Family Ties (John Taylor #5) - Chapter 12

They found the car waiting exactly where they told Joe Solomon to leave it. Taylor had half been expecting a black SUV that was the hallmark of official US vehicles everywhere, but instead, he saw a dark blue, older model Volkswagen sedan. Nice enough to not stand out as a noticeable piece of junk, but not so nice as to be noticeable for being a good car. It was, in every way, average.

They stood near a building, looking at it across a mostly empty parking lot. It was near the back of a row, putting it several spaces away from the closest car. There were enough people out and about to make it impossible to be sure none of them were waiting to spring a trap, but not so many that they could blend into a crowd.

“That sucks in just about every way.”

“We have to trust Joe, or we walk away from it. Even if it was out there all by itself, that doesn’t mean someone isn’t watching from one of the dozens of windows facing this direction with squad cars waiting down a cross street somewhere, ready to pounce.”

“So we’re back to, do we trust him.”

“I’m still saying 'yes.'”

“Fine, let's go.”

“No, you pointed out we shouldn’t both put ourselves in danger, and you were right. I’ll go get the car. If the trap is sprung, you might have a chance to get away.”

Taylor wasn’t in love with the idea, but it was hard to argue with his own words being thrown back at him.

“Fine, go.”

Whitaker walked away from him at a casual pace, heading down the sidewalk looking into store windows before wandering off, seemingly bored down a row of cars towards the waiting vehicle. It was a believable performance that would mean nothing if it was a trap waiting for them, but a good effort none the less.

Whitaker reached the car and didn’t hesitate, pulling open the door and sliding inside. Joe had told her it would be unlocked and where to find a key. It must have been right where he said it would be since the car started up and eased out of the parking space, and then out of the lot, turning right and driving away from them.

There were no screeching tires and no fanfare that would have preceded the closing of the trap, which meant Joe had come through after all. While he waited for Whitaker to return from a short trip around the block to make sure it wasn’t a setup, Taylor couldn’t help but consider how many times Whitaker and Joe Solomon had lectured him on following procedure to the letter. Now here they were, both operating well outside of what they should have done because they thought it was the right thing to do.

He agreed with them in this instance, of course, but it was going to be tough to keep from saying 'I told you so' the next time they started lecturing him on proper protocols.

They drove a mile into the city, roughly towards the area where the person Graf called was located, before pulling off into an empty parking lot.

“What are we doing?” Taylor asked.

“Joe said he’d leave a car and supplies. I wanted to see what supplies he left,” she said, popping the trunk and getting out of the car.

Taylor followed Whitaker around to the rear of the car, stopping next to her to look into the trunk. Inside sat a box filled with a variety of items, including changes of clothes for the two of them, a satellite phone that wouldn’t be traceable by the cell networks, and a box of blond hair dye.

“If we’re going to have to start operating closer into town, this isn’t a bad idea,” Whitaker said, holding up the hair dye.

“Probably.”

She pulled out the phone, a baseball cap from the stack of clothes, and the hair dye, leaving everything else in the trunk.

“Let’s find somewhere where I can do this,” she said, walking back towards the driver's side.

The place they found was a fairly run-down gas station with a bathroom around the back of the buildings. Taylor sat in the car, sitting low in the seat, new cap pulled low on his head, watching the small building while Whitaker went inside.

When she came walking back out, hair still wet, it was kind of a shock. Whitaker’s red hair with its loose curls had been one of the notable things about her, especially when she wasn’t in work mode with it pulled in a tight bun.

Beyond the new color, Whitaker had cut her hair to a shoulder length. For most people, but especially women, hair was one of those things that people use as part of their identity. Seeing her now, Whitaker seemed almost like a different person. Her face even seemed slightly differently shaped, now that it was framed by a hair that no longer fell straight back under its own weight.

“That’s weird,” he said when she got back into the car.

“I know. I looked in the mirror and thought, who the hell are you.”

“Hopefully, everyone else will have the same thought. That washes out, though, right?”

“What, you don’t like it?”

“I didn’t say that. It’s just so different.”

“I’m just messing with you. No, it doesn’t wash out. It will probably grow out eventually, but once this is all behind us, I’m going to dye it back to my normal color. It’s too weird.”

“Yeah. Why’d you cut it?”

