Chapter 1

Special Agent Bob Fairfax was no spring chicken, that much was true. In fact, his chicken was about to be roasted. Not that he had ever really been a career man, instead content enough to whittle away at the edifice of crime from the comfort of a field agent’s desk for his near twenty years at the Bureau. But he’d at least had prospects, a trajectory. A vague notion he’d someday be promoted. But that was all set to change when he was handed a case with the potential to ruin his career for good.

“Just solve the case, Bob,” ASAC Hogan had said. “And it’ll fast track you to the big leagues.”

A little problem with that, though: The case was a swirling black hole and everyone in the NYC Field Office knew it. On its surface it was just a simple bank robbery, this small joint out in Long Island where all their money had gone poof. Except that you looked at the case for a few minutes and quickly discovered it was anything but simple. Not only was it a potential scandal waiting to happen, but also practically unsolvable. The more he delved into the data, the more it swallowed him up. Hell, Bob couldn’t even find the boss of the damn bank yet. He’d just up and vanished.

Just who had he scorned to be handed this landmine? He couldn’t figure it out. He’d always kept in his lane, made sure to toe the line, to preserve the fragile egos surrounding him. He’d always kept his head in the data, the facts. It’s what had earned him the nickname Bookman. He hadn’t cared about the ridicule, the general perspective around the office that he was a lightweight, a desk jockey, a total nerd. Bob had continued to do things by the book regardless, playing the game he was meant to play. And look where it had gotten him. He’d finally been branded a black sheep.

He knew the reason why, too. It was guilt by association. Association with one Special Agent Heather Chase, who had gone out of her way to piss off every agent in the Bureau. He worked with her just that one time and now he was branded for life as a troublemaker, even after transferring out of Violent Crimes into Financial Crime to best employ his skills at data analysis. He’d still been given a wide berth. Bob just had to come to terms with the fact he was a pariah. Hell, he had come to terms with it. But that wasn’t going to help solve a case where hundreds of millions of dollars had evaporated without a trace, along with the bank’s boss Frank Lehrman.

Bob stood in the doorway for a second and sighed, adjusted his red satin tie over his not-entirely-pressed white shirt. He tugged off his French coat and flattened his hair down. Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity, he muttered to himself, the words sounding ironical now. Switching off the internal monkey machine in his mind, Bob adjusted his face into a professional smile that made the creases of his face stand out. He walked into the room like a prisoner on death row. He was just going to tell it like it was, that’s all. No exaggeration, no polite omission. No icing on the cake. If he had to swallow it, so did they. Just tell ‘em, Bob. Give it to ‘em straight.

The room contained six heads including Bob’s—which was now turning numb and fuzzy like TV static. You had ASAC Hogan and his smarmy grin at the head of the table on the left. Across from him at the right end, two agents from Cyber Division probably ranking around GS-10, and one other from Financial. These agents bore a similar smarminess to ASAC Hogan. What did they have to be so smug about? They were regular special agents just like Bob; in fact, Bob was GS-12, putting him at a decent pecking order among his colleagues (in theory, at least). ASAC Hogan was Assistant Special Agent in Charge which is GS-15, and he ran the four investigative units of the NYC Field Office, only answering to the New York SAC above him but basically running the show on his own volition, on account of the fact the SAC was a political go-getter and spent most of his time eating lobster dinners over in Washington D.C.

Then tying off the ensemble, sitting at the middle of the table across from Bob, his direct supervisor Financial Crime Section Chief Jim Stanhorn. Bob’s initial intuitions had proven correct: He’d walked right into a firing squad.

“Take a seat, Bob,” ASAC Hogan said. His square-jawed face stood like an Easter Island head atop his black crepe Ralph Lauren suit. Bob considered updating his initial summation of heads in the room to eight: Hogan’s alone was worth two heads, at least.

He was finding it increasingly difficult to disregard the multitude of eyes fixed on him. Bob didn’t particularly enjoy being the center of attention to begin with, especially not like this. He would have dressed better had he’d known. He surveyed Section Chief Stanhorn’s single breasted blue pinstripe suit that was flattering to his broad chest and stealthily hid his middle-aged paunch. It even somehow made his white mop of curls look distinguished. Bob silently cursed himself for not re-ironing his own shirt that morning: He looked like a bum off the street in comparison. Internally, he placed ‘outfits’ under the list of reasons he hadn’t made supervisor yet.

