No money, no jewels, no letter to his attorney. Inside the safe had been five computer disks of a type compatible with the businessman’s IBM personal computer. That told the agents all they wanted. Bright had at once taken the disks and the deceased’s computer to his office, which was also equipped with IBM-compatible machines. Mark Bright was a good investigator, which meant that he was a patient one. His first move had been to call a local computer expert who assisted the FBI from time to time. A freelance software consultant, he’d first protested that he was busy, but he’d only needed to hear that there was a major criminal investigation underway to settle that. Like many such people who informally assist the FBI, he found police work most exciting, though not quite exciting enough to take a full-time job for the FBI Laboratory. Government service didn’t come close to paying what he earned on the outside. Bright had anticipated his first instruction: bring in the man’s own computer and hard-disk.
After first making exact copies of the five disks using a program called CHASTITY BELT, he had Bright store the originals while he went to work on the copies. The disks were encrypted, of course. There were many ways of accomplishing that, and the consultant knew them all. As he and Bright had anticipated, the encrypting algorithm was permanently stored on the deceased’s hard disk. From that point it was merely a question of what option and what personal encrypting key had been used to secure the data on the disks. That took nine nonstop hours, with Bright feeding coffee and sandwiches to his friend and wondering why he did it all for free.
“Gotcha!” A scruffy hand punched the PRINT command, and the office laser printer started humming and disgorging papers. All five disks were packed with data, totaling over seven hundred single-spaced pages of text. By the time the third one was printed, the consultant had left. Bright read it all, over a period of three days. Then he made six Xerox copies for the other senior agents in the case. They were now flipping through the pages around the conference table.
“Christ, Mark, this stuff is fantastic!”
“That’s what I said.”
“Three hundred million dollars!” another exclaimed. “Christ, I shop there myself…”
“What’s the total involved?” a third asked more soberly.
“I just skimmed through this stuff,” Bright answered, “but I got close to seven hundred million. Eight shopping malls spread from Fort Worth to Atlanta. The investments go through eleven different corporations, twenty-three banks, and -”
“My life insurance is with this company! They do my IRA, and -”
“The way he set it up, he was the only one who knew. Talk about an artist, this guy was like Leonardo…”
“Sucker got greedy, though. If I read this right, he skimmed off about thirty million… God almighty…”
The plan, as with all great plans, was an elegantly simple one. There were eight real-estate-development projects. In each case the deceased had set up himself as the general partner representing foreign money – invariably described as Persian Gulf oil money or Japanese industrial money, with the funds laundered through an incredible maze of non-American banks. The general partner had used the “Oil Money” – the term was almost generic in the venture capital field – to purchase land and set the project in motion, then solicited further development funds from limited partners who had no say in the executive management of the individual projects, but whose profits were almost guaranteed by the syndicate’s previous performance. Even the one in Fort Worth had made money, despite the recent slowdown in the local oil industry. By the time ground was broken on every project, actual ownership was further disguised by majority investment from banks, insurance companies, and wealthy private investors, with much of the original overseas investment fully recovered and gone back to the Bank of Dubai and numerous others – but with a controlling interest remaining in the project itself. In this way, the overseas investors speedily recouped their initial investment with a tidy profit, and continued to get much of the profits from the project’s actual operations, further looking forward to the eventual sale of the project to local interests for more profit still. For each hundred million dollars invested, Bright estimated, one hundred fifty million fully laundered dollars were extracted. And that was the important part. The hundred million put in, and the fifty million profit taken out were as clean as the marble on the Washington Monument,
Except for these computer disks.
“Every one of these projects, and every dime of investment and profits, went through IRS, SEC, and enough lawyers to fill the Pentagon, and nobody ever caught a sniff. He kept these records in case somebody ever burned him – but he must have expected to trade this information for a crack at the Witness Protection Program -”
“And he’d be the richest guy in Cody, Wyoming,” Mike Schratz observed. “But the wrong people got a sniff. I wonder what tipped them off? What did our friends say?”
“They don’t know. Just that they pulled the job of killing them all off and making it look like a disappearance. The bosses clearly anticipated losing them and compartmentalized the information. How hard is it to get one of these mutts to take a contract? It’s like filling out a girl’s dance card at the cotillion.”
“Roger that. Headquarters know about this yet?”
“No, Mike, I wanted you guys to see it first,” Bright said. “Opinions, gentlemen?”
“If we move fast… we could seize a whole shitload of money… unless they’ve moved the money on us,” Schratz thought aloud. “I wonder if they have? As clever as this stuff is… I got a buck says they haven’t. Takers?”
“Not from me,” another agent announced. This one was a CPA and a lawyer. “Why should they bother? This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to – hell, it is a perfect plan. I suppose we ought to show some appreciation, what with all the help they’re giving our balance-of-payments problem. In any case, folks, this money is exposed. We can bag it all.”
“There’s the Bureau’s budget for the next two years -”
“And a squadron of fighters for the Air Force. This is big enough to sting them pretty good. Mark, I think you ought to call the Director,” Schratz concluded. There was general agreement. “Where’s Pete today?” Pete Mariano was the special-agent-in-charge of the Mobile Field Office.
“Probably Venice,” an agent said. “He’s going to be pissed he was away for this one.”
Bright closed the ring binder. He was already booked on an early-morning flight to Dulles International Airport.
The C-141 landed ten minutes early at Howard Field. After the clean, dry air of the Colorado Rockies, and the cleaner, thinner, and drier air of the flight, the damp oven of the Isthmus of Panama was like walking into a door. The soldiers assembled their gear and allowed themselves to be herded off by the loadmaster. They were quiet and serious. The change in climate was a physical sign that playtime was over. The mission had begun. They immediately boarded yet another green bus which took them to some dilapidated barracks on the grounds of Fort Kobbe.
The MH-53J helicopter landed several hours later at the same field, and was rolled unceremoniously into a hangar, which was surrounded with armed guards. Colonel Johns and the flight crew were taken to nearby quarters and told to stay put.
Another helicopter, this one a Marine CH-53E Super Stallion, lifted off the deck of USS Guadalcanal just before dawn. It flew west over the Bay of Panama to Corezal, a small military site near the Gaillard Cut, the most difficult segment of the original Panama Canal construction project. The helicopter – carrier’s flight-deck crew attached a bulky item to a sling dangling from the helicopter’s underside, and the CH-53E headed awkwardly toward shore. After a twenty-minute flight, the helicopter hovered over its predetermined destination. The pilot killed his forward speed and gently eased toward the ground, coached by instructions from the crew chief, until the communications van touched down on a concrete pad. The sling was detached and the helicopter flew off at once to make room for a second aircraft, a smaller CH-46 troop carrier which deposited four men before returning to its ship. The men went immediately to work setting up the van.
The van was quite ordinary, looking most of all like a cargo container with wheels, though it was painted in the mottled green camouflage scheme of most military vehicles. That changed rapidly as the communications technicians began erecting various radio antennas, including one four-foot satellite dish. Power cables were run in from a generator vehicle already in place, and the van’s air-conditioning systems were turned on to protect the communications gear, rather than the technicians. They wore military-style dress, though none of them were soldiers. All the pieces were now in place.