At some point during the night, Owen had fallen asleep at the computer. When the intercom buzzed, he heard it through the fog of a dream and didn’t budge. But the noise grew louder and more persistent, and eventually he sat up and wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth.
“Fuck,” he said, and dug his thumbs into the sides of his neck, which felt as though it might be permanently crooked from sleeping facedown on his dining room table.
The buzzer blared again. This time it sounded as if someone was leaning on it.
“Coming!” he shouted. “I’m fucking coming!”
“Good morning to you, too,” Marina said, when he opened the door. She looked fresh-faced, as though she’d just gone for a run in Central Park. Her glossy hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore black spandex pants and a tight-fitting windbreaker that was unzipped just enough to reveal a slice of tank top beneath. Owen tried his best to maintain eye contact.
Marina held out two large coffees. “Rough night?”
“Long night,” he said, and reached for the coffee before ushering her inside. “What time is it?”
“It’s eight a.m. I was going to come over at seven, but I figured I’d let you sleep a little. Or, you know, bid adieu to any overnight guests.”
“Thanks.” Owen yawned. He hadn’t been out of bed at eight a.m. on a Sunday in a very long time. He nodded his head in the direction of his bedroom. “I think she’s in the shower.”
“Funny. Do you want me to come back later?”
“No. We have too much work to do. I was up all night and barely scratched the surface.”
Marina glanced around. The window shades were drawn throughout the apartment. Three laptops sat open on the dining room table, and from each, a jumble of cables extended, like a multiheaded medusa. Strewn about were coffee cups, a pizza box, USBs, and stacks of paper. Owen was wearing glasses, which meant he’d spent the better part of the past twenty-four hours staring at a screen. Marina hadn’t seen him in glasses since the Darlings investigation eight years earlier. His were thick and slightly off-center on his nose. He looked nerdier in them, but sweeter, too. She wondered why he didn’t wear them more often.
“This place looks like a scene from Snowden,” she said.
“This is bigger than Snowden. You have no idea.” Owen moved a stack of files off a chair and offered her a place to sit. “How was Connecticut?”
“Well, for starters, I think I was being followed. There was a sedan lingering around Duncan’s house while I was there, and it followed me most of the way home.”
Owen frowned. “Most?”
“I pulled out into the Lakeville exit and lost him.”
“Make?”
“I think it was a town car. You know, like from a limo company.”
“Did you get a plate?”
“Partial.”
“Give it to me. I’ll have a cop friend run it. Speaking of cop friends, what’s up with the investigation?”
“Seems like a professional job. Clean shot to the head, .45 with a silencer. Neighbor saw a Kia casing the block earlier in the day, so Miles is going to try to track that down. Duncan’s notebooks were missing, as was his laptop.”
“Bet that’s the first time the Somerset Police Department has come across a hit man.”
“Well, the chief of police thinks it was just a break-in gone wrong. I think it’s a matter of time before he tries to close the case.”
Owen shrugged, unsurprised. “I’m pretty sure those guys aren’t going to be cracking this case, anyway. Did you get the Kia’s plate number? I can run that, too.”
“The last digits were 434. A yellow plate, so probably New York. Could also be Maine, maybe? One other interesting thing. I got a peek at Duncan’s calendar for the last few weeks. He’d been calling someone at the Department of Justice. Hunter Morse. And then he had it penciled into his calendar to go down to DC. He wrote Morse next to it and underlined it.”
“He had an actual calendar? Like a Filofax or something?”
“So do I. Don’t judge. I think it’s nice. Did you know you retain information twice as well if you write it down by hand? Duncan taught me that. And look, you can’t hack into it.” Marina pulled a pink leather day planner from her purse and pushed it across Owen’s dining room table.
“What if you lose it?”
“I’d die. But I haven’t yet.”
Owen snorted. He pulled Marina’s day planner over to his side of the table and inspected it. “Jesus, who even makes these anymore?” He ran his finger over her initials, MT, which were embossed in gold on the lower right-hand corner of the leather cover. “What happens when you get married? Won’t you need to change this? Will it say ‘Mrs. Grant Ellis’ instead?”
