Chapter 25-SATURDAY
The train whirred smoothly over a newly-completed overpass and resumed its course westward parallel to the highway. The countryside stretched away to the horizon beyond the asphalt ribbon streaked with dashes of color. Chimneys and small farm houses dotted the hills between occasional towns. Emily saw none of the beauty as she watched her finger draw lazy waves along the window of the passenger car; instead of a rural landscape she saw only the foyer of Tony's house and the cracked door into the library.
Underwood and Pete Morris knew each other...knew Tony Stonem. The weaving personal connections seemed to branch out from the wave her finger traced, then double back on themselves. How could they possibly know each other? How long had they known each other? But more than that, why were they at his home early on a Saturday morning—and talking about her, no less! The slamming of the library door morphed into a dilapidated old train station that flashed by outside and Emily closed her eyes. Whatever the endgame, Emily felt comfortable assuming they at least were passing the details of her investigation on to Stonem. Their voices rang out clear in her mind, choice words and phrases slamming home with jarring effect: "...couldn't be trusted..."
"...let her back..."
"...guide her..."
"...he never settles..."
If Pete Morris had been under direction to undermine her and tarnish her competency in the eyes of the Chief, his actions (or, rather, inactions) during the hostage situation were minutely more logical. But there was a vast chasm between doing enough to seem like the lead negotiator cared about a terrorist attack and was drowning under the twin pressures of a compressed timeline to resolve the situation and the department's capabilities to assist Emily on the one hand and flat out refusing to help, putting both the majority of Bristol's police force and the hostages in extreme danger, on the other. And Morris had chosen the latter. Perhaps part of his rationale was spite for Emily as the two had never meshed well together, but why let a personal grudge endanger the lives of so many others?
Morris is just a pawn, a logical part of Emily's mind chipped in. Trying to riddle out why he wanted to work against you doesn't help you figure out who's really behind this. Emily uncrossed her legs and wiggled her toes inside her flats. She let her eyes flutter open slightly to look outside at the gradual transition from country to the outskirts of suburban sprawl, but closed them as the fragments of conversation danced through her thoughts once more.
Why in the world would Tony want to make her Chief distrustful of his best detective and have her removed from the case, as their conversation inferred? Since the nascent moments of Emily's investigation, he had been poking around and meddling with his sort-of clues and contributions of information. Repeatedly, Stonem articulated a desire to see justice done and the person responsible be brought to justice. What did he stand to gain from someone being arrested for holding dozens hostage and fleecing SSI out of a billion pounds sterling? More importantly, how could he expect any resolution if he was simultaneously pushing to have the only detective who cared about the case removed for unprofessionalism?
Emily opened her eyes and tugged her bag out from beneath her seat. She withdrew the worn notepad and scanned over the list of demands scrawled across the first page of the SSI hostage section; from Tony's first surprise visit to the station; from the angry margin notes scribbled once she could think about the meetings between her and the Chief. Repeatedly, 'Focus on WHY' was inked into the pages. As she reread the notes, the answer to her question began to take shape.
"He doesn't want anyone to find out 'who.' He just wants them to find out—"
"May I sit here?"
Emily's head snapped up from the pages in her lap at the offending voice, surprise at being addressed so late in the ride back to Bristol by a complete stranger giving way to a suffocating shock at seeing to whom the voice belonged. Apart from the spirited green eyes, Emily swore that a ghost was standing awkwardly in the aisle of her train car. Unable to speak, she swirled her head in a partial nod, partial back-and-forth shaking as if to clear cobwebs out of her thought processes.
"I've seen that look once this week, and just as I did with your girlfriend, I sincerely apologize for startling you. And I'm sorry for your loss."
"It was a long time ago," whispered Emily. She momentarily creased her brow, then extended a hand. "Detective Emily Fitch, but I think you already know that."
Her visitor smiled. "I do." He clasped her hand, gave it a brief yet definite shake, and withdrew a business card from his breast pocket. "Vic Patterson, SFO. I'm not sure if you're aware, but I have a meeting with Naomi today."
"I wasn't, actually. We haven't talked much since she got back from session. What're you meeting her about?"
Patterson's eyes lit conspiratorially. "The only thing worth meeting about right now."
