Page 88

The car turns onto my street, and I close my eyes. Apparently, betrayal doesn't always require a lie. Sometimes it only requires discovering that your seat at the table was conditional.

My apartment feels smaller than I remember.

Nothing has changed except that several important files are missing because a certain Greek tyrant relocated them without permission. My plants are alive, which means either I'm better at remembering to water them than Adrianos believes or one of his security men has secretly developed an interest in horticulture.

I lock the door, set my laptop on the dining table, and open the curtains.

Then I work.

Numbers don't have guns. Numbers don't decide they've heard enough and put a bullet into the only source you've managed to capture alive. Numbers don't look at you across a bed until you forget all the reasons allowing them close is a terrible idea.

Kalliopi used to say people lie, but numbers get nervous.

The first time she said it, I'd laughed.

"Numbers don't have emotions."

"Exactly," she'd replied. "So when they start behaving strangely, blame the person touching them."

I can hear her voice so clearly that my throat tightens.

"All right, Kalliopi."

I open Karras's accounts.

"Let's make them nervous."

Before he died, Karras gave us three terminal locations, access codes, shell companies, server addresses and the names of intermediaries he claimed never to have met twice. Adrianos believed we'd emptied him.

Maybe he's right.

The thought irritates me enough that I immediately reject it, then irritates me again because rejecting a conclusion simply because Adrianos reached it first is exactly the kind of intellectual dishonesty I despise.

So I remove Karras from the equation. If the man is dead, interrogate his money.

I start with access records.

Karras's credentials appear across hundreds of transactions, but credentials aren't people. Anyone with sufficient access could use them. I need to know when Karras himself could reasonably have initiated the movements.

I build a timeline.

Travel dates. Board meetings. Medical leave. Public appearances. Banking activity. Terminal access.

Then I place the OB6 movements beside it.

For the first hour, nothing changes. For the second, I find three inconsistencies. At 6:42 p.m. on a Thursday two years ago, funds moved from an Asterion-linked settlement vehicle into one of the intermediary structures. Karras's terminal is inactive.

That proves nothing.

It could be an automated transaction. Delegated authorization. Delayed settlement. I only flag it and continue. Another appears eight months later. Then another. By the fifth, I stop. Karras wasn't logged into any registered terminal when these transfers occurred.

I pull the shell companies he admitted creating and compare their incorporation dates against the earliest reservoir movements.

My pulse changes.

One of the companies feeding the network predates Karras's first involvement by six years. Another by four.

"Well."