Stolen Prey

talk about it sometime—but I have to tell you, it’s a hell of a relief to hear that it’s probably an inside job.”
    “ICE told you that?”
    “Everybody tells me that. It’s somebody in the company, or it’s this guy Kline,” Bone said. “If it were somebody in Russia, or China, which would suggest that we had a major undetected system vulnerability, I’d be sweating bullets.”
    “Kline just got jumped by the Mexicans.”
    “What!” Bone almost missed a step, caught himself and turned. “Is he dead?”
    “No, he managed to get out of it. But he got shot.” He told the story as they went through the door at the bottom of the stairs and started down the hall to Systems.
    “How’d they find out about him?” Bone asked.
    “Don’t know. ICE said a bunch of people in Systems had been talking about Kline. It’s probably all over the bank by now, and it’s possible that somebody here is monitoring things for this Mexican gang.”
    “Ah, Jesus. But you don’t know that.”
    “No.”
    O’B RIEN AND his accountants were busy with two bank computer-security experts. When O’Brien saw Lucas come in, he broke away and said, “This Bois Brule account is a ghost. The money comes in, but we can’t backtrack it. From here, the money goes out to the Islands, the Caymans, where we’re temporarily bogged down. We won’t get any information from them before tomorrow morning at the earliest.”
    Bone said, “We gotta talk,” and pointed them to a cluster of furniture at the end of the room, and they went over and sat down.
    Lucas: “What’s up?”
    Bone said, “We’ve got a management problem. I don’t care so much about the dope money coming in, or going out, because I understand it now: we were scammed about the source of the money, but all of our systems stayed intact and worked as they’re supposed to. We might figure out some way to do a statistical study of our accounts, to isolate odd behavior, but that’s off in the future. I’m more worried about these hackers—if they attacked one account, they could attack more. We don’t even know for sure that they haven’t. I really need to get them caught.”
    “We’re working on it,” Lucas said.
    “But not so hard. What
you’re
really interested in are these killers,” Bone said. “In the meantime, the DEA is up to its ass in killers, and
they
don’t care that much about individual gangbangers who’ll be dead in a year, anyway. What
they
want to do isbreak into the gang’s banks. So they want the banks, you want the killers, and I need to stop the hackers. But I’ll tell you, Lucas, if the BCA catches these killers, you personally won’t have much to do with it. Somebody will see them, somebody will rat them out. It’ll be luck or routine, not brains.”
    “Maybe,” Lucas agreed.
    “I’ll make it even simpler,” Bone said. “You’ve got three crimes here. First, you’ve got the dopers laundering their money. The DEA’s covering that. Second, you’ve got the killers murdering people. Shaffer’s got that. Third, you’ve got the thieves who took the money out of the bank. Nobody’s interested. But that’s the most important one—I can’t seem to make that sink in. Somebody has to cover it—I mean, like you.”
    “What am I supposed to do?” Lucas asked.
    “Let the other cops, this Shaffer guy, let them do the routine work,” Bone said. “Let the DEA do the accountancy, you don’t know anything about that anyway. You should be going after the thieves, not the gangbangers.”
    “I don’t know any more about them than I do about the shooters,” Lucas said.
    Bone disagreed. “Sure you do. They’re thieves. They had to have some access inside the bank, so you do whatever it is you do when you’re looking for any thieves. Look for opportunity, motive, all that shit you see on TV. I can tell you a few things about them—I can tell you what they’re doing right now, for one thing.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. Not the small details, but I can probably get close even to that. At some point, after running through five or six banks,the Caymans, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Panama … at some point, they have to get cash or an equivalent. Gold, silver, diamonds, rare stamps or coins. Probably not silver, come to think of it, because it’d be too big to move. But they’re going to have to get something to break the paper trail, and it’ll have some intrinsic value. Can’t be unique—can’t buy a Picasso,