Authors: Linda Howard
Maybe it was the long days of solitude, or the mostly empty road that meant she likely wasn’t in grave danger if she let her mind wander, but with nothing to occupy her time except her thoughts she began to feel…uneasy. That was the only way to explain it. She’d made a mistake somewhere, somehow.
All the steps she’d taken ran through her head, and she examined each one. She tried to think what she could have done differently, and other than transferring all the money to the Elizabeth bank and taking her chances with an extended stay in the area, she came up blank. On the other hand, was she taking a bigger chance by hanging around Grissom for so long?
Was she relying too much on the assumption that Rafael wouldn’t go to the police? She didn’t think so. Rafael would want to take care of her his way, the permanent way, which precluded any cops. Her other assumption was that Rafael, who had lived his entire life first in
What if he hired out the job?
A chill shot through her. That was what she’d overlooked. Rafael wouldn’t try to hunt her down himself, he wouldn’t send his men out to beat the concrete bushes of
And the best was…him.
Her heart began hammering and her breath came too fast. Jerkily she pulled to the side of the road and gripped the steering wheel as she fought off the panic attack. She couldn’t panic; she couldn’t afford the wasted time. She had to think.
Okay. The bank wouldn’t give out information about her account to anyone without a search warrant, which obviously Rafael wouldn’t be able to get. But…what about a hacker? The assassin made his living tracking down people, and he was damn good at what he did, or he wouldn’t be able to charge the huge amounts he did. He earned the money by producing results. It followed, then, that he’d either be really good himself at getting into supposedly secure computer sites, or he knew someone who was.
Drea took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds, did that several times to slow her heartbeat. Think it through, think it through.
To hack into a bank’s computer system, he’d first have to know which bank, but, damn it, he’d have the starting point because he’d know which bank Rafael used. Or he could get into the IRS system, knowing that every transaction over ten thousand dollars triggered a report to the tax agency, and from what she’d read the IRS didn’t have the best computer system around. By the same token, Rafael’s bank was one of the huge national banks with billions and billions in assets, so it followed that the bank would have a kick-ass security system on its computer network.
While she’d been wasting time driving aimlessly around looking at fields and sky and not much else, he could have tracked the bank transfers, and be waiting for her in Grissom.
The best thing she could do was walk away from the two million, at least for now, and stay safe. She still had the cashier’s check for eighty-five thousand from the bank in
As soon as she deposited it somewhere, though, so far as she knew that would trigger another of those damn currency transaction reports, which would lead him straight to the bank where she’d put it.
There had to be a lag time, though, even a short one, between the bank and the IRS. She had an advantage with the cashier’s check, because that should mean it would be immediately honored. She needed to go to a large city, use the cashier’s check to open an account at a large national bank, let them know ahead of time she was wiring in two million dollars, and make arrangements to get at least a chunk of it in cash.
Suddenly, she knew how she’d work it. With the cash, she’d open up several different bank accounts, in different but neighboring towns, always less than ten thousand dollars so the bank wouldn’t have to file those damn reports. Then, in a flurry of activity, she could wire smaller sums out of the Grissom bank to all those other banks, and one by one she could go to those other banks, close out the accounts, and get the money in cash. She would fly under the radar. Getting the entire two million would take longer—a lot longer—but unless he could hack into the bank’s computer system she should be home free.
Well, almost home free. At the least she would buy enough time to get a new identity and start over. With a new name, a new Social Security number, she could disappear.
Pulling out her cell phone, she checked the level of service. One bar. Not good enough. She’d have to get closer to a town. That was another thing about the wide-open spaces; they were too wide open, too many long miles of no people, no traffic, no houses, just fields as far as the eye could see. An ear of corn had no need for a cell phone, whereas her ear definitely did.
She drove for almost an hour, keeping an eye on the service indicator on her phone. When the number of bars abruptly jumped to three, she decided to give it a try, and pulled over.
Her first try, she got Mrs. Pearson’s voice mail. “Mrs. Pearson, this is Andrea Butts. Something has come up and I don’t want the two million in cash. I hope your head cashier hasn’t put in the order yet. I really need to talk to you, but I’m afraid to come to the bank. Please call me back at—” She stopped, completely blanking on the number for her new cell phone. “I’ll call you back,” she said hurriedly, and ended the call.
Damn it, what was that number? She turned off the phone, then turned it back on, and watched the screen as it flashed the info. Grabbing a pen from her bag, she scribbled down the number and called Mrs. Pearson again.
To her surprise, Mrs. Pearson herself answered. “Hello, Ms. Butts, I just got your message. I was seeing some clients off and missed your call by seconds. I’m giving a note to Judy right now, about the cash order. I have to say, I’m relieved you’ve changed your mind, but…is something wrong?” She lowered her voice. “You’re afraid to come to the bank?”
“It’s my ex-husband,” Drea said, glad that her hard-luck spiel was making itself useful after all. “I don’t know how, but he’s followed me this far, and knows I have an account with you. I’m afraid he’s watching the bank, and if I show up there, he’ll follow me.”
