The parade of horror had cast a gloomy pall over the assemblage, but a discreet nod from Hartley green-lighted Knight to press forward. He introduced the next victim while everyone settled in for a trip inside the next circle of hell.
Railway Minister Zhang Huang Fu had violated the public’s trust in epic fashion, even by Chinese standards, squirreling an estimated $180 million in secret accounts and amassing over three hundred homes with funds siphoned from municipal coffers. The public outcry on social-networking sites like Weibo—China’s answer to Twitter—was so stunning that Beijing had been forced to temporarily shut down its network to suppress the unrest. Zhang, like many of his ilk, had fled the country to avoid standing trial. Bounty4Justice’s cyber jurists, however, had tried the case in absentia and arrived at a near-unanimous vote, with 99 percent of participants finding him guilty.
The kill video began with a middle-aged Chinese man in a business suit, presumably the disgraced minister, standing on a skyscraper’s rooftop with his back to the camera. The apocalyptic daytime sky glowed orange-green, and in the near distance, behind the Oriental Pearl Tower and the glassy twin towers of the Shanghai International Finance Centre, sampans and junks drifted along the muddy bends of the Huangpu River. Novak figured Zhang either never truly left China, or had been forcibly repatriated to face the music.
Gusting winds drowned out a command shouted by the cameraman (not that Novak could make heads or tails of Chinese) as a menacing pistol came into view in the hand of another man positioned offscreen to the right. Zhang turned weepily toward the camera, face scrunched tight, tears streaming down his cheeks, blue silk tie flapping like a wind sock. The cameraman zoomed in on the face—tight, really tight. As if to say, Let there be no mistaking it. This is the guy. More shouting sent Zhang to the rooftop’s edge, quaking in fear. Then a final, succinct directive—clearly Chinese for “jump.” Zhang shook his head in disbelief and whimpered, abandoning any last notion of saving face.
Novak was pretty sure that carrying firearms most anywhere in China was illegal. That got him thinking that these were no ordinary thugs but professionals who were keyed in to shady criminal networks. The bounty prize was sizable. Though was it big enough to command such an elaborate execution by what appeared to be seasoned professionals? After all, Zhang was the first victim in China.
The cameraman repeated the command. Zhang disobeyed it. The gunman shot the minister in the left shoulder—red blossomed over his lapel—and that did the trick. Zhang’s violent recoil sent him airborne and out of sight. The cameraman scurried mindfully to the rooftop’s lip, took a few seconds to get the right angle and steady the shot, and captured Zhang’s flailing body as it folded and bounced off a terrace railing halfway down the building before continuing its terminal descent toward the sidewalk, easily a hundred stories below. The zoom pixelated into a blur before sharpening for the tiny red splat of the impact.
All Novak could think was that it appeared that he hadn’t landed on a pedestrian.
Final yuan payout converted to U.S. dollars: $623,125.
“Damn,” the agent seated next to Novak whispered. She covered her mouth with her hand.
“One more to go,” Knight said, as if coaching a woman through childbirth. “Lastly, we have a Japanese pharmaceutical executive, Koji Watanabe, whose company had falsified clinical studies on a blockbuster cholesterol drug, resulting in dozens of patients’ deaths. Watanabe denied any wrongdoing, and since no evidence proved he’d had a hand in the cover-up, he was not criminally charged in the investigation. Instead, the blame was pinned on a subordinate, who committed suicide before standing trial. Documents uploaded to Bounty4Justice substantiated rumors that Watanabe had orchestrated the whole thing. And here’s what happened next.”
Fade in: fifty-four-year-old Koji Watanabe, hanging by his shackled wrists from a hook that dangled from something out of view overhead, feet tethered with rope to an eye hook in the floor. The space around him: the girder-and-sheet-metal interior of a pristine industrial warehouse, empty and brightly lit. He’d been stripped to his boxers, which was less humiliating than intended, given that he was a fit man. His expression was resolute, completely unrepentant. Grisly scenarios for this torture-friendly arrangement reeled through Novak’s mind: disembowelment with a scalpel, dismemberment with a chain saw, perhaps flaying alive. Too many possibilities.
