It just knew that its system diagnostics reported a clean bill of health. So it continued to work. Find new account, unlock new account, remove money, repeat.
The light blinked on, placid, content, oblivious to the destruction it wrought.
2
Terencio Manuel Zelaya absently swatted a mosquito. The annoying buzz of parasitic wings had a lower pitch in the jungle, owing to a larger wingspan than city mosquitos, evidence of a larger supply of blood to suck. Zelaya had swatted thousands of mosquitoes, during thousands of hot, sweaty Central American evenings, on his way to thousands of jungle interrogations.
He was good at interrogations, and in spite of his deeply religious upbringing, or maybe because of it, he rather enjoyed them. A 1983 graduate of the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s “Human Resources Exploitation Course,” and an ex-member of the Honduran death squad known as Battalion 3-16 – the biblical reference wasn’t lost on him – Zelaya had so much to hide that hiding was impossible, and intimidation was the only remaining defense mechanism in a society that increasingly frowned on the kinds of political murders that had been Zelaya’s bread and butter for nearly four decades.
He was well beyond nightmares. The atrocities he had committed over his long but insufficiently lucrative career had woven themselves into the fabric of his persona, and were as much a part of his identity as his scowl, his scars, and his ghost-white head of cropped hair, unusual for a man of Honduran descent, but not unusual for an American product.
Zelaya was both. He’d only been to the States a few times, always to attend CIA training courses, during which he had applied his unusual memorization skills to chapter and verse of the KUBARK, a politically toxic tome that distilled the state of the art of coercive interrogation techniques. It existed to train generations of crusaders and ideologues in the arcane arts of pain and extortion. Zelaya was a star pupil.
Many of his compatriots enjoyed the sadism, and many more merely endured it for its utility, but Zelaya had the perfect combination of zeal and twisted proclivity to enjoy a long career as a pipe-swinging, throat-slitting, mind-screwing utility man.
The politics were complicated and ever-changing, of course, but there never seemed to be a shortage of them for us to fight. Near as Zelaya could tell, the Americans were interested in the region for what seemed like a silly reason: Honduras grew the shit out of some bananas. Bananas, as in the bright yellow phallic fruit, though the country had its share of the other kind of bananas, the kind of mental insularity and infirmity that produced civil and international strife lasting decades.
There was an even sillier reason that the gringos had come south, with their large words and their even larger impositions. This related to the uniquely gringo delusion that the entire world would be better off under a new religio-political system, called (drum roll, please) Democracy. Like Truth and Beauty, it was self-evidently, axiomatically, undeniably good. Better than everything else, even.
At least to the gringos.
Zelaya hadn’t bothered to point out that if Democracy needed the same kinds of goons, assassins, spies, shills, and puppets that supported socialism, communism, dictatorships, and other lesser forms of government all over the globe, perhaps the idea wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be.
Making such an observation would have been counterproductive, however. While the gringos were clearly naïve and misguided, they were also dizzyingly well-resourced. And their interests appeared to align more or less with his own, a happy coincidence which, together with the open-faced American gullibility for anyone who murmured the right ideological pet phrases at the right time, formed the backbone of a long and symbiotic relationship.
But here he was, in his sixties, still traipsing through the Central American jungles on the way to a prisoner camp to inflict grievous emotional, psychological, and physical harm on yet another human being, one who was unfortunate enough to find himself positioned by fate on the wrong side of a social or conceptual divide.
Surreal.
Old.
But it was remarkably commonplace in Zelaya’s world, where borders were short but bitterly contested, and seemingly drawn to ensure that political divisions bisected as many familial and historical alliances as possible. There were more beefs per square foot than even Europe at its most truculent.
Job security.
And even in the relatively peaceful times, such as the era after the cocaine wars, the Americans’ need for politically palatable places to conduct “enhanced interrogations” kept Zelaya plenty busy. Most of his reluctant guests over the last few years had been religiously misaligned gentlemen of Middle Eastern descent. They usually had little knowledge or concern regarding any nascent terrorist networks upon their delivery to Zelaya’s care, but that didn’t stop him from performing the proper due diligence.
Zelaya had expected the sudden gringo money problem – the dollar seemed intent on implosion, and appeared to be on the verge of tumbling into an inflationary oblivion of Dinar, Drachma, and Weimar Deutschmark proportions – to have unfavorable cash flow implications for him, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case. A dear old Agency compatriot had called just days after the global meltdown had begun, in need of short-notice service for three Americans, two of whom happened to be female.
It was work, and it was of the lucrative variety, due to the political sensitivities involved, and Zelaya rarely turned down an opportunity. He had his eye on a small villa befitting a man of his loyalty and service, but not quite fitting within his means at the moment, so Bill Fredericks’ call had been most welcome.
Zelaya reached his destination, swatted another mosquito, and rapped three times on a tree trunk to announce his arrival. A hollow echo resounded with each rap, affirming that he had chosen the right tree trunk. It had been hollowed out and resealed with a plaster-coated door designed to replicate the gnarled bark it had replaced, providing a suitably clandestine entrance to a well-used but well-hidden underground facility.
