Page 53 of Juan

Daphne blinked once. “Right. Was not expecting that. We’ll join him,” she said, looking at Lovell, who nodded. The two turned and left.

“I’ll head back, too,” Philly said, lifting Callie’s chin and dropping a kiss on her lips before leaving.

“What are you looking at?” Grace asked. Amber’s eyes darted to Ryan, then back to Grace. The agent huffed. “Toni’s doing?”

Amber gave a hesitant nod.

“You can fill Callie and Leo in after we leave,” the agent said. “Which means you get to go first,” she added, turning to the HICC folks.

“I’m here mostly as backup,” Leo said. “And because Charley and Joey are heading over with Mantis in a bit for a barbecue tonight,” he added with a grin.

“It’s the Callie show tonight,” Callie said. “But it will be a good one. Promise.” She pulled out her computer and booted it up. “The short story is Anthony is committing fraud and possibly money laundering, too.”

“I like the sound of this,” Ryan said.

“The bulk of Anthony’s income, and I use that word lightly, comes from three different consulting contracts he has. Each is set up as general business consulting services—”

“As opposed to a contract for goods?” Ryan interjected.

Callie nodded. “It’s much easier to prove if goods were paid for and not received, and much harder to show the same for consulting services.”

“Or to prove the value of the consulting,” Grace added. “In the government space, a single phone call to the right person, or a single connection to the right person, could be worth millions.”

“All that is true,” Callie said. “But the companies Anthony is ‘consulting’ for don’t actually exist. Well, they exist legally, in a complex structure, but they don’t do anything. All three are investment firms with no clients.”

“Where are they located?” Grace asked.

“The ones who write the checks are located—and I know this will shock you—in the Caymans. Each of the three has a few entities in its own structure, and those shell entities are located all over the world, including a few in the US.”

“That’s convenient,” Ryan said. Amber looked at him in question. “Makes it easier to get warrants if there’s a nexus to the US,” he explained.

“Got it,” she replied.

“Walk us through it,” Grace said. And for the next twenty minutes, Callie did just that, one shell company at a time.

Amber exhaled when Callie wrapped up her findings. “What you just summarized must have taken hours to pull together,” she said.

Callie shrugged. “It’s what I do. I’m good at it, but I like it, too. I know that might make me weird, but…” Again, she lifted a shoulder. Then added, “The only piece I haven’t figured out—”

“Is where the payments into the shell accounts originate from,” Ryan said. “Before they get paid out to Anthony.”

Callie inclined her head. “Well, I actually do know that. They come from payment consolidators. But I’m still working on how they get into the consolidators. There will be a tagging system—”

“A what?” Amber asked, feeling way out of her depth.

“A system that tags incoming payments from payors that are then held and sent to the designated payee. It’s the only way to ensure that the intended recipients get the money meant for them. But I need to figure out the algorithms the consolidators use before I can track it. Leo is helping me with that.”

“Kind of like escrow?” she asked. “Meaning money is paid in, held, then paid out when some event happens?”

Callie nodded. “Very similar, yes.”

Amber considered this. The layers of caution made sense, as did the intricacy of Anthony’s structure. The web would insulate him from some of the risk, and he’d feel very superior creating it. “How do you figure out who’s depositing the money into the consolidator to begin with? Is that what this algorithm will tell you? Through a tagging system?”

Callie nodded again. “It can be done. It just takes a little more time than we had before meeting today.”

“I have some calculations running,” Leo said. “Maybe by tomorrow, definitely by the next day.”

“Can’t you get a warrant for that?” Amber asked, directing her question to Ryan and Grace.