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

by Lars Emmerich

  “What a coincidence. It was dreaming about you.”

  “So I gathered.” One thing led to another. They shared a loud, breathless orgasm, then laughed together about their lack of consideration for the neighbors asleep next door.

  He caressed her cheek, amazed again that she had just given herself to him. “This kind of thing happens to me all the time,” he teased. “Simulgasms with brainy Playboy models, I mean.”

  She laughed. “Color me flattered. I’m glad you didn’t object to my advances. I’m a sucker for a nice ass in Armani.”

  “I don’t even mind that you were paid to spy on me.” It was a serious statement, but Protégé delivered it with a lighthearted smile.

  Allison smiled in return. “I only agreed after they showed me your picture.”

  Protégé laughed. “We’ve never really talked about it. I figure our one-week anniversary is as good a time as any.” He rolled over onto his back. “How long were you in on the whole take-over-the-world plot?”

  “Months,” she said. “I see things differently than most people, so it wasn’t an ideological stretch for me.”

  “What would you have done if I got cold feet?”

  “Cold feet regarding you and me?”

  Protégé shook his head. “Not possible. I meant, what if I had decided not to steal the transmitter and drive it down to Langley?”

  “My orders were to kill you. I thought maybe death by sexual overexertion.”

  He laughed out loud. “What a gorgeous way to go.”

  “Actually,” she said, smiling, leg draped across his pelvis, “I was just supposed to let them know if you had second thoughts. I think they just wanted a heads up if you changed your mind.”

  “Are you glad I didn’t?”

  “I was agnostic, really.” She rolled over on top of him and bit his neck. “I care much more about your libido than your politics.”

  Protégé finished his breakfast of fresh eggs, fried Colorado brook trout, and sliced tomatoes, plucked fresh from the aquaponic greenhouse in back of the ranch house, and marveled again that everything was produced sustainably and within a mile of where they sat. He glanced at Archive, sopping egg yolk with a slice of homemade bread, and inquired about the total investment the old man had sunk into constructing the ranch.

  “Would a dollar figure be meaningful at this point?” Archive asked, amused.

  Protégé shook his head. “It’s difficult to recalibrate my sense of value. I’m still a dollar dude.”

  “I suppose you can be forgiven. We’re only four days into the new world order.” He smiled. “All told, I spent just north of fourteen million, including all the land and permits.”

  Protégé was surprised. “That’s peanuts, actually.”

  “The Ranch and surrounding land produce almost everything to support a few dozen of us indefinitely. Tough to put a price on that.”

  “True wealth, I suppose,” Allison said, gazing out the enormous picture window and across the mountain valley, marveling again at the scale of the peak on the other side of the lake.

  A new voice joined the conversation. “I hate to interrupt the economics lesson,” Trojan said, standing in the entryway to the enormous dining room, wearing the beginnings of a smile, “but I’ve discovered something important.”

  “What am I looking at?” Archive asked, squinting at the large screen on the wall, now containing a map of the Northwestern United States, spotted with hundreds of red dots.

  “I made the assumption that the Bitcoin thefts we experienced were all pulled off by the same person or group of people,” Trojan said. “Obviously, it might have been a false assumption, but I thought it would be a useful mental framework to approach the problem. It led me to plot the geographical distribution of IP addresses used in the thefts.”

  “I think I’m following,” Archive said, “but I think it would be useful if you explained all of this to me as if I were a small child.”

  Trojan laughed. “I’ll try. The Bitcoin network keeps track of every single transaction in the world, and the list of transactions becomes a permanent part of what the inventors of the protocol called a ‘block chain.’ The thieves hacked into some of our Bitcoin accounts using our account numbers and passwords, and in effect, transferred coins from our wallets to wallets of their own.”

  “But all of the thefts were permanently recorded,” Protégé said.

  Trojan nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Doesn’t seem too smart,” Allison said. “I thought those transactions were supposed to be anonymous.”

  “That’s a common myth. They’re not quite personalized, and it takes a little bit of savvy to associate a Bitcoin wallet with the computer that last accessed the account, but it can be done.”

  “So you looked up the IP addresses of the computers that accessed all those accounts?” Archive asked.

  Trojan nodded. “I wrote a script to do it for me, but that’s right. And each IP address can also be traced to a physical location.”

  Protégé pointed to the collection of red dots overlaid on the map of the US. “So those are all the computers that were involved in stealing Bitcoins from us?”

  “Well, not quite,” Trojan said. “If I were going to steal a bunch of Bitcoins from a bunch of different accounts, I would use an IP address masking program to make it look like someone else did it.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to choose the fake account numbers randomly?”

  The diminutive hacker shook his head. “You wouldn’t want to use fake addresses, because the whole idea would be to create a long list of people for the authorities to have to investigate. Fake addresses wouldn’t be associated with a real person, so there would be no false trail to waste investigation time.”

  “You have quite a devious mind,” Archive said.

  Trojan smiled. “Comes with the territory. Anyway, the idea is to find computer IP addresses belonging to real people, that are actually online at the time the theft was committed, in order to end up with a list of thousands of apparent suspects.”

  “They have programs that do that?” Protégé asked.

