by J. A. Jance
“Of course you did,” Graciella replied. She hurried out to the kitchen and returned a moment later with a plastic container in hand. “Put them in here,” she ordered. “I’ll take care of them.”
And she had. On Wednesday, late in the evening, when Graciella brought Christina her customary nightly dose of vitamins and supplements, several pills from those long-hidden bottles had been added to the mix. Christina swallowed the whole collection, washing it down with a long swig of vodka without the slightest concern about what she was taking. That night Graciella feigned interest in whatever her mother was watching on TV. As a result, Christina had an extra drink and another round of pills before they even began the trek to the bedroom. Once Christina was in bed, Graciella returned with yet another drink as well as a third set of pills.
“Sorry,” she explained, handing them over. “I must have forgotten to give these to you earlier.”
By then Christina was far too plastered to argue the point or to remember the pills she had already taken. “You’re very good to me,” she mumbled before swallowing another collection of twenty or so pills. “Very good, very good.”
Christina leaned back against her pillow and was snoring an instant later. Graciella let Christina drift off for a few minutes before returning once more with yet another glass of vodka and another mouthful of pills.
“Mom,” she said, shaking her mother awake. “Why didn’t you take your pills?”
“Musta forgot,” Christina slurred. “Musta.”
“You need to take them now.”
A moment later she had swallowed those as well. By Graciella’s count, that evening Christina had downed a mixture of more than a hundred pills, not counting the supplements. In addition she had consumed an entire fifth of vodka—enough, she hoped, to do the job. In the evenings, Graciella was the one who poured her mother’s drinks, and she had done so tonight as well, leaving her prints on the glass as well as her mother’s. As for the pill bottles themselves? Graciella had been holding the plastic container while Christina had deposited the bottles inside. Tonight, while Graciella had been dispensing the pills, she had worn gloves—not the latex kind found in a doctor’s office, but a pair of soft leather gloves that she’d liberated from one of Christina’s dresser drawers.
Graciella expected death would be more or less instantaneous, but it wasn’t. At first Christina snored as she usually did when she went to bed dead drunk. Graciella used that time to bring the entire collection of pill bottles back from the kitchen and into the bedroom, where she rearranged them, laying them out in an artful display, tipping some bottles over and spilling their remaining contents into the open dresser drawer or all the way to the floor, with a few skittering under the bed.
By the time Graciella completed her pill bottle arrangement project, her mother’s breathing had become noticeably shallower. Graciella resisted the temptation to check for a pulse. Instead, she stripped off the gloves and dropped them back into the drawer where she’d found them earlier. Then, leaving the lamp on, Graciella exited the room.
She returned to the living room, sat on the sofa, and used her Recursos company-issued tablet to send out a series of e-mails. They were mostly routine responses to clients about work matters. Each of them was totally businesslike, totally unemotional, and every one of them featured a time and date stamp. After all, how likely would it be that someone could be in the process of murdering her own mother while sitting in the next room and calmly tending to day-to-day business correspondence?
When it was time for Graciella to go to bed, she tiptoed as far as the doorway to her mother’s room and stood there, listening to hear if Christina was still breathing. She wasn’t. Graciella turned and walked away. She had cared for her mother until she didn’t have to anymore. Now she was done.
Once in her bedroom, Graciella retrieved her private laptop from the safe in her closet and fired it up. While she’d been sitting there in the living room, she’d been thinking about the letter she had sent to Stuart Ramey. It was mailed and on its way. There was no telling exactly how long it would take to get there, but what Graciella really wanted to know was the kind of reaction it would garner once it arrived. In order to do that, she wanted eyes and ears inside the walls of High Noon Enterprises.
For years now, in her account management job, Graciella had handled complex logistical needs for any number of well-heeled, high-profile clients who occasionally operated on both sides of the law. In the process of helping others, Graciella hadn’t been above helping herself.
She disliked spending her own money but she had no compunction about using someone else’s funds. She routinely siphoned off a little here and a little there from her various clients, always disguising the transfers as standard service charges. In the world of blockchain accounting, her skimming should have been right there for all to see. But the people she worked for—the ones who made up the bulk of her clientele—had good reason to be naturally averse to hiring accountants or asking for audits. As a result, her pilfering remained invisible to those around her, while her own accounts—most of which were definitely not handled in house—continued to grow.
To facilitate the logistical needs of her demanding clientele, she had created a directory of useful people—a private dark Web catalogue of trusted service providers. That was where she turned now to do some shopping of her own. Working with Robert Kemper, a reliable vendor who could provide both the necessary equipment and personnel, it didn’t take long for her to put things in motion.
“You’re sure you can get the job done in short order?” she asked.
“That depends,” she was told. “How much information can you give me about the targets? Things will go a lot faster if my guy doesn’t have to do all his own intel.”
“I’ll send you what I have.”
“No problem, then. We do this kind of thing all the time. I have someone in mind to do the job. Ron should have your surveillance up and running in no time.”
Having handled that aspect of the problem, Graciella shut down her computer, stowed it away, and then went to bed. Surprisingly enough, she had no difficulty falling asleep that night, despite the fact that her mother lay dead in her bed in the room next to hers. Graciella’s conscience didn’t bother her, not in the least, since, in that regard, Graciella Miramar truly was her father’s daughter.
