He found the name and number and called him up.
“Colonel Dix? This is George Marchand. You may recall I was the go-between who helped recruit Frank Adversego to your task force.”
“Yes, I recall. Sorry to hear about whatever happened in Frank’s family.”
“Excuse me?”
“Family emergency, apparently. I just got an email from him, saying he’d be out of touch for at least a week.”
Okay. This was bad, George thought.
“Still there?” Colonel Dix asked.
“Yes. But Frank isn’t. Based on what you just told me, I’m concerned he may have been kidnapped – or worse.”
“Whoa – because?”
“He called me an hour ago, agitated, and told me to meet him in half an hour. He said something like ‘Don’t let me down,’ and then hung up. He never showed up.”
“I see,” Colonel Dix said and paused. “Is he also a friend of yours?”
“Yes. Can you keep me in the loop?”
“I’ll do what I can. Better let me get moving on this.”
“Thanks.”
Was there anything else he should do? Well, there was Marla, his goddaughter. Should he wait or share his concern? That was a tough one. She’d probably panic if there was nothing more he could tell her.
Was there anything more he could say?
Not much. All he knew was Frank wanted to meet him in half an hour. Did that amount of time tell him anything?
If Frank was at home – where he almost always was when he was in Washington – it would only take him ten minutes to reach their meeting place, and given how worked up he was, he wouldn’t have walked; probably he was already on the way when he placed the call. So, what was he using the extra twenty minutes for?
Right. He decided he better get to Marla. Fast.
Thankfully, she was there when he arrived, just getting out of her car, balancing a bag of groceries with one arm on her very pregnant stomach while she reached inside the car for another. Grim-faced, he slammed the door and strode quickly up to her. The sound caught her attention, and she straightened up. A look of concern, and then fear, spread across her face.
* * *
Frank woke up lying on something that felt like rough cloth. He reached around – was he on a couch? His head throbbed and his mouth felt foul, as if he’d been vomiting. He had dim memories of being roughly handled while drifting in and out of consciousness. He thought he’d been in multiple places, his hands tied behind him and a bag over his head, able to guess where he might be only from what he could hear when he was aware. Maybe in the trunk of a car. Maybe being carried somewhere. Maybe the sound of a plane. He was reasonably sure he remembered being given injections that were followed by immediate blackness and later made him ill.
How much time had gone by? He had no way of telling. Where was he? Same answer. He had no idea even what continent he might be on.
Maybe he should be less ambitious to start with. What kind of room was he in?
He struggled to his feet and immediately sat down again as he felt consciousness ebbing away once more.
* * *
Ryan Clancy frowned at the message he’d just received: Frank Adversego had unexpectedly left town to attend to a family emergency. He’d be unreachable for at least a week.
Or maybe forever, Clancy thought. He called his chief investigator and told him to come to his office ASAP. It was time to take seriously the possibility that Frank Adversego was a foreign agent. And that a catastrophic attack on BankCoin might be launched at any moment.
Chapter 44
Wakey, Wakey, Rise and Shine
Frank’s eyes fluttered open. Where was he? It was lighter, but his head was spinning. He was someplace he didn’t recognize and, yes, lying on a couch. Was Marla safe? There was no way to know. He tried to sit up and decided that was a very bad idea. Lying back down, he drifted in and out of sleep for a few more hours before deciding it was time to make himself stay awake and face up to whatever had happened to him. He was also ravenously hungry.
After a while he felt a bit steadier. Now what? A set of floor-to-ceiling drapes allowed a few streaks of light to enter the room. He made his way to his feet this time without feeling too faint and wobbled across the room. He would have been dazzled by the sunlight when he drew the drapes open except there was some sort of coating on the glass to block the glare. But the view was still enough to make him back up involuntarily. He must be close to a hundred stories up in the air. Time to sit down again.
He did, his head pounding, and examined the room he was in. It was spacious and well, if somewhat eccentrically, furnished. It looked like a hotel room, but it lacked some of the amenities he’d expect to find if that was the case. Like a telephone or any other means of connecting with the outside world, except for a large TV. He looked for a remote but found none. He walked up to it and tried the power button, but the screen remained dark. He was more fortunate when he explored the piece of furniture it stood on. Behind one door was a half-size refrigerator filled with food.
The room contained a few objects he wouldn’t expect to find in a hotel. That modern art coffee-table book over there, for instance, and the speakers on the bookshelves, which were in the same useless state as the TV. There were also two doors. One led to a bedroom and a bathroom, and the other was locked.
That covered his immediate vicinity. But where was that vicinity located?
He stared out the window; he could see a lot of tall buildings, a harbor with a single, tiny ship in the distance either coming or going, and maybe hazy mountains in the distance. He put that information together and tried to figure out what it added up to. San Diego? No. Too many tall buildings. Vancouver? No sea planes. Manhattan? It didn’t look like New York at all. Abu Dhabi? Too much greenery. He tried to think of other large cities with harbors, but he didn’t know enough about any to decide whether one might be a match.
