Silent Assassin(30)

“Unless . . .” said Shepard, prompting O’Neal.

Bloch raised an eyebrow impatiently. “Unless?” “Unless you can have some massively parallel computer program doing it for you,” said O’Neal. “One with no preconceptions about what should correlate with what, and who can literally just look at everything item by item. And that,” she said, moving just slightly aside and motioning to Shepard, “is where Linc comes in.”

“Excuse me,” he said, as he took over her computer and brought up a simple interface that showed a blank graph. “I came up with this baby over the past couple of weeks. It’s been running on our servers, engaging every little bit of processing power that wasn’t being used. And it’s been sorting through data, looking for things that correlated with the attacks.”

“What kinds of things?” asked Bloch.

“Literally everything we had,” said O’Neal.

“Isn’t that senseless?” said Bloch. “What use is a correlation between the attacks and, say, the weather?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” said O’Neal. “Even if you have no idea what the causal connection is—it doesn’t matter. Not as long as it makes good predictions.”

Bloch looked skeptical.

“It’s a new age, Bloch,” she continued. “Data is queen. And we’ve got more of it available than ever, and it can do things beyond even our ability.”

“So when are you getting to what you actually found?”

With a few keystrokes from Shepard, a complex graph appeared on the screen, a tangle of different-colored lines.

“What am I looking at here?” asked Bloch.

“Prices for stocks, commodities, and a number of derivatives,” said O’Neal. “Specifically, those that saw the greatest change, either upwards or downwards, after the Paris attacks, shown here.” She pointed out a vertical dotted line on the graph. To the right of it, the colored lines went either sharply up or sharply down. “Those could hypothetically create enormous profits for investors—buying the ones that increased directly, investing in swaps and futures to take advantage of the stocks and commodities that took a hit.”

“Sure,” said Bloch. “Any kind of big jump in the markets can make some people boatloads of money. But a lot of people are also going to lose big, unless . . .”

“Unless they know in advance what’s going to happen,” said O’Neal.

“Are you saying that someone knew about the attack, and used it to make money off the financial markets?”

“Here’s what we found,” said O’Neal. “First, there was an increase in activity among these financial instruments in the month leading up to the attack. It was diffuse, spread out over many different funds and over time, some of it disguised as day trades, but it’s undeniable. When we looked into who was buying these, we found that there was a significant correspondence between them—that is, some fifty companies and funds were responsible for an enormous percentage of the purchases of these instruments over the past several weeks.”

“Are you suggesting,” said Bloch, “that whoever is behind those companies had prior knowledge of the attack?”

“That is what the data suggests,” said O’Neal.

“Doesn’t seem like a very solid lead,” said Bloch. “Seems like it could be coincidence.”

“It might be, to someone who doesn’t know their statistics,” said O’Neal. “But I ran the models. The odds of this being coincidence are slim.”

“Not to mention the identity of those firms,” said Shepard, piping up. “We looked into them. They’re all dummy corporations, in the Bahamas, Belize, and other countries that make it their business to attract shell companies. Want to put odds on all of those being on the up-and-up?”

Bloch seemed impressed. “Think you can figure out who’s behind those shell companies?”

“It’ll take some doing,” said Shepard. “Electronic transfers can be traced, but for something like this, there’ll be layers of shells and dummies before we get to something solid.”

“Can you do it?” she insisted.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said.

“You’ll do more,” she said, all business. “I’m going to need a report. Everything you have, and whatever else you find, to send up the chain.”

“Paperwork, paperwork,” said Shepard in a mock gripe, lips pulled into a wide grin. “That’s all I get for being a freaking genius. Shall I throw some nice colorful infographics in there too?”