Silent Assassin Page 9

  “Unless . . .” said Shepard, prompting O’Neal.

  Bloch raised an eyebrow impatiently. “Unless?” “Unless you can have some massively parallel computer program doing it for you,” said O’Neal. “One with no preconceptions about what should correlate with what, and who can literally just look at everything item by item. And that,” she said, moving just slightly aside and motioning to Shepard, “is where Linc comes in.”

  “Excuse me,” he said, as he took over her computer and brought up a simple interface that showed a blank graph. “I came up with this baby over the past couple of weeks. It’s been running on our servers, engaging every little bit of processing power that wasn’t being used. And it’s been sorting through data, looking for things that correlated with the attacks.”

  “What kinds of things?” asked Bloch.

  “Literally everything we had,” said O’Neal.

  “Isn’t that senseless?” said Bloch. “What use is a correlation between the attacks and, say, the weather?”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” said O’Neal. “Even if you have no idea what the causal connection is—it doesn’t matter. Not as long as it makes good predictions.”

  Bloch looked skeptical.

  “It’s a new age, Bloch,” she continued. “Data is queen. And we’ve got more of it available than ever, and it can do things beyond even our ability.”

  “So when are you getting to what you actually found?”

  With a few keystrokes from Shepard, a complex graph appeared on the screen, a tangle of different-colored lines.

  “What am I looking at here?” asked Bloch.

  “Prices for stocks, commodities, and a number of derivatives,” said O’Neal. “Specifically, those that saw the greatest change, either upwards or downwards, after the Paris attacks, shown here.” She pointed out a vertical dotted line on the graph. To the right of it, the colored lines went either sharply up or sharply down. “Those could hypothetically create enormous profits for investors—buying the ones that increased directly, investing in swaps and futures to take advantage of the stocks and commodities that took a hit.”

  “Sure,” said Bloch. “Any kind of big jump in the markets can make some people boatloads of money. But a lot of people are also going to lose big, unless . . .”

  “Unless they know in advance what’s going to happen,” said O’Neal.

  “Are you saying that someone knew about the attack, and used it to make money off the financial markets?”

  “Here’s what we found,” said O’Neal. “First, there was an increase in activity among these financial instruments in the month leading up to the attack. It was diffuse, spread out over many different funds and over time, some of it disguised as day trades, but it’s undeniable. When we looked into who was buying these, we found that there was a significant correspondence between them—that is, some fifty companies and funds were responsible for an enormous percentage of the purchases of these instruments over the past several weeks.”

  “Are you suggesting,” said Bloch, “that whoever is behind those companies had prior knowledge of the attack?”

  “That is what the data suggests,” said O’Neal.

  “Doesn’t seem like a very solid lead,” said Bloch. “Seems like it could be coincidence.”

  “It might be, to someone who doesn’t know their statistics,” said O’Neal. “But I ran the models. The odds of this being coincidence are slim.”

  “Not to mention the identity of those firms,” said Shepard, piping up. “We looked into them. They’re all dummy corporations, in the Bahamas, Belize, and other countries that make it their business to attract shell companies. Want to put odds on all of those being on the up-and-up?”

  Bloch seemed impressed. “Think you can figure out who’s behind those shell companies?”

  “It’ll take some doing,” said Shepard. “Electronic transfers can be traced, but for something like this, there’ll be layers of shells and dummies before we get to something solid.”

  “Can you do it?” she insisted.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  “You’ll do more,” she said, all business. “I’m going to need a report. Everything you have, and whatever else you find, to send up the chain.”

  “Paperwork, paperwork,” said Shepard in a mock gripe, lips pulled into a wide grin. “That’s all I get for being a freaking genius. Shall I throw some nice colorful infographics in there too?”

  “Don’t be smart,” said Bloch. “You’re wearing out the goodwill you earned from this already. Now off to work you two.” They nodded and turned to go. As they did, Bloch said, “And Shepard, O’Neal? Good job.”

  The two bowed out and went back down the stairs, talking boisterously to each other. Bloch fell back in her chair, relieved and praying to nothing in particular that this would pan out. Shepard and O’Neal could get carried away sometimes, but she had to hand it to them: they knew their stuff.

  She picked up her phone and dialed.

  “Morgan. We need you. Drop whatever you’re doing and come in right now. I think we might be on to something.”

  Morgan arrived at Zeta headquarters to find Bloch pacing in her office, speaking on her phone, all noise blocked from the war room, where Shepard and O’Neal sat across from each other, each thoroughly immersed in their laptops. O’Neal chewed on a pen, holding it lazily with her fingers, showing off the black nail polish on her nails. Shepard, his hair falling over his eyes, more disheveled than usual, had his mouth glued to a straw through which he sucked on an energy drink. He shook his leg constantly as he worked.

  “Hey, Cobra,” he said, not looking up from his monitor. O’Neal offered him just a noncommittal grunt as a greeting. “Take a seat,” said Shepard, pulling out the chair next to him without looking up.

  “Bloch said you had something,” said Morgan as he sat down. By now he was used to Shepard’s lack of social graces.

  “We have many somethings,” said O’Neal. She explained to him what they had found.

