Splintered Sky

“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 looking at it, it just simply blends in.”

“Your fine-tooth comb has eliminated a lot of options,” Tokaido mentioned, looking at the relevant data that Wethers collected. “It’s going to take some hairy-ass cyber monkey action to break this open.”

Wethers snorted. “Thank you, Akira, for introducing an image of your hirsuteness that I shall need to gouge from my mind’s eye with a spork.”

Tokaido and Delahunt chuckled at the scholarly computer expert’s subdued shudder.

“Hunt, work with me on trying to back-trace the origin of the trucks,” Delahunt said. “It’ll be something new for your brain to work on to clear the cobwebs.”

“Unfortunately, Able Team didn’t leave much in terms of trace evidence on the vehicles,” Wethers lamented, looking at Delahunt’s notes. “And what Carl and the lads didn’t wreak, the marauders themselves contributed. VIN plates removed, and no accumulation of personal items that could betray origin. Even the odometers were taken out.”

“Thorough,” Delahunt agreed. She took a deep breath, returning to her workstation. “With the odometers, and a rough estimate of the distances traveled, we could have at least narrowed down the trucks to wherever they were stolen or purchased.”

“How about the electronics?” Wethers inquired. “Surely the IR illuminators should have betrayed a point of origin.”

“Chinese military equipment, top of the line for special forces,” Delahunt said. “It doesn’t show up on any catalogs, but we’ve had enough dealings with the Security Affairs Division to know what their gear looks like.”

Wethers observed the screen, looking at the night-vision equipment that had been photographed by Schwarz. Images of the complete unit, then dissected, were displayed. Chinese knockoff transistors were in the design. “It’s pretty damning. Red China is the only concurrent power to the United States to have a burgeoning aerospace industry devoted to orbital craft.”

“We’ve also got an international mix of operatives among those bodies not burned or mutilated beyond the point of recognition,” Delahunt mused. “China does have the kind of budget to…”

Wethers glanced over to her as her train of thought trailed off. Her green eyes flickered and Wethers knew she’d hit a hunch.

“Akira, put the bank search on hold,” Delahunt noted. “Take a look at brokers who make large dollar to yuan conversions.”

Tokaido nodded slowly. “Why didn’t I think of that in the first place?”

“That’s why we’re a team, Akira,” Wethers admonished. “Still, what would the PRC benefit by this? This kind of activity could result in trouble for them once an astute investigator figured this out.”

“You think that this is circumstantial evidence left to implicate Beijing?” Delahunt asked.

“It’s a possibility. Or, it could be a double-blind. The U.S. wouldn’t believe China to be so arrogant as to leave these traces, and thus waste energy confirming such a setup,” Wethers explained.

“One step at a time,” Delahunt said. “We find the evidence, and then see where it points. As setup or as genuine.”

“Fair enough,” Wethers stated. He went to work, going over transistor lots and equipment manufacture manifests. Though it looked as if he were in a trance, mentally slowed to a stop, his brain raced at the speed of light.

In the back of his brilliant mind, the eldest member of the Stony Man cybernetics crew wondered if the speed of light was still too slow to prevent Armageddon.

Midway Island, U.S. Naval Cleanup and Reclamation Center

P HOENIX F ORCE HAD BEEN returning from an operation in India when they received the alert to go on stand-by due to another crisis. David McCarter waited in the hangar at what was a covertly operating Naval Air Station, stubbing out a Player’s cigarette. The U.S. Navy had been publicly ordered to clean up the contamination of the Midway Station National Wildlife Refuse, but there were still low-profile facilities available for the United States Special Operations Command to use as forward staging areas. Phoenix Force was taking advantage of the top-secret station to recuperate from the first half of a long flight when they’d received a stand-by alert.

“Thank you, David,” Rafael Encizo said, waving the fumes away from his face.

McCarter winked and pulled another from its pack, lighting up. “Anytime, mate.”

Encizo rolled his eyes. “This is Hawaii. Fresh air, crystal-blue water, verdant green…”

“Yeah. But I’m workin’ as fast as I can to fix that,” McCarter joked.

“Give me strength,” Encizo groaned. He walked out onto the tarmac. The breeze blowing spared him from suffering McCarter’s secondhand smoke. “Think we’ll have time to head home, or will we have to resupply here?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” McCarter answered. “But I’m betting that it’ll be a little while until we’re back at the Farm. Hope you didn’t have any hot dates waiting.”

Encizo shrugged. “You know me, David. A girl in every port.”

McCarter didn’t know whether that was an exaggeration or not, but he didn’t particularly care. The Cuban had his relationships that had survived the social-life-strangling strains of covert operations, as McCarter had his own.

“We’ve got an update,” T. J. Hawkins announced. The youngest member of Phoenix Force had been manning their satellite uplink-equipped laptop, waiting for news.

McCarter crushed the half-smoked cigarette and joined Encizo beside Hawkins, Calvin James and Gary Manning to observe the electronic briefing from where they’d been occupying themselves.

“Currently, all we have is circumstantial evidence,” Barbara Price announced on screen. “But put together, it’s pretty damning. We’ve got several million dollars missing from People’s Republic of China banks. The money disappeared from facilities that were converting dollars to yuan and vice versa.”

“Added to the SAD-style night vision, it does look damning,” James, a former San Francisco police officer, agreed. “But circumstantial evidence doesn’t hold up. We need something stronger.”

“Try this image we’ve got from an NRO satellite,” Price added. An image appeared on the screen, a photograph of a launch facility. The image enlarged and focused on a corner of the launch campus. “It was observing a facility referred to in the records as the Phoenix Graveyard.”

“Glad I’m not superstitious,” McCarter muttered.

“Looks familiar,” Gary Manning said, cutting off his friend’s gloomy proclamation. “The same kind of terrorist combat training facilities that litter Asia from Syria to Pakistan.”

“Too disorganized to be conventional army barracks, and this tank,” Encizo mentioned. “I recognize that kind of water tank. There’s one at Cape Canaveral.”