"Go on," I said.
"It was a nightmare," Hubble said. "I couldn't sleep that night. I thought I'd never sleep again, any night. Friday morning, we flew home. We sat together on the little jet and he told me what would happen. He said it wouldn't be just me who got cut up. It would be Charlie too. He was discussing it with me. Which of her nipples would he slice off first? Left or right? Then after we were dead, which of the children would he start with? Lucy or Ben? It was a nightmare. He said they'd nail me to the wall. I was shitting myself. Then we landed and he called Charlie and insisted we go to dinner with him. He told her we were doing business together. Charlie was delighted because Kliner is such a big deal in the county. It was a total nightmare because I had to pretend there was nothing wrong. I hadn't even told Charlie I'd lost my job. I had to pretend I was still at the bank. And the whole evening that bastard was asking politely after Charlie and the children and smiling at me."
We went quiet. I skirted around the southeast corner of Atlanta again, looking for the highway south. The big city glowed and glittered on the right. To the left was the dark empty mass of the rural southeast. I found the highway and accelerated south. Down toward one little dot in that dark empty mass.
"Then what?" I asked him.
"I started work at the warehouse," he said. "That's where he wanted me."
"Doing what?" I said.
"Managing the supply," he said. "I had a little office in there, and I had to arrange to get the dollars, and then I'd supervise the loading and shipping."
"Sherman Stoller was the driver?" I asked him.
"Right," he said. "He was trusted to do the Florida run. I'd send him out with a million dollar bills a week. Sometimes the gatemen did it if Sherman had a day off. But it was usually him. He helped me with the boxes and the loading. We had to work like crazy. A million dollars in singles is a hell of a sight. You've got no idea. It was like trying to empty a swimming pool with a shovel."
"But Sherman was stealing, right?" I said.
He nodded. I saw the flash of his steel glasses in the glow from the dash.
"The money got counted properly in Venezuela," he said. "I used to get accurate totals back after about a month or so. I used them to cross-check my weighing formula. Many times, we were about a hundred grand down. No way had I made that kind of mistake. It was a trivial amount, because we were generating four billion in excellent fakes at the other end, so who cared? But it was about a boxful every time. That would be a large margin of error, so I figured Sherman was stealing the occasional box."
"And?" I said.
"I warned him off," Hubble said. "I mean, I wasn't going to tell anybody about it. I just told him to take care, because Kliner would kill him if he found out. Might get me into trouble as well. I was already worried enough about what I was doing. The whole thing was insane. Kliner was importing a lot of the fakes. He couldn't resist it. I thought it made the whole thing way too visible. Teale was spending the fakes like confetti, prettying up the town."
"And what about the last twelve months?" I asked him.
He shrugged and shook his head.
"We had to stop the shipping," he said. "The Coast Guard thing made it impossible. Kliner decided to stockpile instead. He figured the interdiction couldn't last. He knew the Coast Guard budget wouldn't stand it for long. But it just lasted and lasted. It was a hell of a year. The tension was awful. And now the Coast Guard's finally pulling back, it's caught us by surprise. Kliner figured it's lasted this long, it would last until after the election in November. We're not ready to ship. Not ready at all. It's all just piled up in there. It's not boxed yet."
"When did you contact Joe?" I asked him.
"Joe?" he said. "Was that your brother's name? I knew him as Polo."
I nodded.
"Palo," I said. "It's where he was born. It's a town on Leyte. Philippine Islands. The hospital was converted from an old cathedral. I had malaria shots there when I was seven."
He went quiet for a mile, like he was paying his respects.
"I called Treasury a year ago," he said. "I didn't know who else to call. Couldn't call the police because of Morrison, couldn't call the FBI because of Picard. So I called Washington and tipped off this guy who called himself Polo. He was a smart guy. I thought he'd get away with it. I knew his best chance was to strike while they were stockpiling. While there was evidence in there."
I saw a sign for gas and took a last-minute decision to pull off. Hubble filled the tank. I found a plastic bottle in a trash can and got him to fill that, too.
"What's that for?" he asked me.
I shrugged at him.
"Emergencies?" I said.
He didn't come back on that. We just paid at the window and pulled back onto the highway. Carried on driving south. We were a half hour from Margrave. It was approaching midnight.
"So what made you take off on Monday?" I asked him.
"Kliner called me," he said. "He told me to stay home. He said two guys would be coming by. I asked him why, and he said there was a problem at the Florida end and I had to go sort it out."
"But?" I said.
"I didn't believe him," he said. "Soon as he mentioned two guys, it flashed into my mind what had happened down in Jacksonville that first week. I panicked. I called the taxi and ran."
"You did good, Hubble," I said. "You saved your life."
"You know what?" he said.
I glanced a question at him.