Chapter 15: The Missing Two Hundred

The ballroom went quiet again, and every face turned to me.

I had no portal, no password and no screen except the twelve-foot one that Sullivan had paid for.

"Ottilie," I said.

She came up the stage steps with her thermos in one hand.

A small steel fob swung from the chain on its lid.

"I told you once that you were locked out of everything," she said, and held it out. "I never said I was."

She had carried the founder's key across the Atlantic on a flask of tea.

I put the fob to the tablet she'd taken from her cardigan, and the screen went blue and then white.

WELCOME, FOUNDER, it said, in letters twelve feet tall.

Somebody in the back laughed out loud, and it wasn't unkind.

Ottilie touched the screen twice, and a single line came up behind us.

It showed two hundred million dollars, moved out of Singapore client accounts on the twentieth of October.

It had gone into an escrow with a Pittsburgh law office.

The reference read LINDAHL.

"There," Sullivan said at once.

"The founder's own signature, on the founder's own transfer. Two keys, he told the board himself."

"I wasn't there," I said.

"You were everywhere. You're the founder."

"I was in a funeral home."

"Eleven fourteen on Tuesday," said a voice from the third row.

Emerson had risen from her seat.

She stood in the aisle in her charcoal suit with her hands at her sides.

"At eleven fourteen my husband was in the front pew of my grandmother's funeral, holding my hand," she said.

"Two hundred people watched him do it. Check your timestamps."

Ottilie checked them on the screen, and her thumb stopped.

"One signature," she said to the room. "Changed credentials at ten fifty. Single-key override. Mr. Greer's login."

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