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“What is it?” Annabelle asked, looking from the flash drive to Vincent and back.
He sighed, running his hand through his short, black hair. “It’s a bit complicated to explain fully, but it’s a program that will wipe his hard drive.”
She stepped back in shock. “I don’t think I can do that, Vincent.”
“You sure about that? I mean, I know you don’t want Paul to know about—“
Frantically, she reached out and clapped her hand over Vince’s mouth to silence him. Her skin felt warm and soft, and for some reason, he felt her run her fingers across his lips when she drew her hand back.
“Please don’t,” she whispered. “I don’t want Paul to know what I was doing that night…but I don’t want to destroy his personal computer. What if he has important information on there?”
“Anything he has that we would need in the office is definitely backed up on the Meca servers, and as for any personal information…well that’s a risk I have to take.”
“Why?”
Vincent hesitated. He’d gone over this lie a few times in his head, the perfect thing to tell Annabelle to convince her to go through with planting his program. “Because Paul has some damaging personal information about me. I know that he has hard copies, which I’m going to destroy, but if I can’t destroy the digital copies on his personal computer it’s going to be all for naught.”
Annabelle quivered and bit her lip. “What kind of personal information?”
He shook his head. “This is a ‘no questions asked’ favor I’m calling in, okay? It’s something that would be very bad for me professionally that he’s using to prevent me from advancing or potentially get another job. So I need it gone, and soon. Either you’re gonna help me with this, and I’ll forget whatever I saw the other night, or you’re not and I’ll have to use that information to my advantage. I don’t want to do it if I don’t have to though.”
She didn’t respond for a few seconds, then said that she needed to think about it. But before she had rounded the hallway and escaped his sight, Vince knew she would do it.
* * *
Larsen looked at the screen in front of him like a wolf looked at prey. It was all there. Every transaction, every dollar that had been siphoned out of a client’s fund and into that offshore slush fund. He was almost incredulous, seeing it all laid out in front of him so neatly was almost unsettling.
“So you can see that he’s been consistently cycling money into and out of the fund constantly, which is how they never got caught. Looking at some of the accounts that got transferred from the slush, it looks like Volek was initially trying to cover up some corporate losses from a few years ago. Once he got away with it, looks like he kept going, taking more money from more funds, and even setting up some dummy accounts that looked to still be corporate accounts. This made it seem like the money never actually left Meca but was just reallocated and then replaced.”
Vincent stood over his left shoulder, pointing to a column with a date from 2013. “See if we cross reference the dates of these transfers with some corporate filings, they coincide directly with the dates that these shell companies were created.”
Larsen ran his finger along his lips as he studied the columns. “I can’t believe corporate never questioned these transactions.”
“Because corporate thought they were real companies, subsidiaries of Meca. At least, they had the authorization for creation by the Board.” Vincent smiled as he clicked into a separate document, showing meeting minutes from a Board meeting that took place a month prior to the filings.
Annabelle had worked quickly, and texted him the very same night as their meeting in the hallway, that she had done what he had asked. Sure enough, Vincent had been able to access Paul’s network like he had a password set up. The first night, he spent feeling his way around the system, making sure there were no contingencies in place that someone as cautious as Paul might have set up. After that, it had taken him several nights, combing through documents on Volek’s computer, before he thought to cross reference them with information on Meca’s database. Once he had this realization, the pieces to the puzzle began to fall into place quickly.
“Which means,” Vincent continued.
“That Volek has support from higher up,” Larsen finished before leaning back. “Shit! Fuck! If someone on the Board, an executive knows about this…goddamn that fucker is insulated. Protected.”
Vincent nodded. “And it gets worse. Volek was smart enough to cover his tracks, cycling back the money into the client funds before they ever needed to be withdrawn. That’s why no one ever picked up on it, because no one was actively looking at the actual funds in client trusts. Then the SEC came knocking a few weeks ago and…”
He punched a few keys, bringing up a new window showing Meca’s server. “All the client funds are showing that they have the full amount, despite the fact that there were no actual deposits. Or at least, no deposits on record. But when an innocent executive or the SEC is looking, it all looks honky-doory.”
“He’s falsifying financial records now. Christ.”
Vince nodded. “And this is on the Meca servers. If the SEC was to come back looking they wouldn’t find anything amiss. They’d need to subpoena the bank records…”
“And since he’s able to mask the transactions on here, Volek could easily just swap funds from one account to another and no one would know the difference. Shit!”
“Besides, like you said, if the accounts aren’t ones that Paul alone has access to, he can just pin it on someone else. What we need to do is find an account that Paul alone has access to that is currently depleted and see if the client will make a request for a transfer from it. Because the account is actually empty, according to the bank but not Meca, it would require an actual transfer of funds, which Paul can’t mask, before funds are dispersed. That way we can directly tie the transaction to Volek’s personal finances with both bank and Meca’s records. He won’t have time to tie up the loose ends and cover up the double transactions, so it would look like he put money into an account when he didn’t need to.”
Larsen nodded, standing up in front of the laptop and looking around. Sketch Burger was pretty full around 1 p.m., and the two had no qualms about returning to their original meeting place when there might be a bit more crowd cover. Plus, Vince had really enjoyed his bacon double last time.
