A Billion Ways to Die (32 page)

“You actually look a lot like T’Pol,” I told her.

“The one thing these boobs are good for.”

“Did you just spot me?”

“This morning. I’ve been stalking you all day. Making sure you’re alone.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“If you were already busted. You’re not, are you?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. I’m off the net. Actually, pretty much off the grid.”

“That’s why I got worried,” she said. “You disappeared.”

“Except for the connection I made with you. I had to chance that.”

“A rare exposure for such a sneaky guy,” she said. “El Timador.”

“So you know the name.”

“Whoever hacked your bank account is chasing the handle El Timador. I put two and two together.”

“So who’s the hacker?” I asked.

“No hard ID, but I know a few things. Operates outside of the usual crowd. Stays out of discussions except to ask about El Timador. Otherwise, just lurks. No luck so far chasing down his IP. Very good at covering his tracks.”

“You don’t think it’s a team.”

“No. He works alone. In fact, a total loner.”

“So not the government?”

“No, not at all. Unless they hired him freelance. That could be. Those people are getting smarter by the day. Makes me feel like we’re all doomed.”

She held her hurricane with two hands and drew a large portion down through the straw. Her fingernails were still chewed up, though much cleaner, as if recently scrubbed.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” I said.

She smiled at me over the top of her drink.

“You are such a romantic,” she said. “Look, the next war will absolutely be fought in cyberspace. That means governments are putting the best brains they can buy into hacking each other’s networks, public and private. Talk about an arms race. Or a Cold War. The fun times, when banks and universities and all these other dumb institutions were like naive little lambs any of us could lead to slaughter, that’s ending fast. That’s how I know you got a lone wolf on your ass. If it were a government attack team, you’d already be splatter.”

I sat back in my seat and tried to process what she was saying. She noticed.

“I can’t believe you don’t know this,” she said. “You really are off the grid.”

“I’m a little lost,” I said, surprising myself yet again.

“I wish I knew your story,” she said. “I can’t help it. You interest me.”

It might have been the effects of social isolation, Internet withdrawal, or the hotel’s hurricane recipe, but without hesitation, I launched into a description of my past and the path that had led me to that moment. Her face was uncharacteristically filled with wonder.

“Holy crap.”

“I have no right to ask for your help,” I said, “but I need it.”

“Just don’t say it’s a mission. Everyone in this hotel is on a mission.”

“Okay, a project. Specifically The People Project. Get in there as deep as you can get.”

“What am I looking for?” she asked.

“Hidden money. A lot of it.”

She flagged down the waiter and ordered another hurricane. I demurred.

“Okay,” she said. “And I assume you’ll be doing the same?”

“I will. We’ll probably meet somewhere deep in the bowels of their global database.”

“Thanks for that visual.”

We talked for another hour, exchanging signals and signs and other ways to identify each other and communicate within The People Project infrastructure and cyberspace at large. We also managed to exchange a few laughs, which made me feel bathed in comfort and understanding.

By then the hour had grown late and the crowd in the bar had thinned to the usual noisy few. I felt exhausted and overexposed. Strider read my mind.

“Time to go,” she said.

“It is.”

“I’m not inviting you to my room, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like you,” she said.

“I wouldn’t accept the invitation, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like you as well.”

“Good answer.”

We parted and I made it to my much smaller and cheaper hotel with no incident or occasion to feel any less hopeful or invigorated. It was profoundly odd to enter a room without a computer, tablet or smartphone to obsessively check in on. No e-mails, texts or voice messages demanding an instant response. All I had was a bed crammed into a tiny room, lots of street noise outside and a stream of frantic and unwanted mental images to subdue before I could fall into a deep, yet restless sleep.

B
ACK
AT
The People Project New Haven, I gained a better grasp on their standing within the hierarchy of the organization. Tenuous.

Their stated purpose was to raise funds from the abundant wealth and charitable impulses within the high-net-worth community along the Connecticut shoreline. The reality was more nuanced. There was indeed a lot of money slopping around the coasts of Long Island Sound, but competition for those dollars was fierce. And the expectations of The People Project home office in Zurich, driven by highly optimistic statistical models, guaranteed that nothing New Haven ever did was good enough. The stress showed.

Sylvan van Leeuwan was always in the office when I arrived in the morning, and there when I left at night. His pale face had a sheen as if overwork had degraded his basic hygiene. But he was friendly to me, and it wasn’t hard to engage him in conversation and ask him important questions, such as his heart’s desire for his New Haven operation.

“I want a couple of millionaires who have us in their will to drop dead,” he said.

“I might be able to help you with that.”

“Debugging software would be fine for now.”

It took a few days to untangle the mess Finnegan had made of the database and fund-raising application that served as the front end. It was satisfying work, but most importantly, I was able to poke around the interface with The People Project’s home network under her administrative password. Eventually, I found a wormhole through the e-mail system. Strider was surely right about the tightening noose of cybersecurity, but the latest precautions had yet to reach the IT department at The People Project.

