Just before lunch Ryan Munroe received an innocuous text message that contained the number “four.” It could have been any number between one and five, each one of which corresponded to a different prearranged set of Metro stations, times, tracks, trains, and car numbers. The number four translated to the Potomac Avenue Station, the eastbound platform, 2:10 in the afternoon, the third car from the front. He had had to commit all of the details to memory. It wouldn’t do to have the Gestapo search his place and find the list.
In the movies the spies met in public places and exchanged information while wandering around some park. That was a sloppy way to do it. The Feds could focus a directional mike on you from a hundred yards away and record every word. Cars were just as bad. They could be bugged and the cops could record a conversation by bouncing a laser off the windows. Besides that, in a park you were exposed and your escape routes were limited. If you were in the Metro once you hit a station you could disappear into the crowds or jump on another train. And unlike your car, they couldn’t bug the train in advance.
There were hundreds, probably thousands of train cars in the Metro system and even if they could wire them all, given the ambient noise and the fact that Munroe’s contact always used a different seat, they wouldn’t be able to get anything useful. Inside a station you were almost invisible. Thousands of people poured in and out of them every hour. Once you were on a train you could turn your coat inside out, stick your green baseball cap in your pocket and put on a black knit hat and at the next stop emerge invisible, just another shape in the herd. On balance Munroe appreciated the system his contact had set up. When you were at war with the government you had to be careful. Not that it mattered, personally, to Munroe. The cops didn’t need to record his conversations. He was already a wanted man and if they caught him he was dead meat. But that was not the case for his employer.
Munroe spotted his man at the rear of the car, two seats up from the door. The contact always looked the same, mustache, neat beard, dark hair under a black baseball cap, long-sleeved shirt and jeans, black athletic shoes. Because of the cold today he wore a black-nylon winter coat unzipped halfway to his waist. Munroe made a quick scan of the car but nobody seemed to be paying any attention to either himself or his contact.
“Give me an update,” the man said, looking straight ahead, his lips barely moving.
“The contractor finished the job.”
“I’m instructed to ask for the details.”
“I leave operational matters to the man doing the work. All I care about is that it gets done on time.”
“That’s not good enough in this case. We have to be sure that we’ll get the time we need. There are a lot of moving parts.”
“The job is done. There’s no link to my contractor. They’re not going to find the subject, ever. That’s all there is to it.”
The contact frowned then looked toward the door.
“All right. I’ll be in touch.”
“Wait a minute,” Munroe said, half ready to grab the man’s arm. “I need to know when we’ll get the material. I’ve got my own moving parts to line up before I can begin distribution.”
“I’ll give you two weeks’ notice. That should be enough,” the contact whispered with an expression that seemed to add: for a low-life drug dealer like you.
“It’s not. I have people who’re sitting on their hands waiting for product and not getting paid. I’ve shut down my business to get the network ready for this. I need to know when we’re going to have something to sell. My guys can’t wait forever.”
The train pulled to a halt but the contact made no move to leave.
“You know how important this project is,” he said.
Hell yes, Munroe thought. Of course I know. The big money was, as always, in drugs. People would buy drugs before they would buy milk for their kids. Hell, junkies would rather shoot up or coke up than eat, sleep or fuck. The big challenge was moving the cash.
Before the cops had grabbed him Munroe had mostly solved that problem by buying up bodegas and mini-marts, a few check cashing joints and, just before he was busted, a payday loan company. If a mini-mart took in $500 in cash you deposited $2,000 in the bank. Selling cigarettes and beer was a cash business. Short of comparing your inventory purchases against your sales tapes how were they going to prove anything? And Munroe even had a fix for that. He overbought cigs and beer from the wholesalers and ran the fake sales through his registers. Then he sold the extra inventory off the back of a truck. He wrote off the tax on the phantom sales as a laundering fee. Of course, he needed a place to store the additional inventory.
That’s when he bought the farm and stocked the barn with steel shelves and a couple of forklifts. With more money he got more merchandise and with more merchandise he got more money. It only made sense to branch out – prescription drugs, both real and fake, more weapons, kiddie porn, whatever people wanted that the government wouldn’t let them have.
He moved the money through the system as quickly as possible – cash to local banks, wire transfers from there to a bank in the Cayman Islands, hand-carried cashier’s checks from the receiving bank to other Cayman banks – but the cash was like an incoming tide that never stopped.
When the cops grabbed him he still had ten million in currency buried in a hole he had dug in the wilderness of the Patuxent River State Park. As he was shoveling the dirt back in he couldn’t help but think about Black Beard the Pirate and all the loot he was supposed to have buried on nameless Caribbean islands. Munroe wondered if he were hit by a bus or struck by lightning might someone a hundred years from now stumble over his stash of moldering hundred dollar bills. That would be a hell of a thing, he thought and smiled.
After he went on the run he used a front man to hire a lawyer who scoured the court records. His farm and his bodegas and the payday loan service and all his domestic bank accounts had been seized under the RICO statutes. They were all gone. He had made sure that the Cayman money had disappeared into a tangle of anonymous accounts. It was still there, waiting for him, but he was afraid to touch it. The way the government worked these days he figured that the NSA was tracking every wire transfer into U.S. banks out of the Caribbean, the Jersey Islands, Monaco, and the like. The instant he wired any of his money to a bank in the USA the G was going to know about it. Maybe the NSA would tell the FBI and maybe they wouldn’t, but he wasn’t going to take that chance any more than he was going to start digging up his buried stash.
For now, he was leaving his money right where it was. Some day maybe he’d use a false passport to disappear into Costa Rica or Crete or the South of France and then he’d make an annual trip to George Town and pick up a cashier’s check. From there he could take a hop to Antwerp, Brussels or London and deposit it in a corresponding European bank and from there wire it someplace more easily accessible. By then maybe bitcoins would have the rough edges worn off and would be an even better alternative but for now Munroe thought the cyber currency was too risky.
Before they grabbed him he had stashed a million in cash in safe-deposit boxes under fake identities. Half of that had gone to Farber. His freedom was worth it. The money wasn’t going to do him any good in jail. Now he was living on the fees his contact paid him, keeping the rest of his cash handy in case things turned sour and he needed to make another run for it. For now that was fine. He was too young to just lie on a beach all day. He needed something to do and freeing the country from the yoke of laws and rules, making it a place where the cream could rise to the top and the dregs would sink into the muck and people could do whatever they were strong enough to get away with was important work.
“We’ll have product in quantity in twelve to sixteen weeks,” the contact finally answered.
“Three months? What the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“My employer will continue to make payments on the same schedule until the first shipment is ready. Tell your man to keep a low profile. If we have new work for him we’ll contact you in the usual way.”
The train began to slow. The contact stood and without a backward glance edged toward the door.