Then a thought struck him – could this be a guest room in one of the rumored penthouses of the mysterious Günter Schwert? Assuming those rumors were true, that seemed both possible and likely. If so, what did that imply about his immediate, and hopefully long-term, future? There was no way he could think of to tell.
What next? His stomach prompted him with an answer. He wolfed down two sandwiches from the refrigerator, registering with regret that there was no beer.
He spent the next hour reviewing everything he could recall since he lost consciousness outside Marla’s apartment, searching for anything that could be useful or might give him an inkling of his location. But he had precious little to go on, and he’d hardly been in a very observant state. So, he went back over anything that seemed out of the ordinary since the gnomic table tents began appearing in his New York flat. Another blank; he’d already plowed that field down to the bedrock days ago. Why the heck hadn’t he just hired a private investigator when things first started getting weird?
After that, he confronted the dire reality that he had absolutely nothing more to occupy his mind or anything at all to do except flip through the coffee-table book, which didn’t take long since he wasn’t much interested in modern art. When he’d milked that distraction for all it was worth, he stared out the window. He wondered where that ship was headed, wishing he was on it, regardless of its destination.
It grew dark, and he got up to flip the light switch. Nothing happened. Or when he tried the switches of the floor and table lamps.
It was going to be a long, dark evening.
He tried not to think about Marla.
* * *
The same cycle of day to night repeated itself two more times. During that endless stretch of boredom, he came up with a few escape strategies, each of which failed. Smashing furniture against the locked door neither caused it to break nor inspired anyone to open it. It did mean that he no longer had anythi
ng to sit on except the couch, which he’d determined was too heavy to serve as a battering ram.
The presence of a working refrigerator meant there was at least one live outlet in his prison. That suggested another plan. Using a dull fruit knife from the cheese plate in the fridge, he stripped the insulation from one end of the cord he yanked out of a non-working lamp. Then he inserted the other end into the wall socket powering the refrigerator and tried to coax a strong enough spark from the bare wires to set any of the following objects on fire: (a) toilet paper, (b) a page torn from the coffee-table book, (c) stuffing removed from the sofa through a hole he hacked in a cushion, and (d) dust and other crud scooped from under the couch cushions. But he couldn’t persuade anything to smoke, much less ignite, and therefore failed to trigger the fire alarm.
After those efforts fizzled, he gave up trying to force someone to open the door. And anyway, the most he was likely to gain would be a second lump on the back of his head. His captor, whoever that might be, had provided food, so the plan couldn’t be to starve him to death. That was good news. Unless you considered that he had plenty to eat for another week. Surely, he’d go crazy from mental inactivity before that ran out. He wished he had a pen or pencil so he could try to break the Guinness record for calculating pi without a computer.
* * *
Unbeknownst to Frank, events relating to BankCoin were racing ahead. The banks and the IBs were getting close to agreement on a merger of their networks. The financial press was monitoring the situation closely with multiple news services striving to be the first to spot the virtual puff of white smoke that would signal the standoff was over.
Meanwhile, Crypto was feverishly making final preparations for his attack. During an exhausting assault on his exercise bicycle the week before, he’d devised a plan to save both the remnants of his sanity and Frank Adversego’s life.
And thank goodness. The Bees had grown hysterical over Adversego’s fate when they learned of his email asking about Magnus’s compiler. If Crypto didn’t surrender to their demands, the Bees assured Crypto that his torment would never end – not for a day, an hour, a minute – even for a second until the moment he died, an event he would eagerly anticipate. The best he’d been able to negotiate was a standoff: they had agreed to Crypto’s Plan B: kidnapping Frank and holding him for the time being. But then what?
Crypto’s solution was to come up with a reason why Frank must live for the Bees’ aims to be achieved.
His argument went like this: if the goal was to usher in an era of anarchy but not war, then humanity had to be convinced who had launched the attacks. Otherwise, the Americans would assuredly hold the Russians accountable, or the North Koreans, the Iranians – someone. And the Russians would blame the Americans, the Chechnyans, the Ukrainians – anyone. Every government would need an enemy to rally the patriotic citizenry against to preserve its own existence as the chaos spread.
That would never do. The goal of the attacks was to destroy world order, not entrench regimes and lead to destructive retaliation. He needed everyone to know they had been betrayed by their governments, their centralized institutions, their corporate masters. All must know the attacks were the work of a cadre of selfless idealists who had pledged their lives to rescuing humanity from the tyranny of oppressive regimes – capitalist, communist, and authoritarian alike.
Therefore: Someone with public credibility must watch the attacks as they occurred and then bear witness to the waiting world of what he had seen. That person would be Frank Adversego.
It was a brilliant inspiration. Even the Bees were impressed.
And it was just in time. Only a few hours later, the BankCoin and iBetterBankCoin networks released a joint press release, announcing that their respective blockchains had been merged. The last block of the iBetterBankCoin blockchain had been added to the BankCoin blockchain, every IB had opened a BankCoin node and a wallet for each of its customers, and the iBetterBankCoin blockchain had been shut down after less than a week in operation. There was once again only one global financial system.
