BEVERLY HILLS-LA PRECINCT — FORENSIC ACCOUNTING SUITE — 2:30 P.M.
The forensic accounting team was three people: a meticulous woman named Ava who had the demeanour. A younger man named Miles who typed very fast and said very little; and a senior analyst, Brooks, who had been with financial crimes for twelve years and had the permanent squint of a man who spent most of his waking hours reading small print.
Lisa stood at the head of the table and watched them work for a moment before speaking.
"The primary target," she said, when Ava looked up, "is the unattributed transfer on sheet seven. Nine digits, registered to a deceased individual, used once. I need to know who authorized the reactivation of that account and where the funds moved after the transfer cleared."
Ava was already looking at sheet seven. "The account shell is clean on the surface," she said, almost to herself. "But reactivating a dead man's account leaves a digital footprint regardless of how carefully it's done. Banks log authorization requests at the server level. If someone touched this, there's a trace."
"How long?" Lisa asked.
"To find the trace? A few hours. To follow where it leads…" Ava tilted her head. "Depends how many layers we're dealing with."
"Assume many," Lisa said. "Assume someone very careful built this."
"Careful people still make mistakes," Ava said serenely, and turned back to her screen.
Lisa's phone buzzed. She stepped out into the corridor to answer. James voice came through.
"The trace on the account number you gave me last night," he said. "I ran it this morning before the team was assigned. The digital authorization trail dead-ends at a proxy server registered in the Cayman Islands. Standard layering. But—"
"But," Lisa said.
"There was a secondary access. Someone queried that same account two weeks ago from a domestic IP. Not the original user. Someone else, looking at it."
Lisa went still in the corridor. "Someone else was already investigating."
"Or already knew about it and was checking whether it had been found."
The corridor hummed around her. She leaned against the wall and looked at the ceiling for a moment, thinking.
"Can you trace the domestic IP?"
"Already running. Give me until this evening."
"Thank you, Ava."
She hung up and stood in the corridor a moment longer. Either someone inside was checking whether the trail was visible. Or someone outside it, following the same thread she was following, from a different direction.
She pushed off the wall, straightened her jacket, and went back into the forensic suite.
There was still a great deal of work to do before the day was over.
DOWNTOWN-LA— HUNTERS'S APARTMENT — THAT EVENING — 7:48 P.M.
He stood at the window of his apartment with a glass of water.
I knew your mother.
The sentence had been moving through him all day.
He had only searched for his father, because that was the only person Chris told him was alive. His mother was dead, they had made that known to them in orphanage.
Now he is learning, he had a mother, who could be alive?
His phone buzzed on the desk. The encrypted line this time.
After a moment he crossed the room and read the message. It was brief. A name, an address, a timeframe. Below the timeframe, a single additional line that had not appeared in any previous message he had received from this sender.
"This one is different. Exercise additional caution. The target is aware."
Hunter read this line three times.
In his experience, a target who was aware was a target who had taken precautions, had changed patterns, had perhaps acquired protection. It meant the job required adjustment, required more preparation, more patience.
What it did not mean, what it had never meant, in all the years, was that the job would not be completed.
He deleted the message.
He went to his desk and opened the manila folder and looked, as he had looked so many times, at the institutional documents inside it. At the name. At the blank line beside the field marked Father.
Wednesday, he thought. Three days.
He closed the folder, turned off the desk lamp, and prepared for another night.