Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3) Read online

  “Let’s play it on yours,” he said. “Check it out. I just emailed it to you.”

  I booted up my MacBook, which was hooked up to an audio system. I found the email and clicked on the file.

  I want to make a transfer, the voice said again.

  It was the voice of Maria Inés Calderón, who would soon be a vice president of Cuba, and it was as if she was in the room standing next to me.

  *

  I got three fitful hours of sleep that had been interrupted every so often by the pinging of Roberto’s computer next to his bed in Royal’s room. He had set it up so that whenever Maria Calderón’s computer received an email, it would alert him, as her bank would send her a confirmation each time that a transfer had been completed, and then Roberto would go into her email account and delete the messages before she could see them. At around six AM he got the last ping, and we finally both had an hour of real sleep.

  Each wire, he had explained, would be for just under five million. That was the Cayman bank’s limit for an individual transfer outside of business hours, even with the voice authentication. If you wanted to wire an amount greater than that, you had to wait until the bank opened on Monday morning and talk to a real person.

  I had watched him execute the first one: he filled in a form on his laptop, which was actually on his aunt’s computer that he was now controlling. After he sent the form he received a secure email with a code, and he called a 24-hour automated voice response system at the bank. He was prompted to enter in her account number and the code, and then the voice response system asked him to say I want to make a transfer, which was the identifying phrase that Maria Calderón had recorded into the system when she had first set up the account.

  The bank’s voice recognition software would then employ a sophisticated program to verify the speaker’s voiceprint, which was as individual and distinctive as a fingerprint—and if it passed, the wire transfer would proceed. Roberto explained to me that the software had been around for over ten years and that it was still un-hackable, unless you happened to have recorded Maria’s actual spoken words, spliced them together, and then played them back into the phone during the verification call, which he did as I listened. His hacker friends had carefully laid out every step of the process, and he had followed their instructions exactly, but he looked hesitantly at me after the first try with the recorded phrase, and I winked back at him and silently crossed my fingers.

  Verified, the automated voice on the other end said, and we gave each other a high five. The next three attempts were just as successful. Now he had to wait until the money had been received on the other end, and then his friends would start moving it around the globe until it was almost impossible to trace.

  I had asked him why he trusted his online friends—none of whom he had ever met in person—with nearly twenty million dollars that would reside in their accounts, however briefly, and he had responded that there was a hacker’s code, of sorts. None of his friends were into hacking to get rich, or to harm others. Their attraction to it was purely out of curiosity, and to test and refine their skills. The best of them were revered by the others, and I got the feeling that Roberto was one of the exalted ones. They also knew the circumstances of his mother’s disappearance, and so this was the right thing to do in their eyes, although it was also theft on a grand scale and could be no doubt punishable by imprisonment, even though the money was intended to be returned to its owner if Lilian was freed, minus the two hundred-thousand-dollar contributions that Maria Calderón had unknowingly made to worthy causes. That part was payback, and it didn’t seem like anywhere near enough, but we didn’t want her money. We just wanted to scare the crap out of her when she saw the zeros on her bank balance, and then we might finally have the advantage, at least until Monday when the bank opened and the alarm bells went off. Wires could sometimes be reclaimed, and this was a woman who was well versed in finance and wouldn’t be fooled for long. So we figured that we had one day, and our plan was to get a little more sleep, have a nice breakfast, and then send her the message that Roberto had already composed:

  Hi Aunt Maria. Check your bank balance.

  *

  “She looked,” Roberto said. He was coming out of Royal’s bedroom dressed in a baggy pair of pajama shorts and a black T-shirt emblazoned with skulls and some band’s logo on it. I couldn’t read the name, but it probably wasn’t The Carpenters.

  “Did she write you back?”

  “Not yet, but she logged on fifteen minutes ago. She’s got to be going mental.”

  I poured him a glass of orange juice that I had squeezed in the juicer, waking most of the house up in the process, and he took a stool at the counter. “Good,” I said. “What’s next?”

