Storm Front

CHAPTER 18

AMES, Iowa

The circles under his puffy eyes were dark enough to stand out under the John Lennon glasses. The coffee cup next to him practically had scorch marks from being refilled so often. There was a slight shake to his mouse hand.

If Rodney Click looked like he had been up all night, it was no accident. He had been.

Derrick Storm had not slept much either, albeit for a different reason. But eventually he got that reason — Ling Xi Bang — on the first flight out of Ames, heading for Des Moines and ultimately Washington, D.C. It was around 9 A.M. when Storm walked into Click’s tiny office.

Storm wasn’t sure he had ever seen such a large man so close to tears. He was mumbling to himself, making little sense to Storm, whose mathematical education ended with Mrs. Beauregard’s twelfth-grade calculus class. Click’s speech was spiked with phrases like “inputs are just too variable” and “not enough firm data points” and “can’t determine the effective calculability” and a whole lot of other things Storm couldn’t even parse. It sounded like a mathematician’s brain had been split open and was now randomly spilling nonsense.

Storm went around behind the distraught man, put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke in the calm tone of a first-grade teacher.

“Doctor,” Storm said. “Could you maybe tell me what the problem is… in English?”

“I just can’t… I can’t get the algorithm to give me anything,” Click said. “Or at least not anything that I would consider reliable. Put simply, the ISSMDM is designed to only go one direction. You tell it what trades you’ve made, where you’ve made them and by whom, and it predicts the result of that trade on relative currency values. I’ve spent four years perfecting its function, but I’ve never once tried to make it go the other way — taking a result and then backtracking to the potential source. I thought yesterday I could do it with a few simple modifications, but now…”

And then he launched on a long description of what he had tried to do, the vast majority of which was totally inexplicable. Storm listened — sometimes, he had learned, it was important to make people feel heard, whether you actually understood them or not. He made all the right active listening sounds. When he was sure Click was done, Storm patted the man’s shoulder again. He walked around to the other side of the desk, then sat down. An idea was coming to him. He looked at the books lining the walls, out the narrow window to the campus below, then back at the man-mountain of an assistant professor.

“What if we started in a different place?” Storm said. “You’re asking your model to do a lot of hard work, but in this case, there’s a bad guy who has already done a lot of the work for us. Five-sixths of it, to be exact. We already know who five of the victims are.”

“I thought it was just four,” Click said.

“There was a fifth last night. A South African named Jeff Diamant.”

“Diamant,” Click said solemnly. “I actually met him at a conference once. A wonderful man. Not at all like most of the others in his field. No ego on him. Very soft-spoken, actually. That’s just… that’s awful.”

The men shared an impromptu moment of silence.

“So, as I was saying, what if we take what we know about the five bankers, put that into the model, and ask it to tell us who has a similar profile? Let’s work from what’s known as opposed to trying to start from scratch,” Storm said, then started ticking off the names on his fingers. “Dieter Kornblum. Joji Motoshige. Wilhelm Sorenson. Nigel Wormsley. And now Jeff Diamant. What do they share? What can we glean about them that will allow us to learn who Unlucky Number Six is before it’s too late?”

Click tugged on his long beard. “That sounds nice in theory, but we don’t have the data. The only information I have about them is the trades they’ve made. I’d need a whole lot more. You’d pretty much have to hack the FX mainframe, and good luck with that. If I said that thing is the encryption equivalent of Fort Knox, I’d actually be insulting FX. Fort Knox would be easy compared to that. No one could hack that thing.”

A smile spread across Storm’s face. “Wanna bet?” he said.

Storm pulled out his phone and put in a call to the cubby. Agent Rodriguez answered.

“Javi, it’s Storm. Are the nerds occupied with anything at the moment?”

“Yes, but I can un-occupy them if you say ‘pretty please,’ ” Rodriguez said.

“Make it with sugar on top. I need them to break into the foreign exchange market mainframe and give us some information. Think they can handle that?”

