Matthew Mather's Compendium

by Matthew Mather

  An FBI agent walked by the open door to Jake’s office, staring hard at Jake as he passed. There were a few new rules in the office this week. No closed doors. No paper shredding. No deleting of any files, not while FBI agents tore through Donovan’s office like an angry pack of dogs.

  “Susie,” Jake called out, “could you pull up all of Mr. Sinclair’s files?”

  The cubicle pit was a mess—people yelling, telephones ringing. The phone lines were jammed, so shouting was the easier channel of communication. Trying to act normal, with the FBI running from office to office, was like trying to carry on a conversation when having a colonoscopy.

  “Susie! SINCLAIR, please!” Jake exhaled and waited, but got no response. “Susie!” he yelled again.

  “Get it yourself!” came her angry reply. She scowled and ducked behind her cubicle wall. She didn’t like Jake ordering her around, even though that’s exactly what assistants were for.

  “I’m sorry, are you in the middle of another online shoe shopping bid?” Jake said loudly.

  Sometimes a little public shaming was the only way to get things done with her. He was going to have to fire her. Sure, the past week was crazy, but he’d been having problems with her for months. Closing his eyes, Jake leaned his head back. One other new policy from the feds. No hiring or firing.

  Atlas wasn’t closed, not yet, but at the rate clients were leaving, it wouldn’t take long for the inevitable. This morning, everyone stared at each other around the coffee machine, trying to remember what deals Donovan did with them, how they might be exposed.

  Another light lit up on his phone. Groaning, Jake punched the button. “Jake O’Connell here.”

  “Jake?” replied a trembling voice. “Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s Jake, who is…” He frowned. “Mom?”

  “Hello, Jakey,” his mother said over the line.

  She never called him at work. She never usually called at all. He didn’t know she even knew his number. It had to be something to do with his father. “Are you okay?” Jake asked breathlessly. “What did he do, did he hurt you?”

  “No, no,” his mother answered, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  Jake plugged his other ear. “Mom! Speak up, please, I can’t hear you. What’s wrong?”

  Silence.

  “Mom, are you okay? What’s going on?”

  “Sean’s dead.”

  The paper shuffling and shouting faded out of Jake’s senses. “Wh…what did you say?” he stammered. “Did you say something about Sean?”

  “Sean’s dead,” his mother repeated.

  Blood rushed into Jake’s face, his fingertips tingled. “Sean’s dead? Sean Womack?”

  “Yes, little Sean. His aunt called me early this morning. Said there was a traffic accident in London, or something like that. You should call her.”

  “Sean Womack, you’re saying something’s wrong with him? I just talked to him on the weekend.”

  “He’s dead, Jakey. I’m sorry. Call his Aunt Rita. She knows more. I’m sorry.”

  Jake’s hands went numb. He stared at the phone in his hand. “Okay. Thanks.” He hung up.

  An image formed in Jake’s mind, of the first time he met Sean. In a darkened room, bunk beds lining the walls, a foster home when he was six years old. Sean’s face appearing in the darkness, talking about a fort he built out back. About playing with goats.

  Goats.

  That’s what came to Jake’s mind.

  What did he feel?

  Nothing. He felt numb. What should he feel?

  The last time Jake spoke to Sean was Saturday, two days ago, and he hadn’t called him back since then. Why hadn’t he called Sean back again? When they spoke, Sean told him not to worry about it. That’s the reason Jake was trying to tell himself, but that wasn’t true.

  He’d been avoiding it, to be honest. Didn’t want to believe that Sean was involved in something illegal, not after getting that memory key from Donovan. Didn’t want to hear it. Sean had been the one to rise above it all. Though a part of him had been desperate to talk to Sean, he hadn’t made the call.

  And now he couldn’t.

  Not ever.

  6

  Shenzhen

  China

  “So Yamamoto just dropped dead?” Jin asked.

