The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [105]
“I don’t get it.”
“You will.” I tabbed to another section of the workbook. “This is the profit and loss generated by each of the thirty-four accounts, listed month by month for each of the last three years.”
“Four of the accounts always lose money,” she said hesitantly, “and the other thirty always make money.”
“And the net of the money lost and the money made?”
Her eyes flicked to the far right-hand column of the spreadsheet.
“Zero?”
“Right. Which only makes sense because Mohler isn’t really trading. All he does is buy stock through one broker and sell it through another.…”
“And then put the losing trades in the first four accounts and the winning trades in the other thirty,” she finished in a rush. “It’s like the whole IPO thing with Petronuevo. It’s all just a way of moving money from one pocket to another pocket.”
“Bingo. And not just moving money. Mohler’s making payoffs to people and simultaneously laundering the money so the gains look legitimate. All of which explains why he can spend his entire day looking at Internet porn. He doesn’t care if the market goes up or the market goes down. All he has to do is allocate the winners and the losers to the right accounts at the end of the month.”
Reggie and Claire entered, laden with carryout food. Kate stood up to intercept them.
“Let me deal with that,” she said. “You have to listen to Dad. He’s figured this whole thing out.”
“Hardly,” I protested.
“Almost,” she insisted. “You were only wrong about one thing. You’re not an idiot at all.”
“Okay,” Reggie said, pushing his empty plate away fifteen minutes later. “Bottom line, we know what Mohler’s doing.”
“Right,” I said. “The problem is that we don’t know who he’s doing it for. There aren’t any names in his trading records.”
“Any luck breaking into his hard drive?” Claire asked, glancing toward Kate.
“Nope,” she replied glumly. “I’ll check with Gabor again when he wakes up, but whatever kind of firewall Mohler’s running is doing what it’s supposed to do. No matter what I try, his machine just doesn’t respond.”
“So, what are our options?” Claire persisted.
“Beyond breaking in and just grabbing his computer? A couple of things, I guess. We can send him a virus and hope he’s dumb enough to open it, and that he’s not running any antivirus software. That would let me into his computer. And we can keep an eye on his incoming and outgoing mail. We might learn some names that way.”
I stood up from the table where we’d been eating dinner, feeling restless and frustrated.
“No. I don’t want to lose momentum. Kate’s supposed to be at school. And the more time we spend screwing around with Mohler’s records and his network, the more likely it is that someone figures it out and comes right back at us. We need to keep the initiative.”
“I like that idea,” Reggie said.
“What idea?”
“The idea of trying to get these guys to come back at us. The one thing we know about this gang is that they’re not shy. Maybe we can use that against them, to set a trap.”
37
The LaGuardia Motor Court in Queens is an architectural throwback to the 1950s—a rambling, pink-painted, two-story wooden structure that surrounds an asphalt parking lot on three sides, with rooms that open directly to the central lot at ground level and a long, open-air gallery above. My room was upstairs. Four steps carried me from the cigarette-burned nightstand to the peeling veneer of the wall opposite. Another four carried me back. I pushed the yellowed curtain from my window for the tenth time and checked for activity outside. The view was of the half-empty parking lot, a narrow, brown finger of the East River, and the raw concrete buildings of the Rikers Island penitentiary beyond. The only change in the last two minutes was that the lights of the prison had come on, gleaming with a false cheerfulness through the wintry mid-afternoon gloom. A plane roared low overhead from the adjacent airport, making the floor joists tremble. I doubted anyone got much sleep