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Paul was living in a state of anxiety, afraid that at any moment Mr. Frost or Berzin was going to take him aside and interrogate him. So he decided he was going to do some serious due diligence on FanStars. Maybe he’d turn up something like he did on Cavalier, when he was at Aquinnah. Busy work like that would take his mind off the constant nervousness.

The first thing he did was read the twenty-eight-page PowerPoint deck on the company that Frost had shared with him, taking notes in a new document. The research was mostly fluff. It talked about the technology FanStars used, who its potential customers were, why AGF was going after this particular firm. That sort of thing. Then he turned to Bloomberg to see who the investors in FanStars were. It was a private company, so there wasn’t much information available. He combed through the other databases on his desktop—FactSet, Capital IQ, TechCrunch—gathering whatever miscellaneous information he could. Paul had researched hundreds if not thousands of companies and had a pretty good idea what he was looking for: the people who ran the firm. It’s always the people at a company who cause the problems. As the saying goes, you’re betting on the jockeys, not the horses. So he collected the names on the management team and then started digging into them—looking at their LinkedIn profiles, what sports they’d played in college, if any. He looked at Dun and Bradstreet to see whether these people were creditworthy or not, whether they paid their taxes, what the approximate size of FanStars was.

FanStars was legally based in Cyprus. This didn’t surprise him. Gambling companies liked to be based in countries like Malta or Cyprus, where there weren’t too many rules and where nobody asked questions.

Everything seemed to check out okay—no big surprises, no reason to stay away from making a deal with FanStars—until he logged into one of the websites where employees (and ex-employees) anonymously reviewed their own companies. He looked at FanStars’s employee reviews. Most of the reviews said benign, bland things like “Great company” or “Good company to work for and flexible benefits” or “Great working environment.” Then, one caught his attention, an anonymous post from seven years ago:

“OK company but . . . my girlfriend temped there, and they offered her a full-time job, but she heard rumors. Too many stories about too much weirdness going around.”

Rumors . . . weirdness going around . . .

That could mean anything. Or nothing.

He decided to dig some more. He wanted to be thorough with his due diligence. Do another Cavalier. See what he could find. That meant he needed to look at whatever was in the files from five or six years ago, when AGF last looked at the company. See why they ultimately decided against doing a deal with FanStars.

Paul emerged from his office and said to his admin, Margo, “I need to find some files from five or six or seven years ago. Where should I look?”

“Five years ago or more? That stuff’s stored offsite,” she said. “The SEC makes us keep them going back seven years.”

“What’s offsite?”

“Upstate.”

“How far upstate?”

“I think it’s in Ulster County. It’s a place—hold on.” She tapped some keys. “It’s called Hudson DataVault. Underground storage, in some kind of old decommissioned mine.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

*

All morning, he expected to be called in for questioning about the network “attack,” but no message came in, by phone or Slack or any other way. At lunchtime, he said to Margo, “I should be back in an hour. Meeting a friend for lunch.”

He walked to Fifty-Ninth Street and took the downtown C Train to the Chambers Street station. The coffee shop was a few blocks away, on Reade Street in Tribeca.

Addison was sitting at a two-top at the back of the shop. “You look like shit. Coffee?”

Paul shook his head. “Too nervous.” He looked around, slipped the flash drive out of his pocket, and handed it to Addison.

“Great work,” Addison said.

“I may have been caught.”

“ May have been?”

Paul explained.

Addison nodded calmly. “The intrusion detection system was probably triggered by an unusual combination of suspicious actions. Like logging into the system at a weird hour, plus accessing sensitive files and exfiltrating the data.”

“Exfiltrating . . . ?”

“Saving it to a flash drive might do it.”

“Hold on,” Paul cut in furiously. “If saving to a flash drive would trigger the intrusion detection system, why the hell did you tell me to do exactly that ?”

“I didn’t have good information,” Addison said, and apologized.

“Great. So now they know it’s me.”

“If they knew it was you, you wouldn’t be here. Okay? No, they don’t necessarily have any idea it was you. The alarm would tell them which machine the activity occurred on.”

“That’s all?”

“Further investigation will make it clear which account was logged into the system at that time. When the IT guy realizes that it’s his own account, he’s going to go into full panic mode.”

“Which will lead to me.”

“It’ll lead to whoever badged in.”

“Not me.” Some custodial worker , Paul thought. Whose name he didn’t know. But what would happen to that guy?

“You’re not going to be identified on the CCTV. Did you disguise yourself?”

Paul nodded.

“Nothing links back to you unless the camera caught your face.”

“Which I’m sure it didn’t.”

“So no need to worry. Don’t borrow trouble, Paul.” Addison changed the subject. “What did you find in the Formation Documents?”

Paul explained about the billions of dollars wired in by one improbably wealthy Irish citizen, Natasha Obolensky.

Addison nodded. “We know the name.”

“You do?”

“She was a front for Moscow.”

“Jesus. So Arkady Galkin is a money manager for the Kremlin,” Paul said, as much to himself as to Addison.

“Exactly.”

“So what is Phantom?”

Addison startled. “Where did you come across that name?”

“It’s in the KYC forms—the ‘Know Your Customer’ documents. Beneficial owner in every case was something or someone called Phantom.”

“That was in there?”

Paul nodded. “What is it?”

“That’s what I need you to find out. Anything you can. Anything in Galkin’s files.”

Paul shook his head. “I think I’m done here.”

“Almost. Not quite.”

“Don’t I have a choice? Are you going to push me so hard that they finally catch me?”

“You need to take another deep dive into Galkin’s files. You know, do your due diligence. Find out what you can about Phantom.”

“Shit.”

Addison tented his fingers and leaned back slyly. “So I hear you have a name. ‘Ludmilla.’ A fine old-fashioned name.”

Paul just nodded, waited. Addison was studying his face.

“There were five Ludmillas on the faculty of the Bauman Institute when Galkin was a student there,” Addison said.

Now Paul smiled. Some junior FBI research associate had done grunt work.

“What will it take for you to give us her complete name, or as much of it as you have? I think we’ve been pretty transparent with you and very reasonable.”

“And I think you know what I want.”

Flatly, Addison said, “You want your wife shielded from our efforts.”

Paul nodded again.

“She’s quite central to our case, that’s the problem, Paul.”

“That’s your problem. You already agreed to it. I want it in writing.”

A long moment passed. Paul listened to traffic noise from the street. Finally, Addison said, “Would a handshake do? We’re both men of honor.”

Paul looked at him hard. “What if something happens to you?”

“I’m a survivor of a lot of knife fights, Paul.”