“That why you don’t pay taxes?”
“Damn right. It’s illegal what they’re doing. I started a website and tried to pass the word, but all I got was the IRS coming to visit. They showed up one day and ransacked my whole house. Oh, yeah, they had a search warrant, but they weren’t after anything. They just came to deliver a message.”
“Which your failure to pay taxes gave them probable cause to do.”
“I know. They indicted and tried me fast. I went to the first day of the trial and saw it was all a farce, so I got the hell out of Dodge before they convicted me. Which they did, without me being there. I’ve been on the run ever since.”
“You didn’t have to surrender your passport when they indicted you?”
Howell shook his head. “The morons never even asked if I had one, and I didn’t volunteer a thing. I got the passport a few years before for a Caribbean cruise. It definitely came in handy when I ran. I drove from Alabama to Mexico, then just disappeared, ending up in Croatia. I figured nobody really gave a damn about some small-time tax evader.”
He figured wrong. “When did Paul Larks appear?”
“He contacted me through my website. The part about the government owing money to those heirs turns out to be true. A few months ago Larks was tasked with finding out if there was anything in the official records about a debt owed to Haym Salomon. That request came from the president himself. There wasn’t much, but he did find out that Mellon, in the 1920s, may have taken proof of that debt from Treasury records. Then Larks came across stuff on the 16th Amendment in the same classified files. Stuff that shocked him. He was a quirky old guy. Kind of weird. For career government, he had little love for his employer. It pissed him off that the U.S. may have been committing tax fraud since 1913. He went to the Treasury secretary, who ordered him to forget he ever saw any of it. That just made him madder. Thank God that before he lost his job he managed to copy a bunch of stuff. That’s what he was bringing to me.”
“Why you?”
“He found my book online, read it, and told me he may actually have some stuff to prove I was right. It bothered him that people like me were being prosecuted and sent to jail. And it really upset him that his boss told him to forget it all. He told me what he had, which did fill in some of the gaps. Larks was right. It’s wrong what the government is doing.”
“Where does Kim fit in?”
“With me? Nowhere. I thought he was another guy the IRS was after. He called himself Peter From Europe. He and I talked online about the usual stuff. Taxes, jail, that sort of thing. Only with Larks did I discuss details.”
Malone figured Kim was playing both ends against the middle, working Howell and Larks, learning what he could from both.
“Larks finally mentioned to me that he’d been talking to a Korean,” Howell said. “But I never connected the two. Why would I? He told me that the Korean wanted to meet. There was no way I was going back to the States, but he said that was not a problem—the guy was overseas. So Larks offered to pay for my cruise and reserved me a ticket. I just changed it into Jelena’s name. After talking it over some more, Larks and I agreed that we didn’t want foreigners involved. We’d do this ourselves. We needed a face-to-face anyway, so we took advantage of the trip. Look, shouldn’t we be doing something? Searching? Jelena is in trouble.”
“It’s a big ship with nowhere to go until we dock.”
A picture was forming in Malone’s head, but a piece was missing. “Treasury sent an agent here to get those copies back. You clipped her into the water back in Venice. How did you know she was here?”
“I didn’t. I just saw her zeroing in on Jelena, so I took her out. I didn’t know who she was.”
“So tell me what you haven’t said. And don’t lie to me. I’ve tried to make this clear, but you don’t seem to get it. I’m the only friend you’ve got.”
He could see Howell was beginning to believe that.
“There is one document in what Larks brought that’s extra special. The only original among all those copies. That’s what I really wanted to see. It’s why Larks came.”
He waited.
“It’s a crumpled sheet of paper that Andrew Mellon supposedly gave FDR.”
THIRTY-TWO
Department of Justice
_______
Office of the Solicitor _____________
Memorandum
February 24, 1913
Ratification of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
Previously, the Secretary of State referred to the Solicitor’s Office for determination the question whether the notices of ratifications by the several states of the proposed 16th Amendment to the Constitution are in proper form, and if they are found to be in proper form, it is requested that this office prepare the necessary announcement to be made by the Secretary of State under Section 205 of the Revised Statutes.