Marina ignored his mocking tone. “Maybe I won’t need one at all,” she shot back. “Since I won’t be working after the wedding. Maybe I’ll just have my social secretary give me my schedule every morning. Like Letitia Baldrige and Jackie Kennedy.”
“Touché. You aren’t really going to quit though, are you?”
“I really am.”
Owen frowned, suddenly serious. “You’re a good writer. Duncan was grooming you to take over for him. Did you know that? I always thought you should go over to the Journal, though.”
“You’re not even at the Journal!”
“You know what I mean. To a serious news outlet. Press is too much of a society magazine for you. You like hard-hitting stories, you always have. I saw the spark in your eye during the Darlings investigation. You loved it. It’s in your blood, Marina.”
“You make it sound like I have a disease.”
“You do. I’ve got it, too. The truth bug. No cure, unfortunately.” Owen locked his hands behind his head and tipped his chair back, looking smug.
“At least we agree that I shouldn’t stay at Press. I can’t imagine the place without Duncan.”
“I can get you a job at the Deliverable, if you want. It might be too edgy for you now that you live on Park Avenue.”
Marina shook her head. “I’m out, Owen. Grant’s going to be running the family business soon. We can’t both be traveling all the time. Especially not if we’re going to start a family. I always knew I was going to quit. I thought I’d wait until after the wedding. But now that Duncan’s gone . . .”
“So Papa Ellis is running for president, huh? The rumors are true?”
“He’ll announce his candidacy any day now. Don’t give me that look.”
“What look? No look.”
“I know you well enough to know when there’s a look.”
Owen raised his hands. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. I don’t see you as a Park Avenue housewife. That’s a compliment, by the way, not a criticism.”
“Well, maybe I’ll be a Beltway housewife instead.”
“You’ve got my vote. He’s a Democrat at least, right? Hard to tell with billionaires. Or does he prefer the term ‘limousine liberal’?”
“Who’s a Democrat?” Marina almost levitated off her chair when she heard a female voice behind her. She spun around and found herself facing a sultry brunette with olive skin, almond-shaped eyes, and a body that would put a swimsuit model to shame. The woman was barefoot, and her jeans were rolled up at the cuff. Marina couldn’t help but notice the intricate mosaic pattern tattooed around her left ankle that seemed to extend up her leg. God knew how far it went.
“I’m Yael,” the woman said, extending her hand. “You must be Marina.”
Marina nodded and shook her hand. For once in her life, she was speechless.
“You should have woken me up,” Owen said to Yael. “I was drooling on myself like an asshole.”
Yael laughed. “You needed the rest.” She had a light accent that Marina thought sounded Israeli, but she couldn’t be sure.
“I was joking about the overnight guest,” Marina said.
Owen grinned. “I know.”
She stood up and started collecting her things. “I’ll go. I’m sorry. I thought we said—”
“Whoa, where are you going? We’re here to work. You going to join us?”
Marina glanced at Owen, then at Yael, then back again. She felt dizzy with embarrassment.
“Yael’s a programmer,” Owen said. “I keep trying to hire her, but she’s too expensive for me. Anyway, she’s going to help us out. And fuck, we’re going to need it.”
Marina’s embarrassment turned to frustration. “What? Owen, no. You can’t just— May I speak with you? Alone, please?”
Yael gave Owen a wide-eyed “oh boy” glance.
“Marina, look,” Owen said, “I understand your hesitation. But I trust Yael. She’s the best. And we can’t do this alone. Just let me show you what we’ve been doing and I think you’ll understand. Okay?”
Marina hesitated. On one hand, she was furious with Owen for bringing in a partner without asking her first. The source was skittish enough; what if he found out she had a whole team of people looking at his data? He could disappear without so much as a word. He could go to another journalist. Worst of all, he could turn himself in and take his chances with the authorities.
On the other, she knew the volume of data they had to work through was enormous. Every minute they wasted was a minute lost; the sooner this information went public, the better off they all would be. Owen tended to be a lone ranger when it came to his work; his inability to play nicely with others when it came to team investigations was a well-documented flaw of his. So if Owen said they needed help, chances were, they did. And if Owen said Yael was the best, she probably was. Even if she did look like Jessica Alba.
