(R)evolution (Phoenix Horizon Book 1)

by PJ Manney

  Impatient, Talia interrupted the speechifying. “We need you to make this your masterpiece and take whatever time you need. This will be the most scrutinized background check you’ve ever encountered, with every angle at their disposal. So price is no object.”

  “You serious, child?” Dr. Who’s large brown eyes glittered as she imagined the delicious challenge.

  “What you’ve done for me? Square it for him.” She handed Dr. Who a long list. “Here’s some ideas to start. Deep background. Points we need to hit. What do you think?”

  “What she did for you?” Peter asked. He was hoping for real answers to the mystery of Talia.

  The two women looked at each other. After a moment, Talia spoke. “I have an avatar of the old me running around the world. I’m supposedly living abroad, on the run from the club. I rent apartments, buy groceries, live a life. They’ve tried to kill the old me several times, but they’re chasing a ghost. And they have been for the last ten years. Where am I now?”

  Dr. Who smiled. “You’re livin’ in Bolivia, under the protection of Evo Morales and his friends. They won’t mess with you for a while.”

  He found it hard to believe it was possible. But he had no choice.

  Dr. Who smiled her big, toothy grin and continued. “She’s the only other ‘price is no object’ client I got. I have a ball maintainin’ the old her. It’s like a game character. Except the stakes are real. Better adrenaline rush than Grand Theft Auto IX.”

  Dr. Who turned to their list, methodically making notes in the margins. Peter didn’t know how much “price is no object” meant. But whatever it was, he was willing to pay it—as soon as he had some money.

  Peter Bernhardt was dead. Long live Thomas Paine.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  In contrast to the Stepford perfection of San Anselmo, the Santa Cruz “surf city” shack they pulled up to the next morning was as low-rent and shaggy dog as they came. Gray, weathered wood shingles hung precariously off the sides and the newly christened Thomas Paine was sure the shake roof leaked. A collection of battered surfboards lined the walkway. It was hard to believe one of North America’s leading money launderers lived here, but curiosity overrode any concerns he harbored. He needed to know where Talia’s deep pockets came from. She had never said this was the source, but he figured it was, or close enough.

  Inside was no better. It had nothing in common with Dr. Who’s setup, except the awesome computer and security systems. “Tom” sat in the only comfortable seat, an old armchair whose upholstery lost ten rounds with the old calico cat asleep on its shredded arm. Talia perched on the other arm, and Mr. Money sat in the only other seat—a rickety wooden kitchen chair he pulled up to his board and monitor, which sat before an enormous picture window framing the Pacific Ocean. Either this was just his office or Mr. Money was deeply into nonattachment and antimaterialism.

  Mr. Money was also deeply into surfing, and his location and boards were not the only clues. He appeared to be in his midthirties, but his Eurasian face was darkly tanned, with wrinkles heavily etched and shaggy, straw-like black hair fried by sun and sea salt. He was very lean, with powerful, broad shoulders and lats from paddling, and strong legs. He wore board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, which exposed the scars of a gonzo surfer. Arms slashed, legs gouged, a body beaten in pursuit of the perfect ride.

  “So Talia never told me what you do exactly,” said Tom.

  Mr. Money smiled at Talia, but his smile never reached his eyes. Tom’s scalp tensed and rippled. The smile assumed a great deal and none of it good. Talia smiled back, noncommittal, her eyes cast down at the tattered carpeting.

  “She’s a good girl. Knows when to talk and when not to,” said Mr. Money, his eyes focused on her bare, crossed legs, languorously stretched out beneath her short denim skirt. “I’ve checked you out, so it’s only fair you get my curriculum vitae . . . I’ve been doing this since high school. Started out as a peso broker for the drug cartels, before the big banks got in on the action and tried to force small operations like me out of the drug business. I’ve gotten some business back post Patriot Act, since banks supposedly can’t launder money anymore, but some just ignore the act and stick to profit making until they get caught. Most don’t care ’cause they’ve got friends where they need them. Like your club. I have enough loyal clients and work to keep me happy. And I’m loyal in return. Institutions have no loyalty. Can’t overstate the need for mutual loyalty. Isn’t that right, Talia?”

