Daryl curled her feet beneath her in the aspect of the Buddha as she studied the screen, her right hand resting on the mouse. She was tired but too keyed up to go to sleep. Anyway, her body clock told her the time was just approaching 9 P.M. Customarily a night owl, she was good for some time yet. When she received Frank’s message urging her to follow the money, she’d turned to the task with relish. She’d chased more than her share of money trails before, both for the government and while working with Jeff, as well as in her new job. It would be a lot more interesting than tracing the code back to its authors. Daryl still didn’t understand just how the malware worked—she’d leave that part to the boys—but once she’d focused on the cash her attention was drawn to the sequences of numbers she kept encountering. They were not all the same in length, nor did they appear in the same location in the code, but numbers were recurring throughout its functions. Her first impression was that the numbers were encoded in such a way as to conceal the purpose they served.
