Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” was throbbing in her ears as she looked at Rayburn’s Seattle account. It had been opened on April 12, one week before Rockville. It showed an opening deposit of fifty dollars.
Two days later, on April 14, Rayburn received an electronic funds transfer of two hundred fifty thousand dollars.
A quarter of a million dollars for a sheet metal worker without a job.
There had been no further activity on the account.
Voss’s heart pounded. She began moving her mouse.
Where did you come from, quarter million? she thought.
She isolated the transaction number with the Seattle bank, then started the backward trace. She worried that she’d run in to an offshore account. She wouldn’t be able to track it if that were the case—that exceeded RIO’s legal mandate. Of course, she had a hacker on retainer who could find such things if needed. Unofficially.
The trace stopped at a number. Voss breathed a sigh of relief. A domestic account, at least. But that was where the trail went cold. A series of firewalls stopped her from going further, and she was left with only the number. The account was probably in a private bank somewhere. She would need more paperwork completed—not to mention an order by a federal court—to do anything else in official channels.
She didn’t know who owned the account, but she could get a sense of what else the account was doing. She asked the computer to do a search for other transactions originating with the numbered account. She’d traced the payment to Jeremy Rayburn backward from the recipient. Now she was going the other direction, starting from the originating account to see where its funds were sent.
The search went to five minutes, then ten. Voss took off the baseball cap and smoothed her hair. The screen flickered, then the results settled onto it.
The bank account that had paid Jeremy Rayburn had transferred funds into accounts at various banks around the country. All were in the names of anonymous-sounding business entities—Midwest Enterprises, Affiliated Distribution Systems, Western Data. All but one.
Another numbered account. Voss clicked the number.
Nothing happened.
She traced her finger along the screen again. The first set of numbers was familiar. She’d seen it many times. Voss worked with accounts having the same prefix on a daily basis. But the number was incomplete. The last seven-digit sequence was grayed out.
Voss reached over and turned off the music in midchord. Rush fell silent.
She reached for the phone and called Meg Tolman. “Meg? It’s Kerry. Did I wake you?”
“Trust me, Kerry, you didn’t wake me,” Tolman said. “What’s up?”
“The April 19 money,” Voss said, still staring at her monitor.
“What about it?”
“There is none.”
“What?”
Voss explained, then detailed how she’d traced Rayburn’s deposit backward.
“But you can’t find out who owns the account,” Tolman said.
“Not yet, but I—”
She blinked at the screen. Her cursor had moved, ever so slightly.
Voss’s right hand, the one nearest the mouse, was holding the phone. Her left hand was on the other side of her keyboard. She couldn’t have bumped the mouse by accident.
“Kerry?” Tolman said.
Voss blinked. The cursor was still.
Overactive imagination, Voss thought.
“This account,” she said, “the one that’s being fed by the account that paid Rayburn—”
She cradled the phone against her shoulder and put her hand on the mouse. The cursor jumped before she could move it.
“Dear God,” she said.
“What’s the matter, Kerry?”
“Someone’s in our system, Meg. My cursor—someone knows I’m looking at this, and is tracking me live right now.”
“Shit,” Tolman said. “Get out of there, Kerry. Leave the building. Don’t go home.”
“But the kids,” Voss said, rolling her chair away from the desk. “They’re coming back from their dad’s at six o’clock. I—”
“Kerry, listen to me. Leave … the … building. Go to my dad’s. You remember the address? He’ll be able to help you. Just get out of there. You’re on a RIO line, right? Hang it up and call me from your cell when you’re out of the building.”
Voss had an image of her cell phone, on the breakfast bar in her house, right beside the Diet Coke can she had almost spilled. “My cell … I left it at home. I had this idea, and I ran out of the house—”
“Okay, Kerry, okay,” Tolman said. “Get out. I’ll call my dad.”
“I’m going.…”
“The account,” Tolman said. “What is it?”
“It’s us,” Voss said.
“What the hell do you mean, it’s us?”
“It’s a federal government account. I recognize the number sequence.”
“Oh Jesus, Kerry,” Tolman said. “What department? Can you tell what department? Where does it go?”
“The last numbers are grayed out. But I’ve seen that before. That means it’s a black account, off the books, off budget.” Voss jumped, as she heard the front door to the RIO suite rattling. Thank God she’d locked herself in when she came into the office. “Meg, the door. The door to our—”
“Go, go, go! Go down the corridor by the break room, and out that emergency exit. It opens onto the back stairs.”
Voss threw the phone in the cradle and ran.
The door thumped once, twice. She bit her lip and sprinted for the corridor. The lights were off and she caromed off the wall twice before finding the exit sign. Voss crashed through the door and into a tiny alcove with concrete flooring, hearing the RIO door splintering open somewhere behind her.
She pushed open the second door and onto the stairs, moving quickly, silently, thankful for all the times she’d tortured herself at the gym. Four floors below, she emerged from the stairwell behind the building’s main elevator bank. She heard footsteps, both above her and from the other side of the elevator in the lobby.
