Chapter 28

 

 

Amber ignored the clock on her computer screen—she knew it was getting very late. Sunshine, Orion, and the Temple of the Rising Moon were nearly as elusive as ever. Even tracking their real identities, it seemed Foster and Melissa Fordyce owned nothing in their own names. So, okay, she supposed it was okay to run all their expenses through Moon Temple LLC.

People probably did that, although Sandy had hinted that surely a religious non-profit organization couldn’t legitimately deduct all the expenses of the owners—board members, whatever they called themselves. At the very least, they must have bank accounts, the Ladies had all agreed. It became Amber’s job to find them.

And she did—finally. The clock showed 3:06 a.m. when she located a Moon Temple account at a bank called FEBG, a small Delaware entity. She marked the page and started to go further into the records, but exhaustion overtook her. With a yawn and a stretch, she closed her computer and stumbled to her futon to catch a few hours of sleep.

By five-thirty she was wide awake again and itching to figure out what was going on. Foster Fordyce had a law degree with a specialty in international banking. That had to be important.

She brushed her teeth, put her fluffy hair up into a wild ponytail, and made herself a green smoothie. The banking world was awakening in the US and would be in full swing in Europe by now. Any of her searches would likely blend in with the normal transactions, billions of them, which flowed through the banking system during each day. She liked the anonymity of it.

Back at the FEBG site, she dug deeply enough to get behind their firewalls and take a peek into the accounts. Moon Temple LLC had a standard business account, one with a few special perks for 501(c)3 non-profits. So far, that wasn’t anything she wouldn’t have already known. The balance in the account was in the high five figures. Puzzling, since Amber had personally witnessed an evening’s take when the donation baskets came around. She’d felt fairly certain they took in nearly that much every night. They’d been working the Apache Junction location for at least three weeks—maybe longer—so wouldn’t there be a lot more than this in the bank?

How naïve am I? Of course, most of the donations were in cash. How much of that actually made it into the bank account?

The page she was on showed merely a line-item listing for each of the bank’s accounts, not details about any specific one. She highlighted the Moon Temple name on the list and entered a string of code that should have allowed her into the pages-behind-the-pages.

Nothing happened. Not even an Access Denied screen.

She chewed at a cuticle. Account holders themselves couldn’t normally see the type of detail she knew existed. She should be able to tell not only how much of each deposit was cash and how many items were checks or money orders, but also the denominations of the currency and quite likely the serial numbers.

Not that she needed quite that much, but still. Nothing.

“Okay, there’s more than one way at this.”

She pulled out an alternate laptop computer she rarely used. Because it contained a little program—she hated to call it spyware, but it was close. Booting it up, she gave the machine a minute to update itself and then entered the complete address for FEBG and the Moon Temple account page. The software began performing its magic.

It broke through the bank’s central server and came to a complete halt.

No further information exists for this search

“Oh, yes it does,” she muttered, quickly typing a new command.

No further information exists for this search

“Come on, the guy’s a lawyer, not a computer whiz.” She entered a go-around command, thinking that an approach from a different direction would help.

Access denied

“Oh no you don’t.” She tried another backdoor method. She’d only used it once before, and it had been like saying “Open sesame.” Not this time.

She needed to get off the spyware system quickly. The longer she stayed there, the more chance she would be discovered. She backed out of the program, erased her search history, and cleared the cache before shutting down the laptop.

“Well, rats.”

Whoever was making the deposits was good. He was using hidden servers, specialized methods, and most likely multiple transfers to take the money from some other source.

“If it’s Foster Fordyce, he really is a multi-talented guy,” she said as she picked up her jacket and walked out the front door. Maybe burning off some steam with a run in the park would put some fresh ideas into her head.