11
After serving as a driving instructor, Ali spent the next part of her Friday morning functioning as a pinch-hitting travel agent. She had managed to patch together an indirect routing through San Francisco that would have B. on the ground in Phoenix at 1:03 a.m. Sunday morning. The shuttle drive to Sedona meant he wouldn’t actually arrive at the house until the wee hours of the morning. Talk about taking a red-eye! The connections were lousy, but, considering the current chaotic situation caused by the British Air shut down, Ali was relieved to have found a way to make B.’s homecoming happen. She had just looked up from her computer keyboard when a white-faced Stu barged into her office looking for all the world as though he’d just seen a ghost.
“Stu,” she said, “what’s the matter?”
He was clutching several pieces of paper. “Look at this,” he replied, frisbeeing a piece of embossed stationery across her desk. “You’re not going to believe it.”
Picking up the missive, Ali unfolded it and studied the elegantly printed letterhead: Recursos Empresariales Internationales, 18 Vía Israel, Panama City, Panama. Once that information registered, Ali looked at Stu over the top of the sheet of paper. “Not Panama again,” she said.
A month or so earlier, High Noon’s investigation into Roger McGeary’s death had put them in the crosshairs of a Panamanian homicide cop who had been none too pleased with their unwelcome involvement in the death of a passenger on board a cruise ship operating under a Panamanian flag.
“I’m afraid so,” Stu said, nodding miserably. “Keep reading.”
Mr. Stuart Ramey
High Noon Enterprises
#23 Business Park Way
Cottonwood, Arizona 86326
USA
Lucienne Graciella Miramar
Recursos Empresariales Internationales
18 Vía Israel
Panama City, Panama
18 October 2017
Dear Mr. Ramey,
Please accept our sincere condolences on the loss of your associate, Mr. Owen Hansen. I’m sure he will be greatly missed. We are currently holding the cryptocurrency funds Mr. Hansen directed us to disburse to you. You will find a current statement attached.
At your earliest convenience, please log in to our secure server and supply the required access codes and applicable keys. If you wish to have the funds paid to you directly, you will need to advise us as to what kinds of currency and which banking institutions you wish us to use.
If the funds are coming to you in the United States, we will require your Social Security number as well as your tax ID numbers. Naturally we make no claims on the taxability of any of the resulting transactions and urge you to work with an accountant to be sure all taxation issues are properly handled. It is our understanding, however, that in most jurisdictions as far as gift tax purposes are concerned, you would be considered to be in constructive receipt of the funds as of the day Mr. Hansen made the transfer, which is more than a month in the past as of this writing.
Also, for a number of years Mr. Hansen and Recursos Empresariales Internationales carried on a very lucrative business in terms of Bitcoin data mining, for which we were able to provide accounting and banking services. If you have any interest in reestablishing this activity, please let me know if I can be of help in that regard. As with the funds disbursement mentioned above, your ability to resume that activity would require an updated set of authorization codes.
Please let us know your wishes in these matters at your earliest convenience. Feel free to contact me directly at any time. We are looking forward to doing business with you.
Sincerely,
L. Graciella Miramar.
Ali read the letter through once and then she read it again. “Owen Hansen left you money?” she asked. “How much?”
Stuart nodded, and handed her a second piece of paper. “Take a look at this.”
Ali examined the document. It appeared to be an ordinary monthly bank statement, complete with a complex account number. It included a beginning balance of 450 BTC, minus a .5 BTC service charge, leaving an ending balance of 449.5 BTC.
“What’s a BTC,” Ali asked, “some kind of Panamanian currency?”
“BTC stands for Bitcoin,” Stuart explained.
“The stuff that passes for money on the dark Web?”
“Cryptocurrency isn’t just used on the dark Web anymore,” Stuart said. “Bitcoin is one of the major forms and Ethereum is another. They’re both handy when it comes to making international monetary transfers—and also, as it turns out, for money laundering purposes. I just ran a check of Bitcoin’s current value. As of a few minutes ago, one Bitcoin is worth $5,735.18.”
Ali Reynolds wasn’t someone who was capable of doing math in her head; she used her computer. After typing the numbers into her keyboard, she stared dumbfounded at the resulting sum. “Are you kidding? Owen Hansen left you 2.5 million dollars?” she asked.
Stu nodded. “And some change.”
“But why?”
“I have no idea.”
“What did he do, write you into his will or something?”
Stu shook his head. “Not exactly. Since the letter specifically mentions ‘gift tax’ rather than ‘inheritance tax,’ that would seem to indicate that the transfer was made prior to Owen Hansen’s death rather than after the fact.”
Ali was mystified. “But you never even met Owen Hansen until the morning of the day he died. In fact, you were doing everything in your power to help the cops track him down when he committed suicide. Why on earth would he give you any money at all, much less that much?”
“I don’t believe Owen Hansen had anything to do with it,” Stu answered grimly. “I think this is all Frigg’s doing.”
“Wait,” Ali said. “You’re telling me you think Owen’s artificial intelligence authorized the transfers?”
