“So you’re suggesting we stretch before they get here?” As soon as she said it, Neesa held up her hand and shook her head. “Coffee hasn’t kicked in yet. I’m 100% taking this seriously. The special agents are going to brief us, right?” Neesa asked. “We don’t know what we don’t know. This is the first time anything like this has come up. We have a lot to learn from this, so we can prevent it from happening again.”
“This is the third time,” Sun said quietly.
“What?” the women said simultaneously.
“Two other times, fast response team members brought counterfeit U.S. dollars to foreign banks, attempting to convert the money to local currency. At that point, they discovered that it was counterfeit. The embassy and the local government got involved. I think if they weren’t associated with a group bringing them disaster relief, that it would have been a bigger stink.”
“And you didn’t tell us?” Rylee swung her feet off the desk and planted them solidly on the floor. “This wasn’t in any of their reports. No one brought it to my attention.” Rylee turned to catch Neesa’s gaze to check in.
And Neesa shook her head.
“In this case, our legal team was apprised, and we were allowed to bring the CEO and CFO into the circle. But the Secret Service asked that it be kept to counsel and heads of our organization while they investigated the situation. I will addthat other international charities working in disaster response were impacted as well.”
“Not just us, then,” Rylee said.
“Also, the two previous incidents involved twenty-dollar bills and not hundred-dollar bills from our bands.”
“This happened in two completely different countries?” Neesa asked. “But you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. That must mean that someone in the disaster community was involved. Could it be like domestic violence, you test the waters to see what you can get away with, then up your crimes?” Neesa scowled. “Twenties went okay, so now they’re trying for hundred-dollar bills?”
Sun leaned in. “Yes, they could have been stress testing their process. Those first two incidents were a year ago, give or take.”
“Were the three incidents all from the same team? This is Oscar, who deployed to Colombia.” Rylee asked.
“Different teams,” Sun said. “But all three were rapid response teams. Oscar, today, before that, November, and Papa. Tell me, this team that was down in Colombia, were they training?”
“Does this matter?” Rylee asked.
“Yes,” Sun clasped his hands and dropped them between his knees. “I wish to understand the circumstances.”
Neesa bent over to grab her laptop, tapped, then spun the screen around to show Sun a map. “Here in the northwestern region, there was a series of landslides. That area included the city of Bello, which is right here.” Neesa picked up a pen from the side table and pointed to a spot on the map. “There was unusually heavy rainfall that created mudslides, with a significant number of the population either dead or missing.”
“We sent in Oscar Team after coordinating with Italy,” Rylee said. “We’ve trained together, and we have a good working relationship. Italy sent in their search K9s, so wesent in Oscar. Oscar focuses their training on finding people in shifting terrains, extracting people from debris, and dealing with crush injuries. To do that, they figure out where they think the person was positioned before the event, then feed that information into their physics model to predict where the person might have ended up. There are a lot of variables that make this prediction unreliable, but in a river of mud and building materials, it’s a starting point.”
“Did they find everyone?” Sun asked.
“Their last report said fifteen known missing,” Rylee said. “At this point, it’s a recovery effort, and that’s not our team’s training, so we brought them home, and Greece is sending in their team to help find the deceased.”
“And when the teams are called out for a mission, they carry bands of U.S. hundred-dollar bills. Why would that be the case?” Sun asked.
“In an emergency, cash is king,” Neesa said. “But all over the world, when markets are rocky, the U.S. dollar in cash is pope,”
Sun scowled.
“It’s because everyone puts their faith in it,” Rylee clarified. “I can give you a non-mission example of why we send them into a situation with U.S. dollars,” Rylee said. “Following President Milei's inauguration in 2023, Argentina's government carried out a sharp devaluation plan on its pesos. One day, a tourist could exchange a dollar for so many pesos, and the next day, they could get twice as many pesos. I had a friend who was driving in Argentina on that fateful day, and he was in a car crash.” She skated a hand out. “He’s fine, barely a scratch. The car was not. But he had failed to get car insurance. With a totaled car that he’d have to pay for out of pocket, at least he had the luck of the US currency doubling in buying power from the day prior. U.S. money is stable in a world of chaos. And that’s why U.S. currency is so important on rescue missions all overthe world. As a matter of fact, most of the international NGOs that we work with have the same game plan as we do. They carry U.S. currency.”
“Sometimes, when things are bleak, and resources for a given tragedy are thin,” Neesa said, “for better or for worse, having American dollars in one’s pocket makes all the difference.”
“All right.” Sun sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Okay, this is what we’re going to do.” He drummed his fingers on his knee. “Yes. These are your people who are, we assume, innocently involved. Still, they are your responsibility. I think a good solution is that Rylee works with various teams out on rapid response team missions, and that way, Rylee, you can monitor everything until the Secret Service can get this figured out.”
Rylee pulled her chin back and blinked.
“You have these skills, I think? Sun asked. “You just need to pull them out of your closet and brush them off, right?” Sun shifted in his chair. “Why are you blinking at me like that. You stay in shape.”
“I stay in shape, so I lower my risk of heart attack and dementia and hopefully keep myself as free from disability as I can for as long as I can, especially given my genetics. I don’t stay in shape to do tactical insertions and hike mountain passes with my bodyweight in a pack on my back.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Sun said. “Hopefully, it’s a catastrophe somewhere that you can get to with an off-road vehicle. Until then, you could double your protein and start taking creatine to bulk up your muscles. Maybe get a trainer to work with you. I was thinking this through last night. And I came to this conclusion because the Secret Service doesn’t want anyone to know about their investigation. So it has to be a known face.”
“I already doubled my protein and creatine,” Rylee said dryly. “I’m just not in my twenties anymore. You’re a known face, Sun. You go.”