"SSI," Emily stated simply.
"There you go. It's high time someone started truly looking into their business dealings and their books. My office has been doing some preliminary research since the hostage crisis ended. Hopefully Naomi will acquiesce to lead the inquiry during next session."
Emily looked down at the red and blue-tinged carpet and her lips involuntarily mouthed 'shit.' She felt the color drain from her face. Naomi had met with the Serious Fraud Office since their one-night rendezvous in London and they wanted her to spearhead an investigation into SSI? Moreover, if they were having a follow-up meeting, Naomi was certainly taking it seriously. Which means she's not cozying up to Osbourn Ross to hide things, you idiot. But begging Emily to stop her work weakened the ability to bring a viable inquiry to bear, didn't it? Why would she make her own job indescribably more difficult?
"And you're coming to Bristol to get her assent to help you? On a Saturday morning?" Emily asked quietly, refusing to look up at Freddie's look-alike.
"That's the idea, certainly. It'll be a fruitless visit otherwise."
Emily brought despair-stricken eyes up to meet Vic's energetic ones. "I'll help in any way I can. And I...I think I owe Naomi a huge apology, but..." She looked out the window and shook her head slowly. The train was firmly ensconced in suburbia, darting across and over streets lined with small shops and new apartment construction projects. Patterson remained silently, sensing that Emily had withdrawn from the conversation to battle an inner storm.
The train was slowing to a halt at the second-to-last station on the line when Emily's mobile stirred to life on the seat next to her, the screen lighting up eagerly and the small device buzzing insistently across the seat cushion.
"You might want to take that," suggested Patterson with a nod towards the mobile.
"Oh, yeah. Right." Emily took a deep breath and glanced at the screen. "It's a colleague of mine. Sorry."
"Not at all," he said, settling in his chair and withdrawing his own PDA to check his email.
"Detective Fitch speaking," Emily addressed her phone.
"Emily! It's Lewis, Lewis Adams? From work!"
Emily smiled at the eagerness in his voice and rolled her eyes. "Yes, Lewis. I know who you are. Did you find something?"
"Did I—Did I find—" blustered Lewis on the other end. "Look, can you come by the station? It'll be easier to explain in person."
Emily caught Vic's eye, covered the receiver, and mouthed 'Breakthrough.' He responded with twin arched eyebrows. Uncovering the receiver, Emily replied, "I'm just about to get off the train, actually. I'll be right down with a guest. Try and clean up the office a bit, yeah? We'll be there at half one."
Lewis met them at the front door, waving excitedly as they paid the taxi and walked up the shallow steps towards the station. Emily hastily introduced Patterson to her officemate, though she still felt as if she hardly knew him and was in no place to properly introduce him to anyone. The squad bay was nearly deserted; only the duty officers tasked to work the weekend shift were present, and all of them were idly chatting around the coffee maker in the break room. The pitched voices of a sports argument carried across the room as Emily led the two men to the stairs.
"So I was looking over those records you—"
"Not here, Lewis," interrupted Emily sharply. "In our office." She held pulled open the door to the stairs and held it open as Lewis and Vic descended eagerly. Emily looked around at the squad bay one last time, her eyes lingering on her (now Harlan's) office, and followed.
She trailed Patterson into the cramped basement office as Lewis beelined for his desk. He flourished several sheets of paper and turned, handing them to the SFO representative. Emily slid beside the tall man, peering over his right elbow at the financial records and the furious chicken-scratch notes Lewis had added in addition to the hurried circles and lines criss-crossing the typed numbers.
Patterson eased the top sheet to the side, eyes dancing between the two sheets and their bounty of notes. Emily glanced up to see astonishment glazing over his eyes and a dumbfounded half-grin pulling one corner of his mouth upwards.
"This is unbelievable," he whispered.
"I expected something like this, but I've never seen it on this wide a scope. I had the same reaction when I added the numbers up. Unbelievable they hid it for so long."
"Would either of you be kind enough to explain to me what the fuck is so unbelievable?"
Lewis looked across the sheets in Patterson's arms and blushed. "Sorry, Detective. Come here. I'll show you." He backpedaled around his desk, shuffling through multiple stacks of papers and turning some around so Emily could see them clearly. She squeezed around Patterson and placed her palms down on the edge of the desk so that her fingers could clasp the underside of the desktop. Leaning forward, she squinted in concentration at the pages, matching Lewis's narration with what she was seeing on paper.
