Chapter 28

Jose Gardelli

Amelia Bonetti stood on the porch and watched the older man planting the gentians in the flower bed in front of his house. His hair was a little long for her taste, but otherwise he was a handsome man. About fifteen years her senior, at least. She’d seen him at the pub from time to time. Everyone knew everyone in the little Ovest village, but she did not know much about Jose Gardelli. The man had moved in to the little house about five years before. A widower she thought.

Amelia turned back into her own house. “Anne! Hurry up. You’ll be late for school.”

The sixteen year old hurried to the door. As her mother passe her in the doorway Anne kissed her mother on the lips in a heated way that would have been inappropriate anywhere but Mariner. “I have club after school,” she said to her mother.

Young Anne looked at the older man as she passed his house. Like her mother she thought he was quite handsome for an older man. Unlike young women in other places Anne was quite appreciative of the benefits of experience in a man.

“Hello Mr. Gardelli,” the teenager said.

Jose stood and gave the girl a smile. He looked at the teenager. She was quite cute he thought, in her school uniform. School uniforms were as ubiquitous in Mariner as they were in places like Japan. For young women, like Anne, they consisted of a skirt and a blouse. Usually in cool weather like this early spring a matching coat was also worn or maybe a school sweater. Anne’s skirt was gray wool cut just above the knee. Her gray jacket had her schools coat of arms below the left pocket. She had it open and he could see her blouse, its buttons opened to show her cleavage. The young brunette was definable cute, he thought.

“Good morning Anne. How are you today?”

“I’m very well Mr. Gardelli,” she said stopping. “I was wondering if you could help me with some homework I’ve got this weekend.” He saw she looked a little nervous.

“What kind of homework, dear?” the man said.

“It’s for my Human Sexual Interaction class,” she said trying to look shy, but failing.

“Now dear, don’t you think you’d be better off asking your parents to help with that? Or maybe your brother?”

“Gian’s off at the university this year, Mr. Gardelli. I suppose daddy could help me, but he knows what I like too well. I need a new man to practice with.”

“Don’t you get enough ‘practice’ with the boys in your class?”

“Oh sure. I have HSI lab three times a week. But they’re still learning too. I need someone who has experienced too sometimes.”

Gardelli looked a little pensive she thought. “I’ll have to discuss it with your parents,” he said at last.

“I’m sure mom will be very glad to discuss it with you Mr. Gardelli,” she said, knowing Amelia would most likely want a demonstration of Jose’s qualifications before turning her daughter over to him for, ‘practice’. “I’ve got to head to school now. Bye.”

“Goodbye Anne,” the man said.

Gardelli watch the girl walk away, admiring the sway of her juvenile hips as her skirt swished. When she got far enough away he turned to his own door, noticing Anne’s mother had already gone back in side while they were talking.

Jose stepped into his great room. The hundred meter square house was about average for Mariner, where most homes were smaller than what might be found in Austria or the USA. Gardelli’s stepped into the bathroom, which also had a door into his bedroom. He took off the light jacket he had been wearing and then washed his hands.

It was still fairly early, only seven thirty. That would make it still the middle of the night in the USA. Jose made his way to what would in any other house probably be a guest bedroom. The door was a pocket door and when he entered he rolled the door closed behind. There was just enough space between the door and the metal chain curtain inside the door for him to stand. Once the outer door was closed he parted the curtain and entered the room.

The room was cool and dark. A heavy curtain, also lined with metal covered the single window. The window face the back of his property and it was not evident to his neighbors that the curtain was never opened.

Along one wall was a rack system and many pieces of electronics were stored there. In another corner was a small workbench. An array of small electronic fabrication equipment sat on or was mounted to the workbench. Along another wall, next to an equipment rack, was a desk. A pair of monitors hung from a mounting frame over the desk and in front of it was an even larger monitor mounted to the wall.

