Matthew Mather's Compendium

by Matthew Mather

  She needed to hide somewhere and look at Shen Shi’s data in detail, figure out what it meant. The same filtering of social media sites she used could also be used against her, so she couldn’t go to any of her good friends, not even old friends or associates.

  She needed someone she could trust, but who was at a distance from her electronically.

  Wutang had immediately come to mind.

  ▲▼▲

  Wutang appeared from his bedroom and stood awkwardly in front of her, smiling. Jin hadn’t accepted his friend requests yet. He was cute and nice, but she knew how he felt about her—he told her in a million silent ways—and she was wary of romantic relationships. To be honest, she was shy. The only place she didn’t feel awkward was in front of a computer screen.

  “I know this is crazy, but can I stay here for a few days?” she asked, fighting her own desire to turn and run, to go to Shen Shi’s family—her family—and share her grief and terror with them, burrow into their warm embrace. But part of her knew that could be dangerous, for her and for them.

  Wutang blushed. “Yes, sure, of course.”

  “I just don’t want to be alone. Please, please…don’t make a big deal of it,” she stuttered.

  “I won’t, I mean, don’t worry.” Glancing sideways, he grabbed underwear off his kitchen counter. “Do you, ah, do you want a drink?”

  “No.” She noticed she was shaking, and held the counter to stop her hand from trembling. “Can I sit down?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m being rude, please sit.” Wutang motioned to the couch. “I’ll get you some water.”

  Jin made her way to the couch and collapsed into it, dropping her bag on the coffee table. She hadn’t slept the whole night before. Wutang appeared with the water.

  “Thank you.” Jin took the glass.

  “I was about to go to my family.” Wutang hovered over her, clearly unsure of what to do. “It’s my grandfather’s birthday. I can cancel—”

  “No, don’t.” Jin stood, still holding the water glass in her right hand as she took Wutang’s hand with her left. “Don’t change anything you’re doing. I’ll be fine here for a few hours alone. I needed somewhere…” Her voice trailed off. “Wutang, I need you to promise me something.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  Stared into his eyes.

  “Anything,” Wutang said.

  “You cannot tell anyone that I am here.”

  Silence.

  She held his gaze.

  From the look in his eyes, she could tell he understood what she was asking. Something was going on, and if he accepted, he would be an accomplice by association.

  A moment of truth passed, then Wutang squeezed her hand back. “No one, I promise.”

  Jin felt tears coming. “Thank you, Wutang. I’m sorry if I didn’t return your friend requests, I’ve been—”

  “Sit down and relax. I’ll put some tea on.” A warm smile spread across Wutang’s face. “Really, don’t worry.”

  For the first time since the accident yesterday morning, Jin felt some measure of safety. She kissed Wutang’s hand. “Thank you.”

  Wutang blushed again, a deeper shade of red this time. Letting go of her hand, he turned and busied himself with cleaning up some more while the tea brewed. Then, apologizing profusely again, he excused himself and said he’d be back in a few hours; in the meantime, she should make herself at home.

  Jin said she’d take a nap, and he provided a blanket and pillow. She asked for the router code, of course, so she could connect.

  As soon as Wutang was gone, Jin started her laptop and logged into one of her darknet accounts through an anonymous browser. Then she took out Shen Shi’s laptop. She stared at it for a few seconds, still unable to comprehend that he was gone. It was all so surreal. There had been no time to grieve yet, not with the blind terror that filled the space between every synapse in her brain.

  She had to think. Shen said that Sean Womack had recommended them to Yamamoto. Three weeks ago Sean had sent her an odd email message: “Remember the nuggets.” That was it. He hadn’t responded to her email when she asked what he meant. It was the first direct message she had from him in months.

  She turned on Shen Shi’s laptop and entered his security code, then opened the Tor anonymous browser and typed ‘Sean Womack’ into the search box.

  Sean’s blog popped up as the first search entry, www.SeanWomack.com, followed by pages for several agent-based e-books he’d authored along with his social media pages. There was a new post on his blog, written the previous day, on the quarterly results for his cryptocurrency mining operations. It had to be automatically generated, but it was still creepy that it was signed Sean Womack.

  She clicked his main social media page. It exploded onto the screen with hundreds of new messages from people expressing their condolences. He had an app running that automatically generated responses, thanking them for thinking about his death. If she hadn’t known he was dead, she might be excused for thinking he was still a busy man. Digital death followed long after physical death.

  She clicked on a link to a story about his accident: BBC – Aug 12th —A London transit double-decker bus jumped the guardrails today, killing a tourist next to the Bank of England. The man, described as a Caucasian in his mid-thirties, had no identification, and police are asking…

  His body hadn’t been identified for two days, and even then, there’d been no official time of death. Frowning, Jin dug through the connected news stories. Sean had always been wired—phone, tablet, smart watch, laptop—so it seemed strange that he’d been found without any of those things.

  Most of the reports claimed that the driver had swerved to avoid a pedestrian. A social media post by the bus driver’s son swore that his dad hadn’t swerved, that the steering system had malfunctioned and the bus had caused the accident by itself. The story was buried amid others claiming that London Transit was testing new collision avoidance systems in its buses.

