“We have a car to take you to the airport.” She gestured to a town car parked nearby. “You’ll want to go now,” Escobar said, and glanced at the station house. “You should get out of Tulum.”

CHAPTER 30

SARAH KELLER

The bright morning sun reflected off the skyscrapers lining Michigan Avenue. Sarah Keller walked into the lobby of the office tower, her first visit to the Chicago branch of Marconi LLP. She’d analyzed the company for two years—talked to former employees, scrutinized bank records, studied bios of the executives—so it was strange to visit the place in person. Headquartered in New York with offices in nine other states, the entire firm wasn’t dirty—at least, Keller didn’t think so. Just the Chicago office.

A line had formed at the main reception desk of 875 North Michigan Avenue, men and women in stiff suits checking in for meetings at the law firms, telecom, and other companies housed in the impressive one-hundred-floor tower. Keller waited patiently, then displayed her badge to the security guard working the desk. Without hesitation or questions, the guard gave her a key card. He didn’t work for Marconi, and his job was just to make sure no one unauthorized made it to the elevator banks. He wasn’t about to give the FBI a hard time. No analysis paralysis for this guy.

Keller rode the elevator up with a throng of smartphone-staring executives. She smiled at the twentysomething in wrinkled slacks who held a cardboard tray filled with four coffees. Keller’s ears popped from the elevation.

She’d just spent two hours with a team from the Chicago field office, getting them up to speed. As Stan had warned, the Chicago SAC was a bit of a bull in a china shop, and more than willing to bust into Marconi swinging his dick. She’d convinced them to exercise restraint. She’d send a signal—the single click of a pen that was actually a transmitter—if they should storm the offices. She didn’t want to do that. She’d prefer to continue building the case. But she supposed they already had the goods. Payments from various cartel-controlled accounts. The intricate web of investments and shell companies to wash the funds. The return of the money, less a hefty commission. But they didn’t have a single witness who could put the story together for a jury. R. Stanton Jones, their original inside man and the tipster who’d gotten them started with the investigation, had vanished. It was possible he’d been rammed through a wood chipper or dissolved in a barrel of acid, favorites of the Sinaloa Cartel. Or maybe he’d just decided to change his identity and start anew. The taps on Marconi phones revealed no clues about what had happened to the middle-aged accountant. The Marconi executives seemed as baffled as everyone else at Jones’s disappearance.