“Have you called the police?” Mrs. Pearson asked, a gratifying amount of alarm in her tone.
“So many times I’ve almost worn the numbers off the phone buttons,” Drea said wearily. “It’s always the same answer: until he actually does something, they have no grounds to pick him up. He’s a salesman for a large agricultural firm, so he has a good reason for being in just about any area, and I don’t have a right to keep him from doing his job, blah blah blah. I guess this is what I get for covering for him all those times he hit me, saying I fell down the steps, or closed the car door on my hand when he’s the one who broke my finger.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” Mrs. Pearson murmured. “No, you certainly shouldn’t come here if you think he’s watching. But…what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” She did know, she just hadn’t worked out the particulars yet. “He thinks he’s entitled to the money because we were still married when my parents died and I inherited my share of their estate.”
“Ah…an inheritance is the personal property of the heir, I think.”
“So the law says, but he thinks he earned it by putting up with me.” Drea put bitterness in her tone. “I just need to break the paper trail, so he can’t keep following me.”
“Your account information is confidential. How does he—”
“He has a friend who works for the IRS.”
“I see.”
The fact that nothing more needed to be said told Drea that her reasoning about the IRS was more on target than she wanted it to be.
“I’ll have to work something out, but I don’t know what.”
“I’m afraid that any transaction you do will have to be reported to the IRS,” Mrs. Pearson said regretfully. “Banks are required to make currency transaction reports on any movement of funds involving ten thousand dollars or more, so your two million will certainly leave a paper trail.”
“I don’t want to cause any trouble with the IRS, and I’m certainly not trying to avoid any taxes. I just need to get my money, and move it to another location before he can find me.”
“Your best bet of getting a lot of cash on short notice is to be in a city that has a Federal Reserve Bank. We’re in the
Not if the bank wasn’t in this country, Drea thought grimly. If she could ever get her hands on this money, she was taking it offshore as fast as she could, to get out from under the ever-prying eyes of the government. When she got her new ID, she was getting a passport—a legitimate one—and then at least she could go on vacation to the
“The safest way to move this money is to do it online,” Mrs. Pearson continued.
“I don’t have a computer,” Drea said. “Can I use a computer in an Internet café, or a library?”
“Umm, it would be better if you kept the same IP number. Can you do it from your cell phone?”
“This is a cheapie. It doesn’t have Internet capability.”
“Get one that does. Then you can manage your account wherever you are. Or get a laptop, which I really recommend.”
“Then what do I do?”
“Go to our website, and follow the instructions.”
“Don’t I have to sign something?”
“Yes, there’s an agreement you have to sign. I can mail it to you—”
“I don’t have a mailing address,” Drea confessed, feeling as if she was once again beating her head against the wall.
After a moment Mrs. Pearson said, “I wouldn’t normally do this, but if you’ll get a laptop and Internet service, then call me, I’ll print out the agreement and meet you somewhere. Where there’s a will there’s a way, Ms. Butts! We can get this done.”
Getting Internet service would also require putting her name in the system, Drea thought, but what the hell, she wasn’t getting anywhere by any other means, and she sure as hell wasn’t showing up at that bank in person.
“I’ll do that,” she said wearily. “Thank you. I’ll call back when I get things organized.” She disconnected the call and let her head drop back against the headrest. Who knew stealing two million dollars would be so damn much trouble?
WAS SHE CRAZY? DREA WONDERED AS SHE PLOWED through her to-do list with ruthless determination, but no matter how determined she was, the damn thing kept getting longer.
Every step she took seemed to spawn two more steps, without which the first step wouldn’t work. Because she didn’t have a credit card, she had to pay cash for the cheapest laptop she could find at Wal-Mart, and she was beginning to run low on cash. Unless she wanted to risk going to the Grissom bank in person, she had to use the cashier’s check for eighty-five thousand to open an account at a bank in the same town as the Wal-Mart, which would cause another currency transaction report to be issued.
Still, what choice did she have? She had to have Internet service in order to electronically move the two million bucks. But before she signed up for Internet service, she needed a laptop. And to get a laptop, she needed cash.
Everything seemed to loop back on itself. When she went to the cell phone store to get a wireless card for her brand-new laptop and sign up for the company’s wireless service, she either had to have an address to which the bill could be sent, or she had to arrange for the bill to be automatically deducted from her bank account every month.
“Sure, why not?” she muttered to the slim Hispanic kid who was helping her. All of her bank account info was right there in her purse, of course, considering she’d opened the account just two hours before.
And still, she was going purely on supposition. While she was certain Rafael was looking for her, she had no proof he’d hired anyone to track her. Maybe he just had
Not only that, Rafael wouldn’t let him. The very last thing Rafael wanted was to bring the IRS down on him, poking into his finances. It was the IRS, after all, that had brought down Al Capone. This past week had taught her how difficult it was to clandestinely move money around. No wonder money-laundering was such a big-time business; how else were all the drug dealers supposed to move their massive amounts of cash into the mainstream so they could openly spend it?