Dangerous Desire

15

Tabby makes a face at me, apparently insulted I felt the need to point out the obvious.

“I’ve already started a bot to crawl his records. We’ll have a list of all his calls shortly.”

When a cheerful electronic ding sounds from the console behind her, she points over her shoulder. “And there’s the report now.” She spins around in her chair, but then spins right back, holding up a finger. “One other thing I forgot to mention.”

“Yeah?”

She looks me dead in the eye, her chin lifted and her voice low. “I don’t like to be patronized, second-guessed, or told how to do my job. Do you?”

I release a heavy breath, close my eyes briefly, and shake my head. “No. I apologize.”

When I open my eyes again, Tabby’s smiling at me. “Apology accepted. We all handle stress differently. You should see Connor when he’s really stressed out.”

I look at him, curiosity momentarily overriding my panic. “I can’t imagine what that might look like.”

Connor sniffs and looks at me down his nose. “I’m way too cool to stress out.”

“Ha!” When Connor’s look turns sour, Tabby laughs again, then blows him a kiss. “You’re right, honey. There’s never any stress eating at our house. No gallons of mint chocolate chip ice cream wolfed down in four bites, no bags of chocolate chip cookies inhaled as fast as rails of cocaine, no jumbo-sized Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups wrappers littering the coffee table.”

He twists his lips. “So I enjoy an occasional sweet. That proves nothing.”

“You’re right, babe,” she says softly, her eyes warm. “You’re Teflon. My bad.”

Watching them gaze tenderly at each other unravels the last bit of patience I have. “Okay, I’m apologizing in advance for this, but I’m about to rip out my hair by the roots here. So if we could please get a move on, I’d really appreciate it.” I look at Tabby, lay a hand over my heart, and bow. “With deepest respect.”

Tabby turns her warm green gaze to me. “Now that was a proper request.”

She spins around in her chair and engages in a truly impressive display of furious keyboard typing, quickly launching several pop-up windows on the main screen. More dazzling typing. More screens appear. Then she executes some kind of command that makes all the screens begin to cross-reference one another. Numbers are highlighted, moved to one side, and bunched in order of most frequent appearances.

She opens yet another screen, copies and pastes the frequent number list, and hits “Enter.” Then she says, “Hmm.”

I don’t realize I’m gnawing on my thumbnail until I try to talk and discover my thumb jammed in my mouth. “What does that mean?”

“It means our friend Raphael Bergé is definitely acquainted with Dimitri Ivanov.”

A jolt of electricity runs down my spine, making me stiffen. I scan the screen but don’t see whatever the connection is that she’s seeing. “How can you tell?”

She double-clicks one of the phone numbers. A map appears on-screen with latitude and longitude coordinates of a pinned red spot.

Connor recognizes the location immediately. “That’s Dimitri’s home in Russia.”

“So they are Dimitri’s men.” I start to pace again. I’m so upside down, I can’t decide if this is good news or bad.

“Or at least Bergé is,” says Connor.

“The big one must be, too, or he wouldn’t be on the ship.”

“Could be an associate. An employee. A friend, maybe, not necessarily even acquainted with Dimitri. What else we got, Tabby?”

She takes a while to answer, clicking down the list from number to number. Finally she shakes her head. “These others in the top ten are all spoofed numbers, rerouted through anonymous servers, mapped to nowhere. Could be Dimitri, too. Or Raphael knows a lot of other bad dudes.” More clicking, then Tabby stops short. “Oh. Well, there you go.”

I squint at the screen. Displayed is an unidentifiable mass of numbers, letters, and characters that don’t look to be in any particular order. It might as well be hieroglyphics. “What are we looking at?”

She turns around, crosses her long legs, folds her hands in her lap, and looks back and forth between me and Connor. “We’re looking at a SWIFT message.”

She says that like I have a f*****g clue at all what she’s talking about. I bite my tongue, inhale a calming breath, release it, then ask politely, “What is that, and what does it mean?”

Her smile comes on slow and smug. “It’s the format banks use to send messages to each other. And it means that nobody ever told our friend Raphael that you shouldn’t transfer payment orders through a porous international financial network when you’ve got a bona fide computer genius crawling up your booty hole.”

Electricity crackles through my veins. “We’ve got his bank account.”

“Yep. Which means we’ve got access to his entire financial history and all his personal information, including address and national identification number. Which means we have him by the balls.” Tabby looks at me with lifted brows and an innocent expression that’s as fake as they come. “Think you might be able to use his balls for anything?”

My heart starts to beat so hard it leaves me breathless. “I can think of a thing or two. Let’s get started.”