The Russian Deception

CHAPTER 35

It took less than twenty minutes for Stephanie to break through the firewalls surrounding Moscow's central bank. It didn't leave her with a high opinion of whoever had set them up. In a world where cyber security was becoming a major focus of modern warfare, lax security was a glaring mistake on the part of the Russians. An average hacker would never have gotten in but Stephanie was no ordinary hacker.

She began searching for the money sent to Golovkin and through him, to Orlov. Finding out which accounts were theirs was complicated. Everything was coded by number, but Stephanie knew that somewhere on the bank's servers a list existed that connected numbers with names. It took longer to find that list than it had to break through the bank security. She identified the files and copied them to Virginia. The enormous capability of the Crays Stephanie had at her disposal made it easy.

The money flowing into Golovkin's account had come from four separate sources. Two were in the Cayman Islands, one was in Geneva and one was in Leipzig, Germany. She noted the identifiers for the banks and shut down her connection to Moscow.

More than seventy billion euros had been transferred to Moscow during the past year. The latest transfer had taken place only a few weeks ago. Somehow the transactions had failed to trigger the automatic monitoring used by Interpol to track large transfers that might signal terrorist activity or drug money or any one of a number of criminal enterprises. Interpol wasn't the only one looking for suspicious money movements but none of the agencies responsible for keeping an eye on international finance had noticed.

How on earth could this happen? Stephanie asked herself. Whoever is moving this money has found a way to subvert every safeguard that's been put in place. The money comes out of the banks and nobody pays attention. It ends up in Moscow and it might as well be a ten dollar deposit for all anybody seems to care. This isn't supposed to be possible.

She had found the banks but she still didn't know who had made the deposits in them. She chose one of the banks in the Caymans and hacked into it. She was surprised to find that security on this bank was far more sophisticated than what she'd run into in Moscow.

This is getting interesting, she thought.

The first transfer she tracked came from the account of an offshore drilling corporation working in the Gulf of Mexico. She followed the trail to the corporate servers and discovered it was a shell, a false front for another corporation involved in hazardous waste. From there she was led to a mining corporation with interests in Africa. She found herself in a complex maze of corporate accounts and blind alleys. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide the real source of the money. At some point in the afternoon Steph realized there was something familiar about the pattern she was looking at. Where had she seen it before?

Then it came to her.

Gutenberg. The banker who ran AEON. But he's dead, it couldn't be him doing this.

It seemed impossible but when she made the connection, Steph realized that it had to be him. The kind of manipulation she was tracking was as unique as an artist's brushstrokes on a painting, far beyond the usual corporate shell game played by tax evaders all over the world, a masterpiece of fraud and concealment. Gutenberg's mental fingerprints were all over it.

At the end of the day she went upstairs to talk with Elizabeth.

Elizabeth took one look at her and smiled to herself. "You look excited, Steph. What did you find?"

"You're not going to believe it."

"After the last year or two I think I would believe anything. What is it this time? Were you able to track the source of the money?"

"The funds were transferred from four different banks. The real source was hidden behind dozens of shell accounts. I've only seen something like it once before."

"Where?"

"AEON. This is Gutenberg's work."

Elizabeth looked at her in surprise. "That can't be. Gutenberg was killed when his château burned down."

"I said you weren't going to believe it."

Elizabeth picked up her pen and began tapping it on her desktop. She realized what she was doing and set it aside.

"You're certain?"

"It has to be him," Steph said. "No one else could set up something like this. He moved that money without triggering any of the red flags that would cause concern. It's a unique pattern, the same thing I saw when I was looking at him and his organization before. He must be using assets hidden by AEON. They had a thousand years to build up their reserve. It looks like Gutenberg has decided to spend it."

"By sending it to Russia? Why?"

"That's beyond my pay grade," Stephanie said, "but I'm certain this is his work."

"AEON is out of business. Everyone that was part of it is dead. There were bodies to prove it."

"Gutenberg's body was never found."

"If he's alive he has to be stopped. Did you find anything that could tell us where he might be?"

"I don't think he's in the Caymans. Those banks are the last point of transfer to Russia. It seems unlikely that he'd be in Switzerland, not after what happened there. The Leipzig bank is the primary clearinghouse for the funds. The transfers are initiated from there. It's a private bank, hundreds of years old. At a guess I'd say Gutenberg is in Leipzig or somewhere nearby."

"It's a place to start. Good work, Steph."

"That's not all. I found a transfer from the Leipzig bank for a hundred thousand euros that went to Helmut Schmidt. Gutenberg was paying Schmidt for something."

That's what my intuition was about, Elizabeth thought. She picked up her pen and fiddled with it. "He must have hired Schmidt to go after Selena in Vienna. If it really is him, maybe he wants to get even."

"That's vicious."

"Gutenberg is a vicious man," Elizabeth said. "Vienna and Hamburg make sense now. Everybody thinks Gutenberg is dead. When Schmidt failed, Gutenberg must have killed him to eliminate any links back to him."

"He might try to come after us again."

"Now that we know who we're dealing with, we'll be ready for him."

"What do you think he's playing at in Russia?"

"I don't know. By backing Orlov he's set up a confrontation between Russia and the West. It all depends on what Orlov decides to do."

"Why would Gutenberg fund a military adventure that could lead to all-out war?"

"Why did he try to start a nuclear war between India and China?" Elizabeth said. "There isn't any rational explanation for how people like him think."

"What do you plan to do next?" Stephanie asked.

"Send Nick and the others to Leipzig."