Sam wasn’t so certain. She preferred to follow the facts. “Flight logs, please,” she reminded them gently.
“Of course,” the general said. Sam caught the uncharitable note, and smiled sweetly in reply, as if to say screw you right back.
13
Near Ardmore, Oklahoma
Stalwart sat in the warm, darkening anteroom of the rest stop lavatory building, surveying the situation. He’d seen neither hide nor hair of the captors for the better part of two hours.
He observed the roomful of worried people carefully. Children cried occasionally, shushed quickly and with varying degrees of success by anxious parents. Noise was apparently a great way to draw unwanted attention from the band of slack-jawed rednecks who’d corralled them like animals.
Stalwart was an alpha male. He didn’t take well to having his time wasted, much less to being detained. He was accustomed to captains of industry listening to his direction.
He was a big deal in the Department of Defense. Until yesterday, anyway. His family knew him as Mike, and to his old fighter pilot buddies, he was Buster, remnant of the time when his youthful exuberance had led him to exceed the sound barrier far too close to civilization and all of its breakable windows.
The previous morning, before he abetted a spectacular and, some might argue, earth-shaking theft, Stalwart had been in charge of an important multi-billion-dollar acquisition program for the Department.
He was pretty sure he wouldn’t be welcome back at the Pentagon today, however. It might be just as well that he was locked up in some brick shithouse in Nowhere, Oklahoma, or wherever he happened to be. At least there was some slim chance of escaping this particular predicament. But if the Feds remained organized and effective long enough to catch up with him, he was certain there’d be no escaping. They’d throw away the key, maybe even pursue the death penalty for espionage.
Hope Archive has his shit together, he thought.
Everything that happened after Zero Hour had fallen squarely in the “not my department” category. Stalwart had had his hands full carrying out his own responsibilities, and he didn’t have a great deal of mental bandwidth available to dive too far into the plan for how to handle the inevitable chaos their efforts would produce.
But he now wished he’d carved out just a bit more headroom to better understand how Archive and his extremely distinguished group of reluctant oligarchs planned to perform the bit of alchemy that would be required to prevent the masses from pitchforking each other to death.
A crying baby nearby brought his attention back to the smelly, sweaty room full of highway hostages, all seated morosely on the hard tile floor, fidgeting frequently as each new body position rapidly became uncomfortable. The baby’s mother looked at him apologetically.
Stalwart smiled. “Can I help?”
“I’d be grateful. My arms are about to fall off,” she said. She was blonde, athletic, pretty. Two other small children orbited in close proximity.
“Looks like your hands are full.”
She nodded.
“I’m Mike,” Stalwart said as he reached to take the baby.
“Stephanie. Steph to my friends. Thank you so much. I won’t burden you for long, I promise. I just need to let the blood start flowing in my arms again.”
“Where are you guys from, Steph?” Stalwart held the child comfortably in the crook of his arm, resting the little boy’s head on his shoulders. Just like the grandkids, he thought. Hope they’re okay.
“Fort Worth, on our way up to Oklahoma City to visit their grandmother. We’re traveling with my boyfriend and his daughter.” She nodded to a muscular man sprawled on the tile, dozing, and a dangerously pretty raven-haired girl who looked to be about a sophomore in high school.
Stalwart noticed a middle-aged couple looking at him. He smiled. “I’m Mike,” he said. The man looked at him distrustfully, and the wife seemed to wilt a bit under his gaze. He extended his hand, and the man took it reluctantly. “Nice to meet you. Bob and Betty Stevens.”
Stalwart was doing much more than just whiling the time and making small talk. He had the sense that if they were to escape from the band of dim-witted thugs, it would require a great deal of trust and cooperation between them. Connection bred trust, so he set about connecting. “How long have you guys been here today?”
“Since mid-morning, I reckon,” Bob drawled, his voice and accent far friendlier than his eyes. “I guess we were maybe the third or fourth set of folks they put in here.”
“They were here when those people threw us in here,” Steph said. “That was about ten this morning.” Her face darkened. “What do you think they’re going to do to us?”
Stalwart shook his head. “Hard to say. I think we need to stick together and keep our wits about us, though. Have they fed you?”
They shook their heads.
“Given you any water?”
“Naw,” Bob said. “But the plumbing’s still on in the bathrooms.”
Good. “Has anyone looked around for an opening to get outside? A bathroom window or anything?”
Betty shook her head. “I was in the bathroom when one of them was welding the windows shut. The chubby one with all the bad teeth. He gave me the creepiest look when I shut the stall door. If I didn’t have to go so bad, I’d ’a run out of there and got Bob to look after me.”
“Men’s room windows too, I suppose?” Stalwart asked.
Bob nodded.
“Have they asked you for anything? Made you do anything?”
Steph shook her head. “Took our car keys, wallets, shoes, and shirts. Pretty degrading. The skinny kid was giving Jenna the eye.” She motioned toward the pretty black-haired girl.
“Creepy,” Jenna said.
“Probably best if you lay low, then,” Stalwart said. “Any idea where they took your clothes and shoes?”
