The first thing to go wrong was the card.
At the premium check-in counter, buying the upgrade he felt he deserved, his card was declined. He laughed it off — a glitch, he told Bianca, these things happen — and tried another. Declined. And another. Every account he’d so carefully stuffed with st*len money, frozen solid by a federal preservation order that had gone into effect while he slept beside a woman he thought he’d dr*gged.
Bianca’s face, I’m told, began to change around the third declined card.
He put the tickets on the one card that still worked — a nearly-maxed personal one — and they went to the gate. International departure. Somewhere warm and far, somewhere with the kind of banking laws men like Garrett dream about.
That’s where the second thing went wrong.
Because when you are the subject of an active federal financial-crimes investigation, and a complaint has been filed, and the right people have been notified, your name does something it has never done before when it hits the system at an international departure gate.
