Tahoe Skydrop (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 16)

by Todd Borg

  The website wording said,

  ‘Breaking laws is the only way to undermine the corrupt plutocracy that controls the country.’

  I had to read farther to find comments that reminded me of what a plutocracy was: government by the wealthy who, according to the website, controlled everything: business, banking, schools, courts, and government.

  I clicked on some links to other pages that ranted in some detail about these subjects.

  There was one page that was different.

  At the top was the word Marketplace.

  It was vaguely like the wantads for jobs in a newspaper. The fine print said listings were free to post, but would be edited to avoid inflaming the socialist stooges who work for the government. Under that, it said respondents’ replies would also be edited. It further explained that with all exchanges, neither party’s email addresses would be revealed to each other or anyone else, and that all emails go through a Tor network and are untraceable. Correspondents would need to assess their mutual suitability and work out their projects and pay agreements among each other.

  There was also a paragraph of qualifiers and disclaimers. The Brotherhood Marketplace assumed no responsibility for anything relative to agreements struck using the website.

  The Brotherhood Marketplace said all payments would be made in bitcoin. Employers would pay the Brotherhood Marketplace, and the Brotherhood Marketplace would in turn forward bitcoin payments to vendors, minus a small fee equal to 2% of each transaction.

  I scanned some of the ads.

  Wanted: Bodyguard. Imposing size and clean-cut style matters more than experience.

  Wanted: Safecracker. Business opportunity to make easy money. Huge potential. Must know bank vaults.

  Wanted: Hacker, expert in breaking encryption techniques.

  Wanted: Enforcer/persuader. Prefer biker look. Must have own weapons manufactured before World War II. No Tactical Tupperware. Weapons that can’t be traced preferred.

  Wanted: Clean-up specialist who can render a crime scene spotless.

  Wanted: Single-engine, float-plane pilot.

  Wanted: Military weapons expert. Need to acquire rocket launcher and grenade launcher and all related equipment and ordnance.

  Wanted: Actor/impersonator. Must play convincing investment banker with hedge fund experience.

  Wanted: Abduction expert. Must have experience. Pay is commission percentage of revenue.

  Wanted: Avalanche explosives expert. Focus is small dynamite charges hard to trace. No Plastic.

  It was apparent that someone could design and plan a wide range of illegal projects and find people to do the job, all while remaining unknown.

  Like the people behind the abduction of Vince’s kid. Or the disappearance of Yardley LaMotte.

  What a wonderful world of possibilities for those with no ethical compass.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In the morning, I invited Diamond for coffee at my office. He showed up in his uniform.

  I poured him a mug. He sniffed it, then held it out to Spot. “Smell okay to you?”

  Spot sniffed it and wagged.

  “Okay for the hound, okay for me,” Diamond said.

  “Last night, I read a Brotherhood gang website,” I said. “It has a section where guys advertise their services and can connect with people who want to employ them. The website company explains how they pay them in bitcoin. It’s set up so everyone can stay anonymous. I’m curious if you know what bitcoin money is?”

  “Kind of. You can just call it bitcoin. It’s a type of crypto-currency with no centralized government or major bank behind it.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what that implies.”

  Diamond spoke slower. “The way we have a sense of the value of the dollar is that the U.S. Government and the U.S. Central Bank, and a whole lotta other banks and businesses use it and attach dollar amounts to their goods and services. That supports our sense of how much a dollar is worth. But with bitcoin and other such currencies, there’s no official government or big bank support. So all we have is business usage to give the currency value.”

  “Wouldn’t that still be a good way to determine value?”

  “In the short term, yes, absolutely.” Diamond sat down on one of the chairs, leaned back, and put his feet up on the edge of my desk, his ankles resting on the wood, careful to make sure the old surface didn’t scuff his shiny shoe polish.

  He said, “If you can buy a car or a house or a suit of clothes using bitcoin, then that shows that the sellers who take bitcoin believe in its value. From what I’ve read, there are other similar currencies popping up every week. However, without the official backing of governments or big banks, the value of bitcoin and other currencies is less stable than dollars. And how much it buys has varied drastically over the years. Bitcoin value has gone down and up with much more volatility than the value of the dollar.”

  “Does bitcoin come in just coins? Or is there paper money, too?”

  “Neither. It’s in the cloud. A network of computers spread across the internet.”

  “Okay,” I said. I’d heard about the cloud for years, but the concept still seemed a bit foggy.

  “Think of when you see an online banking page that shows your checking account or savings account,” Diamond said.

  “I don’t do online banking,” I said.

  “Yes, of course,” Diamond said. “I keep forgetting the depths of your anachronistic tendencies. Okay, imagine that you did do online banking. You’d go to your bank’s website, log in, and then you could look at a page that shows your balance in dollars. You could then go to a site - let’s say, the IRS website - and pay your taxes by authorizing the IRS to directly debit your checking account. All this time, you would never actually see dollar bills or coins.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  Diamond continued. “So bitcoin is like that. No physical money. Just money in the cloud, money that is not directly connected to dollars or euros or yen. But like other kinds of money, your bitcoin account is accessed with an account number and a password. In essence, you use your computer to point to your little kitty of bitcoins and send some of them to somebody who’s selling something you want. As a private detective, you could, for example, decide to take payment for your services in euros or yen in addition to dollars. Increasingly, people are also willing to take bitcoin instead of dollars. Could be, your dentist will one day advertise for patients and use as an incentive the fact that she takes bitcoin.”

