Stolen Prey

size of a dime and stuck it to the center of the target. “Shoot at that. Focus on it. Even try to focus on the middle of the spot, if you can.”
    She did, and her group tightened up dramatically. “Interesting,” she said.
    “Let’s do it again,” Lucas said. “Then we’ll run through the slap, rack, and fire.”
    “Always hurts my hand.”
    “You need the training,” he said. “And what’s a little pain?”

5
    L ucas again arrived late for the morning briefing, and found a tense tableau: Shaffer was standing behind his chair, his arms braced on the top bar, his body rigid. Rivera sat across the table from him, half-turned away, but his face was red and he was shaking a chubby finger at Shaffer’s face.
    The three DEA guys sat at the far end of the table, looking back and forth between the two as though they were at a tennis match. Four additional BCA agents, part of Shaffer’s team, were scattered around the room, two of them standing with their arms crossed defensively, looking down at Rivera.
    Lucas came in behind Rivera, in time to hear him say, “… so I don’t want to hear about Mexicans this and Mexicans that. These people are criminals and they are rats and the United States of America created them with this drug market, and with these guns that you ship across the border to the narcos. Thousands of guns, black rifles that they change one part, and they have machine guns. Huh?” He patted his chest and said, “It’s my people who are dying in hundreds and thousands so your rich people can put this cocaine up their noses and smoke their Colombians, so don’t tell me about Mexicans this and Mexicans that.”
    He was shaking with anger. Behind him, Martínez was standingwith her back to the wall, holding a briefcase. She glanced at Lucas and tipped her head, as if to apologize.
    Shaffer, as angry as Rivera, said, “I wasn’t trying to lecture you. I was trying to point out the obvious. You’ve apparently shipped a batch of insane killers up here from Mexico and they’re butchering children and women.”
    “
I
didn’t ship them.
Mexico
didn’t ship them. They came here because this is where the money is. Because of
your
market. Because you do the money laundry, huh? Why do you think we are here? This Sunnie Software was the Criminales’ bank, huh? It’s a
bank
. So you provide the market, you provide the bank, you provide the distribution, but it’s the Mexicanos who are at fault for all this? Bullshit.”
    Shaffer stuttered, “I—I—I just don’t want to have this debate. We’re all on the same side here. We’re just trying to clear up this murder. At least I am.”
    L UCAS CLEARED his throat and said, “Sorry I’m late. Any returns from the TV photos last night?”
    Shaffer nodded, grateful for the interruption. He said, “Not yet. Nothing so far.”
    Lucas, looking over at the DEA agents, asked, “What about Sunnie’s accountants? What about the bank? Anything there?”
    “We’re looking at eight years’ worth of paper, trying to spot where the leak is,” said O’Brien. “Haven’t found it so far. Still interviewing the employees. Whatever Brooks was doing, it was complicated. But that … maybe that’s what we should have expected. It wouldn’t be right out there in the open.”
    Another one of the DEA agents, whose name Lucas didn’t remember, said, “Our thinking now is, he was running a computer program that diverts incoming payments, depending on where they’re coming from, to some other place. An automatic diversion. In other words, he’s not actually collecting the money, he’s simply set up a mechanism for collecting it. When it comes through, it carries a … signal of some sort … that simply moves the money elsewhere. If that’s the way it works, and that’s what we’re starting to think, then we won’t find it with an audit. We need a software guy to look at their programming.”
    Shaffer asked, “You got one of those?”
    “We could probably find one,” O’Brien said.
    Lucas said to Shaffer, “We could bring in ICE. We really need to get on top of this. We don’t need to wait a week for somebody to show up.”
    Shaffer: “She’s pretty expensive.”
    “But she’d find it,” Lucas said.
    O’Brien asked, “Who’s this ICE?”
    Lucas: “Ingrid Caroline Eccols. She was one of the people who worked with me when I was running a software company, back in the nineties. Programmer, hacker, gamer, really smart. If she’s not