“It goes without saying,” Williamson said. “By the way, thank you for your Monopoly Man video. Every little bit helps.”
“I hope it has some impact. Are you seeing progress?”
“Anything but,” Williamson said, his voice weary. “I’m aware of twenty thousand casualties in Los Angeles alone, with proportionate numbers in other urban areas. And I’ve had nearly a dozen of my embedded special operators summarily executed by the militia groups they infiltrated.”
“But they were helping!”
“But thanks to the impostors wearing US uniforms, people are having a hard time trusting anyone associated with the US government, particularly anyone in the military. I’ve pulled my forces back to play defense, mostly around landmarks and big federal targets. I just can’t afford to have flare-ups. The people have figured out that we lack the force size to keep things under control on every city block. And I refuse to resort to using firepower. I’ve told the President that no matter how bad things get, there is no way in hell that I will ever mow down my fellow citizens, or order anyone else to do so.”
Archive was momentarily at a loss. He was sickened by the violent turn things had taken. We were so close to a bloodless devolution, he thought. But things had gone to hell, and more rapidly than he’d ever imagined possible. “How did the President react?”
“He’s not as hawkish as his TV appearances have made him sound. My impression is that he’s even more squeamish about the use of force against American citizens than I am.”
“Any idea who the agitators were? I’d love to get my hands on them.”
“You’re not the only one. It’s really disconcerting. None of them were American soldiers, and most of them weren’t even Americans.”
Archive whistled. Had a foreign government or organization created unrest in the US? “Who’s behind it?”
“Most of the ones we’ve identified have been from Russia or from satellite states of the former Soviet Union. If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to blame it on the KGB.”
What an unbelievable mess, Archive thought, his mood at its darkest since the unrest began.
“I have to go,” Williamson said. “You’ll be hearing from me or someone on my staff regarding reinforcements at your ranch.” With that, he signed off, and Archive was left alone with his worries, the television screens in front of him playing loop after loop of violent clashes in the streets of iconic American cities.
10
Sabot sat alone in the shitty motel room, his head throbbing, his nostrils inured by now to the permanent stench of mildew and cigarette smoke, his torso hunched over the aged laptop that Fredericks had somehow procured in the dilapidated Honduran town. He was grateful to have something to occupy his mind, other than his worry over Angie.
The picture haunted him: his Angie sat tarted up and stoned, with dim-witted mooks pawing her. His rage was murderous.
But he forced himself to focus. Fredericks had somehow found her in less than a morning’s work, which was a damn sight better than Sabot could have done for himself. It was against his nature and his hacker ethos to place much trust in other people, and something about Fredericks sat very wrong with Sabot, but Fredericks had won his confidence. At least as far as the fat man’s tactical prowess was concerned. About everything else regarding Fredericks, Sabot had his doubts.
It was still excruciatingly difficult for Sabot not to be directly involved in the search for Angie and her mom. But Sabot recognized the signs of a pro at work, and contented himself to stay out of Fredericks’ way. For the moment, anyway.
His mind returned to the computer as his login credentials were accepted by the high-end anonymizing service he’d retained for his earlier work on the Bitcoin theft operation. Any affiliation was a risk, of course, so he’d used a false identity, complete with its own PayPal account, to provide a layer of protection. It was a thin layer, as the Internet and the millions of computers that comprised it were a forensic investigator’s wet dream, and Sabot knew he was on borrowed time.
He typed in the first IP address from the list that Fredericks had given him. An extremely fast computer lived at this address, Sabot realized at once. It was hidden behind a firewall, but that couldn’t disguise the blazing speed with which it was sending and receiving messages. And while it was upscale, expensive, and customized, the firewall itself offered Sabot little challenge. He breached it within minutes, and began rooting around the computer’s root directory.
Sabot saw many standard applications running on the computer he’d just raided. Some he recognized right away. Others had filenames that looked vaguely familiar; he opened them to discover that they were, indeed, mundane housekeeping programs that ran in the background on most personal computers and mainframes.
But a couple of the applications stood out. Their filenames were strings of letters and numbers that didn’t make much sense to Sabot, so he opened them in a text editor to view their source code.
His blood ran cold. It was a Bitcoin operation of some sort.
Jesus, is this a coincidence? Was Fredericks familiar with crypto currency, too? Where had he gotten the IP addresses?
Sabot looked closely at the code. It was very elegantly written. Russian? They were the most fastidious coders he’d ever encountered, and the precision of the routine in front of him seemed to have a characteristically Russian flavor.
The code used two kinds of inputs: the name of a Bitcoin wallet, which it retrieved from an IP address, and the password associated with that wallet, which it retrieved from a separate IP address.
With those two inputs, the program seemed to be running a single loop over and over again. First, it created one or two new Bitcoin wallets, using a random string of up to thirty characters as passkeys. Then, it transferred all of the Bitcoins out of the “old” wallet and into the “new” ones it had just created. Finally, it sent the name of the new accounts to one IP address, and the corresponding passkey to a separate IP address. Sabot checked these addresses against the list Fredericks had handed him. They both matched.
The script ran through its loop several hundred times every second.
