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“The Patriot Act?” Raab’s knee shot up and down like a jackhammer. “What the hell are you saying here?”
“What we’re saying,” Special Agent Booth cut in, casually scratching at the short orange hairs on the side of his head, “is that you’re pretty much fucked and fried here, Mr. Raab—pardon the French—and what you ought to start thinking about now is how to make this go your way.”
“My way?” Raab felt the heat of the room under his collar. He had a flash of Sharon and the kids. How would they possibly deal with this? How would he even begin to explain …? He felt his head start to spin.
“You don’t exactly look so good, Mr. Raab.” Agent Ruiz pretended to be concerned. He got up and poured him a cup of water.
Raab dropped his forehead into his hands. “I think I need my lawyer now.”
“Oh, you don’t need a lawyer.” Agent in Charge Booth stared wide-eyed. “You need the whole fucking Department of Justice to make this go your way.”
Ruiz came back to the table, pushing the water across to Raab. “Of course, there might be a way this could all work out for you.”
Raab ran his hands through his hair. He took a gulp of water, cooling his brow. “What way?”
“The way of keeping you out of a federal prison for the next twenty years,” Booth replied without a smile.
Raab felt a pain shoot through his stomach. He took another sip of water, sniffing back a mixture of mucus and hot tears. “How?”
“Concerga, Mr. Raab. Concerga leads to Ramirez and Trujillo. You’ve seen the movies. That’s the way it works here, too. You take us up the ladder, we find a way to make things disappear. Of course, you understand,” the FBI man added, rocking back with an indifferent shrug, “your buddy Harold Kornreich has to go, too.”
Raab stared at him blankly. Harold was a friend. He and Audrey had been to Justin’s bar mitzvah. Their son, Tim, had just been accepted to Middlebury. Raab shook his head. “I’ve known Harold Kornreich twenty years.”
“He’s already history, Mr. Raab,” Booth said with a roll of his eyes. “What you don’t want to happen is for us to pose the same questions to him about you.”
Ruiz maneuvered his chair around the table and pulled it up close to Raab in a chummy sort of way. “You have a nice life, Mr. Raab. What you’ve got to think about now is how you can keep it that way. I saw those pictures in your office. I’m not sure how twenty years in a federal penitentiary would go over with that pretty family of yours.”
“Twenty years!”
Ruiz chuckled. “See, I told you we’d come around to that number again.”
A surge of anger rose in Raab’s chest. He jumped up. This time they let him. He went over to the wall. He started to slam his fist against it, then stopped. He spun back around.
“Why are you doing this to me? All I did was get two people together. Half the people on the fucking Street would have done the same thing. You throw the Patriot Act in my face. You want me to turn on my friends. All I did was buy the gold. What the hell do you think I am?”
They didn’t say anything. They just let Raab slowly come back to the table. His eyes were burning, and he sank into the chair and wiped them with the palms of his hands.
“I need to speak with my lawyer now.”
“You want representation, that’s your decision,” Ruiz replied. “You’re a cooked goose, Mr. Raab, whichever way. Your best bet is to talk to us, try and make this go away. But before you make that call, there’s one last thing you might want to pass along.”
“And what is that?” Raab glared, frustration pulsing through his veins.
The FBI man removed another photo from his file and slid it across the table. “What about this face, Mr. Raab? Does it look familiar to you?”
Raab picked it up. He stared at it, almost deferentially, as the color drained from his face.
Ruiz started laying out a series of photos. Surveillance shots, like before. Except this time they were of him. Along with a short, stocky man with a thin mustache, bald on top. One was through the window of his own office, taken from across the street. Another of the two of them at the China Grill, over lunch. Raab’s heart fell off a cliff.
“Ivan Berroa,” he muttered, staring numbly at the photograph.
“Ivan Berroa.” The FBI man nodded, holding back a smile.
As if on cue, the door to the interrogation room opened and someone new stepped in.
Raab’s eyes stretched wide.
It was the man in the photo. Berroa. Dressed differently from how Raab had ever seen him. Not in a leather jacket and jeans, but in a suit.
Wearing a badge.
“I think you already know Special Agent Esposito, don’t you, Mr. Raab? But should your memory need refreshing, we can always play back the voice recordings of your meetings if you like.”
Raab looked up, his face white. They had him. He was fucked.
“Like we told you at the beginning”—Agent Ruiz started picking up the photos with a coy smile—“these things seem to go best when the person has nothing to hide.”
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_df5a102c-a71f-5ca1-8eab-ee23d90efb9c)
Kate barely caught the 12:10 train at Fordham Road to get back to her parents’ home in Larchmont, squeezing into the last car just as the doors were about to close.
