Archive smiled. “That’s certainly an interpretation that some people will choose.”
Sam arched her eyebrows, silently piercing the pregnant pause with the obvious question, But?
“But over ninety-eight percent of the world was enslaved in a debt they had no say in creating. How might they feel, when the insight dawns that they are no longer beholden?”
Helluva point.
Sam nodded slowly, the beginnings of a smile on her face. She noticed gears turning in Dan and Brock’s heads, too. And the young guy with the stupid name, Protégé, seemed to wear a bit of a smug smirk.
“Hero of the commoner,” Sam said. “Cue the trumpets. But a little devil’s advocacy here. What about the people to whom those debts are owed?”
“Yes, the famous One Percent. Really, the one-tenth of one percent these days. If they weren’t smart enough to stay away from paper assets, they’re bound to be exceptionally worse off than they were on Monday. Some will surely contemplate murder. But a few of them will call me up to thank me.”
“How do you figure?” Brock asked. “You zeroed out their net worth.”
“Every episode of class upheaval in the last two centuries has involved some variation on the French Revolution theme.”
“Off with their heads?” Sam asked.
“Exactly. The rich are rarely rehabilitatable, at least to the angry proletariat on the rise. France, Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, half of Latin America, and every almost-nation in the Sahel on a bi-annual basis. And I’m sure I’m missing a few. They slaughter the fat cats. Well, I’m betting that a few of our wiser fat cats will recognize that they escaped this little revolution with their lives and families intact. Besides, if they haven’t bothered to tuck a little wealth away, I have no sympathy for them.”
“But you robbed them of their wealth,” Dan said, evidently still in bad-cop mode, which made little sense to Sam given the conspirators’ talkativeness.
“The crux of the matter, young man,” Archive said, causing Sam to cringe at the avuncular condescension she knew Dan wouldn’t take kindly to, “is that painted paper is rarely a suitable proxy for wealth.”
“Yet painted paper is the way we signify ownership of everything valuable,” Dan argued.
Archive beamed again. “Ahh, yes! Absolutely! You’ve uncovered the very heart of the thing, haven’t you?”
Another pregnant pause.
Get to the point, please, Sam nearly said.
“The agreements between us only work until they don’t. And then they need to be reviewed, renewed, or removed.”
“You’ve been waiting a long time to use that line, haven’t you?” Sam asked.
Archive chuckled. “I am perhaps unduly proud of a well-turned phrase.”
Brock laughed. “Time to shoot a new Monopoly Man video?”
“Brilliant idea.”
“And you’re saying that the dollar was a social agreement gone wrong,” Sam summarized.
“Horribly so.” Archive gazed off into the distance. “My comrades and I overlaid history’s template on the future. Global-scale upheaval was inevitable, and the turmoil would have been disastrous for the true capital in the world, the infrastructure, production, and natural resources that sustain our lives and societies. We sought to kill the disease before it killed the host. Before it killed us.”
Five minds chewed on that little gem, picturing wars, fires, hangings, and other atrocities, stark contrast to the mountain serenity surrounding them at the moment.
Before Sam reached any conclusions, the sliding glass door opened, and she turned to see a short, skinny man with a disproportionately large nose.
“May I introduce one of the world’s foremost computer scientists,” Archive beamed. “We call him Trojan.”
“Sounds more like a prophylactic,” Brock said, aiming to keep the comment beneath is breath, but missing.
The hacker ignored the barb. “There’s a development, boss,” Trojan said. He looked at the crowd and hesitated.
“We’re friends,” Archive said. “All in this together now.”
Sam wasn’t so sure about that. Things were about one hair’s width from turning completely megalomaniacal. Or, maybe the mania had already run its course, and the old man was simply seeking a little retrospective validation. Either way, there was some serious bat-shit craziness in the recent past, and probably more on the way, and she had no idea whether the slightly patronizing old tycoon was part of the solution or part of the problem. So she certainly wasn’t ready to declare allegiances and start waving flags.
But she was grateful for the peek at some of the group’s dirty laundry, which the computer geek with the big nose had already begun airing. “I plotted the geo’s of all the Bitcoin transactions over the last seven days.”
“On the earth?” Protégé asked, incredulous.
Trojan nodded. “Worldwide. Really, the computer did it for me. Wasn’t that hard.”
Dan looked impressed, Sam noticed. Maybe Dan and the other geek can get together later and compare their slide rules.
“I presume there’s a pattern of interest?” Archive’s eyebrows arched.
Trojan nodded. “Still centered on the Northwest. No discernible pattern until Tuesday. Then, wham, a giant flood of transactions, randomly appearing, but all of them clustered within a thousand miles of Seattle.”
“Translation, please,” Sam said.
Trojan, Archive, and Protégé filled them in on the Bitcoin thefts they’d discovered, and explained the way the IP masking program had trouble getting a truly random sample of victim IP addresses. “Nobody has time to detect every active computer on the earth,” Trojan said, stretching his arms out wide, “so the IP addresses they used, attempting to make it look like someone else’s computer had done the stealing, ended up creating a beautiful Gaussian distribution centered on Seattle.”
