Silent Assassin (8 page)

C
HAPTER
15

 

D
iana Bloch locked the door to her office behind her and walked slowly and deliberately, perfectly balanced on high-heeled shoes, around her no-frills metal and glass desk. It was, as usual, empty except for a laptop computer. Paperwork? She had none. She kept whatever she could stored in her brain rather than on paper or electronically—the only way, really, to keep anything secret. The rest was hidden between layers of encryption in her hard drive.

She sat down, closed her eyes, and lay back in her chair; it hardly made a sound as it reclined.
Goddamn, this is comfortable
. Her one luxury, the thing she would not do without. She opened her eyes and stared blankly at the ceiling, and her brief respite was over. She looked down through the glass into the empty war room, dimly lit, just a round pool of light in the middle of the table, by which the chairs cast long shadows. Worries and responsibilities flooded back through well-worn trenches in her mind. It was overwhelming, and it was all she could do just to keep her head above water.
You will figure it out
, she told herself.
You always do. This is just another crisis, and like all crises, you will weather it.
But even she hardly believed it anymore.

She heard the footsteps on the metal stairs first, and then, through the glass, she saw them coming up. They still knocked the same way: first three times, faint and hesitant, then a loud and persistent knock by another hand. Sighing, Bloch said, “Come in!” The door opened, and standing there was Lincoln Shepard, breathless, with Karen O’Neal standing behind him.

“Boss,” he said, still at the door. “I think I got something.”

“You mean
we
got something,” said Karen O’Neal, elbowing her way into the office. O’Neal was their resident data analyst. Petite, lean, and half-Vietnamese, she’d been one of the
wunderkinder
of Wall Street quants—that is, quantitative analysts, people who did in-depth financial data analysis and came up with complex schemes to make a killing in the markets. O’Neal had been a little too creative and outside the box, though she would still insist that it was all perfectly legal. However, the SEC had disagreed. Bloch had offered her a deal similar to the one that she had offered Shepard. O’Neal had been a little more reluctant than Shepard, but it hadn’t taken long for her to come around.

“Anyway, it’s this program I’m perfecting,” said Shepard. “Based on Karen’s financial analysis.”

“He’s more like a scribe, really,” said O’Neal. “For my brilliant ideas.”

“I don’t care who’s the genius behind this,” Bloch said impatiently. “Just tell me what you found!”

“Well, you see,” O’Neal began excitedly, looking at Shepard then back at Bloch, “everything’s being tracked these days. Well, not
everything
, we’re actually quite far from the theoretical limit to how much data we can gather—” She picked up either on Bloch’s impatient stare or on Shepard’s elbowing. “Anyway, we have all this information available to us. Just terabytes of raw data. I’m talking
tons
. Everything from economic indicators to website page views to changes in weather. But data, by itself, doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s just a bunch of numbers on a page.”

“And that’s where—” began Shepard.

“Shut up and let me finish,” said O’Neal. “So we have all this data, but what do we do with it? Well, that’s where quantitative analysis comes in. Me. So, analyzing information—it’s all about finding connections, right? Specifically, those connections that no one has seen before. Those that no one has ever imagined even existed. Like how once someone thought to look at all the satellite pictures of cows, they found out that they all face either north or south when they eat. Or when they looked the length of a man’s index finger and found out that it has a connection to how aggressive he is. That kind of stuff. But the problem with that is that you have to
imagine
the connection before you test for it.” She was speaking so fast she was nearly panting by this point.

“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 gain 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.”