Chapter 4

Monday night, Consuela made a call from her Aunt's house to her Great-Uncle Roberto, asking her aunt to leave the room for a short time. Her aunt had a bit of unrepentant larceny in her soul and would have loved to know what Consuela was planning. She was moderately disappointed Consuela wouldn't share that information, but she understood. She figured she'd find out sooner or later.

Great-Uncle Roberto wouldn't normally have accepted calls from an unknown number but now he was primed to answer when any of six numbers showed up on his caller ID after Consuela spoke to him. She ended the call by "padding" it with domestic chat she would normally have had with him on any other occasion.

Ryan had made one trip to her house in the late afternoon, driving a car loaned to him by one of his workmen. The man had needed the big pickup to go back to San Antonio to pick up a load of building supplies Tuesday morning and had actually suggested the switch.

Ryan made a mental note for him and Consuela to use rentals on their trips to and from his house. He didn't quite know how he'd arrange for them without leaving a trail of credit card transactions, but he thought it could be done. Maybe he could reserve the car with a credit card and then pay the final charge in cash... or maybe he could make a large cash deposit for them. He'd see what turned up.

Belinda had been delighted when her mother left her at home with Ryan while she went to her Aunt's. Ryan enjoyed it too. When Consuela got home and entered quietly through the kitchen door, she found her small daughter cuddled in Ryan's arms while they both dozed in the big easy chair.

She watched them for a long time before waking them. It took that long for the unshed tears to dry up in her eyes.

Consuela spent every free moment the next week... not that there were many... speaking with her great-uncle. When he wasn't talking to her, he was busy calling in favors with contacts he had in Belize, the Cayman Islands, Barbados, Bermuda, Antigua, Curacao, Aruba, Jamaica and in other places Consuela had never heard of. In days, accounts were ready for use in offshore banks that had reputations for maintaining extremely tight security on behalf of their clients. Most of the accounts had been there for a long time, sitting idle and waiting for someone to activate them. A very few were brand new.

By the time the preliminaries were taken care of, Roberto had set up a path for money to flow through such places as a London bank, to the always friendly Swiss Credit Bank, and from there to the Bank of Nigeria, and then back around to a Caribbean destination. He set up several hundred separate accounts because he knew whatever his great-niece was doing had a half-life of only a few days. There would be no time for the funds to accumulate and no way for typical investment transactions to be processed.

A week and a half after Great-Uncle Roberto finished setting up the routing and accounts, a smiling young Hispanic boy knocked on Consuela's front door and handed her a rewriteable CD. Surprised, Consuela accepted the jewel case containing the CD. She looked up to find the boy had turned and left without saying a word.

The CD contained a spreadsheet Consuela and Ryan loaded on a second-hand laptop Ryan bought for cash. It was the only record they allowed themselves. There was no way to memorize all the accounts or they wouldn't have had even this one piece of incriminating evidence around. The CD was sanded smooth, broken into small pieces, and melted before being dumped into the San Antonio River.

The revengeful pair anticipated having to let the money lay in an account somewhere for a couple of years or so to give the inevitable investigations time to die down. This was no real burden. They expected to be able to file civil lawsuits just as they'd planned anyway. They figured they had a good chance of winning them too.

The lawsuits would hurt the bank directly and penalize it for not enforcing their own contract's morals clauses. Pilfering the accounts of super-rich bank customers was designed to create the appearance Sean Michaels and Carrie Gilchrist had conspired in bank fraud. The jail terms they would get were in lieu of being shot they way they would have been a hundred years earlier in this same city.

Ryan and Consuela reasoned the money looted from the rich bank account holders would be replaced by the bank. The bank couldn't afford to lose their business if all the rich customers threatened to take all their funds out and those people could be relied upon to make exactly that threat. The loss to the bank would be a further penalty they'd just have to absorb. Next time, they'd make sure one of their senior supervisors didn't sexually harass a single mother or help himself to another man's wife on company time.

Consuela's older second cousin, Richard, would store the laptop for them when she and Ryan finished the active phase of their plan. Richard was not computer literate and would have no interest in the laptop. He was also a recluse who had no friends. Actually, he associated with very few of the members of his own family.

He lived in a cabin with no conveniences back off behind a mesa and so far out in the sticks even the ranch's cowboys never came there. He'd built there with the owner's permission in compensation for a favor Richard had done him twenty years earlier. No one knew quite what it had been.

