Red Ink (17 page)

“I have sources like any journalist.”

“Sources?” he echoes suspiciously. His eyes shift to Cosgrove’s. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Time to get the FBI into this.”

MacAlister nods ominously.

The FBI? The fucking FBI?! The nightmare is happening, but the monsters aren’t mean-spirited clerks at the Foreign Ministry, or KGB interrogators. No, they’re from the U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization. “You’re making this into something it’s not,” I protest vehemently. “Call Agent Scotto’s office. I’m sure they’ll be able to—”

The phone rings. MacAlister is scooping it up when someone knocks on the door. “Thanks for the warning. She’s already here.”

Girdled in a leather sash and gun belt, from which a sidearm hangs, festooned with decorations, hair tucked up into an officer’s cap, a zaftig woman in a navy blue uniform that’s frighteningly akin to KGB issue blows into the office.

“Scotto, Treasury,” she says, showing her official ID to the two officers. “Sorry I’m late, Katkov. We got a break in a case. I’ve been going round the clock the last couple of days.” She shifts her look back to the officers. “I’m real tired and way behind schedule. Can we get this cleared up?”

“Well, that depends on—”

“Good. I knew you guys’d understand.”

Minutes later Scotto and I are marching across an airport parking lot with a baggage handler who’s pushing a cart loaded with my things.

“Well, you really got off on the right foot, didn’t you, Katkov?”

“I’m afraid they’re the ones out of step.”

“Sure. This sort of thing’d never happen back in the good ol’ USSR.”

“There’s no such place.”

“Come on Katkov, don’t be naive. You know what they say about roses and leopards.”

“You don’t really believe that?”

She grins, leads the way to a salt-spattered sedan with two antennas, and opens the trunk. It’s loaded with cardboard boxes. One contains food: cookies, popcorn, potato chips, canned goods, a bottle of vodka, cartons of cigarettes. Another overflows with clothes: jeans, sweat shirts, socks, running
shoes, a dark blue windbreaker with TREASURY AGENT printed across the back, and what look like wigs. A third holds equipment: a flashlight, binoculars, tools, softball and glove, Frisbee, a small TV set. Stuffed between the boxes are a sleeping bag, pillow, blankets, an umbrella, a shovel, a bag of rock salt, and skid chains. Scotto shoves the boxes around to make room, then gives up and slams the trunk closed. We load my things into the backseat and drive off, wipers chattering across the icy windshield.

“You do a lot of camping?”

“Camping? I’m from Brooklyn. I hate camping.”

“Then what? Your husband threw you out when you separated?”

“No. As a matter of fact he generously offered to bunk with a buddy for a while.”

“Ah, you’re one of those eccentrics who live out of their cars.”

“Sometimes,” she replies enigmatically. “We go way back. Eighty-one Buick Skylark. The good old days when cars had trunks. You bring the documents?”

“Was Stalin a butcher?” I indicate my briefcase.

“Good. I want to go through them as soon as we get back to my office, but I’ve got some business to take care of first. You’ll have to tag along.”

“That’s why I’m here. What kind of business? You wouldn’t be making—what do you call them—a bust, would you?”

“A bust?” she repeats derisively. “What the hell would make you think that?”

“Well, you said you had a break in a case; and that’s not exactly a cocktail dress you’re wearing.”

She groans. “First, we call them takedowns, not busts. Second, FinCEN doesn’t make them per se. We support other law enforcement agencies with data and analysis. Third, I haven’t worn this zoot suit in years, and I hope I never wear it again. Fourth, it’s the last thing I’d ever wear to a takedown.”

“You have special combat gear for that?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, if you don’t wear that zoot suit to busts, what do you wear it for?”

“Funerals,” she replies glumly. “The break in that case had a high price tag.”

21

S
pecial Agent Scotto drives like a Moscow cab driver. Despite snow and rush-hour traffic, she speeds, tailgates, and cuts off other vehicles with abandon.

“Hey, hey, easy does it,” I finally protest, losing my bravado to one near-miss too many. “They’ll be burying us too.”

“Not a chance,” she says, turning off the highway into a tree-lined approach road. “You have to serve in the military to be buried at Arlington.”

