Page 111 of One Minute Out

The Romanian woman looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, so I clarify. “Not those bad guys. Some other bad guys.”

She has no idea what I’m talking about, and that’s for the best.

I send a few texts before we get back on the highway, and then, a little more than an hour later, I get the call approving my request for a face-to-face meeting with a man in Venice.

Talyssa doesn’t lift her head out of her computer for the next three hours of our drive. Every now and then she takes a bite out of an apple or sips some bottled water, but she remains completely focused on her work.

Finally, as I’m arriving at the northern outskirts of Treviso, a city not thirty minutes from Venice proper, she leans her head back and groans like some sort of a wounded animal.

“I take it something’s wrong.”

She ignores me while she rubs her eyes, then takes a long swig of water. Finally she says, “I’m so close, but I can’t do anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been going back through everything I have on the Consortium, all the relationships between all the companies, all the capital equipment I can trace to them: the plane, the yacht, stuff like that. I’ve traced bank accounts to the Caymans and the Dominican Republic and Crete and Luxembourg... but I’m no closer to finding out who the people are who run this thing.”

I was hoping she’d be able to pull a rabbit out of her hat with her research, because I have serious doubts about my plan for tonight. Still, I see that she tried. “Sometimes there is no answer.”

“There is an answer, it’s just not available to me. If someone could hack into one of the law firms around the world that set up these offshore accounts, then they could swim upstream into the account information.”

“You think the name of the Director of the Consortium would be tied to these accounts? I don’t know much about money laundering, but I know they keep an air gap between themselves and the illicit money.”

“Of course the accounts won’t have the names of the people in charge, but they will have information on where the transfers came from: investment firms, hedge funds, real estate brokers. That could... no... that would lead me to the actual men and women who run this whole thing.”

Her plan sounds about as likely as mine now. “Yeah, but you can’t hack into the law firms. Can you?”

She shakes her head. “No. I can’t. I mean, there are people out there who can, but they are criminals, and they sure as hell won’t work for me.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“Some of them. Europol is involved with investigations around the EU where we have identified hackers.”

“Are they in jail?”

She shrugs, rubbing her neck. “Some are. Most aren’t. The wheels of justice move very slowly in Europe. It’s not like in America, where they put you in the gas chamber the day after they know you did it.”

Her English is amazing, but her knowledge of the nation of my birth is lacking.

An idea comes to me slowly, and even as it begins to form, I ask her about it. “These people under investigation. Do they know you are watching them?”

“Well, technically Europol isn’t watching them. Their nations’ law enforcement entities are. But I do know who some of these people are.”

“Where is the closest hacker who has the skills to do what you need?”

She thinks this over carefully. It looks to me like she enjoys the mental exercise of remembering the names and locations.

She says, “There’s some good ones in Romania.”

“Do they have protection?”

“Well... they work with organized crime, but virtually all of the black-hat hackers at this level do.”

“Virtually all? Is there someone who isn’t tied to any crime syndicate?”

Again she thinks in silence. “Well... for what I need, there is one man who has the skills and is not aligned with any known mafia group.”

“Where is he?”

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