The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [103]
“Right. But that’s fine for now. She’s likely moving around under some other name anyway. The department makes Theresa as a connection between Carlos Munoz and Alex Coleman, and two things are going to happen. First, our degrees of freedom will go way down, because Chief Ellison will consolidate everything under someone more politically reliable than me, and we’ll be left out in the cold. Second, he’ll shine a big bright light up my backside, and your backside, and do everything he can to make our lives miserable.” He tipped his head toward Claire. “Pardon my language. But unless we’re willing to toss the whole thing to Ellison, and to give up on the kind of stuff we pulled today, I think we should continue to keep our mouths shut.”
Claire nodded her agreement.
“Okay,” I said. “What else?”
“Picked up some odd news on Rashid. His secretary’s right that there’s some sort of tug-of-war going on over his remains. My guy couldn’t find out exactly what the issue was, but he heard that the State Department was involved.”
“You have any guesses?”
Reggie shrugged.
“I’m clueless.”
“Ta-da,” Kate announced loudly, holding her arms over her head. “Your daughter’s a genius.”
“We already knew that,” I said, starting toward her. “What geniuslike thing have you done now?”
“Figured out that Mohler has a personal firewall on his PC, which makes it really tough to break into, but that he’s also running backup software. His entire document folder is getting copied to a stand-alone network hard drive every fifteen minutes. And the backup drive is completely unprotected.”
“Wow. Why would he protect his PC but not his backup?”
“Gabor predicted that I’d find a whole mix of different security protocols on the network, when I told him it was a small business. Most small businesses don’t have their own IT person, which means they have different technicians working on the network at different times, and even that people sometimes install stuff themselves without thinking about the security implications. I bet that Mohler or Ellen Cho bought the backup drive at Staples and just plugged it in without thinking.”
“Incredible. Can we see his mail?”
“One thing at a time,” she chided. “Documents first, maybe mail later. I’m copying the backup files to my Google account now, but if you get your laptop out, I can log you on simultaneously, and you can start looking through his records right away.”
“You’re the best,” I said, kissing her on top of her head.
“Never forget it.”
I looked at Claire. She smiled at me, and I smiled back.
36
“Shit,” I said, tossing my pencil at my computer screen. “I’m an idiot.”
“I already knew that,” Kate shot back deadpan. “What idiotlike thing have you done now?”
It was just after eight. Claire and Reggie had left ten minutes before to pick up dinner from an Italian place a few blocks away.
“Spent the better part of four hours trying to figure out Mohler’s bizarre trading strategies without ever spotting the obvious. Come look.”
She carried her chair around the table we were working at and sat down next to me. I picked up my pencil and touched the eraser to my screen.
“Thanks to your genius, I was able to copy all Mohler’s positions and transactions for the past six months into an Excel spreadsheet. He’s operating in thirty-four different accounts, so I copied each one to a separate page. The first thing I noticed is that he only trades on the first business day of every month.”
“Is that unusual?”
“So-so. There are a lot of money managers out there who practice something called ‘technical trading,’ which means they make buy and sell decisions based on statistical measures, like the moving average price of a stock and the daily trading volume, and pretty much ignore fundamental information, like how much money a company happens to be earning at any given point in time.”
“Wait a second,” Kate objected. “That’s crazy, isn’t it? How can you invest in a company and not care how much money it makes?”
“Two reasons. First, because you assume that any news