The only thing about Richard's living arrangements that interested Consuela and Ryan was that his home was extraordinarily remote and no one could get near the place without Richard seeing them coming for a long way. No one visited Richard without very carefully identifying themselves at the edge of the parcel of land he considered his. He'd been known to take a shot at interlopers to get them moving along. The laptop was safe with him; Consuela was sure of it and she'd easily convinced Ryan.

A month and a half after Ryan and Consuela first met, all of the groundwork had been laid. The accounts were ready. The first pair of non-traceable cell phones they'd used to communicate with each other so far had been smashed and the component parts scattered in a half-dozen San Antonio dumpsters. All the gear Ryan had purchased from the spy shop and the recordings he'd made with that equipment had all been destroyed, burned, and the remnants deposited a city dump a hundred miles away. All their written notes had been burned and the ashes dumped in the San Antonio River south of town.

The storage bin in the garage where he'd kept the books had already been emptied and the contents carefully disposed of. He hadn't wanted that area in the garage to stand out so he cleaned the whole thing thoroughly, using copious amounts of cleaning fluids and lots of elbow grease. They were as ready as they could make themselves.

Their plan called for Ryan to stay home for a week or two to interfere with the lovers' trysts. He took off from work, telling Carrie he needed the time to recharge and rest after several months of hard work. She could hardly object; there was no good reason to shove him out of the house. Ryan was exceptionally attentive all week long; showing up several times at the bank to take her to lunch or just dropping by in the middle of the afternoon to show her a purchase, ask her advice on something, or just to chat for a moment on her break.

On Friday evening, he and Carrie attended a dinner hosted by one of the bank vice-presidents at one of the posh hotels down on the Riverwalk. It was an excuse for a formal evening out in the early fall to fill in the gap after Labor Day and before the traditional holidays. Ryan hadn't gone to the one last year. He didn't like many of the people Carrie worked with and he surprised Carrie this year with his enthusiasm about attending. She tried once or twice to dissuade him but Ryan wouldn't hear of it.

He surprised her again when she saw the beautifully tailored tux he bought just for this event, along with the best accessories he could find. A visit to the barber that afternoon had corralled his unruly hair and he'd taken extraordinary care with his shave. She noticed his well-manicured nails and commented on them. In his line of work, keeping one's nails long enough to manicure was difficult.

At the dance, Ryan stayed near his wife, though she tried a few times to divert him to other groups of partygoers. He smiled inwardly when she introduced Sean Michaels to him again. Ryan already knew who he was, from previous meetings, if nothing else... but it was interesting to look down into the man's eyes and squeeze his pale hand when Carrie took him over to Sean and his cronies.

The slightly widened pupils and the distinct expression of pain when Ryan's grip began to tighten were well worth the price of the tuxedo. Ryan hadn't realized until now that his six feet, one inch frame was so much taller than Mr. Michaels. He could tell Michaels didn't like it... and Carrie didn't seem to appreciate the clear distinction between the two men either.

Ryan wandered away from Carrie's side not long after that but he wasn't alone for long. A number of women, unattached and otherwise, had noticed the byplay when Ryan shook Michaels' hand and wanted a closer look at the winner of the contest. He noticed a look of irritation on Carrie's face when she saw him across the room with three women vying for the attention of her tall, strong husband.

Carrie grew visibly more concerned when Ryan reintroduced himself to Sharon Michaels, Sean's wife. He'd met her earlier in the year at one of the regular functions, but hadn't seen her since.

The attractive blond spent a half hour chatting casually with Ryan. Near the end of their conversation, Sharon was distracted by something behind Ryan. He turned to see Carrie standing close to Sean and smiling up into his face. They were part of a crowd; there was nothing overtly suspicious about their postures or attitude, but Sharon was watching closely.

When he turned back to Sharon, a ghost of a frown was just fading from her face. There was a sadness in her eyes she couldn't hide. Ryan didn't know what to do. He didn't know her well enough to say anything about what he knew. He wasn't sure how she'd take it and now was not the right place or time to chance it.

All of the contrived interest in being with Carrie... Ryan thought of it as a smokescreen and bait for a trap... slowed in the second week. It had served its purpose. Carrie and Michaels were so spooked, they didn't even try to arrange a rendezvous for fear Ryan would show up somewhere unexpectedly. Ryan did come by the bank again a couple of times, as he'd done the week before, just to keep the adulterous twosome off balance but they were short visits he made to and from other destinations.

