by Sara Forbes
I park my car under a large oak tree, some distance away from the grave where the ceremony is in full swing. A pastor is reading from a large tome with about eighty people gathered around him, with bent heads. Mrs. Davis must have had a big family. This isn’t one of those mafia-type funerals where you can easily tell by their expressions that most people are glad the assholes are gone. Here, there’s genuine sadness in the air as people stand huddled together in stoic silence.
It’s especially heart-wrenching seeing the kids. There are two little girls, maybe six or seven, maybe twins, beside them an older boy of about twelve. All holding hands and staring bleakly into the middle distance. I guess they’re the grandkids. They’ve lost their grandmom, or grandma, or nan, or whatever they called her. The thirty- and forty-somethings nearest the coffin are the woman’s sons and daughters, I guess. Did they have any clue that she felt she needed to speculate on the Bitcoin market? That her desperation at losing the money was so bad that she had to kill herself?
My father had endured this pain too. What if he’d committed suicide? I know for a fact he didn’t but what if he’d been close to it. I hadn’t a clue what was happening.
The air in my car is suffocating. I need out. I open the door quietly and wander to a grave as if to pay respect to some other dead.
I stare at a gravestone, not really seeing it but soaking in the quiet atmosphere of still melancholy that permeates this place. The drone of prayer carries on the breeze. Dad had himself cremated and his pot is lovingly stored beside the pot of a mother I never knew. I really should go there more often. I think the ritual will ground me. My life seems so fleeting at the moment. I’ve nothing rooting me to the rest of civilization apart from my three very loud, and rather self-serving sisters. But maybe it starts with me—the rebuilding of the family. The rebuilding of relationships.
I’m trying not to think about Felix in this context but it’s damn hard. He’s almost the embodiment of perfection in a man. Or at least my definition thereof. I don’t need someone to care for me or to feel responsible for me. I need someone who brings light into my world. Who can make me laugh and forget myself for a while. He’s always done that.
I sigh. There I go again. My mind keeps going down that avenue, the easy one, the glittering road to hell.
I hear the crunch of footsteps toward me. People are walking past, a trail from the resting place of the coffin to the parking now that the ceremony is over. Some of them nod at me sympathetically as if they understand my sorrow. I feel disingenuous so I keep my head bowed as I join the trail back to the parking lot.
“Stage four for two years. Changed her diet to plant-based, but you can only do so much,” one woman is saying the man beside her, “When God has other plans.”
“Was that her initial diagnosis? Stage four?”
“Yeah, terrible. She had no idea till then. But at least she had the time to prepare everything with John and the girls.”
“Ah she did a good job, didn’t she? They said she went peacefully with them all around her.”
Their voices die off as I surge through the crowd, my pulse racing. Peacefully? What the hell?
This was no suicide.
This woman died of natural causes, if you can call cancer natural causes. It certainly wasn’t Bitcoin.
What? Am I at the wrong funeral?
Could there possibly be two Mrs. Davis’s who invested with Goodman? When I get into my car, I scramble to check the file on my laptop. Nope, this is her all right. Goodman got it all wrong! He’ll be so relieved.
I pull out my phone and press the contact I’ve been ignoring so often lately. “Goodman? Yeah. It’s Cara. Look about Mrs. Davis. She didn’t kill herself. She had cancer.”
There’s a pause. A long pause. He must be as shocked as I am. “No, Cara, she killed herself. Reliable sources tell me. Look, what’s done is done.”
“No, it was cancer. She’d been terminal for some time.”
“I don’t know where you’re getting that information from and I don’t think you should listen to it.”
“I’m here! At her funeral. I overheard…”
Then it strikes me. The funeral you asked me not to attend.
The funeral you said would only be attended by family, but it’s clearly not just family.
“Mr. Goodman?” I say “Is it possible you’re mistaken?”
“l—look, Cara. Maybe the wires got crossed somehow. I was under the impression that—”
“Yeah, that’s fine. I get it,” I say. “I have to go.” I click the phone off.