  Shen Shi looked up with a mouthful of noodles and nodded. He raised one arm and then let it fall to the table, slapping it down hard. “Boom, like that. Fell over dead, right in the Goldman Sachs main conference room with everyone watching. It was awful.”

  They were having lunch on the top floor of Building Two of the Shenzhen Nanshan Hi-Tech Incubator. Shenzhen was the city next to Hong Kong, more working class—with much lower rent—than the financial metropolis across the bay. Hong Kong, Shenzhen and the city of Guangzhou spanned a single urban area.

  The noise Shen Shi made hitting the table earned disapproving glances from people at other tables in the cafeteria. The Hi-Tech Incubator building they had their office in was a serious place.

  Or it was supposed to be. Jin and Shen Shi were rarely serious.

  Jin would have giggled at the stares from the stern men in suits, but Shen Shi wasn’t smiling. Yamamoto’s death must have really affected him, and she could see it in Shen Shi’s eyes.

  Jin and Shen Shi had known each other their whole lives. Jin was born in Boston, and Shen Shi here in Guangdong province, but they were the same age and had spent most of their summers together growing up. Jin’s parents went to America in the mid-1980s, before Jin was born, part of an early scientific exchange program of researchers between Northeastern University and Guangdong. It was only supposed to last for a few years, but her family had stayed, becoming American citizens.

  When Jin was snared in a hacking investigation four years ago in Boston, part of a botched intrusion testing program, Shen Shi had offered to help her start a business in China. She’d jumped at the chance. From an office on this floor, they now ran a data mining business that searched through huge repositories of digital information for their clients, which included banks and government ministries. Jin was more of the geek side of their team—reserved, shy—while Shen Shi was outgoing, a real go-getter businessman type. A perfect partnership.

  “So you were in the limo that picked him up?” Jin was curious to get a first-hand report. “Right from his doctor’s office?”

  Yamamoto’s death was front page news in the Shenzhen Economic Daily. Though he’d died on Saturday, the press hadn’t found out until late on Sunday. It wasn’t surprising. The local government kept tight control over the media.

  “That’s the weird thing.” Shen Shi shoveled in another mouthful of noodles. “Why would he drop dead right after getting his heart checked out?”

  It was common knowledge that Yamamoto, the chairman of Japan’s largest financial fund, had had a heart attack the previous year. The news stories had been rife with speculation, but none had mentioned that he’d been at his doctor’s office minutes before his death.

  “Just a coincidence,” Jin offered. “I mean, it’s called a heart attack for a reason.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

  The way Shen Shi said it invited speculation. “Until what?” Jin asked.

  Shen Shi grimaced and looked out the window.

  “Are you okay?” Jin asked. She’d never seen her cousin like this. Distracted. Distant.

  “It’s not just Yamamoto…” Shen Shi’s words drifted off.

  “Then what is it?” Jin asked.

  Shen Shi looked her in the eye and worked his mouth around as if he tasted something terrible. “Sean Womack, you remember him?”

  “Sure.” Jin nodded. They’d worked on contracts at the Bank of China with Sean, many years before. Sean even helped her with lawyers when she was snared in the hacking investigation in Boston.

  “He died yesterday, in London. Just saw a news article today, some random t
raffic accident.”

  “My God, really?”

  “I didn’t tell you before, but he was the one that recommended us to Yamamoto.”

  Jin had one hand to her mouth, still trying to process the news. She wasn’t close to Sean, not in years, but still, he was a friend. It didn’t surprise her that Sean had recommended them to Yamamoto—Sean knew everyone in the financial world.

  Jin spoke through her hand. “Sean sent me an odd email three weeks ago.”

  “What did he want?”

  “I don’t know, and he didn’t respond when I asked him.” And now I can’t, Jin realized with a sinking sensation that settled in her stomach.

  Shen Shi frowned until his forehead creased into red ridges. “All I know is that some of the chairmen of the big banks were present at that Yamamoto meeting. Something big was going down…”

  Jin connected the dots. “Wait, so you think Yamamoto was killed?” She couldn’t help the excitement in her voice.