The subterranean entranceway was even muggier and more uncomfortable than the stifling jungle air, lacking the benefit of an occasional breeze to wick sweat away and replace the sickly sweet smell of decomposing organic matter.
With the door safely closed and locked behind him, Zelaya descended an earthen stairway leading to a narrow passage. He swiped his hand in front of his face to find a dangling string, a yank upon which caused a feeble overhead bulb to glow, helping him avoid the gnarled roots protruding through the cavern floor. Tripping hazard. He would mention it to the lieutenant, who would undoubtedly take the hint.
He felt the familiar downslope begin to level off, meaning he had descended the full twenty feet below grade, and was now on the top floor of a two-story underground interrogation and detention facility built by American contractors in the Reagan era. Talk about bananas. An underground prison with a Tolkien-like entrance in a hollowed-out tree? Couldn’t they have just put a wall around a cabin in the jungle? Zelaya shook his head for the hundredth time at the boundless gringo zeal.
But it was tough to argue with success – in the facility’s lengthy existence, Zelaya was aware of no security breaches. Perhaps there was a method to their madness.
“Our guests arrived safely, I presume?” Zelaya asked, striding with nonchalant authority into the facility’s control center, of which he was undisputed master.
“Si, Señor.” Lieutenant Alvarez was bright, competent, and dedicated. But not mean enough, in Zelaya’s judgment. “Mother, girl, and target. They thought they were on their way to Costa Rica,” he said with a derisive laugh. “All in separate cells, currently undergoing preparations.”
Zelaya nodded. Preparations, as they were euphemistically called, entailed various measures that were designed “to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist.” It was as if a business school graduate had written the Agency’s exploitation manual, except that the sentences in the KUB
ARK sometimes actually made sense.
A superior outside force. Zelaya had always liked that phrase. It was a fitting personal and organizational description, he fancied, as well as a goal worthy of continuous aspiration. Part of his DNA now. The CIA-recommended techniques were varied and voluminous, including prolonged constraint, prolonged exertion, extremes of heat, cold, and moisture, deprivation of food or sleep, solitary confinement, threats of pain, deprivation of sensory stimuli, hypnosis, and drugs.
In all, nature had provided a rich palette of available techniques to place the human psyche in an agreeably compliant condition.
He looked at his watch. Almost dawn. In a few hours, it would be time for an introductory visit with each of his new subjects.
3
Turbulence awoke Special Agent Sam Jameson. She had the kind of nasty taste in her mouth that she always got when she was awakened too early from too little slumber. She looked at her watch, which confirmed that entirely too few minutes had passed while she was unconscious. Just shy of an hour, to be exact.
Her watch was still set to Mountain time. It was a couple of steps behind. Along with her compatriots, who together comprised the entire passenger manifest of a US government VIP jet transport plane, she had left the Pitt Meadows Regional Airport in British Columbia, Canada, and was hurtling down the American Left Coast through the darkness toward Costa Rica.
It was a long story.
It involved what she had come to regard as a colossally bad idea, which had spawned a shockingly successful conspiracy. One of the perpetrators happened to occupy a seat on the airplane. He went by the unlikely name of Trojan, and was busily pecking away at a laptop computer, trying to unscrew what he had so well and truly screwed.
Trojan was part of a group of extremely competent, and in some cases, extremely prominent, illuminati who had become of a mind, collectively, to disable the US banking system. They were pissed off, near as Sam could tell, about the US socioeconomic system’s steady descent into oligarchy, to be remedied only by the destruction of the oligarchy’s lifeblood: the US dollar.
By all indications, they had pulled it off.
Their success had added the Mighty Greenback to a long list of failed or failing fiat currencies, a result that produced just the sort of economic and political upheaval that re-drew maps and invited newly-self-appointed Masters of the Universe to try their hand at wrestling society’s reins from whoever used to hold them.
And that, in turn, was why Sam, a busty, beautiful, brash, and somewhat bombastic redheaded Homeland Security agent, found herself jetting toward a Central American country in the middle of the night.
Messy.
But what else would she have been doing, if she weren’t saving the world from the bastards? Writing memos? Informing stakeholders? Adding value to a value-added team in some value chain somewhere? No, thanks.
She’d rather catch spies, despite the sleep deprivation it sometimes produced. And the near-death experiences. But those things kept life interesting, and she figured that they just came with the territory. After all, was the threat of a violent physical death really all that much worse than the certainty of a protracted and painful death caused by cubicle-induced boredom? Sam had given the matter plenty of thought, and she thought not.
She looked over at Brock James, the man whose bed she’d shared for what was entirely too short an episode in her life. He was, for lack of a better word, perfect. Not in the usual bullshit, starry-eyed sense, but in the sense that all of his jagged edges fit all of her jagged edges as though they were complementary pieces carved from the same sarcastic, intelligent, athletic, and doggedly determined block. Their relationship worked in the way that gravity worked. There was almost nothing they could do to stop it from working.
In addition to the economic meltdown of global proportions, the past week had seen a kidnapping, too. Brock’s. Those were three of the worst days of her life. But Sam’s bull-in-a-china-shop tenacity and her Kimber .45 had saved the day, and while his bedroom athleticism was temporarily diminished by a gunshot wound to the thigh, Brock had survived the ordeal.