Dirty, lying bastard!
Of all the lowdown tricks. He just wanted me to get so angry with the Bitcoin billionaires that I’d do something to destroy them. And I believed him. I trusted him. I trusted him because my father trusted him, I should have showed him the door instead. Oh, I’ve been so stupid.
I’ll bet he made up that whole list of investors and it’s not moms and pops as he calls it, but rather his own investments. I can’t ask poor Mrs. Davis now but I can go through the others on his list. Alphabetically, and right now.
I call a Mr. Jake Anderson of Toledo Drive, CA.
When he answers, I assure him I’m not a salesperson which of course makes me sound exactly like a salesperson and he cuts me off straight away. The next, a Mrs. Shauna Amman, doesn’t pick up. Neither do the next two.
I wipe my forehead. Cold calling is the worse but I’m driven by incandescent anger. Then I try a Mr. Jonathan Avery, the last of the A’s before I move onto the B’s.
“Goodman?” muses the old man’s voice, “Sorry, never heard of anyone of that name.” And when I ask him if he’s ever heard of Bitcoin, he laughs and says, “that’s a mug’s game. Are you trying to sell me Bitcoin? I will pray for you, dear.”
I assure him I’m not but thank him for his time and hang up.
This list? It’s a fake. There are no investors. Goodman’s the Bitcoin whale. It’s all just him. He recruited me to knock out the competition, the lying sneaky bastard.
I snap the laptop shut and start the ignition. Well, now I’m going to investigate him. And I going to turn over every stone until I get to the truth. I want to know how far back it goes, and whether he was doing this while he was friends with my father.
22
FELIX
3….2….1…AND BOOM. I’ve sold the lambo to a gentleman in Cleveland called gr8inbed88. May it secure his prowess with the women for all eternity. He paid me three Bitcoin for it yesterday when the Bitcoin price was $8956. This morning it shot up to $11K so I have to laugh.
It’s all the money I’ve got in the world. I’m going to be super careful. Not a single cent is going on the cards.
I rent a simple a one-bedroom apartment way out of town. Contrary to the poker vlogs who are speculating wildly on my whereabouts, I’m not dead. Not yet anyway. I’m quite enjoying being invisible, thinking, reading.
I want to see with my own eyes how the Bitcoin billionaires make their money and where it’s going in the world. If it’s sucking up my brother, I need to know. If it’s destroying Cara’s business prospects, I need to know.
The problem is Egan and the way he’s turned the Bitcoin billionaires consortium into something of a mafia. But the more I think about it and the more I read up on cryptocurrency, the more I suspect that the problem isn’t Egan at all. It’s Paul.
It’s the universal law of business—the nerds reign supreme. Paul’s the one who’s really controlling everything. Without Paul, Egan’s just a dime a dozen tyrant. A politician without a platform. A gatekeeper.
So how do I get to Paul?
Hours and hours of internet research result in nothing but a series of very deep rabbit-holes and a migraine. Bitcoin is a weird universe and there are weird individuals roaming around in it wearing silly hats, spouting nonsense about the fall of financial institutions. A high proportion of them are poker players. Go figure.
My Bitcoin guys, however, have hidden their
tracks so well that they may as well have never been born. How the fuck am I ever going to figure out where Paul lives so I can talk to him, man to man? He might listen to reason if I ever managed to get to him.
The next day brings me no further, nor the next. After a week of searching, I have to admit I’m stumped. My eyes are burning. I’m so frustrated I’m seriously considering tossing the laptop out the window and simply bugging Jack’s phone and tagging along and gatecrashing the next meeting in London that he goes to. Yes, I’m reduced to thinking about tailing my brother.
Isn’t it ironic? I need a detective who’d be good at this and I happen to know one. But she’s the one person I can’t ask for help in this. Because I’m doing this for her, I need to leave her alone.
Their Achilles heel is the fact that ten years ago, they were less scrupulous about covering their tracks than they are now, and their names still show up on well-hidden webpages that even they can’t erase. I learn how to dig up old websites.
