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“Good thinking,” he said. “But just have Hope come in to the office, not Felicity. She can do her thinking at home. She’s pretty close to her time and Metal would kill me if she has to go into the office.”
“She won’t have to. We can loop her in from home.”
Emma told Toby to continue waiting, went into the spacious living room and connected her call to the maxi flat screen up on the wall. Toby’s worried face filled the screen. “Hey, Tobe. I think we might be both maxed out. I’m calling in some friends in Portland to analyze this stuff.”
“Your old friends from the NSA?”
“Yeah. And Hope worked in a bank for a while so she has some financial background. I think we might be missing something because we’ve looked at the data for too long.”
Emma could tell Toby’s leg was shaking, which was a trait of his when he was under stress. “We don’t have much time if I’m right about the timeline.”
“Yeah. Can you condense the data that led you to today so they don’t waste time wading through extraneous data?”
“Okay.” Toby disappeared from the screen.
Emma called Hope. She didn’t wake her up, she was in her kitchen, drinking coffee with her fiancé, Luke Reynolds, Raul’s friend. He waved.
“Emma.” Hope spoke into her cell, her face projected up on the wall. She smiled. “Good morning. You’re up early. Making another billion for that bank of yours?”
Emma didn’t smile back. “Hm. I might have quit my job. Maybe.”
“Youmighthave quit your job? Isn’t that an either/or proposition?”
Raul leaned forward so the camera could catch him. “She hasn’t been to work in two days, and will never go back.”
Emma rolled her eyes. Hope blinked. “Huh. Okay. So, Emma, you were right that something bad is happening there?”
Emma swallowed. “Yeah. We don’t know quite what. In fact –”
“Whoa!” Hope interrupted excitedly. “If you’re not working for that bank, that means you are out of a job. Come here and work with us! Oh God, it would be perfect! My bosses would hire you in a heartbeat. Give you a huge signing bonus. Felicity and I can barely cope with the workload and Felicity, bless her, is about to pop. Twice. She would probably continue working while delivering her twins, but Metal is putting down his size thirteen boot pretty heavily.”
Emma leaned forward. “We can talk about the future later. Right now, I’m uploading data. A lot of it is from the darknet.”
Hope’s dark eyebrows flew upward. “Financial data from the darknet? Someone’s being very naughty.”
“Someone’s short selling something like several billion dollars, betting that something bad is going to happen. And we just discovered that the due date is today. As of 10:30, which is when the first batch of shorts comes due. If there is a catastrophe bad enough, someone will make over a trillion dollars.”
Hope’s pretty face turned shocked. “Sounds like 9/11 all over again.”
“Only not concentrated on airline shares.” Emma blew out a breath. “Well, whatever it is, most of the short selling is coming from my institution, the Pacific Investment Bank.”
“What?”
“I suspect the CEO has used company funds for a huge number of shorts. The people directly over him have no clue how to read the data and if he has bet correctly, he will make PIB a ton of money. The people under him wouldn’t dare question the investments.”
Hope shook her head. “Get out of there, honey.”
“Don’t worry.” Raul pushed his face toward the monitor. “She’s not stepping foot in there again.” He slanted his eyes toward her, daring her. “Ever.”
She wasn’t arguing. However …
Nope. Not going there. She wasn’t going to get into a pissing contest with Raul. He was tougher than her and probably meaner. Plus, she had a creepy feeling about the place, now. She didn’t want to go back and she didn’t have to. She didn’t even have any personal belongings there. The computer belonged to the bank and the data she generated belonged to the bank, too. In her desk drawer was a Chanel lipstick, a cheap pen and cheaper notebook for the few times she jotted things down, a comb and the business card of a Vietnamese takeout place.
Her only real friend there was Toby, who was never going back, either.
There was nothing there for her. For them. Not anymore.
“No,” she agreed. “Not going back. And maybe I might come up and give you a hand, at least for a while.” She ignored Raul’s gusty sigh of relief. “But right now, I just have this horrible feeling. A feeling that something terrible is going to happen very soon and that someone or several someones is going to make a ton of money off it.”
