Special Agent's Seduction

“I think your supposition is a stretch, Mr. Michaels,” she said, although she privately wondered…Michaels was no alarmist. He seemed cool and collected and had obviously given this a lot of thought.

“I’m not through yet,” he stated, his tone flat and unequivocal. “You need to listen to me and have this checked out.” He gestured emphatically with his hands as he spoke.

He continued to lean toward her, his palms flared as his elbows rested on his knees. “The money is insured, so the clients wouldn’t have suffered any loss.”

“I’m listening,” she told him. “Please go on.”

He met her gaze, sincerely trying to convince her of his theory. “Today’s crime could have played out the way I suggest if we hadn’t stopped it. Your basic robbery, then later on, an unrelated incident of embezzlement is discovered. The apparent perpetrator of that, namely me, already dead. Or maybe he would have forced me to go with him, only to kill me later.”

Dani leaned back in her chair. “Why your bank?”

“Maybe we have all the right customers. The upshot is that I think the funds I was forced to transfer could have already been earmarked to finance terrorists.”

“Three million would only be a drop in the bucket to those groups. Maybe our guy was merely a thief who didn’t realize the Cayman banks are not a good place to hide funds anymore.”

“Oh, I think he knew he couldn’t hide it there. He only needed to get it out of the States first.” Michaels abandoned his ingratiating pose, sat back and crossed his arms. “You won’t find the money there anymore,” he told her with absolute authority.

“Why are you so certain of that, Mr. Michaels? Have you already moved it? Did I happen along at the wrong time and mess up a little plan to cover up a three mil heist with a simple bag job?”

Chapter 3

Michaels didn’t bat an eye at her accusation. “I am trying to help here. If the robber and I were in cahoots, all he had to do was lock you in the safe, too. Or kill you outright.”

In cahoots? Dani stifled a smile and nodded, tongue in cheek. She didn’t really suspect Michaels of involvement and he knew it. “I still think it’s quite a stretch, bank robbery to terrorism. Are you deducing all this from the robber’s physical characteristics?” She had to admit, though, that the thought had crossed her mind when she first felt the gun and heard the accent. But that was a panic response, not good inductive policework.

“Not entirely.”

“Okay, let’s explore the possibility.” She encouraged him to go on. His certainty was a little contagious. “Explain why else you would think he was a terrorist collecting funds from sympathizers?” she asked.

“While you were talking to the chief, I checked the numbers of the source accounts against the surnames of the holders. Those names reflect that this could be an effort by individuals with possible familial ties to the Middle East to amass a tidy sum, jump it from country to country and land the funds where they could easily be accessed as needed.”

“All of the account holders? There must have been thirty accounts you drew from.”

“In total, there were only nine individuals and companies. All have multiple accounts with us and all of those accounts were tapped. All except one have ties to the Middle East, or at least surnames that indicate they might. One of the smaller accounts has a name very similar to an organization on the terrorist watch list,” he said.

Dani dropped any pretense of disagreement. He had made his case, or at least enough of one to warrant a full investigation. “I’ll notify the agency. They’ll institute a thorough investigation. You can’t recover the funds? Have you tried?”

He rolled his eyes. “Of course I tried. Part of it was withdrawn within seconds of the transfer, and most of it was transferred again. It stands to reason there would be an accomplice waiting at the other bank to move on it quickly. It was split. Looks like the man at the other end took his cut.” He paused. “But I can follow the money they moved.”

“You can do that?” she asked. “How?”

“Well, shift funds around all you want, but it always leaves a trail. As you probably know, there’s really no such thing as an anonymous account anymore. I have connections that could furnish names and leads to follow. It’s a place to start.”

Dani recognized competence when she saw it. “My people can call on the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty the offshore banks signed with the UK and the U.S.”

For the first time, he smiled. “That would help. As you pointed out, a few million’s not much in the grand scheme of things. But if you multiply it by a number of small banks like this one, terrorists could secure an absolute fortune before anyone recognized what they were doing.” He shrugged. “Or I could be wrong. This could be a setup to ruin me and my bank.”

“You have enemies who would do that?” she asked, almost smiling at the thought. He appeared so benign, so likable. “Look, no one believes you were involved in this. Insurance will take care of the losses. Why not let it go at that?”