  “Except there’s a problem,” said Shepard.

  At that moment, the door to Bloch’s office opened and she began to make her way down the gently curving metal stairs to the war room. “Any news, Shepard?”

  “I was just telling Cobra here that I don’t have electronic access to those records,” said Shepard. “If there are, in fact, records. The investments were made through dummy corporations, most of them in Belize, but also in a couple other places in the Caribbean. From there, all the money will be transferred out, probably into other dummy corporations. There’s no way of telling ”

  Bloch stood with her hand resting on a chair across from Morgan. “So how do we get this information?” she asked, worry lines forming on her face.

  “We’d have to send someone to Belize,” said O’Neal, looking at Morgan as she said this, “in order to see what records they have. But . . .”

  “But what?” Bloch asked impatiently.

  “Supposing we did get access to those records,” O’Neal continued, “they would only lead us to the next layer, the next dummy corporation. And once whoever is behind this finds out that the operation has been compromised, it won’t take long for him to cover his tracks.”

  “Which would leave us right back where we started—without a lead,” said Bloch. There was a long moment of silence, as Bloch, Morgan, and O’Neal looked at each other. Shepard continued to stare intently at his screen, typing in short spurts. Finally, Morgan spoke.

  “Well, it’s all we have, isn’t it? This is the lead. All we can do is follow it, or else it’s as good as having no lead at all.”

  “It’s useless,” said O’Neal. “They’ll see us coming a mile away.”

  “Well, what else do we have to go on?” asked Morgan. “Should we stay here and sit on our asses while this creep plots another attack?”

  “If we play our hand too soon, we’ll lose everything we have,” said O’Neal.

  “And what do we gai
n by not playing it?” said Morgan.

  “Another shot at it. At a better time.”

  “After another attack?” said Morgan sardonically.

  “Maybe,” said O’Neal. “It would be better than blowing our only lead out of impatience.”

  “I think O’Neal is right about this,” said Bloch. “It would be too risky to act on this as it is.”

  “Risky?” asked Morgan, incredulously. “What about the people who are going to die in the next attack? I bet they wouldn’t consider it too risky to act now.”

  “If we lose this thread,” said Bloch, “we might lose even more.”

  “Hold on,” said Shepard.

  “Unbelievable!” said Morgan. “You’re seriously considering not acting on this?”

  “Do you think I don’t know the cost?” said Bloch, raising her voice, her eyes narrowing with anger. “Every decision I make here costs lives. I just have to choose the one that costs the fewest.”

  “Hey!” Shepard shouted. “Listen. I think I’ve got something here.”

  Morgan and Bloch exchanged a heated look, and then turned to Shepard. O’Neal, who had shrunk from the conflict, seemed glad to see it defused.

  “Most of the investors were shell companies, like I told you before,” said Shepard. “But look.” He turned his laptop for everyone to see. “We’ve got a few who are individuals, investing under their own names. A similar mixture of financial instruments to those dummy corporations, all made a killing in the market. Looks like . . . at least two of them are traders operating in New York City.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said Bloch. “Why go through all the trouble of setting up dummy corporations in tax havens if you’re just going to leave yourself vulnerable by having people make investments in their own names?”

  “What if all these other people are involved in some way?” asked Morgan.

  “It doesn’t add up,” said O’Neal. “If they were all involved in the same scheme, they would match their strategies. No, this is something else. Someone is feeding these people information they’re not supposed to be getting.”

  “I say we go ask them,” said Morgan. “Looks like we’ve got some house calls to make.”

  CHAPTER 16

  New York, January 7

  “Incoming,” said Lincoln Shepard, and the phone rang. Morgan checked his watch: 6:40 PM, right on time. The people around the room tensed up just slightly: in a chair across from Morgan was Bishop, who dropped the pen that he was using to doodle on the hotel room notepad in order to listen. Leaning against the wall was young Risa Rispoli, with her deceptively innocent face, her arm crossed in front of her. She was a spy for hire, a sort of independent contractor whom Bloch had vouched for. Morgan only had to set eyes on her to know what her specialty was: seduction. She stood up straight when Shepard announced the call. Diana Bloch, who had been in position in front of the phone, took a measured breath, her hand hovering over the phone, and picked up.

  “Club Royale,” she said, managing to capture both the solicitousness and the haughty superiority of people who worked in VIP services.

  “Five-thirty-three,” came the deadpan voice over the earpiece that Morgan had inserted in his right ear to listen in on the call. The others, watching Bloch intently, were listening in too.

  “And your code, sir?” said Bloch.

  “Champagne dreams,” he said with a derisive voice.

  “That is correct,” she replied. “What can I help you with today, sir?”

  “I want to set up an appointment. House call.”

  “Will that be for tonight as usual, sir?” asked Bloch. The escort agency’s records showed that he always scheduled his rendezvous on the same day.

  “I want a new girl this time. A nine-ruby.”

