Page 139 of Cruel Lies

But in reality, he was on both sides. He was the wolf at my throatandthe shepherd with his hand on my shoulder telling me not to move, don't leave, trust me, I'll handle it.

This is amateur work, Ms. Meadows. I don't think we'll have an issue fighting back.

Ha! What a joke.

He wasn't fighting anybody. He was acting out every part in the play, and I was the audience, and I fuckingclapped.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see sparks. My coffee's gone cold, but I don't get up for more.

Okay. Okay. This is bad. This is very bad. He wanted my company, so he built an elaborate, patient, months-long machine to take it from me while simultaneously making me fall in love with him.

And I did. I fell so hard it makes me want to be sick.

But I'm a data scientist. I don't stop at the story I expected to find. I keep pulling.

Because there's a question underneath all of it that I haven't answered yet.

Why?

Ronan Akov is a wealthy man. He owns two yachts, and a penthouse over Central Park, and a lake house upstate so perfectly idyllic that it made my children beg to live there. He runs a white shoe Manhattan law firm. His net worth must have just a sickening amount of commas.

It's pretty damn clear he isn't hurting for cash. He definitely didn't need my little data sciences company. On the scale of what a man like that has, my whole company doesn't even count as a rounding error.

So why go to all this trouble? Why steal a thing you don't need?

I don't have the answer. But I have his firm's public footprint, and I have a hunting dog made of zeroes and ones that never gets tired.

So I point that dog at The Akov Firm.

Lawyers are good by nature at cleaning up their tracks, but no one is perfect, not even Ronan, and some filings are mandatory. Traces of what they do and who they are show up like exhaust fumes in the public record. Invoices, stock reports, court documents, paperwork on paperwork on paperwork.

And if it's out there, my creation will find it.

I watch the little progress indicator crawl, hardly daring to breathe. It's almost a miracle how this thing has come to be used. A freakish accident, a bizarre twist of fate. I built it to catch supply-chain fraud. Now, for the second time, I'm using it to catch a liar.

The engine finishes.

I lean in to read?—

And the blood goes out of my face.

The pattern it's found is not a lawyer stealing a startup. It's not a rich man collecting one more toy just for the sheer thrill of ripping it away from someone weaker than him, like I thought it would be.

The billing coming through The Akov Firm and its endless nest of shells is deep and meandering. Payments route through business after business after business, six deep, seven deep, each one taking a little, passing it on, until money that started somewhere dirty comes out the other end looking like a dentist got reimbursed, a consultant got paid, a lawyer billed some hours.

It's all incredibly complex.

It's alsofake.

This is money laundering of the highest order. Someone is taking dirty cash and making it look like clean, new dollar bills, hot off the presses.

Oh, God.

I can't say for sure where the money truly comes from. But I learned early in my auditing classes at college that, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.

So if it walks like a criminal organization and it quacks like a criminal organization…

… does that mean Ronan Akov is a criminal?