  None of the newspaper articles said anything except that it was a heart attack. She tried to keep quiet. They spoke in English—Jin’s Cantonese was rusty—so it was doubtful they’d be overheard. Not here, anyway.

  Shen Shi pushed away his plate of noodles and opened his laptop. He moved around the other side of the cafeteria table to sit next to Jin as it started up.

  “I don’t know.” He started up a data visualization tool. “Yamamoto had me investigating the connection between shell companies spawned by decentralized autonomous corporations.”

  Jin frowned. “Like bitcoin companies?” It wasn’t her area of expertise. She pulled up a web definition on her laptop:

  A Decentralized Autonomous Corporation (DAC) is a network of artificial intelligence agents which divides its labor into two parts: (1) tasks it pays or incentivizes humans to do, and (2) tasks which it performs itself. It can be thought of as a corporation run without any human involvement, under the control of an incorruptible set of business rules.

  Shen Shi nodded. “Bitcoin was the first autonomous corporation, if you want to look at it that way. You can look at them as currencies, but you can also look at them as equities, like companies on regular stock markets. Their value is already in the tens of billions. At this rate they’ll become some of the most valuable corporations on the planet in a decade.” He pulled up a graphic on screen. “And nobody’s in charge of them.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Well, they’re in charge of themselves.”

  “And these autonomous corporations Yamamoto was looking at, they’re not cryptocurrencies? What are they for?”

  Shen Shi slid closer and lowered his voice. “From an outside view, it looks like they’re sending money into the accounts of Politburo members and organizations affiliated with the cyber wings of the PLA.”

  The Peoples’ Liberation Army. Jin and Shen Shi did contract work for them from time to time. Everyone did. It was a massive organization in China.

  Shen Shi opened another window on his screen. “After Yamamoto died, I went and pulled data sets across all the banks we work with to see if there were more connections.”

  It was a common practice. By reviewing data across numerous platforms, it was possible to detect cross-channel schemes—systems that criminals used that hopped from one network to another, making them more difficult to track. He moved his laptop in front of her.

  “So what am I looking at?” Jin tried to make sense of the information on the screen. It was a list of individuals, with a dozen parameters correlating them together. “Are these people Yamamoto suspected of fraud? Was he going to the heads of the banks with this?”

  Shen Shi shook his head. “I’m not sure. These people, they’re acting in strange ways.”

  Fraud detection used to mean keeping track of obvious things like if someone started buying expensive jewelry at three in the morning, or bought something in Amsterdam and then in Atlanta ten minutes later. Now, though, they looked at the amount of time it took a user to type in their password, how long they stayed online, who they interacted with, and more by drawing on a huge amount of data to find anything that looked unusual.

  “Do you think it’s identity theft?” asked Jin.

  It was a growing problem. Working for multiple banks on fraud investigations, Jin and Shen Shi had access to a range of commercial and government data sources—medical, police, social media, credit card, and financial records. Not all of it was legal to access, although “legal” was a malleable word in China.

  “No,” replied Shen Shi, whispering even lower. “At least, not in the usual sense, because nothing is ever reported. These individuals don’t call in about stolen money or fraudulent credit cards. Not ever.”

  Jin studied the data maps. A chill ran down her back. She closed the laptop. “Let’s get out of here, go back to my place.” There were too many people around them.

  Shen Shi nodded.

  They gathered their coats and bags and walked down the long corridor to the elevators. Shen Shi punched the down button. “You see what I mean? Isn’t it strange?”

  Jin nodded. “But you can make enough data look like anything.”

  The elevator pinged to their floor.

  “Maybe, but that many people correlated together like that?” Shen Shi looked Jin in the eye. “That’s an extreme outlier.”

  An outlier, something so far outside of the norm that the data point laid by itself. The signal of something unusual, that wasn’t a part of the rest. Or something that wasn’t right.

