The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  He navigated to a local news station’s website, hoping for an update on conditions out in the suburbs, where Angie’s mom lived.

  As the page loaded, he was struck by its incongruous levity. Instead of pictures of the looting and rioting, as he’d expected to see, Sabot was greeted by a cartoon figure of an old man with a giant, white mustache, wearing a tuxedo and top hat. What the hell? Wasn’t that the guy from that money game? Monopoly or something?

  It appeared to be a video. Sabot clicked play, and turned up the speaker volume.

  The Monopoly guy danced to cheesy music for a while, then stopped, pointed, and spoke. “You’re free, but you don’t believe it yet. That’s why you’re behaving so poorly. Yessiree. Free but ignorant. That’s you. Most of you, anyway.”

  Then an exaggerated smile, complete with a cartoonish sparkle from one of his teeth. “But you’ve been pondering. You’ve thought about what I asked you last time. I can tell you’ve been thinking about it, because you’re starting to make agreements with each other again. Not everywhere, mind you. But in some places, you’re starting to get it figured out.”

  The cartoon figure hopped and clicked his heels. “Remember, those dirty dollars weren’t things at all.”

  More dancing.

  “Sure,” he continued, spreading his arms, “the oligarchs might be a little angry that all their dollars have turned to dust.”

  His smile widened. “But not you.” He pointed at the screen “You are about to realize that you have just been handed the biggest gift in modern history.” The last word echoed dramatically, followed by more hopping and heel-clicking.

  “Just remember,” the cartoon said as it danced over to the side of the screen. “Money is just a symbol. The important thing is the agreement between us.”

  Then the cartoon’s face turned serious, and he pointed a gloved finger at his listeners. “And for Pete’s sake,” he said gravely. “Be nice to each other.”

  Monopoly Man waved goodbye and disappeared.

  “That shit is whacked,” Sabot said aloud, shaking his head.

  He stood up and headed for the snack bar, lamenting its dwindling supply of ramen noodles. Maybe I need to make an agreement with somebody to restock this place. I’m about to starve to death.

  24

  Carter County, Oklahoma

  Sam killed the rented Hyundai’s engine, cursing the small cloud of haze and dust she had kicked up by repositioning the car a few hundred yards off of the dirt trail, hiding it behind a low berm. She didn’t want the goons to discover they were being watched before she had a chance to formulate a plan.

  She shut the car door, patted her Kimber .45 in its pancake holster, and walked in a low crouch back toward the small stand of trees, which sat roughly an eighth of a mile north of the run-down barn.

  Sam sidled up next to Brock, who was lying prone on his stomach and surveilling the farmhouse. Together, they watched a man climb into the police cruiser and exit the farmhouse driveway onto the dirt road, driving back out toward the paved thoroughfare several miles to the north.

  They flattened their bodies as the cruiser drove by, holding their breath, praying not to be seen, exhaling only after the cop car was well out of sight and nearly out of earshot.

  “One fewer bastard to deal with,” Sam said.

  Brock nodded. “So we’re going to rescue these people, then?”

  Sam laughed. “We’re not here to play bridge. And I sure as hell don’t care to join them in the barn.”

  “So you have a plan?”

  Sam shook her head. “Not at all. But something usually comes to mind.”

  “You never cease to amaze me,” Brock said, giving her a peck on the cheek. “And you scare me a little bit, too.”

  Sam’s response was interrupted by what she instantly recognized as a shotgun blast, coming from the barn.

  Stalwart stood, legs unsteady and knees shaking, his feet sinking into the shit-filled hay inside the barn, holding his hands in a calming gesture. His ears were still ringing from the shotgun blast in closed quarters.

  He took a deep breath to speak. The smell of animal waste, cordite, and blood hung heavy in the air, threatening to choke him. His voice quieted a wailing wife and the softly sobbing group of mourners that surrounded her.

  Her husband’s body lay crumpled in their midst, undoubtedly left as a grisly object lesson.

