Fool Me Once

The payments to the non-existent security firm he'd been making to avoid labor problems were illegitimate. He didn't want the union in his shop and they were willing to look the other way for a consideration. He didn't know if it was against the law topay the extortion, but it was certainly unlawful for the union rep to ask for it. Ryan had cooperated to the extent that he had never complained to the authorities. This was way beyond that minor...involvement...with something illegal.

Could he live with this?

"It's risky..." he said finally, "...awfully risky."

He sat on the opposite side of the sofa and leaned his head back and closed his eyes to think.

"But...nottoo risky...if we're smart," he said at length, "and if we don't get too greedy," he added. He thought a moment longer.

"How would we set up accounts to send wire transfers to?" he asked.

Consuela gulped and didn't answer for a moment. The comment, and the follow-up question, indicated Ryan had more than half accepted the premise of punishing the bank, Sean Michaels, and Carrie Gilchrist all at one time.

"My mother's Uncle Roberto lives in Mexico City," she said unsteadily. "He has an import and export company and he travels all over the Caribbean on business. He knows lots of people. Some of them have...contacts..."

Her voice trailed off. Neither commented on the implication her great-uncle knew people in both high and low places--people he could call on who knew how to keep their mouths shut...for a price of course.

"We know the passwords," he mused, "but no one knows we do. Actually, no one could reasonably expect there would be any way in the world wecould know." He thought for a moment.

"Well, unless my video is shown somewhere," he remarked. He opened his eyes and looked at Consuela. "This had better be worth me losing my revenge on my wife," he told her quietly.

"Why?" she asked, confused at the comment. "You can still show the times when she was having sex with that man...it's just the kitchen that you couldn't show anyone."

She stopped. Ryan was shaking his head.

"Nope. We can't afford the possibility someone might wonder if I had spy cameras in one place, why wouldn't I have cameras somewhere else. See?"

She nodded. It made too much sense to be debated. Ryan closed his eyes again and tilted his head to rest on the back of the sofa.

"I paid cash for the cameras and everything else," he said reflectively. "That's all they would accept. The guy was moving, liquidating a lot of merchandise, and needed cash quick. There were no credit card receipts with Ryan's name on them...heck it was up in Dallas more than a year ago. There's no paper trail at all really. They gave me a cash receipt but I know where it is. I can burn it and then there is nothing.He probably has a cash register record of the purchase...but it's not linked to my name.

"Hell, he didn'task my name and I didn't give it. He doesn't know me from Adam and couldn't identify me at this late date if the copsdo find him and talk to him. There's no problem there..."

"We can destroy the VHS tapes, the DVDs, the tape recordings, the cameras, tape decks...everything. All the equipment is one place in my garage and all the evidence I got with it is with me, out in my pickup," he said. He was talking to the ceiling...think of all the details. "We can get rid of all of it some way...after wiping my prints off, of course."

"I didn't drill any holes in the wall to mount the cameras or anything," he mused. "They were all just laying around...hidden in places I knew Carrie wouldn't look." He snorted. "Suzy Homemaker she is not."

"Hmmmmm. What else? Am I missing anything?"

They talked for hours, finally winding down in the early hours of Saturday morning. Most of the discussion had involved how to dispose of all the gear and the mountain of evidence he had gathered on his wife. It was hard letting that go, but there could be no hint Ryan had any idea of what was going on, much less that he had done some personal investigating. If that was known, there might be questions about what he'd seen during those investigations. That was a long shot but there was no sense taking the chance.

Consuela had wondered how she would get access to Michaels' laptop, but Ryan knew the answer to that already. Michaels and Carrie were in a hurry when they came in the house for their trysts. The laptop was always parked quickly on the sofa while the two adulterers rushed upstairs. It rested there until the first time one of them came downstairs.

He also knew how he could get himself and Consuela to the Gilchrist's house without anyone upstairs knowing. There was a large swath of undeveloped land behind the house choked with scrub oak, some scruffy cedar, and lots of underbrush. Ryan had investigated it to some extent when they first moved into the new home. He knew how to work his way through from a street on the other side of the undeveloped land and right to their backyard. It was only a couple of hundred yards--five...maybe ten minutes, tops.

