NORA
NUMBERS, LIKE people, have no inherent quality. Their value lies only in their relation to others and what they represent. Good. Bad. Strong. Weak. These are descriptions given by the counter. The counter weaves a story into the numbers, a narrative combining quantity and quality, fact and fiction. Numbers by themselves are invisible, much like the counters.
Take fifty thousand. In and of itself, the number had no significance, but add a resource (people) and a quality (frenzied) and now the number mattered. Fifty thousand confused and frantic people all looking for one person.
The counter.
Her.
* * *
Nora rushed through the promenade.
“Her name is Nora Trier. She’s in the stadium and we need your help to locate her as a person of interest regarding Logan Russo’s disappearance.” The voice boomed over the sound system, reverberating off the glass dome.
Tides of shock swept through the stadium as the news sank in. Logan Russo, legendary athlete and feminist icon, the hero they’d all flocked to see and cheer with during tonight’s championship fight, was missing. Her Twitter account was silent and her Instagram, dark. The police had searched her penthouse apartment, finding nothing except broken glass and blood.
And Nora was the reason she was gone.
Nora pulled a clip out of her hair and shook the dark blond length into her face. People stood up in their sections, craning their necks and pointing in every direction. Keeping as far to the side of the walkway as possible, Nora donned reading glasses, clipped her Strike badge to her jacket, and lifted her phone to her ear. Everyone she passed peered at her. She returned each look with equal and unabashed suspicion while speaking rapidly to no one.
At the skyway exit, two security guards checked the few people who were already leaving, holding their phones up against the faces filtering out into the downtown Minneapolis night. When one of the guards tilted his phone, she saw her own picture on the screen.
“No, I’ve already worked sixty hours this week and I’m not putting in any more overtime.” She flashed her badge irritably at one of them, who hesitated before Nora leaned in and whispered, “Screw this bitch, right?”
Grunting, he waved her past.
She’d gotten twenty paces into the skyway that stretched long and almost empty, a shadowy tunnel suspended in midair, when her phone buzzed and a series of messages started popping up.
They live-streamed it.
Get out of there.
Now.
Where are you?
The bridge crossed over the top of an intersection where squad car lights flashed. She was texting back when a voice shouted behind her.
“Nora!”
For forty years she’d been invisible, a quality she’d not only taken for granted, but turned into her greatest asset. She was the unseen eye, the counter nobody counted, who wove numbers into dark and avaricious stories.
Her breath hitched in her chest as she looked back and saw it—the figure standing with the security guards and pointing at her from the other end of the bridge. The other people walking back to their condos and high-rises started yelling and lifting their phones. A few of them hurried toward her, but they were incidental. It was the one who’d alerted them she cared about, the one who might have been following her the whole time. He broke into a sprint the moment their eyes met. Turning, Nora pushed through a set of double doors and barreled into the maze of abandoned passageways, the second-story city her only hope.
She wasn’t invisible anymore.
OPPORTUNITY
NORA
One Week Earlier
“FRAUD KILLS.”
Nora allowed the words time to land on the crowd, a full audience of mostly twentysomethings with brand-new CPA licenses still crisp inside their wallets.
“You’ve all heard, at some point in your lives, the lie that fraud is a white-collar crime, a victimless crime.” She paced the length of the stage, heels marking the distance between the darkened aisles.
“Sam White was the founder and president of Computech, a microchip manufacturer that weathered the tech crash with little more than a shrug and a few treasury stock purchases. They employed ten thousand people and maintained manufacturing facilities in China, Mexico, and Ohio, with headquarters in Minneapolis.”
The screen behind Nora flashed to a wall-sized scene of a rocky beach where a group of people squinted into the sun. Two teenage boys corralled a pair of dogs while a middle-aged couple, both fit and wearing their gray with ease, corralled the boys. The entire family was frozen mid-laugh.
“Sam White built Computech from his parents’ garage into a Fortune 500 company in less than two decades. For five years they boasted the highest gross profit percentage in the tech sector worldwide, until a whistle-blower inside the company exposed a major misstatement scheme. The SEC opened an investigation into securities fraud, share prices plummeted, and three weeks after the scandal broke in the Wall Street Journal, Sam White shot himself in the head.”
The room, massive as it was, had fallen completely silent. No one sipped their complimentary coffee. No one checked their phones. Two hundred faces stared at the one smiling down at them, the larger-than-life father hugging his son to his dead chest.
Nora glanced at the picture, a familiar swill of emotion clotting her throat, but her voice carried clearly as she swiveled back to the young accountants eager to kick-start their careers. “Sam White was forty-seven years old when he died. Computech declared bankruptcy less than two months into the SEC investigation and thousands of people lost their jobs, including me.
“I was the whistle-blower.”
* * *
Fraud, whether it was a petty cash scheme or a multibillion-dollar revenue inflation, required three essential elements. The first was opportunity; the thief needed access to the assets or financial statements. The second ingredient was pressure. Maybe that meant a gambling problem and a silent, ballooning debt or a sick family member accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills. The pressure could be professional—the imperative to outperform competitors or meet investor expectations—but whatever the form, the person was under stress. They spent nights awake, withdrawn from family life, suffering from headaches, upset stomach, constipation, muscle tremors, and chest pains. They had trouble performing sexually.
Both of those elements—opportunity and pressure—existed ubiquitously. Millions of employees around the world were entrusted with financial authority simply because someone had to write the checks; someone had to approve the journal entries. And stress was the postrecession way of life, the corporate imperative to do more with less. Despite having the opportunity and feeling the pressure, employees didn’t commit fraud until the final, game-changing factor came into play: rationalization. The thief had to find a way to reconcile the crime within their individual moral framework. They created a narrative in which their actions were justified, even righteous. They deserved what they stole. They deserved so much more.
“Sam White took a skydiving trip with his family the summer before I discovered the fraud.” After two hours of lecturing on the basics of fraud detection, Nora always wrapped up the presentation by circling back to the beginning.