“About as easy as you handle that ugly Ford Taurus you drive.”

“Hey, no bashing the finest automotive company in the world. I’ll report you to the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

“You gotta stop reading those old spy novels, Storm. The Cold War is over, bro. Hang on, let me put you directly in touch with one of the nerds.”

The line went silent for a minute or so, then Storm found himself talking with a young woman who made it sound like breaking into the ForEx mainframe was roughly on the same difficulty level as ordering a pizza. Storm half-expected her to ask whether he wanted extra cheese.

She told Storm she’d be back to him shortly — in a half hour or it’s free? he wondered — then put him on hold. Storm told Click what was going on.

“Are you sure this is legal?” Click asked.

Storm just shrugged.

“That’s what lawyers worry about. Thankfully, I’m not one of those. Why don’t you just tell me what kind of thing you’ll be looking for once we get inside?”

Ever the professor, Click started his lecture. Storm felt like he needed a spiral notebook, but he did his best to absorb what he was hearing while he kept his phone at his ear. Fifteen minutes later, the phone came back to life.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m in. What do we need?”

“Let’s start with Dieter Kornblum,” Storm said.

Over the next four hours, they slowly built a profile of each banker, putting in all the information Click thought he needed and some he didn’t know he needed until it was suddenly available to him. They fell into a pattern where Click asked questions that Storm relayed to the nerd, who then provided the information to Storm, who dictated it to Click, who put it into his model. The process was painstaking at times. But they made steady progress. Storm was forever amazed at the amount of money that was out there in the world, and he began to understand why bankers could refer to it in terms of game theory: When there was so much of it, it didn’t feel real.

Finally, Click announced he had all the data points he felt he needed. Storm thanked the nerd for her patience and service, asked her to stay on standby in case they needed more, then ended the call.

“Okay,” Click announced. “And now for the hard work.”

The hard work turned out to last several more hours. Storm’s role was now reduced to that of gopher: He fetched Click coffee; then he got them both sandwiches; then Click asked him to make a cookie run, which explained to Storm where at least a little of the mountain came from.

In between food runs, Storm placed a few phone calls to contacts in D.C. who would help smooth Ling Xi Bang’s path to Senator Whitmer. They were contacts who assumed Storm was acting at the behest of — or with the implicit cooperation of — Jedediah Jones and the CIA. Storm didn’t bother correcting them. Nor did he bother telling them the woman they were helping was actually a Chinese agent. There seemed to be no point in burdening them with details.

It was when Storm came back with coffee for perhaps the fifth time that he found Click beaming at him.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “Now, bear in mind, a model like this deals in probabilities, not certainties. But there has to be a sixth banker, and I’ve run the model numerous times now, tweaking it in a couple of different ways each time just to make sure I can’t shake it. And it keeps giving me the same answer. As you can see, there are other names, but none of them got above a twenty percent probability. According to my model, there is an eighty-seven percent chance that this is your sixth banker.”

Click tilted the computer screen in Storm’s direction. Storm stared for a moment. It was the final piece of the puzzle, the last bulwark between them and financial apocalypse. Storm pulled out his phone to call Jones, then thought better of it. This was starting to feel like one of those times when the less Jones knew, the better.

Instead, Storm typed a quick note to his insurance policy/father, telling him the latest. He always wanted to feel like he was leaving the old man some bread crumbs to follow.

Then Storm fired up one of his People Finder apps and put it to work. Before long, it gave him the business and residential addresses of the man in question.

Storm looked at the time on his phone. It was 3:06 P.M. Volkov had hit the day before, but in South Africa. It would be at least another day before he could get the needed pieces in place to strike again.

Storm would be able to get there first. But there was no time to waste. Not if he was going to protect the man whose name was at the top of Click’s screen: the CEO and chief proprietor of Prime Resource Investment Group, G. Whitely Cracker V.