“Arlington—your President Kennedy is there, isn’t he?”

She nods solemnly. “One of your heroes, huh?”

“Well, not quite in the same league as Lincoln or Peter the Great, but his speeches were rather inspiring.”

“Yeah, to every woman he met. Ask not what your president can do for you, ask what you can do for your president.”

I can’t help but laugh. “Those are some of my favorite lines—I mean as originally written.”

“Mine too, actually. My family hated his guts—the Hoffa thing, I guess—but you’re right, he had something special. I’m sorry to say he’s about to be joined by Agent Edwin Woodruff—lovely wife, three great kids, one of the most decent people and dedicated cops I’ve ever known.” She smiles, reflecting, then adds, “Played a hell of a second base too.”

Iron gates hung from massive stone pillars flank the entrance to the cemetery. A marine sentry in dress blues glances at Scotto’s ID and waves us on. The road winds through groves of bare trees that reach skyward in prayer. Beneath them, thousands of headstones march with military precision over white-blanketed hillsides.

Scotto parks behind a line of cars. She gets out without a word and walks swiftly to a hearse, joining a group of uniformed pallbearers. On a signal from the minister, they remove the coffin and carry it at a solemn pace toward the gravesite where mourners wait.

Agent Woodruffs family emerges from a limousine and follows. They’re African-American. The possibility never occurred to me. There are few blacks in Russia. Mostly students and diplomats. Certainly none on Moscow’s militia. They stand with heads bowed as the honor guard sets the coffin on a platform adjacent to the grave.

I remain in the car. Snow soon covers the windshield. I can’t write about what I can’t see, can’t hear, can’t feel. There’s a hallowed silence here, and the click of the door latch carries like a gunshot. I make my way past a TV reporter whispering grimly into his microphone, until I’m close enough to see the widow’s saddened eyes and hear the minister’s words.

I’ve been in America for barely an hour, and I’m attending a funeral. It’s strangely disorienting. Indeed, my body is here, but my mind still isn’t. It’s drifting to the past, to another wintry day, to another cemetery and a weathered tombstone that proclaims KATKOV. The wail of a bugle pulls me out of my reverie.

Woodruff’s widow is holding her head high with defiance and pride now. When the service ends, she and Scotto hug like grieving sisters. Their pain seems nearly equal in intensity. The mourners quickly take their leave, sent to their cars by the numbing cold. Scotto drives in silence, eyes welling with tears that I can’t ignore.

“Are you all right?”

“No. It’s not fair.”

I let it go for a moment and light a cigarette. “Would you like to talk about it?”

She shakes her head no.

“Sometimes it helps.”

“It won’t bring him back.” She takes a hand from the wheel and pulls it across her eyes. “I still can’t believe it. Two tours in Vietnam, he gets blown away by a fourteen-year-old in a junkyard in St. Louis.”

“A fourteen-year-old,” I echo incredulously.

“With an assault rifle. They’re putting metal detectors in grade schools, for God’s sake. Witnesses said Woody had his gun drawn, but held his fire, just for an instant, just long enough . . . damn . . .”

“Rather hard to kill a child.”

“It’s rather hard to kill anybody, Katkov,” Scotto snaps, braking hard for a traffic light. The car skids slightly. She bounces a fist off the steering wheel, then sighs remorsefully. “I’m sorry. You’re right; and I probably would’ve done the same thing.”

“Not you, Scotto. You’re tough as nails, aren’t you? You would’ve blown that child right out of his running shoes.”

She smiles. “Maybe, maybe not. The agent backing up Woody had no choice.”

“I imagine you two were quite close?”

She bites a lip and nods. “Woody was my partner before I took this job. It’s like being married. You squabble, share things, support each other. I asked for him when I got into this case. If I hadn’t, maybe . . . maybe he’d . . .” She groans and lets it trail off.

“Really. You can’t blame yourself.”

“Yes, I can. I sent him down there.”

“To be killed?” I prompt facetiously.

“Of course not. As we say in this business, he was following the money. Trying to anyway.”

“Whose money?”