“You’re kidding, right? Let it go?”

“You seem to be taking it very personally,” she said, wondering how far he’d work this theory of his.

He planted a fist in his palm and bared his teeth in a grimace of frustration. “Of course I do. This bank is my responsibility and my reputation was threatened.”

After a pause, she said, “Okay, let’s word this for my boss so I can run it by him and I’ll make a call.” She poised her pen over the little notebook she always carried in her pocket. Michaels cleared his throat and began. He dictated clear, concise sentences, like Dani had read in many official government incident reports. Dani noted the way his dark gray eyes narrowed as he drew to a close. “If those funds are meant to support terrorists, we need to make sure that doesn’t happen. I mean to make certain it doesn’t.”

His last sentence brought back some doubt to her. Was he a glory seeker trying to get his name in the papers by making up some fictitious plot? All the agencies got scads of those. So many they were now having to prosecute the “witnesses” when fraudulent intent was clear. False claims tied up too many people in useless investigations and took time away from real cases.

Or did Michaels really have something? It was never wise to consider any citizen’s suspicions frivolous, no matter how outrageous they sounded. And, unfortunately, his sounded feasible.

“What if this was just a little more sophisticated than your everyday bank job?” she suggested. “Our boy probably knew all the tricks about tracing stolen money when a thief actually carries it out in a sack, like the dye, the tracking devices, marked bills and so forth. Crooks do watch a lot of television.”

He acknowledged with a wry smile. “Add to that the fact that few banks actually keep three million in cash lying around. And even if we did, extremely large bills are too hard to spend without raising questions. And a cache of small ones in that amount would be too damned heavy for one thief to carry.”

He dropped the smile and looked away. “Besides, I haven’t mentioned the clincher, the thing that convinced me this was no regular heist. Make sure this is in your notes.”

Dani turned the page in her notepad and clicked her pen.

Michaels met her gaze with one of pure fire. “He muttered something immediately after the transfer, just before you acted. Did you hear it?”

“Sounded like a curse,” she replied. “To tell you the truth, I was too busy concentrating on what I was doing.”

“It was a phrase in Arabic,” Michaels told her. “He said Death to America. Then the rat bastard smiled.”

Dani’s eyes widened and she sat silently for a moment. “You speak Arabic, Mr. Michaels?” Now this seemed a lot less far-fetched than it had before.

He shrugged. “That particular phrase is one I heard enough times to engrave it on my brain.”

She leaned forward. “And just what did you do in the service?”

If he was surprised that she had guessed he was former military, he didn’t flinch. His beautifully sculpted lips tightened into a line before he relaxed them. He promptly reverted to the stillness that signified his stolid banker image before he replied. “I picked up phrases like that one.”

“Ah. Okay,” she said, clicking her pen rhythmically, watching his eyes. “Did you mention your theory to the chief?”

“No, it’s not within local scope. That’s why I wanted to speak to you about it.”

She nodded her approval. “Could you step out and give me a few minutes to make a call?”

He stood, then paused before leaving the room. “Just so you know, I plan to follow through on this. Nobody…I mean, nobody, rips off my bank and gets away with it. Especially not for the purpose of bankrolling the bin Ladens of the world. I can track the money.” He shook a finger at her. “You tell your people that. They can work with me or around me, I don’t really care—but there’s no way I’ll be camping out behind some desk while someone else tries to straighten this out.”

Whoa. The man didn’t come off like a mild-mannered banker when he got his dander up. But Dani knew what her boss would say to having a civilian muddying up the waters of an international financial investigation. “We have experts who follow up on things like this, Mr. Michaels.”

“And by the time they decide who and how many to send, get the travel approved, orders cut, run everything through their computers and bureaucrats, and settle on what to do first, the money will be spent. And if I’m right, people will die.”

The fire in his eyes told her he’d had some experience with that. She could also see that her words would have little effect on his actions. Plus, he was right about the systemic delays. That was one reason her own team had been formed.

Whoever investigated this would certainly need the cooperation of a banking expert, and Ben Michaels did have all the particulars of the transaction and perhaps knew how to trace it, if that were possible. She would at least call the boss to see what he thought about Michaels, his suspicions and his plans to pursue this. Maybe the investigating operatives could use him.