Chapter 2 - THE FOURTH COPY

Alex didn't go to the police station.

That was the first decision he made after escaping his apartment.

The second was to stop thinking like a millionaire.

Money wasn't the useful thing he had.

Information was.

Forty minutes later, Alex entered a twenty-four-hour laundromat on the other side of the city wearing a baseball cap and a twenty-dollar jacket he had purchased from a convenience store.

Maya was waiting beside a row of dryers.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She hugged him.

It lasted only a second.

Then Alex stepped back.

“Tell me everything.”

Maya opened her laptop.

“Noah found it during the final technical audit.”

“Found what?”

She turned the screen toward him.

A map appeared.

Thousands of dots.

Transactions.

Companies.

Bank accounts.

“What am I looking at?”

“Lattice wasn't just optimizing payment fraud anymore.”

Alex nodded.

That had been their breakthrough.

Their software looked for relationships between financial events that humans didn't notice.

Maya pointed toward a group of red dots.

“Meridian gave us six months of historical data for integration testing.”

“So?”

“So Noah ran Lattice against everything.”

Alex leaned closer.

The red dots formed clusters.

“Shell companies?”

“At first.”

Maya clicked.

Another network appeared.

Politicians.

Consultants.

Nonprofits.

Investment companies.

Offshore accounts.

Alex looked at her.

“What the hell is this?”

“We don't know.”

“You said it could put Victor in prison.”

“Because Noah found payments connected to market manipulation, bribery, and companies that don't seem to exist.”

“How much?”

Maya hesitated.

“Maya.”

“Potentially eleven billion dollars.”

Alex sat down.

A dryer spun behind him.

Jeans slapped rhythmically against metal.

He almost laughed.

Thirty-eight million suddenly felt very small.

“They knew?”

“During due diligence, yes.”

“And instead of stopping the acquisition—”

“They accelerated it.”

Alex remembered the last two weeks.

The sudden willingness to compromise.

The extra eight million added to the offer.

Victor congratulating them personally.

Maya closed the laptop.

“They weren't buying Lattice.”

“They were buying the analysis.”

“And us.”

Alex looked at her.

“Why us?”

“Because we knew the system.”

Alex shook his head.

“I didn't know any of this.”

“They don't know that.”

His phone buzzed.

UNKNOWN NUMBER.

A video arrived.

Alex opened it.

Noah appeared on screen.

Sitting in a chair.

Hands taped.

Blood at the corner of his mouth.

Alive.

Alex stopped breathing.

A man's voice came from behind the camera.

“Mr. Carter.”

Noah lifted his head.

“Alex, don't—”

Someone struck him from outside the frame.

“NOAH!”

The voice continued.

“You have something belonging to Meridian.”

Alex's hands shook.

“We want it back.”

A message appeared beneath the video.

MIDNIGHT.

Then an address.

Maya grabbed Alex's wrist.

“You're not going.”

“They have Noah.”

“They'll kill both of you.”

“They want the drives.”

“No.”

Maya looked directly at him.

“They want whoever can prove the drives are real.”

Alex stared at the video.

“What do we do?”

Maya reopened her laptop.

“We give them exactly what they asked for.”

Alex looked at her.

“The evidence?”

“No.”

For the first time that night, Maya smiled.

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“We give them a drive.”