They'd had a close call in Hamburg. Someone had made sure Helmut Schmidt would disappear. Whoever that someone was couldn't have known the team was interested in him. Schmidt had been eliminated for some other reason.
Not about the team, yet…something bothered her about it. Elizabeth's intuition was tapping on her awareness, telling her to pay attention. Her intuition was one of her strengths and she'd learned long ago to honor it. Experience told her that sooner or later whatever it was about would become clear.
Her father had taught her to believe in intuition. She'd been a teenager at the time, a senior in high school. The Judge had been sitting on the porch outside their Colorado home, sipping bourbon. It was a pleasant autumn afternoon, the smell of burning leaves in air touched with a hint of winter to come.
Two days before, five of her classmates had died when their '57 Chevy plowed into a bridge abutment at over a hundred miles an hour. Elizabeth and most of the older students at her high school had been at a party after a football victory. The driver of the car was the high school quarterback. He'd been drinking beer to celebrate. Elizabeth was telling her father how she'd had a feeling something bad was going to happen as she watched her friends drive away.
She remembered the sound of his voice, warmed by the bourbon and the afternoon sun.
"People talk about intuition as if it's some kind of feminine nonsense, but it's a valuable thing to have. Some people have a natural gift for it. This isn't the first time you've had a feeling like that, is it?"
"No. But how do you explain it?"
"I don't think there is an explanation. A psychologist would probably say that the unconscious puts together clues from what the mind is observing and figures out a result. That might be true sometimes but I don't think it's always that simple. Maybe your unconscious put together enough clues to tell you that those kids shouldn't be driving and could get in trouble. But I'll bet it was more than that. What did it feel like?"
"It's hard to explain," Elizabeth had said. "Like a warning, an electrical tingling. It even had a sense of color to it, a sort of unpleasant, yellow feeling."
Her father nodded, rocking back and forth in the chair on the porch.
"See? That's what I mean. You're describing a thought, a sensation and a color, all associated with a bad feeling. An experience, not just an idea. That sounds like a lot more than just putting a few clues together. It's a gift to have intuition like that and you should always pay attention to it. Don't be afraid to act on it, if that's what it's telling you."
"But what if I'm wrong?"
"What if you are? Once in a while you probably will be. But what about the times when you're right? Would you have gotten in that car if they'd offered you a ride?"
"They did offer me a ride," Elizabeth said. "It didn't feel right. That's why I didn't go. After they left I felt like a fool."
Her father looked at her in surprise. "Thank God you didn't get in that car. If you had, you'd be dead. I think that proves my point."
Something about what had happened in Hamburg felt wrong. Even though she couldn't see how, her intuition was making a connection to what had happened to Selena in Vienna. The only thing she could do was wait and see if something turned up to prove her intuition right.
CHAPTER 35
It took less than twenty minutes for Stephanie to break through the firewalls surrounding Moscow's central bank. It didn't leave her with a high opinion of whoever had set them up. In a world where cyber security was becoming a major focus of modern warfare, lax security was a glaring mistake on the part of the Russians. An average hacker would never have gotten in but Stephanie was no ordinary hacker.
She began searching for the money sent to Golovkin and through him, to Orlov. Finding out which accounts were theirs was complicated. Everything was coded by number, but Stephanie knew that somewhere on the bank's servers a list existed that connected numbers with names. It took longer to find that list than it had to break through the bank security. She identified the files and copied them to Virginia. The enormous capability of the Crays Stephanie had at her disposal made it easy.
The money flowing into Golovkin's account had come from four separate sources. Two were in the Cayman Islands, one was in Geneva and one was in Leipzig, Germany. She noted the identifiers for the banks and shut down her connection to Moscow.
More than seventy billion euros had been transferred to Moscow during the past year. The latest transfer had taken place only a few weeks ago. Somehow the transactions had failed to trigger the automatic monitoring used by Interpol to track large transfers that might signal terrorist activity or drug money or any one of a number of criminal enterprises. Interpol wasn't the only one looking for suspicious money movements but none of the agencies responsible for keeping an eye on international finance had noticed.
How on earth could this happen? Stephanie asked herself. Whoever is moving this money has found a way to subvert every safeguard that's been put in place. The money comes out of the banks and nobody pays attention. It ends up in Moscow and it might as well be a ten dollar deposit for all anybody seems to care. This isn't supposed to be possible.
She had found the banks but she still didn't know who had made the deposits in them. She chose one of the banks in the Caymans and hacked into it. She was surprised to find that security on this bank was far more sophisticated than what she'd run into in Moscow.
This is getting interesting, she thought.
The first transfer she tracked came from the account of an offshore drilling corporation working in the Gulf of Mexico. She followed the trail to the corporate servers and discovered it was a shell, a false front for another corporation involved in hazardous waste. From there she was led to a mining corporation with interests in Africa. She found herself in a complex maze of corporate accounts and blind alleys. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide the real source of the money. At some point in the afternoon Steph realized there was something familiar about the pattern she was looking at. Where had she seen it before?
Then it came to her.
Gutenberg. The banker who ran AEON. But he's dead, it couldn't be him doing this.
It seemed impossible but when she made the connection, Steph realized that it had to be him. The kind of manipulation she was tracking was as unique as an artist's brushstrokes on a painting, far beyond the usual corporate shell game played by tax evaders all over the world, a masterpiece of fraud and concealment. Gutenberg's mental fingerprints were all over it.
At the end of the day she went upstairs to talk with Elizabeth.
Elizabeth took one look at her and smiled to herself. "You look excited, Steph. What did you find?"
"You're not going to believe it."
"After the last year or two I think I would believe anything. What is it this time? Were you able to track the source of the money?"
"The funds were transferred from four different banks. The real source was hidden behind dozens of shell accounts. I've only seen something like it once before."
"Where?"
"AEON. This is Gutenberg's work."
Elizabeth looked at her in surprise. "That can't be. Gutenberg was killed when his château burned down."
"I said you weren't going to believe it."