  “We wait for her to email back. And then we find out where my mother is, or my aunt loses the money.”

  My cellphone began to vibrate on the countertop, and I picked it up. Bobby Bove.

  “I don’t think you’re going to like this,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Javier Pimentel is dead. Somebody shot him last night, in a hotel room in South Beach.”

  “You’re right, I don’t like it.” If Javier was now dead, then the millions that the Pimentels owed Maria Inés Calderón might be also at risk, and we didn’t need that complication right now. It would be on the news, and his half-sister would surely find out about it.

  “You’ll be interested to know that we found a shell casing,” Bobby Bove said. “Guess what caliber?”

  “Thirty-two,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “So we have the same hitter, taking out the whole family,” I said.

  “Do you still have the other sister staying with you?”

  “Yes. And she has a twenty-four-hour bodyguard, as of right now.”

  “Let me know if you hear anything,” Bove said, and we hung up.

  I didn’t even have time to relay the news to Roberto, because, speaking of complications, Barbara Tanzi pulled up in front of the house in her Yukon, got out, slammed the car door and barged into the front hallway of the house. “I want to talk to you,” she said. “Outside. Right now.”

  “Welcome home,” I said.

  “We’ll talk outside,” she said. “Unless you want me to embarrass you in front of your friends.”

  Sonny and Susanna were coming downstairs from the bedroom at that moment, and they stopped cold when they saw my wife’s expression.

  “Go ahead,” I said to Barbara. “Speak your piece.”

  “All right,” she said. “So, Vince. Maybe you can explain to me why you were fucking Megan Rumsford the other night?”

  “I’m in the middle of something,” I said. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  “We’ll talk about it right now.”

  “Cool down, Barbara—”

  “Cool down?” she screamed. “Go to hell, Tanzi. I never want to see you again, and you’re never going to see your son again, either.” She turned, left the house, and slammed the front door so hard that the windows rattled.

  The study door opened, and Rose DiNapoli emerged, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of black sweatpants that I had lent her the night before. It was probably a good thing that Barbara was already gone. The kitchen was silent except for the ticking of the toaster oven.

  “Anybody else want some OJ?” I said.

  Rose, Sonny, and Susanna quietly took their seats at the counter, next to Roberto. “I’m sorry, man,” Sonny said. “You don’t deserve that shit.”

  “Oh yes I do,” I said. “But at the moment I have other things on my mind.”

  *

  Put back what you stole. Then get your uncle to pay his debt. After that we’ll talk.

  That was the first email message from Maria Calderón, and it was an effective one, just as you would expect from somebody in a leadership position: calm, firm, and nonnegotiable. She apparently hadn’t heard about her half-brother’s murder yet, unless she was bluffing for some re
ason. Possibly because she knew who had pulled the trigger? I had changed my mind about whether telling her would hurt us or help us, after discussing it with Roberto, Sonny, and especially Susanna, who hadn’t shown the slightest sign of mourning or even surprise at Javier’s death. “My brothers took too many risks and had no regard for the law,” she’d said. “They learned that from Raimundo.”

  We decided as a group to inform Maria about the shooting. Roberto tapped at the keyboard.

  Uncle Javier was killed this morning in a hotel, so the twenty million may be all that you ever see. I’m sorry for the bad news.

  I had to hand it to Roberto; he was respectful, and almost sympathetic in his tone.

  Five minutes later a reply appeared:

  No deal. I won’t respond to your threats.

  It’s not a threat, Roberto wrote back. The funds are already gone.

  “Give her an hour,” I said. “A time limit. And then tell her you have to go.”

  One hour to comply, he typed. Thank you Aunt Maria. I have to sign off now. I’ll talk to you in an hour.

  Maria Inés Calderón sent one more message, which I wish that Roberto hadn’t seen, because this was a dangerous game that was being played with a powerful, vindictive woman who had kidnapped her sister and had quite possibly murdered both of her brothers:

  Just because you’re young doesn’t mean that you won’t suffer when I find you.