  “Much easier than you might think. But there’s a problem, something I think the thief didn’t consider.” He pointed to the dots on the map. “In order to steal online IP addresses, you first have to search for them, and you can’t search the entire globe at the same time. The IP search program is a victim of the internet’s architecture, in that it detects the nearest active IP addresses before it detects online computers that are further away.”

  “So the process isn’t truly random?” Protégé asked.

  “Exactly. The randomizer chooses randomly from among the list of active IP addresses, but it builds the list based on the active IP addresses nearest to it. So the effect, in aggregate, isn’t really random at all.”

  “Producing a nice geographic distribution centered on the thief’s actual location, I’m guessing,” Archive said.

  “Right, but only if you can put together a long enough list of theft transactions. But for safety reasons, our Bitcoin assets were distributed across hundreds of accounts.” Trojan snapped his fingers. “So automatically, because we have so many wallets, we can build a nice map of the IP addresses they used.”

  “And the thieves are roughly in the center of that distribution?” Allison asked.

  “Exactly,” Trojan beamed. “In this case, Seattle.”

  “I’m glad you’re on our side,” Protégé said, shaking his head.

  Trojan smiled demurely. “I don’t know. We’re up against some serious talent. Whoever put this theft operation together did a damn fine job. They have exquisite skills. Maybe only a handful of guys on the planet could have pulled it off. We just got lucky that we were paranoid enough to spread our assets out over so many accounts.”

  Archive laughed. “With apologies, I feel compelled to make the obvious observation that just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t actually out to get us.”
>
  34

  Seattle, Washington

  Sabot sat at the kitchen counter in Connie’s house as dawn broke, chancing a brief connection via the Almighty Interwebs to count his spoils.

  It was an impressive number, becoming more so by the minute.

  He wasn’t quite sure how the money thing would ultimately shake out, but he liked Bitcoin’s chances, given its lack of central control. Plenty of governments could mess with it, just like they could mess with guns and books and taxes, but he was relatively certain there would still be a market running in Bitcoins somewhere.

  At least, he was convinced they would ultimately be worth more, in real terms, than whatever ended up replacing the greenback atop the fiat currency heap.

  Something caught his eye. What the hell?

  He got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The mouse cursor had moved. He was certain of it.

  In a flash, he had opened a copy of Wireshark, a program that let him view the messages his computer was sending and receiving over the modem. It took less than a minute to confirm his suspicions.

  Spyware.

  Someone had installed a key logger on the new computer he’d just purchased the night before from Doggy Style. It was broadcasting messages back to different computer addresses at a rate of about one report every four and a half minutes.

  They don’t play around. He’d broken the plastic seal around the computer himself just hours before, and had ensured it was clean of spyware. These aren’t teenage script kiddies. He figured a state security apparatus, or the remnants of one, or some other group with deep talent and resources to burn.

  Like maybe the organization that Balzzack011 worked for, whatever the hell it was.

  They know. He’d set up another Bitcoin operation for his own benefit, a clone of the one he’d created for Balzzack011. The spyware had born silent witness, then reported Sabot’s dalliance to his masters.

  His heart pounded in his chest. He had known that something like this was a possibility, but he wasn’t truly prepared for it. He fought panic.

  Get your shit together, bro!

  Sabot watched the message traffic until the spyware made its next report. Then he started his stopwatch. Four and a half minutes, vato. Don’t screw it up!

  His fingers flew into frenzied action, floating over the keyboard, working desperately to sneak his fortune out from under the bastards’ noses before the spyware made its next report.

  He bought server space through Tor, the anonymizing network, paying in Bitcoins. One minute gone.

  He paid for exclusive use of an entire server, which was not a small investment even in normal times. Another minute later, he had his Bitcoin theft program up and running on the remote server, the ones and zeroes piling inside a computer in a server farm probably located in an old mine shaft, disused auto manufacturing plant, or other industrial relic that was sufficiently uninteresting to the layman.

  A brief eternity later, Sabot saw confirmation that the remote machine had begun adding to his growing stack of pilfered riches.

  Ninety seconds left. Faster!

  He used Excel’s randomizing function to create a one-time cipher, still the most secure encryption method available, then pasted the encoded list of Bitcoin accounts and passwords onto his new server. He copied the cipher – the code that would unlock what was rapidly becoming a fortune of global proportions, and without which Sabot would be just as penniless as the next poor schmuck – onto a zip drive disguised as a tube of lip balm.

  The fortune of a lifetime, sitting in the palm of his hands.

  Thirty seconds. One more failsafe.

  He grabbed a new thumb drive, this one hidden inside a heart pendant. He pasted the encoded account list to the portable data drive and unplugged it, just as his stopwatch crossed four minutes and fifteen seconds.

  Then he ripped out the power cord, pried the laptop’s battery loose, and smashed the computer on the floor.

  Too close, esé!

  Had he made it?

  The question was academic. Knowing the answer wouldn’t have changed anything.

  He picked through the shards of shattered computer parts until he found the hard drive, putting it into his pocket just as Angie made her way into the kitchen, pulling her robe around her shoulders, sleepy and concerned. “Dingo, what’s going on?”

