Chapter 48: The Wire Transfer

Lautaro

I had my gun out before Elías finished moving. I don't remember deciding to draw. I'd known the man twenty-six years, and my body still picked the barrel over his face.

He pulled out a small black notebook. Slowly, like he was handing me a baby.

"Floor," Carlos said.

Elías got down on his bad knee and slid the notebook across the concrete with two fingers. It stopped against my boot. Nobody breathed.

"Every late login in this house gets written in there," he said. "Your father made me do it when you were a boy. Habit." His voice shook, just a little. "At 5:52 this morning somebody opened the east study. Not Millaray's room. The east study. The door badge says it was your father's old key card."

"My father's been dead for four years."

"Then somebody kept his card alive."

Millaray had gone gray. I wanted to put my hand on her head like I did when she was small. But I couldn't look away from Elías. If I looked away and I was wrong, people in this room would die.

"You walked into a room full of guns to prove what?" Rayén asked quietly.

"That I'm not the one who sold you." He looked right at me. "Shoot me after, if you still want to. Just let your sister finish first."

I lowered the gun. Not all the way.

"Millaray. Go."

She dropped back onto the stool with shaking hands. Rayén picked the stool up first, without being asked, and set it right. A small thing. I noticed it anyway. I was noticing everything about her, which was a problem.

Then Rayén came over and pressed a folded cloth to my bandage again. She didn't say anything. She just held it there, her eyes on the screen over my shoulder.

"I'm fine," I said, low.

"You've said that four times. You're a bad liar for a man who lies for a living."

My mouth almost smiled. It surprised me so much I looked away.

"Okay," Millaray said, and her voice was thin. "The 5:52 transfer. Three hundred and forty thousand dollars. It left the Panama account and bounced through two banks in Cyprus. But it landed here." She tapped the screen. "Inversiones Bellavista Limitada. Valparaíso."

"Never heard of it," Carlos said.

"Nobody has. That's the point. No employees, no website, no phone. One address." She swallowed. "Calle Blanco, number 412."

Something cold moved through my chest.

"Say that again."

"Calle Blanco 412. Why?"

I didn't answer. Rayén's hand pressed harder against my side. "Lautaro."

"It's a yellow house," I said. "On the hill. Narrow stairs, a green gate. Four years ago I told no one about it except the doctor and Elías."

Nobody spoke.

"That's where I kept Conco," I said, and the words tasted like iron. "The first two weeks after the fake execution. Before the border. It's the only place in Chile your brother slept safely, Rayén."

Her face didn't change, but I felt her pulse jump in the wrist against my ribs.

"You said four years ago," she whispered. "Conco's been gone eleven weeks."

"The house is older than the plan. I bought it through a dead man's name years back, for my own reasons, and I used it for him. Nobody else knew."

"Somebody knew," Millaray said.

"I never told a soul." Elías's voice cracked. "Don Lautaro, on my mother's grave."

I believed him. That was what scared me. If I believed him, then there was a hole in my own head, a place where somebody had walked through my life and I hadn't felt it.

"Keep going," I told Millaray.

She clicked. A scanned invoice opened, grainy and gray, like it had been photographed on someone's knee. The header was a funeral home. Funeraria Costa Azul.

Rayén made a small sound I'll hear for the rest of my life.

"Order of transport," Millaray read, slowly. "Date, this morning. Pickup time, 4:10 a.m. Pickup address, Calle Blanco 412, Valparaíso. Drop-off..." She stopped.

"Read it."

"The Altiplano mausoleum. Santiago."

The bulb hummed. Somewhere upstairs, a pipe knocked.

"There's a line below," she said. "Passengers. It says..." Her lip trembled. "One deceased. One living. Sedated. Medical escort included."

I felt Rayén's whole body go rigid against mine.

"Living," she said. "Lautaro. It says living."

"I see it."

"They took him alive. They drove him in that box with a dead man and they took him back to..." She couldn't finish. She pulled the cloth off my side and pressed it to her own mouth instead, and for one second, I saw the girl she'd been before all this, twelve years old and counting her brother's breaths through a wall.

"Who authorized it?" I said. My own voice sounded far away. "Somebody signed for the transport. Find the signature."

Millaray scrolled to the bottom. The page was gray and flat, but the stamp at the corner was crisp and dark. A condor, wings spread, pressed into red wax that still looked wet.

Beside it, a handwritten line.

Authorized by the family. Rayén Altiplano.

Rayén went very still.

"I didn't sign that."

"I know."

"Lautaro, I've never been to Valparaíso. I was in your house at four this morning. You know where I was. You were there." Her breath came in short jerks. "That's not my hand."

"I know it isn't."

"Then whose is it?" She turned to the screen. "That's a forgery. It's exactly what she did to Millaray. She's doing it to both of us, she wants..."

"The seal," I said.

She stopped.

"Look at the wax. That's no copy. That's pressed. That's the real condor, with the chip in the left wing from when your grandfather dropped it." I could hardly hear my own voice. "I took that seal off your father's hand the night he died. It was in my jacket. My jacket has been hanging in the upstairs hall since we got back."

"So somebody took it from the hall."

"Maybe."

"Maybe?" Rayén stared at me. "What do you mean, maybe?"

I didn't answer, because Carlos had gone stiff by the door, and Elías had gone white, and Millaray was reading something at the very bottom of the invoice that none of us had seen yet.

"There's a time stamp," she whispered. "On the seal. They press it and log it digitally. Lautaro. It was used at 4:10 this morning."

"So?"

"So it wasn't in the hall at 4:10." Her eyes lifted to mine, wet and terrified. "It was in the room you told us you were sleeping in. You said you put it under your pillow."

The basement turned very slowly around me.

I had told them that. At the cottage. I'd said it half-asleep with Rayén's head on my arm, to nobody, to the dark.

And somebody had been listening.