Storm Front

It took another hour or so for the authorities to unravel the whole mystery, and another hour or so beyond that for the thing to be put in the Interpol computer. From there, the flags went up. Interpol performed its notification protocol quickly.

Jedediah Jones got the call around 5 A.M. East Coast time, just as he was coming in from his daily run. Jones waited until a slightly more decent hour to call Derrick Storm and tell him the fifth banker was now dead. They had already put out the necessary bulletins for Gregor Volkov, but it was redundant. He was already on every Do Not Fly and Most Wanted list across the world. And yet he had once again disappeared into the mist.

CHAPTER 18

AMES, Iowa

The circles under his puffy eyes were dark enough to stand out under the John Lennon glasses. The coffee cup next to him practically had scorch marks from being refilled so often. There was a slight shake to his mouse hand.

If Rodney Click looked like he had been up all night, it was no accident. He had been.

Derrick Storm had not slept much either, albeit for a different reason. But eventually he got that reason — Ling Xi Bang — on the first flight out of Ames, heading for Des Moines and ultimately Washington, D.C. It was around 9 A.M. when Storm walked into Click’s tiny office.

Storm wasn’t sure he had ever seen such a large man so close to tears. He was mumbling to himself, making little sense to Storm, whose mathematical education ended with Mrs. Beauregard’s twelfth-grade calculus class. Click’s speech was spiked with phrases like “inputs are just too variable” and “not enough firm data points” and “can’t determine the effective calculability” and a whole lot of other things Storm couldn’t even parse. It sounded like a mathematician’s brain had been split open and was now randomly spilling nonsense.

Storm went around behind the distraught man, put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke in the calm tone of a first-grade teacher.

“Doctor,” Storm said. “Could you maybe tell me what the problem is… in English?”

“I just can’t… I can’t get the algorithm to give me anything,” Click said. “Or at least not anything that I would consider reliable. Put simply, the ISSMDM is designed to only go one direction. You tell it what trades you’ve made, where you’ve made them and by whom, and it predicts the result of that trade on relative currency values. I’ve spent four years perfecting its function, but I’ve never once tried to make it go the other way — taking a result and then backtracking to the potential source. I thought yesterday I could do it with a few simple modifications, but now…”

And then he launched on a long description of what he had tried to do, the vast majority of which was totally inexplicable. Storm listened — sometimes, he had learned, it was important to make people feel heard, whether you actually understood them or not. He made all the right active listening sounds. When he was sure Click was done, Storm patted the man’s shoulder again. He walked around to the other side of the desk, then sat down. An idea was coming to him. He looked at the books lining the walls, out the narrow window to the campus below, then back at the man-mountain of an assistant professor.

“What if we started in a different place?” Storm said. “You’re asking your model to do a lot of hard work, but in this case, there’s a bad guy who has already done a lot of the work for us. Five-sixths of it, to be exact. We already know who five of the victims are.”

“I thought it was just four,” Click said.

“There was a fifth last night. A South African named Jeff Diamant.”

“Diamant,” Click said solemnly. “I actually met him at a conference once. A wonderful man. Not at all like most of the others in his field. No ego on him. Very soft-spoken, actually. That’s just… that’s awful.”

The men shared an impromptu moment of silence.

“So, as I was saying, what if we take what we know about the five bankers, put that into the model, and ask it to tell us who has a similar profile? Let’s work from what’s known as opposed to trying to start from scratch,” Storm said, then started ticking off the names on his fingers. “Dieter Kornblum. Joji Motoshige. Wilhelm Sorenson. Nigel Wormsley. And now Jeff Diamant. What do they share? What can we glean about them that will allow us to learn who Unlucky Number Six is before it’s too late?”

Click tugged on his long beard. “That sounds nice in theory, but we don’t have the data. The only information I have about them is the trades they’ve made. I’d need a whole lot more. You’d pretty much have to hack the FX mainframe, and good luck with that. If I said that thing is the encryption equivalent of Fort Knox, I’d actually be insulting FX. Fort Knox would be easy compared to that. No one could hack that thing.”

A smile spread across Storm’s face. “Wanna bet?” he said.

Storm pulled out his phone and put in a call to the cubby. Agent Rodriguez answered.

“Javi, it’s Storm. Are the nerds occupied with anything at the moment?”