Steve knows exactly what Debbie would tell him to do. She’s telling him right now. He feels sick.
But then he realizes there’s another feeling too. One that he can’t quite put his finger on. Surely not excitement? At being wanted? At being needed? At danger? No, he must just be in shock.
“Are there alligators?”
Steve hears Amy put this question to Rosie, who replies, “God, yes, huge ones.”
If Steve does go to America, he’s going to have to rearrange that shelf delivery. That’ll be another half an hour on hold to the call center. And there will be no bolognese.
And, worst of all, four murders. Or, given what he has just seen, maybe five?
“Steve, I need someone I can trust,” says Amy. She is quieter now. She knows that she has him. “There are murders to be solved, and I can’t do it by myself. It’s you and me.”
“But we don’t solve murders,” says Steve.
He can hear Amy smiling down the phone. “Then we’re going to have to start.”
PART TWO
From South Carolina to Dubai
(via St. Lucia and County Cork, and a brief return to the New Forest)
26
From the Desk of François Loubet
ChatGPT, rewrite in the style of a friendly English gentleman, please.
Another email from Rob Kenna, my trusty murder-broker. I almost forgot to put my ChatGPT on, by the way! What a shock you would have had, hearing the real me!
Amy Wheeler still at large. Apologies. Being dealt with.
Well, I really have got myself into something of a pickle here, haven’t I?
Let me tell you a little about myself, so I can explain all! If you’re reading this, it’s either because I’m dead or I’m in prison. There is also the slight chance that these little notes might be intercepted by the authorities one day, so I will continue to cloak myself. But that’s unlikely, because I take care. And that’s also why I very much doubt that I will ever end up in prison. And that’s because I always take out insurance.
Money-smuggling is the biggest business of them all—that’s the first thing you need to understand. Every single illegal activity in the world is made up of two sides. The buyers and the sellers. The sellers offer all sorts of different things: drugs, guns, people, counterfeit clothing, secrets, rare-bird eggs, military-weapons systems. But the buyers, by and large, offer just one thing—money.
And so it goes, that in the sum of the parts of all the illegal activities anywhere in the world, trillions of dollars’ worth of good old-fashioned cash money is just sloshing about, looking for a safe harbor.
And, for the most part, that money is nothing but trouble. Have you ever tried paying a million pounds into your local bank branch? Try it. See where that gets you. In the old days they turned a blind eye. A pile of fifties stained with blood? Let me count that for you, sir.
But now? Sometimes it’s honestly not worth the bother. Anti-money-laundering laws are a real disincentive to entrepreneurs. Just last week a friend told me she had sighed when being handed a bag containing ten million dollars, dismayed by the thought of the effort and time and expense it would take to clean it all up.
And that’s why people employ me. If you need your money laundered, fed through fake companies, washed through casinos or money exchanges, I am a veritable one-stop shop!
So that’s me! Now, about this current scheme, which has begun to backfire like a cheap motor car!
A lot of the job is electronic these days—transfers upon transfers upon transfers, a long, laborious process that means it might be months before you have some actual cash in your hands.
Which is why one of the fun parts of the job is when circumstance forces one to physically move money around the world. A client in São Paolo needs a million dollars in cash by Tuesday. An Australian mining magnate needs untraceable currency to pay a bribe at a weekend barbecue. Sometimes people just need cash, and they need it quickly.
This is where couriers come in. Just as mules smuggle drugs, so couriers smuggle money. Every day, sums large and small pass through the scanners and security checks of airports and docks around the world. Much of it controlled by my good self—the man known as François Loubet, though, by the time this is being read, you will of course be familiar with my real name!
Now, at any given time, I have an awful lot of smuggling schemes on the go. I diversify. I refuse to put all my eggs in one egg-receptacle.
So when did this “influencer” scheme begin? Two years ago, something like that?
I had been using the services of a company called Maximum Impact Solutions. Just a bit of light security work for one of my people in London. They were perfectly fine, efficient, didn’t ask too many questions, and they didn’t balk when they were paid in Rwandan francs through a bank in Indonesia.
Then a week or so later I received an email from someone called “Joe Blow,” who was clearly connected with Maximum Impact. “Joe Blow” had rather a neat proposal to supply me with couriers.
Influencers.
I hadn’t even really known what the word meant when Joe Blow emailed me out of the blue and suggested it to me. I’d heard of it, of course, but hadn’t paid it any heed. But, it turns out, they are the perfect couriers.
You see, if you want to smuggle large sums of money around the world—and I do very much want to do that—here is the question you must ask yourself.
Who has a jet-set lifestyle? Who might travel halfway around the world for only a day or two? With bulky luggage? Without it looking too suspicious?
Famous people would be the answer. Hiding in plain sight, taking selfies on the plane, always with the perfect reason to be flying to America, or St. Lucia, or the Cayman Islands.
But what’s the problem with most of the famous people who lead these jet-set lifestyles?
You’re ahead of me, I’m certain. They’re already rich.
So this is where these influencers come in. The influencers with limited numbers of followers. They can fly around the world raising no suspicion. But they have no money. And therefore they can be bought.
