Chapter Fourteen #2
She explains in spurts about Evan Barlow, about Nadia’s breast augmentation, about the facial surgeries on Oleg Ragoravich, about Ragoravich disappearing from his recovery room, about the sudden panic, about the attempt on her life.
She doesn’t go into the griefbot. As she speaks, exhaustion wedges its way into her bloodstream and spreads.
It takes everything she has to stay awake.
“You know it’s not a coincidence,” Lockwood says. “You being hired for this job.”
She does now, doesn’t she?
“Who are you?” she asks.
“My name is Charles Lockwood. Just as I said.”
“Are you CIA?”
“Let’s just say something like that.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re safe,” he says. “And to answer your next question, you’ve been here two days.”
Two days. Her head drops back on the pillow. She wants to ask a million more questions, wants to stay awake, but her eyes are starting to flutter closed.
“I want to know…” She stops speaking.
“You will. I’ll tell you everything soon. But one last thing for now.”
Her eyes are closed now.
In the dark, she hears his voice: “Where is Trace Packer?”
“Bangladesh maybe,” she tells him.
“No, he’s not. Trace is missing, Maggie. We think he may have intentionally gone off the grid.”
“I don’t understand.”
And then, as Maggie sinks under, hoping to head back to that dream in the vineyard, she could swear she hears Charles Lockwood say something that makes absolutely no sense: “We think Trace is trying to find your husband.”
Maggie doesn’t see Charles Lockwood the next time she wakes up.
Or the time after that. She is being looked after by two women in hospital scrubs.
The women are kind and quiet. Maggie feels her strength returning.
She asks them questions—where am I? where is Charles Lockwood?
—but they give her a lot of tight smiles and no answers.
She is soon able to get out of bed, walk around.
Her recovery may seem remarkable, but her injuries ended up being more superficial than serious.
There is some pain near her shoulder where the bullet grazed, and her head aches from the aftermath of a concussion.
But she also feels antsy and ready to go.
That night, when Maggie wakes up in her dark hospital-like room, she senses someone is with her. Her eyes adjust enough to see the silhouette, and then the face comes into focus. It’s Charles Lockwood. He stares at the wall.
She speaks first. “Why did you say Trace is trying to find Marc?”
He doesn’t move.
“Marc is dead,” she says.
“I know.” Charles Lockwood leans back in the chair. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Why did you?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I want some answers. Like I want them now.”
He nods. Her eyes are adjusting. She can make out his face now. The gloss and polish she’d seen at Ragoravich’s have been wiped away. There are lines etched on his face. His hair has a touch of gray. He looks weathered, worn.
“There’s a lot to tell you,” he says. “I also don’t know how much you know already. I don’t know how much you knew at the time or how much you figured out later.” He turns to her. “Do you know who Eric Hoffer is?”
“No.”
“An American philosopher. He has this quote I love: ‘Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.’” He smiles. “Good, right?”
She doesn’t reply.
“Corruption starts small,” he continues.
“My uncle was a pastor. He had this pious parishioner, a sweet widow, to handle the church’s budget.
Mrs. Tingley. She devoted her life to that congregation.
She worked long hours. One night, when she stayed late yet again, she got hungry and wanted to get a sandwich.
She’d forgotten her wallet at home. That’s what she said.
Who knows, right? Anyway, Mrs. Tingley ordered a sandwich from the local sandwich shop and used some of the petty cash from that week’s tithing to pay for it.
No big deal. Easily justified. Then she did it again.
Then she ordered two sandwiches and brought one home for her son.
That’s it. Just an extra sandwich. Ten years later, the parish realized Mrs. Tingley had embezzled almost half a million dollars. ”
“I assume there’s a point to this story,” Maggie says.
“There is. And I think you know what it is.”
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“You were the pretty face of WorldCures Alliance. Sorry, I know you’re more.
But the media loved you. The combat surgeon.
Devoted her life to helping the poor in dangerous hot spots.
You’re pretty and telegenic and yeah, that shouldn’t matter, but we both know it does.
” He pulls his chair closer. “Why did you end up leaving WorldCures?”
“My mother was sick. I came home to be with her.”
He tries to give her a probing look. “That’s all?”
