Norwood popped a couple of pain pills and washed them down with another swallow of whiskey. He’d sit tight for two more hours, listen to the all-news radio station, and see if he could find anything incriminating on Finch’s computer. It would probably be best to just scrub its internal disk clean and then ditch the laptop in the Potomac. But Trevor Norwood was a computer whiz and couldn’t miss a chance to examine a Secret Service agent’s hard drive.

He returned to the kitchen, where his own laptop was logged into the tracking program. His apartment was within range of the device’s GPS signal, and he saw that the second bag of currency hadn’t been moved. Were the police simply taking their time or had Finch hidden it too well? For that matter, why would the police even know of its existence? Maybe the plan was still salvageable.

Things had begun to unravel when Finch stopped so soon after leaving the parking deck rendezvous. Norwood had expected the anonymous seller of cryptocurrency to be someone who had driven to the site from farther away and that there would have been time to catch up to him and retrieve the bags as they were unloaded. But Finch had already carried one bag in before they could confront him. The shooting forced them to flee immediately, grabbing only what they could find in the car and on his person.

Norwood looked at Finch’s laptop and demolished cell phone lying on the kitchen counter. He’d yanked out the phone’s battery and then used a hammer to reduce the pieces to the size of his thumbnail. The police would find the last cell tower ping but that was all. It was the currency that worried Norwood. The bag was somewhere in the house, and it could focus the investigation uncomfortably close.

Norwood turned his attention to Finch’s open laptop. Although it had closed, the computer hadn’t had the chance to go into sleep mode. Norwood had kept it active to avoid having to hack past a login password. The program for executing the Bitcoin transaction was still engaged. The history showed the virtual wallet receiving the coins, but seeing them and retrieving them were two different operations. An unbreakable private key existed for each wallet. Finch had about ten thousand dollars of cryptocurrency left. Without the private key, it might as well have been buried on the bottom of the ocean. He traced the coins back farther and saw the address for another virtual wallet, this one the source of the coins that were transferred into the first one.