Brock frowned. “You’re going to have to say it much dumber than that, please.”
Trojan smiled. “I put a red dot at the location of every computer that received a Bitcoin transaction. A shitload of red dots ended up centered around Seattle.”
Protégé translated further. “The upshot is that someone in Seattle is stealing massive quantities of Bitcoins.”
“So this operation is as large as we feared?” Archive asked, worry in his voice.
“Larger,” Trojan said. “If I use the volume and size of the thefts against our accounts as a scaling factor, and multiply it by the number of transactions I think are likely thefts committed by the Seattle people, we’re looking at tens of thousands of Bitcoins already stolen. Dozens every minute.”
Protégé whistled. Dan shook his head in amazement. Sam had no idea what the hell they were talking about. Brock looked as confused as she felt.
“Plus, as of this morning,” Trojan went on, “there’s another locus of activity on the East Coast. Looks like it’s near a server farm I’m familiar with in upstate New York.”
Archive looked serious, grave even. “This, I had not foreseen. Not even remotely.”
Sam shook her head and held up her hand, confused and a little exasperated. “Listen, poindexters, you’re going to have to help this criminology major understand what the hell is going on here. We’re concerned about this, why, exactly?”
“Miss Jameson, perhaps your earlier worries about consolidation were well-founded,” Archive said. “It is certainly not of our doing, but it appears that the other shoe has indeed dropped. By this time next week, if left unabated, the thieves will have amassed a fortune larger than all the private holdings on the European continent.”
39
Seattle, Washington
It was a feature of the brave new world that, unless you lived in an RV in the middle of the desert, your face was captured on video nearly continuously. One camera kept watch over every ten citizens in the United States.
Benevolent watch, the camera owners were quick to add. But that was before the US Federa
l government co-opted their hardware, rendering their intentions irrelevant. It was in this way that Bill Fredericks discovered that one Domingo Mondragon, aka Sabot, had it in his mind to fly the coop.
Fredericks liked it when they fled. It triggered his pursuit instinct. He was fat, bald, and recently castrated, from a career perspective, but he still fancied himself a hunter, an alpha male. He ran field agents, and he wasn’t really a field agent himself any longer, but changing times brought their own demands.
His quarry had taken along two boat anchors, in the form of a girlfriend and her mother, which made his job roughly three times easier. It was hard to travel light and unnoticed in a gaggle, particularly when nobody in the gaggle had the slightest notion of how to stay under the radar.
Fredericks had been to the warehouse where Sabot had set up the Bitcoin operation. He had been to the looted apartment where Sabot lived. He’d even been to the old lady’s place, where Fredericks had correctly diagnosed the problem with the spyware. It hadn’t sent a report in half a day, and Fredericks discovered that the virus’ host had died a violent death, evidenced by the trash can full of crushed laptop parts in Connie Fuentes’ garage.
So, in this case, Fredericks figured that two and two likely summed to four, and he had promptly enlisted the help of a computer-savvy agent who he knew would be utterly unruffled by the current economic kerfuffle. He knew this was the case, because the unwashed, unkempt recluse of an agent rarely emerged from his three-bedroom apartment, which he shared with two and a half bedrooms full of computer equipment and a powerful funk. The agent generally avoided opening the door, except to accept delivery of food, prostitutes, or computer gear, and he didn’t care much who paid him for services rendered.
All of that made him pretty much the ideal asset.
Two Bitcoins and thirty minutes later, Fredericks hopped back in his car and pulled away from Connie Fuentes’ residence, heading north, geo coordinates in hand, Canada his destination for the second time in as many days.
40
Lost Man Lake Ranch, Colorado
“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Dan said. Sam recognized the facial expression – furrowed brow, one eye slightly squinted – that invariably warned of serious geekery to follow. She wasn’t wrong. “We should run a recursive statistical refinement as the number of transactions increases.”
Trojan shook his head. “We’ll run smack into the noise floor of all the legitimate transactions going on in the world. It’ll smear the solution accuracy.”
“Unless we subtract out the noise floor,” Dan said.
“How?” Protégé seemed to be following along.
“Continuous false alarm rate logic,” Dan said. “Invented for radars, used to separate aircraft skin returns from the background noise. Pretty easy, actually.”
“Suppose you get the noise thing figured out,” Sam ventured. “How closely will you be able to locate the source?”
Dan looked at Trojan. Both shrugged. “Within a radius of a couple of city blocks, I would imagine. Hard to say for sure.”
“That could leave us with a few hundred addresses to search.”
Dan shook his head. “Not really. We’ll narrow the search down beforehand by analyzing the modem traffic from the computers inside that radius. The people stealing all those coins are going to have a pretty high continuous data transfer rate over the past several days. Should leave us with a manageable search list.”
“I was going to suggest that,” Brock joked.
Sam walked out of the basement computer stronghold in the ranch, leaving the eggheads behind to work their black magic and summon the appropriate voodoo spirits to ferret out the location of the Bitcoin theft operation. She was glad that such hardcore computer wizards existed, but she had no desire to watch them work.
And she had her own preparations to make, which she hoped the old man could help with.
