Джеймс Паттерсон - Killer Instinct

“Are you sure you got them all?” I asked.

Julian looked at me as if I’d just asked Annie Leibovitz if she was sure there was film in her camera. “ Yes, I got them all,” he said. “When Sadira Yavari googles you, there will be nothing to dispel the notion that you’re straight.”

I glanced across the table at my father, who looked to be holding his tongue on a couple of punch lines to the point of dizziness. Or maybe it was the fatigue catching up to him. He still hadn’t slept. If Foxx hadn’t explicitly asked for him to join us, I would’ve insisted he crash at Elizabeth’s apartment, as she’d offered. For the record, she was less than pleased that she couldn’t come along to O’Sullivan’s. She’d mumbled something about an all-boys club, but she understood the real reason. She didn’t work for Foxx. She wasn’t CIA.

That didn’t mean she had to be happy about it. Whatever the purpose of the meeting, she knew it had to be important. I knew it, too.

For the hundred and first time, “Just give me a hint,” I said to Julian. “Amuse me. Why does Foxx want all of us here? What’s it about?”

Julian tilted his glass of whiskey, motioning over my shoulder. “You can ask him yourself,” he said. “Here he comes.”

Chapter 68

FOXX SAT down in the booth. He nodded to me and Julian and then promptly forgot we existed for a couple of minutes while he caught up with my father, reminiscing about a couple of missions. “Company hasn’t been the same without you, Eagle,” Foxx eventually said, shaking his head. “Like it or not, you’re a legend.”

“Careful or I might just believe you,” said my father. “Now go ahead and ask me what you really want to know.”

Foxx wasn’t one to play coy. Called out by my father, he normally would’ve been more than happy to cut to the chase. But he was also no dummy. When a man already knows your next move, you’ll never get what you want from him.

“I was going to ask what brings you to New York,” said Foxx, “but we both know you have no intention of telling me the real reason because you’re not ready yet. So we’ll leave it at that.”

My father smiled, impressed. For a second, I thought he might actually tell Foxx about our early morning encounter with Eli, the Prophet. Then I remembered. This is my father. As sure as Woodward and Bernstein, he would never burn a source.

“Okay, now that we’ve got that settled,” I said. In other words, Let’s get on with things.

I’d already briefed Foxx about Sadira when he called me at the courthouse. He was pleased that I’d made contact with her, although he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with my plan.

“Sadira Yavari either killed Jahan Darvish herself or set him up for someone else,” said Foxx. “Either way, he had to have been compromised. The question is how.”

“That’s what I’m working on,” I said.

“It’s what we’re all working on,” said Foxx. He gave a quick nod to Julian. That was his cue.

“Landon asked me to look at Darvish’s file to see if there was anything the Agency had missed about him,” said Julian.

“So what was missed?” I asked. It had to be something. Julian wouldn’t be at the table otherwise.

“The Agency had presumably pulled all of Darvish’s financial records, including a Caymans account that was receiving his payments from the Iranian government,” explained Julian. “The professor was laundering rials into dollars through an offshore gambling site, exactly as he’d told the Agency when he became a double agent.”

I really heard only one word of that. “Presumably?” I asked. “The Agency had presumably pulled all of his financial records?”

“We stopped at rials and dollars,” said Foxx.

It was all he needed to say. I turned to Julian. “Cryptocurrency?”

Julian touched his nose. Bingo. “Only this particular crypto is new and a bit different. It’s on the darknet and seems to be backed by hard currency.”

That was new. Imagine being able to digitally print your own hundred-dollar bills. “But you don’t know which currency it is yet, right?” I asked.

“No,” said Julian. “I have my suspicions, but the whole setup is rather sophisticated.”

That was Julian’s way of admitting he hadn’t fully hacked it yet. There were indeed limits to what he could do from behind a keyboard, at least under a time constraint. Not that he would ever wave the white flag. As he was fond of telling me, failure is just success that hasn’t happened yet.

“So transmission-wise, how does it differ from the likes of Bitcoin?” I asked.

While Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are pseudonymous, a few hackers have been able to chart individual transaction flows, as well as figure out the real-world identities of both senders and receivers. In fact, Julian was the first.

“I can see where the crypto lands,” he said. “I just can’t see who sent it. There’s an added layer in this case, an intermediary account that actually erases the trail a split second before the transfer is complete,” said Julian.

“How is that possible?”

“I’m not sure yet. It’s as if the currency intuitively knows where to go even after the transaction is canceled.”

“You mean, like a snake that still slithers even after its head gets cut off,” I said.

“More or less,” said Julian.

I turned to Foxx. “So Darvish was receiving additional monies he didn’t tell you about, and it wouldn’t make sense that they were from the Iranian government since Iran was already paying him.”

Foxx nodded. “I know what you’re thinking, Reinhart.”

“You got played,” I said. “Darvish was feeding you misinformation.”

“Maybe,” said Foxx. “Maybe not. We’ll never know for sure.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Julian.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Foxx. This was clearly news to him, too. “What do you mean?”

My father chuckled. Exhausted as he was, he was still listening to every word. Better yet, he was reading between the lines.

“He means he knows who the intermediary is,” said my father. “He knows who the money is funneled through.”

Julian grinned and put a finger to his nose again.

Bingo.

Chapter 69

“WHO IS it?” asked Foxx.

Julian took out his cell. The picture was already cued up. “Meet Viktor Alexandrov,” he said.

We all stared at the photo. It came from the web pages of Viktor Alexandrov International.

“That’s convenient, the guy has a website,” I said. “Does it list an address?”

“No, just his phone. But it’s a New York number,” said Julian. “He lives in SoHo.”

Foxx grabbed the phone for a closer look, his finger scrolling. “He’s an art dealer?”

“A Russian art dealer,” said Julian. “And if there was ever a country that would create a darknet cryptocurrency to counterfeit the ruble it would be the Russians. Black market weapons, money laundering, influencing foreign elections—and, of course, the occasional funding of terrorism.”

“Who better to run cover for them than an international art dealer,” I said.

“We need to get acquainted with this guy,” said Foxx. “Quickly.”

“He could be sitting in your lap right now, and it wouldn’t make a difference,” said Julian. “He’s not going to know anything.”

“What do you mean?” asked Foxx. “How would he not know where the money emanates from?”

Again, my father chimed in. “That’s the whole point of the intermediary,” he said. “He can never know.”

Foxx was back to being pissed. “What the hell, Julian? So it is a dead end.”