Chapter 6

The morning after the TV show was videotaped, another attorney Ryan had hired showed up at the bank and settled into one of the overstuffed easy chairs in the big, well-appointed suit where the most senior officers had their offices. When Jon Harrison... the bank president... walked in, he asked why Carlton J. London was sitting there with three of his law assistants in attendance.

Harrison knew exactly who the attorney was. They were both members of the same art groups and charitable organizations in San Antonio. London was also one of the finest civil law attorneys in the state. Slim and dapper, he was tough as shoe leather in the courtroom or in the saddle at the ranch he had out west of Abilene.

Mr. Harrison flinched and his face paled when he was told London was representing Mr. Ryan Gilchrist, husband of Mrs. Carrie, a senior manager in Sean Michaels' section. Mr. Gilchrist had filed suit against the bank for failing to enforce it's own morality clauses with a number of specifications.

Mr. Gilchrist was suing under the common-law tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress claiming the bank knew of his wife's affair with a junior vice-president, did nothing about it, and attempted to cover it up in spite of the morals' clauses in both their contracts. The suit claimed the institution had thus fostered a climate in which Mr. Gilchrist's marriage had been irreparably damaged.

With the preliminaries over, Mr. London announced he would be pleased to see Mr. Sean Michaels' personal records. Locating the supervisor of the Human Resources department, the attorney presented him with the first in a stack of subpoenas signed just this morning by a friendly judge.

The president called his senior managers together to find out just how deep in the excrement they were wading. The HR director was pulled out of the meeting twenty minutes into the meeting. He came back in a few minutes later pale and trembling. With the whole bank hierarchy in the meeting, a junior in his department had come by and noticed the subpoena lying on his supervisor's desk.

Not knowing the legal department had not yet seen the writ, the junior employee had produced the requested records and two of Mr. London's assistants had used the high-speed copier in the junior's own office to make a duplicate of every document in the file. Another of Mr. London's assistants had departed the building immediately with the duplicates in hand while Mr. London was scrutinizing the originals in the small conference room.

Did anyone know if the Human Resources director could get some of the security guards together and forcibly remove the file from Mr. London's hands. Just because he had a subpoena, was that the final word? What could they do about the copies that were already out of the building and beyond their control? No one in the room would look at the HR manager, or the bank president.

Before anything could be done, the phone in the corner rang and the most junior of the executives answered. After listening for a long moment, he told the president Mr. London had let loose a string of four-letter words while going through Mr. Michaels' personnel record and hadn't stopped mouthing them for a long while.

Now Mr. London now asking for the records of all sexual harassment complaints in the bank for the past two years. He was saying something about getting a subpeona duces tecum, whatever that was, to make that happen. The junior executive wanted to know if this was important.

Three levels of management had a simultaneously urge to throw up their breakfasts.

Ryan and Consuela had discussed the TV show as a way of replacing the confrontation Ryan would have had with Carrie in family court using his own video recordings. Then, based on what she knew of the banking industry, they'd quickly realized not only would the episode of 'Busted' accomplish that aim, it would almost certainly spark an audit of Michaels' entire stewardship of the personal wealth division. It did.

A week after Ryan's attorney filed the suit against the bank, Consuela got a late evening call from an excited friend still working at the bank. The building had gone into a virtual lockdown just before lunch. Apparently, it was all coming from what was discussed in a panicked meeting upstairs that had begun shortly after the big bosses came in. Ever since noon, an army of men and women in expensive suits and carrying voluminous briefcases had come into the bank and disappeared into the express elevators to the top floor.

Just at closing time, a second, smaller, army of people in cheaper suits had arrived. This group glanced about with hard eyes and one of the tellers had seen two of them show FBI credentials to the guard before he would let them in. Other people with different looking badges had come in right behind them. No one... no one... looked happy.

Someone was even saying the senior vice president in overall charge of the investment and personal wealth divisions had had to be restrained when he tried to open a window on the twenty-second floor. That was probably just a rumor, but wow! Could Consuela believe all this, her friend asked.

Consuela thanked her girlfriend and begged off, saying she needed to get Belinda to bed. Seconds after hanging up, she used the disposable cell phone to call Ryan's throwaway with the news.

They discussed destroying the pre-paid cell phones but decided not to until one or the other got some indication they were even suspected of being in contact. They couldn't bear to lose the one way of communicating with each other they had left. The sound of each other's voice was becoming increasingly important to them.

They would limit the use of the cell phones though. It was the smart thing to do.

"Mr. Gilchrist?

"Yes?" Ryan answered absentmindedly. His attention was on the quarterly inventory he was studying and not on the two men who had wandered in his office's open door.

"Special Agent Thomas, Special Agent Williams, Federal Bureau of Investigation. May we speak with you?" the taller agent asked.

"You're in now, I reckon you might as well," Ryan answered, glancing up at last to show them an irritated scowl.

He was truly annoyed with the two agents, though not for the reason they suspected. Instead of being unhappy they were there, he was upset they hadn't come by several weeks earlier. Waiting had never been his strong suit.

He motioned with his free hand. The agents shoved their badges closer so he could see them.

"Nah, I don't want to see your badges," Ryan growled. "I can buy ones that look just like that in the toy section at Walmart. Show me your ID cards, gents."

The agents looked at each other, faintly surprised. Very few citizens asked for the hard-to-reproduce identification but the agents were obligated to produce them upon request. They did.

