Blood Orchid (Holly Barker 3)

“I’ve been staying in a guest cottage at Blood Orchid, courtesy of my friend Ed Shine. I’ve been kind of stunned, I guess, since the bomb went off in the cemetery. Mostly I’ve been watching TV—old movies, sitcoms, anything I could find. I tried not to think, but I believe a part of my mind was working, because I began to think of things.

“Yesterday, Ginny called me on my cellphone and invited me to go flying, said it would be good for me. I asked her to pick me up at the Blood Orchid airfield, and while I was waiting for her, a business jet landed and offloaded a bunch of heavy boxes into a Blood Orchid van. The guys flying the airplane noticed me, and before they took off, one of them made a cellphone call. I think it was about me.

“Ginny came, and we took off; I was flying left seat. We went around the pattern once and did a touch-and-go, and as we started to lift off, somebody opened fire on the airplane. The windshield exploded, and we took some rounds in other parts of the airplane. Ginny flew us to a disused field not far from there, and we landed safely, and Ham came to get us. Got all that?”

“Yes.”

“Does any of that tell you anything?”

Grant hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

“Did I mention the boxes the jet unloaded were heavy?”

“Yes.”

“What weighs a lot?”

“Metal . . . liquid . . . paper.”

“Yes, paper.”

“You know about what was going on at Blood Orchid when it was Palmetto Gardens, before the Feds went in and broke it up?”

“Yes, they were shipping money out of the country, money from drug sales in the U.S. They were flying it out of their own airstrip to wherever they wanted, in South or Central America.”

“Do you think they’re doing that again? Is that your idea?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“The Pellegrinos are taking in huge amounts of money from their offshore banking operations and putting it into their own offshore bank, right?”

“Right. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Yeah, sure. So they can send as much money as they like to any bank in the world, right?”

“Right.”

“Now, say you’re running a drug ring in the U.S. Say you’re associated with other people who’re in the same business. It’s a cash business; you don’t take checks or credit cards, and you don’t put the money in the bank, right?”

“Right; it would be noticed by the bank examiners if huge amounts of cash were being deposited, and they’d notify Treasury or the Bureau.”

“Right. So they’ve got to get the money out of the country.”

“Right.”

“You know about this network of informal banks that people from the Middle East use to send money to relatives? They don’t actually wire-transfer it; somebody deposits it with a bank in the sending country, then a phone call is made and the relatives go and collect it from a so-called bank in the receiving country. There’s no paper trail, as with a wire transfer.”

“Yes, it’s thought that some terrorism operations may have been funded that way. It’s very difficult to stop.”

“Right. Now, the Pellegrinos are sitting on large sums of cash in Saint Marks that they can’t send back to the U.S., right?”

“Right.”

“And the drug dealers in the States are sitting on large sums that they can’t get out of the country, right?”

“Sort of. There are other ways to get money in and out of the country; it’s called money laundering.”