Matthew Mather's Compendium

by Matthew Mather

The moment Jake disembarked from his taxi, a black limo pulled in through the front security gate, the outline of Viegas’s head visible through its tinted window.

  Lucky, but it was perfect timing.

  Ducking through the trees, Jake jogged to the entrance just as Viegas got out of the limo and passed through the front doors. Someone shouted behind Jake. He picked up his pace, ran harder, and in a few seconds he was at the doors. They slid open before him.

  Cindy, the receptionist, saw him coming in and stood. “Mr. O’Connell? Did you forget something?”

  “No, I need to use the bathroom.”

  Cindy was already picking up her phone, probably dialing security. “Mr. O’Connell, you cannot come in here.”

  Jake jogged past her desk and ignored her. He’d been here before with Sean, so he knew Viegas’s office was to the left, past the pit of programmers on the first floor.

  “Mr. Viegas!” Jake called out, rounding the corner. Viegas’s head turned toward him. “I’m Jake O’Connell. We met at MIT a few times, and we shook hands at our office last week. I need to talk to you about Sean Womack.”

  Jake sprinted the last few feet, then skidded to a stop, holding his hands up. He knew the guards would be on him in seconds, but he figured Viegas would at least hear him out.

  Viegas stared at him.

  “Sean Womack,” Jake repeated. “You were his thesis advisor, we got together in Cambridge. He…he’s been working with your company for the last few years.” Jake took a gulp of air. “Sean was killed in London, I wanted to—”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Viegas backed away.

  “He’s over there,” someone said behind Jake.

  “I know you were close to Sean. I want to talk to you for a minute. Just a minute, please.”

  Viegas’s eyes remained blank. Frightened.

  “Sean Womack,” Jake repeated, pleading now.

  Something seemed odd. Jake did a quick scan of the office space. It extended for at least a hundred feet on each side, the space filled with dozens of cubicles. He remembered it as a beehive of activity when he was here before.

  Now it was empty.

  Someone grabbed Jake’s arms, pulling them behind his back as he stared at Viegas. He felt cold metal. Click-click-click. Handcuffs tightened around his wrists.

  “What the hell?” Jake tried to twist around, but now two people held him, lifting him from the ground.

  “Mr. Jake O’Connell, you have the right to remain silent…”

  Jake craned his neck around enough to see police uniforms. Four of them were behind him, with more streaming into the lobby. Red and blue lights flashed and shimmered in the chandeliers overhead.

  “…you have the right to an attorney…”

  “Are you kidding? I just ran in here, you can’t arrest me for that.”

  How did they get here so fast?

  They continued to read him his Miranda rights.

  “What is this?” Jake shuffled forward. Five police cruisers were parked outside the entrance. “Does this have to do with the SEC investigation?”

  The front doors slid open in front of Jake, and the policeman standing on the other side answered his question. “No, Mr. O’Connell, you’re being arrested for rape.”

  10

  Shenzhen

  China

  Yawning, Jin pulled off the bed covers and called out to see if Wutang was home.

  No response.

  Getting out of bed, she opened the door and peered outside the bedroom. The apartment was empty.

  Quiet.

  And immaculate.

  She hadn’t even heard Wutang leave.

  He’d been gracious to her when he returned from his family event. Rather than make some insinuation about the two of them sharing his bed, he’d insisted she take the bedroom. After changing the sheets and grabbing a pillow and covers for himself, he shepherded her into his room despite her protests, telling her they could talk in the morning.

  After not sleeping the night before, she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

  Wutang’s apartment was in a high-rise complex, one of a dozen cookie-cutter buildings that had sprung up almost overnight, towering residential mushrooms in the Yeuhai district. It was modern and comfortable, if small. The bedroom was the only closed room—apart from the tiny bathroom with its shower stall—leading onto an open-plan combined living room and kitchen. Not more than six hundred square feet, and painted stark white. Unimaginative framed prints of orchids decorated the walls. The main defining feature was the massive flat screen display that covered the living room wall, and above that, a mass of wires connected to several routers.