  Had someone hacked the system?

  It wouldn’t be the first ‘grand hack auto’ story. She found a related story on Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, who had been investigating military intelligence agencies a few years before. Hastings had died in a mysterious car accident the day after telling colleagues he was going ‘off the radar.’ There was evidence that he was the victim of a car cyberattack.

  It was also strange that Sean had been carrying no ID. Jin remembered Sean as being careful, always aware of his surroundings.

  Exhale. Let the stress out. She had to think. Maybe she should look at the data again. She opened a visualization app and loaded the information Shen Shi had shown her.

  Yamamoto had given Shen Shi access to a wide range of databases, many of them technically illegal to access—Chinese ministry databases of medical files, police records—in addition to the usual social media feeds and commercial banking and credit card databases. The strange activity Shen Shi had flagged was from a group of people whose online behavior had changed, where they had started making donations to the Chinese Politburo and PLA.

  Jin made a fresh pot of tea, then sat to begin a new analysis. She tagged unusual deaths from the police records and cross-correlated them with the groups of people flagged in Shen Shi’s analysis. Outliers popped up right away: suspicious pacemaker failures, strange drug mix-ups.

  By themselves, they were within the noise of probability distributions, but when linked with Shen Shi’s data, it became obvious something else was going on. One way or the other, all these people liquidated most their assets just before their deaths.

  On her screen glowed a connected trail of wealthy dead people that stretched all across China.

  AUGUST 17th

  Wednesday

  9

  Bluebridge Offices

  Stamford, Connecticut

  The receptionist smiled. “You can’t go in, sir.”

  Jake glanced around the Bluebridge lobby.
Big enough to be an aircraft hangar, its polished marble floors reflected the overhead chandeliers. Entering through the phase-shifting glass entrance doors, which lightened and darkened depending on exterior lighting, was an otherworldly experience, like passing through a time portal into the future.

  The chandeliers hanging in the Bluebridge lobby were famous. Jake saw an article about them in one of his wife’s architecture magazines—unique artworks by some Japanese post-modernist, forged in huge 3D printers from sintered quartz. In person, hanging from the thirty foot ceilings like shimmering angels, they seemed to say, Herein lie the gates to power and wealth, to anyone who dared enter.

  Jake looked back at the receptionist, flashing his best high-wattage smile. “Like I said, I know Mr. Viegas. Could you please call him?”

  He inspected her nameplate, then inspected her: flawless skin, hair done in a business-but-sexy bun, and a Burberry-pattern neckerchief tied in a neat bow. “Cindy, please, this is a personal matter,” Jake added.

  “Sir, you cannot meet with Mr. Viegas today. You will have to make an appointment.” Cindy checked her screen. “I could put you in for a video meeting sometime over the next two weeks. Let me check the scheduling system.”

  No chance of getting anywhere with her. Cindy was a professional goaltender.

  Nodding, Jake leaned onto the reception desk and looked at the display on his smartphone. He was researching some of Sean’s businesses, trying to find out what he’d been involved in before the accident. Sean had been working in banking, designing automated trading systems. That much he knew.

  His friend also mentioned something about cryptocurrency mining. Jake had heard of it, but wasn’t familiar. He pulled up an online definition:

  Cryptocurrencies are software-based online payment systems, the first of which, bitcoin, was introduced in 2009. Payments work peer-to-peer without a central administrator, which has led the US Treasury to call them decentralized virtual currencies—a cryptocurrency or digital currency. A key feature is that funds, and funds transfers, can be completely anonymous….

  Jake continued reading while Cindy searched the scheduling system. Cryptocurrency mining was an activity used to generate new digital funds. So Sean had been involved in an online money generation scheme. This didn’t surprise Jake. Cryptocurrencies could be pegged to US dollars, and even used to create “bit-shares” of virtual online corporations. Money shifted from one place to the other, all outside of governments and regulators. He read another webpage:

  Digital currencies have been the subject of scrutiny amid concerns that they can be used for illegal activities, much like cash. In October 2013, the US FBI shut down the darknet Silk Road black market and seized 144,000 bitcoins worth $28.5 million at the time.

  Jake sighed. What had Sean gotten himself tangled up in? And what was a darknet? He clicked another online definition:

  A darknet is a private network where connections are made only between trusted peers, often associated with "underground" web communications and technologies, commonly associated with illegal activity or dissent. Darknets are anonymous, enabling users to communicate with little fear of government or corporate interference.

  Jake could barely keep up with the jargon.

  “Are you available on Thursday, two weeks from now, at 2:45 pm?” Cindy asked.

  Jake looked up from his phone. “Sure, I’ll take the meeting.”

  “Very good.”

  The interior courtyard was visible through the glass wall behind Cindy’s desk. Bluebridge headquarters was reminiscent of Egyptian or Mayan stepped pyramids, but with a hollow interior. Each floor had offices—he could see a smattering of people standing and walking on all levels—ringing its circumference, all of it chrome-and-glass, creating a semi-transparent structure with vines and plants hanging off the interior balconies like a modern Babylon.

