Page 85 of Gone Before Goodbye

“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 WorldCuresa 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 backto 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?”