Bai was right. IDEA was a great piece of analytical auditing software, and just about anything Paul needed to do on this “due diligence” audit could’ve been done with it. Paul’s software was even better because he’d written the macros and templates himself, based on his years of experience in fraud analysis. But to do a proper fraud investigation would take several weeks for a company this size. What Paul really needed was the Dalfan encrypted USB flash drive. That didn’t solve his problem, but it got him one step closer to completing his mission.

Or so he hoped.

In the meantime, he had work to do. Rhodes had told him that the audit was legit, but that it was in addition to his more important task. Paul couldn’t shake the feeling that the auditing assignment was just a cover for the software upload. A giant waste of time. That didn’t make sense, either, though. Rhodes was paying a lot of money to send him and Jack out here. But then again, it wasn’t his money, was it?

Paul pushed that idea aside and opened up his program. Time to eat the elephant.

Even if he had all the time in the world, on a project this size the trick was to cut it up into bite-sized pieces rather than try to swallow it whole. If there was some kind of fraud or illegal activity taking place, and if whoever was behind it was careless enough to record the transactions somewhere in the general ledger, his auditing software might be able to sniff it out. It would take a great deal of luck to find anything, since all he could do with so little time available was perform random checks of selected data sets. But Fortune was a lady, and she favored the bold, statistically.

Paul had constructed thirty discrete tests to perform, most of them numerical, but some were qualitative, searching and comparing the names and addresses of vendors, banks, warehouses, and products, as well as key words related to transactions, assets, destinations, and personnel. Connecting people, places, and patterns of behavior sometimes proved more valuable in cracking a fraud case, especially when the fraudsters were good at hiding the numbers. In fact, one of the Singapore banks that did business with Dalfan had been connected to the North Korean rare-earth-element debacle a few years ago, though no charges were ever filed. It was an interesting coincidence he would check out later.