The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,91

concentrated in Rome, but as the dates progressed the acquisitions spread to Milan, Florence, and Parma. The companies receiving the loans were almost as diverse, with home addresses spread all over Italy.

New York was next, and two parts of the pattern changed. The companies getting loans were registered in the New York area and nearly all the individuals attached to them had U.S. addresses. The Toronto office had opened only six months after New York. Ava couldn’t believe how many properties were listed, using the New York model of local companies and addresses. It seemed that a lot of Woodbridge and Vaughan, two new high-end Italian suburbs in Toronto, was owned by the ’Ndrangheta, or at least by local Italians somehow affiliated with them. She searched again for names she could recognize. She thought a couple of the companies sounded familiar, and the name Rocca popped up repeatedly, although it was attached to Luciano, Alfredo, and Joseph, not Dominic.

There were more pages outlining activity in Venezuela, but Ava had already seen enough to know that Cameron had been telling the truth. She scanned the pages a second time. There had to have been more than five hundred transactions. She quickly calculated their value — more than five billion dollars.

Ava dug into her bag and found two USB drives. She downloaded the files onto one memory stick for herself and then onto the second as backup. When that was done, she phoned Uncle.

“Wei.”

“I got the passwords and I got into their system. He wasn’t lying about all the money they’ve been ploughing into real estate. It’s at least five billion,” Ava said.

“How much information is there?”

“More than I would have thought prudent,” she said. “Dates, company names, company officers and directors, addresses, and phone numbers for every company receiving a loan. Payment schedules, copies of corporate and personal guarantees — on and on it goes. And then enormous detail about every property being financed.”

“Just what you need to record if you are really running a banking operation.”

“Exactly.”

“And all of which would look completely above board unless someone knew specifically what you were really doing.”

“Yes.”

“How are the loans grouped?”

“By date, by branch.”

“The Italian ones — where were the companies incorporated?”

“Seemingly everywhere but in Reggio Calabria.”

“That is not surprising,” Uncle said.

“I downloaded it all, twice. I’ll keep a stick with me and arrange to have one sent to you before I leave here.”

“Ava, we have booked you on a Cathay Pacific flight leaving Surabaya at six tonight.”

“Okay.”

“And I think Perkasa should get back to Jakarta tonight as well.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“The locals he hired, how good are they?”

“Excellent.”

“Will they keep their mouths shut?”

“I think so, but you should ask Perkasa that question,” Ava said, not willing to vouch for people she didn’t know, hadn’t hired, and couldn’t talk to.

He became quiet and she wondered if she’d offended him. Instead he said, “The banker is a problem.”

“I know.”

“He seems to like to talk.”

“He was coerced,” Ava said.

“No matter. If they suspect anything, they will make him talk as easily. He knows your name, yes?”

“He does, and he knows people who are friends of friends — friends who know me very well.”

“So the question is, can you trust him not to go to his employers and tell them that a young woman named Ava Lee has been sniffing around the bank? Believe me, he does not have to tell them any more than that to make them paranoid. And they are relentless. No one would be safe.”

“I don’t trust him at all,” said Ava.

“So, what to do?”

“I was thinking about it during the car ride to the hotel. He has a meeting scheduled with the Italians in Surabaya tonight, at seven. If he doesn’t show, from everything he’s told me, they’re going to go nutty. The last thing we want is them running around digging into his past twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

“You cannot let him go to the meeting,” Uncle said quietly.

“No, of course not,” said Ava. “The thing is, we can’t just dump his body and his car somewhere. Sooner or later they’ll be found. And even if they aren’t found right away, he can’t just go missing. We need to make them think he’s done a runner on them. We need them to think that Cameron is their problem. We need them to focus entirely on finding him.”

“You obviously have some idea of how to do that.”

“I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve come up with something that might work, but I really need