  “Absolutely.” Her voice was affectless.

  Tom’s scalp tensed again. It was disturbing.

  “So this can go two ways,” said Mr. Money. “If you give me account and routing numbers and banker’s IDs into established accounts big enough to rip from the inside, you can have the money today. Five percent fee. If not, it’ll take way more dinero to come up with a clean approach based on my own contacts. I charge for both hours and expertise. Ten percent and one thousand dollars an hour until I’ve cracked it. Usually takes a couple of days to set up if I’ve got the right contacts. Weeks, if I have to make ’em from scratch.”

  Talia sighed. “No one has all that information at their fingertips.”

  “Maybe not your fingertips, baby . . .” Mr. Money’s lips compressed in the faintest smirk.

  The assumption of intimacy made Tom’s internal radar scream. Did Talia use sex to keep Mr. Money and Dr. Steve loyal to her?

  “What about the Russian RATs? Could we buy it from them?” asked Talia.

  “They’d have to have it for sale already. And I doubt any Trojan’s getting this type of account information regularly.” When he saw Tom’s confusion, he added, “RATs are crackers who write remote-access Trojans that hide their malware as something harmless that appears on the user’s system. The Russians are the undisputed masters, and they’ve raised it to an art form. A very lucrative art form. I guarantee if you’ve ever had a system hooked up to the Internet, and you’ve ever made a financial transaction—from banking to eBay to charity to subscriptions—they’ve had your information for sale to thieves at one time or another.”

  “So why not them?” asked Tom.

  “The key to their business model is taking small amounts from millions of users. Ten bucks times a million accounts is ten million bucks. Banks consider it the cost of doing business, and customers only get angry when the amounts are high enough to matter. This is not our situation. No VXer goes after the kind of cash you need in one bite. It would bring the wrath of governments and corporations down on them. No one wants that if they can avoid it.”

  Tom had no choice. “I have them.” He wasn’t sure he did. If the processor was still attached to him, he’d know.

  “Really.” Mr. Money didn’t sound like a believer.

  “Try this. Bank of the Caymans . . .”

  Mr. Money looked at Talia, who subtly nodded. He turned to his keyboard and brought up the Bank of the Caymans website. But it wasn’t the homepage interface a customer would use. It was the internal interface for employees.

  Tom closed his eyes and thought of the music he heard reading the memo—Flaming Lips’ “Race for the Prize (Sacrifice of the New Scientists).” Music always embedded itself with other memories, but since the implants, he had noticed it more and more. “Manager’s name is Octavius Crawford. Hard to forget a name like that. I saw a code next to his name, just once, don’t know why, but maybe . . . Try, all caps, C8G5V93JKB7.”

  Mr. Money tapped on his keyboard. After a minute, the screen changed to an internal user screen. “I’m in. But you won’t know his password.”

  Tom was disappointed. “Right. Of course it’s not his password.”

  “It’s his ID. And that was an amazing piece of luck. Also tells me the guy’s an imbecile for sending it in a document. Unless he’s in the pay of a cracker team already. It’s possible. I’m running a password generator. Might take minutes or hours. You might have to come back. Why don’t you both relax.” Mr. Money got up. As he walked by,
he grazed his fingertips lightly over Talia’s shoulder.

  The computer beeped. “Already?” exclaimed Mr. Money.

  “Why the surprise?” asked Tom.

  “It goes through proper names, fictitious names, and dictionary words first. Then date configurations. Birthdays and anniversaries. All very popular with the rabble. Then it starts randomly generating letters and numbers. That’s what a password is supposed to be, especially at the institutional level, alphanumeric nonsense, and that can take a long time to crack. This doofus used”—he peered at the screen—“oh, Jesus! ‘HarryPotter.’ They should fire his fucking ass! Then again, if they catch this, he’s dead.” Mr. Money sat back down at the keyboard. “Okay, dude, you’re on.”

