Shit, thought Beck. He doesn’t believe it.
Beck put it aside. He concentrated on looking at the man in the cell as someone who had been part of a force gathered to kill, or maim him. Or do that to his friends. Beck pictured the man attacking him. Shooting him. Or striking with a knife or bat. He worked at connecting the man in the cage with pain that could have ended his life. Or the lives of the others.
Beck stared at Sukol and imagined the Bosnian kicking him in the face. Breaking his teeth. Maybe stomping out an eye. He thought about fists and feet slamming into his back, ribs, head. Beck thought about the pain. About the number of agonizing days he might have suffered. About the certainty of permanent damage.
The hate welled up. The mercy leached out. And the Bosnian saw it happen right before him. He saw Beck’s face. He was ready to believe it now.
It seemed that the man was about to say something, but right at that moment Beck turned and walked back toward the opening in the far wall, his footsteps echoing off the concrete floor, filling the cold, forlorn, unidentifiable space behind him with the sound of his retreating steps. Empty save for the dim lights and the meat-grinding equipment.
When Beck reached the opening in the wall, he stopped to place four fingers over four light switches. With one move, he flipped all of them down.
The fluorescent ceiling fixtures all went off, plunging the entire space into darkness so deep and profound that he knew Gregor’s man would not be able to see his hand in front of his face.
As he ducked into the opening Beck heard the man cry out, “Wait. Stop.”
Beck grimaced. Nope. No stopping now.
49
By the time Beck had made his way back to the bar, Manny, Ciro, and Demarco had assembled around the big petrified wood coffee table on the second floor. Joey B remained downstairs watching the street.
Manny and Demarco had their shotguns within reach. Ciro had a semiautomatic version of the M-16 assault rifle, a weapon designed to fire bullets at very high velocity.
Alex Liebowitz sat at the other end of the loft, eyes glued to his computer monitors. Apparently Alan Crane was back at work.
Beck asked. “Where’s Olivia?”
Manny answered. “She’s keepin’ to her room. When are we going to move, James? Sitting here waiting for the shit to fall on us is a bad idea.”
“The list of shit about to fall is going to take me some time to explain. Let me talk to Alex, first.”
Beck headed to the other end of the loft. Liebowitz leaned back in his desk chair, arms crossed over his chest, eyes half closed staring at the computer monitors in front of him. Each monitor was divided into four segments, so Alex was watching eight different images simultaneously.
“Your hack is working?”
“Not exactly a hack. I’m not controlling anything. Yet. But the malware I implanted is humming along nicely.”
“So I was only half-listening to you last night, what exactly did you end up doing with Crane’s setup?”
“I spent a chunk of time in the cellar tracing his phone wires. His Internet connections, luckily, ran through the basement, too, instead of just along outside walls. They wired the whole building when they renovated it. But his wiring is special. He’s got a full 4nx T-1 line in there. No fractional. Plus, four different phone lines. Plus…”
Beck interrupted, “So did you get everything done you wanted?”
“Close enough. Hard to tell when you don’t know everything he has in that apartment.”
“What happened with his computer?”
“After I disabled and rerouted all his alarm shit with some routing boxes Ricky lent me, which are tricky because you have to get all the interfaces wired in before you reroute…”
“Uh-huh.”
Alex could tell Beck was being patient, so he tipped forward in the chair and tried to be more specific, but he just couldn’t avoid talking about relays, codes, information packets, Internet protocol, radio frequencies, access controls, identity management, and alarm systems.
Beck gave it a minute, then carefully interrupted and said, “So, Alex, did you get what we needed to find out about what Crane is doing and where he has the hedge fund money?”
“Yeah. As far as it goes.”
“What do you mean, as far as it goes?”
Liebowitz talked to Beck while glancing intermittently at the images on the computer screen.
“Like I said, after I overrode all the alarms and security, I went up into the apartment. His computer was on, but of course access had shut down and I didn’t have time to get through his pass code. I suspect he has at least two layers. Long story short, I just bypassed everything and copied the entire hard drive.”
“And?”
“And I’ve been spending the last six hours unbundling everything, while I’m key-tracking everything he’s doing when he’s online. I’ve got just about everything opened. But, it’s only current from the time he shut down last night. He started up again about a half-hour ago. I’m still catching up.”
“And you can do that how? The short version, Alex.”
“Short version, I loaded a sniffer program into his computer. Routed it through his T-1 line to a VPN connection that is hooked into this computer which is maybe an hour from being a full twin of the one in his apartment. Mostly. Whatever he does on that computer, he does it on this computer.”
“Okay.”
“Thing is, I can see what he’s doing, but that doesn’t mean I completely understand what I see. He places his trades through a very high-end platform. It’s been customized a hell of a lot.
“From what I’ve tracked so far, he has four or five different accounts in his fund that he trades through leased servers. Those servers connect to six or seven electronic exchanges. He routes every trade into the exchange that gives him the best price, so it’s a lot to keep track of.”