CHAPTER 43
THE COFOUNDER OF PALADIN brought his chair forward while his corporate counsel and I sat on the couch.
“I’ve never seen a wheelchair like that,” I said.
“Because it’s a prototype built for me by an old friend. Six independent wheels, remarkable suspension—it can do three-sixties in the parking lot.” Malcomb laughed and then leaned forward to pour our coffee with a slight awkwardness to his shoulder and arm movements and a tremor to his hands. But he performed the feat without spilling a drop.
“I still got the knack,” he said and laughed again. “You’re thinking, What exactly is wrong with him? Aren’t you, Dr. Cross?”
“Yes,” I said.
Malcomb smiled. “Muscular dystrophy. I was lucky and did not begin to develop symptoms until I was in my teens, because it is degenerative. I get very, very slowly worse.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
He shrugged. “Everyone has challenges. I fight mine every bit of the way and remain happy because my mind is completely unaffected.”
“You wrote the algorithms that the supercomputers run?”
“I had a lot of help to get them where I wanted them,” he said with a slight wave at the bustling floors below and behind him. “Most of my engineers are far more sophisticated at the intricacies of looking for a needle in a haystack than I am. Steven and I had the vision, but they really wrote most of the code to achieve that vision.”
“The vision of finding commonalities and anomalies?”
“Among other purposes, that is correct,” he said, leaning forward again and tapping on the glass tabletop, which lit up like a large computer screen.
A bewildering stream of numbers, text, and images flooded the screen until Malcomb stopped it. “That’s what a huge data dump looks like when we get it,” he explained. “But then we pour it through our filters—our algorithms. Our digital sieves, if you will. We’re looking for crossovers and singularities, commonalities and anomalies, as you said, in the data we’re searching. In this case, the data is everything we could get on the six-block area surrounding each of the Family Man crime scenes.”
Malcomb tapped the tabletop once more and the data stream began again. A holographic keyboard appeared; he gave a command, and the avalanche of information spewing across the rest of the table became a series of thin trickles that entwined in several places.
Gesturing to those knots, Malcomb said, “There is your first commonality. In the hour surrounding each attack, cell phone and mobile data service was spotty or interrupted in the six-block area.”
“How’s that possible?”
“A jammer of some kind, we believe,” he said.
“Could the jamming have come from the cell service itself?”
“We don’t think so. This appears to be aggressive outside interference directed at the cell towers most likely to carry calls and data into and out of those six-block areas.”
He typed on the keyboard again. The waterfall of data again covered the tabletop for a moment before it filtered down to thin entwined streams.
“Here’s the second commonality,” Malcomb said. “Once the jamming begins, satellite phones are used.”
I sat forward. “Really? How many?”
“At least two, maybe three.”
I felt a ripple of excitement. “You have the phone numbers?”
“We do, but they’re worthless,” he said. “They belong to SIM cards that anyone can buy loaded with minutes on the satellite. The sat phones themselves are neutral nodes. It’s the disposable cards that talk to the satellites, and that’s what keeps the users anonymous for the time being.”
“Time being?”
Malcomb held up one slightly tremoring hand. “I’m not promising anything, but I asked several of my smartest people to design a new kind of search, one that might at least give you a direction to move in.”
“How would that work?”
“We’ll look for electronic signatures that we did not pick up the first time through, something that might indicate the manufacturer of the satellite phone chips being used and perhaps their points of purchase. And the signature of the jammer.”
I thought both angles were something of a long shot but nodded. My focus turned elsewhere.
Satellite phones and jammed cell towers. So this is a conspiracy of some kind. We are facing more than a lone wolf.
“What time is your flight?” Farr, the company’s counsel, asked.
“Eight?” I said, looking at my watch. It was a quarter to five.
Malcomb said, “There’s been endless construction slowing traffic going out to Logan, but you should make it in time. Where are you off to now?”
“Charleston, South Carolina,” I said. “Can I get your bright minds to sift for anything tied to Thomas Tull in those areas?”
Malcomb frowned. “The writer?”
I nodded. “The crime writer.”
CHAPTER 44
BREE LEFT PHILLIP HENRY LUSTER’S office feeling as if she’d taken a crash course in the business of fashion and the hidden life of Frances Duchaine, the stuff that never made the news stories or official biographies of the icon.
Perhaps more important, Luster had called two friends in investment banking to suss out Duchaine’s current balance sheet. Barry, the first of them, had no clue, but he asked the designer to dinner, which Luster accepted for later in the month.
“For a moneyman, he’s a hunk,” Luster had told Bree.
The second investment banker, Sammy, was a different tale altogether. When asked about Duchaine, he had gone conspiratorial. He whispered that he had to close his door, then returned and asked, “What are you hearing? Is she going down? Chapter Eleven? We have a big position in Crescent Partners, Ari Bernstein’s hedge fund, and he’s got her leveraged out the wazoo. If Duchaine’s going under, I could really use a heads-up here, Phillip.”
“And here I came to you for the same reason, Sammy,” Luster replied. “And you’re doing business with a snake like Ari Bernstein? Since when?”
“Since he started crowing about his ten percent annual return.”
“Tell me, what would Frances crashing and burning do to Bernstein’s fund and his vaunted annual return?”
“We’d be hurt, but Bernstein would take a biblical hit. Maybe enough to take him out. So is Duchaine going down?”
“How much debt do you think she’s carrying?”
Sammy hesitated. “That’s private.”
“Until she’s in court.”
After another pause, the investment banker said, “You don’t know where you got this, Phillip, but her company’s awash in debt and she’s personally on the hook for four hundred and twenty-five million with balloon payments coming due in three months.”
Luster whistled. “Four hundred and twenty-five million!”
Bree’s heart had pounded. There it was. Frances Duchaine was under big-time financial pressure. It could explain the human-trafficking allegations. It could explain why she’d take the risk.
By the time she reached her hotel, Bree believed in her gut that it was all real, that the instincts of whoever was paying her were dead on, that Duchaine was the worst kind of criminal, a creature who ruthlessly preyed on human foibles, desires, and weaknesses.