  “Something horrible is happening here,” Stalwart said. He spoke in low tones, both to avoid being overheard by the murderous dirtbags who had just left the barn, and because he knew that people listened more intently to a quiet, calm voice than a strident one.

  “I think we all hoped for the best at the beginning of this ordeal. I think we all hoped that if we cooperated with them for a while, they would let us go.”

  Nods of assent. The victim’s wife sobbed a little louder, then quieted as more fellow prisoners embraced her.

  “Things have become dramatically worse,” Stalwart continued, “and I think we need to put our heads together to come up with a plan.”

  “Damn straight.” A young man in the back.

  “But here is what we absolutely must do,” Stalwart said, making eye contact with each of the male members of the group. “We must stop losing our cool. If we want to live, if we want to get out of this situation, then we have to use our heads.”

  “You wanna stand by and take this shit?” someone asked.

  Stalwart shook his head. “You better believe that I’ll be first in line to rip their throats out. But we need to be smart about this. Two guys let their emotions get the best of them, and we’re now grieving their loss.”

  “They raped those girls!” an athletic-looking twenty-something said.

  Stalwart nodded grimly. “Which is why I would love to kill them slowly and painfully,” he said. “But we’ll never get the chance unless we keep our wits and work together.”

  More nods of assent. “We’ve already proven that a one-man unarmed assault isn’t the way to go,” someone said.

  “We have to be smart. This is a bad situation,” Stalwart continued, “but it’s not un-winnable. These guys aren’t that bright, and this isn’t the Hanoi Hilton. Let’s figure something out.”

  Sam took a swig of water from their provisions and handed the bottle to Brock. It had been nearly half an hour since they’d watched two men in overalls, one fat, one skinny, both armed, exit the barn and shuffle onto the farmhouse porch. The men had perched themselves atop aging porch furniture and propped their shotguns across their laps.

  “I think it’s safe to assume that these guys know an awful lot about that corpse at the rest stop,” Sam said.

  Brock nodded. “No shit. I can’t help wondering whether that was a warning shot we heard, or if it was…”

  Sam grimaced. “Bad situation either way.”

  They heard the porch door creak open and saw a third man walk out from within the farmhouse, bottles of beer in his hand. He handed one out to each of his companions, then sat on the stoop.

  “I’m not in favor of strolling up to the porch and striking up a conversation,” Brock said.

  Sam nodded. “The book says I have to attempt to read their Miranda rights to them. But I don’t expect much cooperation. You okay with pulling the trigger on someone?”

  “You forget that I’m a veteran of two wars. I’ve dropped a hundred tons of steel and tritonal on bad guys on two continents.”

  Sam smiled. “I know, tough guy, but this is a little bit different. This kind of stuff will stick with you.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. I watched you kill a guy with your bare hands once, remember? That would have scared off a lesser boyfriend, I think.”

  Sam smiled. “Reason number one zillion that I love your big dick. I think it makes you much less insecure than average.”

  He laughed. “It loves you right back.”

  Her face turned serious. “Here’s what I’m thinking.” She outlined her plan.
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  25

  Seattle, Washington

  Sabot watched the computer screen while munching a bag of chocolates, which represented the last food-like product in the converted warehouse where he’d spent the better part of the last twenty-four hours. He’d curled up on the floor for a brief nap, but was awakened after less than an hour by the ringing phone. It was Angie.

  Everything was fine, she’d said, but the world was going to hell, and fast. There were starting to be roving blackouts in the suburbs, she’d said, something about the power plants running out of coal and not being able to buy more. And they were running out of food.

  Sabot relayed the news about their compromised apartment, and filled her in on the strange turn of events with his employer.

  Angie had been silent for a long time when he told her he’d been working at a computer since the afternoon prior. “Dingo, baby, if you go back to jail, I’m not waiting for you.”

  “Adkins’ orders,” he’d said. Which was true – his FBI handler had told him in no uncertain terms that he was to do as his new employers desired.