The venetian blinds in the room were mostly shut and artificial ceiling light launched long ugly shadows over every item on the surface of the conference table. Coffee cups rose like black monoliths, stacks of files morphed into Aztec ziggurats. The theater of investigation was a show of shadow puppets and its warped display spread under Bob like an elaborate grave.

Bob cleared his throat. “Should I begin my preliminary report—?”

ASAC Hogan’s giant head nodded his assent, his neck creaking under the stress.

Bob cleared his throat again, shuffled his papers and began.

“I’ll start at the beginning so that we’re all on the same page.” He glanced around the room at expressionless faces that gave away nothing. It felt like a poker game—except that the others were penny ante and he was betting his whole damn career.

“As you may have heard, gentlemen, the sum funds of RVC State Bank have vanished. The boss of said bank, one Frank Lehrman, has also disappeared without a trace.”

“Seems pretty cut and dry who took the money,” Section Chief Stanhorn said, folding his arms snug.

“Motive-wise, he’s a key suspect,” Bob said, feeling his insides turn gray and weak. “The only problem is, there’s nothing tying Lehrman or anyone to the stolen money.”

A low mumble as the room traded perplexed whispers.

“But—er—Bookm—that is, Bob,” ASAC Hogan said, “Any kind of financial transaction has to leave a paper trail. You’ve been dissecting the data behind the robbery for a week now.”

“That much money doesn’t just up and disappear,” Stanhorn said. “We’re talking how much again?”

Bob cleared his throat and said hoarsely, “$250 million.”

“Two hundred—” Stanhorn’s voice trailed off, as if it was his first time hearing it.

“Agent Fairfax, you know,” the other Financial agent in the room said. “That’s a quarter billion dollars. It’s very difficult for so much money to just… Vanish.”

“Yes.” It was also the reason Bob was toast.

Stanhorn adjusted his seat, leaned forward on the desk, his arms bulging inside the blue sleeves. “You’re telling us a quarter billion dollars disappeared and there’s nothing—not a single trace showing where it went?” He leaned back in his seat again, his eyes milky and gleaming with confusion and anger.

“There’s a trace,” Bob retorted. “But the trace doesn’t lead to anything substantial.”

“How is that even possible?” The other Finance agent said.

“Okay, hold on,” ASAC Hogan said congenially, his perfect row of teeth gleaming under the office light. “Let’s focus on the heart of the matter here. Where has the money gone, Bob?”

“Well ASAC, it’s—everywhere,” Bob said, his voice becoming harder and harder to project past his larynx. He wasn’t making sense and he knew he wasn’t making sense, but he was also finding it difficult to make himself make sense.

Hogan’s left eyebrow cocked a notch higher on his broad forehead. “Define everywhere.”

“Okay so look. What happened was this. The bank’s internal funds were used as collateral in a series of microloans. Each loan was reportedly so small that it didn’t trigger automatic security measures.”

“Loans?” Stanhorn said. “Then that would mean the bank’s funds increased, would it not?”

“I’m getting to that,” Bob said. “That was the second part of the heist. If you want to call it a heist. Each individual loan only increased the total sum of the bank’s money, such that the security measures didn’t realize when more and more of the funds were being sent out to escrow as collateral for new loans. Think of it as a chain of transactions, where bit by bit, the money in the bank was being replaced by money that the bank did not, in fact, own.”

Stanhorn sat there scratching his white curls, but the three special agents were nodding.

“Elegant,” one of the Cyber agents said.

“It’s like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the other Cyber agent said. “Where Indy switches out the artifact for a bag of sand.”

The special agent from Financial said nothing for a while, then muttered in a low voice, “What happened next, Agent Fairfax?”

“Nothing,” Bob said. “Nothing had to. It was already over.”

“Meaning?” Stanhorn said.

“These microloans,” Bob went on. “They’re designed for traders to exploit arbitrage opportunities. It’s not like the loans you take out to start a business or buy a house. They’re expected to be paid back within minutes, sometimes seconds. You borrow the money, a trade goes through, you get your original sum back with profit and pay back the loan. Algorithms do this all day long.”