And then, a full two weeks into this frustrating hunt, I discover on a defunct Bitcoin mining forum about a miner called Paul Aufranc. He’s revered on this forum as a major Bitcoin miner—someone who cracks the encryption to extract the next Bitcoin and adding it to the world’s supply—it’s like creating money the way the government does.
It’s a throwaway comment from him that alerts me. “Greenpeace in Reykjavik want me dead.” Bitcoin was then at the point where it was no longer trivial to mine and the extreme electricity costs needed to power the CPUs doing the number crunching were getting the attention of environmentalists
Reykjavik? Iceland?
But where in Iceland? It may only have a population of quarter of a million but it’s still a big island.
It hits me when I’m trying to cook noodles and I burn myself. Infrared imagery. If there even is such a thing. All I need is a satellite image. If Paul is sitting on a computer farm, calculating trillions of numbers per second, then all the heat generated by the computers has to be going somewhere, and it has to be detectable when he’s surrounded by cold earth.
I will find Paul Aufranc if I find the center of this heat, I’m sure of it.
I contact the local university meteorology department and get my hands on a high quality infrared image of Iceland, way better than anything that came up on my Google searches. There are several “Hot spots” but one in particular is suspicious as it’s miles away from anything else. The nearest town is Árneshreppur. I don’t think I’m saying that right. It’s in the Westfjords peninsula of northwestern Iceland.
It may be crazy but I have to take a gamble.
*
An icy wind whips my face and all I want to go is dive back into the jeep but it’s never going to get up that icy lane. How do people live here? How can it be May? Locals at Reykjavik airport told me the winter’s lasting particularly long this year but at least there’ll be plenty of daylight. And then they looked at me curiously when I told them where I wanted to go. Maybe it was the way I pronounce it. Or maybe it’s because they know it’s a bleak windswept edge of the country miles away from civilization.
I lock the jeep up even though there’s no point, hoist on my backpack, and start the hike. The sky seems wider with the clouds lying so low. It’s like there are extra dimensions here. It’s closer to fantasy than reality. If elves or trolls were to crawl out from the dark, sodden earth, it wouldn’t at all surprise me.
Árneshreppur, the nearest village has 260 inhabitants—basically it’s a school and a thermal pool, but the geocoordinates I’m trying to reach are several miles north east of there. The rest is pure Mother Nature, mountain after mountain, starkly contrasted against the white sky.
This guy is definitely off-grid. I wonder how he buys his milk and toilet paper. What if he had an accident? I never can understand people who want to live far away from emergency services. Somehow, I don’t think he’s going to be happy to see me. If he’s here at all. I only have geocoordinates and a mad theory to go on.
I trudge over a crest in the hill, fighting the doubts that are swooping in, like Dementors. Then I spot them—a group of wooden cabins huddled together. The ice is melted around the perimeter and alien-looking red and purple flowers flourish there. A gust of air hits my face and it’s surprisingly warm. As I approach the huts, the humming becomes stronger. I’d bet my right arm it’s a server farm, computer CPUs slaving away at all hours of day and night, mining Bitcoin. I was right!
I approach the door. There’s no buzzer, no name. No letterbox even. How does he get his pizzas delivered?
There’s nothing for it but to knock. So, I knock.
Nothing
It’s a long way to come for nothing. There’s got to be someone in there—though now I can’t help picturing a group of sentient robots strolling around, bleeping at each other. I take off my gloves and try again, my bare knuckles making a louder sound against the wood.
Still nothing.
I curse under my breath and brace myself for an even louder knock but before my fist hits wood, the door flies open.
A dark head peers out, blinking as if the daylight’s attacking him. It’s Paul. He’s sporting the same crew cut, the dark circles under the eyes, the tough, scruffy look of a biker gang member. With his classic bone structure, he’d look great if he were to clean up his image but the fact that he doesn’t, makes him more likeable.
“You,” he says, not sounding half as surprised as I think he should.
