A half-hour later, Paul cut into his steak. He watched the bloodred juices sluice into the pile of fried potatoes and onions heaped up on his plate—just the way he liked it. He took his first bite, sweet and peppery.

“You ever slaughter a cow, Jack?”

“No, but I’ve eaten plenty of them. How’s your steak?”

“Perfect. If you ever decide to quit Hendley Associates and open up your own steakhouse, I’ll be your first customer.”

“Thanks. I’m not great in the kitchen, but I’m hell on wheels on a Weber grill.”

“I prefer a kamado grill, myself.”

“Is that what a Big Green Egg is?”

“Yeah. It really locks in the flavor, like a smoker. Keeps everything moist.”

Jack decided to let his hair down tonight and decompress with a glass of Bushmills—not that he was under a lot of stress at Dalfan. In fact, it had been one hell of an exciting day. He was still reeling from the virtual reality demonstration. If America had a couch potato problem now, he couldn’t imagine what would happen when teenagers locked on to VR gaming systems.

“How was the demonstration today?” Paul asked.

“Funny, I was just thinking about that. Pretty freaking awesome. I need to get you up on the third floor to check it out for yourself.”

“I’m not much of a gamer.”

“Me neither. Trust me, you need to see it to believe it. How was your day? Any interesting discoveries?”

“Actually, not much. I was finally able to download some of the Dalfan data sets I needed so I could begin running my screening software. Not a whole lot turned up, except . . .” Paul had also indulged in a glass of the same Irish whiskey Jack was drinking.

“Except what?”

“Well, I hate to cast aspersions, but I found a file that didn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“I ran a ratio analysis for some AR and AP reports on a product line that Dalfan sells to a firm in Shanghai—you know, maximum/minimum pricing over set time periods. The closer the ratio is to one, the happier I am.”

“Why is that?”

“If the ratio between the highest price and the lowest price paid for an item equals around one, that means that the overall price paid for an item is relatively stable. But if suddenly the maximum price paid for an item skyrockets—or if the minimum price suddenly bottoms out—that’s usually a pretty good sign of fraud. What bothers me is that in the last six months the price ratio nearly quadrupled. And the number of units sold doesn’t quite add up.”

Jack took another sip of Bushmills. “What kind of product are we talking about?”

“Cell phones.” Paul took another bite of steak.

“Wait. Dalfan is selling cell phones to China?”