“Okay.” Marina nodded. She slid back into her seat. “Sorry. I just—”
Yael waved her off. “I get it. This material is as sensitive as it gets.”
“Wake up, Maestra, baby,” Owen said to the computer. He typed in a password and the screen whirred to life. “Time to rise and shine.”
“Maestra?”
Yael laughed. “That’s what I call her. She’s mine, by the way.”
“And she’s a beaut,” Owen said.
“I thought we were using your computer,” Marina said to Owen. “I thought we agreed.”
“Do you know what an air gap is?” Yael asked. Marina shook her head.
“This computer has never been connected to the internet,” Yael explained, pointing to Maestra. “Its WLAN—that’s wireless local area network—is deactivated, so no LAN cable will ever penetrate its casing.”
Marina stared at her.
“Basically a computer is only safe if an air gap separates it from other systems. So this ensures that no one will be able to hack us. Also, it has five hundred gigs of memory. So it can handle the amount of data the source has sent. So far, anyway.”
Owen shot Marina a look, as if to say, See? This is why we need her.
“Basically, what I’m doing here is setting up a secure database for all the documents. Right now, they’re just indexed. Eventually, I’d like to construct visualizations so that every company and its related entities will appear, along with their shareholders. Like an org chart. That way, we can see who is connected to whom. But we’re not there yet.”
“How are you indexing them? The documents, I mean. There must be millions.”
“I’ve been using Nuix Investigator. Nuix is a company that makes forensic IT software. Basically, it’s a program that helps you sort and sift through vast quantities of data. It can even search unsearchable stuff, like PDFs and scanned documents. It’s super cool.” Marina was impressed that Yael didn’t seem annoyed with her questions. In fact, she seemed excited to have someone to talk to about the project.
“It’s crazy expensive,” Owen said. “It’s not like a new version of Adobe Acrobat or something. You can’t just go out and buy it.”
“It’s basically only used by police forces and law firms,” Yael said. “The SEC. Places like that. But Christophe Martin hooked me up with a license. So we’re off and running.”
Marina frowned. “The head of the ICIJ?” She didn’t love the idea of the head of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists getting looped into this. The ICIJ was a global network of more than 150 reporters who collaborated on in-depth, cross-border stories. While Marina had nothing but respect for their work, she couldn’t imagine getting 150 reporters from across the world involved in this story. How could they possibly operate with that many cooks in the kitchen? And could they tell the source they had gone from a team of two to a team of 150 in fewer than twenty-four hours? Surely, if the source wanted to have that many journalists involved, he would have taken it to the ICIJ in the first place.
“Christophe’s a friend. Don’t worry. He doesn’t know what it’s for. He trusts me,” Yael said.
“Think of it as super-Google,” Owen explained. “Basically, the files you want to search are uploaded into the program as evidence. Nuix automatically indexes them. Once the index is created, we can search anything. You can type in a name, a company name, whatever. And Nuix will bring up all the documents related to that search. It’s totally wild.”
“Wow. Even if it’s a PDF? Or a fax?”
“Yeah, that’s the cool part.” Yael’s eyes gleamed. “Nuix is sophisticated. It has optical character recognition. So like, if there’s a photo file that has me standing in front of a law firm, and in the background, you can see that it says ‘Schmit & Muller’ on the door, Nuix will pick that up. Normal search tools can’t do that.”
“So is the index done?” Marina asked incredulously. She thought it would take days—weeks, maybe—for them to manually click through everything. But instead, they were light-years ahead. Now they could get to the fun part—writing the story.
“Yup.” Yael nodded. “We were up all night, but it’s done.”
“He’s still sending more,” Owen said. “It comes in batches. Even Maestra may not be able to handle what this guy’s got.”
Yael shrugged. “We’re caught up now. We have a secure database in place. Now we just need to start searching it. We can add data as it comes.”
“So where is the data coming from? Any thoughts?”
“At first we assumed the source was someone inside a big offshore bank—CIB maybe, or Swiss United. But now it looks like it’s coming from inside a law firm in Luxembourg. Schmit & Muller. They seem to be the go-to law firm for all these offshore banks, like CIB and Swiss United. They are the middleman, so to speak. They help the clients set up these shell entities with fake directors. And then they take the shell entities’ money to the banks. How on earth they are still in business is a mystery to me. If these people have time to do legitimate business, I’d be amazed.”