“Seemed like a good idea. If I was going to change it to be less recognizable, why not go all out.”

Whitaker pulled out of the parking lot, heading back towards their destination while Taylor stared at her, trying to adjust to the new Whitaker.

“Stop staring at me.”

“Sorry,” he said, looking out the passenger window instead. “Let’s find a hotel somewhere near the cafe. You can give your friend the number to the satellite phone, and then we’ll wait until Graf calls the banker. Even with your new look, I’d prefer if we were off the street as much as possible.”

“Sure.”

They drove on into the center of Berlin, ending up at a hotel a half-mile from the city center. Their target cafe was less than a block away, around the corner from the hotel they’d found. It was more expensive then Taylor would usually have liked, but it was the only one in the general area. Luckily, one of the things Solomon had left them was a stack of money, not a fortune, but enough to let them operate for a few days.

Taylor waited in the car while a now blond Whitaker went inside and rented them a room. She’d thought ahead and got one close to the street so they could get out fast once they were alerted to a call. Once inside their room, they both decided to take showers again and change into the clean clothes Joe Solomon had provided.

Taylor couldn’t help but wonder if he was getting soft. When Taylor had been in the service, he would sometimes spend weeks in the field, just changing his socks occasionally. Now he’d gone one day without clean clothes, and he was itching to change.

“Now we wait,” Whitaker said, sitting on the bed next to Taylor.

They’d showered, changed, gone through everything Joe had left for them, and were now just cooling their heels, waiting for something to happen.

“Yep. I don’t think it’ll happen today. It’s already getting dark, and if this guy’s moving money around, it’ll need to happen when banks are open.”

“In my experience, criminals like to operate in cash. Harder to trace that way.”

“Graf probably has the money pulled out and turned into cash so he can hand it out, but I doubt the Trust is sending him bags of money. Their accounts have accountants. Their whole lives are structured to make it hard for governments to know exactly how much money is going where, to keep it out of the hands of the tax collectors. Plus, they feel above the law anyways, I doubt needing to operate in cash would even occur to them.”

“Or no one is going to call anyone, and we’re wasting time.”

“Like I said, I’m open to other suggestions, but I think I’m right.”

“Then what’s Graf waiting on?”

“Best guess, he put things on hold when it looked like they were going to grab us near the college. It would be easier for him to let us get caught legally and then have a prisoner off us than have us disappeared. You guys take it seriously personal when someone tries to keep someone in law enforcement. If that person then vanished off the face of the earth, someone would wonder why. If we were captured and then killed by a violent prisoner, that’s just one of the hazards of the system.”

“So, tomorrow?”

“I think so.”

“If nothing happens tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. We can either try and go public with what we have, which I don’t think will be enough, or put our sights on the trust itself. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of hope that either of those is going to work.”

“So, we just wait.”

“Yep, we just wait.”

Neither slept well that night, both too keyed up, waiting for something to happen. Neither wanted to leave the room, both to keep anyone from recognizing them and to make sure they could move as soon as her friend called in. Whitaker had called her friend the night before and given her the number of the satellite phone, so they were able to dump the burner she’d been using, just in case.

Lunchtime came and went, without much happening. Taylor sat quietly, working everything they’d learned so far over in his head, trying to see if he’d made a mistake or missed something. Whitaker paced to the point Taylor wondered if she was going to wear herself out. She was a ball of nervous energy. She refrained from pointing out, again, how much of a long shot their current plan was, but it wasn’t hard to guess that was what she was thinking.

They were both in their own heads that when the phone rang just before two in the afternoon, it startled both of them. Whitaker answered, listened for a moment, and hung up.

“Your first guess paid off. The ‘banker’ just retrieved a call from Graf that he didn’t answer.”

“We have five minutes, let’s go.”

Walking quickly out of the hotel, they rounded the corner and walked partway up the block. The day they’d rented the room, Whitaker had gone out and scouted a spot for the two of them to observe the cafe.

The spot turned out to be a thin alley one building down from the cafe. Whitaker stepped partway into the ally and turned her back towards the cafe. She then told Taylor to stand in front of her, turned slightly so that his body mostly blocked hers, allowing her to hold the satellite phone at chest level unseen by anyone that wasn’t practically on top of the two of them.