  “You called it a cryptocurrency. What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know the details. I’m a cop, remember? But I understand that the encryption software - the cryptography - that keeps such a currency secure is very complicated. The fact that the encryption is hard to break gives users a sense of security critical to maintaining bitcoin’s value and usefulness.”

  “So that people can’t make counterfeit bitcoins?”

  “Yeah. But more details would be above my pay grade,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Gotta go.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  After Diamond left, I thought about the people I’d met who were experienced in the computer and financial worlds. People like Yardley LaMotte and his employees at Tahoe Robotics. Angel investor William Lindholm. The lender who just died, Anders Henriksson.

  Before I could organize my thoughts, the phone rang.

  “I was so busy playing banking professor that I forgot to tell you,” Diamond said.

  “What?”

  “A trucker was coming over Carson Pass into Hope Valley on Highway Eighty-eight. When he got down to the valley floor, he pulled off to relieve his bladder and saw a body lying not too far away. The man apparently looked like he was taking a nap on the meadow.”

  “But no nap, huh?” I said.

  “No. Turns out the guy was the missing helicopter pilot. He worked for the charter company in Reno.”

  “The same pilot who flew the Tahoe Robotics mission at Job’s Sist
er?”

  “Indeed,” Diamond said.

  “What are we to conclude? That someone tossed the pilot out of his own helicopter?”

  “Probably,” Diamond said. “And found maybe ten or fifteen miles as the crow flies from where the helicopter was left in Alpine County. After the autopsy, we’ll know for certain that the man died from blunt force trauma caused by a fall from his own helicopter.”

  “Because the helicopter was found in relatively pristine condition, we can then assume there was another person in his helicopter who was also a competent pilot?”

  “Pretty sure about that, too,” Diamond said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I’d previously tried to find the property address for the parcel number I’d found in Yardley’s file. The number fit a property in Placer county. But the address for that parcel number was Rural Route Creek View Terminus, which did not show up on Google Maps.

  I wondered what would come up if I plugged the address into a regular search page rather than a map page.

  That brought up no exact match to my search. But it did give me some possible connections. I clicked on several with no good result. So I varied my search, taking out some words, then taking out other words. I came to a hiking website that had faint copies of topo maps, the old kind that showed mine locations, information that has been removed from newer government maps.

  Below the image of one map was a description of a hike. Part of the description said to hike up the old Ward Creek View Rural Route. Several of those words were on the address I found for the parcel number.

  This time, I went back to Google Maps, found the general location, then expanded it, comparing it to the old topo map on the hiking website. Sure enough, there was a single road on a background of dark green like one would find for National Forest land.

  I searched on a topographical map of the area and studied the topo lines for elevation.

  The property appeared to be situated on a ridge to the southwest of Tahoe City. The access was a study in privacy. There was a trail on the topo map that appeared to be a Forest Service road. The road went near the Granlibakken Resort, one of Tahoe’s earliest ski hills, which was now a resort with an adventure park for people who wanted to test their physical skills, with bridges through the treetops and multiple zip line rides. Outside of the Granlibakken Resort was an area of vacation homes unseen from the highway on Tahoe’s West Shore. From that neighborhood emerged a smaller road that twisted around back on itself as it climbed up the slope. And from that road, there was a turnoff to an even smaller road that zig-zagged in switchbacks up to a ridge. The road, a driveway, went along the ridge to a house.

  I switched to the satellite view. After it loaded, I zoomed in on the photo.

  The house looked sizable from above. It had a roof line with multiple small gables as if each projected over a window on the second floor. The pattern was uniform, with none of the unusual angles common to modern mansions. I switched over to the horizontal view. Nearly all of the house was obscured by trees. But I could make out enough to sense that the house was large and sided with a mosaic of different gray tones, like stone.

  I went back to the overhead view and saw that the house had some small yard areas free of trees. It also had a large companion building positioned like a garage. Using the trees for scale, the garage would probably hold three or four vehicles. Zooming to the maximum magnification, I saw a faint fence line tracing an irregular shape in the forest around the house. In places, the line seemed to disappear, obscured from satellite view under the trees. The fence formed a perimeter around the property and crossed the drive at a long distance from the house. At the sides of the driveway crossing were columns, large enough to be visible from the satellite. Anyone who drove up would be blocked well back, possibly distant enough that they couldn’t even see the house.

  Next, I plugged the address into the Zillow property website. No sales records were available. Yardley had probably acquired the property in a private sale, no multiple listing service, no realtor advertising it with a video tour posted online.

  The property appeared to be one of the old summer Tahoe lodges, elegant but rustic, kept in steady private ownership for decades such that almost no one knew it even existed. Even the closest neighbors down below in the Granlibakken area likely weren’t aware of its presence on the ridge above. Perhaps they wondered where the occasional vehicle crawling up the rural road was headed. And if a neighbor hiked up the road, they would find everything gated and fenced.