Voss spun away from the elevators and out a glass door, into the bright sunshine. The back door of the building opened onto an alley, with the expected dumpsters. She turned right and ran for the parking lot. At the edge of the building, she stopped, scanning the lot. It was almost empty—there was a small SUV that she thought belonged to a lawyer who officed on the second floor, a couple of old pickup trucks that always seemed to be there, and her red Nissan Altima. Otherwise, the lot was Sunday-morning empty.
Voss ran. But the kids …
She would have to call her ex from Ray Tolman’s house. He would understand. He had to. The kids would be okay to stay with him until—until what?
She made it to the Altima and reached into her pocket, then dropped her keys on the pavement.
The footsteps came from nowhere, everywhere, the other side of her car, behind her …
Then hands were grabbing her, the hands of a strong, muscular man.
“Easy,” he said. “Don’t fight. That just pisses me off.”
“No!” Voss screamed, and the big man clapped a hand over her mouth.
“All the smart people are either asleep or off praying somewhere,” said the man. “You should have stayed in bed.”
A car pulled alongside, a black SUV, larger than the one that belonged to the second-floor lawyer. Voss struggled, but the man was at least a foot taller than she. He tossed her into the back of the SUV as if she were a sack of flour, then put his weight on top of her. Her head rested against the car door.
A door slammed. “Go!” the man said, and the engine accelerated.
Voss started to struggle, to crane her neck and see out the SUV’s window.
“No, no,” said the man on top of her.
Voss kept moving.
Then the man’s fist crashed into the side of her head. “I don’t get off on hitting women,” he said, “but I’ve got a job to do, and you better be still a
nd be quiet.”
Voss felt nauseous. “Who hired you?” she managed to say.
The fist rained down again, this time in her eye. The pain bloomed bright and hot and hard.
“Where are you taking me?”
This time, the blow was on her cheek.
“Don’t be stupid,” the man said. “You won’t be so pretty with your face all rearranged.”
The kids, Voss thought. The kids are coming back tonight.
Voss fell silent, resting her head against the seat, no longer trying to see outside. The man loosened his grip, but she was still pinned. “Better,” he said.
She blinked. Even that simple action hurt. The eye was beginning to swell already. But Voss’s mind wouldn’t stop racing. The anonymous account had paid terrorist Jeremy Rayburn. It had also paid large sums of money to a federal government account. A “black” account. Money that didn’t really exist. But Voss knew that money had to sit somewhere, and while it was sitting there, she could track it. Unless it was tens and twenties stuffed under someone’s bed—and clearly it wasn’t—she could track anything.
No, I can’t. I’m in this SUV with a swollen eye, probably a broken cheekbone, and my face hurts like hell. I can’t do anything. I don’t even know if I’ll be alive in another hour.
The kids, she thought, jumbled up with seven more numbers …
The two thoughts ran together. A plan began to form in Voss’s mind.
CHAPTER
27
“Shit!” Tolman shouted. “Shit, shit, shit!”
She arched her arm as if she were going to throw her phone across the dining room table. Andrew stopped whistling in midnote and glared at her. She pushed her chair away and turned her back to him. He spat in her direction.
“Andrew,” Journey said, keeping his voice down. He glanced at Tolman. “Remember…”
“Sorry,” she muttered, walking in long strides across the living room, throwing open the front door, and stepping onto the porch. Sharp followed.
“Shit,” she said again when he joined her.
“What?” Sharp said.
“Kerry. They tapped into RIO’s network somehow. They saw what she was doing—”
“Who?”
“Kerry Voss, my financial analyst.” Tolman paced the length of the long porch. “She said the money went out of an account to the April 19 leader, but also into a government account. An off-the-books account. A nonexistent account.”
Sharp said nothing. The screen door opened and Journey and Andrew came out. Journey pointed and his son sat in a lawn chair with soccer balls emblazoned across it. Tolman looked at him. “If these people, whoever they are, can get into RIO’s network, they can do a hell of a lot of damage.”
“Not to mention three buildings blown up at the same time,” Journey said.
“I’m thinking we need to go to West Texas,” Tolman said, meeting his eyes.
“You’re getting ahead of yourself. There’s a lot of space in the Texas Panhandle, and in most of it, there’s nothing there. We have to get a clear picture of where it is. Otherwise we’re wasting our time.”
“Can you access GIS from the college?”
“The Geography Department. But I don’t have keys—”
“They’ll let you in,” Tolman said. “Make arrangements for Andrew. We have to get out of here. I wonder if Kerry made it to Dad’s yet.” She pulled out her phone. “Dad?” she said when her father answered. “I’m sending a friend to your house.”
“What? What’s going on?” Ray Tolman said.
“No time, Dad. You remember Kerry Voss? She came over to dinner a few times.”
“I remember. The short one with the Big Bird tattoo and all the kids. What’s wrong?”
“She’s in trouble and needs a safe place. I’ll explain later.”
“I’ll be ready,” Ray Tolman said, and clicked off.
Her dad was a pro. He didn’t ask questions when there was no time for questions.
“We should get our things and go,” Tolman said. “First the college, then we plan the next step.”
“What’s in Texas?” Sharp asked.
“The Silver Cross,” Journey said. “And that links the past with the present.”
“We hope,” Tolman said.
