The fluorescent lights of the Veyra Financial Regulatory Board still flickered on, and by Wednesday morning, after fourteen hours of staring at transaction logs, Chief Investigator Jude Reacher felt the hum vibrating inside his teeth.
His desk was completely buried under stacks of printed ledger confirmations, encrypted terminal route maps, and a heavily highlighted copy of the Veyra Banking Act. On the twin monitors flanking his desk, the five-minute spot gold chart from Tuesday's session remained frozen, a jagged cliff face dropping from 2,349.50 marks down into a flat, unyielding horizontal floor.
Reacher gripped a blue ink pen, aggressively circling a series of microsecond time-stamps on a printed sheet from the central clearing house.
"09:12:04," Reacher muttered to himself, his voice thick with exhaustion. He leaned closer to the paper, his eyes narrowing. "The exact millisecond the volume spiked. Not a second before, and not a second after."