  Morgan had to smirk at this one. The ruby system ranked the women in the brothel by quality, nine being the highest and, of course, most expensive. Except the whole system was a scam, and a brilliant one at that. All the women who worked there were equally gorgeous, all of them top model material. But the ruby system let the johns believe that there was a difference, and pay accordingly. This way, they could charge more from those who could pay more—the highest price was something like five times greater than the lowest—while still being affordable to those whose budgets were on a lower level. More than that, the ruby system kept everyone who paid for below nine rubies always thinking there was something better, something to aspire to. He had to admire the simple genius of this charade.

  “Big spender,” she said. “Celebrating tonight?”

  “I thought your job required discretion,” he said in a prickly tone.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Bloch. She was, of course, quite aware of what she was doing; even that bit of mild break from protocol was calculated, a way to deflect thoughts of suspicion. “We have a new nine-ruby girl that you might be interested in. Young, tall, slender redhead. Green eyes and the face of an angel.” Morgan looked at Risa, whose lips curved ever so slightly to form a sly smile. “Might that pique your interest?”

  There was a pause. “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good.”

  “Shall I make an appointment at the usual place, at ten tonight?” That’s when he always had them come in, according to Club Royale’s records.

  “Do it,” came the voice, and then hung up.

  Their assets inside escort services were some of the most useful that Zeta Division had, both for finding out secrets and for blackmail. Few powerful men could resist engaging such services, and the threat of scandal usually proved to be just the right amount of leverage to get some small political favors and just about any piece of information out of them. And while they did not own Club Royale, they had enough pull with the management that organizing this whole ruse had been trivial. They had come out not only with the client’s contact information, but also with everything that Royale had on him in their files.

  The mark, one of the people Shepard had identified, was a mediocre investment banker in his mid-thirties named Len Stuart. Getting his information had been easy enough. Shepard just had to remotely lift his daily schedule off his smartphone, and Len himself had proven most helpful in that regard.

  “This guy has literally every minute of his day planned,” Shepard had told Morgan, looking over Stuart’s schedule. “Morning exercise, brushing his teeth . . . Look at this: ‘6:37 – bowel movement.’ The guy is like some kind of machine. Anyway, there’s this not so subtly named ‘recreation’—it corresponds to every past appointment he had with the escort agency. And the next one is set for just a couple of days from now.”

  “I wonder if he’s made the appointment yet?” said Morgan.

  And there they were, with an operation set to gain access to Stuart’s apartment and interrogate him. Morgan and Bishop went ahead, dressed in casual polos and khakis—just a couple of high-class guys, coming over for some wine and cheese or whatever, and Morgan with a duffel bag, containing everything they’d need that night for the interrogation. They sat at a bar in front of Stuart’s apartment building, right in front of a storefront window that gave them a plain view of the street, drinking iced tea out of whiskey glasses, and waiting for the plan to unfold.

  They didn’t have to wait long before they saw Risa’s driver bring her around in a town car and drop her off at the doorstep of Stuart’s building. She rang the bell, was buzzed in, and disappeared inside. Morgan nodded to Bishop, and they each popped in their earpieces.

  “Cobra and Bishop online,” Bishop said quietly so that no one around them could hear.

  “All right,” came Shepard’s voice over the radio. “Testing, one, two. Bishop, if you can hear me, pick up your glass and move it three inches to the right.” He did, while Morgan looked nonchalantly for the camera Shepard was using. No matter how many times he did it, Morgan was still impressed by the hacker’s ability to crack any system. “I’ll take that look-see to mean you can hear me, Cobra, but just to make sure, why don’t you touch your left ea
r with your index and middle fingers?” Morgan did. “Okay, good. So without further ado, heeeere’s Risa!”

  The sound cut to footsteps—heels along a corridor. They stopped, and then there was the ringing of a doorbell. Silence, then a door opening, and then voices, coming in as clear as day.

  “Len?” came Risa’s voice. “Hi, I’m Stacey.”

  Stuart looked at the woman standing at his door. She really was a nine-ruby. Face of an angel, the woman had said on the phone. And that it was.

  “Of course you are,” he said, with a predatory tinge in his voice. He was wearing his best suit, a graphite Zegna with a metallic blue tie—an outfit intended to project dominance and power. He knew what these women were all about. He knew how to get under their skin. “Well? Are you coming in?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” she said, with impeccably faked girlish excitement. He knew they were faking, and it didn’t fool him. But he liked it when they performed for him. When they thought they were getting away with something. He closed and locked the door behind her, and then he told her, “So this is what I get for two grand an hour.”

  She slinked toward him like a cat, holding her body against his and bringing her mouth to his ear. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” she said, and he felt her hot breath on him.

  “I’m sure I haven’t,” he said in a husky voice, smiling, running his hand along the side of her body and squeezing her supple flesh. “How about a drink? I have some merlot in the decanter.”

  “I can’t,” she said taking a step back and pouting as if she were sorely disappointed. “House rules.”

  “This is my house,” he said, stepping toward her, so close that he looked down on her. He grabbed her wrist roughly. “Don’t you think I get to decide what the rules are?”

  “Powerful man,” she said. “I like that.”

  They usually flinched when he grabbed their wrists, but this one didn’t. Stuart was a bit put off by that. Just a bit. After all, he liked a challenge. He let go of her hand, and she walked a few steps away from him, pretending to be interested in the decor all of a sudden.