27. Elena
Elena
By nine in the morning, I have decided Kalliopi hated me.
There is no other reasonable explanation for the seventeen pages of handwritten symbols spread across Adrianos’s dining table, three encrypted files refusing to surrender anything useful, and a column of numbers that has led me in a perfect circle twice.
I stare at the screen until the figures blur, rub my eyes, and return to the same sequence I have been trying to break for the last forty minutes.
“They’re wrong,” I mutter.
Adrianos looks up from the file he is reading across from me. “The numbers?”
“The pattern.”
“You’ve said that three times.”
“Because it has been wrong three times.”
“Then perhaps stop trying the same pattern.”
I slowly lift my gaze to him. “Do you have any idea how irritating it is when someone who isn’t an accountant says something sensible about accounting?”
“More or less irritating than discovering the man isn’t entirely decorative?”
I let my gaze travel over his black shirt, expensive watch, and the face responsible for a disturbing number of my recent bad decisions. “Entirely is doing significant work in that sentence.”
His mouth shifts into the almost-smile I have learned to recognize, and something warm moves through me before I can stop it.
Yesterday, I wasn't certain we would get back here.
Not to the investigation. We were always going back to that.
There are hundreds of millions missing, people are dead, and someone has been digging tunnels beneath the Crown for years.
I wasn't certain we would get back to us, whatever that word means when applied to a forensic accountant and a man whose conflict-resolution skills frequently involve firearms.
This morning, Adrianos woke beside me in my apartment, made one phone call, and somehow my kitchen acquired enough breakfast to feed a small army.
He didn't order me back to his penthouse.
He asked where I wanted to work. I chose his place because the security is better and most of our records are already here, and I am choosing not to examine too closely how much I wanted to return with him.
He slides another sheet toward me. “This date appears twice. Different accounts, different countries, but the same notation.”
“I know.”
“Then why haven't you connected them?”
“Because they don't belong together.”
“According to what?”
I open my mouth, then close it again. Adrianos raises an eyebrow. I hate that eyebrow.
“Fine,” I say. “That was annoyingly useful.”
“I’m improving.”
“Don't get excited.”
A fresh cup of coffee appears beside my hand a few minutes later. I look at it, then at the abandoned cup near my elbow and realize I never noticed him leave the table. The first one is stone cold.
“Thank you.”
He nods and returns to the file without making anything of it.
That is the problem with Adrianos when he isn't threatening people or making decisions that send my blood pressure into orbit.
He notices things. Not grand gestures designed to impress me, but small things that are much harder to defend against. Cold coffee.
The headache I get when I haven't eaten.
The way I rub the back of my neck when I've spent too long staring at a screen.
The man can put a bullet through someone's chest without blinking and remember exactly how much sugar I don't take in my coffee.
There should be regulations against that combination.
I drag my attention back to Kalliopi's notes.
She left fragments everywhere: numbers in margins, symbols beside transaction dates, tiny marks that looked meaningless when I first found them because I assumed they were shorthand for accounts.
A triangle. Two vertical lines. A circle divided through the center.
Then combinations that repeat often enough to be deliberate.
II-3.
III-2.
IV-1.
Sometimes the notation appears beside an account. Sometimes beside a date. Sometimes beside nothing I can identify.
Kalliopi knew how I think. That matters.
If she wanted to hide information from whoever might be watching her while leaving a path someone like me could eventually follow, she wouldn't build that path from something requiring a cryptography doctorate.
She would use patterns. Structure. Something ordinary enough to escape notice until you knew it wasn't ordinary.
I pull one of her handwritten pages closer and push it toward Adrianos. “Tell me what you see.”
He moves his chair around the table until he is beside me, his shoulder brushing mine as he leans over the paper. “A woman with terrible handwriting.”
“Useful.”
“You asked.”
“What does that look like?”
“Roman numerals.”
“Obviously.”
“Then why ask me?”
“Because you're supposed to see something I don't.”
He studies the page again, and I feel the heat of him beside me. “Rank, perhaps. Account categories. Families.”
“I've tested all three.”
“Transaction type?”
“No.”
“Sequence?”
I pause. “Sequence of what?”
“That,” he says, leaning back, “is your job.”