I looked over the top of my monitor at Finnegan working just a few feet away. I could see her screen, but she couldn’t see mine. I sent her an e-mail with a list of things she’d need to do as part of the database cleanup.

“Thanks a lot,” she said over her shoulder. “Do I have to do it now?”

“It would help.”

As she bent to the task, I slipped into the servers in Zurich and made a survey of the file structures. I wrote everything out on a pad of paper, tearing off the pages and stuffing them into my back pocket before Finnegan emerged from her labors with a triumphant, “Got it. Done!”

At the next opportunity, I went directly to Albalita’s e-mail in search of correspondence with Andalusky or Joselito, but whatever might have been there, it wasn’t there anymore. Not just deleted, which I knew how to recover. Gone, like it never existed.

But I pressed on. Over the next week, I not only gained mastery over The People Project’s global network, I made contact with Strider and set up communications within a folder buried deep inside an administrative backwater. As hoped, she already had burrowed her way through the accounting department, and had deposited a copy of “Audited Financials, Current and Year Prior” into our secret file. I thanked her and loaded the documents onto a flash drive, which I took to an office supply place around the corner and had printed out and secured inside a ring binder.

On lunch hours I sat on the New Haven Green and lost myself inside columns of numbers and arid financial commentary. Luckily, everything was in English, as required by the people for whom the audit was most importantly undertaken. The Société Commerciale Fontaine, fiduciaries for the US State Department.

While I could find my way around reasonably well, accounting and finance weren’t strengths of mine. Luckily, they were Strider’s, who revealed to me she had her CPA and a master’s in economics.

“Why else do you think I’d want to hack banks?” she’d written when I was back on the computer in the Yale study room. “It takes a crook to know a bunch of crooks.”

So I felt confident in where our joint inquiry eventually netted out. The books were clean as a whistle, and so was The People Project. Over the course of five years, a billion and a half dollars had flowed from the US Treasury through Fontaine to The People Project, which distributed the money in the form of microloans to thousands of tiny businesses throughout the world.

“Every penny’s accounted for,” Strider wrote.

“If you believe the audit.”

“We have to. The auditors are a giant accounting firm who’d be ruined if they screwed up anything attached to federal money.”

“Albalita said she and Joselito took a billion dollars. Which I then somehow stole out of the accounts.”

“Not a chance. You can’t just swipe a billion dollars.”

“That’s what I keep saying.”

“I need to get behind the numbers the auditing firm was using. It’ll take some pretty serious forensics. And time.”

“I understand.”

We confirmed our communications protocols and I watched her blink away, while ignoring, almost successfully, a faint pang of renewed loneliness. Which is probably why I leapt without hesitation into a role I’d played before, and had hoped to never repeat.

Bait.

I
T
WAS
absurdly easy. I merely had to go to websites run by Black Hats and White Hats, hackers and those in the service of defeating hacking, and post this simple message:

“Yo bank robber. Catch me if you can. El Timador.”

Then I logged into a site run by market researchers, to kill time, and consume what amounted to intellectual comfort food, before jumping back into the world of cybersecurity.

The message was in Spanish: “El Timador. You’re a dead man.”

I wrote back: “I’ve heard that before.”

“This time it’s true. You ruin my life, I ruin yours.”

“Joselito?”

The man who’d served Spanish death squads, whom I helped put away in a federal prison so deep he’d likely never be heard from again. A man who was supposed to be banished from the Internet for the rest of his life.

“Si, El Timador. I’m coming.”

Having had a bullet smash through my skull, I was sensitive to the psychologist’s claim that the brain could be smarter than the mind. That there were thoughts going on in the background that your consciousness wasn’t privy to, but were nevertheless far more brilliant and perceptive. I don’t know about that, but I do know at the moment I read those lines from Joselito, I knew what had happened, and what I had to do about it.

“I’ll be waiting,” I wrote.

I forwarded the e-mail chain to Strider, then logged off the site and the computer, picked up my backpack and walked slowly back to my dorm bed at the Second Chance University.

C
HAPTER
25

T
here were two packages wrapped like birthday presents on my bunk when I got to the open dorm. My next-door neighbor, Davis, the guy who tried to steal my meds, was sitting on his own bunk, waiting for me.

“They’re from me,” he said. “I bought them for you.”

“New strategy? More blessed to give than receive? By stealing?”

“If you insist on putting it that way, which happened a long time ago, by the way.”

“It did. Sorry.”

“Go ahead. Open them up, but don’t take anything out.” He looked around the room. I got the message. “Start with the one on the right.”

Inside the package was a slim knife handle, yellow, etched with the name “Stan.”

“It’s a switchblade. Ceramic. Almost weightless. I made it on the 3D printer. Open the other one.”

Inside that box was a tiny automatic pistol, bright red, with my name on the grip.

“Also ceramic,” Davis whispered. “It takes real .32-caliber rounds. Not a lot of range or accuracy, but close in, it’ll do the job. Kind of a chick gun, but fun, right?”

“How did you get this stuff in here?”

He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.

“They’re ceramic. Go through any metal detector. But you knew that already. You’ll have to buy the bullets on the outside.”