Bob spoke up. “I reckon they turned left out the door with our stuff.”
“Away from the parking lot?”
“Reckon so.”
Stalwart considered. He tried to recall the scene as he’d been captured, but he’d been preoccupied with the sudden pain in his kidneys and the shotgun barrel pressed to his back.
He did remember one detail, though. “Isn’t there an abandoned farmhouse over that way?”
“Ain’t abandoned!” A new voice joined the conversation. Stalwart turned to see an old man leaning against the wall, wearing overalls similar to the ones worn by the kidnappers. “Been hangin’ my hat there fer nigh on forty year.”
Steph asked the obvious question. “How’d you end up here, then?”
“Them no-goods pounded on my door this mornin’ early. Mebbe an hour or two after firs’ light. Wavin’ them guns at me. I’m callin’ the law, I sez, but they jes’ starts a’laughin’. The fat one sez they arready done that. That’s when I noticed the blue an’ red lights a’flashin’. I ain’t done nothin’, I sez, but they was havin’ none of it. Got real nasty with me. Figger’d I’d best come along like they said.”
So it was planned.
Was it a coincidence that it happened today? Rogue cop and shit-for-brains rednecks decide to play wild frontier on the same day the financial system melts down?
Probably not. Early morning here meant mid-morning on the east coast, so the world knew what was going on with the financial system. And the police department would likely be attuned to anything strange, like payment systems all over the country suddenly going belly-up, so Clem probably had a solid idea that anarchy would likely break out.
So the kidnappers were opportunists.
It meant they were making things up as they went along. It gave Stalwart hope for a relatively quick resolution. Hasty plans often made for bad plans.
A loud clanging noise sounded from outside the door. The people on the floor straightened up, and some stood to face whatever was making its way inside the smelly, dank chamber. Stalwart heard the links of the chain clatter through the door handles, and felt his heartbe
at quicken. He instinctively tightened his grip on Steph’s baby boy, still cradled in his arm.
The door flew open. Rat Face stalked in, shotgun in hand. “Y’all need ta be more quiet. I don’t like to hear you plottin’ an’ sech.”
He surveyed the crowd of prisoners, as if he was looking for someone specific.
He found her.
He walked slowly toward Jenna, the pretty young girl with jet-black hair. “You.” He pointed the shotgun at her. “Come with me.”
“The hell she will!” Her dad leapt to his feet, his large, muscular frame moving with surprising quickness.
Rat Face swung the shotgun butt around with a practiced quickness. Jenna’s dad dodged the first swipe, but the effort threw him off balance, and Rat Face followed up with a second, vicious swing. It connected with a sickening crunch, and the large man’s knees buckled. He collapsed in a heap on the floor.
Rat Face racked a shell and pointed the gun at the fallen man.
“Stop!” Stalwart commanded. The baby cried at the sudden noise.
Rat Face turned his head to regard Stalwart. “You again. I know’d you’d be trouble. I told Jimbo we shoulda shot you and throw’d you in the ditch.”
“Use your head, son,” Stalwart said. “You kill that man, and you sign your own death warrant.”
Rat Face sneered. “Ain’t no law no more, old man. Jus’ us.”
“You think a little financial trouble means the end of law and order?”
“Don’t think it. I knows it.”
Rat Face clamped his hand around Jenna’s arm. Stalwart heard her soft sobs as Rat Face dragged her through the crowd, pointing his shotgun to clear a path, and hustled her out of the room.
The door slammed shut and the chains locked them in again.
My God, Stalwart thought. We’ve unleashed the animals.
14
Seattle, Washington
Sabot sat in the small, dark room, eyes glued to the computer screen. It had been three years since he’d been able to sit at a computer, and for all of that time, it had felt as though a piece of him had been missing. Though he’d learned to behave more socially since his conviction had removed machines from his life in any meaningful capacity, he still felt that he related much better to hunks of silicon than to people.
Twenty-five grand, he kept repeating to himself, checking the exchange rate obsessively as the dollar continued its free fall. The ten Bitcoins left in an electronic “wallet” by Balzzack011 as a token of good faith seemed to be climbing in value by the minute.
He switched back to the internet page that explained how the strange electronic currency worked. The information theory and cryptography behind the concept was miles above his head, but he thought he was slowly getting a grip on how things fit together.
Apparently, Bitcoins weren’t really things. They weren’t digital files that could be lost, copied, or emailed. They were simply records of transactions between addresses, called “wallets.” The whole system was nothing but a record of each transaction, sending Bitcoin amounts between wallets. If you had the passkey to gain access to a particular wallet, you controlled all the Bitcoins assigned to that wallet by the giant worldwide ledger.
It behaved like cash – users just sent Bitcoin amounts between themselves in exchange for goods or services – with an important difference. If you lost a dollar, you were just out one dollar. But if you lost the passkey for a particular Bitcoin wallet, you lost everything in that wallet.
When the currency first came out, and each coin was worth little more than a penny or two, some guy had stashed something like ten thousand coins on his computer, and had subsequently forgotten about them – the coins were worth maybe twenty bucks altogether at the time – and he eventually replaced the hard drive containing his passkey.