A short guy in a ski mask came waltzing into the frame, pushing a cart. But the tray atop it wasn’t full of rusty old blades and clamps and implements of torture. It was stacked with cash. Not dollars. Yen. The executive started berating his captor in rapid-fire Japanese, spittle flying, neck veins bulging. Masked Guy grabbed a fistful of yen and stepped up to Watanabe. Watanabe, in turn, spit right in the guy’s masked face. Masked Guy responded with a gut-wrenching left jab that landed on Watanabe’s nose much the way a falling anvil might flatten a water balloon, blood exploding in every direction.
Silence in the warehouse.
Now Masked Guy got busy. With his left hand, he cranked open Watanabe’s jaw like a nutcracker, then proceeded to jam the wad of cash in his mouth, with authority. Watanabe tried his best to fight it, to little avail. Masked Guy grabbed another fistful of bills off the cart and sent them home, too. With a crushed nose and a mouth stuffed with yen, Watanabe struggled for air. In less than ten seconds, his face went a sickening purple, veins cabling out from his temples.
Then Masked Guy went to town on the executive, working over the engorged face and body with well-aimed punches to beat the last molecule of oxygen out of him. Watanabe went limp, and his bladder let loose to signal the end. For good measure, the video played for a solid minute before cutting to black.
Final bounty in U.S. dollars: $489,145; the guilty/not-guilty pie chart split, 81 percent / 19 percent.
Thus ended the viewing of Bounty4Justice’s current video archive.
Jacob Feldstein @Jacob_Feldstein • 8m
Some #NUTJOB posted me on @Bounty4Justice. I don’t deserve to die for an ACCIDENT people! ICYMI the judge said I’m #NOTGUILTY!!!
Billy J. Olson @MonsterBJ • 2m
@Jacob_Feldstein is a DOUCHE and a #shittyattorney. No surprise he’s on a hit list. Not guilty? GTFOH! Have at it @Bounty4Justice!
# 09.01
The conference room remained as quiet as a tomb for a good thirty seconds, until Tim Knight finally broke the silence. “Of the twenty-two active targets, five reside here in the U.S.,” he noted. Using the remote, he clicked a filter on the Bounty4Justice home page so that only domestic targets showed. “The names will sound familiar to most of you, because, like Chase Lombardi, they’ve all been fodder for the nightly news for quite some time.”
He ran down the list—a veritable who’s who of scoundrels and lowlifes who’d recently dodged the justice system on technicalities or whose despicable crimes far outweighed their prescribed punishment. The vote-split pie chart next to each name was practically solid red to indicate a resounding “guilty.”
At the top of the list was Paul Garrison, a weaselly forty-three-year-old from Chicago who’d served a mere seven years for molesting nearly two dozen young boys while employed as the grounds manager at a Lake Michigan summer camp in the late 1990s. Following his release in June, he’d been using a windfall inheritance to bankroll a highly publicized legal challenge to Illinois’s Sex Offender Registration Act, which required him to register as a “sexual predator” every year for the remainder of his natural life—one of many tough measures he viewed as “excessive” and “unfair.” He also felt that being banned from Facebook and other social media venues during his parole was “draconian” and “outright unconstitutional.” The street outside his home had become an encampment for angry residents and protestors, so he’d been moving around from place to place, engaging the press via Skype, like some political dissident. His profile picture came directly from the Illinois State Police website. Bounty: $511K and counting.
In the second slot was the notoriou
s Californian “attorney to the stars” Jacob Feldstein, best known for three scandalous murder trials in recent years that had resulted in acquittals for his decidedly guilty celebrity clients. This past spring, he’d zoomed his Maserati through a busy Los Angeles crosswalk and plowed over a mother pushing her newborn twins in a stroller, killing the babies instantly and leaving her in a drug-induced coma at Cedars-Sinai. Though the incident had been captured by a traffic camera, Feldstein managed to keep the video sealed throughout his trial, which, along with shoddy police work, let him walk with only traffic citations. His profile on Bounty4Justice included an upload of that inadmissible, stomach-turning audiovisual, alongside his infamous smirking mug shot, to ensure that justice would get the last laugh. Bounty: $422K.