  But Sabot was pretty sure Adkins had no idea they’d asked him to commit larceny on a spectacular scale. He irrationally hoped the subject never came up, but a part of him knew those were unlikely odds.

  They made arrangements for Angie to come pick him up, and they planned to stay the night at her mom’s house. Angie would arrive in a little over two hours, which made Sabot feel anxious. He had a lot to do.

  He checked the running tally of stolen Bitcoins on his computer monitor, then did some quick math using the latest exchange rate. His automated scripts had swiped a little over $300,000 worth of Bitcoins. Not bad for a few hours’ work.

  Of course, he wasn’t sure what $300,000 was worth anymore. Compared to just a day earlier, it took just shy of ten times as many dollars to buy a Euro, and a little more than eight times as many greenbacks to buy Yen. But all of them were in free-fall compared to the price of gold and silver. I shoulda bought more bling. And oil prices were through the roof – almost fifteen hundred dollars a barrel.

  It was hard to wrap his mind around it all. He was accustomed to measuring the value of everything in terms of dollars. So it felt like a barrel of oil had suddenly become twenty times more valuable than it had been the day before, but he knew that wasn’t right. A barrel of oil was a barrel of oil. It hadn’t suddenly become twenty times more scarce in the last day.

  So that’s what happens when the money goes to shit. He thought of a picture he’d seen of a Zimbabwean trillion dollar bill. It bought a pack of gum or something, if he remembered the story correctly.

  It reminded him of a snarky blog post title he’d read while researching Bitcoin earlier in the day: Welcome to the Third World, America. It was starting to look like the European blogger’s gleeful and schadenfreude-filled prediction was more prescient than Sabot had originally thought.

  He thought about his brilliant hack of the BitChange system, and all of the riches he was making for Balzzack011, whoever the hell that was, and he felt himself growing resentful of having to hand over nearly all of the spoils. It was his skill and savvy that had produced the bounty, after all, and he began to feel taken advantage of. We’ll have to see about all of that, he thought.

  But he was certain that Balzzack011 was watching him. It was inevitable. They wouldn’t give a computer to one of the world’s best hackers without protecting themselves by installing a key logger at minimum, and probably several other layers of spyware. If he was going to slice some of that Bitcoin pie for himself, he’d have to find a different computer to do it with.

  His eyes were drawn back to the rising tally of stolen Bitcoins on his monitor. Swiping coins at the rate of a hundred an hour – safely and securely, no less – was an impressive accomplishment, but you couldn’t eat a Bitcoin, and Sabot was hungry. So were Angie and her mom, from the sound of things.

  Beaners gotta eat. Ain’t like the farmer’s market is open today.

  But his years as a hacker had taught him that there was almost always a way to get what you wanted. And since digital currency seemed to be holding up much better than the paper stuff at the moment, he was pretty sure that if anyone had figured out how to turn digital currency in to tangible goods, it was probably the hackers.

  Back to the Dark Web. He opened a browser window and typed a series of symbols into the address bar: J57—4—1u1z. The web address was a phrase written in a web dialect called “Leet,” a name derived by bastardizing the word elite. Leet was a combination of slang words and homographic representations of letters. Leet users replaced letters with symbols or numbers that were similar in shape, to communicate the same words while avoiding chat room or website filters, and also to stymie neophytes lurking in the chatrooms.

  Leet was second nature to Sabot, and his mind instantly thought of the symbols he had typed as “Just for Lulz.” It was the name of a chat room frequented by power geeks.

  “Lulz” was itself a bastardization of the popular expression “LOL,” and a working transliteration of the chat room’s title was “Just for giggles.” It was a hangout for the bored and slightly malicious.

  Sabot had been watching chat room activity for the last three years, but always from a distance, relegated to reading hard-copy printouts handed to him by FBI investigators. So he needed to create a new identity in order to participate. He called himself n008 1337, Leet for “Noob Elite.”