While this meant that only Taylor could look for their subject, it allowed Whitaker to call her contact, using the phone on speaker with the volume turned low, without being easily seen. It had the benefit of cover since they looked like a couple stopping to talk. If the conversation got more intense or if Whitaker couldn’t hear her friend well, she could step into the alley, out of sight.

Taylor leaned on the wall next to the alley, trying to look casual, positioning himself so it would be hard to tell if he was looking at the cafe or Whitaker. From this spot, Taylor had a good view of the patio seating in front of the cafe. They’d discussed it the day before and agreed the banker would choose to sit outside, where he could keep his voice down and be covered up by the noises of the neighborhood, rather than inside where he could be overheard arranging illegal payments. It was a gamble, but Taylor was reasonably sure it was a safe one.

Taylor looked at his watch. Four minutes and thirty seconds had passed since the first call. There were two people on the patio: a woman in a stylish but understated dress, and a man in a suit. Both had been seated before Taylor and Whitaker got there. Taylor alternated between looking at the man and his wrist, watching the seconds tick away.

The five minutes passed, and Taylor looked back up at the man, who was still looking at papers in front of him, sipping a coffee. Taylor’s eyes slipped over to the woman, who was now on the phone.

“Call your friend. See if the banker is on the phone with Graf.”

Whitaker sidestepped into the alley, out of view of the cafe, and dialed the satellite phone. A sentence and two single word responses later, she hung up and moved back in front of Taylor, leaning close.

“Yes, exactly five minutes from the first call. They are on the phone now.”

“Huh,” Taylor grunted.

“What?”

“Our banker's a woman.”

“What, women can’t be criminals?”

“No, I was just picturing a middle-aged man in my mind.”

They were too far away to actually hear anything, and the woman was seated facing away from them, so all Taylor could do was watch her back as she talked on the phone. The call lasted under two minutes. As soon as she pulled the phone away from her ear, the woman downed her coffee, stood up, and walked away from them.

“On the move,” Taylor said.

Whitaker moved to Taylor’s side as he started walking forward, her left arm hooked through his right, leaning in close. For all intents and purposes, they looked like a couple in love, out for a stroll. It was harder to walk this way and wouldn’t have worked if the target had been moving fast. Thankfully, the woman was walking at a normal speed, never looking around to see if she was being followed.

Not a hardened criminal at all, Taylor thought. She was comfortable in the routine of whatever she did for Graf. The precautions of the burner phone and two call setup were almost certainly something mandated by Graf. She did them because she was told to, but she didn’t go one step beyond that. She hadn’t looked around at the cafe and had chosen a seat that left one direction unobserved, as opposed to keeping her back to the cafe itself so she could see anyone looking in at her.

She walked like a normal person, back to the office. No sense of urgency. No looking around for anyone following her. She was used to the trip to the cafe for her clandestine calls. Comfortable. Taylor was certain he was right, and she was a money person of some time. A professional feeling safe in the functions of their office. It’s easy for white-collar criminals to justify breaking the law. It’s just a piece of paper, they think. It wasn’t like they were holding a gun on anyone.

They followed her for two blocks to a tall office building, an awning stretching out onto the sidewalk. Taylor slowed down. This was the hard part. They couldn’t just walk in right behind her, get in the elevator with the woman, and follow her up. She might not be looking for threats, but even a civilian would notice that.

They needed her in the elevator before they went inside, assuming the woman didn’t work on the first floor. They’d have to find out what kind of people worked here and do research on them. It would probably extend how long they needed to stay in hiding since they’d have to independently find out who the woman was. Maybe they’d stake out the closest parking garage and building front, find out if she had a car and a license plate they could trace.

Taylor and Whitaker slowly walked towards the awning, giving the woman time. There wasn’t a doorman, which was good. They didn’t need someone paying attention to their snooping. Their luck continued when they got inside the building. There wasn’t a reception or security desk that some buildings have, with helpful guards taking down names and observing faces. There were also no ground floor offices.

Instead, there was a bank of five elevators in the middle of a polished but empty lobby, one facing the front door and the other four in pairs of two facing each other. On the side of the left-hand bank was a large black sign in a silver frame with white, stick-on letters helpfully telling them which businesses were on what floors.

Taylor’s luck held yet again. There were all kinds of businesses listed. Lawyers, an IT company, an employment placement company. On the fifth floor was a CPA, who happened to be the only company listed that had anything to do with money.

