He squints his eyes at me, suspicious of my deranged behavior. “No, it’s all good. So, what did you want to talk about?”
“Oh, um, I found something in an unlabeled folder. It looks like a hit Lex prepared, but never did. And given the metadata, he abandoned it around the same time he quit hacking.”
“That’s interesting. You’re thinking of using that for the hit?”
“Yeah. I mean, I’ve had ideas of my own, but nothing will ever beat an actual Nammota plan, right?”
“I agree, yes. Should we look into it?”
“Let’s go.”
We go over everything together, and I wait for him to share his thoughts on it. It’s big—huge, even—but it’s exactly what we need. Something only Nammota can pull off, something that will divert the focus from Lex, and trick the entire world into thinking the legendary hacker is still out there.
Oli remains silent for about a minute, intensely processing his thoughts. While he does, I let my eyes wander to the ring in its box, which I’ve been keeping on the desk as a reminder, my motivation to keep pushing even when my eyes won’t stay open. One day, Lex will slip it on my finger himself, and it’ll never leave it.
“So, it’s just one bank?” Oli asks.
“Yes. Imperium. They’ve gotten huge in the past twenty, twenty-five years. The über-rich flocked to them because they offer not only anonymity but also discrete transfers to offshore fiscal paradises, where they also operate. It’s all very legal, but ethically wrong, which they don’t care about much.”
“And Lex found a flaw?”
“Yes, he found an unmonitored backoffice API, and I looked. It’s still there. They never fixed it.”
“How much per hit?” he asks.
“A little over fifty-seven million.”
“And how many hits?”
“Twenty at least. Lex meant to do twenty-five.”
“And that’s—”
“Over one point four billion.”
That renders him silent again, as he tries to fathom how huge the plan is. But like me, he knows it has to be monumental. Otherwise, people won’t truly believe this is Nammota.
“And you really think we can pull it off? We can’t waste two weeks on it before realizing it won’t be possible,” he prudently points out.
“With everything Lex left behind and your help, I really think I can. We can. We have to.”
“We have Lex’s shuffling algorithm, so making the money disappear is one thing we won’t have to worry about.”
“Exactly. It needs to be slightly updated, but it’ll still work.”
“And there’s the list of vetted charities, too?”
“Yes. But we’d have to add a few—some created in the past five years.”
“You know what to pick?”
“Well, I’ve been living and breathing Nammota for weeks, so I’ve got a good understanding of how his mind works.”
“You’re also dating the guy,” he jokes.
“True.”
He stares at the screen, rereading some of the information there. “So, one bank with a massive security flaw, twenty-five accounts, one point four billion dollars, and a thousand charities around the world.”
