One of Kosugi’s female assistants stood beside Patrick and the other sat behind two monitors opposite his. That was fine. He didn’t mind being monitored. He was going to move Kosugi’s money and get out of there as soon as possible.
He heard Kiri and Jenna in the other tatami room through the sliding doors.
Patrick opened Nine Dragons system. After all the legal fluff, a shell company was basically a series of passwords inside passwords, gradually obscuring ownership through a series of access points. Leung had once told Patrick that the secret was neat record-keeping. If you lost the path, you lost the money.
Patrick remembered most of the paths, but the others were on his computer in Honolulu. He wanted to check his own account, but the women were watching him too closely.
Even with the fast connection, the transfers took time, so he asked one of the women for another computer. She brought over a laptop and set up a second monitor, so now Patrick had two computers and four monitors.
She bowed and smiled as brightly as any other service industry professional. By the door, one of the buffed men who’d picked them up at the hotel stared as dully into space as any bodyguard or bouncer.
Patrick plugged in the second set of numbers. He had a system for passwords, changing them regularly according to the date, but opposite one hundred and eighty degrees so the passwords were different every day and easily calculable. He logged in and set the transfer going. If his own passwords still worked and if the transfer went smoothly, the whole nightmare would soon be over.
The numbers clicked into place and Kosugi’s accounts were where they were supposed to be. Kosugi had three separate accounts. Patrick wondered if anything were missing from them, prayed there wasn’t, and wondered how Kosugi made all that money. He had a pretty good idea it wasn’t from golf bets.
In the other room, Kiri was singing the theme song to “Doraemon,” or was it “Anpanman”? He remembered the melody, the girls played it so many times watching the show with their grandmother.
He started transferring Kosugi’s money to the new accounts. One of the two women went in with Kiri and Jenna and he was left alone with the woman at the monitors across from him and the bouncer on a stool by the door.
Nine Dragons’ head office or the police would get into the accounts and freeze them soon. Maybe they were tracking them already. He’d logged on at the hotel, but maybe Kosugi had better security.
The first account of Kosugi’s finished. He waited for follow-up messages, but none came, so he turned his attention to the other two. The second started smoothly so he let it roll and turned to get the third account started. It was set up in Wyoming with a backup connection to Panama, routed through Latvia and Luxembourg.
Leung had a thing about bouncing the transfers through several countries. That added layers of security but could draw attention. Just one SAR could pause transfers or put them under scrutiny. He’d do things differently when he and Kyle set up their firm.
He checked the second transfer and an error message popped up. It was taking too much time and stopped. He kicked the third account back up on the screen and glanced at the woman and the bouncer. He started the procedure again, and decided to check Leung’s past month.
He heard Kiri and Jenna’s voices behind the sliding door in the tatami room.
He opened the other accounts, hoping the woman wouldn’t notice where he was or what he was looking at. He could always say he needed to check other accounts of Kosugi’s to be thorough. The accounts clicked open and he slid back in his chair. Nothing more than the same out and in strategy he’d seen when he logged in at the hotel.
He switched to his own master account, the one he used for temporary transfers, and scrolled back a few months.
And there it was!
Money was moving in and out of an account in Patrick’s name. He had never seen that account before. Leung must have set it up to make it seem that Patrick—not Leung—was executing all the transfers. He’d been so busy getting the new accounts set up in Wyoming, he’d barely even checked his own transfer account.
Leung had a master password for all accounts. He used it mostly for oversight, but for the past few months, he used it to shuffle funds in a way that made it seem Patrick was the one doing it. Without a more granular check of settlement delays, routing codes, and endpoints, he couldn’t be sure where the money went.
What he could see was that Leung made it appear that it was Patrick, not Leung, misusing floats, churning accounts, and kiting other people’s money. All this on-the-run shit was because Leung dipped into the wrong accounts, imagining no one would notice. There must be a lot left unreturned when Leung was killed. If Kosugi had noticed, others would also, if not now, soon enough. This could drag on for a long time.
He’d like to kill Leung himself.
Patrick made sure the women were drinking coffee before he started to download the information to his cloud storage folder, but he was startled by a hand on his shoulder.