“Wow. Who do you think the source is? Maybe a disgruntled ex-employee or something?”
Yael shook her head. “The data is recent. We’re getting emails from yesterday. Whoever our source is, he is very much alive and still working at Schmit & Muller. And he has access to its entire database. It’s like we bugged their computers. We’re watching what happens inside as it happens. A fly on the wall of a deeply corrupt law firm.”
“That’s a crazy risk.”
Owen nodded. “Insane. Honest to God, we should be checking in with this guy regularly to make sure he’s still alive. It takes serious cojones to steal data in real time. Most sources steal it and bolt. This guy is just stealing it, sending it to us, and stealing some more.”
“Stealing isn’t the right word,” Yael argued. “He’s doing the right thing. This guy is whistle-blower of the year. Maybe the decade.”
“Fine. You’re right. He’s like the Robin Hood of data. Stealing from the corrupt rich. Distributing to us, the noble poor. Sorry, Marina. I know you’re no longer a member of the proletariat now that you’re engaged to Grant Ellis.”
Marina ignored him. “Did you look up Morty Reiss?”
Owen and Yael exchanged glances.
“So Yael and I were talking about the best way to do this,” Owen said. “Both of us think it might be time to call in the cavalry. If we bring it to the ICIJ, we can get a team of reporters working on it. Only the best. We’ll work together with Christophe to determine who will be pulled in. Each reporter we bring covers a region—Russia, China, the UK. You and I can pick which US stories we want to work on, dole the rest out to other reporters here—maybe folks at the Times, the Journal, the Post. We can discuss. Then we all publish simultaneously. Same hour, same day. It will be incredible. The biggest data leak in history.”
Marina shook her head. “I think it’s too risky.”
“This story is bigger than Morty Reiss, Marina. Morty Reiss is a small fish in a very big, dirty, illegal pond.”
“What about Matthew Werner?”
“We looked. And you were definitely onto something. Matthew Werner isn’t all that interesting, but Fatima Amir, the woman he died with, sure was. Come check this out.”
Marina moved her chair over next to Owen’s. Yael stood behind them, her arms crossed. He typed in “Fares Amir.”
A glossy head shot from a London-based hedge fund, the Amir Group, appeared on the screen. Smiling and handsome, with thinning but perfectly groomed hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a bright blue Hermès tie that popped against his dark skin, Fares Amir looked like the quintessential British banker.
“Meet Fares Amir, Fatima Amir’s brother.”
“Fares Amir is a managing director in charge of Client Services at the Amir Group, a hedge fund founded by his sister, Fatima Amir, in 2009,” Marina read. “Fares holds degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and prior to working at the Amir Group, he spent several years in the Real Estate Principal Investment Area (REPIA) at Goldman Sachs.”
“Impressive résumé, right? He forgets to mention that his biggest ‘client’ is his cousin Bashar al-Assad. Who, publically, he claims to have no relationship with. Otherwise he’d end up on sanctions lists. But in private, he’s been doing the guy’s money laundering for years.”
With another click, Owen pulled up a grainy photograph of two dark-haired men in suits. They were walking shoulder to shoulder, their heads turned in caucus. Marina squinted at the screen. One was unquestionably Assad. The other bore a remarkable resemblance to Fares Amir.
“Fares is a client of our friends Schmit & Muller. Through them, he sets up a series of shell companies, with innocuous names like ‘UK Land Corp’ and ‘Island Properties Inc.’ Assad deposits money into UK Land Corp, typically in gold bars that have been purchased with dirty money, made from arms sales or payoffs from corrupt officials. UK Land Corp turns around and uses the gold to buy property, which is then sold to Island Properties. This continues down a chain of shell companies, until the original source of the funds is so obscure that it would be impossible to trace. Eventually, the property gets sold back to one of Fares Amir’s clients at Amir Group. The client is thrilled because they pick the property up at a significant discount. And Assad doesn’t care that he’s losing a bit of money, because now it’s clean, sitting in a bank account at Swiss United, ready to be withdrawn for him by one of his minions.”