“We don’t know if she’s actually Graf’s money person. Even if she is, we don’t know if that’s her day job.”

“True, but I think that’s her. She could be one of the lawyers, but I don’t think so. Look at the calls. Calls from the trust followed by calls to Graf or calls from Graf followed by calls to the Trust. Think about the woman we were following. Unobservant living her life, comfortable in the world around her. A citizen. She isn’t a middle man for orders. She didn’t call Graf and say, ‘the Trust wants you to kill Fredrick Wissler’.”

“Why not. Maybe Graf wanted deniability.”

“Graf’s already doing enough that deniability wouldn’t matter. The Trust, on the other hand, would want deniability. The fewer people that know about the specific tasks they ask Graf to do, the better. No, orders would have been given to Graf by the Trust themselves. So why does Graf need to call this woman, and why would she then need to call the trust if it wasn’t for orders?”

“To take care of payments?”

“Yep. Reviving money from the Trust, laundering it, and passing it on to Graf. Not even a real crime, she’d probably rationalize to herself. The Trust is old money with lots of connections to powerful people. Graf is an upstanding member of law enforcement. She knows what she’s doing is illegal, but it’s one of those illegal things that someone like her could explain away as just getting around red tape.”

“A lawyer could still do all that.”

“Yeah, but I think it’s the CPA. Let's go upstairs and see. If we’re wrong, we can say sorry and excuse ourselves.”

“People talk. We might overplay our hands going into the wrong business.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think people talk to others in the same building that much. Plus, they’re not on the same floor. The CPA is on the floor with the IT people, who look to take up most of the floor. What else do we have? We’re here, let's go and see.”

Taylor headed to the elevators and pressed the up bottom. Whitaker followed, not precisely agreeing with his plan but not fighting it either. They were the only ones in the car as they rode up to the fifth floor, where the CPA was located.

In a very German way, the floor was logically laid out, making it easy to find the suite they were looking for. The office itself was small, a suite designed for a sole proprietor. The door from the hallway entered into a small waiting area with a receptionist. Next to her desk was a door that probably led to the banker's office.

The sectary said something in German that Taylor didn’t recognize, but that was said in a ‘May I help you’ kind of tone. Whitaker started to step up to her, probably to see if she spoke English when she was surprised. Taylor pointed at a photo on the wall showing the woman they’d seen at the cafe shaking hands at some kind of event and then walked straight to the door into the inner office, reaching for the doorknob.

The sectary clearly didn’t appreciate that. Taylor assumed she was saying something like ‘you can’t go in there’ or the like, her voice agitated. Taylor ignored her and pushed the door open. Inside, the office wasn’t much larger than the reception area.

At the desk sat the woman from the cafe. She looked up as Taylor, followed by the secretary and Whitaker, filed into her office. The secretary was going a mile a minute, alternating between yelling at Taylor and talking to her boss, probably explaining the situation.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes,” the woman said, holding up a hand to quiet her secretary. “What’s this about?”

“It’s about that phone call you just took from Kriminalhauptkommissar Graf. It’s probably best if you ask your assistant to step outside and let us talk. I’m sure you’d agree we don’t want to have a big hoopla over your call.”

“I’m not sure what ‘hoopla’ means, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The secretary had stopped yelling but was still standing in the door, probably waiting on the okay from her boss to call the police.

“I think you do. He’s the man that calls you on the disposable cell phone you have, and then calls you again five minutes later when you’re down at the cafe. Considering you just took such a call, I’m pretty sure you remember.”

She said something to her secretary, who looked annoyed and closed the door softly. Taylor hadn’t heard the word for police, one of the few German words he knew which, along with the secretary's reaction, probably meant the cops weren’t on their way.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want information on what you’ve been doing for Herr Graf. I know you’ve been handling payments from the trust to him and distributing it to both Graf and his agents. I want to know all the payments made in the past three months and any records of who you paid money out to.”

“All of my records are confidential.”

“These aren’t legal payments. We know what the Trust was paying Graf to do, and we know who Graf had you pay money out to. You’re the middle woman in a criminal enterprise that includes multiple murders. We aren’t the police, and if you help us, we won’t feel the need to include your name in the information we hand over to them.”