  Tom knew the stakes were high, and he couldn’t dwell on Octavius Crawford’s fate if he was after bigger fish. He needed to concentrate. The next numbers would fail if he got even a single digit wrong. It was only a fluke that he’d been in Carter’s office in the first place. He had asked a question about a club wire transfer and his partner, eager to allay his fears, jumped on a keyboard to access the account himself. He remembered watching him type a number, but even though it came up all stars on the screen, he thought he remembered keystrokes . . . He squashed down his anger and focused on Carter’s hands flying over the keys on his mental screen. “Account number . . . 0409856735627585 . . . Routing number . . . 198403849587.”

  After thirty seconds, the only thing he heard was a male voice say, “Fuck me.” He opened his eyes. Mr. Money was staring at Talia and Tom with deep suspicion. For a moment, Tom thought Mr. Money was imagining him dead along with Octavius Crawford. “You been planning this for a while?”

  “No. Why?”

  “That’s the smoothest ride I’ve had from a civilian. How could you remember that? You some idiot savant?”

  “I’ve got an unusual memory. And I always believed you keep your hands on the flow of funds personally, even if I had a great controller and accounting department. Start-ups suck down money like crazy, so I spent a few minutes every day looking at financials and asking stupid questions since I started my first company at twenty-six.”

  Mr. Money said nothing for a moment, but stared at Talia again. She nodded, looking as calm as possible, but Tom could feel her fear.

  “That’s old-school, dude. You only hear that from geezers or Russian mob . . .”

  “Guess I’m an old-school kinda guy.”

  “So what have I just landed in?”

  “Talia told you my company was financed by the Phoenix Club. This is the account the last payment was made from on”—he closed his eyes again—“May 28. How much is in it?”

  “$1,275,360,032.27. You know this is just one account. I’m sure they’ve got others. In other banks. In other tax havens.”

  “I know they do. As far as I can figure, they’ve got a few trillion deposited around the world.” Tom smiled at Talia. “So I did okay?” he asked her.

  Talia tried to look relieved. “You did more than okay.”

  “If you’re not the angel of death, you’re my new poster client,” said Mr. Money. “In my experience, it’s delegating too early that gets dudes in trouble with their finances. Before you know it, some accounting grommie’s got his hand so far up your butt, you can’t see his elbow. And then you can kiss your business—and your keister—good-bye.”

  “How do you make sure the club can’t trace this money back to us?” asked Tom.

  “I’ve got so many rabbit holes, through so many ISPs, in so many countries, most of which are so corrupt, all they want is their cut, and they’ve got no interest in helping some badass American club or corporation. I give them more money than the multinationals do. The account just disappears without a trace. For my percentage, I make sure there are no loose electronic ends or trails, I backdate everything, with just enough user history to make it seem real enough, but not too much to get questions asked, although I can’t guarantee hard-copy issues, like if the bank decides to rectify their hard-copy printout to their computer-accessed information by hand. But no one bothers anymore, and I’ve never had a problem yet.”

  “But they’ve got to realize it’s missing,” insisted Tom.

  “Yeah, but it’ll be too late, too hard to trace, and too embarrassing.”

  “But what’s to stop everybody doing this? Why isn’t everyone missing their money?”

  “First of all, who says money doesn’t go missing all the time and the banks just replace it? Banks still make a fortune, even with all the theft. It’s the run-of-the-mill ID theft at banks that hurts the most, because even though the amounts aren’t huge and not many succeed, the numbers of people giving it a try with all that stolen information are enormous. But it’s still cheaper for banks to put in half-assed electronic measures that foil non-pros than to keep the old-fashioned human labor—eyeballing signatures and personally okaying transactions—that made theft harder. Single big takes like this are inside jobs, with the board of directors’ blessing to make cleaner payoffs to shady contacts, ’cause there’s no corruption line item in their annual reports. And as always, the best way to rob a bank is to own one. But there’s the dynamic duo of human interaction that makes sure big outsider grabs like ours rarely happen.”

