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“Not right away. I was simply filing paperwork and discovered some discrepancies in the timelines. Then there was that article about structural failure. I suppose you could say it was a confluence of things.”
“Synchronicity, perhaps?” Annie asked slyly.
Zoe’s eyes widened.
“Divine intervention?” Myra added.
“All of it.” Zoe raised both her hands. “I don’t discount anything.”
“Please continue,” Myra urged.
“When I was looking through some of the documents, I discovered we purchased supplies from a different company than we normally do. It’s not that unusual, especially with all the supply chain issues we’ve had over the past several years, but I’d never heard of them before. And they’re in the Dominican Republic. Again, not unusual; however, when I tried to find information about the company, it didn’t exist. I checked to see if an LLC or a division of some other company existed, but came up blank. Nothing.” Zoe pulled out one of the pages from her file and handed it to Annie, who passed it over to Fergus.
Charles leaned over his shoulder as both read the information. Charles was the first to speak. “Let me see if I have this right. El Cemento was hired by your company to manufacture cinder blocks for a job you were working on. The job got canceled but El Cemento still got paid. The accounts payable log has the date and time the money was released, and it was to a bank in the Cayman Islands.”
“A wire transfer. We do that for most of our accounts. Large sums of money are exchanged and it’s the easiest way to follow them. But the Caymans? That’s the black hole of hidden money.”
“To your knowledge, no one in your accounting department found this unusual?” Fergus asked.
“Everything is done via email. They get an invoice, check with the account executive, the account executive checks to be sure the inventory was received. Buttons get pushed; money gets shuffled. No one has the time or the enthusiasm to care where it ends up. They did their job.” She looked up at the two Brits. “And Bob’s our uncle.”
Charles and Fergus busted out laughing over Zoe’s use of a common British phrase meaning “and there you have it.”
Charles regained his composure and continued. “But you said the job was canceled.”
“That’s what I was told.” Zoe sighed.
“What do you suppose is going on?” Annie was trying to get a handle on this complicated problem.
“My take? Donald Walsh has a scheme to buy subpar materials and mixes them in with our compliant ones. He gets to stretch the goods. I wouldn’t be surprised if Walsh was the head of El Cemento and is pocketing a big chunk of change.”
“How does this implicate you?” Myra asked.
“If my suspicions are correct, he is using the substandard materials for jobs where he’ll lower the price and get a kickback. Meanwhile, other jobs are also getting garbage. Jobs that were mine.”
“This is where we need to start. Do you have a list of the jobs you oversaw that are still under construction?” Myra inquired.
“Yes. I keep everything on a flash drive.”
“Splendid,” Fergus said.
Annie began to make her lists. “We’ll send two of you to each of those sites. You’ll either be official or unofficial. Whatever it takes to get samples of the masonry.
“Fergus, Charles, do a background check on REBAR and all its executives. Who has come and gone in the past eighteen months. Any severance packages. And this Donald Walsh person.
“Next is tracking down this mysterious company in the Dominican Republic with an account in the Caymans. Fergus? You think you can hand that off to Avery Snowden?” Annie was referring to one of their colleagues who was a master of surveillance, among other talents.
“Let me ring him up,” Fergus replied.
Zoe’s head was spinning. Was this really happening? Had she slipped into another dimension and landed in the middle of a James Bond movie? She looked at Charles. He resembled Patrick Stewart more than Daniel Craig, but Stewart could have pulled off playing 007. Fergus reminded her of Colin Firth. Was he in any spy movies? Yes! He was part of a group who fed the Nazis false information in the movie Operation Mincemeat. She remembered that it was based on a true story, and one of the characters was named Ian Fleming. Ha!
“Zoe?” Annie asked with concern. “Are you alright?”
Izzie poured a glass of water and handed it to Zoe.
Zoe slowly scanned the room. Then her eyes darted across the table.
“Sister shock.” Maggie chuckled. “Hey, kiddo.” She reached for Zoe’s hand. “It’s okay. We are all friends here.”