It took Sabot a while to understand what was really happening. The script was apparently designed to keep money in constant movement. But what good is money if all you do is move it around all the time?
The computer script also kept a running archive of the wallets it created, and passed it along to two other computers on Fredericks’ list. The reason was fairly obvious: misplacing a Bitcoin wallet’s name or passkey was exactly the same as misplacing a wallet full of cash. If you couldn’t find it, there was no backup. It was gone.
It was this second aspect of the computer script, the continuous archiving of the randomly generated accounts and passwords, that finally led Sabot to understand what was happening. Whoever was running this computer script was trying to keep their money safe by keeping it in constant motion, to prevent someone from stealing it.
But there was another possibility as well. What if they’re trying to hide the money? Every Bitcoin transaction was a public event — in fact, there were websites dedicated to nothing but listing all of the thousands of Bitcoin transactions occurring every hour of every day — and it was alarmingly easy to figure out exactly how much money was in each and every Bitcoin wallet in the world. Unlike cash, Bitcoin transactions were infinitely traceable. But if someone’s money spent only a few seconds inside any given wallet before it was shuffled off to another account, there was effectively no way to figure out where it sat at any given moment.
Unless, of course, you could read the script directly, just as Sabot had done moments before. Then, it would be an extremely simple matter to liberate every last fraction of every last Bitcoin. You’d simply insert a line of code that sent the money into your own account, and send fake account information to the two recipient addresses specified in the original code.
In fact, Sabot felt an exceptionally strong temptation to do just t
hat. It would be like swiping candy from a kid. He wondered how much money might be in play, how many Bitcoins these algorithms were throwing around every second.
He spent the next half hour investigating the computers behind the rest of the IP addresses Fredericks had given him. He also called up the public transaction record to see how much money was moving around with each of the transactions created by the code he’d just examined, and he used a spreadsheet to estimate the totals.
The numbers were staggering. This operation dwarfed what he’d stolen. And he’d stolen a truckload of money. He sensed opportunity on a scale he’d never encountered.
Oh, shit. A disconcerting realization hit him. Why didn’t I think of this before? All of the Bitcoin he’d stolen was instantly traceable to static accounts. Sure, his theft operation had created a ton of new accounts, and he’d only swiped a small amount of Bitcoin from each victim. But the money was just sitting there for all the world to see. Every person he’d stolen from could very easily use the public ledger to find the wallet containing the money that Sabot had taken from them.
He made a copy of the perpetual account motion program and saved it to the tired laptop’s hard drive. He saved another copy on the server he rented, located in New Jersey. As soon as humanly feasible, he needed to get the laundering algorithm working to preserve the fortune he’d stolen over the past few days.
Sabot was suddenly very eager for his alimentary canal to pass that infernal USB drive. It contained the key to ungodly riches, which might, even at this moment, be under attack by angry victims.
Or by someone else, someone with sufficient resources and vision. Like, perhaps, the people who had created the computer script he’d just examined.
He got a sinking feeling in his gut. Where did they get all this Bitcoin?
And who the hell were they?
Because to Sabot’s knowledge, the only Bitcoin theft operation in existence with the scope to produce numbers that staggering, was the theft operation he’d created.
Balzzack011. That was the moniker of the person who’d directed Sabot to set things up. But Sabot had never even spoken with him. Or her. Sabot had no idea who Balzzack011 really was. But he suddenly felt confident that the IP addresses Fredericks had asked him to investigate either belonged to Balzzack011, or belonged to Balzzack’s employers.
So how the hell did Fredericks get his hands on those IP addresses? Did he rip off a private security customer? Or was Fredericks more directly involved? Had Fredericks stolen from Balzzack himself? Or Balzzack’s employer?
An even more disturbing possibility occurred to Sabot. Were Fredericks and Balzzack the same person? Holy shit, that would be the mindscrew of the century.
He rose and paced the room, recounting the unaccountably weird incidents that had rocked his world, searching for some piece, some clue, that allowed him to wrap a unifying theory around all of the seriously messed up happenings.
He’d chartered a flight from Canada to Costa Rica, but somehow ended up in Honduras.
Fredericks, that fat, smelly bastard with the ridiculous comb-over, begged a ride on the charter flight, spent time in the same dungeon in the jungle, pulled three rabbits out of his hat to help them escape, and then handed Sabot a list of IP addresses that could very well be linked to the Bitcoin operation that he, Sabot, had set up in the first place. That’s hardly screwed up at all, Sabot thought sarcastically, shaking his head.
And then there was Zelaya, the slight, graying man with eyes like iron who had claimed to be Sabot’s torturer, then a court administrator, and finally a doctor. What was that all about?
And then there was that other doctor, the one who had visited Sabot while he was still chained beneath the freezing shower. Sabot recalled the guy in a doctor’s lab coat with booze on his breath and the strange-tasting tongue depressor…
The tongue depressor.
Sabot slapped his pockets, searching for the drugs he’d stolen from Zelaya’s medicine cart moments after shooting the little bastard with the tranquilizer gun. The drugs were nowhere to be found, of course. He’d obviously lost them at some point, possibly during their search of the dungeon, or during their long crawl through the earthen tunnel, or as he and Fredericks had bounced along the jungle trail on the rickety motorcycle.
