The Brummie Con

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

“Then how do you know about the blockchain?” And do you know about us being able to fake it? I think back to the pub in Birmingham in November. “And why are you on the run?” Another thought hits me. “Did you tell them where we were?” The thought makes me ready to launch myself at him. Winn takes a small step to position himself between Ham and I.

  “Helmet.” Winn holds out his hand for the scuba helmet I set on the seat behind me.

  “Absolutely not,” I say, pinning Ham to the seat with my disgust. “The truth. And I better fucking believe it.”

  Ham licks his lip, flicking his gaze between Winn and I. He suddenly looks like a small wretched creature. A man that’s lost, a man that has gone too far down a road to turn back, and knows it. I still feel the urge to pummel him, but now it feels like it would be like beating a child, an adult invalid.

  Ham barely whispers, “I stole it.”

  “Stole what?” I ask like the spouse of a mark who just learned they were conned.

  “The code,” Ham answers, still in a whisper, not meeting my eyes. “Caesar’s code. Right before the Waylan Lo job.”

  Holy shit. Caesar is, or was, Ham’s Guild Master. We really stole Caesar’s code.

  “They knew you stole it,” I say, following the logic.

  Ham nods, going back to fidgeting with his clips. “Caesar gave me a choice, work for him without question or ... or....” Ham’s hands start shaking so bad he can’t do the clip.

  “You were a pawn,” I say.

  Winn takes mercy on Ham and reaches over to finish the clips.

  Puo breaks in, whispering, “Keep him talking. You got three minutes.”

  Three minutes to the blow off.

  Ham nods. “But not a pawn without my own resources.” He looks up. “I was able to gather information. Plot my escape. When you killed Christina—”

  “Colvin,” I interject. Colvin killed Christina.

  “That’s not how they view it,” Ham says. “When Christina was killed they questioned me again—”

  “Again?” I ask.

  “Yes, again—”

  “When was the first time?”

  “After the Waylon Lo job.”

  “They questioned you about whether we stole it?”

  Ham doesn’t answer, wringing his hands.

  “And they questioned you a second time?”

  Ham goes quiet. “Vigorously. After that, I bolted and have been on the run ever since.”

  “But did they ever ask you, or tell you, we copied the code?”

  Ham fidgets, not making eye contact. “No. But it was clear that’s what they were asking about.”

  “Which time?” I believe that for the second time, not the first time.

  “Both times. But definitely after Christina’s death.”

  It’s Christina’s squeegee. The one I’m holding in my hand right now. It has the blockchain technology. “Can you use the blockchain registry to identify the other members?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Ham says. “That’s the whole point.”

  Holy shit. We have it. We have the proof. Their identities. The road map to retribution. We’ve had it all along. That’s why they started coming after us after Christina’s murder! They didn’t know about us initially stealing the code from Ham. But, then, when did they figure out we could fake the blockchain?

  Ham sits there, his shoulders hunched over, avoiding eye contact. His eyes are vacant, lost in tortured memories.

  Winn’s eyes by contrast are bright and alert. Seeking me, studying my face. He’s looking for an indication of what to do next. That’s when I realize: I’ve changed the plan. Can he see it on my face? Or does he just know me that well?

  Puo whispers over the comm, “Bringing the power down.”

  The lights in the train start to flicker again, followed quickly by the train starting an emergency power down.

  “Ham,” I say. “Get out of the scuba suit.” I talk over his protests. “This isn’t the dive point. We needed to make sure your equipment was sized properly before we get there,” I lie easily.

  Ham apparently believes me and does as told.

  The original plan called for ditching him here in the train—there’s more than just oxygen in Ham’s scuba tank. But that was before the authorities tried to pick him up. And that was before the existence of the National Syndicate was confirmed and their motivation known, or at least strongly suspected.

  I explain our exit strategy off the train to Ham as Winn fluidly stands up and starts unclasping the emergency releases on the window.