Hurriedly, Vincent slurped down the rest of his drink and tossed the remnants of his meal into the trash can. Tom was already outside, walking down the curb towards the office, and Vince had to dodge a few pedestrians as he dodged to catch up.
“You have an idea?” he asked the senior attorney.
“I do,” Larsen replied, not even looking at the 24-year-old lawyer. “If you sent that information to the SEC, how quickly do you think they would be back with subpoenas and looking in our servers?”
“I thought you said we shouldn’t go to the SEC until we have more concrete evidence?”
“We shouldn’t, but we can have someone in IT provide an anonymous tip about irregular transactions to client accounts.”
Vincent shook his head. “Weren’t you just listening? If they look at the records on our servers they won’t–”
“They won’t find anything, I know. That’s not the point, how long before the SEC responds?”
“Given that they’re still investigating Woodcomb’s insider trading and how thoroughly they went through our system, they’d be back that same day.”
“I assume that you can get this information to them anonymously, looking like it was someone from IT, correct?”
“Of course, but–”
“How much lead time do you need before you’ll be ready to monitor Volek’s accounts for the transactions?”
“Ten minutes ago,” Vincent replied with a smirk. Hoping that he might get lucky, once Wong had gotten access to Volek’s financials he’d set up another watch dog program to alert him if any funds were transferred from the slush fund to a client’s holdings. It was shooting in the dark, hoping one of the transactions would line up with a client disbursement request, but it was a shot nonetheless.
As they stopped at the intersection, three blocks away from the office, Larsen turned and looked over at Vince. “A few months ago, Volek passed off one of his clients onto me. It was a dispute over a trust, whether the trustee violated his fiduciary duties to the beneficiaries, but in all honesty it’s fairly easy to reconcile. I’ve been a bit lazy since the clients really don’t care about the money–it’s a family issue they love fighting–but now that I have this incentive I can throw some BS at them about the tax implications if this dispute isn’t resolved, the fiduciary duties that were or weren’t violated, yada yada. The point is, this matter could be closed and they could be asking for their money tomorrow, so this all has to work simultaneously.
“Once the trust issue is resolved, you drop the line to the SEC, the client will be asking for disbursement of the funds contemporaneously with the SEC arriving to investigate, meaning…”
“Volek will panic, maybe do something stupid, and not cover his tracks carefully at Meca. At the worst, we’ll have the SEC in Meca’s system, we can show them the transfer from his account, and their guys will easily be able to strip apart whatever bullshit Paul puts in front of them and see there never was any transfer.”
Larsen nodded. “And there’s our smoking gun.”
* * *
The next day, Vincent was sitting at his desk, enjoying his lunchtime Honeycrisp apple like he always did. Annabelle walked up, silently, with a stack of papers. She didn’t speak, but just leaned over and gestured to the line on the document that needed his signature. He scrawled his name hastily, an oblong V followed by some chicken scratch, and then a looping W, before she scurried away.
As he munched on the apple, he watched her hips sway back and forth in the tight pencil skirt that she so often wore. A fool might think that after the whole ordeal was over, Vincent and Anna might be able to get back to a cordial, or even friendly relationship. Hell, the sappiest among them might say they should end up together romantically. He was the focused, uptight, professional who could reel her in, but she was the carefree, effervescent spirit who would help him be a bit more relaxed. Vincent knew better.
His life wasn’t some fairy tale or rom-com, it wasn’t some high-drama tv show filled with beautiful, charming people doing espionage while flirting. His whole life, he’d been as charming as a wet mop, and hardly anyone would call him “beautiful” with his chubby physique and adult acne covering half of his face. Getting the girl wasn’t a part of his plan.
As he tossed the apple core into the wastebasket near his desk, preparing to return to reviewing some more documents he couldn’t care less about, a window popped up in the corner of his screen. It was an instant message, from Tom Larsen.
A single word, Vincent didn’t have to read it twice to know what Tom wanted him to do. He could recognize that Larsen was trying to be cryptic but direct, believing that no one who looked at the Meca servers and chat logs would have any idea that he was instructing his protégée to begin the process they had been working towards for months to expose and dethrone Paul Volek. Revolutions are often started with speeches, rarely with words, but never before with a word. Yet the one word Larsen typed was the only word a revolutionary needed, the essence behind all uprisings, movements, and plans. Two letters: “go.” .
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@joshetyler
@joshetyler
This story SLAPS. I had to read it a couple times to really “get” what how the money was being washed (might have been aroused doing it) and the attention to detail is immecable. Also – Still say that Annabelle is “Girl” from TGDAF once shit hits the fan and she hits the witness protection program
Cannot confirm nor deny this theory, but I will say that Annabelle is going to get a much bigger role in the series sometime in the next few installments.
Do it to me author guy. DO IT
If ya smell what Volek… is cookin
This. Is. Awesome.
Just what I needed after tearing through Ozark season 2.
Wow, turns out Vincent is ugly. I thought of him as a sharp dressed, slimmer guy with a decent face. Like a kind of handsome nerd.