  You bitch, I thought. Her words made me want to get on the next plane to Havana and kick her ass all the way down the marble-clad stairway of the Ministerio de Finanzas y Precios.

  *

  I turned the breakfast duties over to Sonny and went into the master bathroom, being careful not to wake Gustavo, who was sleeping that medicated sleep that you get with the kind of painkillers that they had given him.

  The shower is one of my favorite places to think. And this was going to be a long shower, because I had a lot to think about. For starters, I had my wife’s white-hot outburst to ponder, but that was too big a topic to deal with at the moment, and I had no choice but to compartmentalize it. Also, there was Javier’s shooting, but, like his sister Susanna, I wasn’t all that shocked or even surprised. My biggest concern by far was Maria Calderón, who Roberto had just robbed and probably humiliated, and people don’t always react rationally when you do that. Especially rich people with big egos. The instinct was to fight back, even when you were cornered. If she had been systematically killing off the Pimentel family, then I figured that taking out Vince Tanzi and Roberto Arguelles would soon be added to the list of Things to Do Today that she kept on the side of her fridge.

  She probably knew that because the money had been wired it was most likely gone permanently unless we returned it, and twenty million was a lot of money unless she was able to collect from the Pimentel brothers posthumously, which would surely be a long if not impossible process. And, collect what? Her part of the Maria Marta Batista trust? Those things took forever. Ms. Calderón had told me that she’d given Javier until the weekend to cough up sixty million, and the weekend was now. Exactly what was the sixty million dollars, and how did it play into this?

  Sonny Burrows opened the door to the bathroom and waved his hand in front of him to clear away the steam. “Vince, you got a phone call,” he said.

  “I’ll call them back,” I said.

  “She said it’s urgent. Woman named Cleo.”

  “Give me a second,” I said. I didn’t know anybody named Cleo, but it was eight thirty on a Sunday morning, and I didn’t think that it was someone who needed a ride to church. I turned off the water, grabbed a towel, and Sonny passed me the phone. “Vince Tanzi.”

  “This is Chloe Heffernan. I need to see you.”

  “What about?”

  “Javier Pimentel,” she said. “He was killed last night.”

  “I heard about that,” I said.

  “I might know who did it. But I’m afraid.”

  “Where’s your husband? You should tell him about this.”

  “You don’t understand, Mr. Tanzi. I’m in my car, and I’m on the way to your house. There are a lot of things that I haven’t told you, because I was afraid to, but it’s too late for that now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m about half an hour away,” she said. “Please don’t tell anybody, especially my husband.”

  “I’ll be here,” I said. “You can stay with us, and you’ll be safe.”

  Plenty of room at Camp Tanzi.

  *

  Roberto hadn’t heard back from his aunt, and more than an hour had passed. So much for my idea of imposing a deadline. I didn’t think that she had forgotten: more likely, she was marshalling all the forces she could for an all-out attack on the people who had taken twenty million bucks from her Caribbean bank account, and I wondered what her strategy would be. For now, nobody was allowed to leave the house, because I didn’t want to run the risk of one of my refugees meeting up with the Walther-wielding hitter or anyone else.

  Chloe Heffernan had definitely aroused my curiosity, and I was anxiously waiting for her arrival. I had allowed Rose DiNapoli to make a fast trip out to the mailbox to get the Sunday paper in hopes that it would distract our group, but we were all on edge. Even Gustavo, who was now bathed, dressed, and briefed on the recent happenings, looked tense. He had winced when I’d told him about Javier’s death, for the same reason that I had—a killer was on the loose, and his victims were all related. I hadn’t told Gustavo about Maria Inés Calderón’s thinly veiled threat to Roberto, but it wasn’t relevant, because nothing bad was going to happen to Roberto, period. It just wasn’t.

  I heard the crunch of the driveway outside and saw Chloe Heffernan get out of her black Mercedes E-class coupe. Nice ride for a cop’s wife, I thought, and I wondered how much she had made as a paralegal. Maybe being Segundo’s lover had come with some perks.

