Page 40 of Broken Empire
“Yeah?”
“All these cryptocurrencies are pretty new, right?”
Leah nodded. “Yeah. Bitcoin has been around for a decade, and that’s the oldest one.”
“So Pyotr and every other user on this site had to use something else to make their payments before 2009. Something that’s traceable. Right?”
Her eyes widened. “Shit, why didn’t I think of that? We just have to find older transactions.”
She typed rapidly for a minute and finally pulled up a new page. “Okay, here’s every transaction from 2008. Hopefully Pyotr was a user back then,” she said, furrowing her brows. “I’ll go backwards from December.”
PyotrTwoDelta’s username popped up on the list almost immediately. On December 4th, 2008, he’d paid half a million dollars for a ‘sale item’.
“You’re right. He paid with a bank transfer,” Leah said. “God, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
“Don’t feel bad. It’s six in the morning and we’re running on zero sleep,” I said, raising a brow. “I’m surprised you can think at all.”
After Shay’s disappearance, I’d grown accustomed to functioning on very little sleep. Leah, however, was brand new to all of this. I’d given her at least ten coffees over the last twelve hours, and she still looked like she was about to pass out at any moment.
She yawned, rubbed her eyes, and started typing again. “Shit,” she muttered.
“What is it?”
“The bank Pyotr used is located in the Cayman Islands, and the account is registered under a bogus business name.”
“Shell company?”
“Yeah. He’s obviously too smart to use his own bank account.”
“There has to be a name on that account somewhere, right?”
“I’ll keep looking.” Leah yawned and hunched over the keyboard again. “Okay, found it. The person who opened the account is named Davina Hewittson.”
“There’s no way Pyotr is a woman. This Davina person must be someone who works for him.”
“Maybe. But who knows? I’ll keep digging.”
Five minutes later, Leah had Davina Hewittson’s life story laid out in front of us, all the way down to her credit score and home address.
“So she’s a London-born art dealer currently based in New York,” she muttered, forehead wrinkling. “How the hell did she get involved with all this shit?”
“It makes sense,” I said, nodding slowly. “The Schöneberg Group launders all the money they get through art, so there’s probably quite a few so-called art dealers who are actually intermediaries in the scheme.”
“This particular intermediary works directly for Pyotr, though,” she replied, arching a brow. “She must run all the financial stuff for him. I’m guessing he pays her very well in return for putting her name on his shell company accounts, on the off chance they’re ever audited.”
“Looks like we need to go and see her,” I said, rising to my feet.
“At six in the morning?”
“It’ll be seven by the time we get back to the city, and I’ll need to go and get some supplies for our visit too. You can nap in the car for a couple of hours while I do all that,” I said, extending a hand to help Leah up. “You need the rest.”
Her brows rose. “What sort of supplies will we need?”
“Ones that will effectively convince Davina Hewittson to spill everything we need to know.”
Leah didn’t argue. She just set her lips in a thin line and followed me out of the library.
By eight-thirty, we were back in the city with everything we needed. We headed to Davina Hewittson’s Upper West Side apartment and hurried through the front door behind a delivery guy after someone from upstairs buzzed him into the building.