  I tried several different kinds of searches using the house’s address and also using generic descriptions such as ‘stone house on mountain above Granlibakken.’

  Nothing came up that was close. I kept varying my search terms, but with no more success. Then I wondered if the Granlibakken Resort existed when the house was built. I searched its history and found out that it only went back to about the late 1940s. Before that, the area was a ski hill and ski jump run by the Tahoe Tavern over on the shore of the lake. So I typed in ‘stone house on the mountain above Tahoe Tavern ski hill.’

  Scanning down the results, I came to a link highlighting almost those exact words. I clicked on it. It was from a memoir published in 1957, written by Sylvia R. Blomburg. The passage was in a chapter titled Our Magnificent Summers At Tahoe. The passage with the highlighted words said:

  One of our favorite activities back in the 1920s, and even before, was to hike up to Stone Lodge on the mountain behind the Tahoe Tavern ski jump. It was a hideaway built by the banker Isaiah Hellman, the first president of Wells Fargo Bank.

  Of course, everybody knew Hellman built Pine Lodge, the mansion on the West Shore of Tahoe just south of Homewood. Unlike Pine Lodge, few people knew about Stone Lodge because Hellman wanted it private, his own nirvana away from all of his acquaintances and family except his faithful valet and caretaker, an old man named Ignatius.

  I should point out here, that this information comes from Ignatius himself. So if he presented it in a self-serving way to us young girls, that is to be both accepted and excused.

  Stone Lodge was a fraction the size of the lakeshore palace. However, it had amazing views! As far as we could tell, Mr. Hellman was never around.

  Ignatius let us girls wander around. We would carry sandwiches up the mountain and picnic on Stone Lodge’s veranda. We even played on the tire swing just off the patio. Swinging out from the mountain, it felt as if you could drop directly into the magnificent blue of Lake Tahoe.

  Sylvia’s memoir continued:

  Later, we found out that Isaiah Hellman was more than just the president of Wells Fargo. He was also the biggest banker in Los Angeles and ran several banks in San Francisco. He brought the railroad to Los Angeles and owned a huge quantity of land there. More than anyone else, Hellman was responsible for starting USC. And, just like those other Tahoe businessmen, Lucky Baldwin and D.L. Bliss, Hellman also bought a great deal of land in Tahoe.

  My friend and I met Ignatius, the caretaker of Stone Lodge, the first time we climbed up the mountain and discovered the house. I remember the date because it was shortly after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the summer of 1919, at the end of June.

  I think it was because the Great War was formally ended that Ignatius - normally a reticent man - was willing to speak of Germany and Bavaria, where Isaiah Hellman and his siblings and cousins were from.

  Ignatius explained that Hellman was a Jew, and, like so many Eastern European Jews, had emigrated to America hoping to find a more tolerant place to live, where they could escape the continuous anti-semitism in their homeland. This was back just before the Civil War. According to Ignatius, Hellman thought America great, and he prospered mightily.

  It was Ignatius who let us in on one of Hellman’s secrets, what Ignatius called Hellman’s Ahab fixation.

  I should back up and say that during Hellman’s early years in this country, he had reportedly taken interest in the novelist Herman Melville. The reason, Ignatius sai
d - or maybe surmised - was that Melville was one of the few American novelists of any substance who seemed not to harbor any anti-semitism. And when Hellman learned that Melville had even traveled to Jerusalem in pursuit of a greater understanding of Judaism in particular, and of all religion in general, that further piqued Hellman’s interest in Melville.

  So Hellman read Melville’s Moby Dick. In addition to great entertainment, it was useful in helping an immigrant polish his English.

  In the novel, a vengeful, crazy, sailing man named Captain Ahab is on a mission to kill Moby Dick, the whale that bit off Ahab’s leg a long time before.

  Of course, we asked Ignatius what an Ahab fixation was, and he rambled on about how it had something to do with a stereotype called The Wandering Jew. Captain Ahab was Melville’s representation of a Wandering Jew, a man who, despite his craziness, has impressive focus and drive and, in his hunt for the whale that maimed him, tenacity. This apparently made Hellman fascinated with the character of Ahab.

  Because of our young age and our naiveté, we girls didn’t really understand what Ignatius was telling us. But his excitement was obvious. And when he said he’d show us something amazing, but only if we promised to never tell anyone, we became equally excited. So we eagerly said yes.

  With his eyes sparkling, Ignatius said that Hellman had little phrases based on Ahab’s name. One of them was Alway Have A Backup. If you take the first letters of each word, they spell Ahab. Ignatius said that Hellman had many of these Ahab phrases.

  So we asked what Always Have A Backup meant. Ignatius said that it meant never create anything that doesn’t have a separate way out, which, I suppose, could also mean another way in.

  Of course, as smart young girls, we took this to mean a metaphorical backup as much as anything.

  Then Ignatius, eyes sparkling even more, turned and looked at Stone Lodge and said, “Now imagine how an “Ahab” would apply to his lodge!”