She took one, bit in. “Warm. Good.”
“They are. Now Banks’s portfolio is managed by Schultz’s grandson, and competently enough, who appears aboveboard. Though my impression is he’s passed it to another in the firm. But to confirm that, I’d cross the line you cling to.
“Just keep going.”
“All right. Our boy bought a small chunk of Quantum stock in November, fifty thousand, in the margin. He put in an order to sell this morning, just after the bombing.”
“Panicked.”
“He did—but perhaps just tiptoeing along that line—I stumbled over some correspondence. His broker advised him, strongly, to hold on to the stock, by rightfully telling him he had little more to lose, and ascertaining the stock would level at least.”
“Did he listen?”
“In his way. His response? Fuck it, Tad. Whatever. My take is he bores very easily. But his initial reaction leads me to believe he wasn’t in on the scheme.”
“Maybe not. Maybe Tad was. Maybe he didn’t know he was in on the scheme. Maybe being a scamp, a wanker, and a git, he was also a dupe. Whatever else, he’s dirty. Money laundering’s frowned upon.”
“A pity, as it comes out so crisp and clean.” He polished off the cookie. “Willimina Karson paid his gallery thirty thousand and change—for art. Econo paid his gallery nearly a hundred thousand.”
“Interesting. And he’d get seventy percent of that. I’m going to talk to her in the morning, push out what I can about what she told Banks on the deal. I’ll go another round with him, and interview the two I culled out. Both of them would have had some access to Rogan, have means to study him.”
She pushed up, walked to the board. “You’d have to have inside info. Sure, there’s buzz about the merger, but they kept the lid on the details until they had it set. And this scheme took weeks, if not months, to refine. So they had to know more than the average onlooker, even money people. Speculation, sure, but enough to plot this out means solid data.”
She turned back. “Am I wrong?”
“If you knew what to ask, how to ask, who to ask, you could find out more. Then there’s the politics and bureaucrats. So you’d have information there, as the deal rolled through the red tape. You’d have some leaks.”
“So some assistant to some assistant with the right clearance could brag to his buddies over a brew about drone work on a big deal.”
“Possibly.”
“Yeah, I figured.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Okay. It’s a heist.” She dropped her hands again. “You know about heists, and you know about money, about business, about deals. You know how to cheat and steal.”
Thoughtfully, Roarke eased a hip onto her desk. “I’m taking all of that as a compliment.”
“It’s a heist,” she repeated, “but at the base it’s a con. You know about those, too. It’s not what you did, using innocent people, killing them, but you know how to set up heists, grifts, cons, thefts.”
“Still taking the compliment.”
“How would you do it? If you were a sociopath, didn’t care about leaving a trail of bodies. How would you set this up? How long would it take? How much would you need?”
He blew out a breath. “Well now, let’s sit by the fire.”
“I want—”
“A brandy’s what I want,” he decided, and strolled over to get one. “And we might as well be comfortable while I’m planning out a job without worrying about the death toll.” He grabbed her hand as he walked, tugged her over to the sofa.
The cat slid off the sleep chair, bounded over and up to stretch out across both their laps.
“Cozy,” Roarke decided. “The start could be from a variety of points—and there’s where you’ll have your issues. You might be inside one of the companies, or know someone who is. You might catch the word in the media, or on the street. You might be in finance, or again, the politics of it. But from there you have to know enough to have vision.”
“Crash the companies at the optimum time, buy, wait, sell.”
“In shorthand, yes. And if you’re that sociopath, you’d think the optimum way at that optimum time to bring about that crash is blood and fear.”
“Explosion, loss of life, confusion. Nobody knows what the fuck for the first couple of hours.”
“Exactly. The world being what the world is, people rush toward terrorism at such moments, foreign or domestic. The market reacts. So if this is my plan, I’d want times, dates, names. I’d want the companies to rebound or it’s not profitable, is it?”