A few years later, when Bitcoin values went through the roof, that same guy realized his mistake. Sabot had read that the poor bastard had spent two full weeks sifting through a landfill, looking for the lost hard drive containing the password to unlock millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins. He finally gave up.
So when you get ‘em, you gotta hang onto ‘em.
But how do you get them? They apparently called the process “mining,” but it really wasn’t that at all. Sabot realized it was really just a sexy name given to a very unsexy problem that needed solving: someone had to do the bookkeeping for all of these transactions.
What made the Bitcoin system unique, and therefore, valuable and irreplaceable, was the fact that all of the bookkeeping was done publicly. The ledger was the currency, in effect. There really was no physical or digital thing floating around, other than the record of past transactions, encoded forever in what amounted to the currency’s genome.
Transactions were a little weird. People didn’t physically transfer any money when they bought things with Bitcoin. Rather, they simply broadcast coded messages to the entire world, saying something along the lines of, “I hereby pay Joe Bagodonuts 1.69 Bitcoins.”
At least, that’s how Sabot visualized the process. In reality, it was a bit more complicated, but he tried not to get hung up on the technical details. For the moment, he just wanted to know what the hell it was that he was going to be stealing for his new and very generous employers.
When people “mined” Bitcoin, they were really just verifying the validity of each transaction. It was really quite ingenious, Sabot thought. Each deal, large or small, was announced to the world using the internet. “Miners” competed to be the first to package and encrypt a record of that transaction, appending it to a “block chain” of previous transactions for posterity, and cementing the transaction into the permanent ledger. There was no welshing on a deal, because the whole world acted as witness.
Whenever a particular computer – an individual “miner” – won the worldwide competition to verify and encode the latest block of transactions, that computer would announce its victory to the world. Every other computer on the planet would then cease working on the now-obsolete problem, and start working to encode the new problem, appending newer transactions to the latest block chain that was just generated by the winning computer.
As a reward for the effort, the winning computer received 25 Bitcoins, which appeared out of nowhere, just as if they’d been dug up out of the ground like a hunk of gold or silver.
It hurt his head a little bit to think about the way it all fit together, but it slowly started to make sense. It seemed like the idea had caught on because nobody really had the ability to manipulate the currency. It wasn’t owned by a central bank. People were basically free to decide between themselves what was a fair price to pay for things. It just used the power of the network and millions of people participating in the process to make the whole thing go.
There were countries on earth whose money couldn’t be relied upon – his own now among them, Sabot realized – and this Bitcoin thing seemed like a nifty way to hedge your bets. It all seemed agreeably democratic, and it appealed to his hacker ethos.
Plus, cryptocurrency appeared to be pissing off the governments of the world. In general, anything that made governments unhappy tended to put a smile on Sabot’s face.
He switched over to another window to start searching for ideas on how to steal Bitcoins when a headline on one of the search engine returns caught his eye: “Doomsday Predictions True?” Sabot clicked and skimmed.
Apparently, people had been arguing about “safe money” for quite a while. The whole thing sounded political, which wasn’t his thing, and Sabot was about to click off the site when a phrase in the text jumped out at him: “What would you do if you couldn’t withdraw money from your bank?”
Sonuvabitch! With everything going on, he hadn’t thought to check his own bank account. He didn’t have an online password, of course, but he had the bank’s phone number memorized.
He got a recording. “We’re sorry, but we are unable to provide account balances, or to accommodate transfer requests, money orders
, payments, or withdrawals, at this time. ATM transactions are also not supported. Please visit our website for the latest information on this rapidly evolving situation.”
This is serious shit, man. He had bills coming due. He couldn’t be late with the rent again. The old hag would kick them out.
He navigated to his bank’s website. “We regret that we are closed until further notice. Please check back frequently for updates.”
Where’s my damn money?
He opened the Bitcoin wallet again. Twenty-seven thousand smackers. For ten tiny little Bitcoins.
Of course, he realized that the number could have been a zillion dollars, and it wouldn’t have mattered. He couldn’t sell the Bitcoins for dollars, because nobody seemed to have access to dollars. And who would want dollars if Sabot did get his hands on some cash? The value was vanishing too quickly.
He realized that his ten Bitcoins weren’t making him richer as the dollar’s value kept falling in comparison. He just wasn’t going to be quite as poor as everyone else.
Maybe he’d be able to use Bitcoins to buy food. There wasn’t much in the pantry at home.
He suddenly had a much greater understanding of why his new employers had hired him to steal Bitcoins. There wasn’t much else around to buy things with.
He thought of Balzzack011’s payment terms. Sabot could keep 0.5% of all of the Bitcoins he collected.
I’m going to collect a lot of those little things, he resolved.
15
Langley Air Force Base, Virginia
Sam handed the flight manifest printout back to the desk sergeant at Langley’s base operations center. If the manifest wasn’t a smoking gun, it was damn close.
Her phone rang. Wish those silly things would quit working, too, she groused. A little peace and quiet for a few days would be nice. “Hi, Dan,” she answered.
“What’d you think of the Monopoly Man show?”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 148