“We hope,” Journey echoed.
* * *
Half an hour later, as they were piling bags into Sharp’s Jeep, Ray Tolman called. “She’s not here, Meg,” he said.
Tolman closed her eyes and leaned against the Jeep. “My office building,” she said. “There was someone there. Take your weapon. And backup. Can you call your friend Pat Moore from the Bureau? Does he have a line into Hostage Rescue at Quantico?”
“I’ll call him,” her father said. “Pat can get whatever we need. Your friend’s a federal employee with ties to DOJ, so it’ll be a priority. And I’m guessing that I’ll be feeding the cat for a few more days.”
“You better not let Rocky starve. Sit with him awhile when you’re there.”
“Like I’ve said before, that cat hates me.”
“No, he doesn’t. He just—well, maybe he does. He’s a one-person cat.”
Ray Tolman’s voice turned serious again. “Heading out the door now. I’ll find your friend.”
Twenty minutes later, Ray Tolman was on the phone again as the Jeep pulled into the SCC gates. “Found her car. Keys were on the ground beside it. She’s gone, Meg.”
“Shit,” Tolman whispered. “Kerry’s not an investigator. She’s a financial analyst.” She pounded the seat in frustration. “Jesus, she has three little kids.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“I—” Meg Tolman stopped. She pounded the seat again.
I don’t know what to do.
It was, as an adult, as an investigator, an unusual place for her to be. She always had options. She always had ideas about where to go, and that’s where she went. But now she felt nothing, only a windy emptiness.
Her father always used to say, in any situation: Just be ready.
“Just be ready,” she finally told him. “I don’t know what else to say.”
Ray Tolman was silent for a long time. “Let me know. I’ll be here.”
“I know,” his daughter said, and clicked off the call.
Journey directed Sharp to drive around the common to Cullen Hall. Ten minutes later, a South Central security officer let them in to the Geography Department’s computer lab on the fourth floor of Cullen. The room was covered with high-tech color maps on the walls. A dozen computers sat at workstations.
“I can log in using my ID,” Journey said. “Come on, Andrew.” He’d brought puzzles and a ball for Andrew, and he parked him in a corner.
Surprising them, Sharp said, “I’ll sit with him. Does he like to play ball?”
“Sometimes,” Journey said. “Roll it back and forth to him. He enjoys that for a while.”
Tolman settled into an empty desk and took out her laptop. “My Ann Gray search was still too broad—thousands of responses.” She tapped the computer. Across the room, Andrew laughed—a happy and genuine laugh. She and Journey both looked. Sharp was tossing the ball to him, not simply rolling it on the floor. Sometimes Andrew caught it, sometimes he simply raised his hands and the plush ball bounced off his chest. But he was clearly enjoying himself. Sharp was smiling as well. Tolman hadn’t seen Darrell Sharp smile since their Academy days.
Journey and Tolman looked at each other. “You never know,” Journey said.
Tolman returned to her computer and Ann Gray. “I’ll query our database again. Someone like an Ann Gray has to show up somewhere. The government has to know about her. Someone has seen her, knows what she is.” She began tapping keys again.
Journey scanned the map of West Texas into the computer he was using. He brought it up on the screen, thinking about the times he’d used this system, usually with geography faculty nearby in case he became stuck. The resolution on the old map wasn’t great, an
d he tried to sharpen it, setting up the process of georeferencing: first he had to select control points on the old map, places that were known. Then he would overlay a modern, digital map of the same area onto the historic map, matching up the control points.
The surveyor or cartographer who drew this map—Journey guessed it was one of Father Fournier’s “new men” or one of the Mexicans, who would have been more familiar with the region—had done a good job outlining Texas. The shape was distinctive, from the straight line at the top of the Panhandle, to El Paso clinging to the tip at the extreme western edge. These were natural control points. Moving the mouse, Journey clicked at the northwest and northeast edges of the Panhandle, where it hung beneath No Man’s Land—now the Panhandle of Oklahoma. Red dots appeared on the screen where he had placed the markers. Then he scrolled down and placed another point at El Paso—another known quantity on the old map. In between were hundreds of miles of rough country, largely the realm of the Comanche and Kiowa at the time of the Civil War. And of course, the hand-drawn cross—Le Croix d’Argent—in one of the region’s rivers.
With his control points in place, Journey went searching in the college’s GIS database for a current map of Texas. He had it in less than five minutes and was ready to layer the modern map onto the one from 1863. Journey didn’t pretend to understand the mathematic algorithms involved in the process. His geography colleague had tried to explain it to him, but Journey had no interest in algorithms, only results and context. He remembered that the geographer had told him that the computer would “warp” the original map, a process sometimes called “rubber sheeting,” because the program stretched and shrank the image, much akin to a thin sheet of rubber being pulled to fit a certain form.
Journey clicked “OK” and watched the two images begin to merge, the French map from 1863 and the modern digital one.
“Amazing,” Journey said.
“What?” Tolman looked up from her laptop, frowning.
“Technology. You live in a fascinating world, Meg. I don’t live there, but it’s interesting to visit now and again. They didn’t even have this technology when I was in grad school.”
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