Thank god for that. She loved that man and his bedroom athleticism.
She could go for a little of that right now, she thought, watching his beautiful face as he slept. Alas. She resolved to take advantage of him sometime when they weren’t confined in the presence of subordinates, criminals, and other unsavory people.
Unfortunately, a cozy bed wasn’t anywhere on the agenda. They weren’t exactly headed to Costa Rica on vacation. It had taken convincing, cajoling, and even a little coercion, but Sam had eventually wrestled the destination of Domingo Mondragon’s chartered jet from the Obsidian Air charter service’s desk clerk. An American government badge didn’t go far in Canada, but Sam had found an exploitable pressure point. Thanks to her above-average persuasion skills, they subsequently found themselves winging their way toward Juan Santamaria International Airport in the little banana republic’s capital, San Jose.
She chuckled to herself at the absurdity of the situation. She was on a plane with her deputy, her lover, and an international criminal responsible for helping to castrate the world’s banking and monetary system, flying to the Central American jungle to chase down a felon and FBI informant, turned FBI employee, turned rogue Bitcoin thief.
You can’t make this shit up.
The sound of clicking computer keys interrupted her reverie, and she looked over to see Dan Gable’s face illuminated in the blue-white glow of a laptop screen. Her deputy was built like a bodybuilder, though one who had perhaps enjoyed a few too many ho-ho’s. His physique made his uncommon computer skills seem a bit incongruous. He was putting his geekery to good use, searching for digital clues left on a laptop in the warehouse they’d searched just a couple of hours earlier. By all indications, this was the very laptop that Mondragon had used to steal tens of thousands of Bitcoins.
Those were worth about seventy gazillion dollars, now that the dollar had inflated beyond recognition. This week’s dollar, Sam reflected, was worth quite a bit less than last week’s penny.
More clackety-clack, caused by Dan’s meaty fingers typing excessively hard on the keyboard. He was, in her estimation, the sole trustworthy individual in the Department of Homeland Security. She loved him like a brother. Sometimes he was an annoying brother. But he was nothing if not effective.
Their relationship was extremely close, but always professional. He’d touched her naked body once, and had even put his hands on her bare chest, but that was in an attempt to restart her heart, which had stopped beating on account of her very recent death. Thankfully, death didn’t take, and she returned to the realm of the living with a few scars and an outrageous story.
Dan noticed her looking over at him. “Found something, boss,” he said, turning the laptop so she could read the screen.
Sam saw instant-message artifacts from several conversations that occurred between someone named Sabot – Mondragon, she assumed, since Sabot was his pre-incarceration hacker moniker – and a person who called himself Balzzack011. “So it looks like this wasn’t really Sabot’s idea,” she summarized after reading the message traffic between them.
Dan nodded. “The reluctant genius, kept chained up in a warehouse, stealing a fortune in Bitcoins. But who’s pulling the strings?”
Sam shook her head and scowled. “The fact that there’s a master of any sort is a bit disconcerting. If Mondragon was just a random hacker with a bright idea about how to get over on the world, that would be much easier to deal with. But this sounds a bit like coerced theft, which means that someone understood the importance of Bitcoins after the dollar pancaked, but lacked the technical skills to actually steal any.”
Dan assented silently.
Sam pondered. There was no shortage of megalomaniacal bastards in the world, it turned out. It was simple probability math. One in twenty-five denizens of Planet Earth had sociopathic tendencies. A fraction of those were also narcissistic
. And a slice of that cohort had the intellect and social skill to manipulate their way to real power. The sudden rise of the Bitcoin market in the wake of the dollar’s implosion was a juicy motivator, and Sam didn’t doubt that it had brought the nut jobs out in force.
So she had no clue about who might have been running Sabot, the hacker-thief. “Any clues about why Mondragon ran?”
“Maybe,” Dan said. “I found something in the ftp history.”
“The history of what?”
“Are you completely computer illiterate?”
“No,” Sam said. “I can program my vibrator.”
Dan frowned and shook his head. “You can use the internet to transfer files directly between computers, without sending them in an email. It’s called file transfer protocol, or ftp. It leaves less of a trail than email, which is the digital equivalent of petrified wood.”
Sam nodded. She’d typed angry before, and had clicked send, which was how she had learned that email was forever.
“Our guy deleted the ftp history, which is a great indication that he’s got something to hide. Porn, usually, but in this case, it turns out that Sabot transferred the scripts that were behind all the Bitcoin thefts to a server farm in New Jersey.”
“How did you figure that out if he deleted the history?”
Dan smiled. “A few tricks of the trade.”
“Constitutionally dubious, no doubt.”
“No comment.”
Sam smiled, shaking her head. “So he made a copy of his own program for his own use,” she summarized. “I suppose that might be grounds for a falling out, given that this ‘Ball Sack’ guy seems to think that Mondragon works for him.”
Dan nodded. “He must have been pretty scared. He took his girlfriend and her mother along with him.”
“There’s a ton of money in play. I can see why he was concerned. How about the list of Bitcoin accounts and passwords?”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 164