“But you said RVC did nothing,” the Financial agent said.

“Right. The bank didn’t pay the loans back. They defaulted on every single one of them.”

Silence pervaded the room then. The tension was rising to visibility, like a heatwave in the desert. It was starting to click with them.

“Bob,” Hogan said, still maintaining his amiable voice but unable to hide the subtle clenching of his oversized jaw muscles. “Am I understanding this correctly? The bank defaulted on all of its loans—then all of its money went to the money lenders to pay off the accrued debt, correct?”

“Correct, ASAC Hogan.”

“So then, what you stated earlier isn’t exactly true, is it? That you don’t know where the money is. The money all went to the lenders.”

“That’s the thing, ASAC. The lenders aren’t an organization; they’re not linked in any way. They’re just other random financial entities who lend out money through these systems.”

“How many uh, random entities are we talking here, Bob?” Hogan said, his face growing even more stone-like and solemn.

“Hundreds of thousands of them. The money was broken up into infinitesimal amounts.”

“And spread like dust over the whole planet,” the Financial agent said. “Like money laundering turned up to the nth power.”

“Right,” Bob said. He calmed a little, now that he’d managed to convey the situation. But it was a false calm, like the settling of the wind inside of a tornado. All you could hear was the small whisper of the A/C and distant voices from other offices down the hall.

Stanhorn chewed on his pen. “That would be somewhat—difficult to pin down.”

Bob felt relief flooding through his muscles, his heart unclenching. So, it wasn’t just him. He had been secretly scared to death that he had overlooked something entirely obvious and that he was just being inept. But the others in the room seemed equally at a loss—and these were no slouches either. You had high ranking agents from both Cyber and Financial in here. The case was just that much of a landmine, and this fact broke in the room like the ugly purple sun over the Hudson River.

“Any suggestions?” Hogan said, looking around the six others at the desk. The Cyber geeks exchanged some whispers, shook their heads. The other Financial agent mumbled something about waiting until some of the money got spent, but this was quickly shot down. The money wasn’t connected anymore—that was the killer. It didn’t matter if someone spent one cent or one million dollars of it: It didn’t mean a thing. The money had been obliterated, torn into shreds and thrown out the window of a Manhattan skyscraper to the people below. It had become untraceable. Even if Lehrman was spending increments of the money on some tropical island somewhere, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to do it in a way which connected the dots back together. It was a total blow out. They had all this data, all this transparency, yet it revealed nothing.

“There is one other way to approach this,” Bob said, already regretting saying anything, but also resigned to the knowledge that at this point there was little other option.

“Shoot,” ASAC Hogan said.

“We could try finding Lehrman himself. A man is liable to leave more of a fingerprint than his washed money—at least in this case.”

The others at the desk exchanged looks.

“We were thinking something similar,” one of the Cyber agents said. “Suspect recognition technology has reached maturity now—whether it’s an appearance offline or on. Sooner or later he has to pop up on the grid. Unless he lives like a savage in the jungle.”

Stanhorn chewed his pen and traded some kind of psychic transmission with ASAC Hogan. Hogan then turned to Bob, his eyes somewhat softer, his jaw less clenched.

“It strikes me, Bob, that you’re proposing we go ghost hunting…”

Bob’s eyes widened at this phrase. His mouth dried up. He knew where this was going. He also suddenly felt like he’d been set up. He was meant to fail at catching the trace of the money: This had just been a prelude. Hogan’s real purpose for giving the case to Bob became all too clear.

“…In which case,” Hogan went on, his grin alligator-wide. “I think I know the perfect candidate who can help you.”

“Sir?” Bob said, his voice only a croak now. “Who?”

“Bob, as of this moment I’m assigning you back to your old partner: Special Agent Heather Chase.”

Chapter 2

The next day, Bob found himself driving into Brooklyn to pick up his partner. Apparently she was living over in Gravesend now, this little neighborhood north of Brighton Beach. Mostly red brick apartments and houses sided the road, two or three stories tops. Bodegas on the corner of the block. A quaint little place as long as you didn’t go too far east. Bob looked at his GPS, which was pointing at him to continue east.

