A/N: standard disclaimer, disavowing any knowledge of the story below, the characters therein, and any similarity to canon is pure coincidence. Any sum of money that has impacted this work has not ended up in my hands. In fact, I'd probably be richer if I spent my time working on real life issues instead of this fic...

I'd like to thank my beta's, FraidyCat and SerialGal, for their excellent work. This story would not have been half so well-written without their input. Any errors are mine, for failing to listen to their good advice.

Brothers

By OughtaKnowBetter

Speed.

There was always a certain exhilaration in achieving velocities not available to the average man. Despite the circumstances, Dr. Charles Eppes, genius extraordinaire, found himself unable to resist calculating the variables currently in play: the speed of the vehicle that he was driving, the horsepower of the engine under the hood, the resistance of the guardrail that the aforementioned vehicle had just careened through, and the angle of the slope which would determine just how many times his vehicle tapped the rocky ground and flipped over and over before coming to an exhausted rest on the forested ground below.

His last coherent thought, before blackness overtook him, was that his passenger, Dr. Andrew J. Simon, was quite likely calculating the estimated cost of repairs to the vehicle, the blue book value of the damaged hybrid car, and whether it would be cost-effective to put said vehicle back on the road in any shape other than on top of a flat-bed tow truck to cart it off to the junk yard. After all, Prof. Simon's expertise was in forensic accounting.

Two days previously:

He never noticed the shadow through the frosted window of his office door, but the firm repeated rap on the wooden frame managed to attract his attention. A golden head poked its way in, the blond hair spiked here and there with the occasional gray thread indicating that his visitor was older than Charlie himself. Here on CalSci, that was not an anomaly. There were many staff members significantly older than Charlie; Charlie himself was the anomaly.

He was conducting office hours at the time, though none of Charlie's students had availed themselves of the offer. Charlie had decided to take it as evidence of his superior lecturing skills rather than laziness on the part of his students, and had moved on with pleasure to do some rather fanciful work on one aspect of the Cognitive Emergence theorem that he was developing. It was a doubtful hypothesis, this part of the theory, but part of the fun of developing the proof was to explore the concept and either prove or disprove it conclusively. After all, some bright wit out there in academia would be certain to come up with the same thought and challenge Dr. Eppes to refute it in the academic journals. Better to derive the solution prior to that happenstance. It was hard work being a genius, but a little forethought made it that much easier.

However, none of Charlie's students were over thirty, therefore the head did not belong to a student of his. This piqued his interest. "Can I help you?"

"Dr. Eppes?" The body eased itself in past the door with a level of confidence that students rarely possessed: more evidence that his visitor was not a student. In fact, Charlie thought that he'd seen the man before, somewhere nearby, somewhere familiar…

The man stuck out his hand. "I'm Andrew Simon, from the School of Business."

It clicked. Charlie had seen him in the Faculty Club, a place noted for food well above the quality found in the student dorms, and a place where Charlie had placed plenty of take-out orders for those times when treating his graduate students to a good meal seemed like the sensible thing to do. Charlie had seen the man there, entertaining others and taking a break from teaching and research.

Always happy to meet new people. Charlie shook the man's hand. "Charlie Eppes. What can I do for you, Dr. Simon?"

Simon winced. "Call me A.J.," he requested, clarifying the desired quality of the relationship. "I need a favor."

Charlie grinned. "Which, in my case usually means some really fun applied math. And, since you're from the School of Business, this sounds like I'm going to get to stretch my wings a bit. What project are you working on?"

"Well, it's not really so much a project as kind of a hornet's nest that I stumbled upon," A.J. confessed. "There's not going to be any kind of publication out of this. Rather, not anything you can publish in an academic journal."

"You're intriguing me." Charlie gestured to the chairs in his office, realized that the visitor's chair held a stack of tests, and hastened to clean it off. The stack of tests ended up on the floor next to a similar stack, also on the floor. "Let's sit down."

Once seated, A.J. steepled his fingers and pondered how to begin. "Like you, Dr. Eppes—"

"Charlie."