  The elevator doors opened. Shen Shi turned, took a step forward, and disappeared.

  Jin didn’t even hear her cousin scream as he dropped down the elevator shaft, just the thud—thud—thud of his body hitting metal girders, over and over as he fell twenty floors.

  AUGUST 16th

  Tuesday

  7

  Upper West Side

  New York City

  “Is that him?” the new guy asked.

  Cormac Ryker leaned forward and squinted, trying to see through the glint of the afternoon sun shining on the windshield of the old Caddy they were doing surveillance from.

  “No, that’s not Jake O’Connell.” Cormac opened the file sitting in his lap and shuffled through a few pages. They were only here to gather information, at least for now. He held a picture up. “I think it’s his brother.”

  “You sure?” His new partner opened his own file folder. “O’Connell’s brother is in jail.”

  Cormac frowned. How did I get stuck with this idiot? “Weren’t you supposed to verify that last week?”

  “I did. He was still in Attica, doing a dime for armed robbery. Wasn’t due out for another year.”

  “Well, he’s out now.”

  His partner nodded. “I guess so.”

  And that was it. No apology for messing up, no ownership of the mistake.

  Cormac let it go.

  This time.

  It was nice to be back up north, to have some fresh air to breathe. Cormac’s new employer seemed to want him in and around New York, which was fine by him. Maybe he was getting too old to be out in the wild. If he didn’t eat another taco for as long as he lived, that would be fine by him.

  Officially, he didn’t know who his new employer was, or at least, his employer had chosen to remain anonymous. But Cormac still had a good idea. Intelligence was a key skill of any operative, so he made it his job to find out who—and what—he was dealing with. And he knew this was one big fish. The paydays made it feel like Christmas.

  He laughed to himself.

  During his two years in Mexico, he’d found out that there was a new Santa that people got presents from, but this one wasn’t a jolly old man. The cartels he’d worked for worshipped the Santa Muerta—the patron saint of death—whose shrines made the Saint look like a grim reaper in drag. It was a serious deal for them. Narco cultura. The pushers and dealers, mules and pimps, and even the human traffickers n
eeded someone to pray to.

  Cormac never understood the need for a higher power. He figured other people made it up to hide their fear and trembling—but his hands were steady. His eyes were as clear as his conscience.

  Cormac’s new partner turned to look at him. “You’re Hard Core, aren’t you? I’ve heard of you.”

  Cormac glanced at him and shook his head, then returned to staring at the entrance of Jake O’Connell’s apartment building. His partner tried to introduce himself the first time they met, but Cormac had stopped him. Wearing Ray-Bans, camouflage shirtsleeves rolled up, the man looked like he was showing up for a film audition for the part of the generic bad guy. Cormac’s greatest skill, like a chameleon, was to blend in, become a part of the landscape.

  Make them think you’re weak.

  The little guy.

  Then they never saw you coming.

  The skill of surviving in hostile environments wasn’t about muscle or even firepower, but more about intuition—about knowing the enemy’s customs and rituals, knowing what the right thing to do was in any given situation.

  Right now, the thing to do was to try to ignore his partner as much as possible.

  How some of these idiots got through Q Course was a mystery to Cormac, but then, he came from a different generation. Even so, it was a small community, and they all knew each other. His new partner was staring at him, still waiting for a response, smiling at his own cleverness. He didn’t realize it, but he had just done something dangerous.

  “Some people call me that,” Cormac replied.

  ‘Hard Core’ Cormac Ryker was a nickname he earned early in his career. Cormac was top of his class in Jump School and the Special Operations Preparation Course and Assessment—SOPC and SFAS—at Fort Bragg after two tours in Afghanistan. He had a special skill with languages, and went deep on several missions. Left alone out there, things sometimes got turned around. It wasn’t all black and white. But when it came down to it, the problem wasn’t what Cormac had done. It was that his superiors caught him.