All she’d had time to do was grab a few personal things and leave a cryptic message for Greg on the way: “Something’s happened with Ben. I’m heading up to the house. I’ll let you know when I know more.”
It took until the train pulled away from the station and Kate found herself in the midday emptiness of the car for it to hit her—body-slam her, was more like it—just what her mother had said.
Her father had been arrested by the FBI.
If she hadn’t heard the panic in her voice she would have thought it was some kind of joke. Money laundering. Conspiracy. That was crazy.… Her dad was one of the straightest shooters she knew.
Sure, maybe he might finagle a commission here or there. Or put a family meal on the company tab once in a while. Or fudge his taxes.… Everyone did that.
But RICO statutes … abetting a criminal enterprise … the FBI … This was nuts. She knew her father. She knew what kind of man he was. There was absolutely no possible way.…
Kate bought a ticket from the conductor, then leaned her head against the window, trying to catch her breath.
Reputation was everything to her dad, he always said. His business was based on it. He didn’t have salesmen or some fancy arbitrage program or a back room filled with hustling traders. He had himself. He had his contacts, his years in business. He had his reputation. What else was there beyond his word?
Once, Kate recalled, he had refused to handle a large estate sale—it was well into seven figures—just because the executor had shopped it to a friendly competitor on the Street and Dad didn’t like the appearance that he’d been bidding for the job against his friend.
And another time he’d taken back an eight-carat diamond he’d brokered in a private sale after two years. Just because some shyster appraiser the buyer had found later insisted that the stone was a little hazy. A six-figure sale. Hazy? Even Em and Justin told him he was nuts to do it. The stone hadn’t changed! The woman just didn’t want it anymore.
The Metro-North train rattled past the housing projects in the Bronx. Kate sank back in her seat. She was worried for him, what he must be feeling. She closed her eyes.
She was the oldest—by six years. How many times had her father told her what a special bond that created between them? It’s our little secret, pumpkin. They even had their own little private greeting. They had seen it in some movie and it just stuck: a one-fingered wave.
She looked a bit different from the rest of them. She was wide-eyed and pretty, kind of like Natalie Portman, everybody always said. Her hair was shoulder-length and light brown. Everyone else’s was thicker and darker. And those sharp green eyes—where did those come from? Flipped chromosomes, Kate always explained. You know, the dominant-recessive Y … how it skips a generation.
“Pretty,” her dad would tease her. “I just can’t figure out how she got to be so smart.”
Leaning against the glass, Kate thought of how many times he had come through for her.
For all of them.
How he’d leave work early to come home and catch her soccer games in high school, once even hopping a plane a day early from the Orient when her team had made the district finals. Or drive all over the Northeast to Emily’s squash tournaments—she was one of the top-ranked juniors in Westchester County—and coax her back to earth when that famous temper got the best of her after she lost a tough match.
Or how at Brown, after Kate had gotten sick, when she took up crew, he’d drive up on weekends and sit there on the shore and watch her row.
Kate always figured that her dad was such a committed family guy because, truth was, growing up, he’d never had much of one of his own. His mother, Rosa, had come over from Spain when he was a boy. His father had died there, a streetcar accident or something. Kate actually never knew that much about him. And his mother had died young as well, while he was putting himself through NYU. Everyone admired her father. At the club, in his business, their friends—that’s why this didn’t make any sense.
What the hell did you do, Daddy?
Suddenly Kate’s head started to throb. She felt the familiar pressure digging into her eyes, the dryness in her throat, followed by the wave of fatigue.
Shit …
She knew that this might happen. It always came on with stress. It didn’t take but a second to recognize the signs.
She dug through her bag and found her Accu-Chek—her blood monitor. She’d been diagnosed when she was seventeen, her senior year.
Diabetes. Type 1. The real deal.
Kate had gotten a little depressed at first. Her life underwent a radical change. She’d had to drop soccer. She didn’t take her SATs. She had to watch her diet strictly when everyone else was going out for pizza or partying on Saturday nights.
And once she had even fallen into a hypoglycemic coma. She was cramming for a test in the school cafeteria when her fingers began to grow numb and the pen slipped out of her hand. Kate didn’t know what was happening. The dizziness took over. Her body wouldn’t respond. Faces started to look a little gauzy. She tried to scream—What the hell is going on!
Next thing she knew, she was waking up in the hospital two days later, attached to about a dozen monitors and tubes. It had been six years now. In that time she had learned to manage things. She still had to give herself two shots a day.
Kate pressed the Accu-Chek needle into her forefinger. The digital meter read 282. Her norm was around 90. Jesus, she was off the charts.