  I grab the three helmets and distribute them. We get them on right as the lights go out. The nightvision picks up the low red emergency lights and recasts them as detailed blue pixels.

  The window squelches as Winn works it inward and sets it down, out of the way.

  “Let’s go,” I say. “Keep close.”

  I go out first, dropping down six feet to the concrete ground. Ham flops out next. Winn hands me both the scuba bag and duffle bag of clothes and then lightly drops down.

  We stay close and low to the train so that anyone looking out, can’t see us.

  Our feet move quickly and quietly. The concrete floor has been blown smooth from all the high-speed trains passing by.

  Once past the train, we continue down for several hundred feet until I find an access door that we huddle into.

  “This is the dive point,” I announce. “Get Ham suited up first.” I bend down and pretend to fiddle with the equipment. Ham can’t come with us, but he’ll stand a much better chance of getting away and surviving down here than if we had left him on the train.

  “Sit down,” Winn tells Ham, who complies immediately.

  Winn gets the equipment on Ham more quickly this time and attaches Ham’s specially prepared tank. Winn looks at me to give the go ahead with his hand on the valve to turn it on.

  I nod.

  With a pneumatic hiss the air starts flowing.

  “Ham, listen to me,” I say quickly. “When you wake up—”

  “When I ... ?” Ham asks, already groggy.

  “Hide. There’s a juncture five hundred feet that way.” I point the way the train had traveled from. “You have a squeegee—you’re welcome. Stop a train. Sneak on. Do you understand?”

  Ham’s head slumps forward. He’s out.

  Well, I’m sure he’ll figure it out.

  Puo breaks in. “I can’t hold the power off for much longer.”

  We quickly strip off Ham’s scuba equipment and lay him down on his side, his head tilted forward. I set a bottle of water next to him. He should wake up in the next ten to fifteen minutes without the laced air.

  Winn hefts the bag with the scuba equipment, I grab the smaller one, and we make haste to the aforementioned junction.

  “Listen,” Puo says, “about the quants—”

  “No,” I cut him off. “Wait until we’re on the train and moving.” And I’m sitting down and can deal with the jackknives that are about to shred the inside of my stomach.

  The intercontinental tunnels down here extend for hundreds of miles, connecting parts of Ireland, Britain, and France under the Irish Sea and English Channel. It’s a no-woman’s land. A veritable concrete desert for miles. No water. No rest stops. No food. A place only built for trains.

  Ham will never get out of here, the thought bubbles up out of nowhere.

  Damn it.

  “Go,” I tell Winn. “I’ll catch up.” Stupid Ham, stupidly passing out so quickly.

  “Where are you going?” he asks, stopping and turning toward me.

  “To leave Ham a message.” Spell out exactly what he needs to do to get out of here on that squeegee we left him. “Just go,” I say. “It won’t take long and you have that heavy bag.”

  Winn stands his ground. “I’m not leaving you.”

  “Tick tock,” Puo rushes. “Stop arguing and just do it.”

  Winn drops the bag with a heavy whump and takes off running toward Ham. “Follow m
e!”

  I drop my bag and run after him. “This was my idea!”

  Puo breaks in dryly, “So long as we know where this stupidity comes from. Just hurry.”

  ***

  The detour for Ham only adds an extra minute or two. The tunnels are still dark and Winn and I are still in our helmets with nightvision walking up to our train to Manchester and a date with an air transport home. The classical music has changed to a lively tempo that makes me think of a promenade as we walk up.

  It has to be a bluff. It just has to be.

  “I knew you wouldn’t leave him,” Winn says, jerking my attention back to the present.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. We just left him.

  Winn shifts the scuba bag to his other shoulder.

  Is that what that look back on the train was about? “Ham is a wildcard in all this,” I answer evasively. “It’s better to keep him in play.”

  The back of the train emerges out of the darkness in the rightmost tunnel of the juncture, a sleek snake painted in blue pixels by the nightvision.