“Everything going OK?” Kosugi asked. He had a grandfatherly manner to him, a grandfather who could do whatever was needed.
“All good so far.” Patrick smiled at him as cheerily as he could muster.
Kosugi looked over his shoulder. “You’re really a genius with these things. My girls here,” he gestured at the women in the office, “really liked how you set up everything over there in Wyoming. It’s just too bad Leung had to mess with it.”
Patrick noticed that the screens of account numbers didn’t mean anything to Kosugi. His assistants would know exactly what they meant, though. That’s why he had them there. And Kosugi would call the bank eventually for confirmation.
Kosugi talked as he balanced himself for a practice golf swing. “You should learn to enjoy your money before you’re too old. I misspent my youth, encouraging executives to pay, extracting insurance from wealthy companies. Profitable but boring. I should have done the fun stuff when I was young. You can’t put ‘good at golf’ on your tombstone, can you?”
Patrick sighed. “I’m sorry about Leung. I don’t know what he was thinking.”
Kosugi patted Patrick’s shoulder again. “I know it wasn’t you. My assistants checked. They figured out that much already. We still needed you to get in and move our money out.”
Patrick looked at the two women standing in front of the two monitors opposite him.
“I’ve never been the kind to quibble about a percent here or there. But to take our money, use it for a quick profit, and not tell us? And to do that to friends I recommended?” Kosugi swung his imaginary club and stayed in place for a long follow-through.
“I wasn’t involved in that.”
“I know you weren’t. Like I said, we check on things like that. We know you set up the shell companies and those trust fund things. You should go into business for yourself. Let me know if you ever do.”
Patrick nodded, hoping the third transfer would hurry up.
Kosugi settled his stance for another practice swing. “I still have a lot of good friends from the old days. A lot didn’t make it, of course. It’s a hard life. After the bubble years fizzled out, I decided to take my share and invest it. I barely knew what interest and dividends were.”
He spun into his swing hard and steady. The women looked where he hit as if following the ball down a green.
Kosugi loosened his shoulders and turned to Patrick. “I pay a couple of golf pros to keep me from embarrassing myself at Tara Iti, Dornoch, or Cape Wickham. The women like the resorts in the south of Portugal, and the new ones in China. You should learn to enjoy yourself along the way. I wish I had.”
“I might refocus. But for now, I need a flight out of Japan,” Patrick said.
Kosugi dropped his hand on Patrick’s shoulder again. “I always use private jets. You arrive rested. No immigration headaches. Some services skip logging flight details. From Tokyo, head to Guam. You’re in America there. Get another private jet from there to wherever you’re going. Google it. You’re a smart kid.”
“Was it you who’s been following us?”
Kosugi cocked his head. “It wasn’t me, but I found you easily enough. Who was following you?”
Patrick looked confused. “You sent me, and her, photos, right?”
“Photos?” Kosugi gave him a hard look. “It wasn’t one of my people. Mine are all here and I never hire out anymore. Too many things go wrong.”
Patrick looked back at the screen. Then who was it? The transfer finished. Patrick wanted to shout hallelujah, but he stood up calmly and backed away from the screen. “All done.”
Kosugi leaned down, but he didn’t really read it. “Wait here, all right?” Kosugi went back to his office.
The women smiled at Patrick and stood in place. Waiting patiently was probably a lot of what they did. They were too polite to ask questions and Patrick hoped the silence would speed things along.
Kosugi came out tossing a golf ball into the air. He was lithe and worked out a lot, not just golf, more like personal trainer workouts. “All good.”
“And my girls?”
“Just be glad you were with your daughters or this might have taken a different turn.” Kosugi called and the door to the tatami room slid open. Kiri and Jenna were sitting at a low desk covered with bright-colored squares of paper and origami figures.
Kiri walked on her knees to the edge of the tatami. “Look what I made.”
“What is it?”
“A turtle, can’t you tell?”
Jenna finished her creation. “Look at mine.”
“That’s a crane.” Patrick turned it over in his hands, impressed at the neat folds and deft tucks that formed the complex angles of the paper crane.
He gave the girls a big hug, but it was really he who needed the hug.