“Me,” I confirm.
“What do you want?”
“I’m lost.”
He points at my navigation unit. “Seems fine to me.”
“Please?”
“Are you with that detective?” He peers around.
“No.”
“Come in.” He leads me into a cavernous space. The heat hits me like a sauna.
“How did you figure it out?” he asks.
“Infrared imagery.”
He grunts. “Heard you crashed your lambo. What the hell happened?”
“Had to stop a maniac.”
He nods sagely. “Maniacs. That’s why I stay out here. What happened the detective?”
I shake my head. “We didn’t see eye to eye.”
I seem to have passed some kind of test because he beckons for me to follow him down a corridor leading from the cavern, down a stairway into a much larger underground room. There’s an impressive array of screens displaying charts recording the movement of various coins and tokens in the markets. He’s got access to some dark web places too. A fridge, bed and a sofa plus table nestle in one corner but apart from that, it’s all hardware, wires and cooling units. It’s your standard geek’s wet dream.
“We got all the exchanges here. The US ones here, Europe here, Asia there. I’m mining my own still. Mostly Bitcoin. A little Ether.”
“That’s your central heating taken care of then,” I remark.
“Nice and toasty.” He grins and points to an open pizza box that’s being heated by the graphics cards from underneath. The cheese is actually bubbling. My stomach growls. I haven’t eaten since the airport and it’s been a long trip. My attention is then drawn to a tawny cat swirling its tail sitting on the floor in front of the server.
“That’s Carter, my cat,” Paul says fondly.
I laugh. “So, it’s just you and Carter, huh?
“Yeah. What are you doing here? Egan chucked you out.”
“My brother’s still in though, and we’re a team. Before I lose him totally to your cause, I want to find out how you’re doing what you’re doing. Tell me about all this.” I wave around the room.
“I’m a day trader, a swing trader a whatever-which-way trader as long as I’m growing the portfolio. It keeps me happy.”
There’s a ping. A notification pops up on one of the screens. “Fuck, something’s going up, gotta check it out.”
I watch a line shoot in vertical fashion on the screen he’s pointing at. The chart is labelled Zilliqua v
ersus Bitcoin. It must be one of those obscure altcoins.
I watch as his fingers fly over the keyboard. “Have to recalibrate my bot’s parameters here. Damn. Damn, Damn.” He shakes his head impatiently. “Hey Carter, Taiwan’s just woken up,” he tells his cat who’s come trotting over, interested in the fuss.
I’m feeling kind of in the way as I watch them.
When the crisis seems to be over, Paul, slides back on his chair. “Uh, look, Felix, I’m kind of busy here, but be my guest.”
I need no further encouragement, I prowl around his dominion, inspecting each screen. I slide into a chair when I see a coin exchange I’ve actually heard of before. I watch the buyers and the sellers battle it out. It’s like live sports in a way.
His account is open. I glance down at the bottom of the screen where the orders are set up. What if I set up an order?
“Don’t touch that,” Paul warns, not pausing in his typing. He must have heard my eyeballs moving or something.
“Calm down, I know what I’m doing.”
“No seriously.”
“If you set your sell order now at $14,400, you’d make a tidy sum,” I say. “Looks like it’s going to dump. Just sayin’”
He groans, rises, and stomps over.
“I was just going to calculate the theoretical amount,” I say in my defense, “not actually execute it.”
His eyes flicker over the data. “Fuck it. Do it.”
I do the trade. And I’m right about the dump. It’s now dropped to $13,535 and I expect it to drop further still. I set a buy order at $13,400 and it gets filled.
I rise, slapping my hands together. “Easiest thousand bucks I ever made outside of poker. Would it cover bed and breakfast?”
Paul scratches behind his ear. “There’s a sofa over there, I have coffee, but milk is eighty-five kilometers away.”
“I can live with that.”
He claps a hand on my shoulder. With a piercing glare of his inscrutable, brown eyes, he says, “sit.” He points at the screen. “Work.”