  “If we left him on the train, he would’ve been arrested, and then the National Syndicate would’ve finished him.”

  “And we don’t kill people,” I say, instinctively dropping my voice as we approach the back of the train, and shifting the bag on my shoulder in front of me. “So how is this any different?”

  “I don’t know. It just feels different somehow.”

  We step quickly over the uneven tracks and up to the train. The back door isn’t even locked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  PUO DOESN’T WAIT for the train to Manchester to be up to full speed before asking, “Can I talk now?”

  “Yes—” I say, watching the monotonous concrete scenery stream by us through the window of my and Winn’s private cabin. Puo reserved it for us in advance. How long ago was that?

  Puo turns down the classical music and plows on, “It’s definitely about quants. I just copied enough quants to pay off the Citizen Maker. We’re debt free. How’s it feel?”

  Like I want to throw up.

  “How did you not know about this at the lake house?” Winn asks, sitting next to me. His cologne is fading, melting into his natural scent from running through the tunnel.

  Damn good question. I shift in my seat away from Winn. I don’t want to move away entirely, but neither do I want to be touched right now while the jackknives dance.

  “I didn’t recognize it as a blockchain,” Puo admits. “It was a hybridization, as Porkchop said. I did recognize it as a tracking function that needed to be bypassed, and it was done under duress in minutes between the first time Porkchop plugged in at the lake house and the second. But as soon as Porkchop said blockchain—”

  “You undermined the entire digital financial system in minutes?” Winn asks, impressed.

  “Yeah,” Puo perks up at that. “But I didn’t know that’s what I was doing.”

  “So, we’re rich,” Winn states.

  “We’re rich,” I confirm.

  “Infinitely so,” Puo says.

  But all our words are bankrupt.

  I lean back into the cushioned plastic seat. We’re finally debt free, set up for life. And all it cost us was a full-scale war with the Cleaners against all the Bosses, my father kidnapped and tortured, and a national organized crime ring relentlessly trying to kill us.

  “They’re never going to stop,” I say to myself.

  Music fills the silence before Puo says, “No, they’re not.”

  “It’s us or them,” Winn says.

  Oh, God. I slump further down into the seat across from Winn. Winn’s right. It’s us or them. They were desperate enough to launch a full-scale war against the Bosses before they were ready. They were desperate enough to kidnap my father. There’s no telling where it will stop.

  It has to be a bluff. My heart thunders in my chest. It just has to be.

  “It is,” Puo says reassuringly—I must be mumbling.

  Winn puts his arm around me and adds, “It’s a bluff. They can’t follow through with it and expect to have any leverage over us.”

  Us. Winn’s use of “us” is the only comforting thing in those lies.

  Fifteen minutes to Manchester. An eternity relentlessly slipping away.

  Twenty minutes left on the countdown. The classical music whiles away, oblivious to what we’re hurtling toward.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The rest of the train ride to Manchester is in a strained silence blanketed over by the thin veneer of classical music, a breeding ground for the jackknives.

  Are the Cleaners bluffing? It is the question that consumes me; the question I can’t escape. I sit in a tin tube, the indifferent, invisible clock clicking down to judgment—an innocent woman awaiting unjust sentencing.

  I’m tight, having to constantly make an effort to relax my shoulders, take calming breaths. Winn is near, watching me worriedly, but his arm around me has long since retracted. I can’t stand to be touched right now. If anything I want to pace, to run, to leave this place behind forever.

  We finally have it. What we’ve been working for since Puo and I were ten. Enough money to be debt free. Enough money not to have to scrape by. Enough money not to be beholden to anybody for anything. And we didn’t even know it, didn’t even have a chance to enjoy it.

  The Cleaners are never going to stop coming after us. There’s no fix big enough to hold them off. No deal that they’ll agree to. They’ve gone too far for any kind of trust to be established between us. This has to end in body bags. There’s no other choice. They’ve made sure of that.

