Page 106 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“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.”

“Mayhave 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 todo 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 tothatguy?

“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.”

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