I glare at him, but his hand settles briefly against the back of my neck. His thumb presses into the tight muscle there once before he lets me go. The touch is casual, almost absentminded, which somehow makes it more intimate than if he'd kissed me.
I collect every page containing Roman numerals and arrange them chronologically. The theory collapses almost immediately because IV appears before II in several places. I rearrange by company, then country, then Crown family. Nothing holds.
Two hours disappear.
By noon, I have constructed three theories and personally murdered all of them.
The first assumes Kalliopi grouped accounts by jurisdiction.
It falls apart when identical symbols appear in Athens and Moscow.
The second assumes transaction purpose, which dies when shipping insurance and property settlements carry the same notation.
The third survives almost forty minutes before Adrianos points out that one company I classified as Italian was Irish-controlled during the year in question.
I stare at him across the table. “I preferred you when you just threatened people.”
“No, you didn't.”
“I did. You were less disruptive.”
“You liked me last night.”
“I was temporarily impaired.”
His gaze darkens with amusement. “Repeatedly.”
Heat crawls up my neck. “I am trying to solve a conspiracy.”
“I haven't stopped you.”
“Your existence is currently sufficient.”
That earns me another almost-smile before he turns back to the documents.
I stare at Kalliopi's notes again, refusing to let myself be distracted.
There has to be a reason she repeated those marks.
I take the oldest file we successfully decrypted yesterday and compare its structure with the newer OB6 records.
The encryption isn't identical. That shouldn't be surprising.
Security systems change. Software improves. People adapt.
My fingers stop over the keyboard. People adapt, but systems evolve.
I pull up three files from different periods and place them side by side.
The newest uses the architecture we've already been studying.
The middle file uses a more primitive version, but the routing logic underneath it is almost identical.
The oldest barely resembles either of them, except for one recurring structural feature buried inside the metadata.
I grab Kalliopi's notes.
IV.
III.
II.
My pulse accelerates.
“Oh, my God!”
Adrianos immediately looks over. “What?”
I don't answer because I need to prove it before I say it aloud. I take another file, check the notation, compare the encryption structure, then repeat the process with two more.
It works. Every time.
“Kalliopi, you brilliant woman.”
Adrianos moves closer. “Elena.”
“They're generations.”
“What are?”
“The numbers. I thought she was labeling accounts or transaction classes, but she wasn't. She was labeling versions of the network.”
I pull the files onto one screen and point to the differences. “Generation four uses the current encryption architecture. Generation three uses an older protocol, but the routing logic is almost identical. Generation two is cruder.”
“And generation one?”
“I haven't found it.”
Yet.
That single word electrifies me. I search Kalliopi's notes for every reference to I. There are only four, and one has a strange sequence beside it that looks like a date. I enter it into the archive.
Nothing.
I reverse the month and day. Still nothing. Adrianos watches me work without interrupting until I swear under my breath.
“Maybe it isn't a date.”
“It is.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Kalliopi writes dates backward when she's trying to annoy me.”
His eyebrows rise. “Why?”
“She claimed American date formatting was an act of international aggression.”
His mouth curves. “I liked her.”
The simple statement catches me unexpectedly.
I look at him. “You would have terrified her.”
“Most sensible people are terrified of me.”
“She wasn't always sensible.”
“Neither are you.”
For a moment, Kalliopi feels close enough to walk through the door and complain that I have taken too long. The ache arrives without warning, sharp enough that I have to look back at the screen.
Then I see it. Year. Month. Day. Not day, month, year.
I reverse the sequence. A record appears.
“Got you.”
The file is tiny, barely twelve kilobytes, and encrypted differently from everything else. I run the key structure we've derived from generation two.
Rejected.
I alter the sequence. Rejected again.
For the next hour, I get nowhere. I try fragments from the later encryption, then older Crown banking protocols, then combinations based on Kalliopi's notes. Every attempt fails.
Frustration crawls beneath my skin until I push the laptop away.
“Maybe we're wrong.”
Adrianos looks up. “About the generations?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
I blink. “That's very confident for someone who once looked suspicious when I said EBITDA.”
“I didn't know what it meant.”
“You looked like it had personally offended you.”
“Most accounting terms do.”