Marina stared, wide-eyed at the computer. “And you have proof of all this?” she asked Owen. “A full paper trail?”
“Full paper trail. Emails—very explicit emails. It’s actually kind of awesome how crooked these guys are. They literally just talk about what they’re doing like its business as usual. ‘Mr. Al-Assad would like to transfer ten million US dollars into four new companies. He understands that the fee for this transaction will be five hundred thousand US dollars. He would like this done by close of business on Friday.’ Stuff like that. And then there are the bank accounts, the wire transfer confirmations, the formation documents for the shell companies. All in neatly labeled folders from inside Schmit & Muller’s internal database.”
“It never occurred to these people that they might be hacked? Or that this data might leak in some way?” Marina said.
“They have an incredibly sophisticated security system in place,” Yael explained. “Schmit & Muller is like Fort Knox. The only way the information would get out is through an inside leak. I guess they have their ways of preventing those, too.”
Marina frowned. “They weren’t able to prevent this leak.”
“No. But I think they tried.” Owen clicked open an email between Hans Hoffman and Julian White. “Remember these guys? From the Morty Reiss emails? Hoffman’s one of the heads of Schmit & Muller. White is a private banker at Swiss United. He reports directly to Jonas Klauser, the bank’s CEO.”
“I remember.”
Marina skimmed the email. She shivered, her arms crossing her body reflexively. The content was short and the words were chilling.
October 20, 2015
From: Julian White
To: Hans Hoffman
Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL: see attached
We have confirmed that on at least three separate occasions over the past month and a half, Fatima Amir met with an agent from MI6. At the second meeting, her banker from Swiss United, Matthew Werner, was present. We believe that they have and will continue to provide confidential financial information regarding Fares Amir, Bashar al-Assad, and his associates to the authorities. Photos are attached.
Marina clicked open the photos. They were grainy and shot from above. They showed two men and a woman, sitting on a private balcony of what appeared to be a hotel. They sat at a table, and the woman’s face was partially obscured by the table’s umbrella. She was leaning forward, her hand atop a manila envelope. One of the men had a briefcase. In the subsequent photos, he could be seen examining the contents of the manila envelope and then placing it into his briefcase.
“So Fatima Amir was giving incriminating information about her own family to MI6?”
“Her brother is a money launderer. Her cousin’s a war criminal. Anyone who thinks their family is fucked up should meet the Amirs.”
“But our mole is from inside Schmit & Muller,” Marina pressed. “And our mole is, as far as we know, alive. So Fatima Amir and Matthew Werner were not the ones feeding information to Duncan. But it just seems like too much of a coincidence, right? That they were all killed on the same day? Something about it doesn’t sit right with me.”
“But maybe Schmit & Muller didn’t know where the leak was coming from. All they know is someone is feeding information to the authorities. And these two appear to be doing just that.”
“So she was a mole, but not our mole.”
Yael opened another screen. It showed the wreckage of a plane, its parts strewn about a glistening mountaintop. “And this is how they deal with moles.”
“Christ.”
“Plane crashed just forty-eight hours after these emails. Same day Duncan was murdered. Convenient, right?”
“If by convenient, you mean terrifying.”
“Oh, and remember Duncan’s trip to the Caymans?”
Marina nodded. “Yeah, the Schmit & Muller guys figured he had a source inside CIB.”
“Well, guess who turned up dead the day after Duncan left? Freak boating accident.”
“A CIB banker.”
“Bingo.”
“So we’ve got two dead private bankers, a dead private banking client, and a dead journalist,” Marina said, shaking her head.
“But one living mole,” Owen said, pulling up his computer. He pointed to the screen. “He’s sending us more data now. Let’s get to work. If we’re going to go to the ICIJ, we need a secure database first that can be accessed by users around the globe.”
“The source has to agree. We can’t bring in a whole team without talking to him.”
“This guy is already on borrowed time, Marina. I think he’ll come around to seeing the benefit of having the ICIJ behind him.”
“Is Christophe Martin ready to help us?”
Yael smiled. “Are you kidding? This is the story of a lifetime. For him—for all of us.”