Tycho shook his head, “No the firms were not a global headline.”

Bette held up another finger, “Second, it would have taken time for the 130 banks to unravel the far-flung assets of these firms, and even if the army of lawyers and investigators eventually managed to ferret out the gold shipments, the real people behind the shipments would have had time to move the gold again, once they’d been officially registered somewhere, through the normal channels.”

“Third,” she said, as she held up another finger, “the undoubtedly loose controls of those firms made them perfect targets to hide the movement of the gold.”

“So what the people behind this, and not those three firms, apparently, have managed to do is move and then hide a significant amount of gold, legitimately,” she concluded.

Tycho blew out a breath, “Well. They could actually get away with it.”

Bette frowned, “How is that possible? Massive amounts of money were lost by many firms.”

Tycho answered, “Well, flash forward to today, a series of settlements was hammered out with the three firms, after all the other seized assets of those firms began to grow in value, and as the economy improved.  It turns out those firms had lucrative assets, and through their eventual sale, many of the financial institutions were able to recoup a significant enough portion of their losses to think of writing the rest of their losses off.”

He frowned, “At least that’s what a lot of them are telling me, privately.”

“Publicly, they’re outraged, of course. But lots of people just want to close out that story already.”

“But not everyone,” Bette observed, looking closely at his reactions again.

He shook his head, “no, not everyone.”

“Especially those in the gold market, I’d imagine,” she added.

“Yes.”

She drew an imaginary line across the squares that she’d been tracing on the glass table.  Her next move would be critical. This required getting her hands on those numbers.

“You said earlier that the numbers on the gold bars had been documented somewhere?”

He nodded, and then bent forward, letting his head hang, as he held it lightly between his hands.

Bette asked, as casually as she could, “Have you seen them?”

He nodded again, and then muttered, from behind his hands, “Yeah. Various firms who backstopped the third party creditors were given a list of all the numbers and other information related to the shipments.”