Chapter 22 : Follow the Money
Financial District, Manhattan — December 3, 2013, 11:30 AM
The General Ludd attack hit the financial grid at 9:17 AM on a Monday, which was either strategic brilliance or theatrical timing, and in Nathan's experience, terrorists who named themselves after historical figures rarely distinguished between the two.
Nathan learned about it the way most New Yorkers learned about infrastructure attacks: the subway stopped. He was on the F train somewhere beneath Midtown when the lights flickered, the car shuddered, and the conductor's voice crackled through speakers that had been designed during an era when audio clarity was considered optional. "Attention passengers. We are being held at this station due to a service disruption. Please be patient."
Forty-five minutes of patience later, Nathan emerged into daylight at 34th Street to find lower Manhattan in chaos. The financial district's power grid had been hit — targeted, specific, the kind of attack that didn't destroy infrastructure but disrupted it in ways that cost billions in delayed transactions and crashed trading algorithms. Power was back within hours. The damage wasn't.
The headlines wrote themselves: CYBERATTACK ON WALL STREET. ECONOMIC TERRORIST TARGETS FINANCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE. MARKETS PLUNGE ON GRID VULNERABILITY.
General Ludd. Blacklist No. 109. The show framed him as an anti-technology crusader — a man who believed modernity was a disease and destruction was the cure. But the real story, the one nobody was writing, was the money. Not the money lost in the attack. The money that moved during it.
Nathan knew the pattern from his previous life's financial journalism: chaos was profitable. Market disruptions created arbitrage opportunities. If you knew the attack was coming — if you'd planned it, or been told about it — you could position trades to profit from the panic. The attack itself was ideology. The profit was the point.
He needed someone who understood financial systems from the inside. Not Kevin, whose analytical expertise was law enforcement databases, not banking infrastructure. Not Deborah, whose courthouse records couldn't track real-time financial flows. Someone who lived inside the banking system and understood its vulnerabilities the way a doctor understood a patient's weak points.
Rebecca Stone's name had been in Nathan's research file for two weeks. He'd found her through a trade publication — Banking Compliance Quarterly, the kind of magazine that existed in the specific intersection of necessary and unreadable. She'd been quoted in an article about anti-money laundering failures: "We flag suspicious transactions daily. The flags go into reports. The reports go into files. The files go into archives. And the money goes wherever it was going."
The quote had the particular bitterness of someone who'd spent a career being right and being ignored, which Nathan recognized as the most reliable fuel for source cultivation he'd found since Deborah Kim's frustration with being passed over for promotion.
[SCP Lv.2 Assessment: Rebecca Stone — Compliance Officer, Meridian National Bank. Motivation profile: Institutional frustration, professional undervaluation. Risk tolerance: Moderate (has daughter, custody considerations). Approach vector: Validate expertise, position as platform for her institutional critique. Recruitment difficulty: Medium.]
The Lv.2 assessment was sharper than its predecessor — more nuanced motivation mapping, a clearer read on risk tolerance. Nathan noted the daughter detail. Sources with children operated differently from those without: they had more to lose, which made them more cautious, which paradoxically made them more reliable because when they did share information, they'd already calculated the cost.
He called the number listed in the trade publication's contributor bio.
"Rebecca Stone."
"Ms. Stone, my name is Nathan Cross. I'm a journalist covering financial crime and federal law enforcement. I read your interview in Banking Compliance Quarterly — specifically your comments about AML flag response rates. I'm writing a piece about how banks detect suspicious activity before economic disruptions, and I'd value your professional perspective."
Silence. The specific silence of a compliance officer calculating whether talking to a journalist was a career-ending decision or a career-defining one.
"I don't discuss client information."
"I wouldn't ask you to. I'm interested in process — how the system works, where it fails, why the flags you raise don't generate the responses they should. Public-facing analysis, not internal data."
"You're the one who wrote the Barnes piece."
"I am."
"That was..." She paused. "Uncomfortable reading. But honest."
"That's what I do. Make things uncomfortable and honest."
She didn't laugh, but the tension in her voice loosened by a fraction. "Coffee. Tomorrow. I choose the location."
"Of course."
The location she chose was a café on Pine Street that charged $9 for a drip coffee and $14 for anything with foam, the kind of establishment that existed because financial district workers needed to spend money to feel like their salaries meant something. Nathan paid without flinching, because the $23 total for two coffees was the price of credibility in a neighborhood where frugality signaled failure.
