The Story of Blood and Roses

"The hackers are awfully swamped, I don't mind doing this bit of the work myself," I negotiated promptly, wondering if it would be the beginning of another heated up conversation, but I didn't believe that it would. Despite me calling him a monster before, he had utmost faith in his employees and kept an eye out for not overworking them. He was a good Boss like that.

"You can do that. Godspeed," he commanded as he took off from the room. I heard the thumping of his foot against the stairs as he climbed up the stairs towards what I presumed was his room.

I wandered into the computer room which buzzed with people who spread across the room in different positions of relaxation and typed away at their computers and laptops. The room was mostly filled with smoke as the hackers lit up cigarettes and sucked at them hungrily to ease some of the tension and ease into their work and actually do shit as fast as Anthony would take the time to ask them to find out whatever he wanted. It was a difficult task, but they were supposedly the best team of hackers that one could put together and expectations always ran high.

I waved my hand in front of my face to stop from breathing in too much of the pungent air and moved across the room to get my hands on a free laptop which I could use while the others did their own thing with their own devices. Some of them didn't even look up, while others glanced at her curiously. Sean was one of them, and each one of them earned a barked comment about returning to work or a deadly glare. It turned out that most of them were ruffled as easily as Sean was, and quite frankly I enjoyed tormenting people.

I took place on the couch on the hall (which of course had taken its place back where it had been before we had relocated everything to hold the meeting between the heads) and got comfortable. I stretched my legs before curling into myself as I leaned against the couch and placed the laptop between my body and legs. I tried to carefully find out more about the house and locate it with Google Earth and then go on to get into the details of the building and the transactions made.

I found that according to the contract with the constructors, the owner—Nolan had signed an agreement to stop the progress of the building. I conjured more information about the architectural firm involved with the project and tried to find out specific connections to Darcy. As it turned out, nothing was out of place. It had been the first time that the firm had ever done business with anyone who knew Luke Darcy.

Eventually, feeling like a failure I hopped onto the actual task that I had taken upon myself to complete. Look through the transactions related to the house. I checked over the legal document again, which Anthony had left of the sofa for me to look over and saw that the amount of money allotted for the buying of was too huge for someone mostly insignificant as Nolan, but he was our first suspect. I checked into his account and logged into various ATM sites where I could see his face, nervously moving around to check if anyone was looking. But the way he handled money just showed that he was not the criminal mastermind. The ATM CCTV camera left me utterly drained and I chuckled at one point of time where I had seen him picking his nose as he waited for the money to arrive.

The amounts he took out for transacting were small, which lead to the suspicion that he didn't have the money to pay the amount for the land. I assumed that he might have had another bank account where he kept all his money for business purposes and so as to evade the tax law. In this way, he could pretend he was filthy rich but never come under the radar of well-known people. Still, I looked through his own bank account and found that there no traces of any transaction. It did, though, point towards another bank account which was clearly a spinoff of his real name. This one had more money had than the last, but it was not enough. Never enough.

I, then, realized with a start that one of the accounts could be a joint account with Darcy. And after what seemed to be an hour of tinkering with the site and carefully treading on it so as to not get trapped and get me into trouble.

The answer was right there. The payment had been made from an account that Luke had been connected to. He had been the identity proof of the person in question and had made a joint account for him. Pulling up the page of that particular account I found that there had been numerous transactions made from and to the account. A lot of money had been deposited on the day that I had met Nolan at Poseidon's Realm. Looking closely into the account, I pulled up the markers that were visible and worked on finding the IP address of the person or people who had made the transactions.

It turned out that the most recent transaction had been made from a cell phone which was located in Syracuse and under the name of some unrecognizable person. Following the lead, I slowly revealed that the man was in charge of the operation and let the tech team know about the proceedings. I pulled up Eric on my cell and checked with him to find out if Luke had been spotted in Syracuse during that time period.

I hit the jackpot. Eric returned the call after an hour or so, during which I had taken a shower, changed into comfortable clothes and grabbed a bite to drink and informed me that after checking through surveillance videos, they had found Darcy getting off a black car somewhere in Syracuse and meeting with the person from whose cell phone the transaction had been made.

Nolan was, truly, working for Darcy.

It was time to let Anthony know.

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