"Remember how I calculated that there was an annual £450 million in unaccounted for funds, like clockwork? That the records SSI sent to the news stations were doctored to minimize these numbers to something more reasonable?"
"Yes. Go on."
"Right, well. That was before I had these." He tapped the papers Emily recovered from underneath the vending machines in SSI. "A couple of them were redundant or thoroughly unhelpful, which is to be expected. I mean, I was looking for the proverbial needle."
"And that needle is what exactly?" Emily looked up from the papers at the mousy man in front of her.
Lewis adjusted his glasses and hovered his finger directly over one of the line items he had circled. "This."
"If you're going to launder money, you have to set up shell companies and fictitious groups to siphon the money through, to distribute it out to all the various bank accounts of those involved," supplied Vic from behind Emily. He was still flipping through the sheets Adams had handed him. "And when I say those involved, I mean both sides. The ones providing the services and the ones receiving."
"So this is what? Proof they were stealing from themselves? I mean, didn't you already know that before? That's what the £450 million was, right?"
"Yes and no," hedged Lewis. He cleared his throat. "It's one thing to say, 'Oh they're committing fraud.' It's another thing entirely to find the key to unlocking those other ledgers where the company keeps track of its dirty deals."
"And this item," Emily peered back down at the word shadowed by Lewis's finger. "Uh, Ocelot? That's the key?"
"That's the key," confirmed Lewis.
Emily looked back over her shoulder. "So what does he have?"
"The Ocelot books," Patterson answered without looking up.
"Like I said, a couple of the new sheets you gave me were shit. Excuse my language."
"I don't give a fuck about your language, Lewis." said Emily good-naturedly.
"Oh. Okay. Right. One of the sheets was an ordinary sheet of their records, but it did have a single line-item that stood out." He placed the sheet in question in front of Emily, who picked it up and traced the line Lewis had circled: a single expenditure for a personal security program called Ocelot in the sum of a half million pounds with no receipt number. "It stood out because nowhere else in the records I've gone through all week was there a mention of a security program called Ocelot in the Domestic Security department.
"On a hunch, I decided to check the same week of these records for all the other departments. Nothing for this year, but last year..." Lewis frowned and lifted a binder off the floor, dropping it on the desk and scattering several sheets of paper. He grabbed a large section and flipped past it. Making a noise of satisfaction in the back of his throat, he spun the binder around and pointed triumphantly at another line item for exactly the same amount for a program named Ocelot. "This binder is the records for the Cyber Security department. So I kept checking and sure enough, two years ago it was there in the records for Military Security; three years ago for Security Consultations, and so on. The earliest mention of it was in the records for International Partnerships eight years ago."
Okay, so one of the records I gave you yesterday led you to this, which I'm guessing took a while to track down," Emily waited for an affirming nod from Lewis before continuing, "but what about the last page I gave you?"
Lewis pointed over her shoulder and looked across the desk over his glasses. "An actual page of the Ocelot ledger."
"Fucking hell," muttered Emily. She turned to Patterson. "Well?"
"It's extraordinary. They were obviously supremely confident no one would catch a single program that bounced around the company expenditure records from year to year. A half million price tag for a program is about right; it's not extravagant, but only listing it as a couple hundred pounds would raise questions also. So they made it innocuous. And then proceeded to bribe, cajole, sell, and manipulate however much they could under Ocelot's umbrella." Patterson shook his head in dismay. "It's only one sheet, but that means there have to be more. And this one sheet is a treasure trove of information—everything's listed plainly. Like I said, supremely confident."
Emily pulled the sheets out of his grasp and scanned over the print-heavy pages. She did not recognize many of the individuals named, but she could not claim the same for a handful of defense contractors and arms companies that appeared alongside them. "Who are the people?"
Patterson quickly read the page upside down and shrugged. "A who's who of arms dealers, warlords, terrorists, politicians, and businessmen." He began pointing at various names and giving rapid-fire accounts of who they were. "Leads a militia in Angola...Member of Parliament for Manchester...created his own arms manufacturing firm in Moldova in the mid-nineties and now traffics all sorts of weapons from Eastern Europe to everywhere else..."