Every nutcase with a mountain stronghold had to have an armory, Sam figured. It was one of the immutable laws of the universe, like gravity, free healthcare, and other entitlements.
The stereotype held true. Archive’s professed distaste for violence notwithstanding, he possessed a handsome collection of assault gear. While he may have been hoping for the rosier shades of human nature to emerge after his “bloodless devolution event,” as he described it, he had evidently prepared for the opposite.
Panther Arms was a favorite supplier, apparently, which agreed with Sam’s tastes. She chose several DPMS models, each capable of firing 5.56 or 2.23 rounds interchangeably, and each fitted with a holographic scope. “Sighted in?” she asked Mike Charles, whom she had learned was called Stalwart by the rest of the crackpot coterie.
He nodded. “Fifty yards.”
“They’ll do nicely, I think. You guys will donate for the cause?”
“Of course.”
“Night scopes?”
He pointed to a large drawer in the armory, and Sam added them to the provisions, along with ballistic vests. It took her several trips to get everything out to the trunk of the Oklahoma police cruiser she’d commandeered two days earlier.
If the news reports were to be believed, the unrest in the cities had been largely quelled. But Sam was well aware that the government had a vested interest in appearing to be in complete control of the situation, and was certainly not above adding a little spin. Or completely falsifying things, for that matter. So she had reverted to her default stance – trust no one – and prepared for the worst. Her plan was to speak softly and carry a machine gun.
She finished packing the gear about the time that Dan and Trojan emerged from their basement Geekapalooza, a short list of Seattle addresses in hand. “We ride,” Dan said.
“We’ll need wheels,” Sam observed.
“Taken care of,” Stalwart offered. “Archive is cozy with the four-star in charge of Northern Command. Took a bit of convincing, but they’ll have a six-pack truck waiting for you at the airport in Seattle.”
“You’re not going?”
Stalwart shook his head. “A man’s got to know his limits,” he said, extending his hand with a smile. “Thank you – you’re not all bad, for a Fed.”
“Thanks. You’re okay, too, for an evil zealot.”
With that, Dan, Brock, and Trojan piled into the cruiser, and Sam took the wheel.
An hour later, they climbed the stairs into the government VIP transport plane on the ramp at the Aspen airport. They lifted off and arced west, toward the falling sun.
41
Warehouse District, Seattle, Washington
SoDo, or South of Downtown, a Seattle play on New York’s more famous gentrified warehouse district, Soho, didn’t quite live up to its East Coast rhyming partner’s glory. Development dollars hadn’t quite resurrected the desuetude left by failing physical goods businesses, yet there had been just enough investment to keep things respectable, maybe even a little hip, in a retro-grunge sort of way.
But Sam was much more interested in what might lay inside the quasi-dilapidated infrastructure, and, so far, they’d struck out.
Two addresses on Dan’s short list, which was assembled based on larger-than-average internet usage, turned out to be buildings that simply employed internet-based security camera systems. They beamed hours of video footage to a server in a data center, accounting for the heavy internet traffic. Strikes one and two.
A third facility was indeed full of Bitcoin activity, but it was of the honest variety. Someone had assembled a gigantic array of Swedish mining hardware. Dan and Trojan each had a little geek hard-on, admiring the endless arrays of whirring fans and waves of heat thrown off by over-clocked processors crunching away on hundreds of billions of calculations per second, harvesting Bitcoins for their efforts. The internet bandwidth usage was attributable to each of these mining rigs communicating with the worldwide network that kept the books on each Bitcoin transaction.
“Getting warmer, at least,” Brock observed.
Sam nodded
, gritting her teeth a bit. The sun was just about to set, and she was losing her patience. There were two more places on their list, and she sincerely hoped one of them panned out. Plus, the assault gear was uncomfortable and heavy, and she was ready to slip into something a little more relaxed.
They pulled into an empty parking lot at the next address, belonging to another nondescript and slightly run-down warehouse. They announced themselves, tried the door, and were surprised to find it unlocked.
Sam sighed. The cavernous space was completely empty.
Then she noticed a collection of offices, drywalled off from the rest of the warehouse, tucked into the far corner. They advanced slowly. Dan and Brock flanked the entryway, assault rifles at the ready, while Sam tried the door.
Unlocked.
Two for two. Too easy. Getting ready to walk into a bullet?
Dim lights shone, but nobody was inside. There was evidence of recent activity – candy wrappers and styrofoam noodle bowls, mostly – and the place had a vague human stench, the kind that accumulated when someone spent too much time in an unventilated room.
A green light flashed on and off in a small adjacent room, its door ajar. “Bingo,” Dan whispered. “Modem light.”
They advanced, slowly clearing the dingy office space. When they had satisfied themselves that they were indeed alone, Dan and Trojan got to work on the computer in the closet-sized office. Sam watched and listened, while Brock stood guard at the entrance to the warehouse offices.
“256 encryption,” Trojan announced after toying with the laptop’s password protection. “Wanna see something cool?”
Dan nodded, a bit too eagerly in Sam’s judgment, and Trojan inserted a small USB device into a port on the side of the laptop.
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