“You’re right,” I said. I went over to Checker and tossed the phone back to Rio. “I should stay here and work. You mind taking a ride and making the call?”
Checker groaned.
“What do I ask for?” said Rio.
“A man called Steve,” I answered. “Tell him what we’re doing.”
“We’ll need high-level, verified alerts sent out to a variety of government organizations, both here and overseas,” said Checker, giving up. “Here in the U.S. it’ll be the Secret Service—I can put together a list, but with the whole shadowy multinational organization thing they have going, they might know better than we would. Some support on spoofing our messages to the banks to be authentic would be helpful, too.”
“They’ll want us to turn over the information,” I warned Rio, remembering how thoroughly Steve’s group had dismantled both Courtney’s and Checker’s houses. I thought of Anton and Penny, and wondered how many people would die if we handed over the data. “Whatever you do, don’t agree.”
“Do not worry,” said Rio. “I am not accustomed to allowing anyone to make requirements of me.”
That made me quirk a smile. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the other end of his phone call. “Checker, do you have a secure email address we can give them to coordinate through? Something they wouldn’t be able to trace?”
He grumbled something unintelligible about signing our own death warrants, but wrote one down. I added Steve’s number from memory and handed Rio the paper; he folded it carefully and tucked it in an inside pocket.
“I shall return in a few hours. Cas, if necessary, I have some armaments on the roof.”
“Good,” I said, and turned back to Checker, whose face was a funny shade of white. “Okay, let’s finish this.”
Five hours later, Rio hadn’t gotten back yet, and Checker and I were almost done with our notification algorithm.
And we were in terrible trouble.
Chapter 32
Checker had unearthed the alcohol in Rio’s kitchen. He’d deemed it necessary, after what we had found.
“What happened to your no food or drink rule?” I asked. Not that I could blame him.
“Tequila doesn’t count,” he said, taking another swig. “It’s tequila.”
To be fair, the alcohol didn’t seem to impair his computer skills at all; his fingers hadn’t slowed on the keyboard. “You almost have my alcohol tolerance,” I said.
“Well, then you should be drinking, too! I need company in my paroxysm of misery here.”
“I don’t drink on the job,” I said. “I drink more than enough between jobs.”
“Between jobs, you say?” He took another swig. “You’re on, Cas Russell.”
“On for what?”
“You and me. Drinking contest. Once all this is over. I bet I kick your ass.”
I highly doubted that, but this wasn’t the time for a pissing contest. I snapped my fingers at him. “Hey. Focus, or I’ll cut you off.”
“I’m focused!” he protested, and to be fair, even my math ability could only detect the barest elision in the words. “I can’t do this without drinking. Too depressing.”
I couldn’t argue with him there.
Three hours ago we had realized—well, Checker had realized, with his uncanny savvy about finances and money laundering operations—that the sources of Pithica’s enterprises weren’t merely faceless organizations. To be sure, some were innocuous front businesses, or odd governmental funds, or false charities. But others…
Once we figured out where some of the money was coming from, we started looking more closely. And then more closely. It turned out the lion’s share of Pithica’s revenue came from…well. From places that would have been on Rio’s target list.
I stared at the monitor, feeling nauseated. “Dawna said Pithica basically owned the drug cartels,” I murmured. “She wasn’t lying.”
“Yeah, well, did she mention the human trafficking? Arms dealing? Owning corrupt governments? Holy shit.” Checker’s fingers drummed against the keys, and a few lines of scripting spit out on the screen. He was running his predictive programs again, the same algorithms he’d used on Kingsley’s data to hunt down Pithica in the first place. The same ones we’d been running now for hours, hoping for different results, ever since Checker had become suspicious of what we were looking at. “This is not good, Cas Russell. This is…it’s not good.”
Pithica’s economic model was ingenious. They wanted to make the world a better place, and they were. They hadn’t chosen to steal from just anybody; their benign-looking accounting was siphoning from and slowly strangling off some of the most extensive crime syndicates in the world. The cartels put up a good front, Dawna had said, but on the whole we’ve defanged them…eventually we’ll phase them out entirely, but for now they provide us with means of accomplishing our objectives—
No matter how we ran the mathematical models, if we let Pithica’s victims keep their own money, then they got to use it. And the violence, the human slavery, the human suffering…it was going to spike off the charts afterward.
If we knocked down Pithica this way, we were going to take a whole hell of a lot of innocent people with them.
“They really are doing good,” said Checker. “They weren’t just saying that. Who knows how much else they’ve been doing? They’re probably using all this money to help people even more.”
I swallowed.
“I’m not arguing that they aren’t Evil with a capital E,” said Checker. “But—I guess—are they? Yeah, they manipulate people, and not setting aside that they almost killed you and Arthur, but…it’s not like they’re going around starting wars. More like preventing them.”
“Preventing them by twisting people’s minds around,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Checker. “But…maybe it’s like what Professor X does, you know? I bet in their eyes they’re the heroes.”
“What about what they do to children? The children they take?”
“You mean like Daniela Saio? What about them? We don’t even know—”
“She was ten,” I said. “We know enough.”
“Yeah, and what did they do to her? Gave her telepathic superpowers? Dude, I’d go in for that in a heartbeat.”
I barely restrained myself from clocking him. “Take that back.”
“Whoa!” He twitched away from me. “Hey, sorry. Uh, that really upsets you, huh.”
“They’re kids,” I said. “They’re just kids.”
“I thought those kids were our bad guys.”
“Maybe now,” I said. “But they didn’t have to be.”
Checker was quiet for a moment, looking at his computer screens without seeming to see them. “You know, kids get hurt by the drug trade, too. I’m just saying. And human trafficking, a lot of it’s children. Slavery. Child prostitution. Child porn. It’s—it’s not good.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “It’s a zero sum game. We take out one monster, the other rises up.”
“It’s not zero sum,” I corrected. “If that were true, taking out the drug cartels would increase Pithica’s power, not the other way around.”
“Stop being accurate when I’m trying to be dramatic,” Checker groused.
“Well, I’m just saying. If we could find a way to take out all the corruption in the world simultaneously, Pithica would get drained of its resources, not win, which means there is a game theoretic payoff where both monsters die—”
“Oh, great,” he shot back. “You come up with a way to uproot and eradicate all the crime syndicates and fix all social justice problems everywhere at the same time, you let me know. I’m not sure, but I think there might be a Nobel Peace Prize in it for you, if you need the incentive.”