Free Fraud: A Stepbrother Romance by Stephanie Brother Page B

right
gear.
     
    *****
     
    About fifteen minutes later, a Coastie
cutter came alongside, and some ropes were tossed to me. I climbed onto it, and
it headed back to shore.
    “Things just got real, Randy,” I said.
    “What’s up? Did you find out anything
useful?” he said.
    “Either we’ve got King for murder, or I’ve
got bigger troubles than I think I can handle,” I replied.
     
    *****
     
    At least our team was making some progress
in finding out about Robert King’s money laundering operations. We just could
not figure out how he had been able to hide the transactions.
    Ever since the Patriot Act came out, banks
had been more and more stringent about assuring that a legal audit trail
existed for all of the ways that money was being handled. To ignore or try to
bypass these regulations put the bank at great risk. Nobody wanted to be
accused of assisting in the funding of terrorist organizations such as ISIS.
Bankers by nature are very conservative.
    It was one thing to hide Nazi gold in
their vaults that had been confiscated from Polish Jews, but it was a
completely different thing to provide money that purchased weapons that now
were being used against US allies
    Including bankers...
    The indiscriminate nature of terrorist
bombings, especially in the London banking districts, had forced the banks’
officers to finally take these steps seriously.
    Working in concert with the state
departments of both European Union countries and the United States, the banks
were clamping down.
    What made this so frustrating for our team
was that somehow Mr. Robert King had managed to find loopholes.
    Shell companies only held his money for a
very short period of time and paid exorbitant instant interest rates to make
sure that the transactions were kept as secret as legally possible.
    But we suspected that couriers were used
that would bring bearer bonds into former Eastern European countries, where
they were converted to Russian or other currencies. Once that was done, they
were arbitraged due to the interest rate differences between member countries
and other markets such as China or Korea.
    It was a difficult and tangled web to
unravel, and we had the best forensic accountants trying to decipher how it was
being done.
    Our team’s task was to find any possible
evidence we could that would be used to indict King.
    After several months of surveillance, we
had determined that the “ Disco Inferno ” was a common meeting point for
King and his associates.
    Most of our ways of conducting secret
investigations of the ship were unsuccessful.
    We finally came upon the plan of attaching
a Limpet microphone to the hull of the yacht. The transmitted sound was
recorded onto a small hard drive in the device. In this way we were able to
monitor conversations held on board the ship. The electronics inside it would
also capture all the radio and cellular traffic within 20 yards of the yacht.
Then it would beam it to a satellite, using an encrypted method.
    We had the NSA to thank for this, as they
had developed the technology 10 years earlier for use in Middle Eastern
embassies.
    After only a few weeks, we had finally
managed to gather enough evidence to mount the legal assault, and had gone to
Judge Turner for a search warrant.
    The Judge was reluctant to issue one based
on the evidence we provided, so we had to go back for one last try.
    That’s how I found myself bouncing around
in a small speedboat, acting like a drunken fool, so that I could attach a second
Limpet mic to Kings’ yacht.
     
    *****
     
    Randy was on duty when we had finished
recording the latest conversation between King and his buddies.
    “Derek, I think you need to hear this,” he
said.
    I came over to where he was listening and
picked up one of the headsets. I could make out King speaking to several other
men.
    “Are you sure?” said King.
    “We checked the birth records and other
available documents, and they are definitely connected,” said another