He drove his stuttering Taurus onward, the engine rattling as he accelerated. It needed looking at, he just hadn’t had the time or spare funds to get it serviced. Alimony, child support, dining outside when he didn’t have time to cook: It all added up. Across another couple of crossroads now, the storefronts getting grungier, the fire exits rustier. Ugly block-lettered graffiti in pastel blue and cinnamon red sprawled across permanently locked shutters on stores that had gone under half a decade ago. Ratty lawns behind chain link fences painted orange with rust. Finally the GPS’s comforting voice told him it was safe to pull over now, in a street buried under construction scaffolding and green chipboard barriers, the road was blocked on one side by blue skips full of dirt. He got out and breathed in the rising wood chip dust coming off the building under repair, the thud of the drill echoing through his skull. It was near noon now, but the weak February sun did little to warm the chill in him. Bob looked across the street at Chase’s apartment; another red brick joint set on the second floor above a clothing store with its shutter down too, unclear if it was closed for good or the owner just on vacation. The tag painted on the front of the steel shutter read: Eat at Joe’s.

He felt himself stalling. He really didn’t want to go up there and start this all over again, watch Chase go barreling into danger on a whim as he struggled to keep up with her mad logic and spur of the moment intuitions. The last time was exhausting, and that had only been a simple murder case. Now they were dealing with millions of dollars missing and a case that totally perplexed.

The truth was, Heather Chase remained a specter that had never really left Bob’s mind. It had only been one case they shared, but that one case had radically altered Bob’s position in the Bureau and made him reevaluate his entire career. It’s not as if Bob had ever treated his job frivolously, in fact he was the type to still be glued to his seat staring at figures on a computer screen long after all his coworkers had gone home to their families. But Chase took obsession to a whole other level.

In the FBI, you had two classes of people: You had the kind who met the cruelty of criminal society with a hard skin, who developed the ability to stop caring and this became their whole source of strength. With this kind of person, every feeling was experienced buffered, as if through a dense filter and every face they showed the world was a mask. On the other hand, you had whack-a-moles like Heather Chase, who was pants-on-head, balls-to-the-wall crazy when it came to the job. They threw themselves so deeply into their work that it poisoned them from the inside out. It meant they couldn’t walk one side of the line anymore. They became as much robber as cop, murderer as victim. You always got the feeling they were split right down the middle, that they would just snap one day, go on a shooting spree and start nailing every suspect they felt was culpable.

Bob had always considered himself the first of these two categories. He had numbed himself to overdosed drug addicts and executed gang members, the bloated bodies the PD fished out of the East River, the grieving families and the confused victims coming to terms with an innocence permanently lost. But even when you shut it out, Bob now realized, sooner or later it all starts to take its toll. It eats you up even when you don’t show it.

So Bob’s answer had been to turn to data. Cold hard numbers on a screen. You deal in statistics, in times, dates, places. GPS coordinates on a map. You don’t have to look in the eyes of someone who just lost the one most valuable to them and tell them you’re sorry—all the while trying desperately not to be sorry, because if you ever did feel that deeply about it you wouldn’t be fit to do the job.

But something had changed in that case last fall, working the murder of Deborah Doyle. He had been flung together with Agent Chase under the pretext of keeping a loose cannon in check. At first he had stood back and watched things unfold, tried to dissect the case in the way his 18 years at the Bureau had taught him. All he could do was watch as the case slipped through his fingers like a wet tablecloth. It wasn’t that Bob was doing his job incorrectly: In fact, any regular agent working that case would have been totally blindsided by the forces at work behind the scenes. But not Chase. She had latched her claws into the case like a starving dog to a T-bone steak, from the very start suspecting anyone and everyone involved, even law enforcement. It led to uncovering a massive string of corruption in the NYPD that had gone on unhindered for a decade.

The fact was that Chase was possessed of a kind of uninhibited madness to which others couldn’t allow themselves to fall, simply because they always had to think of the consequences: They thought of what might happen to their career, their friendships, their personal lives. By the time Bob had gotten to the end of the Doyle case, he found that he himself had slipped into Chase’s mindset that personal lives were just another unnecessary barrier to getting the truth.