Silence.
“What else happened, Maggie?”
“Do you go by Charlie or Chuck, or should I call you Charles?”
“Most people call me Charles.”
“Great. Let’s not worry about me, Charles, okay? Tell me what’s going on.”
“Fair enough,” he says with a nod. “You know about the Kasselton Foundation.”
“Of course.”
“But you never worked with them directly?”
“No, never.”
“They were WorldCures’ biggest donor.”
“I think so, yes.”
“So here’s how it plays out. One day, the Kasselton Foundation gets in touch with a new charity desperately seeking funding. In this case, WorldCures Alliance. Maybe they called you. Maybe they called Marc or Trace.”
“It was Marc.”
“Okay, fine. So Marc goes to woo them. Maybe you go too. Doesn’t matter.
They seem impressed by your passion and presentation.
They claim to love your idea of advanced, cutting-edge treatments for refugees and the poverty-stricken.
They offer to make WorldCures a sizable donation, probably in chunks.
Like Hoffer said: It begins with a cause—and you had a great cause.
The Kasselton Foundation was going to help you save lives.
So, of course, WorldCures took the money.
Who wouldn’t? None of you knew it was connected to Oleg Ragoravich via back channels and shell companies.
And even if you did suspect, well, so what?
Ragoravich is just a businessman. How he makes his money isn’t your concern.
And hey, better he donates his money to a worthwhile cause like WorldCures than using it to, I don’t know, spread his corruption or buy another megapalace.
There’s a lot of ways to justify it. And again, you’re just nonprofit employees looking to do good.
So you take the money. Maybe a million dollars to start.
My God, you think, the patients you can save with that.
And you do. You save lives. You develop new medical technologies and techniques.
It’s great. And then, a few months later maybe, the Kasselton Foundation comes to you again.
They want to make another donation because they realize WorldCures has a lot of needs.
You need to hire staff. You need trucks and drivers and construction workers and paper clips and beds and medical equipment and whatever else.
And guess who has vendors for you to use? ”
“The Kasselton Foundation,” Maggie says to keep things moving.
“Precisely.”
“Straight-up money laundering,” Maggie says. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“Nothing straight-up about it. But yes. Money laundering seems complicated, but I’m going to make it very simple in this case.
Let’s say I’m a criminal. I donate my ill-gotten money into a nonprofit.
The nonprofit uses my donation to purchase legitimate goods and services from a company owned or controlled by me.
Period, the end. I also overcharge. I mean, who would notice?
Maybe the truck rental is normally a thousand dollars.
Your charity will get invoiced for five thousand dollars.
The point is, my money gets laundered—it came back to me via a respected nonprofit—and you, the altruistic charity, still get a lot of money via my donations.
It’s why you look past it—it’s in your interest to do so.
Yeah, sure, you may think that price seems too high for a truck rental, but so what?
You aren’t footing the bill. You are making out.
If someone else is also making out, that’s not your concern.
It’s a win-win, if you think of it that way. ”
“And this is what you claim happened with WorldCures?”
“Yes. And I don’t claim it. You know it.”
“Do me a favor, Charles. Don’t tell me what I know.”
He puts up his hands in mock surrender. “You’re right,” he says.
“And it doesn’t matter. I’m not here to prosecute anyone for that.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think any of you three did know at first. You, Trace, Marc—you’re physicians.
Healers. You don’t do the books. When you got the first check, the Kasselton Foundation probably insisted you hire one of their own under the pretense of making sure their money was spent in a proper way.
So I think for a while, yeah, like I said, this kind of corruption grows slowly.
You may have had some inklings which you subconsciously ignored. Doesn’t matter if you did.”
“So where do you fit into this, Charles?”
“What about me?”
“You said it wasn’t a coincidence I was chosen to do Oleg’s surgery.”
“Right.”
“It also wasn’t a coincidence you were at the house for Oleg’s party.”
Lockwood grins in the dark. “Didn’t you say it was a ball?” His hand goes up. “Kidding, kidding. Just looking to add a bit of levity here.”
“Yeah, pretty hilarious.”
“I’m trying, Maggie, because this story is grim, and it gets grimmer.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe there’s hope at the end of this too.”