Almost immediately, the TV screen in Frank’s room winked into life.
Chapter 45
Fancy Meeting You Here
If Frank thought he was finally about to meet the foe he had imagined for so long, he was disappointed. Instead, all he saw on the screen was a cartoon avatar of a laughing dog, as if he was using some silly game app that requested, but did not require, you to upload a selfie before you could play. Nor was the voice that came out of the till-then dormant speakers recognizable. Some sort of device was being used to disguise it.
“And so, we meet,” the odd voice intoned.
What to say, Frank wondered, taken aback by the strange, sudden presence. “I know who half of ‘we’ is,” he settled on. “Would you care to introduce yourself?” He figured it had to be Schwert, but who knew? Then he had an urgent thought. “And what about Marla? Is my daughter safe?”
“Who I am does not matter. What I am about to do does. You will pay close attention. And yes, your daughter was never touched.”
“How do I know that?”
“Watch.”
The dog avatar was replaced by what he guessed was a slightly askew video stream from the camera on Marla or Tim’s laptop. It showed Marla sitting in her usual chair, holding a magazine in her lap but looking blankly into space, her face troubled. Without thinking, Frank jerked upright and took a step toward the screen. Thank goodness, she was safe! Assuming the stream was live and not recorded. He had to hope. And play his cards right, too. What next?
“Why should I do anything for you?” Frank asked and then added, “Günter.” But if his guess was correct, the voice gave no indication.
“Because if you pay close attention and agree to tell the world what you are about to witness, your daughter will remain safe, and you will be released when I am finished.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Do you have anything better to do with your time for the next hour?”
Frank eased back down on to the sofa, his eyes still fixed on the image of Marla. “Point taken. Your show.”
“Good. So. We shall start with the preliminaries.”
The screen flashed to the headline of a story in the Wall Street Journal.
“As you see, since you became my guest, the banks and investment banks have merged their blockchain networks. Once again, BankCoin is carrying virtually all international financial traffic, excluding only transactions with the Russian Federation, China, and, to varying degrees, the least developed countries.”
The screen switched to the headquarters of the National Security Agency in Maryland before reverting once again to the laughing dog. “I am aware of your work with the Russ Task Force and, therefore, that you know the extent of Russ-based trade between the Russian Federation and the scope of violations of current Western sanctions. The great majority of Russia’s foreign commerce now flows through this channel, and the value of the ruble and the Russ are now inextricably intertwined.
“You are also aware your president has succeeded in pushing the price of oil to its lowest level in years. Yes, it recovered for a time when NASLA took down the GPN, but that respite is now over, leaving the Russian Federation once again dependent on the health of the Russ for its economic survival.
“Finally, I must mention that it has recently come to my attention that you have discovered that the BankCoin compiler incorporates some unexpected capabilities. Your awareness of that fact, of course, is one reason for the loss of your freedom. You will be interested to know that the Russ compiler also contains covert code. I will explain what the unique features of each program are shortly.
“And so, it is time to begin,” the voice continued. “Which attack shall we launch first, Mr. Adversego? Should our target be the Russ or BankCoin?” The voice paused. “No preference? Then let me rephrase the quest
ion. Do you prefer pleasure first or pain? Still no answer? I am afraid you are not being very helpful. Perhaps if I make it simpler. When you were a little boy, Mr. Adversego, did you eat the frosting on your birthday cake first or last?”
This was beyond bizarre. Frank felt as if he was in some sort of real-world James Bond movie except the evil genius taunting him was a cartoon dog with its tongue hanging out. Best to keep his own still.
“Well, never mind,” the voice said. “In that case, it will be the Russ.” Frank heard an odd, muffled clatter, and decided it was the sound of a computer keyboard, modified by the same software disguising the speaker’s voice.
“So. I am just now adding a block of Russ transactions to the node I maintain in Kazakhstan. I prepared this addition many months ago expressly for this occasion.”
Despite the gravity of what he was witnessing, Frank was fascinated. What would happen next?
“There. I have issued the block,” the voice said. “Shall we see what happens now? I think yes.”
The screen changed to display a variety of charts, numbers, and Cyrillic text. At first, Frank could make nothing of it.
“You will please observe the pie chart on the left. The red wedge, which already extends from the twelve to the three o’clock positions and continues to grow, shows the percentage of other Russ nodes that are verifying my block. Now, note the activity in the center of the display.”
To Frank, it resembled a very flat sine wave on an oscilloscope or the horizon of a landscape with very low hills. The voice explained.
“This screen displays the changing value of the Russ. Indirectly, it also shows the level of price support the Russian government is giving to its cyber currency. When the line goes up, it means the value of the Russ is also rising because investors, or the Russian government, are buying it; when it falls, it means there are more Russ sellers than buyers or that the Kremlin is issuing more Russ to prevent it from advancing too quickly.
The Blockchain Revolution Page 32