Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(47)

She said, “I’m pretty sure these are their real names. Which makes me feel a lot better, because if they were fake names, I’d have nothing to grab onto.”

“Why do you think they’re real?”

“I got inside their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and checked the timelines. The photos seem to match the faces on the licenses. Social media is easy to fake, but it’s also an easy path to getting caught, because you can end up tagged in other people’s photos. For a good fake identity, people tend to focus on institutional paper, like a birth certificate and credit cards, because they’re mostly trying to fool the government.”

“You got into their social media? How do you know this stuff?”

She gave him a look. “I’m an investigative reporter and my beat is technology. You don’t think I know a thing or two?”

“But wouldn’t these guys have the privacy settings turned way up?”

“Oh, they do.” June smiled. “But there’s a back door into Facebook. It’s even legal. Although Facebook gets really mad if they catch you.”

“You ever been caught?”

“What do you think?” The smile got wider. “Anyway, most people aren’t very tech-savvy. They post shit online like nobody will ever see it. You wouldn’t believe how many times the cops catch people because of something stupid they did online. Our guys’ accounts were started years ago, and the posts span a long period of time, so they likely weren’t faked or made by bots.”

“What do you mean, ‘made by bots’? Like robots? Robots have Facebook pages?”

“Oh, sure. Facebook even said publicly a few years back that something like five to ten percent of its profiles are false, some of them made by automated software systems. Even if they’re not wildly underreporting the number, that’s fifty to a hundred million fake accounts. You know how much product marketing gets done through Facebook?”

Peter just shook his head. The digital world wasn’t really his thing.

“Anyway, from what they’re posting on Facebook and LinkedIn, our guys are definitely ex-Army, although it looks like they served in different units. And the two younger guys were pretty heavy on Facebook until a few years ago. Then they basically stopped. They both updated their profiles showing they’d been hired by SafeSecure, a corporate security company based in Seattle. And that’s also the name on the registration for their SUV.”

“Aha!” said Peter. “Right?”

“Not so much,” said June, still tapping away on the tablet. “SafeSecure doesn’t seem to have a website, which is odd for a business today. The car registration gives its physical address in Seattle, somewhere down in the Rainier Valley, although it’s probably some kind of PO box. According to the State of Washington, SafeSecure does exist, but is a subsidiary of Western Holdings, based in Belize.”

“Belize?”

“Small country in Central America? South of Mexico, east of Guatemala. Used to be called British Honduras.”

“I know where Belize is,” he said. “But why there?”

“Belize has become another tax haven,” she said, her face back in the tablet. Screens everywhere, Peter hated them. It was convenient for everything except actual human interaction. “Like the Caymans, the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, a bunch of other places. A good place to hide both your income and the names behind your corporate identity.”

“So how do we find out more about Western Holdings?”

“This isn’t really my area,” she said, “but my guess is we don’t. I’m on that right now. Give me a few minutes. This cheap-ass tablet is really slow.”

She tapped and read and the night rolled past outside the windshield. She had the bag of ice on her lip again.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Apparently, incorporating in Belize gives you a lot of protections. You’re required to disclose almost nothing, not even any company personnel or shareholders. You only need a single registered agent, which can be you or any person working for a specialized company that provides that service. You’re not required to disclose any information about the actual shareholders, which could be you, or could be one or more corporations. This would provide still another level of identity protection.”

“But we have a place to start, right?”

“Sure,” she said. “But if they want to be really tricky, they use more than one country. A global web of registered agents from Belize to the Caymans to Singapore to fucking Luxembourg. It’s a way to exhaust the resources of anyone trying to track them, because every added step costs more time and more money. So unless we have serious allegations against the corporation itself, and we can get the U.S. government involved, this is a dead end.”

“What about the algorithm? Can the skeleton key get in there?”

“Fucked if I know,” said June. “I don’t even know how to find it, let alone use it. We better not count on it.”

Peter sighed. “So we’re back to physical locations. SafeSecure in Rainier Valley. What about the addresses on the driver’s licenses? Are those real?”

“Let me look.” More tapping. “Google Maps thinks they are. So we can start there.”

“Well, that’s something,” he said. “Anything else you can do from here?”