Whitaker looked over at Taylor, surprised. She’d controlled the look, but he knew her well enough to know what she was thinking. While he believed her when she said she needed to reevaluate how she thought about doing everything by the book, he knew that offering to look the other way on one member of a criminal conspiracy was alarming to her.

For Taylor, he didn’t care. This woman was just a facilitator and probably only did it out of some kind of connection to Graf himself. She didn’t operate in a way that would suggest she regularly took part in criminal enterprises. Despite what he had just said, he still stood by his words to Whitaker earlier. This wasn’t a middle woman in a string of orders to murder people. This was a functionary, making money moved from one place to another. Sure, it was illegal, but Taylor had no problem looking the other way if it got him what he needed.

When she paused, looking at the door leading out to the reception area, Taylor said, “I want you to understand that so far, we are doing this the nice way. One way or another, though, we’re going to find out what we need to know.”

To make his point, Taylor pulled the gun he had hidden under his shirt, holding it at his side. He knew Whitaker didn’t like it when Taylor pushed the envelope, questioning criminals, but he didn’t feel bad about threatening the woman. She may not be like some of the criminals he’d dealt with over the past several years, but she was a criminal. While he might have had no qualms about letting her get away with her illegal activity, he also didn’t feel the need to treat the woman by the letter of the law.

That went doubly now, considering Whitaker and Taylor were outside the law themselves.

The banker looked past Taylor and Whitaker again towards the door before looking back at Taylor, her brow creased with worry.

“I only handle payments,” she finally said after one last look to the door. “I don’t know what Herr Graf is actually doing.”

“You must have some idea,” Whitaker said, ignoring Taylor’s threats. “You’re too smart to see whose paying him and who he’s paying, all requiring phone calls outside the office, and not figure it out.”

“It’s easy if you don’t want to know. Of course, I know it’s illegal, but beyond that …”

“How about you tell us what you do know,” Taylor said.

“Torsten contacted me five years ago. He knew about some trouble I’d been in around the time and made it clear he could make my life difficult if I didn’t help him out with something. He said he was going to be getting payments from an organization that he needed to be untraceable, and he’d need to make payments out to contractors from time to time that needed the same thing.”

“Did he tell you who these people were? Either the people paying him or the people he was paying?”

“No, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. The Trust just transferred money to accounts I set up as the collection point for Graf’s payments without trying to hide who they were. I hadn’t heard about them, but I looked them up once. As for the people he was paying, no. That tended to be paid out in cash.”

“How would that work?” Whitaker asked. “How would he receive the payments?”

The woman paused, clearly not wanting to discuss her illegal activities. It was one thing to sell out Graf, it was another to implicate herself in direct criminal acts. Taylor tapped his gun to his leg, loud enough to get her attention. She glanced at the weapon and then back up at Whitaker.

“I would arrange to get money out of one of the holding accounts, and he would send someone by to pick up an envelope.”

“When you said holding accounts, is that all you did? Take the money in and then pass it directly to him?” Taylor asked.

“Only if it was for cash, which wouldn’t be reported by the people getting it, so it didn’t matter how the money tracked back. For the money that I transferred to Herr Graf, I would put it through a series of holding companies before the final company paid him as an investor in that company.”

“Do you have records of payments from the trust or any of these payments to Graf that weren’t cash?” Whitaker asked.

After another look at Taylor’s gun, she said, “Yes.”

“Show them to me,” Whitaker said.

Whitaker went around the desk and stood behind the woman as she brought up various documents showing what she’d just explained. Whitaker had the woman pull up all the documents and then step away from the computer. Taylor couldn’t see what she was doing but assumed she was repeating what she’d done for the video, sending copies of everything to herself.

The banker didn’t look happy, since there was enough there to put her in real trouble if it got out. She kept glancing at Taylor who stood passively, staring back. When Whitaker finished, Taylor holstered his weapon.

Once they were out of the offices and back at the elevator, Taylor asked, “Did you get it?”

“Yes. I haven’t worked on white-collar crimes much, but it seemed like enough to prove illegal payments to Graf.”

“Maybe. Let’s go back to the hotel, and I’ll call Joe, see what he thinks.”

They stepped out of the elevator into the lobby and froze. On either said of the door were armed police officers in tactical gear, with more by the lobby out of view from inside the elevator.

“Shit,” Taylor said as both he and Whitaker put their hands above their heads.