"All of this did make me wonder one thing though," said Lewis, notes of confusion laced in each word. Emily turned back around to him; Vic simply looked straight over her head at the financial investigator. "Why would someone go through all the trouble of holding hostages and risk getting caught just to demand SSI publicize all this stuff? I mean, that's what this is all about, right? Why someone would take an office building hostage?"
"And who would want to?" added Emily, nodding.
"Well, that seems a little more obvious now, doesn't it?" countered Vic. Emily turned and craned her neck to look up at him. "Someone knows their name is on this list and thought it was too much of a risk to try and blow the whistle on them when they already possessed the equipment to make a bigger statement—a statement with a large paycheck as the exclamation point at the end."
Emily pursed her lips and nodded slowly. "I said I'd try and help your investigation any way I could; I didn't realize it'd be so soon."
"I hope you'll continue to help. But nothing can move forward in a meaningful way against SSI without Naomi's help in Parliament. Speaking of which," Vic looked at his watch. "Her chief of staff asked me to be at her local office in ten."
"I'll go with you," offered Emily. Her accusations and poisonous stabs about being untrustworthy and disloyal to all the morals and values they had championed for the better part of a decade started to churn again, and Emily struggled to keep her composure in front of the two men. "I have some apologies to make."
"No worries." Patterson turned to Lewis and extended a long arm, firmly shaking the smaller man's hand approvingly. "I'd appreciate it if you don't make copies of any of these records just yet, Mr. Adams. You've done some outstanding work and I would hate to see it go for naught."
"Me too. My work's not quite done yet though. I still have so much to go through: routing information, the amount in all these bank accounts, who had access to them from SSI..." Vic and Emily smiled at one another and silently slipped out of the room as Lewis continued muttering to himself and searching through the sea of papers drowning his side of the office.
Vic and Emily stood on the sidewalk outside the front door, waiting on another taxi, and enjoying the rarity of a sun-drenched day when Emily began to feel the same tingling sensation that had plagued her in Tony's home earlier that morning. She discreetly checked back over her shoulder to see if Lewis had scrambled upstairs to tell them one final thing, but the steps up to the station were barren. Frowning, Emily slowly scanned up the street as she turned back around.
"Everything alright?" asked Vic as he noted Emily's discomfort.
"Shhh," responded Emily quietly. Cocking her head, she narrowed her eyes and stepped off the curb without warning. You have got to be fucking joking.
"For fuck's sake!" Patterson exclaimed as the detective moved into oncoming traffic and crossed the street. A passing Vauxhall blared its horn at her as she reached the far side and turned to her right, walking as quickly as she could. Ahead of her, a man wearing a tattered jacket over a hoodie moved away from the doorway of the closed restaurant he had been lurking in and took off at an equally brisk walk.
Several blocks up, a taxi turned the corner and started down the street towards them. The man's hand shot into the air as he flagged it down and jogged across the single lane of traffic on their side of the street.
"No! Wait!" shouted Emily as she took off after him at a sprint. Patterson called after her from where he still stood in front of the police station, but Emily ignored him. The man grabbed the door handle of the taxi and jerked it open. Emily watched helplessly as he leaned into the car. Why doesn't he just get in?
The man extricated his head from the taxi and, with the briefest of glances back at Emily, broke into a sprint around the back bumper and down a side-street. Emily gave an incoherent shout and chased after him, drawing yet another horn blast from a college student in a convertible. Rounding the taxi, which had yet to move from where the man flagged it down, she slowed as the side street, devoid of any pedestrians or shoppers with a tattered jacket and hoodie, filled her field of vision.
"Shit!" Emily grabbed her head with both hands and, frustrated, spun in a circle. "Shit, shit shit!"
"Emily, what the fuck?" demanded Patterson as he walked up to the cab and asked the driver to wait a moment. Emily looked over at the SFO agent, then back down the street for her missing quarry. "Emily, the driver says that guy paid for our fare."
Emily wrinkled her nose and walked back towards the cab. Vic gave her a questioning look.
"It's, uh, it's nothing." Emily cast a final look over her shoulder down the side-street. "I just thought I saw an old friend."