“Drug cartel. We’re talking big, real big, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“If? I’m afraid we’d better settle this right now, Scotto. No ifs. We’re joined at the hip, as they say. You show me yours. I show you mine. Deal?”

“Two conditions,” she fires back. “Like the INS guys said, you publish nothing here; and whatever you do publish waits until the operation’s over.”

“Fair enough. Now, as you were saying . . .”

The light changes. She nods and tromps on the accelerator. “Montreal to Miami, New York to St. Louis, we figure the cartel’s
raking in somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred K a minute—that’s six million an hour, a hundred fifty million a day, fifty billion a year—that’s
billion.
”

“You’re right. I don’t believe it.”

“But before they can spend it or invest it, they have to launder it; and before they can do that, they have to collect it, count it, package it, and store it until they can move it. The fifty-billion dollar question is ‘Where?’ We keep looking for it. They keep moving it. We call it Operation Shell Game.”

“How does this teenage gunman fit into that?”

“Indirectly. Woody and his partner were checking out a warehouse. The kid was riding shotgun for a drug deal going down in the junkyard across the alley. They just happened on it.” She shakes her head in dismay. “We lost him over a couple of crummy vials of crack.”

“And the warehouse?”

“Empty, unfortunately. We’d been informed it was being used by a certain corporation—one of several we’ve linked to the cartel.”

“The ‘cartel.’ Another one of those nameless, faceless words like ‘organized crime.’ The company wouldn’t be called ITZ, would it?”

“No. Why?”

“It has a rather nasty habit of turning up in Vorontsov’s documents.”

“Really? Never heard of it.”

“I’m afraid you have. As a matter of fact, you’re the one who put me onto it.”

“Me? I think I’d remember.”

“Rubineau . . . Rubinowitz . . . ITZ. Follow?”

She whistles, clearly impressed, and makes short work of what’s left of the drive to her office.

FinCEN is headquartered in Arlington, a few miles from the cemetery on Fairfax Drive. U.S. and Treasury Department flags hang stiffly from a pole on the corner. The nondescript concrete box would fit right in with the drab housing blocks on Moscow’s Kalinin Prospekt. Its four-story precast facade dwarfs a lone tree and a brick building across the street that has a stove-pipe chimney from which gray smoke curls.

“Burn, baby, burn,” Scotto mutters, turning into the parking lot behind FinCEN. “That damned barbecue’s going all day.”

“Barbecue?”

“It’s a funeral home. They do cremations. Sorry, it’s my way of dealing with—” She bites it off when a media horde surrounds the car, pushing TV and still cameras against the windows as Scotto pulls into a parking spot. She can barely get her door open. “Back off, guys. Come on, back off.” She slips out and charges across the pavement.

The media pursues, shoving cameras, tape recorders, and microphones into her face. “Can you tell us who you’re investigating?”

“Not without tipping them off.”

“What was Agent Woodruff doing in that junkyard?”

“Giving his life for his country.”

Scotto darts down a colonnade toward the entrance, the reporters at her heels, the questions coming rapid-fire: “Several witnesses claim the kid was trying to surrender when he was shot? Is it true he had no criminal record? What about his family’s claim he was unarmed? As Woodruff’s former partner, can you tell us how you’re feeling right now?”

Scotto stonewalls it until we reach the entrance, where uniformed guards restrain the reporters from following us inside. “That’s your competition, Katkov,” she growls, glaring at them through the glass door. “I’ll make any deal you like, but if you’re counting on me to keep those animals from beating you to the punch, you’re nuts.”

“Mind telling me what you have against journalists?”

“I did, once. Obviously you didn’t want to hear it. You all think as long as you tell the truth, you’re not responsible for the consequences.”

“Sounds like someone burned you rather badly.”

“I’ve lost count. Frankly, I don’t know a single person who’s talked to a reporter and wasn’t either misquoted or quoted out of context.”

The lobby is a cramped space with few chairs and a gray steel reception desk that looks like it was lifted from someone’s office. A black felt board with letters pressed into grooves serves as a directory. Sections of ceiling tile have been removed, and workmen on ladders are pulling thick cables through a utility chase. The guard has me sign the register, then clips a plastic visitor’s badge to my parka.