Once there, the chain-link fence around the back yard could be negotiated by anyone in reasonably good shape. He and Consuela were inexcellent physical condition. It would be no problem for them to jump the fence.

At the house, the patio door rolled open and shut easily. It was silent for all practical purposes. He could leave it unlocked when he went to work. He'd make sure he left after Carrie...and he was willing to bet Carrie would never check it when she came home with her lover. The patio door opened into the dining room and it was only a few steps into the kitchen where the phone jack was. The sofa in the living room where the laptop would be sitting was just beyond the dining room through a doublewide doorway. Extricating themselves would be a simple matter of retracing their steps.

They didn't know how long Consuela would have on the laptop. They'd made a note to themselves to use a stopwatch on the VHS tapes to figure out how long the breaks were that Michaels and Carrie took between couplings. They'd been thinking the amount of transfers Consuela could make would be limited by the time they had on the day they pulled this off. It had finally occurred to them, they could do this several times. Admittedly, it would have to be over a short time frame, say...a week, but that should be more than enough to drain enough funds from the bank for it to hurt.

Ryan had a fair idea Carrie would jump at the chance to invite her lover over if she thought Ryan was out of town. As a matter of fact, she had probably been doing Sean every day this week while he was gone. He'd know when he went home tomorrow. There'd be more videotapes to review because he'd left the all cameras and recording equipment in place.

They broke for the night, too tired to make more plans. Before they parted, they agreed once they started thisoperation,they would never again make notes on paper or on a computer. The ones they had already taken to remind themselves of things they needed to investigate further, and other notes they'd make when there was no alternative, would be strictly controlled. When their use was over, they'd be burned and the ashes disposed of somewhere safe.

They'd never make phone calls from phone numbers that could be traced back to either of them. They could never speak to anyone else about this, and most importantly, there was no way they could ever be seen in public together until this was over.

The last agreement hurt the most. They'd become comfortable with each other even though they'd only known each other for five days. It hurt to realize they couldn't afford to attract attention by been seen together.

Ryan went back to his motel and Consuela went to bed after checking on Belinda. The little girl would be sad when she woke and saw Ryan was not there.

********

When he got home Saturday afternoon, Ryan found more proof of Carrie's infidelity waiting for him. He wouldn't have bothered watching it except he needed to time the gaps between the sexual bouts the two engaged in. He wasn't interested in an average or a maximum period he and Consuela would have. It was theminimum amount of time they would plan for.

His review of the tapes showed they'd have a little more than twenty-five minutes each time for Consuela to do her magic. The sexual interludes Carrie and Sean engaged in were never less than thirty minutes...and there was only one time it was that short. Ryan figured if he and Consuela were in the house only twenty-five minutes, there was no way they'd ever be caught. They had a five-minute margin.

In the garage, he dumped all the tapes into a cardboard box along with most of the cameras, recorders, the audiotapes, and recorders. The box went into the passenger side floorboard in his pickup. It had been a year and more since Carrie had been near the truck so it was a safe hiding place for virtually anything.

Sunday afternoon, he drove to Austin and purchased half a dozen prepaid cell phones. Ryan and Consuela would use them to contact each other while they were avoiding each other for public consumption. They were untraceable and he paid cash for them at six different convenience stores to ensure the purchases were also untraceable.

Before going inside the stores, he checked to make sure those neighborhood stores had no security cameras. He smiled gently or kept his face comfortably blank, and was appropriately courteous everywhere. No one would have any reason to remember the man dressed in nondescript clothing.

When she wasn't being cold and hostile, Carrie ignored him the entire weekend. That suited Ryan to a "T." He had no intention of spending any time with her he didn't have to, and sex was out of the question. It made him physically ill to think of making love to her.

She even slept most of the weekend. Ryan figured she was tired and he considerately left her alone so she could recuperate. He was beginning to relish the idea of what he and Consuela were going to do to Carrie and her Mr. Sean Michaels.

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.