  I met her at the door and immediately regretted my crass speculation about her income and her love life. This was a woman in severe distress. I seemed to have amassed a collection of them over the past several days.

  “Quiet place to talk?” she said.

  “Out back,” I said, and I led her through the house and out the sliding glass door to the patio without any introductions. She took a seat at the table and began to nervously twirl her strawberry blonde hair in her fingers. “Glass of something?” I offered.

  “It’s too early to start, but I’d like a drink,” she said.

  “Orange juice? I made some fresh.”

  “Put something in it,” she said. “I think I’m about to destroy my whole life, and I want a real drink.”

  I returned a few minutes later with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice spiked with a shot of vodka. I might have joined her if I hadn’t been running on three hours of sleep.

  “My husband and I have breakfast every Sunday morning at the S&S Diner on Second Avenue,” she said. “Downtown Miami, off of Biscayne Boulevard.”

  “I know it.”

  “Tal likes to go out to Dodge Island afterward and walk around. That’s where the cruise ships dock. He and I used to go on cruises, a long time ago. We’d wait for the deals.”

  “So what made you afraid?”

  “Have you found Segundo’s sister yet?”

  “No. We think that his half-sister in Cuba kidnapped her. She’s being held as a hostage because the Pimentels owe her some money.”

  “Sixty million,” Chloe Heffernan said. “You found all that on Segundo’s tablet, right?”

  “Some of it. Not all of it though. What do you know?”

  “She was financing them. She’d set up a sovereign loan fund through the Cuban government. The fund was supposed to make foreign investments, and she secretly lent them the money through a bank in the islands, so that they could buy the malls. This was back in 2007.”

  “Right before the crash,” I said.

  “Yes. Raimundo paid top prices, and then a few months later everything we
nt to hell. They couldn’t make the payments, and so they started a side business laundering cash. Every couple of weeks they would drop off millions in dollars, and she’d sell it and would make a profit. It was all good, and they were waiting for the market to come back, and then she got nominated to be a vice president.”

  “What was the problem with that?”

  “Her ministry got audited,” Chloe Heffernan said. She had drained the orange juice and vodka, and leaned back in her chair. “Nobody knew that she had lent Cuban government money to an American enterprise. It was a major problem, according to Segundo. The Cuban bosses kept it quiet, but they gave her an ultimatum—get the money back, or she was out. And Segundo said that they didn’t know that she had been pocketing her cut of the profits from the money laundering, which would be even worse if they ever found out.”

  “This is on the tablet?”

  “There are spreadsheets,” she said. “They probably look like nothing, but I know how to read them. When I gave you the tablet I hoped that you would bring her down. She’s a witch. She screwed Segundo every step of the way, and she even beat him out of millions in backgammon bets, just to rub it in. Segundo died almost penniless. He had pledged every dollar of his share of the family trust to her.”

  “And then she killed him? Or she had him killed?”

  “That’s what I thought. Until this morning.”

  “What happened this morning?”

  “After breakfast,” Chloe said. “Tal had been on duty all night, or so he said. He told me Javier had been shot. He was almost smiling about it, and then he said, ‘The more for you.’ I was shocked when I heard that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Segundo made me his beneficiary,” she said. “I’m entitled to his share of his mother’s trust, which is now basically nothing because he’d pledged most of it to Maria, but with Javier dead it would be something, because Javier’s share would be divided among the others. We’re talking about many millions. But I never breathed a word about this to Tal.”

  “So then you came here?”

  “No, then we drove out to Dodge Island. We were walking around where the boats are, and Tal took something out of his jacket and threw it into the water, behind one of the cruise ships. He said, ‘I won’t need that anymore,’ and I said, ‘What?’ And he said nothing, but I saw it. He had it all wrapped up in a plastic bag, but it was obviously a gun, and it had a thing on the end of it like a soda can. It made a splash when it hit the water.”