“Yeah,” Lyons said, rolling his eyes. “It’s the price I have to pay to get a look at Burgundy Lake.”
“We’ll be able to reconstruct the raiders’ hit when we’re on-site,” Blancanales added. “The tactics they used might give us a clue as to who trained this group.”
Lyons nodded. “I hope they’re local. I’d hate to lose a shot at them because they’re overseas.”
“Phoenix Force is prepped and ready to move out,” Price told him. “Your job this time around is to work inside our borders.”
Lyons sighed. “Used to have the whole world as our beat map.”
“You’ve been getting more chances to step out and play, Ironman. Don’t worry. This doesn’t seem close to finished,” Price promised.
Lyons glanced toward the broom closet where Paczesny was being softened by Schwarz’s home-brewed sonic assault. “Not with Paczesny. Right now, I’m melting his brain. In a few minutes, he’s going to wish he didn’t have one.”
The Able Team leader broke contact and freshened up.
C HRONOLOGICALLY , L EON P ACZESNY was left in the sensory deprivation for only forty minutes total. However, due to the white noise and utter lack of sensation except for the tearing agony in his ruined elbow, it felt as if he were penned up in the broom closet for forty hours.
The first hint he had of the real world was when the duct tape was ripped off his mouth and eyes. Gag free, he let out a yell that was cut off when Lyons punched him just under the sternum. The blow interrupted the shout and cut off his breathing for a few seconds.
Just long enough for the Able Team commander to slide the headphones off Paczesny’s ears. Then the turncoat felt the back of his head crack against the broom closet wall, ironhard fingers squeezing his jaw until it felt as if the mandible would snap.
“Welcome back to the land of the walking dead,” Lyons snarled. “I’m the Ironman, and I’ll be your host on the scenic tour of hell.”
“You can’t do this. I’m an American citiz—”
“You, Mr. Paczesny, are nothing anymore,” Lyons growled. “You are listed among the corpses stacked like cord wood back at Burgundy Lake. As such, you are a non-entity, only useful for as long as you are giving up information. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
“I have no rights?” Paczesny asked, already knowing the answer.
“You’re acting as if I’m some kind of cop. I’m the Grim Reaper, pal. It’s just been a busy night, thanks to you, and I want to play a little before packing you off to hell.”
“Damn it, you can’t do this. You have to have some kind of authority, some rulebook…” Paczesny said. “This isn’t Camp X-Ray.”
Lyons slammed his forearm down on Paczesny’s. “Camp X-Ray? That’s amateur hour, dip shit. It’s kindergarten, while this is the graduate class. Get it?”
“Yes. Yes, sir,” Paczesny whimpered. “I got it!”
Lyons started the digital recorder, and began asking questions. Paczesny spilled his guts.
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
H UNTINGTON W ETHERS LISTENED to the download of the MP3 file that Able Team uploaded to him. Paczesny’s confession made the process of forensic accounting easier, enabling Wethers to locate the trail of funds.
Naturally, the identities of the mysterious donors remained vague. Paczesny didn’t have faces or voices, only e-mail contacts and a few shadowy meetings with men who hid their features and utilized vocal distortion technology. The trail of cash in Paczesny’s Cayman Island account also followed a tangled snarl of jumps from front company to front company, all of which were new and lacked any ties to previously known espionage or organized crime groups.
Wethers squeezed his brow as he went over the financial autopsy on the screen before him, scanning line by line for the name of a front company owner who would register on any of a thousand law-enforcement watch lists. Though the plodding, meticulous cyberdetective was utilizing his search engines to look for a familiar name, his own vast reserves of memorized information churned in his mind, working as fast as the powerful processors of the Cray supercomputers in the Annex.
For all of the technological power in the Stony Man cyber-center, the computers were still only pale duplicates of the human brain, lacking intuition or the ability to correlate something that didn’t quite match what came before.
Wethers blinked his eyes, realizing he hadn’t done so in several minutes. Tears washed over his parched orbs, flooding down the side of his cheek.
“Doing okay, Hunt?” Akira Tokaido asked from his workstation.
Wethers picked up his pipe and chewed on the stem, sitting back to allow his subconscious to digest the images burned into his retinas. “Just slow, steady work. I need to rest my eyes a little.”
Tokaido nodded.
“Nothing’s shown up yet?” Carmen Delahunt asked, stepping over to Wethers’ station.
“The money that ended up in Paczesny’s account has been immaculately sanitized,” Wethers responded. “I’ve gone over every single penny, and can’t make head nor tails of where it came from, despite all the front companies.”
“Maybe you’re looking at too large an object,” Tokaido responded. Wethers glanced over at his younger partner, gnawing on his pipe stem.
“You mean that this might have come from another source?” Wethers asked. “Someone might have found a way to pick up the fractions of pennies in interest and convert the digital leftovers into real money?”
“It’s happened before,” Tokaido replied. “But you’d have to be very good to break into that kind of a slush fund.”
“Wait…fractional cents of interest?” Delahunt asked. “Sure. Bank computers round down the interest they’re offering, keeping the leftover bit for themselves. But surely, it would take a large bank to accumulate that kind of money.”
“You’d be surprised, especially since we’re talking how many banking franchises in the U.S.?” Tokaido asked.
Wethers nodded his understanding. “So someone has a tap on banks, and they’re using that to create a clean form of money. And of course, the banks won’t say anything, because they don’t want the public to know that they’re being shortchanged. Instead of getting thirty-two point eight-five-two cents, they only get the thirty-two, and the bank keeps the slop over. In the course of a year, that can add up to ten cents an account, times however many hundred customers per branch, over the course of several years…”
“Big money tucked away for the guys up top,” Delahunt said. “And it’s completely independent of the FDIC insurance on any account.”
“So Paczesny ended up with forty grand in his account,” Wethers mused out loud. “And it’s made up of withheld interest surplus from a banking franchise, which can’t mention the disappearance of that kind of money, unless they want to pay taxes on it.”
“We’re dealing with a good hacker,” Delahunt noted. “The dummy companies that filtered those funds also have nothing much to give in terms of who set them up. Akira, think you can do something about that?”
“I’ll hit it hard,” Tokaido said, accepting the challenge. “There’s no way to make a dummy without leaving one fingerprint on it.”
“It could be that they left a fingerprint, but we just haven’t recognized it as such,” Wethers added. “Some signature that would be so obscure that while we’ve been