What did the label say? Metha-something? Para-metha-something? With the suffix “-B”. He was sure of the suffix.
He ran to the laptop and typed “Paramethalin-B” into the internet search engine.
“Did you mean paramescaline-B?” responded the most intelligent organism on earth.
That’s it. Paramescaline-B. Sabot clicked on the Wikipedia article that topped the search engine results. A caution informed Sabot that more citations were required, and that the article contained unsubstantiated information, blah blah. Sabot read it anyway.
His jaw dropped. Paramescaline-B was apparently a derivative of mescaline, a psychedelic drug. The article claimed that Paramescaline-B had been synthesized in a long-running CIA experiment that was never acknowledged by the US government.
The secret drug induced dramatic temporal distortion and exceptionally vivid hallucinations, but it did not cause the tripped-out feeling that other psychedelics caused, and there was no synesthesia, which was the phenomenon that made users of psychedelic drugs see sounds and taste colors. Paramescaline-B’s milder peripheral symptoms made it very difficult for test subjects to know whether they’d received the drug or a placebo.
The drug was exceptionally useful in interrogations, the article claimed, because interrogation subjects had trouble differentiating between real and imagined events. The CIA denied all allegations of psychedelic experiments, including paramescaline-B, the article said.
The drug’s side effects included a nearly debilitating headache as it cleared the subject’s system.
Sabot’s head pounded like a drum with each heartbeat. “My God,” he said aloud. “What have they done to me?”
The door swung open, and light suddenly filled the musty room. A fat figure stood silhouetted. “Hi, esé,” Fredericks said.
11
Sam splashed water on her face and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. The flight had been an exceptionally welcome relief. Brock’s gimpy leg had earned them an upgrade to first class. She and Brock had enjoyed a toe-curling carnal encounter in the first-class lavatory, and then they’d slept like the dead for the remainder of the flight. It felt like she’d been living one exceptionally long day for the past two weeks, and the seven hours of sleep she managed to steal during the flight was a lifesaver.
She exited the ladies’ room in Rome’s Leonardo DaVinci International airport and found Brock waiting for her. He was moving much better now, the pain from the gunshot wound in his thigh finally letting up somewhat. “Where to?” Brock asked. “Colosseum? The Forum? Pantheon?”
Sam smiled. “Maybe next time.” She bought a new burner and dialed Alfonse Archer’s number.
“Can you call me back on a fresh burner?” she asked as soon as he answered.
“Why?”
“Telling you right now would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”
“Right. Sorry.”
Ten minutes later, Archer called back using a disposable cell phone. Sam filled him in on her suspicions regarding the leak at Homeland.
“Not this again,” he said.
“You’re not the first person to have that reaction,” Sam said with a chuckle. “Anyway, I just wanted to see if you’d uncovered anything else from our list of laundromat names.”
“Actually, I do have some news,” Archer said. “The guy on your list from the laundromat? He’s ex-KGB.”
“The guy who listed his address as the FBI safe house?”
“Right. He’s an old school Cold Warrior, evidently. He knew of the Bureau safe house because he switched teams at some point in the Eighties.”
“A KGB defector?” Sam asked, incredulous. “Selling thug services through a Chinese laundromat?
”
“Times must be tough,” Archer said.
“Guess so,” Sam said. That was one hell of a curveball. It had been a while since anyone had mentioned the KGB. The wall had fallen, what, twenty-five years ago? After that, the KGB had officially ceased to exist, but in reality, it just got a new set of initials: FSB. Same goons, different letterhead.
“I don’t really know what to make of the KGB angle,” she said, after mulling things over for a short while.
“Me neither, but I would be damn careful if I were you. They’re still bad hombres. There were crazy stories of those dudes having their fingernails and teeth pulled out during training, just to toughen them up.”
Sam shuddered. “Thanks, we’ll keep an eye out,” she said. “Listen, would you mind running a Zip Line query on a number I’ve got?”
Archer was silent for a moment on the other end of the line. “Sam, this is an open line,” he finally said.
Sam nodded. “I was afraid you were going to say something like that.” Zip Line was an unacknowledged program. It was used to eavesdrop on folks, including US citizens. There was often a warrant involved, but often not, which Sam guessed was a big reason for the secrecy. Domestic espionage tended to piss people off. “We’re sightseers until we get a lead of some sort. So I’m going to text you a phone number, and if you happen to text any information back to me, that will be between us and the fates.”
“Uh…” Sam could hear the indecision in Archer’s voice. He was a straight-laced Bureau guy, and Sam’s request wasn’t exactly by-the-book. Or, according to some interpretations, legal.
“If it’s any help,” Sam said, “my supervisor at Homeland did the honors for us last time. I’m just not confident there’s a way to contact him without our conversation being broadcast to the other team.”
Archer considered for a moment longer. “All right, Sam. Then you have to promise me you’re going to burn the burner afterwards.”
“Please,” Sam said. “What am I, a rookie?”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 187