She did not glance at me when she said my name.
“The plan is broken because I cannot now behave naturally for the Marseilles crew to read me. I will look over my shoulder. I will check the exits. I have been doing those things for two years and I will do them more now because I know what is hunting me. So the plan that uses me as bait is dead. I am not going to be useful to you that way.”
She drew breath.
“I am going to be useful to you a different way. May I see the file.”
She said it to Sal.
He slid the folder across the table to her, and whe opened it.
I watched her. I watched her the way I had watched her at the kitchen table on the third night, when she had bent over Marco’s leaked files with three highlighters and a legal pad, and her hair coming out of its tie, and her glasses sliding down her nose. She had said: it’s a lighthouse. She had said: they want to be found, but only by the right person. I had thought then that I was watching a woman do work she loved. I had not understood, until this moment, that I was watching the woman.
She did not turn the pages quickly. She did not turn them slowly. She turned them at the pace of a person who already knew what she was looking for and was confirming where it had been filed.
Page one. The surveillance still. She glanced at it and moved past.
Page two. The motel intake. A glance, a small nod to herself.
Page three. The wire transfer trace from Toronto. She slowed there. Her finger came down at the second column of routing numbers and tracked across the row, and her lips moved without sound, the way they had moved over the leaked files in the kitchen. Page four. Page five.
She stopped on page six.
She did not look up. She tapped the page twice, lightly, with the pad of her index finger.
“This,” she said.
Sal lifted his head.
“This,” she said again. “The Marseilles crew was paid through this shell. Northbridge Atlantic Holdings, registered in the Caymans, redomiciled to the Isle of Man eleven months ago. The routing pattern is Toronto to Zurich to the Isle of Man to Marseilles. You followed it forward, from the wire to the men. That is correct work and it brought you the crew. But you do not need the crew.”
She looked up. Not at me. At Dante.
“I know this shell,” she said. “I documented this shell. Eighteen months ago, at Halberd. It was one of three vehicles the Valenti operation used to move money out of the United States and into European custody. The other two were Mercier-Lan in Luxembourg and a real estate construct out of Monaco that I never finished mapping because I went into the program before I could. Northbridge is the one I finished. I have a paper file on it. I know who signs on it. I know which two banks correspond on it. I know the names of three of the four shell directors. The fourth was a placeholder eighteen months ago and I doubt very much they have changed her.”
The room had become a different kind of quiet.
Marco straightened off the counter.
“If we trace the money backward,” she said, “instead of forward through the crew—if we go from Northbridge back up the routing into the structures that fund it—we get to Enzo faster, and we do not have to use me. The crew is the visible end of the operation. The money is the spine.”
She closed the folder. Set her palm on top.
“That is a better plan,” she said.
Marco came forward. He came to the table and he sat down in his usual chair, beside Sal, and he looked at her across the wood with the careful, contained attention he gave to a thing he had not expected.
“Can you actually do that,” he said.
“I can do it. Quickly,” she said, “if I have access to the right banking data.”
Dante turned his head and looked at me.
“You vouch for her? She’s not a spy? Not anyone from a different family? Not a plant? A cop?”
“I vouch for her,” I said. “Not for the plan. I am not the one to judge the plan. She is the only one in this room who can do it. I have read her work. I have watched her work. She has been mapping Marco’s files for five days at my kitchen table and finding things in them Marco did not know were there. She is what she says she is. I vouch for that.”
Marco did not bristle at the line about his files. He just looked at Angela with new attention.