“I’d be willing to bet on it,” Stuart said. “This whole thing amounts to nothing more or less than a gigantic bribe on Frigg’s part—a bribe and a gamble. She must have realized that Owen was about to disable her. Draining his accounts and transferring the funds to someone else would have crippled him financially. By sending his money to me, Frigg must have expected that when it came time came to save her, I’d be in her corner. That’s why she sent me the kernel file—in hopes that I’d take pity on her and recall her files rather than shipping her off into oblivion.”
“But you did send her to oblivion,” Ali countered. “You thought she was too dangerous, and you deleted that file.”
There was a long pause before Stuart spoke again. “You’re right,” he said. “I did think she was dangerous, I still do, and I did delete the file. The problem is, I may have kept a backup copy.”
“You’re saying you could bring Frigg back if you wanted to?” Ali asked.
“If I wanted to,” Stuart replied bleakly, “but that’s a very big if.” Ali turned back to the letter and studied it for a time. “What does ‘Recursos Empresariales’ mean?” she asked.
“Business Resources,” Stuart answered. “I already translated it.”
“That doesn’t sound like a bank,” Ali suggested.
“It isn’t a bank. It’s more like a clearinghouse,” Stuart answered. “Recursos Empresariales doesn’t deal in regular currencies, although they network with banks and other institutions that do. Their primary specialty is handling cryptocurrencies of various kinds. Ordinary banks mostly can’t touch the stuff without violating banking regulations. But this letter is the reason I may have to bring Frigg back.”
“Have to?” Ali repeated. “I don’t understand.”
“Because you can bet that somewhere or other Frigg has squirreled away a file containing all those authorization codes, the ones I’ll need in order to access the money, which is the only way I’ll be able to sort out whatever taxes are owing.”
“And the only way to access the authorization codes is to reactivate Frigg?”
“That’s my read on the situation.”
“How would you go about doing that?” Ali asked.
“I’d need the kernel file, of course,” Stuart answered, “and a whole hell of a lot of computer power.”
“How much?” Ali asked.
“According to the police report from Santa Barbara, when Frigg was fully operational, she had access to eight hundred blades or GPUs. She might run in skeletal mode on less computer power than that, but there’s no way to tell if skeletal mode would provide access to the authorization codes we need.”
“You’re saying you need to access her completely or not at all,” Ali mused.
Stu nodded in agreement.
Ali had a clear idea of how much computer power it took to handle High Noon Enterprises’ corporate needs, including banks of off-site equipment that operated in stations scattered around the globe. Here at corporate headquarters they were currently in the process of expanding their space in order to double their local computer power, a process that had slowed to a crawl awaiting final sign-offs by building inspectors and the arrival of currently back-ordered computer equipment.
“At the time we took Owen Hansen down, I was amazed by how many GPUs he had, but now, knowing he was a Bitcoin miner, that whole thing makes a lot more sense.”
“What’s this about mining?” Ali asked.
“Bitcoin isn’t handled by a governmental agency. And it isn’t a centralized system, either. Transactions happen on the Web in a public arena and are recorded for all to see in what are referred to as blockchains. People who have enough knowhow and enough computer power available to do so are the ones who log all that activity. They do it on a freelance
basis and are paid for each logged transaction.”
“And they’re called miners?” Ali asked.
Stu nodded. “And how are they paid for doing the logging? In Bitcoins, of course.”
“Is that where all this money came from?”
“Probably,” Stu answered. “At least some of it, and since the IRS is currently targeting Bitcoin accounts larger than $20,000, I’d be a prime target. You can bet what’ll be due is more than I can pay out of pocket without accessing the funds. So Frigg has put me between a rock and a hard place. I’ll need the funds to cover the taxes, and I need her to access the funds.”
“In other words,” Ali mused, “in order to stay out of hot water with the IRS, you’re going to need to reactivate Frigg and consult with her for however long it takes to get the account passwords. Do we have enough capacity here at High Noon to do that?”
“We?” Stuart echoed. “Are you saying you’d involve High Noon in this mess?”
“Absolutely,” Ali answered. “You’re part of High Noon, and your problem is our problem. But back to my original question. Do we have enough computer power here?”
“Probably, but I don’t want Hansen’s AI anywhere near High Noon’s computers,” Stuart told her. “If and when I turn her back on, her operation has to be kept absolutely separate from ours. I could maybe install her temporarily in the new computers we have coming in, but . . .”
“But those are currently on back order,” Ali added. “By the time they show up, there’s a good chance those taxes won’t just be payable, they’ll be overdue. Maybe, in the meantime, we could lease some additional computer capacity.”
“Lease?” Stu echoed, looking horrified. “As in renting computers that have already been used by somebody else?”
It was as if, by even mentioning the word “lease,” Ali had just suggested the cyber equivalent of sharing a toothbrush. When it came to computers, Stu was utterly fastidious. He had a remarkable collection of old ones—museum pieces, as he liked to call them—but only computers that came to him straight out of a box were ever allowed to hook up with High Noon’s computer system. Stu’s outrage might have been comical if he hadn’t been dead serious.