"—Charlie." A.J. accepted the correction without blinking. "Like yourself, I take on the occasional outside consulting project."

"Helps give my accountant heart failure," Charlie interjected wryly.

"Yes, well, I am my accountant, and I suspect that your clients are rather more well-heeled than mine," A.J. said, "especially the ones funded by my tax dollars and going by the sobriquet of Uncle Sam." He moved on to the more pertinent pieces of his dilemma. "My area of specialty, Charlie, is forensic accounting. I figure out who has caused substantial sums of money to disappear as well as the current location of those sums. There's the occasional throwback who uses money laundering to get what he wants, but mostly these days people use various economic dodges to hide their money. If I were solely in private practice, I'd be tracking down funds to be split during divorce proceedings with the odd CFO trying to embezzle funds prior to making a disappearance. I gave up that sort of thing years ago."

"You had your own accounting practice?" Charlie asked.

That elicited a crooked grin from his guest. "Not exactly. Actually, I was a private investigator, then an attorney for a while, before going after the Ph.D. Still have a license for each of them, although my investigations these days begin and end at my desk and probably don't require a PI license. Still, old habits die hard."

Looking at the man, Charlie wasn't so sure. Dr. Andrew Simon, despite hovering around sixty years of age, had clearly kept himself in shape. "You were a private investigator? As in, sneaking around corners at midnight sort of thing, taking infrared photos of people who didn't want to be seen?"

"Made my living that way for several years," Dr. Simon told him proudly. "I'm not about to say it was a good living, but I survived. I formed an agency with my brother. Then we both got the itch to move on, and things sort of fell apart. I headed back to graduate school and academia."

"And your brother?" Charlie pictured yet another college professor, this one with leather patches on the elbows of a merino sweater, perhaps teaching at some genteel liberal college back East that had gone co-ed in the last decade. Vassar, perhaps?

A.J. Simon followed his host's thoughts all too clearly, and grinned. "No, Rick was more along the lines of a black sheep. If you can believe it, he won the lottery. Not a grand prize, not millions of dollars, but a sufficient amount that I invested it for him and it now churns out enough to keep him comfortable. Let me qualify that," he added. "It keeps Rick comfortable as long as he doesn't get involved in any ridiculous schemes or too many beer binges with old buddies. Which is what I thought was going on, at first."

"Now we get to the heart of the matter." Charlie eased back in his chair. "What's the story?"

A.J. wasn't quite ready. "Let me just make certain of something, first. You have a brother with the FBI, right?"

"That's right. Why?"

A.J. cocked his head and relaxed into the chair. "I just need to be certain of where you stand. Some of the things I'm going to talk about may be marginally illegal, and I wouldn't want to put you into a position where you felt that you had to discuss this with your brother in an official capacity."

Charlie started to protest, then thought better of it. "I appreciate that. What can you tell me?"

"Let me start at the beginning." A.J. settled back in his chair. This was going to be a long one. "I keep a number of contacts in the community; business owners and financial types, people that I've done business for and some of whom are just friends that I respect. One of them, a man named Mitch Felsner, came to me recently with a concern."

"Which was?"

A.J. dodged the question. "Mitch and I have known each other for many years. I met him shortly after my thesis defense; one of my examiners on my Ph.D. board suggested to Mitch that he look me up for a problem that he was having at the time." A.J. grinned suddenly. "As a direct result of my analysis, Mitch dumped the stock that he had in a certain business and got out of the market just before the all went broke. He's a millionaire, in part because he consulted me, and he's never forgotten it. He's a good friend."

"But he has a concern," Charlie prodded. History was great, but Charlie needed to hear where history became current events.

"Yeah." A.J. leaned forward, suddenly serious. "As I said, Mitch is a good friend, and he came to me for a professional consultation. He still dabbles in stocks, not like he used to do—he's a terror on the golf course now—but still does enough to take routine trips to the Caribbean on his yacht, and I do mean yacht. The big expensive type of yacht that comes equipped with its own crew of eight, not counting the maitre d'."

"He came to you." This was getting tiresome.