  A noob was a newcomer, subject under normal conditions to merciless ridicule and slander. But to call oneself “elite” was an outrageous boast and a horrific violation of unwritten hacker protocol. Sabot knew it would draw incredible amounts of vicious vitriol. That was exactly what he wanted – it would draw idle users in from the sidelines.

  It didn’t take long before nasty comments began to rack up, variations on the usual themes of maternal fornication, homosexuality, and bestiality, and Sabot made note of the usernames that contributed.

  Then he searched the chat room’s archives for previous posts made by those users, looking for references to Bitcoin and its uses in local real-goods economic transactions.

  A particularly vociferous gentleman with the username “|>0gg`/ 57`/13,” which Sabot recognized instantly as the words “Doggy Style,” had written a string of posts in which he bragged about how easy it was to get almost anything you needed, just by using Bitcoins and the right connections. “Just gotta look around, man,” one post read. “Ppl still wanna sell shit & ppl still wanna buy shit. I’m livin BIG yo.”

  Bingo.

  Sabot got to work “doxing” the user named Doggy Style. Doxing was hacker slang for figuring out a person’s real identity using online clues. Hackers who hung out in the Dark Web were generally ruthless, capricious, and merciless, and protecting one’s real-life identity was paramount. Ruined relationships, lost jobs, and frozen bank accounts were frequent side-effects of failing to keep private information private.

  But it was child’s play for Sabot. He had risen to the top of the hacker dog pile for a good reason: he was damn good. It took a little bit less than an hour to dox Doggy Style and hack into his private computer, and Sabot was soon watching a webcam video feed of a lanky white kid just out of his teens, sitting in a small room with video game posters on the wall and action figures visible on a shelf in the background.

  Sabot clicked a few keys, and watched gleefully as Doggy Style’s eyes widened. Damn, that never gets old! He had just caused the video feed to pop open on Doggy Style’s computer, and the kid had suddenly been confronted with an unexpected live camera view of himself. Sabot had just announced his arrival in grand fashion.

  He saw Doggy Style’s eyes flit about the screen, and watched as he typed at his keyboard. “Very funny, fkr,” Doggy Style’s chatroom entry said.

  Sabot responded. “Fkg ownd.” I freaking owned you.

  “What do you want?”

  “Pay ur respects, then we’ll talk,” Sabot typed. He watched the v
ideo feed. The kid dutifully took off his shoe and held it above his head, as if he were being stepped on like a bug. It was a hacker tradition, making the victim acknowledge his defeat and powerlessness.

  “Good man,” Sabot typed. “I got skillz, you got cnxnxs. Lets do biz.”

  “Whatchu need?” Doggy Style asked.

  “Food,” Sabot typed. “And chipzezz.” Slang for a new computer. It was a risk. If Balzzack011 could decipher what Sabot had just asked for, there would be trouble. But Sabot was betting that Balzzack011 wasn’t sufficiently well versed in hacker slang to catch the hidden meaning. If confronted, Sabot would claim he was asking for Doritos.

  Sabot smiled as he read Doggy Style’s response. “EZ. I gotchu bro.”

  26

  Carter County, Oklahoma

  Sam and Brock knelt low between emaciated tree trunks in the small thicket, shielding their eyes from the early afternoon sun as they watched the farmhouse.

  But for a trip inside the house to fetch more beer, the three men hadn’t moved from their positions on the porch. They passed what looked like a glass pipe and lighter between them, taking turns holding the flame beneath the pipe’s bowl while sucking on its mouth, and laughter soon rolled up the small hill.

  “Crack?” Brock asked.

  Sam shook her head. “Too expensive and exotic for this area. That’s probably a home chemistry experiment.”

  “Meth?”

  Sam nodded. “The new rural business of choice, now that farming has consolidated.”

  “Doesn’t it screw up their teeth?”

  “Yep. Great job security for dentists, except nobody but the dealers can afford dental work.”

  She pointed to a low, uniform berm running north to south, on the west side of the farmhouse. “Irrigation ditch, looks like. We can approach using the berm for cover. I’m thinking it’s the only way to get to the house without being spotted.”