Stony Man Farm, Virginia
H UNTINGTON W ETHERS LISTENED to the download of the MP3 file that Able Team uploaded to him. Paczesny’s confession made the process of forensic accounting easier, enabling Wethers to locate the trail of funds.
Naturally, the identities of the mysterious donors remained vague. Paczesny didn’t have faces or voices, only e-mail contacts and a few shadowy meetings with men who hid their features and utilized vocal distortion technology. The trail of cash in Paczesny’s Cayman Island account also followed a tangled snarl of jumps from front company to front company, all of which were new and lacked any ties to previously known espionage or organized crime groups.
Wethers squeezed his brow as he went over the financial autopsy on the screen before him, scanning line by line for the name of a front company owner who would register on any of a thousand law-enforcement watch lists. Though the plodding, meticulous cyberdetective was utilizing his search engines to look for a familiar name, his own vast reserves of memorized information churned in his mind, working as fast as the powerful processors of the Cray supercomputers in the Annex.
For all of the technological power in the Stony Man cyber-center, the computers were still only pale duplicates of the human brain, lacking intuition or the ability to correlate something that didn’t quite match what came before.
Wethers blinked his eyes, realizing he hadn’t done so in several minutes. Tears washed over his parched orbs, flooding down the side of his cheek.
“Doing okay, Hunt?” Akira Tokaido asked from his workstation.
Wethers picked up his pipe and chewed on the stem, sitting back to allow his subconscious to digest the images burned into his retinas. “Just slow, steady work. I need to rest my eyes a little.”
Tokaido nodded.
“Nothing’s shown up yet?” Carmen Delahunt asked, stepping over to Wethers’ station.
“The money that ended up in Paczesny’s account has been immaculately sanitized,” Wethers responded. “I’ve gone over every single penny, and can’t make head nor tails of where it came from, despite all the front companies.”
“Maybe you’re looking at too large an object,” Tokaido responded. Wethers glanced over at his younger partner, gnawing on his pipe stem.
“You mean that this might have come from another source?” Wethers asked. “Someone might have found a way to pick up the fractions of pennies in interest and convert the digital leftovers into real money?”
“It’s happened before,” Tokaido replied. “But you’d have to be very good to break into that kind of a slush fund.”
“Wait…fractional cents of interest?” Delahunt asked. “Sure. Bank computers round down the interest they’re offering, keeping the leftover bit for themselves. But surely, it would take a large bank to accumulate that kind of money.”
“You’d be surprised, especially since we’re talking how many banking franchises in the U.S.?” Tokaido asked.
Wethers nodded his understanding. “So someone has a tap on banks, and they’re using that to create a clean form of money. And of course, the banks won’t say anything, because they don’t want the public to know that they’re being shortchanged. Instead of getting thirty-two point eight-five-two cents, they only get the thirty-two, and the bank keeps the slop over. In the course of a year, that can add up to ten cents an account, times however many hundred customers per branch, over the course of several years…”
“Big money tucked away for the guys up top,” Delahunt said. “And it’s completely independent of the FDIC insurance on any account.”
“So Paczesny ended up with forty grand in his account,” Wethers mused out loud. “And it’s made up of withheld interest surplus from a banking franchise, which can’t mention the disappearance of that kind of money, unless they want to pay taxes on it.”
“We’re dealing with a good hacker,” Delahunt noted. “The dummy companies that filtered those funds also have nothing much to give in terms of who set them up. Akira, think you can do something about that?”
“I’ll hit it hard,” Tokaido said, accepting the challenge. “There’s no way to make a dummy without leaving one fingerprint on it.”
“It could be that they left a fingerprint, but we just haven’t recognized it as such,” Wethers added. “Some signature that would be so obscure that while we’ve been looking at it, it just simply blends in.”
“Your fine-tooth comb has eliminated a lot of options,” Tokaido mentioned, looking at the relevant data that Wethers collected. “It’s going to take some hairy-ass cyber monkey action to break this open.”
Wethers snorted. “Thank you, Akira, for introducing an image of your hirsuteness that I shall need to gouge from my mind’s eye with a spork.”
Tokaido and Delahunt chuckled at the scholarly computer expert’s subdued shudder.
“Hunt, work with me on trying to back-trace the origin of the trucks,” Delahunt said. “It’ll be something new for your brain to work on to clear the cobwebs.”
“Unfortunately, Able Team didn’t leave much in terms of trace evidence on the vehicles,” Wethers lamented, looking at Delahunt’s notes. “And what Carl and the lads didn’t wreak, the marauders themselves contributed. VIN plates removed, and no accumulation of personal items that could betray origin. Even the odometers were taken out.”
“Thorough,” Delahunt agreed. She took a deep breath, returning to her workstation. “With the odometers, and a rough estimate of the distances traveled, we could have at least narrowed down the trucks to wherever they were stolen or purchased.”
“How about the electronics?” Wethers inquired. “Surely the IR illuminators should have betrayed a point of origin.”
“Chinese military equipment, top of the line for special forces,” Delahunt said. “It doesn’t show up on any catalogs, but we’ve had enough dealings with the Security Affairs Division to know what their gear looks like.”
Wethers observed the screen, looking at the night-vision equipment that had been photographed by Schwarz. Images of the complete unit, then dissected, were displayed. Chinese knockoff transistors were in the design. “It’s pretty damning. Red China is the only concurrent power to the United States to have a burgeoning aerospace industry devoted to orbital craft.”
“We’ve also got an international mix of operatives among those bodies not burned or mutilated beyond the point of recognition,” Delahunt mused. “China does have the kind of budget to…”
Wethers glanced over to her as her train of thought trailed off. Her green eyes flickered and Wethers knew she’d hit a hunch.
“Akira, put the bank search on hold,” Delahunt noted. “Take a look at brokers who make large dollar to yuan conversions.”
Tokaido nodded slowly. “Why didn’t I think of that in the first place?”
“That’s why we’re a team, Akira,” Wethers admonished. “Still, what would the PRC benefit by this? This kind of activity could result in trouble for them once an astute investigator figured this out.”
