my dad sort of was, so some of it rubbed off."
Dad kept trophy hand grenades around the house, a veritable arsenal of unregistered weapons: "Gun nut" didn't really begin to describe him.
"You a good shot?"
"Not bad."
"I'm guessing you're probably a pretty decent shot. The good ones never brag about it. So you got a choice here. You're either gonna be my friend and my helper, or I'm going to have to kill you."
"Let me think about that one."
"Guy like you could go either way." He shook his head. "I still get a vibe off you like you might try to be a hero."
"You don't know me."
"Thing is, I don't hear the fear in your voice. Like maybe there's something missing in you. Or something different."
"That right?"
"Haven't figured it out yet."
"Let me know when you do."
"I'm thinking you might try something reckless. Don't."
"I won't."
"What I got going here is too important to get screwed up by a kid with more testosterone than brains. So don't think you're fooling me. Don't think I'm not onto you. Someone's gonna have to be the first to get shot tonight, just to teach everyone a lesson. Make sure everyone gets it. And I think it might just be you."
46
If he meant to scare me, it worked. I refused to let him see it, though. I paused for a second or two, then affected a lighthearted tone.
"Your call," I said, "but I'm not sure you want to do that."
"Why not?"
"You think I'm the last guy you can trust? Consider maybe I'm the only one you can trust."
He sat back, folded his arms, narrowed his eyes. "How's that?"
"You said it yourself, Russell. Of all the guys here, I'm the peon. I don't get a bonus. I don't get stock options. I really don't care how much money you take from the company. A million, a billion, it's all the same to me. Doesn't affect me in the slightest. I don't care how much money Hammond makes or loses. I didn't even want to come here in the first place. Most of them didn't want me here."
"You telling me you don't really care one way or another if something happens to any of those guys? Sorry, I don't believe you."
"Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see anyone get hurt. But it's not like any of them are friends of mine. They may be worth more, but their lives aren't worth any more than mine."
"You'd care if something happened to your girlfriend."
"She's a friend. Not a girlfriend." I hesitated. "Yeah, I'd care if anything happened to her. I'll admit that. But I'm cooperating. I want this to be over. I just want to go home."
"Well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Anything could happen."
"Like I said, I'm cooperating."
His pewter eyes had become dull, opaque, as if someone had switched off a light. "Sounds to me like maybe we're on the same side here."
He didn't mean it, and I knew better than to agree. "I don't know about that," I said. "But I get it that you're not kidding around. So I'll do whatever I can to help you get what you want."
"That's what I like to hear."
"So what are you gonna do?"
"What am I gonna do?"
"Half a billion dollars, huh? That's a shitload of money. What are you gonna do with it?"
His stare pierced through me as if he had X-ray vision and was examining my insides to see what made me tick. "Don't worry. I'll figure something out."
"Half a billion dollars," I said. "Man. Know what I'd do? If it was me?"
A long pause. "Let's hear it."
"I'd take off to some country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S."
"What, Namibia? Northern Cyprus? Yemen? No thanks."
So he had looked into it. Most people wouldn't know the right countries unless they were serious.
"There's other places," I said.
"Such as?"
Was he still sizing me up, or did he really want to know? "Costa Rica, I think," I said.
"Forget it. That's like trying to disappear in Beverly Hills."
"There's this place in Central America, between Panama and Colombia I think it is, where there's no government. Ten thousand square miles of real outlaw country. Like the Wild West in the old days. Kit Carson stuff."
"You're talking about the Dariйn Gap." He nodded: You couldn't tell him anything. "No roads. Mostly jungle. Full of Africanized honeybees. I hate bees."
"There's gotta be decent countries in the world that haven't signed extradition treaties-"
"Signing an extradition treaty is one thing. Enforcing it's another. Plus, there's a difference between extradition and deportation, buddy. Sure there's plenty of decent places. You can get lost in Belize or Panama. The Cubans won't deport you to the U.S. if you know who to pay off. Cartagena's not bad, either."
"You've done your homework."
"Always. I hope you learn that sooner rather than later."
"Sounds to me like you've been planning this for a while."
A slow, lethal grin. He said nothing.
"I hope you've taken precautions to cover the money trail, too," I said. "You steal half a billion dollars from one of the world's biggest corporations, you're gonna have an awful lot of people trying to track it down. Track you down."
"Let 'em hunt all they want. Once it moves offshore, it disappears."
"You know, our bank's not going to authorize a transfer of five hundred million dollars to the Cayman Islands or whatever. That'll just raise all kind of red flags."
"Actually, I was thinking Kazakhstan."
"Kazakhstan? That sounds even more suspicious."
"Sure. Unless you know how often Hammond wires money to a company in Kazakhstan."
"Huh?"
"It's all there on the Internet. On some-what is it?-Form 8-K on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Seems Boeing buys their titanium from Russia, so you guys buy it from Kazakhstan. One of the largest titanium producers in the world."
"That right?" I'd never heard this. I wondered if he was making it up; I didn't think he was.
"Titanium prices keep skyrocketing, so you guys like to stockpile it. Hammond's got a ten-year contract with some company in Kazakhstan, name I can't remember, for over a billion dollars. So every year you wire hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Bank of Kazakhstan."
"We wire money to Kazakhstan, huh?"
"Not directly. To their correspondent bank in New York. Deutsche Bank."
"How do you know all this?"
"Like you said, Jake, I do my homework. So let's say I set up a shell company in Bermuda or the British Virgin Islands or the Seychelles and gave it the name of some made-up titanium export firm in Kazakhstan, right? Your bank wires it to this fake company that has an account at Deutsche Bank in New York-they're not going to know any better."
"I thought the Germans cooperate with the U.S. on money laundering."
"Oh, sure. But Deutsche Bank isn't going to have it for more than a second or two before it goes to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. And from there-well, just take it from me. I got this all figured out."