Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

Lou had insisted she bargain with Svengrad, despite her repeated arguments that he held all the cards. “It’s complicated,” had been Lou’s reply, who went on to say he couldn’t tell her everything that was in play.

She typed in her user ID, and then her password, which appeared as a series of asterisks.

Svengrad pushed her out of the way and sat down in the chair, and Liz did not attempt to fight him. She told him, “I was going to use whatever account information you gave me. You could have trusted that.”

Svengrad watched the screen as various commands were announced and small graphs, indicating loading time, moved like the mercury in a thermometer, marking progress. He said only, “This is better.”

One of the loading instructions caught her eye-an account number she recognized-and for the first time she understood what David had done to hide the money. Brilliant , she almost said aloud.

Finally the screen they had both awaited presented itself, a preprogrammed menu offering wire transfer options. Svengrad instructed her to stand back from him. He slipped out a piece of paper, pulled the keyboard into his lap, leaning over it, and carefully input the information into the machine. She wondered if he knew about the camera looking down from above, or if his instincts were nothing more than blind luck. Either way, she thought he’d probably used Hayes’s know-how to cut off the surveillance. The entire process passed quickly. Liz marveled that all these weeks of agony had culminated in a few keystrokes and no more than a couple minutes of time.

Svengrad hit the ENTER key. The screen hesitated, then delivered a graphic announcing the transfer was complete. “Done,” he said, looking at Liz with a triumphant look.

Lou had fed her several lines, making her repeat them carefully, on the off chance Svengrad left the phone line open as he gave her wiring instructions. She said them now. “Yes, well… I, for one, never trust David when it comes to his programming.” Svengrad’s triumph suffered a momentary twitch of concern. “You and I saw that money get wired. For your sake, I hope it goes where you think it’s going.”

“David Hayes knows better than to cross me.”

“Yes,” Liz said. “That’s exactly what I thought.”

The screen indicated the drive was “REFORMATTING.” David had programmed the disk to erase itself and all traces of the transaction after the wire transfer was complete.

“Looks like he thought of everything,” Liz said, moving to the door ahead of Svengrad, who took a moment too long to come out of the chair. She pushed through to the sister server room and quickly out the secure door back into the office area, Svengrad now right behind her.

Danny Foreman and Gaynes watched them, Danny fuming, but to Liz’s surprise, he stepped aside and allowed room for them to pass. Gaynes, who held Danny by the elbow, never took her eyes off Foreman. Lou had explained to Liz that Danny’s motivations were in question, and it seemed possible that in these few minutes, Gaynes had given him a choice of options.

Liz had nothing to say to Danny Foreman. She wanted her children back home and, at the very least, the semblance of an ordinary life returned. She wanted out of this party, out of this building, and nothing more than to be home in bed, though she knew it could not possibly be that simple for her.

Gaynes said, “Whatever you did in there… Security crashed. Special Ops is on their way up. Foreman and I are going to try the stairs. You, Mr. Svengrad, I would suggest should return to the party. You try to leave now, they’ll question you. Mrs. B., it’s you they’re after, I’m afraid. It helps us all if you can delay them a little.”

Liz nodded. The group broke up as Phillip approached.

“Mr. Svengrad,” the CEO said in his best host voice. He didn’t look comfortable all of a sudden. “I see you’ve met Elizabeth!”

“Yes,” Svengrad said. “She was just explaining some of the complications of the switchover to me,” he said, eyeing Liz. “Quite impressive.”

Phillip eyed Liz and looked into the server room. There was no telling what might become of her when suspicions and the inevitable interviews began. Phillip stepped closer to Liz, throwing an arm around her. “Hell of a party, Liz. Well done.” He looked at Svengrad. “You have any more questions, Mr. Svengrad, why don’t you address them to me.”

At that moment, four undercover detectives rushed from an elevator, turning the heads of many in attendance.

Liz felt choked with emotion when she saw Lou among them, his eyes searching the room and finding her. He then registered Svengrad’s presence as well and a triumphant look overcame him. Proud. Defiant.

“What’s this?” Phillip asked, looking suspiciously at Liz.

“This…,” Liz said. “This is my husband.”

LIZ AND BOLDT STOOD INSIDEthe front door of their home, LaMoia’s Jetta parked and running at the curb. It was five in the morning, a pale hinting of the sunrise rimmed the horizon. They’d both been up all night, she in debriefings with Special Ops, Boldt writing a report that was mostly lies.

“I told them exactly how David did it,” Liz explained. “He split the money into tens of thousands of tiny amounts-a few cents, a few dollars-and tacked those amounts onto trades as Securities and Exchange Commission fees. It worked because the SEC account is one of only a very few accounts that we don’t audit unless the government files a complaint. David kept the funds moving through the system, these tiny amounts charged as SEC trading fees, impossible for us to connect or follow. Only the software knew where that money was on any given day. My guess is that at the end of the quarter, just as the SEC fee funds were about to be wired to Washington, the seventeen million was collected into the SEC fee account we hold for the government, giving David a chance to ‘find’ it”-she drew the quotes-“and wire it out. It would be safe there for a few weeks, a few months, even years. He got locked up, and it just stayed in the system, looping around, impossible for our auditors to identify. The merger meant our SEC account would be closed, the balance paid-all this happens invisibly and automatically each quarter, the government being paid what it’s owed-but the merger forced him to wire the money out or lose it forever. The government would have eventually reported the overage, and maybe then we’d have finally figured it out.”

Boldt said, “They could only grab the seventeen million four times a year.”

“I’m guessing. Yes. He wouldn’t have wanted it to be lumped together for very long, nor very often. Auditors might have spotted that, though even that’s doubtful. The whole purpose was to keep it moving.”

“And no one reported the incorrect SEC charges on their statements?”

“How many investors are going to question a few cents more on an SEC trading fee that’s a charge they probably don’t pay attention to anyway? He did the smart thing: He hid that money out in the open.” She changed the subject, asking, “What do you do if he doesn’t give you the tape?”

“John has one of his wild ideas. He’s been studying terrorist technologies for the past two weeks and, typical of him, has ‘borrowed’ a device.”

“You’ll be careful.”

It was a sentiment impossible for her not to express, but Boldt wished she hadn’t. He didn’t want to think of this upcoming meeting as dangerous, though he knew otherwise. Judging by Svengrad’s tone of voice, he had already been hit with the surprise. Boldt’s mission was to deflect and redirect the blame.

“It’s more ridiculous than dangerous,” he said of LaMoia’s idea.