“Not really. Can I come over?”
Mila’s brotheropens the door to his run-down apartment building, wearing a black hoodie and sweats, his dark hair disheveled and falling in front of his eyes.
“I was wondering when you’d pay me a visit,” he gives me his signature smirk. “It’s been a long time, McCarthy. Or is it Sullivan now?”
“Are you alone?”
“Always.”
I step inside, and he leads me upstairs to his apartment. It’s even smaller than Mila’s, which is saying something, and it perfectly reflects Max’s somewhat reclusive hacker-genius vibe that he has going on. But the state of his apartment is of little consequence to me. What’s important is that he’s good at what he does. If anyone can help me figure out what the hell is going on with this account, it’s him.
He leads me into his bedroom, which more so resembles the control center of an alien spaceship, with four huge monitors above his desk, each one running pages and pages of code.
“I need to trace a series of offshore payments. I thought they were going to my family’s accounts, but now I’m not so sure.”
Max raises a brow. “How illegal are we talking?”
“It’s a gray area, the moral justification is pending.”
Max chuckles under his breath. “Good enough for me.”
I hand him my laptop already loaded with the encrypted payments, and he sets it up on his desk and starts working, his fingers flying across the keys.
“These payments came from an account linked to Seamus Sullivan?”
“Yes.”
“And you thought they were going to your father’s accounts?”
I nod. “But they weren’t. I just checked, and there’s not a single trace of the payments coming into McCarthy Enterprises. None of it makes any sense.”
Max frowns as he links my laptop to one of the huge monitors and starts uncovering even more layers to the payments.
I perch on the edge of his bed, nervously picking at my nails as I watch him work. Occasionally, he mutters a curse under his breath before furiously attacking his keyboard.
“What is it?” I get to my feet to peer over his shoulder.
“Here.” He points to the name of a shell company. “It seems the money was funneled through a dummy account in Belize set up under a fake name, but it looks like the passport used to open it was real.”
“Whose passport?”
He clicks a few more times, then freezes as the photo ID fills the screen, clear as day. “Callum McCarthy.”
“That’s impossible.” I look at the date the account was created, a date I will never be able to forget. “He was with me the day this account was created. W-we were at the hospital with Mom...”
“Well, someone used his identity to open this account in person, which means either he has a twin you don’t know about, or someone forged this using legitimate credentials.”
My mind races as I consider the date, the signature, the in-person verification.
Clearly, someone not only had access to Callum’s documents, but they could also imitate him well enough to slip into a bank under false pretenses and set up an account.
“Can you try to see who it was? Because it sure as hell wasn’t Callum.”
Max frowns. “I can try…”
I pace anxiously around the cramped bedroom as Max works his way into the CCTV cameras inside the bank. It takes him some time to scroll back to the date the account was made, but then he finds it.
He pauses the footage and zooms in. “Here. Do you recognize this guy?”