  He rose to face her.

  Her face changed.

  She knows.

  He saw her eyes fall, tears forming. “You promised,” she whispered.

  “Baby, I kept that promise. I provided for us. I made a life for us. It’s time for you to trust me.”

  She shook her head, tears falling freely. “No, Dingo, I can’t be part of this.”

  He grabbed her arms and looked in her eyes. “Angie, they came for me. I didn’t start this. Do you understand? They found me, okay? I did what had to be done.”

  He saw fear and anger in her eyes. “Because of your past.” It was more accusation than question.

  Sabot snorted. “Of course, because of my past! And because of my job. My goddamned FBI job, Angie, the one I go to every day! These people know what they’re doing.”

  The tears intensified, her shoulders shaking as she cried, Sabot’s embrace tightening around her.

  The crying stopped, and Angie pulled away. Sabot saw her eyes fall to the groceries on the counter, and to the destroyed computer on the floor, weighing one against the other. She shook her head. “I knew this was going to happen.”

  “Bullshit!” Sabot was suddenly irate, the tension and exhaustion finally getting the better of him. “You knew the world would go to shit? You knew they would kidnap me and threaten me and make me steal for them? You knew that?”

  Connie appeared in the doorway, cigarette in hand, scowl on her face, displeased by the early-morning commotion, instantly taking Angie’s side out of an entirely predictable maternal bias, but one for which Sabot had no tolerance at the moment.

  “Angie,” he said, still talking too loudly for the scant distance between their faces, “these people turned on us, just like their kind always do. I took precautions, okay? I took care of you.”

  He looked at Connie, still glaring at him from the doorway. “And I took care of you too! That food you ate last night? Where do you think it came from? I did that.” He pounded his finger into his own chest. “Me. And there’s much more out there where that came from. There’s a whole economy rising up, and I’m in the middle of it. I know how it works. And I’m really good at it.”

  Connie nodded slowly.

  Angie looked at him for a long moment.

  “Okay, Dingo,” she finally said, eyes softening. “What now?”

  Sabot slammed Connie’s car trunk shut, their hastily-packed bags barely fitting inside the large white import. Just for a few days, he had lied, knowing that Angie’s over-packing penchant was undoubtedly genetic.

  “Can I see your phone, babe?” Angie handed her handset to him. He composed a text message to Doggy Style: “Dinosaurs?” Slang for gasoline.

  The reply was almost instantaneous. “WTHAY?” Who the hell are you? Angie’s cell number was unfamiliar to the young black-market entrepreneur.

  Sabot identified himself, and Doggy Style’s tone changed instantly. A devastating hacking victory, such as the one Sabot had attained over the skinny white kid with all of the handy barter-economy connections, went a long way toward creating a conducive atmosphere for business. “My man! For you? Brontosaurs! But ching ching.” Lots of gas, but it would be pricey.

  “Can you dlvr 10 gals in 30 min?” Half an hour wasn’t a lot of time for the kid to work his connections, Sabot knew, but time wasn’t on their side.

  He had another thought. “Throw in a burner and a gun, too?”

  Long pause. “10 BTC,” Doggy Style replied.

  Sabot laughed aloud. “4get who ur talkin to?” It was an outrageous sum.

  “Make me an offer.”

  They came to terms – two
Bitcoins, equivalent at the moment to six thousand dollars, but climbing rapidly – and agreed on a meeting location.

  Sabot asked Angie to drive, then thought of something important. “We gotta leave behind all our cell phones.” There was gnashing of teeth, which escalated to an uncomfortable pitch when he mentioned that the girls’ e-readers had to stay behind, as well. “Yeah, it sucks,” he finally said. “But it beats getting a knife between the vertebrae.”

  Moments later, with their personal electronic devices reluctantly abandoned, Angie merged onto northbound traffic on the highway. “Canada,” Sabot said when Angie asked about their destination, which had thrown Connie into something between a mild conniption and transpolar orbit.

  But he didn’t relent. He wasn’t sure who was pulling Balzzack011’s strings – or the Bureau’s strings, for that matter – but he didn’t plan to leave any advantage on the table, even if the concept of national sovereignty appeared to be in the throes of a serious test at the moment. Best to put as many barriers as possible – real and virtual – between himself and his employers.

  35

  East of Denver, Colorado

  It looked like the Rocky Mountains had endured an early winter snowstorm. A fresh blanket of white reflected the bright Colorado sun, a little painful on the eyes, maybe more potent than at lower elevations because of the thin atmosphere, Sam supposed.

  Her eyes were red and irritated, a byproduct of having driven through the night to reach Denver with minimal interruption by the nouveau barbarians and highway robbers who had come out of the woodwork since society’s strictures had suddenly gone slack a few days earlier.

  Brock dozed in the passenger’s seat, but Mike Charles was wide awake in the rear, behind the plexiglass shield, staring absently, his face tinged with a bit of a maudlin look, Sam thought. Let him stew.

  She felt her cell phone buzz, and found herself squinting to make out the words on the text message. I need to get my eyes checked. A little bit of sleep probably wouldn’t kill anyone, either.