Fraud: A Stepbrother Romance by Stephanie Brother Read Free Book Online Page B

then reversed into the cockpit.
    Looking up I couldn’t see any of the
guards, and I was confident they couldn’t see me either. There weren’t any
surveillance cameras at this level of the ship.
    Nobody had seen me place the tracking
device.
    Seconds later, I slammed the boat
full-reverse, spinning it around completely a couple of times, to make it look
as though I were really drunk.
    As I did, the jet boat’s engine revved and
then I aimed the rooster tail onto the yacht’s aft deck.
    The water splashed harmlessly on the deck,
drenching the tender and stern of the “ Disco Inferno ”.
    A few wet guards menacingly raised their
weapons, but by then I was off, who’d giving  them a final flipping of the bird
and waving a fresh beer at them.
    On my way back to a secluded mooring area
for my boat, at the marina, I smiled hugely, observing the tracker’s signal as
it rhythmically beeped.
     
    *****
     
    “Mission accomplished,” I said into my
Jawbone headset.
    “Roger that,” came the reply. “Good work!”
    “Come home to Mama,” I heard over the headset.
    “Time for a status report and update.”
    “Roger,” I replied.
     
    *****
     
     
    I guided the boat down the waterway, and
considered the situation.
    Robert King was obviously involved in a
massive fraud.
    He’d somehow managed to bilk billions of
dollars from a considerable collection of A-list celebrities, old-moneyed socialites
from Palm Beach and other such hangouts of the very rich, and not a few fairly
sophisticated bankers.
    His methods were unclear, but we had put
together a likely scenario for the way the money was being gathered and
disbursed to King’s many shell companies. Our main problem was linking his
activities to any manner of criminal behavior.
    So far, the man had been uncannily lucky,
and his reputation as a hard man to beat preceded him.
    He had made fortunes in real estate in
both New York and New Jersey before settling in Florida.
    His mansion in Boca Raton overlooked the
Intracoastal, and he always had several boats and occasionally his yacht moored
out front.
    The best we could figure, at this point,
was that King had at least seven shell companies that were involved in moving
his money around ten different banks. The banking records showed that most of
the money was originating from offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, and
from an obscure branch of the Bank of England, located in Monaco.
    How the money was made and deposited to
those accounts remained shrouded in secrecy.
    However, a seaplane landed at least four
times a month and taxied up to King’s mansion. It would stay for only a few
hours before taking off again.
    The DEA had tracked it as far north as
Bermuda, and as far south as the Dry Tortugas.
    From either of those locations, the
seaplane would fly to either Freeport or Jamaica.
    When it had been intercepted at one point,
the only cargo was some luggage and sundries that were being transported
legally. There was no evidence of illicit goods, drugs or anything amiss. The
cargo manifest, such as it was, correctly identified the sundries as tanning lotions
and some souvenir seashells.
    The drug sniffing dogs didn’t alert, and
nothing seemed unusual.
    The seaplane did sit in the water a bit
lower than might seem unusual, but we checked and the pilot had made a note of
the FAA flightworthiness directive for that particular make and model plane
that explained that, depending on float design, the draught of the pontoons
varied considerably.
    None of the agents was well-versed enough
in seaplane manufacturing to sense any irregularities. For the next few months,
although the seaplane was monitored and traced through its flight paths with
some regularity, the only practical outcome was that the flights became fairly
routine. Eventually this avenue was considered too expensive to continue
investigating, and my team sought other measures.
    And, King’s fortunes increased in any
event.
    King was a very careful and