Stolen Prey

nothing.
”
    “What about the ‘We’re coming’? If they get to us? Eyeballs gouged out and cut throats? No thank you.
No thank you
!”
    Turicek dropped his voice. “Twenty million,” he said. “Twenty million dollars.”
    That stopped her. Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “More like twenty-two, now. We need to call Edie: it’s time to get out.”
    “How much more is in the system?” Turicek asked.
    “Two million. Not enough to risk moving. Time to finish the harvest,” she said.
    “I agree. You go see Jacob, I’ll call Edie.”
    E DIE A LBITIS freaked when she heard. She was standing on the Vegas strip, outside Treasure Island; it was 105 degrees and an obscenely fat woman was rolling down the sidewalk toward her, carrying a small dog and wearing what looked like a tutu. “I’m the one who’s dangling in the wind out here,” she said into her cell phone, one eye on the fat woman. She didn’t want to get run down. “The banks have about a million pictures of me.”
    “But they don’t know it,” Turicek said in his most comforting tone. “In every one, you look like the Sultaness of Istanbul.”
    Albitis was wearing a
hijab
, a traditional Arabic woman’s robe, and, though even most conservative Arab states allowed an uncovered face, she also wore a
niqab
, or veil. These were somewhat culturally uncomfortable for a woman who’d danced both topless and bottomless, sometimes simultaneously, in both Moscow and New York; whose parents were Jews now living in Tel Aviv, which was where she picked up her Arabic; and who was blond, to boot. But, if you were doing major money laundering through America’s finest banks, it was best to show as little skin as possible when you were setting up the accounts.
    She did speak Arabic well enough to fake her way past North African Arabs, or Iranians, who got most of their Arabic from the Koran, but if she ran into a Jordanian, or a Lebanese, or an Iraqi, she could be in trouble. Of course, most Arabs working in American banks seemed to be Jordanians, Lebanese, or Iraqis. That was just the way of the world, she thought: set up to fuck with you. “Who the hell did it? This killing?”
    “The police don’t know. They’re investigating,” Turicek said.
    “Ah, God. It’ll take me a week to clear out the accounts.”
    “No, no. We’re going to leave it,” Turicek said. “Kristina is correct: there’s not enough for the risk involved. What if we just buy what we’ve already got online, and collect what we’ve already paid for?”
    Albitis thought about it for a moment, then said, “If I run, I can do it in three or four working days.”
    “Then do that. Are we still solid with the dealers?”
    “Yes. They won’t ask any questions as long as the wires keep coming,” Albitis said. “But they won’t ship the gold until they clear the transfers. That’s a full day, sometimes. They know that when the gold is gone, it’s gone.”
    “I can’t leave here right now,” Turicek said. “Not with these murders. We need to be really quiet. I doubt they’ll even talk to us, but if they do show up, we all need to be here.”
    “Shit. Why’d this have to happen right now? Another week…” Albitis pulled at her lip, through the veil. “All right, listen: let me think about this. I don’t know if I can widen out the number of dealers, so I’m going to have to make up some bullshit story and sell it to the ones we’ve got. Some reason to jack up the purchases. There are not that many goddamn Arab womenrunning out the door with a quarter million in gold. You know what I’m saying?”
    “I know what you’re saying, but what
I’m
saying is, we might not have a choice,” Turicek said.
    Getting the gold was the touchy part. There were gold dealers all over the place, and they sold a lot of gold—but they might start to wonder if the amounts got too big. They might wonder about drugs, or spies, or terrorists, or something…. She didn’t need to walk into a dealer’s office and find the FBI waiting for her. “Just routine, ma’am,” they’d say, and then discover a blonde with a shaky passport.
    “So we’re getting out,” Turicek said. “Jacob will go along.”
    “You’ve got to watch Jacob,” Albitis said.
    “I know. We will. Kristina has him under control.”
    “They’re both nuts.”
    “And I’m watching both of them.”
    “Okay. Do that, Ivan. I’ll start right now. I was going to set up four more accounts this afternoon,