Fatal Exchange (Fatal Series Book 1) by Russell Blake

Author:Russell Blake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Reprobatio Ltd
Published: 2014-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

~ ~ ~

Treasury was bustling. A courier had picked up the bill in New York early that morning and was on his way to D.C.; he would be arriving within the hour. Ken was reading the report that David and Larry had generated the evening before, a coil of anxiety tightening in his gut as he finished it. Someone butchered Saul to keep them from getting their hands on the bill. Saul had indicated it had originally came from a watch dealer, who’d also been murdered. Ken had taken notes while talking to Saul, and he dug them out. There it was: Robert Gideon, killed on Monday, got bills from a Korean, no name. One million dollars’ worth. Watermark flaw. State-sponsored? That’s all he’d written.

Ken might have been a bureaucrat, and a lazy one at that, but he was organized and had developed powerful instincts for self-preservation. He ran the name Robert Gideon through the government computers and saw an NYPD investigation was underway. He did a global search, and confirmed that on Thursday Robert had flown roundtrip to San Francisco, returning the same day. So far the story was consistent. He did a little more checking and saw the NYPD investigation was being headed by Detective Barry Childen. He looked up Childen’s number on the NYPD directory, and placed a call. Voicemail.

“Detective Childen, this is Ken Pritchard over at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. I understand you’re working a double homicide involving Robert Gideon. Could you give me a call at your earliest convenience to discuss the matter? I’d really appreciate it.” Ken left his number and signed off.

His next step was to notify Secret Service there was a potential issue involving state-sponsored counterfeiting. He thought about the Department of Homeland Security, but decided this really didn’t count as a terrorist threat. Now all he needed was for the bill to show up so they could see what all the fuss was about.

The courier arrived half an hour later and dropped the pouch on his desk. Ken picked up his phone to call a lab technician to come and get it, but then reconsidered and took it to the Treasury Department’s state-of-the-art laboratory facility himself. The head of the department met him when he entered and greeted him warily.

“Ken. Nice to see you. We don’t get you down here too often…”

“Mark, I have a project for you. I need to know if this bill is a counterfeit, and if so, I’ll also require an assessment of the technology used to generate it. Can you make this your top priority?”

“Well, let’s see what we have here,” Mark said, opening the pouch and dumping out the baggie containing the bill. He donned latex gloves and grabbed a set of forceps, then gingerly pulled the bill out and placed it on a backlit work table that featured a large magnifying glass mounted on an elaborate swiveling system. “Hmm. The paper’s right, the security strip is right, the inks look right…hmmmmm.”

“Saul Balinsky said he’d evaluated it and determined it was definitely a fake,” Ken said.

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