“Oh, those aren’t my concern,” he said. “I’m more concerned with Sedam’s current activities. You see, after cleaning up on the Internet crash, they went back to their Spiders, but only for a month. Starting early April they began selling off all their holdings—all their holdings. They’re doing it discreetly, so as not to draw attention, but I’ve no doubt they’re doing it.”

“And you know this how?”

He glanced at Donny. “I can’t say. Just let me be clear that there’s no question they’re liquidating.”

Okay, he’d hacked them.

Hari shrugged. “So what? What do you care?”

Art leaned forward, his expression grim. “I wouldn’t care in the least if I didn’t know about their February puts. But I do. They were betting on something happening to the Internet. And something did: one of the biggest social, commercial, and communications disasters ever. If the computer geeks hadn’t been able to fix it so fast, I’d be selling apples on the street—and I don’t mean MacBooks.”

The Internet crash…just three months ago. Every business in the world had been affected, including Hari’s. Amazing how fast they’d repaired or replaced the damaged fiber-optic cables and disrupted the botnet by developing a fix for the Jihad virus. In a matter of only a few days much of the Word Wide Web was back up and running. Not without glitches and bandwidth problems, not business as usual by any means, but people were able to begin to get things done again.

“So…you’re wondering if they’ve got some insider info on another calamity?”

“‘Calamity’ might be too gentle a word for it. Catastrophe? Cataclysm? Apocalypse? They’re no longer working an angle to profit from the market, they’re getting out of the market. Does that mean they suspect that all stocks will soon be worthless? If so, I want to know—I must know.”

Hari shook her head. “I don’t see how a forensic accountant can help you with that.”

“Indirectly, you can. Sedam brokerage is moving to cash, and that cash is, in turn, moving to its source: the Septimus Foundation. But where’s the cash going from there? They can’t be storing it in a vault—they’ve got to be spending it. But on what? Krugerrands? Soybeans? Rare single malts? If I know that, I’ll have a clue as to what they think will happen.”

“How do you know anything’s going to happen?”

“I don’t. But I want to know what they know, and then I’ll make my own decision.”

“I don’t know…” Hari said.

And she didn’t. This did not seem to be in her bailiwick.

“One week,” Art said. “Give me one week and I’ll pay you one hundred K. In advance. If you solve it in less than one week or even if you don’t solve it at all, the hundred-K is still yours.”

A hundred thousand for a week’s work…her hourly billable rate was high, but no way she’d ever amass that number of hours in a week. But first offers were rarely the final offer. Could she goose a boost?