Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 112244 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112244 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
I was also dying to check my phone, which continued to buzz with unread messages in my pocket, but I resisted the urge.
“Okay,” I said patiently, continuing my example, “so now I can take my sixteen hundred bushels of sparrowflox, and I can sell half of it to a user in Haiti who’ll give me ten thousand pips for it—”
“Wait, that’s as much as you paid for your whole inventory,” Jordan argued.
“Exactly. Hell of a profit margin, right? And I can sell my pips back to the game and get my cash back. Meanwhile, the Haitian user can sell theirs to a user in Dallas, and so on and so forth.”
“Who the hell is spending these crazy amounts of money in the game?” Elvo demanded. “How could HOG Corporate not see exactly what’s happening here?”
“You need to understand just how much some people spend to play this game every single day. It’s not just bad guys who are purchasing thousands of dollars’ worth of pips. I haven’t put a dime of my money into the game, but I’m the exception to the rule. I’d be willing to bet that nearly every ranked player in the game has paid to give themselves the upper hand,” I said disgustedly, thinking of Kev Rogers and his immunity boosters.
I mean, I didn’t know for sure that Kev was buying them, but the chances of him earning them the hard way was practically nil.
“And there’s the sheer volume of the game to consider,” I went on. “If this was a game with a couple dozen users, they could never hide that kind of money. But there are millions of HOG players and tens of millions of transactions each month.” I hesitated, then admitted, “That’s also probably why HOG doesn’t have much interest in eliminating this problem.”
“Explain,” Champ demanded.
“Well. If I put ten thousand dollars in HOG’s bank account today to buy pips and then cash in my pips and withdraw my money next week, HOG has been collecting short-term interest on my money. That’s not gonna earn you a ton on ten thousand dollars, but on a million? Ten million? More?”
Elvo whistled. “Yeah, I see.”
“It’s a very handy way to launder money because it’s basically untraceable…” I leaned forward slightly. “Unless you have a list that links usernames to real-life names. Because once you know that, you could subpoena those people’s Horns, and their device will show exactly what they did with their pips and their sparrowflox and where they were when they did it. So, thinking practically, if we’re able to look at HOG’s financial data for these cartel members, and we see that the Dallas username has just purchased a lot of pips…”
“We’d know they were probably about to make a large purchase, and we’d be able to watch for an incoming drug shipment to their location. If we got their Horn, then we could create a trail showing the flow of money back from Dallas, to Haiti, to Venezuela…” Champ said excitedly.
“And connect them to the cartel,” I agreed. “Yeah.”
“Wait. Hold up.” Elvo narrowed his eyes. “You mean the DEA could issue subpoenas and create a trail. Not ‘we.’ Why would we have any interest in doing their job for them?”
Champ hesitated. “We wouldn’t… unless we could figure out a way to get the DEA the info they need to take down the cartel without implicating HOG Corporate like we’d originally hoped to do.” He shrugged. “It always comes back to the same thing.”
Elvo shook his head. “I don’t see how you keep HOG out of this. How do you explain the money-transfer thing to the DEA without talking about pips and sparrowflox powder?”
Champ sighed. “You’re right. We’re gonna have to talk to Jacob Horn and tell him we’re going to the DEA about Vince and the stolen Horn.”
He didn’t need to say out loud what we all knew—that in the hierarchy of priorities, getting a cartel off the streets was way more important than any client’s reputation, let alone our own.
I saw the tension in his face. Once we’d passed off the decoy Horn to Vince and Quinn was safe, Champ had thought for one shining moment this case was finally over. Now it looked to be as far from over as possible.
Riggs had been mostly quiet, so when he spoke, the rest of us snapped our heads over to him. It was clear his mind had been following a different path. “What if Vince is undercover? I know his name is on the list of cartel associates from the Horn, but what if he’s a plant in the cartel to help bring them down? Doesn’t that make the most sense?”
To spare Champ from having to say it, I answered for him. “There are a number of indications he’s not. There are limits to what a government agent can do even when undercover. There’s no record of a warrant for the wiretap on our office. There’s no justification for the intimidation and bribery he used with Quinn. And, frankly, if the DEA wanted Tommy Drakes’s Horn, they would have gotten a warrant for it. Finally, Vince Parler is a known DEA agent. If he was undercover, they would have tried to erase him from their public records or something. Either that or he’d have to have done something incredibly bad to convince the cartel to trust him.”