  Most important, Jin felt safe here.

  The days before seemed like a nightmare, but on the coffee table next to her laptop was a rude reminder that it wasn’t a dream. The card from the policeman who had interviewed her after Shen Shi’s “accident.” She stared at it, willed it to go away, but it wouldn’t.

  The shock of her cousin’s death was fresh. Jin felt flat, single-dimensional, her emotions a distant concept that belonged to someone else. On the counter was a note from Wutang saying he’d be back before noon. Had to go out to the office.

  Instinctively, she checked for her cellphone before realizing she’d left it at her apartment. If someone was looking for her, a cellphone was a beacon that could pinpoint her. Better to be safe. But there would be a dozen messages on it from her mother and aunts.

  Better check my email.

  Reaching into her backpack by the door, she pulled out and opened her laptop, putting it on the coffee table. Jin had left emails for her family saying she was fine, staying with a friend, but they’d be frantic by now.

  She should be frantic herself, but somehow, she wasn’t. She felt numb.

  Jin filled the kettle on the kitchen counter and turned it on, then walked over and opened the sliding patio doors that led to the small concrete balcony outside. Humid air and the noise of traffic ten stories below rushed in through the open doors. Rows of nearly identical skyscrapers stretched into the distance to the glistening waters of Qianhai Bay.

  Her laptop pinged. Someone was messaging her. Sitting on the couch, she opened her encrypted messaging app.

  >>Wutang: You okay? Worried about you.

  She smiled. She liked that he was worried about her.

  >>Jin: I’m fine.

  The cursor blinked. Wutang typed on his end: I’ve been looking up digital autonomous corporations, DACs, the stuff Shen Shi was researching for Yamamoto.

  Appended to his message was a list of web pages. Jin clicked on the first one, and an article popped up from Forbes magazine about the recent flourishing of autonomous corporations operating on darknets, linking them to organized crime: IdentityDAC is a digital corporation that manages the valuation and disbursement of stolen identities and credit card numbers. The FBI and Interpol have been investigating the sudden explosive growth of IdentityDAC, but due to the distributed nature of its operations...

  >>Wutang: Are you reading?

  Jin responded, yes, still scanning the end of the identity theft story. The article had links to another discussing BlackCorp, a criminal collective for hacking, and RansomCorp, which enabled attackers to use an encryption virus to ransom the contents of a target’s hard drive.

  >>Wutang: I need Shen Shi’s credentials, can you get them?

  Shen Shi’s laptop was next to Jin. She knew his usual passwords. Yes, she typed back.

  The list of autonomous corporations went on and on. Jin scanned them, a low-voltage tingling working its way down her back. Something related to this must have been what Yamamoto was planning to expose to the banks. What got him killed. What got Shen Shi killed.

  >>Jin: When are you coming back?

  >>Wutang: A few hours. There’s an emergency I need to fix.

  The cursor blinked.

  She typed: Are
these corporations purely digital then, no humans involved?

  >>Wutang: The autonomous corporation itself is, yes, but they pay people to do work in the real world—to hack, to steal—while they carry out their programmed missions in the digital world. And under US law they have rights as ‘people’…

  People? Jin picked up her cup of tea and blew on it, taking a sip. Corporations counted as people?

  >>Wutang: I need to log off. Find those credentials. We’ll do more when I get home.

  >>Jin: Will do. See you soon.

  Wutang logged off the messaging app, and Jin sat back with her cup of tea. On her laptop screen, an alert flashed, advising twenty-two unread email messages. Deciding she didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with that right now, she closed her laptop.

  So autonomous corporations used humans to do their work in the physical world. She’d heard of them, glanced at articles on cryptocurrencies when going over the morning news, but she’d never considered the implications. Leaning forward, she grabbed her backpack and took out Shen Shi’s laptop.

  Shen Shi.