  Tom bit. “And that’s . . . ?”

  Mr. Money smiled. “Loyalty and fear. But in this case, none of us have loyalty to either the bank or the club. And we don’t care if we live or die. If we did, we would never have the balls to do this.”

  Tom shoved the contemplation of “fear” into the mental appendix that held “collateral damage.” He hoped he didn’t stuff it so full his mental appendix burst. “What’s next?”

  “I set up five Swiss bank accounts based on the information Talia gave me last night. Even though your accounts will appear old, we also need to back up because of your nonresident status in Switzerland. Swiss attorneys represent non-Swiss residents in absentia to prevent money laundering. Only thing the law does is make lawyers rich. I work with several Swiss attorneys. Thomas Paine has been a client of Zeiss Spiegel for the last decade, and they’ll have proof they set up your accounts, which I’ll provide. You send that info to your ID maker to build into your new dossier. I’ll also give you all the information you’ll need to do your own banking.”

  “Good. Then what?”

  “My trade route’s all set. Now . . . we transfer.” He typed a command into a screen and clicked his mouse.

  “Swiss accounts have no names, right?” asked Tom.

  “Right, just numbers.”

  “So what’s stopping you from using my accounts later?”

  Mr. Money’s face went flaccid, his eyes vacant, voice robotic. “I told you. Loyalty. And fear. In my business, if you screw a client, you’re dead.”

  Talia unconsciously shifted closer to Tom. How much disloyalty had she witnessed?

  The money launderer’s animated affect returned. “Hey, it goes both ways. I’m getting my five percent—and let’s face it, $63,768,001.60 is nothing to sneeze at, and it’s sixty-three mil more than I had this morning. I’m not greedy. Of course, I share a healthy percentage with my compatriots around the world, but those are my expenses, not yours . . .” That sly, creepy grin that made Tom’s skin crawl spread across his mouth. “It’ll keep me in bitchin’ boards, scorchin’ babes, surfside vacation villas, state-of-the-art computing, supreme al pastor burritos with extra salsa at Taco Moreno, and personal security for the rest of my life—and really, what else does a dude like me need?”

  Mr. Money was a very valuable friend. Tom Paine walked in a pauper and walked out a billionaire. And he couldn’t wait to leave.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Driving back to the Haight, Talia slowly unwound from her rigor mortis-like tenseness. Tom hesitated asking her about her relationship with Mr. Money, for fear she’d clam up again. He approached on another tack.

  “So now I’m a Getty, how much do I owe you?” he asked.

&nb
sp; “About seven million, give or take.”

  The uninsured medical bills alone would be millions. Plus mercenaries, ID builders . . . “Well, you tell me how, where, and it’s done.”

  “From now on, it’s harder than you think. Every movement of funds, every move in a vehicle, every call, every computer connection is monitored and recorded by surveillance video, cookies, RFIDs, smart cards, and GPS, collected and transmitted by private data-mining companies to their corporate clients and the intelligence community of the United States and therefore, to the Phoenix Club, all to complete the daily dossier of every American. Of course, that’s where Dr. Who and Mr. Money get their information, too. Money talks and bullshit walks, especially in the low-paid corridors of intelligence gathering, and there are leakers, moles, and the disaffected everywhere.”

  “Thank God. We need them.”

  “And that’s where Dr. Who’s creation comes in. The Thomas Paine online avatar is your personal agent in the world. And your smoke and mirrors. It’ll go places you can’t. Have done things you didn’t. All to create your electronic dossier.”

  “But I thought to be a true personal agent, you needed a more sophisticated level of artificial intelligence than exists right now. Human or near-human level artificial intelligence. And that doesn’t exist yet.”

  “It is human level. Dr. Who, Mr. Money, you, and me. You don’t need a computer.”

  “You don’t look artificial to me.”