Return To Sender: An Alex Glauberman Mystery (The Alex Glauberman Series Book 1) by Dick Cluster

Author:Dick Cluster [Cluster, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: crime fiction, amateur sleuths, international thriller, literature and fiction, action and adventure, travel, Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense
ISBN: 9780990454373
Publisher: booksbnimble
Published: 2015-04-25T05:00:00+00:00

15. White Cliffs

Alex kissed Meredith good-bye in Covent Garden, leaving her to the ministrations of her father. This was not so much to avoid farewells— though there was that— as to appear in the station alone. If anyone was keeping an eye on his departure, however, that eye was professional and invisible. Alex made his way past tour groups and reserved cars to a second-class coach near the front of the Channel-bound train. He sat next to an Englishwoman in a gray suit, who chatted about the theater to an identically dressed Englishwoman opposite. Nothing could be more normal.

The train’s departure had the usual magical quality of imperceptibility. One moment the heavy car was stationary, motionless, a part of the scene. In the next its motionlessness was transformed by some alchemy into a slow, gliding acceleration. There was no sound of engines— on the wings or under any hood— no rush down the runway or letting out of the clutch; just a vague cerebral knowledge of a locomotive, pulling, somewhere ahead.

Perhaps, Alex thought, it was this unhurried inevitability of railroad travel that appealed to him. You went where the engine pulled, where the tracks led. You did not concern yourself, and you did not rush.

For the first hour of the trip to Dover, he set to work with pencil and paper trying to diagram the bizarre and Byzantine way of financing trade that, as a by-product, produced paper that investors could buy and sell. What he came up with was this: If you had money to launder and a destination to send it to, you could funnel that money through a pretend commercial transaction that turned it into a legitimate piece of commercial paper that was as good as gold. All you needed was someone in a bank to process the documents and otherwise look the other way. Alex’s diagram had an arrow labeled Jack going into a rectangle that represented this device, and an arrow labeled pol coming out. The rectangle was labeled B. Acceptance (Jerry). For good measure he added a close-up illustration of the device, in the form of a drawing of a hand wielding an old-fashioned rubber stamp. Then he added another arrow coming out of the rectangle. This arrow ended at a circle labeled Cynthia, with a question-mark attached. Discarding the idea that Meyer had been trying to create any kind of imbalance in the bank, he settled on the simpler one that Meyer had decided to divert some funds from their intended recipients to his abandoned daughter. How he had thought he could get away with that, Alex didn’t know.

Satisfied with this as a working hypothesis, for the second hour he slept off the last of the washed-out feeling. When the train reached the sea, he felt that his yo-yo period was over for awhile. He sniffed the salt air, then hurried to the jetfoil lounge and grabbed a phone. He had talked Meredith into lending him her credit card.

“Mr. Glauberman.” Trevisone’s response reached him, via satellite, from the other side of the Atlantic.

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