Boston—roughly the same time
Finding the account from the inquiry string that her program had captured was not difficult once Chelsea understood the protocol.
What was baffling, though, was the fact that the account didn’t seem to exist.
To make sure she understood the protocol and was therefore getting everything right, she canvassed the cafeteria for anyone who had an account at the same bank. She recorded a query with the card—that morning Massina had leased an ATM machine for the lobby, for research as well as his employees’ convenience—then replayed everything with the account information.
Nothing. Nada. The account didn’t exist.
Which a bank manager confirmed for her in person when she went to inquire about it, asking about a check supposedly written on it.
It had to have been erased. There were ways to get the information back—looking at backup files would be the easiest, but she’d need the bank’s cooperation. And if they weren’t going to cooperate with the FBI, they surely wouldn’t work with her. She didn’t bother asking.
Not sure what to do next, she went back to the lab and replayed the drone footage. It had taken the drone about ninety seconds to get over the site after receiving the command.
Which wasn’t all that much time, but it was certainly after the card had been used.
So why was the suspect facing in the direction of the ATM when the drone arrived?
At the time, they thought it was because he’d heard the boy on the bike behind him, but the more she considered it, the more Chelsea wondered. She went back to the drone’s video and zoomed in, looking at the scratchy images from the distance. The earliest image showed the suspect on the sidewalk alone, walking toward the ATM. It wasn’t until several frames later that the bike appeared.
Maybe nothing.
Or maybe they had gotten the wrong person.
The person on the bike was a girl. The drone had gotten a decent facial image, good enough to use for a search.
The computer system went to work, testing the image against a series of commercial identity databases, starting with anyone ever charged with a crime in Massachusetts—police mug shots had recently been declared public information. After the criminal databases turned up nothing, it began trolling through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, paging through a mountain of selfies.
But it wasn’t until a full five minutes had passed—an eternity considering the computer resources Chelsea had at her command—that it found a hit on a picture that had appeared in a school newsletter the year before.
The girl’s name was Borya Tolevi.
Gabor Tolevi’s daughter.
Chelsea replayed the drone’s image, looking at the confrontation between the two. There was no sound, but it was clear that the two were having an argument.
What about, Chelsea wondered. But it wasn’t hard to guess.