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“More than a ton,” Hope said earnestly. “A ton of $100 bills would be a little over 90 million dollars. Many tons.”
Emma slid her eyes to Raul and saw him smile a little. She smiled back.
“Plus, your feelings are pretty good indicators. Remember that feeling you had about ISIS members meeting in Rome when we were at the NSA?”
That wiped out her smile. Alarmed, Emma turned to Raul. “What’s your clearance level?”
“Probably not as high as yours,” he replied. “We didn’t analyze, we just kicked down doors. But I’m not talking, so don’t worry. Worry about what might be happening today.”
He was right. She got back to business.
“Hope, I’m looping in Toby Jackson, my colleague at PIB.”
“Formercolleague,” he said tartly, coming online. “Current friend.”
Hope waved. “Hi, Toby.”
“Hey, Hope.” Toby lifted his hand. “Heard a lot about you from Emma.”
“Gang.” Raul leaned forward. “Let’s get back on track. What do you want Hope to do, Emma?”
“Well, Toby and I are going to keep refining the data and we’ll go over it together when it’s been consolidated. There’s a lot of noise to signal. We should talk when it’s signal only.”
“Right. So, what do you want me to do?” Hope asked.
Emma glanced at Toby. “Do you think you could do a deep, deep dive on this man?” She put up the photo of Brandon Rutherford entering Whittaker Hamilton’s office. “I’ll be sending more photos and what we were able to dig up.” Raul opened his mouth and she lay a finger across it. “Raul tells me that somehow he is also the head of a drug cartel in Baja, known for its production of fentanyl. He has perfected a variation known as santalucia. In both incarnations, he has a degree in chemistry and in Mexico is known as El Quìmico. His name is also Jorge Marin de Herrera. There’s not much on him. Can you do a deep NSA dive on him?”
She knew what she was asking. A ‘deep NSA’ dive meant hacking and cracking illegally into databases.
“Sure,” Hope said, as if it were no big deal. As if she wouldn’t be tried as a cyber-criminal if she were caught. She’d also have to make sure nothing came back to ASI. “You’ll have to mask ...” Emma began.
“On it,” Hope answered. “And in a few minutes, I’ll loop Felicity in. Hoping I won’t have to run interference with Metal.”
Felicity was the Atom Bomb of hacking and cracking.
Well, Emma had two of the finest minds in the business on this. She’d have called in Riley, but Riley had gone offline diving deep into some esoteric NRO project. The clock was running …
A cup of coffee magically appeared at her elbow. Together with a flaky croissant. She looked at Raul with gratitude.
“Nothing else I can do for you,” he said grimly. “Not at this stage.”
Well, considering he’d saved her life …
She and Toby turned back to the data.
6:30 a.m. on a day in which something bad was going to happen at 10:30.
On the screen, Toby was looking grim and exhausted. He’d been held captive and drugged, of course he was exhausted. But he was doing his very best. She had to, too.
They had to figure out the pattern of the short selling. It didn’t seem to be linked in any way to a specific sector of the economy. Which was nuts, because whatever it was that was supposed to trigger a swift downturn of the economy, it had to be linked to something. To airline crashes or mass poisoning orsomething.But the stocks were bought in every single sector. Insurance, manufacturing, computers, hotel chains, vehicles. She and Toby tried to find any commonalities, any local threads running through them, but they couldn’t. They ran algos Toby created on the spot to find underlying links, but there were none. The only commonality was that the investments were huge.
Whatever it was, it was going to be big. And bad.
7:30. Emma stopped for a moment when the figures started blurring, hanging her head. A strong hand rubbed her sore neck muscles and shoulder muscles. God, that felt good.
7:32. She bent back over the keyboard when Hope’s face appeared on the monitor. She was in her office. Her boyfriend Luke hovered in the background, looking grim. A third person appeared on the big wall monitor and Emma did a double take. He looked like the husband of a friend of Hope’s and of Felicity, Lauren Jackman. Emma had seen photos of her husband. Jacko Jackman, a frightening looking man everyone said was a genuine hardass except around his wife, Lauren, and daughter, Alice. And around Felicity and Hope. Everyone else had to watch out.
The man on the monitor looked exactly like Jacko Jackman except thirty years older and with a full head of steel gray hair where Jacko shaved his head.