He didn’t want to think about what had happened since then. He didn’t want to think of the legal documents sitting at home announcing the end of yet another marriage, another alimony bill to pay, the foreclosure on his house. He didn’t want to think about his estranged kids. Bob searched out Chase’s window, on which the drapes were still drawn. He glanced at his watch: 12:35 p.m. His phone rumbled inside his pocket with a notification. Another nag message from his creditors.

“To hell with them,” Bob said, flinging his phone into the dash of his Bureau-owned Taurus. Just as well he had no car of his own. Just more collateral for the bank to take when they felt like it. He skipped across the street and up the stoop, panned the street behind him for threats automatically. Hitting the buzzer to Chase’s 2B was returned with dead silence.

“Come on Chase,” Bob muttered. He hit the buzzer again, slipped his hand inside his pocket for the phone which was no longer on him. Sighing, he hit the buzzer a third time. Then hit a few other random buttons. The speaker crackled with a young man’s voice. “Yo, Scotty, that you dawg?”

“Yeah,” Bob said, far enough away from the speaker to mask his voice. “Buzz me in, bro.”

The door gave off a sharp buzz and Bob let himself in, took the stairs to Chase’s floor and started knocking on her door. “Agent Chase? Open up. It’s me, Bob. Chase are you in there?”

About a minute passed before the sound of shuffling feet finally came from inside the door, mixed in with an incoherent grumbling. He wondered if he had the right place or if Chase had moved again, if she’d forgotten to update her employee record. Bob heard three different deadlocks being unbolted before the steel apartment door opened to a pale, heart-shaped face mostly hidden under a tousle of dark auburn hair, her amber brown eyes barely open. Chase was wearing blue Quantico sweats and her bare toes curled inward as a cold draft spilled into the room.

“Hi, uh, were you asleep?”

“What d’you want, Bob?” Chase said grumpily.

“Right. See there’s this case and—”

“Can’t help you.” Chase slammed the door.

Bob stood there with his mouth still hanging open. He should have known this wasn’t going to be easy. Nothing ever was. He knocked on the door again once, twice. The door opened. Chase’s black-rimmed eyes peered out. “Can’t help you even if I wanted,” she said, slamming the door again.

“Your suspension has been lifted,” Bob called through the door.

“By whom?” She called back in the hoarse, dry voice of someone who’d taken pills to sleep.

“ASAC Hogan personally released you back into active service.”

“Phooey,” Chase said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Hong Kong Phooey. Huey, Louie, and Phooey. I’m going back to bed.”

“Aren’t you even curious why he wants you back?”

“No, Bob. The reason’s obvious.”

“So, tell me.”

“You’re desperate.”

Bob worked his mouth, then shut it again. Then opened it to retort before Chase fell into another doze. “Chase, it’s more complicated than that.”

“Complicated? It’s always complicated, Bob. That’s why we’re the FBI.”

“Look, we have to find someone before they vanish forever. He’s made off with a lot of money.”

Silence for a few heartbeats. Then Bob heard footsteps treading back and forth across a polished wood floor.

“Who?” Chase asked.

“The name’s Frank Lehrman. The boss of RVC State Bank.”

“RVC State Bank? Never heard of it.”

“RVC as in Rockville Center.”

“Rockville Center.”

“As in Long Island.”

“I know where it is, Bookman. But Rockville Center’s not even a real town. It’s like—a strip mall and a church and that’s it. The hell’s it doing with its own bank?”

“Yeah, well the complications start there. It’s one of those neobanks.”

“A what?”

“You know, like digital. Does away with the brick and mortar aspects, all the traditional high costs, etc.”

Chase pondered this for a while, her half-asleep brain seemingly struggling with the new set of facts it had been given to chew on.

“Bob, if it’s digital only, it’s not a State Bank, it’s just an IT company.”

“Uh—see there’s the thing. Technically it’s not just a neobank. It’s a hybrid.”

“A hybrid.”

“Yeah. Like the Toyota Prius.”

“It’s the Toyota Prius of banks, you’re saying.”

“Right, Chase.”

“And the boss has done a legger with all the bank’s money.”

“Yep.”

“How much?”

Bob said nothing, just awkwardly looked down the unlit corridor.

“Bob, how much was stolen?”