“Nobody likes a sleazy lawyer,” whispered the agent seated beside Novak.
And that’s really all it takes for Bounty4Justice to get a vote, thought Novak, giving her a polite smile.
In third place, a former Jacksonville bookie turned banker named Ralph Demaris, who’d peddled predatory no-doc mortgages to anyone with a pulse during the buildup to the epic national housing bust a few years back. His greedy maneuverings had blighted neighborhoods in his native Florida and forced hundreds of families to forfeit their homes and life savings. A recent 60 Minutes exposé chronicled how he’d emerged from the scandal unscathed and very rich. In 2009, he’d seeded a hedge fund that snatched up hundreds of those same properties at fire-sale prices, which were then rented to many of the same families he’d bankrupted. He’d also secretly cooperated with federal authorities to provide inside information that allowed the IRS to target many of his past clients for tax evasion and fraud, while the offshore accounts that sheltered his own windfall profits were never audited. Bounty: $389K.
Fourth place went to a serial rapist dubbed “the Sorority Stalker,” who for months had been terrorizing female students on college campuses throughout Greater Boston. He’d been using a GoPro camera to take videos of his sick acts and post them on anonymous servers hosted on the darknet—the unindexed, lawless realm of the Internet that could be accessed only through an invite in an anonymous chat room. The authorities had little to go on and thus far, the same was true for Bounty4Justice. But if clues were to surface as to the man’s identity, Novak was sure that the website’s highly dynamic forum for information sharing with a $384K kicker would give the authorities a run for their money in seeing who might get to the cyber rapist first.
In the fifth slot was Alan Bateman, the Long Island–based mastermind of the largest-ever Medicare-fraud scam. He’d used more than seven thousand stolen identities to file fraudulent claims for healthcare services and supplies billed by various companies registered in eighteen different states, all of which existed only on paper. Federal reimbursements paid to his bogus companies totaled $127 million. After expenses to cover roughly four dozen co-conspirators—many of whom were members of a notorious Armenian crime syndicate—he’d netted $88 million. He’d been investigated by the FBI, tried by the Justice Department, and found guilty by a judge and was currently on house arrest awaiting sentencing. By all accounts, he was expected to be treated very leniently, since he’d snitched on everyone involved in the operation. Bounty: $320K.
It was a solid list, thought Novak—thorough, unbiased, and in line with public sentiment. People despised criminals who were let off easy for their crimes, and they particularly hated bad guys who “got away with murder” within the law. Whoever was behind Bounty4Justice knew exactly how to tap into those hardwired emotions that resided deep in every human’s lizard brain. But were the proceeds from the lapel pins actually being paid out to the assassins, or was the mastermind laughing all the way to the bank?
“And there you have it, folks,” Knight said, nodding to Hartley.
The assistant director in charge made her way to the open floor in front of the podium, wearing an expression typically reserved for funerals. “It’s understandable that the public is very upset with Chase Lombardi’s acquittal, as well as the misdeeds of the other victims whose gruesome deaths we’ve witnessed just now. Frankly, I share in that sentiment, as do you, I’m sure. Yes, lots of people have been disenfranchised by con men and have suffered terribly at the hands of criminals of every stripe. Many of them might see this as a tangible solution, or perhaps a fix for the punishment they believe we cannot deliver. But this is not justice,” she said, chopping her hand at the screen. “This is an aberration of justice. Pure vigilantism. I don’t think I need to lecture anyone on that.” She closed her eyes and clasped her hands together, searching for direction. Then she continued, cool and collected: “I’m sure every agent in this room has experienced the difficulties of cracking Internet-based crimes. But from the looks of it, this one’s a doozy.”
Novak felt overwhelmed. “Doozy” was putting it mildly. Taking down a gorilla like Bounty4Justice was going to be a Herculean task.