A.J. took pity on him. "Mitch was thinking that someone, somewhere, was draining away some of his assets. The numbers just weren't adding up. Not enough to bring on shock and awe, just enough so that unless you were very sharp—and believe me, Mitch is plenty sharp—you wouldn't notice anything until you were out a few hundred thousand or so."

Charlie cut to the chase. "You investigated. What did you find?"

"Something very interesting." A.J. refused to be rushed. "I did indeed find that someone was siphoning off funds, diverting them slowly but surely into an offshore account."

"So far, pretty straight-forward. You could have reported this to the cops, to the D.A.'s office," Charlie observed. "What stopped you?"

"The name of the person who was doing the siphoning," A.J. replied promptly.

"Do I get to know this name?" And how does this turn into a math problem?

A.J. hesitated, then spit it out. "My brother."

Charlie sucked in his breath. "Uh-oh."

Crooked and unhappy grin. "You said it."

There was something wrong with this conversation, and Charlie puzzled it out. "But you don't think that he's guilty, and you have evidence to back your theory. Otherwise you wouldn't have come here to me; me, with my brother the FBI agent."

"Exactly." A.J. nodded, pleased with his fellow professor's insight. "Forget that Rick Simon is my brother. Rick's done a lot of things in his life that I don't want to think about but, frankly, these sorts of financial shenanigans are beyond him. If he was going to rob someone, he'd walk up to them with a handgun and demand their wallet. For Rick, devious behavior means watering the whiskey underneath the bar."

"You're sure—"

"I'm sure." A.J. cut him off. "Rick has no drive for money. He's far happier lounging on his boat and feeding that mutt of his."

"So who's doing this?" Charlie asked. They were still in A.J.'s territory.

"I'm sure you've heard of identity theft," A.J. said. "That's what's going on here. Someone stole Rick's identity and is using his good name to smuggle money to more than one offshore account. If someone like me comes along and starts looking for the perpetrator, I get led straight to Rick. Who, by the way, has reacted in a very predictable fashion by loudly denying any involvement, just what you'd expect a criminal to do. If it wasn't for the fact that they picked Rick as their patsy, I'd have spent a few weeks tracking down all the avenues that the money was moving along before concluding that Rick was a red herring. It would have delayed any official investigation for months, at a minimum."

Charlie nodded. It made sense. He would have come to the same conclusion had it been Don, or even his father. "So we can take it as a given that your brother is an innocent dupe. Where do I come in?"

A.J. warmed to his topic. "I've got several hundred possible leads, all of which lead to further combinations. I could track each and every one of them down; I could also resign from CalSci and spend the next year doing it and only get halfway through the workload. I need a better way of identifying the top contenders."

"So you came to me." Charlie's brain was already at work on the problem. "Let's look at the criteria. What have you got?" He pushed paper at A.J., eager to get on with a new problem.

A.J. grabbed the pen, just as fired up now that Charlie had accepted his invitation. "First: quantity of money. No sum under one hundred dollars and none over one thousand."

"Excellent. Top and bottom limiting filters. More?"

"I've identified at least seventy different brokers, some that are used more than others."

"Very good. I can break that down into usage probabilities." The brain cells of both professors were whirling.

"Bayesian filters?"

"Better than that." Charlie's eyes glittered. "Markovian discrimination, the next level of filter. Instead of using discrete entities, it essentially links 'phrases' together to produce a higher probability of success. A lot of spam filters use the process, and we can adapt the principle for our purposes." He pulled his laptop around. "Give me the data points that you have. I'll set up the field equations, and get you your answer."

"How long?" Clearing his brother's name was important to A.J. Simon.

Charlie grinned. "I'm aiming to finish inputting the equations shortly before midnight, with the answer popping out sometime before morning. Join me for coffee first thing, before classes start, and we'll go over the results. That fast enough?"

"Wow." Prof. Simon was impressed. "You've just compressed three years' work into an afternoon."

"Not really," Charlie demurred. "All I'm doing is sorting out which of your identified leads has the greatest probability of success. I'm just focusing your resources. Works for you, Dr. Simon?"

"Works for me, Dr. Eppes."