Page 62 of Philly
That snapped Callie out of whatever she’d been thinking. “We are?”
“We are,” Sabina replied. “We received an interesting piece of mail today. It was addressed to the Falcons and mailed to the club’s PO. Mantis brought it over this afternoon. It’s from Rian.”
“What did it say?” Philly prompted. He had the utmost respect for Sabina, but she did like a dramatic pause.
“As Rian told Philly, he’s been working on the inside to get evidence against his dad,” Leo said. “Between Callie stopping by his office a few weeks ago and Philly reaching out to him—thanks for not telling us that, by the way—he’s hopeful a case can finally be made. He wanted to get you the information he found—which isn’t a lot but is helpful—so that you could pass it along, maybe encourage the process.”
“You contacted him?” Callie asked, not accusingly, but also not happy he’d kept it from the team.
Deciding offense was the best defense, he winked at her. “I might have sent an email to check in on him. I also might have mentioned that an old friend was in town and that she worked for the FBI. At that point, I didn’t know you’d quit. Oh, and since Paris is Rian’s favorite city, I mentioned that this friend of mine and I were thinking of visiting the city.”
Leo chuckled. “Enough info for him to get the message while still sounding like chitchat. Nice.”
Callie stared, her dark eyes searching his face. Then she gave a little shake of her head. “What did he send?”
“A donation to the Falcons’ work helping people out of bad situations. It came in a greeting card that also had a link to a file drop site,” Leo answered. “He uploaded seven pictures—all bank statements—three email files, and summaries of a few conversations he overheard.”
“Anything useful?” Philly asked.
“The bank statements are interesting as they aren’t associated with the business and aren’t even in Aiden’s name, but when we traced them back, it does appear as if he controls them. We’ll have to firm that connection up, but over the past three years, funds were wired from those accounts and into accounts associated with the wives of two Indian government officials, the son of a Chinese businesswoman, and two of our very own politicians. We’re checking the payments against business with Nolan Enterprises.”
“What about the other pieces of information?” Callie asked.
“The conversations were also interesting. Nothing damning on their own, but in the context of some of the other things we’re finding, it supports our theory about Aiden’s corrupt activities,” Leo answered.
“Surely Rian heard his father talking to a lot of people. What made him suspicious about those conversations?” she asked.
“We’ll send them to you to look through. They are cryptic enough to border on being cliché. I think it was more the weirdness of them than the substance that caught Rian’s attention,” Leo answered.
Callie bobbed her head.
“And the emails?” Philly asked.
“Those are the most interesting,” Sabina said. “They are emails to Aiden from three separate government officials. One from Saudi, one from Italy, and one from the US. The US email is more subtle, but all of them allude to receipt of the payment, including one that came in a suitcase. There’s no reply from Aiden, but still, we confirmed Nolan won bids associated with those officials.”
“What kind of deals?” Callie asked.
“In Saudi and Italy, they supplied clothes to high-end shops owned by relatives of the officials. The US one was for uniforms, although for bus drivers, not the military,” Leo answered.
“We’ve received authorization to look deeper into those procurement processes,” Sabina added.
“The house of cards is crumbling,” Philly muttered.
“But hopefully not completely,” Callie said. He glanced over. “As you pointed out, thousands of employees rely on Nolan Enterprises for their livelihoods, and it’s a minority percentage of their business that Aiden has poisoned. If we can carve out the cancer, that’s what we need to do.”
“And that’s what we’ll do,” Sabina said as Philly studied Callie. He’d never thought her cold-blooded, but it did funny things to him that she hadn’t lost sight of her humanity in the hunt for her prey.
He cleared his throat. “Any updates on the iPad data dump?”
Leo groaned; Sabina chuckled. “Your friend had shit security, but she didn’t need much. We’re still trying to decipher everything.”
“Any chance she used Tewa?” Callie asked, referring to the language Liza had used in the files she’d left.
“Oh, she did, but like a Spanglish or Hinglish version of it,” Leo said. “She’ll start a word in Tewa then end in English. Or start a sentence in English, then end it in Tewa. It would have taken us longer to figure it out if your earlier work on her files hadn’t pointed us toward the language.”
“Any highlights you can share?” Philly asked.
“Her informant was a woman,” Sabina said. “French—which isn’t a surprise—and young enough not to catch a pop culture reference Liza made.”