  The train starts to slow down, approaching the station. I resist the urge to look at the time.

  I’m sure Puo has the countdown up, the scared and broken image of my father staring at him right now, time steadily ticking down below it. But Puo hasn’t mentioned it, and I haven’t asked. It wouldn’t do any good right now to know, except to feed the jackknives. There’s nothing I can do either way, and we still have to get to the air transport.

  I can’t help looking at the clock. Seven minutes. Damn it. When the time clicks down to zero, either Puo will confirm nothing happened, laying to rest my anxiety, or he’ll say nothing, confirming the worst. But if the worst isn’t explicitly stated, I can pretend everything’s fine, at least, for a little awhile.

  Deep chugs sound inside the train as it pulls into the station and starts to power down. People queue up to file off, mostly families and tourists. Many look tired, relieved to be getting off after the snafu in the tunnels. More than a few are on their tablets searching for news and talking with those around them about it. Children chatter obliviously—the ones closest to us are discussing the comedic merits of eyeballs versus bellybuttons.

  We shuffle off the train and into the flowing mix of people heading up the stairs out of the station. I’m carrying the smaller duffle bag, while Winn is muscling the larger one. Out of habit I notice all the wallets and purses so lazily up for grabs, but I impatiently match my pace to those around me (which is horribly slow). Now that I’m moving, I want to move.

  Standing still on the escalator up does not help this feeling, and I’m entirely fed up with the annoying music in my ear. I can’t wait until I can take the stupid thing out and be done with all this.

  The escalator journey subjects me to repeating touristy advertisements morphing on the wall every few feet in response to my citizen chip. Come see some stupid play! Visit our over-sized stadium! Isn’t it big! Isn’t it great! Please come validate our obsession!

  They really need to shut up. The only useful thing on them is the local time readout at the top. Four minutes. My heart rate quickens; thick, quick pulses pound in my neck. There’s nothing I can do. I take a deep breath. There’s nothing I can do.

  I shift away from the advertisements. Winn is two steps below me, shouldering his heavy bag. His face is a neutral mask that I know means he’s thinking—probably about our next st
eps.

  We need to get to Birmingham, link up with Puo, and then take an air transport home. Then what?

  The thought is like a scrap of meat tossed to a starving school of piranha—the jackknives feed in a frenzy. I’m nauseated, hot, clammy. I hate not knowing what to do. I take a deep breath, feel it in my chest and exhale slowly. Winn looks up at me, but I don’t acknowledge him.

  We think we finally know what’s going on, but all it’s done is generate more questions. Puo is stuck on: how did the Cleaners learn we could fake the blockchain? I’m more worried about: what are we going to do next? And what, if anything, do we tell Durante, Colvin, and the other Bosses about the blockchain? How do we protect the fact that we can copy quants?

  White stone floors spread out before me as we crest the escalator. After a halting walk though a narrow hallway (people who randomly stop to stare at their tablets should be publicly stripped and lashed—bumping into them with your bag is soo less satisfying), the large open-space train station opens before us.

  Large float screens hover over the crowd showing the train schedules. The steady thrum of large groups of people moving about echo around us. It’s colder here than the hallway we just left from, but not as cold as it is outside. Somewhere near by is a fast food joint. The fried food smell makes my poor stomach curdle. An announcement for the next train sounds over a bird chirping of all things.

  “Over there,” Winn says, pointing with his head toward a ticket kiosk.

  We need to purchase tickets to Birmingham. It’s a counter tracking measure. Buy a ticket on the spot in cash. If the police are able to track us this far through digital purchases, they’ll have a much harder time figuring out if this was our final destination or a transfer for us.

  1 minute.

  We start walking to the kiosk. My legs feel light. Comfortable. Actually, they feel great. It’s utterly bizarre, considering my chest feels like it’s going to rip itself off my body and run around in circles screaming at people.

  I’m about to ask Winn about this phenomena when I see a sliver of pink hair through the crowd ahead of us.