Dante sat nearby, his fingers flying across the keyboard. Elin was hunched over her own screen, muttering about layers and security. Sophie bounced between all of them and Con, a natural link between intelligence and the leader of the team that would act on it.
Ellory peered at the screen for a long beat, then pulled off her glasses and tapped the stem against her lips.
A low sound, almost a groan, came from one of the guys seated around the table, but she didn’t look up to see what they were doing. She filtered transactions by a new date range, and a new list populated. She scanned it methodically, leaning in to study the results.
She sucked in a small breath.
Sophie hurried to her side. “Did you find something?”
“There.” She pointed to the screen. “Another rental payment. Same shell, different property. And there’s a transaction for a safety-deposit box too.”
“Good catch.” Sophie hurried back to her own system and a moment later, the transactions appeared on the big screen for the team to see.
Ellory placed her glasses on again and nudged them up her nose. Down the table, a chair gave a loud creak, as if the man seated in it was torturing the screws holding it together.
Paying it no mind, she continued to work and flagged three more transactions, each one fitting the pattern she’d identified. Empty offices with short-term leases and payments structured to look legit while hiding something far more sinister.
Like moving money in order to fund terroristic activities.
Low chatter continued around her, but she tuned it out as she worked. She was about to flag a fourth transaction when the air in the room shifted.
Conversation dropped. The keyboards went silent.
Ellory looked up from her screen to find Dante, Elin and Sophie all staring at her. And she guessed if she were to glance around the room, she’d find all the others were staring at her too.
Their expressions were serious, almost grim. Her stomach did an uncomfortable flip.
She looked down at herself, wondering if she’d spilled coffee on her cardigan without noticing. “Did I miss something?”
Elin exchanged a look with Dante, then turned back to Ellory. “We’ve been going through the security protocols for the office location. The one Ash identified as the entry point.”
“Okay…” She drew the word out. She’d worked with enough agencies to guess she wouldn’t like where this was headed.
“There’s a computer system in there.”
“Right.” She hooked a lock of hair behind her ear.
“The computer system has to be tapped from the inside,” Elin said. “Not something I can hack remotely. We need physical access to their internal ledger.”
Ellory nodded. “We’ve traced the shell companies and the transfers. But the ledger will show who actually controls the accounts—authorization keys, sign-offs, everything. Once we have that, the Treasury Department can freeze every dollar tied to Cipher.”
The room silenced, and she realized everyone was staring at her. Oh no. No, no, no.
“So you’ll send someone in undercover to—” she began.
“It has to be you.” Opal’s voice carried from the end of the table.
Ellory’s head whipped around, along with several others’. The woman gave her a sympathetic look.
“What? No. I’m support. I analyze financials. I don’t—I’m not field ops.”
“But you’re cleared for it. It’s how we met,” Opal reminded her gently.
“What makes Ellory the right person?” Ash’s gritty voice threw her even more off-balance.
Opal met her stare. “Because she might see something that we don’t notice. Because she has a photographic memory.”
If there were documents, receipts or anything financial, Ellory wouldn’t just catch it—her mind would take a snapshot of it to pull up later.