Rebecca Stone was thirty-six, tall, sharp-featured, with the specific posture of a woman who'd spent fifteen years in boardrooms and had learned that taking up space was a political act. She wore a gray blazer over a white blouse and the particular expression of someone deciding whether to trust a stranger.
"The patterns show themselves weeks before an attack," she said, twenty minutes into the conversation, her professional reserve dissolving under the pressure of having someone genuinely interested in what she knew. "Transaction velocity increases. Shell company activity spikes. Money moves through jurisdictions that don't cooperate with U.S. regulators — Caymans, Singapore, certain Swiss cantonal banks. We flag it. Every time. And every time, the flag goes into a report that someone above me marks as 'reviewed' without reading."
"What happens to the money during an attack like yesterday's?"
"The same thing that happens to water when you drop a stone in it. It moves. Rapidly, outward, into positions that profit from volatility. If you know the disruption is coming, you can be positioned to catch the wave." She set down her coffee. "I'm not saying someone profited from yesterday's attack. I'm saying that if they did, the compliance systems that should have caught it were already failing before the first circuit blew."
Nathan took notes. Not names, not specifics — process, systems, the architecture of failure. Rebecca spoke in the fluent technical language of her profession, but underneath the jargon was something Nathan recognized: the fury of competence ignored.
"I'd love to quote you as a banking compliance specialist familiar with anti-money laundering procedures," Nathan said.
"Anonymous?"
"Completely. Your name never appears."
She studied him. Brown eyes, steady, the particular assessment of a woman who'd raised a daughter alone and could read intentions the way she read balance sheets.
"I have a daughter," she said. "Eight years old. If anything I tell you threatens her stability—"
"Then we stop. Immediately. No questions."
"The patterns show—" She caught herself using the phrase for the third time and almost smiled. "I'll talk to you, Nathan. Background, anonymous, process only. The moment it crosses into client data or internal memos, I'm done."
"Fair enough."
[Source Acquired: Rebecca Stone — Financial sector, Compliance. Trust: 15 (initial). Active sources: 3/3 (Tier 1 maximum). Source network spans: Courts, FBI, Financial.]
The Tier 1 source cap. Three active informants was the system's maximum at his current level — Deborah, Kevin, and now Rebecca. Maria Vasquez remained a loyal ally and occasional contact, but her role had shifted from active source to grateful friend after the Stewmaker story. Janet Chen was indirect, accessed through Deborah. The network was small but diversified, covering three sectors that together gave Nathan a peripheral view of the same ecosystem from different angles.
He filed the article that evening: "Banks Saw the Warning Signs — And Couldn't Act Fast Enough." Rebecca's anonymous quotes anchored a piece that examined the structural failures in financial sector threat detection — not the General Ludd attack specifically, but the systemic pattern of compliance flags being raised and ignored that made attacks like it possible.
The piece ran in Diane's outlet at 8 PM. Modest traffic — 12,000 views in the first day, the kind of steady readership that the financial sector audience generated. Not viral. Not controversial. But deeply credible among the specific people Nathan needed to impress: federal law enforcement analysts, banking professionals, and the growing community of readers who'd come to associate the name Nathan Cross with journalism that understood how institutions actually worked.
[+30 XP (sector-specific credibility article). XP: 280/400.]
Nathan paid his tab — the $23 coffee plus a $5 tip that his wallet protested and his conscience required — and walked to the subway through the financial district's evening desolation, the particular emptiness of a neighborhood that existed only during business hours and became a ghost town after 7 PM.
His phone buzzed. Kevin.
"People in my division read your financial piece. Three different analysts sent it around. Quote: 'Finally someone who gets it.' You're building fans in here, Nathan."
Nathan typed back: Tell them I'm just listening to the people who know.
"That's the problem. Nobody else does."
Three sources. Three sectors. The courts. The FBI. The banks. Each one a window into a different part of the same architecture of power and failure that Nathan was mapping, piece by piece, article by article, relationship by relationship.
The subway arrived. Nathan boarded, found his corner seat, and opened his notebook to the page where he'd drawn the Reddington diagram three weeks ago. He added a notation: General Ludd — financial infrastructure attack. Follow the money angle. Who profited?
Below that, circled twice: Eastbrook Logistics.
The name had been sitting in his floor safe since July — the shell company from his third article, the loose thread he'd filed in the LATER folder because the time hadn't been right. Now, with a financial compliance officer in his network and a growing understanding of how money moved through criminal infrastructure, the time was getting closer.
Not yet. But closer.
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