  The inside area was as large as a football field. Workers were busy setting up for the event tonight. A fundraiser in the inner sanctum of Bluebridge.

  He’d tried to get a ticket. It wasn’t possible, not even through his wide network of connections. Viegas was going to be here tonight, and Jake wanted—needed—to speak with him. In person.

  “Could you place your finger on the scanner?”

  Jake frowned. “Now? For an online meeting in two weeks?”

  “We require everyone we schedule meetings with to bio-authenticate.”

  “Are you kidding me? What if I was remote?”

  Cindy wasn’t fazed. “Our procedure is to send out teams to authenticate remotely.”

  Jake stared at the scanner in front of him, his Atlas work email displayed on it.

  He knew they were paranoid here. All the big financial funds—Vanguard, Cerberus, Blackrock—were secretive to varying degrees, but Bluebridge took the ribbon. Working here was like joining a cult. Management warned employees not to talk to outsiders about anything they did inside, and could only communicate via approved devices—whether work or personal. Bluebridge recorded every conversation and email. It was the only place he knew of that had four Chief Security Officers, all of them high ranking ex-CIA. It wasn’t like the security apparatus of any other corporation.

  Then again, Bluebridge wasn’t like any other corporation. Henry Montrose III, the founder, had made a reported five billion dollars the previous year, with Viegas not far behind, making them the highest paid executives on the planet. That was as much money as run-of-the-mill billionaires made in a lifetime, but at Bluebridge they gave the impression they were only getting warmed up.

  Jake glanced from the scanner to Cindy, then pressed his thumb onto it. Something fluttered past him and Jake tensed up and turned around. He was about to tell Cindy that a bird had flown into the lobby when another of whatever it was buzzed past.

  “Delivery drones,” Cindy advised, smiling. “It does take a little getting used to.”

  Jake watched this one zip down the corridor. It was a four-prop helicopter, much like the ones carried in electronics stores, with a small package secured underneath. Two people walked up the hallway talking, oblivious to the device flying at them, and Jake was about to yell a warning when the drone executed a neat sidestep around them. The people didn’t even look up or acknowledge its passing.

  “Thank you, Mr. O’Connell. You will get a message the day before the meeting with instructions.”

  Jake lifted his eyebrows in response. “Sure.” Who knew what he’d be doing in two weeks.

  Yesterday, after his brother’s visit, the SEC had served Jake formal investigation papers by a bailiff. They’d instructed Jake not to leave the New York metropolitan area. Not to contact Donovan. Not to erase any emails or documents.

  Not a surprise.

  He’d expected it to happen, so he hadn’t paid it much attention.

  What he had been doing was researching Bluebridge. Many of the shell companies listed on Donovan’s memory key connected to it, through circuitous ownership networks spanning the global financial system. Was Bluebridge framing Donovan? Did it have anything to do with Sean’s death?

  Jake had met Viegas several times before shaking his hand at Atlas last week—a few times at MIT when visiting Sean, then once more at Bluebridge. Viegas scored low on Jake’s psychopath scale, more Dalai Lama than the other way around. Sean might have been the brilliant one, but Jake’s skill was reading people, noticing what they were thinking. He wanted to confront Viegas, see how he reacted.

  Not a sophisticated plan, but he realized now that they wouldn’t let him stand there and wait.

  “I took the liberty of ordering you a car service,” Cindy said. “I assumed you came in from the train station?”

  Jake glanced over his shoulder to see a car waiting beyond the entrance doors. It wasn’t a taxi. It was a limo. He nodded. “Thanks, Cindy.” Elle and Jake didn’t have a car. He had taken the Amtrak from Penn station to Stamford, then a taxi to Bluebridge. Cindy must have noticed him arri
ving in it.

  ▲▼▲

  Cormac watched Jake get out of the limo and walk into the station. Rolling down the window of his Buick, he used binoculars to watch Jake through the glass walls of the enclosed second floor waiting area.

  After ten minutes, the southbound Amtrak pulled into the station, obscuring Cormac’s view of Jake. A minute later, it pulled out of the station, leaving an empty platform behind.

  “We’re good,” Cormac keyed into the encrypted messaging app on his phone.

  He was leaning forward to start his car when he spotted something from the corner of his eye.

  A taxi headed out of the station, already up the road.

  With Jake in the back seat.

  Cormac swore under his breath and dialed a number. No answer. Swearing again, he keyed another number and fired off a hurried text message.

  ▲▼▲

  The taxi driver dropped Jake off just before the entrance to Bluebridge. As he’d waited in the train station, the anger had built inside Jake and then sparked like a rushed ignition sequence when the train pulled in. If someone here was involved in Sean’s death, he had to find out.

  Now.

  He was pretty sure Viegas wasn’t involved. Viegas had been Sean’s friend and mentor. If Viegas saw Jake, he would give him a minute. Maybe he didn’t even know Sean was dead.

  Going back and waiting outside the Bluebridge entrance seemed like a workable idea. He’d spotted a coffee shop across the street, and decided he could wait there until a limo or helicopter arrived. Then he could cut through the pines, past the exterior security, and try to confront Viegas. Not elegant, but better than nothing.