“Headquarters will need to have our legal attachés in Beijing, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt, and Madrid validate exactly what happened to these other five victims in Asia and Europe. I’ll brief the director on the matter and see to it that those inquiries are made. In the meantime, our local offices here in Manhattan will continue to assist NYPD every step of the way in tracking down Chase Lombardi’s sniper. And since Alan Bateman also falls under our office’s jurisdiction here in New York, we’ll see to it that he gets to his prison cell before someone decides to cash in on his bounty.” She looked expectantly to SAC Karasowski-Fowler, who nodded confidently. “Furthermore, since Chase Lombardi was Bounty4Justice’s first victim here in the U.S., I will request that this office spearhead the cyberinvestigation. As you all know, our cyber chief, Jim Cooper, is the best of the best”—she looked over to the SAC, and he smiled appreciatively—“as is our world-class Cyber Command Center. Therefore, I’m confident that Walter and his team will have the support they need to get things rolling and identify the servers hosting this website and, in time, the mastermind behind it. From there, we’ll work with headquarters to determine the appropriate course of action.”
Walter straightened in his seat and nodded. Challenge accepted. Over the years, Novak had come to know that Walter was to the Web what Stephen Hawking was to quantum mechanics. And no matter where in the world Bounty4Justice might be operating, Manhattan’s Cyber Command Center had the resources, reach, and international partnerships to find it and shut it down.
“Tim has already begun to assemble an emergency task force, and I’ve been told that Special Agent Novak will be leading that team. Is that right, Tim?”
“That’s correct,” Knight said.
“Agent Novak, would you like to say a few words?”
Not really, he thought, as all eyes turned to him. He stood, smoothed his tie, cleared his throat. “Based on everything we’ve seen here today, I think we all understand the seriousness of this undertaking. The way I look at it, we cannot stand by and let some rogue website rewrite the laws of justice. So let’s crush Bounty4Justice right now, before this goes any further.” Nothing else came to mind, so he stood there for a few seconds, wondering if he’d sounded absurdly mawkish.
“Do you have a name for this operation, Agent Novak?” asked Hartley.
He hadn’t thought that far ahead. Typically an operation was dubbed something witty that captured the essence of the crime itself, like the code name for the investigation into the 9/11 attacks: PENTTBOM, for “Pentagon, Twin Towers Bombing Investigation.” “I’m open to suggestions, but I’m thinking Operation CLICKKILL.” Sounded catchy enough.
“Excellent,” Hartley said. “I wish you and your team luck, Agent Novak. Please be sure to issue an EC right away to the field offices where the remaining U.S. targets reside. And let’s all do our best to shut this thing down before it goes any further.”
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Monday, 10/23/2017
TASK FORCE ADVISORY
Case no.: 9843TR12
Op
eration code name: CLICKKILL
Task Force Leaders:
—Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Knight
—Special Agent Roman Novak
FBI New York
26 Federal Plaza, 23rd Floor
New York, NY 10278-0004
The New York field office is leading an investigation into bounty4justice.com for its role in facilitating and remunerating the murder of Chase Lombardi in lower Manhattan this morning. The website has posted sizable bounties for numerous targets throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, and the threats have been deemed credible. Cyber teams are working to identify the host servers and map the block chain for the website’s financial transactions.
What follows is a Q&A regarding bounty4justice.com’s functionality, profiles for its remaining U.S. targets, and field offices for which we request assistance in coordinating with local authorities to mitigate potential threats against known targets.
# 10.01
@ Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Tuesday, 10/24/2017
At 5:30 A.M., Novak swatted at the chirping alarm clock and groaned. He’d slept like crap, thanks to looping nightmares featuring smashed skulls and an old lady roasting like a rotisserie chicken. Bad enough he hadn’t gotten home until midnight, after staying at the office into the late evening with Knight and Walter to cobble together an action plan for the task force and prepare an electronic communication announcing New York’s claim over the Bounty4Justice investigation.
He stumbled into the kitchen, brewed some coffee, ate some yogurt sprinkled with granola, then put on his workout gear and walked to the local gym for a forty-minute training session mixing treadmill sprints and free weights. A call from Captain Agner came in just as he returned to his apartment.
Bounty Page 5