Ring of Lies (37 page)

‘
I said share a room, Grace, not a bed.
The guest room has two.
We’ll sleep in there.
That way I can keep you safe.
’

He
watched her face
as
she glanced at the bolts
securing
the
kitchen door
.
It took her less than a minute to come to the same conclusion he had, that they wouldn’t deter a
nyone hell bent on breaking in.

‘
So we stay here, then what?
’

‘
I found a safe in the
study.
I want to take a closer look
at
it
.
Find out what, if anything
,
is inside.
Any idea what the combination might be?
’

‘
It could be anything.
Daniel loved numbers
and liked to design puzzles
.
’

‘
Okay, I’ll try using birthdays—yours,
Catherine
’s
,
and Daniel’s.
If that doesn’t work I’ll ask Mike to send out a Bureau safe cracker.
In the meantime,
I suggest we get some sleep.
W
e’ll go and
talk to
Pete
Jacobs
, the guy who runs the seaplane charter,
in the morning,
find out exactly where he took Daniel
.
A
nd how often.
’

Mike Zupanik’s expression was grim.
He’d spent the last
three
hours
bent over his desk
going through old files and crime reports searching for any reference to
Daniel Elliott,
Lionel Lattide
and
Zachary Parous.
So far all he had was a sti
ff neck and a killer headache.

According to the passport
,
Lionel Lattide had passed through immigration
five
times in the last six months.
Apart from the first occasion when he’d stayed for two weeks, his other visits had been relatively short—
five
days, roughly once
every four to six weeks.
And the pattern was always the same.
He flew direct from London to Miami, spent a day
,
two at most
,
in the city
then left town, presumably to stay at
the house on Gasparilla Island.
He met w
ith
Parous,
his attorney
, played
a round of golf,
ate in the same restaurant each evening and appeared to be a model
visitor
.

Yet something about
Lattide
bothered him.

Mike
extracted a yellow legal pad from his des
k and started doodling, a habit he’d developed very early on in his career.
The random squiggles helped him relax, clear his mind of all but essential thoughts.

Something linked Parous and
Elliott/
Lattide
.
Parous handled the purchase of
the beach house
, but was that sufficient reason for the two men to continue to meet?
T
here had to be some other reason.
A mutual client perhaps?
He could subpoena the attorney’s files and records
and compare them with the list
of Elliott’s clients
, but
with so little to go on a
judge would
laugh him out of the courtroom.

He needed one tangible clue, one
tiny piece of information that would tie the two men together.
He continued to doodle.
When drawing stick figures brought no fresh ideas he turn
ed to a fresh page on the pad.

Daniel Elliott/Lionel L
attide

Mike stared at the two names.
He played with the letters, arranging them and re-arranging them.
Could it be a simple code, the kind his grandchildren played with?
Then it struck him
. B
oth names
contained the same
letters
, just arranged differently
.
Lionel Lattide was an anagram
of
Daniel
Elliott.
But which was the alias and which the real name?

What’s more,
Grace Elliott had told Jack that her husband was an accountant and that he liked puzzles.
Daniel
Elliott
’s passport showed his date of birth as January
tenth
1970,
but what if
he was actually born on October
first
?

‘
Diego, get yourself in here.
’

A short
, dark
man in his mid-thirties stuck his head round
the corner of the SAC’s office.

‘
You want
ed
me
,
boss?
’

Clean shaven,
and sporting
the requisite short
, slicked down
hair, Alejandro Diego was
highly intelligent, quick-witted and diligent, and
one of the
Bureau’s
rising stars
.
B
orn in
Dulzura on the Mexican border to mixed race parents, he
’d
joined the US Navy
on his eighteenth birthday
and spent the next five years in various hot spots around the world.
A short stint with the DEA followed,
before
he signed up with the Bureau.
An expert on
the Cuban drug trade,
he’d
settled quickly into the Miami office
.

‘
Take a seat.
This Elliott/Lattide,
’
Mike
tapped the passport in front of him.
‘
I’ve
got
a feeling
he had
more than two
passports
or was on his way to
getting others
.
’

‘
You mean the ‘five flag’
scenario
? A
t least two passports, a safe location for any assets, an offshore tax haven
,
and still be a bone-fide resident of a country even though he may not spend much time there.
’

‘
Yeah
, that about covers it
,
’
Mike said
.
‘
He’s supposedly a
British
citizen, yet he h
a
d an American passport and owned property here.
C
heck with the IRS to see if he’s
got a
s
ocial
s
ecurity
n
umber
.
Then I want you to start checking with our associates in all know
n
tax havens—South America, Aruba, Cayman Islands
, Switzerland
—the usual places.
See if
any of them issued him
with a passport recently and whether he opened a
ny
bank account
s
.
’

‘
It won’t be easy. Some of those
countries
have strict banking laws.
’

Mike shot him a dark glance.
‘
If the banks won’t give you the information, put the skills you learn
ed
at Quantico to good use and hack into their systems.
He had to get that money from somewhere.
Jack seems to think
Elliott/
Lattide was involved in money laundering, but I wonder if it was a Ponzi scheme, one that pays high returns to investors from money put in
by subsequent investors.
’

‘
In that
case, why
would anyone
threaten the widow?
’

‘
Those
schemes inevitably collapse; it’s only a matter of time.
O
ne or more of the investors
could have
hired
some
heavy to threaten Grace, only
to find out
she d
oesn’
t know anything about her husband’s business dealings.
’