Nearly four thousand miles away, the phone rang in a small office of the Western Union Telegraph Company. It wasn’t answered until the tenth ring. It took several more minutes to locate Mr. Dante. Finally he picked up the phone.
“Mr. Dante speaking. How may I help you?”
“Mr. Dante, I have a Señor Cormona here. His instructions are Bravo Bravo.”
Without hesitating Dante answered. “Two seven eight four. Today’s date is three September.” Then just as quickly he hung up.
Arellano listened to the disconnect tone for a few moments before he lay down his receiver. He then turned to face the two men who were waiting. Suddenly he wanted very much to complete their business and escort them out of his office, wishing all the time he had been more polite.
“What are your instructions, Señor Cormona?” he asked as he picked up a pen to write.
“We are going to transfer money from three accounts in Zurich into one account in Brussels. Don’t write any of this down. I will step you through the account numbers and give you all the necessary PINs. It should only take a minute.”
Morozov couldn’t help but be impressed as he watched Salinas work. It was apparent that Salinas had set up each account so that only he could have access to them. He repeated each account and access code from memory and never hesitated with the required response. In only a matter of minutes exactly fifty million dollars had been transferred into a previously dormant account in Brussels. Salinas had already provided Morozov with the access numbers to the Brussels account. It was now only a matter of waiting to confirm the transfer. That would take some time.
“We will call you in an hour to confirm the transfer,” Salinas said as he turned toward the door. “Please don’t keep us waiting.”
As Gorge Arellano escorted his visitors out, he couldn’t help but notice Morozov. The man had not spoken the entire time, which wasn’t surprising. But there was something unusual about him. Perhaps it was the way he touched his boss’s shoulders to steer him out of the room. Perhaps it was the way he seemed to observe everything, without ever really moving his eyes. Whatever it was, Arellano knew that Salinas wasn’t the one to fear.
Salinas declined Arellano’s offer to call them a cab. Instead, he and Morozov walked the three blocks back to their hotel. After taking the elevator to the third floor, they entered their sparsely decorated room. They watched television for half an hour, then Morozov picked up the phone. He called the bank and received a transaction confirmation number. Then he dialed an international code and talked to the bank in Brussels. They confirmed the account had been activated, but refused to reveal the new account balance. Morozov smiled in satisfaction.
Twenty minutes later, Carlos Manuel Salinas went down to the restaurant for lunch. He ate alone while he read the paper and then returned quickly to his room.
Five minutes later he was dead.
That night Morozov was sitting comfortably on an international flight bound for Guatemala City. From there he would use three different passports as he made his way back to Europe. His first stop would be in Madrid. From there he would fly to Prague and then finally on to Kiev.
While waiting in the Guatemalan airport for his flight to Spain, Morozov secreted himself in an old wooden box of a phone booth. He studied the ancient telephone for a moment, then began to dial. Once the call went through, it only took a few minutes before he had transferred three million dollars out of the account in Brussels into his personal account in Bucharest. He considered the money as a kind of bonus. An extra tip for a job well done. And besides, since he was the conspirators’ bookkeeper, who would be any wiser? Certainly not his fellow Ukrainians. They would never even know it was gone.
After completing his call, Morozov left the phone booth and stopped by a small airport bar and ordered a bottle of Corona. He sipped the beer in silence while eyeing the beautiful, dark-skinned women that seemed to surround him. Ten minutes later, he was on his flight for Madrid.
About the time Morozov’s flight was touching down in Spain, a maid entered a hotel room back in Colón. There she found Salinas’ body lying peacefully on his bed, his head cocked awkwardly to one side as a result of the three fractured vertebrae in his neck. Protruding from his ashen lips was a crisp fifty dollar bill, along with a handwritten note from Ivan Morozov that apologized for making a mess.
Less than four hours after the order to transfer money out of the Zurich accounts had been sent from the bank in Colón, Bret Cosner, a senior agent at the Drug Enforcement Agency, had to interrupt his lunch-break game of basketball to answer his phone. He was a huge man, well over six feet five inches and three hundred pounds. His skin was dark, more from his Latino mother than from any time spent in the sun, and his hair was bushy and long. He walked to the sideline, sweating like a pig and swearing under his breath, threw a thick towel over his hairy shoulders, and picked up his cellular phone.
“Cosner here. If this is Kenneth, it better be good.”
“Yea, I love you too, babe,” Kenneth Murry, Bret’s partner at the DEA answered back. “Always good to hear your voice. Now if you’re finished playing hopscotch, or miniature golf, or whatever you do during lunch to keep in shape, why don’t you come in to work? I’ve got something you might want to see.”
Bret immediately began to head for the shower, waving absently to the guys on the basketball floor to go on with the game. Glancing at his watch, he estimated the time.
“Be there twenty minutes without a shower, thirty with. Which do you want?
“Twenty. With.” The telephone went dead.
Bret immediately picked up the pace. He recognized the urgency in his partner’s voice; Kenneth wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to cry wolf.
Thirty minutes later, Senior Agent Bret Cosner strode into his office at the DEA Regional Center in Miami. He threw his jacket over the back of his chair and sat wearily behind his desk just as agent Murry walked into the room.
The difference between the two men was striking. Murry, a thin man with balding hair and narrow gray eyes, was young and bookish-looking. He always wore a jacket over his white shirt, even on the hottest and muggiest days. His pants were always pressed. His shoes always shined. He was neat and trim and slightly elfish.
Agent Murry closed the door behind him and set himself down opposite Cosner’s scratched and worn government desk.
Cosner leaned back in his chair and placed his feet up on the corner of the desk. Murry frowned in disapproval. Cosner reached down and grabbed one of the two double cheeseburgers he had bought for lunch and began to cram food into his mouth. Murry frowned even further. Cosner took a quick swig at his cola, then belched. Murry nearly came out of his seat.
“Geez, you’re a pig. You know that, Cosner? Watching you eat makes me want to throw up.”
“Hey, cool. That’d be neat.”
Murry shook his head in disgust. Cosner belched once again, then shifted in his seat. A noxious fume filled the air. Murry’s eyes narrowed and glazed over, but he didn’t respond. Cosner laughed. He loved yanking Murry’s chain. And after working with him for more than three years, he knew which buttons to push. But it was all just a part of the chemistry — part of what made them a team. Though different as night and day, they liked each other and worked well together. And they liked their work, which was more than Bret could say for most of the other saps that he knew.
Although most DEA agents wore a gun, neither Cosner nor Murry ever did. They had never actually seen a drug deal go down, for they rarely went out on the street. And to participate in a drug bust would be the last thing either one of them wanted to do. Such things were better left up to “street agents,” one thing they had never pretended to be.