And then, crucially, there was the matter of the parasite and humans, who could pick it up by consuming contaminated food or by just being too close to a cat. Once inside a human, the parasite gets to work on his or her brain. It can’t achieve its goal of getting back inside a cat, since cats don’t eat people. But, in that futile effort, it does succeed in making infected people, like infected rats, act recklessly. Which in humans can be both a negative and a positive. Studies had shown that infected humans are more likely to drive too fast, to abuse drugs, to commit suicide. On the positive side, they are more likely to be less fearful, to act boldly, to be aggressive, to be entrepreneurs, to be successful in business.

To work as thieves, even in broad daylight.

The Syrian stepped around the corner and started to walk along the river.

Raisins

RAISINS

Loitering on the quay near the office of Sterling Wealth Management, Rafe wasn’t sure what he expected to see. If Majid was involved in this, would he come waltzing out arm in arm with a bearded fanatic brandishing an ISIS flag and a backpack bomb?

Not very likely.

And maybe there was no this anyway. Banks in Turkish Cyprus, which wasn’t even really a country, were widely known to be, uh, accommodating to clients who valued discretion. So Majid might have made a transaction via that route not for a terrorist but for a normal discretion-seeking client—a normal rich tax cheat or a normal married man hiding assets from the wife he was planning to divorce or a normal kleptocratic government official from any one of a hundred countries. Or Majid could simply be pursuing a deal for the benefit of his own fund that he didn’t want visible to competitors who might copy (and dilute) his trade or to law enforcement officials who might interpret it ungenerously. Rafe knew all about that. During his dealmaking days at Klamath Capital he had not to his own knowledge committed any actual felonies but he sure as hell had threaded through a lot of loopholes, which he hadn’t even needed Turkish Cyprus to accomplish. It required less identifying information to establish a shell corporation in Delaware than it took to get a library card. Which was convenient and very useful.

It was actually sort of amazing that anyone ever paid tax on investment income anywhere.