It worked. By the end of the second week, Carrie was clearly frustrated and anxious. It was assumed Sean was in the same state of sexual dissatisfaction. Ryan and Consuela congratulated themselves. The pump had been primed.

It was even easier than Ryan had estimated to get into the house on Carrie and Sean's first "date" on his first Monday back at work. Ryan had been able to orchestrate almost the exact time the time the pair of lovers would leave work for the afternoon by making a point of taking Carrie to an early lunch. He set it up on Sunday, telling Carrie he would come by to pick her up on his way out of town for a business appointment in Austin. She'd agreed--she could hardly say no the way Ryan put it to her--and suggested a Taco Bell near the downtown bank's location. Ryan knew the proposal of a "fast food" meal was made to get it over with quickly and get Ryan out of town speedily.

That was fine with him. His only goal in eating lunch with her had been to make sure she and Sean Michaels couldn't leave work in the morning. Ryan and Consuela wouldn't have to wait all day near the Gilchrist residence waiting for something to happen.

Instead of renting cars to travel back and forth, Ryan and Consuela borrowed nondescript vehicles from Consuela's family. They were in Consuela's cousin Alfredo's car today. The rest of the week they would have the loan of automobiles--a different one each day--from other individuals in Consuela's family and friends of the family.

The way it worked was that Consuela's Aunt had spoken with a number of people she trusted. She arranged for a gassed up, smooth-running vehicle to be sitting in an out-of-the-way parking lot with the keys under the mat each morning by 7:00AM. Consuela and Ryan, though Consuela's Aunt had no knowledge he was part of this, had full use of the vehicle all day. When it was returned to the parking lot, it was understood there would be an envelope under the mat with the keys containing a few hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. No questions would be asked, and none answered.

Ryan had told his senior foremen he was going to continue his time off and go out to the deer lease he'd had for years up near the little town of Marble Falls. It wasn't unusual, even though he'd already been away from the job for two weeks. Ryan always got some deer tags about this same time each year and took a little vacation time to drive north of San Antonio up to the cabin on the lease near Marble Falls. It wasn't remarkable enough to even comment on. The business hadn't been making enough money in prior years to permit the three-week vacation. Everyone wished him good luck in the hunt.

Consuela was sick. It was that crud going around, she told her boss... or maybe it was the flu. She really hoped it wasn't a new strain because she hadn't gotten a shot this year. Anyway, she was going to use some sick time. She hoped she'd be back in tomorrow or maybe the day after. The bank manager wished her the best and hoped she'd soon be feeling better.

Ryan and Consuela talked about anything that came to mind while they waited in the small BBQ restaurant's parking lot. It helped pass the time and they were slowly coming to realize they enjoyed just sitting and talking. Just being with each other for any reason was beginning to be important to them.

Ryan had left one bug in place, a sensitive listening device taped to the back of a small table in the foyer that would tell them when Carrie and her boss came in. Consuela had gone into the restaurant and brought out a bag of pulled pork sandwiches. She and Ryan had each eaten a couple--he was still hungry after his rushed lunch with Carrie--but the primary purpose of the purchase had been to establish a reason for the thoroughly unremarkable auto to be parked in the restaurant's parking lot.

"Well, it's about damn time," Ryan commented. He'd just glanced at his watch, thinking his wife and Michaels should have had enough time to set up their excuses after lunch and leave for a few hours of licentious pleasure. The key rattling in the front door lock was clearly audible coming from the speaker of the portable receiving unit resting on the dash. The excited voices that followed almost immediately made it a certainty. Carrie and her lover had arrived.

Consuela and Ryan got out of the big gray Ford quickly. They had no time to lose, but they were careful. Taking a slow look around to make sure no one was watching, Ryan led Consuela into the scrub oak and brush to the west of the restaurant. It was the same stand of stunted trees and heavy underbrush that ended just behind Ryan's home.

They'd talked about dressing in black and maybe drawing a mask over their faces or something, but they'd quickly discarded the idea. Going about dressed like ninja wannabe's would draw attention from everyone in sight. Instead, they settled for a wig to conceal Consuela's true hair color; plain, faded baseball caps; and dark sunglasses, and thoroughly unremarkable clothing.

The colors in their shirts and pants were muted greens, browns, and dark grays. Their footwear was unremarkable, and dark colored. The sizes on the shoes and boots they'd bought for this job were varied. On one day, they could put up with too tight shoes for the short time they would need to. Another day, they would wear multiple pairs of thick socks in shoes that were too big.