Savas furrowed his brows. “What you thought?”
She blinked quickly and regained focus. “What I think, yes, agent Savas. Law enforcement can make great use of drones to pursue criminals when vehicle chases would be impossible or dangerous, take surveillance without endangering officers, many things.”
“And what of arming them?”
She cocked her head to the side. “That has been discussed in closed-door sessions, but I don’t see that as necessary or likely in the near future.”
Savas sensed her resolve returning and saw that they were losing the advantage. He spoke on a hunch. “Are those your daughters?”
Instantly, an anxiety seemed to spread over her features. She smiled stiffly. “Why, yes, yes. Margaret and Sophia. Twins. They’re in college now, opposite sides of the country.” Her fingers curled inward toward her palm, the nails digging slightly into the wood. "Identical twins and so different. Isn't that strange?"
“How are they doing?” he continued.
“Well!” she nearly shouted. Cohen leaned backward, and the senator adjusted her tone instantly. “Sophia’s pre-med, 4.0. Margaret’s still finding her way but she’s doing great. Absolutely great.” That smile again.
“Well, try to appreciate every minute, senator,” said Savas earnestly. “I can tell you, you never know what you have until it’s gone.”
He faced blanched. “Yes. You know all too well, agent Savas. I will. I promise you.”
They stepped out of the Russell Senate Office Building into the brisk October evening, a black town car before them, waiting by the curb. Savas pulled his collar up and turned to Cohen.
“Well, what do you make of that?”
She shook her head, a cool breeze tossing brown hair about her face. “She’s been compromised, John. Did you see the terror in her eyes? You pushed a very bad button with her kids.”
“But who? And what? And why with fear? Don’t the players just buy their way to influence these days? Corporations are people, all that?”
She nodded. “This doesn’t make sense, and it feels very dark. Moss is a believer, John. You can see it all over her record. I’m not saying she’s above lobbying or influence, but nothing in her twenty years in the Senate compares with what’s happened the last few weeks. She’s either had a mental breakdown, a stroke or something, or what we saw means somebody has her in a very bad vice.”
“Her kids?”
“We should look into them. Check on their whereabouts, status. Start tonight with social media, get some shoes on the ground at their schools.”
“If they were snatched, we’d know.”
“True. But maybe something will come out of it if there has been some kind of threat.”
“Political? Dirty laundry?”
“Always in play with these folks.”
They arrived at the vehicle, and Savas opened the back door for Cohen. They got in and he slammed it shut distractedly.
“Reagan National,” he told the driver. He whispered to Cohen. “A CEO car bombed. A US senator looking blackmailed and changing her votes. What’s going on?”
She stared out the window. “Nothing good, that's for sure.”
5
Halfway around the world, off the tip of the Malay Peninsula, the city-state of Singapore was an engine churning into morning overdrive. Businesses hummed, planes were launched around the world, financial transactions from hundreds of nations sped through the computer systems of their exchanges.
In a gleaming new building of blue and gray, on a wide and open floor lit by a bank of windows facing toward the front of the structure, rows of digital detectives sat in front of their computers. Near the middle of the floor, a short, gray-haired man of European descent hunched arthritically beside the desk of a young Asian woman. He wore a stunned expression as he stared at her screen.
“Are you sure about this?”
Yi Ling nodded to her superior. The thin fingers of her right hand drummed nervously on her keyboard. She reflexively tugged at her chest-length hair with her left. She could not afford to be wrong about this.
It was only two months ago that she had landed this job at the newly opened INTERPOL Digital Crime Centre in Singapore. The DCC was a dream job, letting her use her computer skills in her home country under the auspices of one of the largest and most respected law enforcement agencies in the world. Her friends were all impressed. It paid very well. But now, everything was threatened by the discoveries she had made over the last two days. It had taken her all of yesterday to convince herself that should risk raising the issue with her superiors.
“Yes, Mr. Rosenfeld,” her perfect English hardly accented by her native Mandarin. “It’s always on the derivative bets. All off-market.”
The older man coughed and adjusted his glasses. “Nothing from the exchanges?”
“No,” she said, wetting her lips with her tongue. “See these modifications to the contracts? They occur after the parties have established the contract terms but before the instrument is finalized.”
Rosenfeld nodded. “That’s incredible. How are they not noticing the modifications?”
“I don’t know, sir, except that few check the source code anymore. Everything is automated these days, everything comes out of code. Maybe that’s why nothing was tried on the exchanges since there’d be too many eyes on the trades. There’s a code injection into the contract scripts here.” She indicated a row of text on one side of the display. “The siphoning is minimal and scaled to the return on the instrument. They’d have to dig through the layers of fees and clauses to root it out.”
“God damned penny shaving. But these are pretty big pennies. How on earth are these modifications getting in there?”
“I’m not sure, but look at this. The losses don’t show except for hundredths of a second because an equal amount of money comes into the account.”
“From where?”
“It’s random. Shell-accounts, investment banks, everywhere. And that’s what happens in every instance. There is a loss and nearly immediate plug of the deficit.” She didn’t want to say more and hoped Rosenfeld would reach the conclusion she had.
“I’ll be damned. It’s some sort of light-speed Ponzi-scheme.”
Yes. “I think so, sir. And I think it works because of the epic nature of the worm infection. There are so many compromised accounts, tens of thousands, that the code left on the systems can continuously shuffle money, even in these increased amounts, so that for no length of time does any one account report much of a loss. It’s fantastically complicated, but there is so much unregulated and unmonitored in these dark markets. I think that explains how it’s gotten away with this for so long and with so much money involved.”
“Just how bad is the spread?”
“I don’t know for sure, but unprecedented. I couldn’t believe how systematic it is. I’ve been using the NSA share-data on the known financial OTC trading, and I haven’t found any derivative contracts of significance in the last six months that haven’t been modified. It’s got to total in the trillions.”
“Incredible.”
“And as long as the contract is viable, it’s funneling the money. Untraceable. The money trail disappears in one offshore account after another.”
“Like some damn invisible parasite. Thank God we have access to the OTC bids. We’d never have known. Chalk up a success story to the NSA octopus.”
The woman swallowed. “Well, that may be part of the problem, sir.”