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list of bank accounts,
names and addresses. Craig skimmed the names, but recognized only the first
name on the list. It was Goldstein, McCormack & Powell alongside accounts
with both Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase.
    “What are you doing?”Nikki asked,
blinking sleepily from the bedroom doorway.
    “You’re the financial expert,”
Craig said, handing her the page. “What do you make of this?”
    “Do you know what time it is?”
she said without reading it.
    “Please, this is important.”
    Nikki stifled a yawn and ran her
eye down the page. “Banks, bank account numbers, bank identifier codes, passwords
and dealers.” She skimmed the names of the dealer organizations responsible for
each group of accounts. They were located in the world’s financial capitals: New
York, London, Shanghai, Zurich, Frankfurt, Sydney and Tokyo. “Everything you
need to transfer money from one bank to another.” She snapped sharply awake. “You’re
not becoming a white collar criminal are you?”
    “This is what they were killed
for,” Craig said.
    “Where’d you get it?”
    “I stole it.”
    “You should put it back, before
anyone knows you have it.”
    “That would be the smart thing to
do.”
    “Whose Marcell Laurence?”
    “I don’t think he exists. One of
the associates did a search once – out of curiosity – but found nothing. It’s just
a name.”
    “Sounds French,” Nikki said.
    “I think this is what the guy who
phoned me wants.”
    “You can’t give him this!” Nikki
said, suddenly alarmed.
    “It’s all I have to trade,” Craig
said, his mind already made up.
    “If you’re caught, you’ll go to
jail forever! And you will get caught. Go to the police. Tell them this guy is
trying to blackmail you. They’ll help you.”
    Craig took the page out of her
hand. “If he got a whiff of the police, he’d disappear, and I’d never find out what
happened to my old man.” He slid the master list back into the envelope and locked
it in his brief case
    “Promise me, you won’t do
anything stupid.”
    “Define stupid.”
    “Don’t play your smart ass lawyer
games with me. You know the law, stay on the right side of it.”
    Craig looked at her big dark
eyes. “Will you rat on me?” He put his arms around her.
    “No. But I won’t be visiting you
in prison.”
    He pulled her close. “Not even
for conjugal visits?” Skin touched skin, and they both felt the electric charge
of contact. Craig began running his hands over her body as her arms came up
around his neck and they kissed.
    When she pulled away for air, she
smiled. “OK, I’ll visit you once or twice, but only if you have a private cell.”
    “I know a great lawyer,” he said
with a grin.
     
    * * * *
     
    Craig returned
to his apartment early next morning to change into fresh clothes before work. Pete,
his cat, slinked out from under a table and wound itself around his legs.
    “Hello
boy, did you miss me?” Craig cooed as he picked up the cat and stroked its fur.
He carried it into the kitchen, setting it down beside an empty bowl. “You
hungry, Pete?”
    The cat
purred as Craig emptied a tin of cat food into his dish. With the cat’s
immediate needs satisfied, he retrieved the master list from his brief case and
scanned the document into his computer, being careful to manually check every character
had been read correctly. When he finished, he shredded the original page, copied
the computer file onto a flash drive and wiped all trace of the MLI file from
his computer. He took a roll of adhesive tape into his bedroom and taped the
flash drive inside the toe of an old pair of sneakers, then dropped the
sneakers casually at the foot of his bed, in plain sight.
    Craig
returned to the computer and changed three numbers in each account, then three
more in each of the passwords, ensuring the computer file was useless. Satisfied,
he printed the corrupted master list, slid the page back into Goldstein’s
envelope and locked it in his