Checking my phone, I move on to the next transaction on the list, queue it up on the video, and let it play. “Elena Hisai, a hundred thousand units on two one oh four at thirteen oh four hours… ”
The monitors show a busy time in the bank, probably a typical late lunch hour rush on a weekday, with lines at every teller station. A lot of customers take cash, and there’s too much blur and obstruction to make out every chip that moves across the counter. I let the video play past the minute mark, waiting for someone to be escorted out by security, but that doesn’t happen.
“Couldn’t tell much from that,” Brady says.
“Me neither. Next.”
I play a couple more, but they’re just as unclear. I don’t see a security escort on any of them, but I can’t say for sure that the exchanges listed didn’t happen. The next one up is the first repeat—Arjun Chatterjee, ninety-one thousand units on seven ten thirteen at nine forty-four. I queue up the video and play it at half speed. It’s a quiet period with only two people taking out cash over the course of the minute on the records. The first of the withdrawals is just a single hundred-unit chip. In the second, a woman takes a few chips of unclear denomination. As she turns away from the counter to leave, I freeze the playback.
“You see what I’m seeing, Brady?”
He hesitates. “What?”
“This is not the same woman from the earlier video.”
Another pause as he looks closer. “It isn’t?”
“No.” I roll the video back to the point where the money crosses the counter. I can see the labels on about half of them, and they’re all twenties. “Three hundred twenty-unit chips. Even if the other three are thousand unit chips, what does that add up to?”
“Three thousand sixty,” he answers immediately. “Not enough.”
“Not even close.”
“So what does it mean?”
The obviousness of the conclusion doesn’t make it any less important or any less heavy. “It means these withdrawals never happened.”
I sit frozen in the chair, silent for maybe a few seconds or maybe a few minutes, plunging into the abyss of the deeper implications of this revelation. This whole time I’ve been operating on the assumption that if Marvin Chan got his weevil cultures through blackmail, the secret he threatened to reveal must have been the source of the weevil cultures itself. Whoever supplied the eggs had to get them by some illegal means, and it seemed to me that those means would be the obvious, easy target of blackmail. But what if it was something else Chan threatened to reveal? What if the weevils were peripheral? If Chan stumbled on a money laundering scheme and demanded a high price for his silence, the launderer would need some method of mutually assured destruction. Maybe the weevils were that option—they were valuable as payment, sure, but maybe they were more valuable for the fact that revealing Chan’s possession of them would have doomed both Chan and his blackmail victim…
“Taryn?” Brady is asking. “Taryn? You going to put up the next one or not?”
I snap out of my line of thought slightly annoyed at the interruption. “No, Brady,” I tell him calmly. “I think that’s all we need.” Standing up, I step away from the chair and the monitors. If the security guards are thinking anything, I can’t read it on their faces as I pass between them to the door. “Thanks, gentlemen.”
“We’ll show you out,” says the shorter one, a stocky man with sallow skin, a pinched face, and a prematurely bald head. He opens the secure door ahead of me. “After you.”
I get the message, and flash him a disingenuous smile as I exit into the hallway. He follows behind Brady and me to the door out into the lobby, then opens that for us as well, standing aside as we exit. The door snaps shut behind us, and again we’re in the corner of a vast, busy space filled with strangers and low-level noise.
Glancing around uncomfortably, Brady leans a bit closer and asks, “Those people don’t even exist, do they?”
“I doubt it.”
“So where’s the money going?”
“This is not the place to talk about this,” I tell him, mindful of the cameras all around us. “And I thought you were off this now anyway.”
“Hey,” he says, “a thank you would be nice. You were about to get turned away before I came in and rescued you.”
He’s right, but that only makes it more annoying. “Whatever you say, Brady.”
“If those names are not real people, how did they get on Commerce Board payroll?” he asks. “That’s what I want to know.”
Why is he asking these questions? Is he trying to probe my suspicions, test what I know?
The info, or lack thereof, that I’ve picked up here seems vital, but for the life of me, I can’t put it all together. Dr. Chan must have put the names of those Commerce Board employees on his patient list for a reason. Was it a failsafe like Troy Sales might have been? A mechanism to prevent his blackmail victim from taking him down? Did he even know that if he was to die under suspicious circumstances the trail would lead here? If that was his plan, the person he was blackmailing must have seen the patient list at some point, though I suppose Chan could have shared it with whoever he wanted…
“Taryn?”
“We can’t talk about it here, Brady,” I snap. “Don’t you get that?”
He holds up his hands, backing off. “Sorry.”
“Let’s go,” I tell him, resigned. “I’m sure you’ve got work to do.” I start out ahead of him, trying to keep my distance from customers. I can hear the sound of his hard-soled dress shoes on the stone as he follows, but I don’t bother looking back.
About halfway to the exit, I stop suddenly, paralyzed with surprise and suspicion and fear. Walking through one of the main entrance doors is a courier, dressed in the same uniform as the one I killed in ParkChung Tower, except this one is wearing a bright red cap on his head. He’s lean and fit, with narrow but otherwise generic features, and he’s carrying a brown box exactly the same as the one that blew up Troy Sales’s office.
“Package?” he calls loudly. “Who takes deliveries?”
He’s drawing a suspicious amount of attention to himself. My first thought is that he’s coming after me, but he doesn’t make a move in my direction or even search the crowd for me, heading instead toward the tellers’ counters. Surely the bank’s security data is backed up somewhere off-site, so if this guy blows up the bank he won’t eliminate whatever incriminating evidence is in the video footage. What could he be doing?
I’ve got no time to think, no time to wait and watch. Determined and hurried but keeping my pace even and cool, I leave Brady behind and cross the floor toward the courier, refusing to let my eyes leave him even though the possibility enters my mind that he is a decoy, bait to draw my attention so that I can be attacked from a more advantageous angle. He arrives at a teller window, where he places his box on the counter, says a word to the woman behind the window, and curtly walks away. I change direction slightly, aiming to cut him off.
And that’s when I see it. My heart leaps at the sight of the object in his left hand: a small, simple, matte-gray tube. A proximity detonator. Just like the one the bomber used at ParkChung.
14
I quicken my steps, hurrying toward the courier but trying not to alert him or alarm the bank’s customers. He’s moving fast, though, and he’s closer to the exit than I am to him. Each step feels like a mile, each second an hour. I’ll never make it. His lack of discretion is troubling, but as he nears those glass doors, I’m running out of time and running out of choices.
Faced with no other option, I break into a full run. “Stop!” I shout, pushing an old man out of my way. “Stop the man in the red hat!”