“A quarter billion. US dollars.”

“It’s too high profile. Bob I hate to tell you this, but you’re a patsy.”

He gritted his teeth. She wasn’t necessarily wrong about that.

“Look, you don’t have to commit to anything, just talk to me.”

She opened the door again. Her eyes bored into Bob like two spinning drill bits.

“I mean, come on Bookman, what the hell was a tiny bank in Long Island doing with a quarter billion dollars? The whole thing stinks like a Philadelphia flophouse.”

Bob, who had been looking into just that question for the past week, could only shrug in response. “It’s—I dunno. It’s perplexing. They had customers all around the country as well as overseas. They were dealing with more than just grandma’s pension check here.”

Chase teased her hair back from her face and extended a hand expectantly. For a split second Bob hallucinated that she wanted to shake with him, but the angle of her hand was wrong—it was facing upwards.

“Oh,” Bob said, going into his bag and sifting through it, then coming up with a thin plastic folder. Chase took it, eyed the few pages inside which amounted to the articles of incorporation of the Frank Lehrman Corporation and some brief details taken off the bank’s website.

Chase glared at him. “What the hell is this? Where’s his real file?”

“There isn’t one.”

“Excuse me?”

“The fact is, there isn’t much to tell.”

“Why not?”

“Frank Lehrman, I’m thinking, is an alias. No registered passport, education, credit record, no criminal history, no prints, never seemed to have been outside the country. Also the face they use on the website, I analyzed it but it seems computer generated. So, not his real face, which means can’t run it through the facial recognition server.”

“Bob, he owns a bank. A state bank. You can’t do that through an alias… Can you?”

“He’s the CEO of the RVC company, not the owner of the bank. The owner of the RVC Bank is a corporation.”

“The Frank Lehrman Corporation.”

“Right.”

“And who owns that?”

“Well, a bunch of parent LLCs.”

Chase sighed, pushed her hair back over her ears. “This sounds like a cluster fudge of epic proportions, Bob. The more I hear the more I don’t like it. What do you possibly think I could do here? This is your game. I hunt down killers and kidnappers, remember?”

“You hunt ghosts, Chase. ASAC Hogan and I believe the best route in solving this case is by apprehending the man known as Frank Lehrman. We believe, since the data is so obviously tainted, that the best method here is in fact to go the old fashioned route. Like through the bank’s employees and so forth. It wouldn’t be too far beyond what you’re used to.”

“I don’t think you quite know what I’m used to, Bookman.” She shuffled through the files some more. “Hold on a second. This bank is an FDIC member?”

“Right.”

“You gotta be freaking kidding me. Wouldn’t the FDIC have vetted this Lehrman character?”

“They would have vetted the parent corporation, which is backed by so many Wall Street firms it kind of has the halo effect behind it.”

“Uh huh. The halo effect.”

“Like you know how these things work in big business, Chase. The chain of trust…”

“More like the chain of greased palms.”

Bob stared at her. “You think bribery was involved? At the level of the Federal Government?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, Bob, you tell me.”

He thought about it. It was a small possibility. Tiny, in fact. But one he had shut out until now—simply because it had seemed so unthinkable. That was wrong of him. He had exhausted all the thinkable possibilities, and now the unthinkable ones were exactly where he needed to return. Crud, he thought. He really did need Chase after all.

“Chase,” Bob finally said, throwing his pride out the dusty window. “I don’t think I can do this alone.”

Chase just looked at him, her sleepy eyes still half-open, but burning hotter now, like old bulbs slowly flaring up in their sockets.

“So, basically,” Chase said, “we go after Lehrman. It’s a manhunt then.”

Bob smiled meekly. “What can I say, you have a reputation for these things.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And look where it’s gotten me.”

Took the words right out of my mouth, Bob thought.

“So, are you in?” Bob said. “It’s gotta beat lying in bed all day. I have a meeting scheduled with the bank in half an hour.”

Chase looked drowsily back at her unmade bed, the clothes scattered across her floor, the stack of unwashed dishes in her kitchen sink. Suddenly it seemed like this was the last place in the world she wanted to be.

“Fine,” Chase said. “But I have one condition.”

“Shoot.”

“You’re driving. I need to take a nap on the way.”

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