All of the equipment was very high efficiency. Gardelli doubted his house drew significantly more power than the Bonetti’s, who owned an electric car. Not being noticed was the name of the game.

Gardelli sat at the desk and scanned the monitors. On one several xterms showed the progress of a number of bots he had checking on some darkweb hacker forums. The other held a window containing pedestrian email accounts, which he checked quickly, marking a few messages for later reading.

The single connection through the Faraday cage that was the room’s guardian was via a fiber optics cable that was connected to one of the three Internet backbone lines that ran through Mariner. None of Gardelli’s neighbors knew that one of those lines ran beneath their feet in a deep tunnel which had been carved out by a TBM, a Tunnel Boring Machine. Of course Gardelli’s coupler was not exactly authorized.

Gardelli was searching through his logs when he noted something of interest. One of the ways of tracing someone was to follow the money. When she died Lilith Louve was quite wealthy. One of the questions Jose asked himself was where did that wealth go? Typically wealthy people do not allow their wealth to be disposed of upon their death based on the whims of the locality. Most states, at least in the USA, have laws that allow them to attach the wealth of people who die without heirs and without a will. So wealthy people write a will

Gardelli started with the premise that Louve had a will. He checked with an expert in the USA and found that in the state of New York, where Louve was resident, probated wills were in the public record. They were not online, so Gardelli had to find someone who owned him a favor and could get a hard copy of Louve’s will.

This gave him a place to start. He found that Louve seemed to have very few assets. So Louve’s wealth was not held personally. That meant that she was keeping it somewhere, probably outside the USA. Considering her link to Vincenzo Lupo that would most likely be somewhere in the Swiss Banking System.

That would be a problem for most people. However many of the Swiss banks used server systems in Mariner. Those that did not still had to use to Internet trunks to service their systems, unless they were totally off the net, as some were. But that was becoming increasingly difficult. Still most Swiss banks did not always even associate accounts with names.

He needed another angle.

Louve was at Hamilton University, the same school the Princess Cecelia and Prince Henry attended. How did she pay for it? Wealthy people do not take out student loans. Finding the twenty year old financial records of an American university was not the easiest task Gardelli had ever set himself.

Hamilton was a private university and they seemed to keep everything. They kept it behind a firewall of only minimal security. Student academic records were fairly easy. The university kept them all on line and relatively accessible because even students twenty years out of college sometimes needed transcripts. Financial records were a different story. Everything older than seven years seemed to be kept offline.

This required Jose to engage in a little spearfishing. A number of carefully contrived email messages allowed him to compromise the admin account of one of Hamilton’s employees. He then ordered up a restore from one of those offline backups. Within two days he had restored data from twenty years ago.

Louve had paid for college with money from a local New York Bank account. Escheatment laws in New York state required the state to seize deposits abandoned for greater than three years. Jose noted that this particular bank was not named in the disposition of assets from the executor report of Louve will.

Banking records were more difficult to get into than university records. But not impossible. Particularly since Jose had no interest in moving funds, only in reviewing fund transfers. The funds for the New York account had originally come from a bank in Luxembourg.

So began a long, months long, search for money sinks and conduits. It did not take Gardelli long to determine that Louve’s step-father had been laundering money, likely for one of the New York mobs. Money from her father, however came from Swiss banks passed through Mauritius, the Caymen islands, Seychelles, Macau and eventually Luxembourg.

Transfers of money from the mob stopped after the death of Louve parents. Money from the other stream continued for at least another decade after Louve’s supposed death. A very interesting fact considering.

Of special note to Gardelli were the entities involved. Otsoa Enterprises, Volk Trust Group and Okami no Ginko. The infusion of the wolf in this affair was something Gardelli could not ignore.

The young prince, probably in an ill advised move, had revealed to his agent much of the information held by the Mariner National Intelligence Service (NIS). He had scans on his computer of the both packets of evidence from the assassination of Prince Henry and the attempted assassination of Prince James, along with the numerous attempts on the Regent.