—
ON THE WAY, Lucas called Russell Forte, told him about the meeting with the FBI. Forte said he’d be there, and O’Conner would probably come along to add weight. When Lucas finished the call, he made another to the manager at Ritter’s condo complex, asked if they had a maintenance man. They did. “We need him to do some plumbing,” Lucas said.
The maintenance guy, a phlegmatic man with watery blue eyes, was waiting for them when they arrived. He said they might not have seen everything, but they’d seen most of it, no longer curious about why three feds in suits showed up to have him take a sink apart.
They started in the kitchen, found nothing in the trap.
In the bathroom, he looked at the trap, and said, “This has been taken apart a few times, but not by me. And I’m the only one authorized to do it.”
The maintenance man took off the looped section of the pipe, stuck his finger into it, and popped out a plastic tube about the length and diameter of Lucas’s little finger. The ends were wrapped in tape.
He handed it to Lucas, and said, “Radiator hose tape. So water can’t get in. Couldn’t put it in the kitchen because garbage going down could push the tube along and clog the sink. Nothing goes in this sink but water, soap, and whiskers.”
While the maintenance man put the sinks back together, Lucas borrowed Bob’s Leatherman tool to cut the tape off the plastic box. That done, he pulled the box apart and took out a flat, odd-looking key.
“Safe-deposit box,” Rae said. “This should be good.”
* * *
—
LUCAS CALLED FORTE. “I need a couple of clerks and another warrant, and I need them in a hurry.” He explained, and Forte wasn’t sure they’d need the warrant because Ritter was dead but decided that having a warrant when they didn’t need it was better than needing a warrant when they didn’t have it. “I’ll write it up and get it.”
The clerks started calling banks in the area, using three names: Ritter’s own, and those on the two passports they’d found under the rug. One of the clerks found a David Havelock at a Citibank a half mile away. Forte wasn’t much farther away than that, at the Marshals Service headquarters, and said he would meet them there with the warrant.
Lucas said, “Let’s go,” and they were out the door and into the heat. They arrived at the bank ahead of Forte, got to the branch manager, and told her what was about to happen. “The warrant’s fine,” she said, after looking at their IDs, “but I’ll need to call a man to drill the lock.”
Lucas took the key from his pocket. “We have Ritter’s key, and also the passport he used to get the box under false pretenses.”
The woman looked at the passport, and the key, and muttered, “Yeah, it’s one of ours. It’s a big box. I think I remember this gentleman. He’s a nice-looking fellow.”
“Not so much now,” Rae said.
* * *
—
FORTE SHOWED UP, sweaty yet well dressed, and produced the warrant. “You know I don’t do this so much, come to the scene. I’m more of an intellectual than a street guy.”
“We all know that, but it never hurts an office guy to add to his street cred,” Rae said.
“Hadn’t thought of it that way,” Forte said. “I should start packing heat.” They all looked at him, and he added, “Okay, maybe not.”
They followed the manager into the vault, along with the women who managed the registry and safeguarded the master keys. The box opened on the first try, the woman pulled it out, said, “Heavy. Let’s take it to a viewing desk.”
The desk was in a private niche. They sent the bank people away, gathered around as Forte popped the top, looked in, and Bob said, “Oh boy.”
The box was filled nearly to the top. The first layer, six or eight inches thick, was a mass of documents in English, French, and Arabic. “Contracts for delivery,” Rae said, thumbing through them. “Guns. Oh my God, antiaircraft missiles.”
“Ritter was keeping the docs for self-protection, his cover-your-ass files. Just in case,” Lucas said.
“Looks like it’s gonna work, too, if we’re right about who killed him,” Rae said. “Maybe not for self-protection, but revenge.”
Under the first layer was a thin, flat plastic box, identical to those that Lucas had for his fishing tackle. Inside were two dozen thumb drives.
The third layer consisted of cash—hundred-dollar bills and five-hundred-euro notes—and gold coins, and three more passports. They did a quick count of the cash, and an estimate of the gold, and Forte, looking at his cell phone calculator, said, “He was looking for a rough equivalent of a million dollars in cash. The five-hundred-euro notes make it more compact.”
The eighty gold coins added a bit more than a hundred thousand dollars to the total.
* * *
—
RAE WENT BACK to the lobby and got a cardboard bank box from the manager. Forte filled out a return on the search warrant, signed it, the manager took it away to xerox, and then they put everything inside the box and carried it out to Forte’s car.
“Got thirty minutes to get to Hoover,” he said. “We could be a bit late, especially if I drive slow. And I will. Holy cats, a million dollars in the footwell. Maybe I’ll be really late, drive out to Reagan and get on a plane to Panama.”
“Think about the wife and kids,” Bob said.
Forte said, “That’s what I was doing.”
20
Forte’s boss, Gabe O’Conner, was waiting for them outside the Hoover Building. He saw the box that Forte was carrying, and joked, “Money?”
Forte said, with a straight face, “Over a million, we think, though we didn’t have time to work out the exchange rate on the euros. Or the current price of gold.”
O’Conner looked from Forte to Lucas, to Rae, to Bob, and back to Forte. “Are you shittin’ me?”
“Might not be the most important thing,” Lucas said. “We took it out of Ritter’s safe-deposit box; there are a lot of CYA docs in there, apparently about illegal weapons sales.”
“You guys find . . . interesting cases,” O’Conner said. He looked at his watch. “Let’s go. Russell, talk to me about this while we walk up. I don’t want to be late, but I don’t want to be the complete dumbass in there, either.”
Forte started talking, and didn’t stop, even when their escort showed up. He talked fast—and in paragraphs, Lucas thought. If you’d typed out what Forte said, you could have published it as an essay. He continued all the way to the conference room, with O’Conner nodding steadily like a bobblehead doll. The conference room was still empty, like the first time they were there, until Jane Chase and her retinue of suits showed up, Chase carrying a thin aluminum attaché case.
As they were arranging themselves in their chairs, Forte stood up, plunked the mass of documents on the table. He followed that with the thumb drives and passports, added the stacks of cash, and finally the pile of gold coins, and sat back down.
“Where did you get it?” Chase asked.
Lucas smiled, rubbing his nose as cover. They weren’t asking “How much?” or even saying “Oh my God” but instead “Where did you get it?” The gold and cash weren’t enough to impress this particular bunch of bureaucrats.
Forte looked at Lucas, and said, “You talk for a while.”
* * *
—
LUCAS STARTED with Ritter’s laptop and the encrypted documents, explaining how the code had been concealed—though openly—on the back of Ritter’s gun belt. Then he explained Bob’s sudden comprehension of the “S” design on the same belt and finding the safe-deposit box key.
One of the suits with Chase, a woman, said to Bob, “You thought it was a drain? Why would you think that?”
Bob said, “Well, it looked like one. The design.”
The woman said, “I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a drainpipe.”
“Probably not a do-it-yourselfer,” Bob said. “I’ve looked at quite a few of them. They’re kind of interesting, if you really get your head around them.”
The woman said, “Huh.”
* * *