Ryan examined them for a moment, and then picked up the office phone. Looking in a phonebook, he had a number for the local FBI office in seconds, called them and had a short conversation with the Special Agent In Charge of the San Antonio office. He admitted they did have two agents fitting the description Ryan gave and with those ID card numbers. Ryan grunted, thanked the agent in charge, and hung up.

"Okay," he said, "you're real... what can I do for you." His eyes and forehead had cleared and his voice was friendlier.

"You have had occasion to doubt the validity of a federal officer, Mr. Gilchrist?" asked the older agent. Ryan nodded.

"Two... maybe two years and three months ago, some jerk came around wanting to talk to all of my workers about some "anti-racketeering" complaints or something like that. He flashed a badge around and had my boys wandering around wondering who 'Rico' was." Ryan grinned at the agents.

"Turned out he was a union organizer come down from New York, New Jersey or somewhere. He thought he'd do a little bit of intimidation... figuring if I was scared enough, I'd let the shop go union and so on and so forth. He's still in a federal prison somewhere, I think. I had to testify at his trial."

The agents glanced at each other, a habit that was slowly beginning to get on Ryan's nerves. He wondered if they were even aware of it.

Actually, both were thinking there had been an entry in Gilchrist's file to the effect that he had indeed cooperated in a sting operation some years ago. The special agent who'd been in charge of that had made a number of glowing comments about Gilchrist.

"So... who's doing some racketeering now?" Ryan asked, trying to get things moving.

"No, no," Special Agent Thomas said. "We're part of a joint task force organized under the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury. We're investigating allegations of money laundering at the bank where your wife works... formerly worked."

"Hah!" Ryan snorted explosively.

"Have you boys done your ground work? Don't look at each other dammit! One of you just answer," he ordered them peremptorily.

Startled, the two agents threw another fleeting look at each other before facing back to the man they were supposed to be interviewing. They both flushed slightly. Ryan shook his head and sighed loudly.

"If you have investigated anything about me," he said in a disillusioned tone, "you already know I won't have a wife when the judge lifts the continuance my so-called wife's lawyer asked for," Ryan added.

"We do know that, Mr. Gilchrist. We know other things too. We're aware the divorce is held up pending the outcome of the criminal investigation... and maybe the trial... but we think you might have information that might assist in the investigation. Is there anything you'd like to tell us?"

That was from Agent Thomas. It was accompanied by a glowering look intended to frighten the guilty into spontaneous confessions.

Ryan was unimpressed. His only reaction was to show them a confused frown.

"Gents, I can spell bank, and on a good day, I can write both "money" and "laundry" down on paper without hurting myself too bad, but that's about it. How the dickens can I help you with what's going on down there. Shoot, I don't hear anything from there, now that me and the wife are on the outs," he said forcefully.

Ryan sighed when the agents shot another look at each other before either spoke. He wasn't all that impressed with his first visit from law enforcement about the bank fraud.

The FBI agents accepted a cup of scalding hot, almost bitter, coffee from the urn in the corner and continued questioning Ryan for another fifteen minutes without the agents learning anything of interest. They tried every angle they could think of but neither got any signals from the guy that he had anything at all to contribute.

"What do you think?" Agent Thomas asked his pardner as they drove away.

"I didn't get anything," Williams replied.

"Me either," Thomas replied, "the guy's a little bit of a rube, don't you think? I don't think he's got the smarts to be mixed up in this."

"Nope. I don't think that at all," Williams shot back. Stan Williams had been in the Bureau for twenty-two years and had seen a lot more people come and go than his junior pardner.

"Gilchrist is plenty smart. Watch his eyes if we talk to him again and you'll see what I mean. He's sharp, but he doesn't mind folks underestimating him. Gives him an edge," Williams commented.

"But... I doubt he's involved in this," Agent Williams remarked. "All he's got is a BBA and a grand total of two or three night courses in elementary banking practices some years ago. I don't see how this guy could be part of it."

"Uh-huh," Thomas said. "Yeah, he doesn't even have a passport, no indication he knows anyone in the Caymans or anywhere else down there, no unexplained money, no unusual debts... and none that are putting a strain on him or his business. If he's part of it, he's damned good."

Ryan told Consuela of the visit, using his pre-paid cell phone, that night. She was wondered nervously what the agents knew, but Ryan dismissed her fears.

They were just fishing, he told her. If they'd had anything, they would have asked specific questions about his work, where he'd been during the important dates when the funds had gone missing, who he talked to on those days... stuff like that.

He told Consuela he'd waited for even a hint of a suspicion about his connection with her but none had come. He put it stronger. They'd asked no questions that might even possibly develop any information leading in her direction. He'd made sure of that.

It was clear there was nothing to the visit, he told Consuela. They were just filling squares in the investigation so the defense could not say they'd "rushed to judgment." Ryan and Consuela would need to be concerned only if they came back armed with search warrants wanting to search his office or something like that.

However, that really wasn't a problem, he told her... not when you thought about it. Even if they did come back with search warrants, Ryan said, they would find absolutely nothing.

What was there to find? The only incriminating physical evidence was the laptop a hundred miles away out on the prairie under Cousin Richard's guardianship. Everything else was smashed, burned to oblivion, and the unidentifiable remains dumped in lakes for a hundred miles around.

Even if they found out about Consuela, whatever anyone had seen would be assumed to be an affair of the heart and not at all suspicious, given the state of Ryan's marriage. There would be some people at the café who could testify Ryan had had breakfast with her a couple of times, but that was all they could say.