Cosner and Murry were accountants; specially trained technoweenies who had become invaluable tools in the international war against drugs.
They worked for a very special and highly secretive office within the DEA. Their job was simple. Track the money. Track the money. Track the money. That was all that they did. From Bermuda to Alaska, from Chile to Moscow, they traced and accounted for the billions of dollars that circled the world as a result of the drug trade.
And they were good. As a direct result of their efforts, organized crime and the drug cartels had had hundreds of millions of dollars confiscated from foreign accounts. Working on the razor-thin edge of legality, Cosner and Murry, and several others just like them, spent their days tapping into foreign bank records, eavesdropping on cellular-telephone conversations, searching Federal Bank transaction accounts, and monitoring the hundreds of thousands of daily financial transactions that flowed through the intercontinental telephone lines, all in an attempt to hit the cartels in the only place they could really be hurt.
As Cosner ate, Murry settled back in his seat, then handed his partner the transcript of the intercepted phone message, along with some handwritten notes describing the general conditions in which the message had been intercepted. Cosner read the transcript fairly quickly.
“You’re certain the Zurich accounts are controlled by Salinas?” he asked.
“Yep,” was all Murry said.
“That’s a little unusual. Much more money than he has seen fit to move around, even before he started his little stay down in Harada.”
“Yep. That’s a pretty good hunk of cash. I figure it’s about thirty percent of everything that he’s worth. So, what do you suppose is going on?”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Cosner responded between gulps of burger and fries. “It sounds to me like our ol’ man Salinas is about to take a fall. One of his boys must be circling around him, setting himself up for the kill. What else could explain it? Somehow, one of his lieutenants must have gotten hold of a few of his numbered accounts and started to figure, with Salinas safely out of the picture, now might be a good time to grab a piece of the action. You know what they say — while the eat’s away, the mice will play — and judging what I know about Harada, that’s about as ‘away’ as Salinas can get, at least without crossing to the other side of the veil.”
“Yep. You’re probably right,” Murry replied, then leaned forward in his chair. “Only thing is, based on what we have seen in the past, I don’t think it works out that simple. Salinas was no fool, not by any means, and he was always very careful with his money. Never — and I’ve gone back to check this — never has Salinas manipulated any accounts since he was ordered to prison. The prison won’t let him get near a phone. They want him out of the business. So, from the day he was apprehended, none of his accounts has seen any activity at all. No deposits. No withdrawals. No transfers between accounts. I’ve seen more movement in glaciers. And now suddenly this comes along.”
Cosner grunted. Murry went on. “As far as one of his lieutenants taking over, it has always been clear that Salinas had set up the security surrounding his accounts so as to avoid just such an endeavor. Now we find that not just one, but three… three numbered accounts have had rather significant withdrawals, to the tune of fifty million dollars, and all the money was wired to some unknown account somewhere in Brussels. Now, does something seem kind of strange, or is it just me?”
Cosner dropped his feet to the floor and sat up in his chair. “So, you think Salinas ordered the transfer? But I just don’t see how he could do that, Kenneth. Not while he’s rotting in jail. He must have ordered one of his attorneys to take care of it for him. That seems like a pretty simple thing to do.”
“Let me ask you something,” Murry interjected. “If you were Salinas, if you knew you were looking at at least ten more years in Harada, and if you had surrounded yourself with some of the worst thugs and creeps in the business, would you trust them with your bank accounts and their security numbers? That doesn’t seem like a very bright thing to do.”
Cosner quit chewing once again. “Okay,” he finally said, “let’s make some calls.”
Twenty-four hours later, the two agents knew the truth. Salinas had indeed paid a quick visit to a bank in Colón, then shortly thereafter was murdered. The details were still sketchy, but one thing was certain. Salinas, the drug lord, was dead.
But that wasn’t all. Carlos Manuel Salinas had not visited the Banco de las Americas by himself. He had been accompanied by some kind of advisor.
Cosner and Murry shifted into high gear, for with figures floating in the fifty million dollar range, and with Salinas, one of the most powerful members of the drug cartel, having been popped, something bad was definitely going on. A new guy had obviously come to town. And he was good. He had some connections, that was evident by the way he got Salinas out of prison, then had him killed. The guy had some pretty good tricks. And lots of power.
The real question was, who was he?
Very shortly after the story broke within the drug enforcement community, many people, from the local Panamanian police in downtown Colón to every DEA office in the world, was busy wondering who this special man might be.
The security camera at the Banco de las Americas was quickly confiscated. After several days of behind-the-scenes political wrangling, a copy of the video was sent to the DEA office in Miami, with a follow-on copy to DEA headquarters in Washington D.G Again and again, the image of Morozov and Salinas entering the bank was run through a high resolution tape machine. Dozens of agents studied the image, racking their brains, searching their memories, trying to figure out who the man with Salinas might be.
Then, some hotshot new agent in D.C. made a suggestion. Why not digitize the image and feed it into the image-processing computer over at the Defense Intelligence Agency? This was just the thing that the DIA computer had been designed for — to take an unidentified image and digitize it so that the computer could search through its files, comparing thousands of known photos in an effort to match the picture with a name. It was a long shot, no doubt, but maybe, just maybe, with the help of the computer, they could put a bead on the man.
Again, there was some behind-the-scenes political wrangling. In fact, the head man, the director himself, had to get involved. A fair bit of begging and maneuvering finally produced an agreement to let the DEA use the image-identification computer.
Six hours later, a “For Your Information” bulletin was sent to every intelligence and counterintelligence agency in the United States government. Ivan Morozov, former head of the Russian Sicherheit was again at work. Last known to have been contracted out to the Ukrainian government, he seemed now to be branching into other things. Keep your eyes and ears open, the agents were told. Based on the amount of money he was now involved with, he was apparently working on something very big.
ELEVEN
The pastures and dry wheat fields of southwestern Russia passed beneath him in a blur, his shadow sweeping across the empty fields at over 1,000 feet per second. The aircraft’s dart-like nose cut through the cold air at just under the speed of sound, the heat and thrust from the four huge engines kicking up faint rooster tails of dust and sand and blowing debris — telltale signs of the enormous aircraft’s arrival.
The B-1 first appeared as a tiny dot, a mere pinpoint on the horizon. From a distance, the aircraft didn’t have any form, its light-gray paint reflecting back little of the evening’s closing light. But as the aircraft got closer, its tapered nose and sharply canted wings quickly became visible, and it was only a matter of seconds before the shape-less dot grew to fill the evening sky.