She ended the call and looked at Sam, who'd been monitoring financial data throughout the conversations. "Anything useful?"
"Meridian Services has processed payments for forty-three different organizations over the past eighteen months," Sam said. He still wasn't looking up from his tablets. "Most appear legitimate on surface examination. But if I assume they're all fronts for this same organization, the pattern becomes clear. They've been building a distribution network across the eastern quadrant for over a year. Medical facilities, research stations, refugee assistance programs—all of it creating infrastructure for moving people and materials without attracting attention."
"How big?"
"Big enough that shutting it down would require coordinated action from multiple government agencies across multiple planets." Sam finally looked up, his expression was grim. "We stumbled into something way larger than a single criminal organization, Sophie. This is industrial scale."