“That was easy,” I remark, following Scotto to the elevator. “No lie detector test, no background check, no strip search?”

“And no smoking,” she says smartly, stabbing a finger at a forbidding sign. “As far as security goes, we already pulled your skivvies—twice. Once when I looked you up in Moscow, and again after you called. I think the director has a soft spot for people who did time in the gulag, especially for subversive writings. You’d be cooling your heels in the lobby if he didn’t like what he read.”

“He actually read my articles?”

“Some of them. He thought the one on athletes was particularly on target. We discard them here too—usually right after college.”

The elevator deposits us on the fourth floor in an institutional gray corridor lined with file cabinets. More open ceilings. More workmen on ladders pulling cables. More NO SMOKING signs. Scotto parks me outside her office for a few moments and changes into street clothes, then leads the way to the director’s office and introduces me to her boss.

Joseph Banzer is a heavyset fellow with thinning hair, wearing a medium brown suit that blends with the wood paneling behind him. He seems to possess a certain absentminded cunning and comes off more like a distracted law professor than relentless investigator.

“This is very interesting, Mr. Katkov,” he says softly as he peruses Vorontsov’s documents. “We’re familiar with the holding company for Rubineau’s hotel operations, but—”

“Travis Enterprises,” Scotto interrupts. “It’s an acronym: Tahoe, Reno, Atlantic City, Vegas, Isabelle, and Sarah.”

“Isabelle and Sarah?”

“His granddaughters,” she replies.

“Whatever happened to widows and orphans?”

“But,”
Banzer repeats commandingly, putting an end to the levity, “we haven’t come across ITZ Corporation yet, have we, Agent Scotto?”

“No, it never turned up in our data, let alone linked to Rubineau.”

“I’m afraid you won’t find a link in those either,” I confess a little apprehensively. “It was pure deduction on my part.”

“Best kind,” Banzer says smartly. He glances at me with a
puzzled look, then shifts it to Scotto. “Where’d you say he was from?”

“Moscow.”

He drops a perplexed brow and nods. “That’s what I thought you said. Anyway, it’ll take some time to run these deals and determine whether or not they’re legitimate; but ITZ is either Rubineau’s company or it isn’t—we can run that one right now.” He slips the documents into a folder and heads for the door. “You see, Mr. Katkov,” he explains as he lumbers down a corridor, “Systems Integration is the key to FinCEN’s operation. That means we have immediate access to multiple data bases, including records of federal law enforcement and regulatory agencies like DEA, BATF, FRB, OCC, OTS, RTC, SEC, not to mention commercial repositories like Dun and Bradstreet, TRW . . .”

Scotto’s rolling her eyes. “I covered some of this ground, Chief.”

“Oh,” Banzer says, a little disappointed at having the air let out of his balloon. “Well, to make a long story short, in partnership with other enforcement agencies, FinCEN detects and supports investigations and prosecutions of financial crimes. Our primary mission is to identify national and international money-laundering schemes, mainly those involving the proceeds of narcotics trafficking. . . .”

Scotto leans to me and whispers, “Right out of his congressional budget proposal.”

“Don’t remind me,” Banzer warns, overhearing. “This damned deficit crunch has cut us to the bone. We’re already outgunned and outfinanced. Out-of-business is next, if we’re not careful. Budget meeting at two, Scotto. I want you there.”

“Been burning a hole in my calendar for a week.”

Banzer cuts a corner, pushes through a set of doors into the Operations Center, and wraps up his orientation lecture with “State-of-the-art computer technology’s the key to our effectiveness. This place is up and running damn near twenty-four hours a day.”

The room is alive with the steady hum of central processors, the zip-zip-zip of printer heads, and the probing questions of analysts who shoulder phones, freeing their hands to dance over keyboards. Rows of work stations—each with computer terminal and communications console—run down the center of
the cramped space. Study carrels line the perimeter. There’s just enough room between them to roll back a chair. One wall is covered with clocks set to various time zones, another with official-looking insignia, each about the size of a dinner plate. Scotto explains they represent the enforcement agencies that have signed information-sharing agreements with FinCEN.