  Her hand trembled. She put her cup of tea down, spilling some of it as the sobs came. The fear she’d felt since the “accident” all turned to sadness. Shen Shi was gone. Her resolve hardened. Someone had done this to her cousin. They had to find out who.

  She settled onto the couch with Shen Shi’s laptop and found his encrypted password locker, opened it, and sent the contents to Wutang. Logging in as the administrator, she changed the password, then opened an anonymizing web browser.

  It was strange that Sean had been carrying no ID. Jin remembered Sean as being careful, always aware of his surroundings. He had friends everywhere, and he wouldn’t be without identification unless it was on purpose. Had someone stolen his wallet? Was it a robbery? It seemed unlikely.

  She repeated the web searches she did the night before to see if she missed anything, then scanned the list of results. On the third page, a connection popped up that she hadn’t seen before: Vidal Viegas.

  Vidal Viegas had been Sean’s thesis advisor at MIT. She remembered hearing about the mentorship from Sean, who used to joke about having someone at the top of the industry. Jin pulled up more searches clustered around Viegas: author of the machine-learning algorithms that she and all of her colleagues in the data business used. She found as many references to fundraising events with US-presidential-candidate Senator Russ as she did Viegas’s technical work on automated agents and data mining.

  A fluttering dread roiled Jin’s stomach. Viegas was now the famous co-founder of Bluebridge, the world’s largest hedge fund.

  The strange email from Sean before he died. He’d written a single phrase in his message: “Remember the nuggets.” Was it a warning, a coded message?

  He had to be referring to the last time she’d spent time with him in person, years ago in a bar in Guangzhou. The memory stood out because he’d brought a dozen boxes of chicken nuggets to the bar with him, and within minutes, pretty young models had mobbed their table. The night had turned into an urban legend among their colleagues in the banking world. When they worked on data mining projects, they called influential outliers ‘nuggets,’ little golden pieces of information that seemed to have magical properties.

  Remember the nuggets. She’d met Sean’s friends that night in Guangzhou. What were their names? Max Lefevre was one of them, a French Canadian that Sean worked with, and another guy was there, Sean’s best friend. Jin scrunched up her face, trying to force the name out.

  Jake.

  Jake O’Connell.

  She remembered him as a nice guy. Good looking, clean cut, and nothing at all to do with the usual crowd of hangers-on that buzzed around Sean.

  Jin opened her social media account and typed Jake’s name into its search box. Yes. They’d friended each other. Details of Jake’s life spilled out on her screen: well wishes for his daughter’s birthday, location tags at restaurants around Manhattan. A life observed from a distance for the entire world to see.

  She opened a new search box and queried Jake’s name together with “Manhattan,” then clicked the first story: New York, Aug 17th—Jake O’Connell, an executive linked to the Atlas Capital fraud investigation, was arrested on rape charges…

  That didn’t sound like the Jake she knew. She’d only met him that one time in person, but they’d friended each other on social media and she’d followed his postings. She liked to think she was a good judge of character. But maybe she was wrong. Taking a deep breath, Jin sent an encrypted email to Jake, asking him to contact her. No other details than that.

  She decided to go back to the data sets she’d been looking at the night before—the trail of wealthy dead people. The big question: Was it real?

  The problem with examining a lot of data at the same time, cross-connecting it and searching for outliers, was that eventually you’d find whatever pattern you were looking for. With enough data, you started seeing anything, like reading a medical textbook and deciding you had the symptoms of a dangerous disease when all that was happening was the regular mechanics of life.

  She needed a second opinion.

  >>Message>>Jin to Chen: Could you have a look at something for me?

  Chen was a friend who she and Shen Shi had worked with on their last two Ministry projects. Even so, she made it a policy to contact everyone through an anonymous connection. You never knew who might be tapping the data stream. She leaned forward toward the tea set. Before she could finish pouring herself a cup, the messaging app pinged.

  >>Chen: Heard about Shen, so sorry.