She dug into her purse and came out with her kit. She always kept a spare in the fridge at the lab. She took out a syringe and the bottle of Humulin. The train car was not crowded; no reason she couldn’t do this right here. She lifted the syringe and pressed it into the insulin, forcing out the air: 18 units. Kate lifted her sweater. It was routine for her. Twice a day for the past six years.
She pressed the needle into the soft part of her belly underneath her rib cage. She gently squeezed.
Those initial worries about what it meant to live with diabetes all seemed like a long time ago now. She had gotten into Brown. She had changed her focus, started thinking about biology. And she started rowing there. Just for exercise at first. Then it created a new sense of discipline in her life. In her junior year—though she was only five feet four and barely 115 pounds—she had placed second in the All-Ivy single sculls.
That’s what their little wave was about. The sign between them. Em’s got that temper, her Dad would always wink and tell her, but you’re the one with the real fight inside.
Kate took a swig of water from a bottle and felt her strength start to return.
The train was approaching Larchmont. It started to slow into the redbrick station.
Kate stuffed her kit back in her bag. She pulled herself up, looped her satchel around her shoulder, and waited at the doors.
She never forgot. Not a single day. Not for an instant:
When she opened her eyes in the hospital after two days in the coma, her father’s had been the first face she saw.
Ben will fix this, Kate knew. Like he always did. He’d handle it. Whatever the hell he had done. She was sure.
Now, her mother … She sighed, spotting the silver Lexus waiting in the turnabout as the train pulled into the station.
That was a totally different deal.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_66e54568-b246-553d-bf20-059ea7f5a493)
It was a long, difficult drive back to Westchester that afternoon for Raab, in the back of the black Lincoln limo his lawyer, Mel Kipstein, had arranged.
An hour before, he’d been brought in front of Judge Muriel Saperstein in the United States courthouse at Foley Square for arraignment, the most humiliating moment of his life.
The frosty government lawyer who’d been in on his interrogation referred to him as a “criminal kingpin” who was the architect of an illicit scheme by which Colombian drug lords were able to divert money out of the country. That he had knowingly profited from this enterprise for years. That he had ties to known drug traffickers.
No, Raab had to hold himself back from shouting, that’s not how it was at all.
Every time he heard the judge read off a charge, it cut through him like a serrated blade.
Money laundering. Aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise. Conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.
After some negotiation, during which Raab grew alarmed he might not even be freed, bail was set at $2 million.
“I see you own a fancy home in Westchester, Mr. Raab?” The judged peered over her glasses.
“Yes, Your Honor.” Benjamin shrugged. “I guess.”
She scribbled something on an official-looking document. “Not anymore, I’m afraid.”
An hour later he and Mel were heading up Interstate 95 toward Westchester. All he told Sharon was that he was okay and that he’d explain everything when he got home.
Mel thought they definitely had some wiggle room. He figured there was a reasonable case for entrapment. Up to now he had represented Raab on matters like contract disputes, the office lease, and setting up a trust for his kids. Just two weeks before, the two of them had come in second in the Member/Guest golf tourney at Century.
“The law says you had to assist them, knowingly, Ben. This Concerga never declared to you what he intended to do with the gold, did he?”
Raab shook his head. “No.”
“He never explicitly told you the money he was giving you was derived from illicit means?”
Raab shook his head again. He took a long gulp from a bottle of water.
“So if you didn’t know, you didn’t know, right, Ben? What you’re telling me is good. The RICO statutes say you have to conspire with ‘knowing’ or ‘intent.’ You can’t be a participant, nonetheless aid or abet, if you didn’t know.”
It somehow sounded good when Mel said it. He could almost believe it himself. He had made some critical mistakes of judgment. That was what he had to get across. He had acted blindly, stupidly—out of greed. But he never knew whom he was dealing with or what they were doing with the gold. Tomorrow morning they had a follow-up meeting with the government that would likely determine the next twenty years of his life.
“But this last thing, Ben, this Berroa guy … this complicates matters. It’s bad. I mean, they have your voice on tape. Discussing the same arrangements with an FBI agent.” Mel looked at him closely. “Look, this is important, Ben. We’ve been friends a lot of years. Is there anything you’re not telling me that could have an impact on this case? Anything the government might know? Now’s the time.”
Raab stared Mel in the eye. Mel had been his friend for more than ten years. “No.”
“Well, one thing’s lucky.” The lawyer looked relieved and jotted a few notes on his pad. “You’re lucky you’re not the one they really want here. Otherwise there’d be nothing to discuss.” Mel kept his gaze on him awhile, then just shook his head. “What the hell were you possibly thinking, Ben?”
Raab dropped his head back and closed his eyes. Twenty years of his life, gone … “I don’t know.”
