Chapter 2
Falco did not know the full nature of what he was facilitating. This was by design. The Vulov organization had compartmentalized the arrangement precisely because they understood that the more completely any given participant understood the whole operation, the more completely that participant could dismantle it if they chose to, and Falco was too valuable as a logistics node to be trusted as a full partner.
What Falco knew was that he was being paid to ensure that certain containers moved through Briggs's processing window on specific dates, and that questions about the contents of those containers were not a line of inquiry he was expected to pursue.
What I had spent eight months establishing was that Falco knew enough, and that Falco's records documented enough, to provide the evidentiary foundation for the prosecution of every person above him in the chain.
The problem was getting to Falco in a way that would hold up.
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Men like Carmine Falco did not talk to people who approached them directly. They talked to people they had decided to trust, which was a category they populated with extreme caution and an entirely different category from people whose credentials they had verified, because credentials could be forged and trust was something you watched develop over time, and Falco had been watching me for four months before he started leaving the hundred-dollar bills.
He was not paying for my silence. He was testing whether I would take it. A person who takes money without asking what it is for is a person who has decided that curiosity is less valuable than income, and that was the specific profile of person Falco preferred to do business with. I had been taking the bills and saying nothing, and I had been letting him watch me handle difficult situations in the diner in ways that demonstrated competence without drawing attention, and I had been watching him watch me, and the watching had been going in both directions for four months before I put the second phase of the operation in motion.