  The cursor blinked as Chen continued to type on the other end.

  >>Chen: Very weird.

  Jin sighed, put down her cup of tea and replied.

  >>Jin: Yes.

  >>Chen: Are you okay?

  >>Jin: No.

  She waited. The cursor blinked.

  >>Chen: What can I look at for you?

  Uncrossing her legs from the couch, she put the laptop on the coffee table. Opening some online tools, she set up a data exchange, answering questions back and forth about what she wanted examined. She didn’t want to tell him what to look for—that might skew what he found—so she only said that there were some unusual correlations.

  >>Chen: Do you want to get lunch?

  Jin blinked and stared at the cursor. She could use some company. Wutang wasn’t going to be back for a few hours.

  >>Jin: Sure.

  She didn’t want to say where she was staying, but she gave him the name of a noodle shop around the corner, a small one she knew to be quiet. They could discuss the results and see if Chen saw the same patterns.

  One click of the ‘send’ button, and the data started uploading from Shen Shi’s laptop into a secure cloud repository for Chen. Logging off the chat app, Jin checked the time. It was forty minutes past twelve. She needed to grab her shower.

  Leaving her own laptop open, she picked up Shen Shi’s and deposited it into her backpack. She smiled. Wutang had left towels out on top of the counter for her. Jin picked up the top towel and held it to her nose. It smelled fresh. What a sweetheart.

  Her laptop issued an angry ping. An urgent message alert.

  Still holding the towel, she leaned over the couch and squinted at the screen. It was a message from Wutang.

  >>Wutang: You need to look at this right now.

  Jin sat down, towel in her lap, and clicked the link attached to the message. A web article popped up:

  The Assassin Market—a crowd-funding service that enables people to anonymously contribute cryptocurrency funds toward a bounty on anyone. A kind of Kickstarter for murder, this darknet site has resisted multiple attempts by the CIA to bring it down as it spawns itself…

  Her background low-voltage dread spiked into high-voltage panic.

  >>Jin: Why are you sending me this??

  >>Wutang: Sit down.

  >>Jin: I’m sitting d
own.

  The cursor blinked. Then blinked some more.

  >>Jin: What?? What’s going on??

  >>Wutang: Don’t go anywhere; I’m on my way home.

  >>Jin: Why?

  >>Wutang: I used the credentials you gave me from Shen Shi to log into the Assassin Market the article is talking about.

  >>Jin: And??

  Why hadn’t Shen Shi told her? Why was Wutang making her wait?

  The next message pinged with an attachment. A spreadsheet. She double-clicked it. A list of names appeared, each name with fractional number of cryptocurrency funds, along with a dollar equivalent next to it.

  >>Wutang: This is the Assassin Market hit list.

  $275,652 posted as bounty for the assassination of the International Monetary Fund director.

  $142,544 for the President of the United States.

  Jin scanned down the list of names, which looked like the typical crackpot—

  A name popped out, floating disconnected from the rest of the page: Shen Shi Heng. Recent payout: $86,544.

  The apartment spun and her stomach churned. She held the towel to her face, her hands shaking. There was one more name, added just that morning: Jin Huang—$103,233.

  >>Wutang: I’m sure this is some sick joke. Stay there, I’m almost home—

  Jin snapped the laptop closed and pulled her hand away as if it was burning hot. She got up, knocking the table, spilling the tea. She grabbed her backpack with Shen Shi’s laptop. She had to get out of there.

  But where would she go?

  She turned to the patio doors. Better close them. Pull the curtains.

  Hide.

  Behind her, the apartment door splintered and flew open. Men in head-to-foot black clothing forced their way in.

  Jin shrieked and dropped the towel, spinning around and crashing into the coffee table. She was still holding her backpack with the laptop. One thought filtered to the top: they had to be after Shen Shi’s data. Scrambling to stand, she swung the backpack out the balcony door just as one of the men grabbed her and pushed her to the ground. She watched the bag clear the balcony railing outside and fall from view.