Reverend Jake Z. Long @RevJZL • 5h
“Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all.”
—Romans 12:17
# 38.01
@ Lake City, Colorado
10:59:11 MDT
Jonathan Farrell sat on the front porch of the cabin, drinking coffee, gazing out at the snowcapped mountains and the trees and the blue sky and the babbling river wending its way through the valley below, coming to terms with the notion that he’d finally found something that he might one day miss. Something that could hurt him. It was a tough thing to let down one’s guard, to surrender, to own something…to become vulnerable. It unsettled him.
At heart, Jonathan Farrell was a simple man who wanted only simple things out of life. Dignity, first and foremost, since no man’s life was worth a damn without it. It was the one truism that generals and politicians rarely understood when assessing an enemy. He’d seen it time and time again. Rob a man of dignity and sure as shit you’ll regret it. Most men in most places in the world just wanted to live their lives, worship the god of their choosing, and make some money to pay for basic things, with a little left over to splurge here and there on their lady, or their kids, or their car, or their camel, or whomever or whatever they fancied most.
Purpose ranked up there, right alongside dignity. After all, a man needed to carve out his place in the world. He needed to feel connected. He needed context. He needed a sense of achievement and contribution.
True love was a desirable luxury, Farrell supposed, though he couldn’t miss something he’d never had. And it was quite possible that he was incapable of such a thing—this fairy tale of romantic love. He knew that sounded cold. Heartless. But it was true. And being true to oneself, he decided, ranked right up there with dignity and purpose.
Maybe there was something broken inside him. There had to be. In fact, he figured that was the reason he’d passed with flying colors all those mental tests the navy put him through, before they’d given him the green light to become a killing machine. Truth was that something had to be dead or absent inside a man in order for him to kill on command, without question, without emotion. No doubt there’d been a piece of him missing right from the get-go.
It seemed, too, that most men wanted children—something to do with passing their seed on and leaving behind a legacy of some sort. To him, the desire to have children was selfish—perhaps even narcissistic—seeing as the world was already overrun with people who were consuming the planet willy-nilly, from oil to food to anything coming up out of a mine, even to clean oceans and breathable air. Human history, after all, boiled down to a never-ending squabble over too few things for too many people—the catalyst for warmongering, genocide, and the rise of psychotic demagogues like Hitler and Stalin. In the calculus of life, he’d determined early on that having children only meant more squabbling for more resources. Better to keep the numbers down.
Having gotten a good look at the shit and suffering that men created and endured, he was amazed that the human species had made it even this far. Though he thought it might have been nice to see part of himself passed on to another human being, maybe have someone who’d love him and who’d ask him to impart his wisdom. Realistically, however, he wasn’t cut out to be a father. That piece of him the navy couldn’t find was probably the same piece that could have made him a great dad, and might have allowed him to love and be loved. Given how things had turned out, it was probably best that the piece was gone, so as not to leave behind pain for anyone else in the future. He would exit this world silently, causing no war or heartache or indignity. There’d be no legacy left by Jonathan Farrell. Even the family name would die with him. No, there wasn’t much about this world he’d truly miss, because he’d never really been connected to it the same way most folks were. In the end, he hadn’t even belonged in the ultimate brotherhood of the Navy SEALs.
Then he started thinking about his nameless, faceless employer—code name: Oz—and the strange business in Manhattan. The usual encrypted directives delivered to his phone ten days ago had been clear: kill Chase Lombardi in a highly public way. Big impact…in his NYC office…long-range head shot…video confirmation critical (1080p)…you have one week. A tall order, albeit excessive, with its rigid stipulations on the place, the video, and the daring shot to the head (as opposed to a more conventional, and forgiving, hit to the center mass of the chest). Nonetheless, per usual, he’d executed in superb fashion. Reliable. Methodical. Clean.
That traffic incident on the D.C. Beltway, however, could have caused a serious wrinkle in the plan. But it hadn’t. Neither his rental car nor the minivan that had bumper-tapped it had sustained visible damage. A D.C. Metro patrolman had filed a basic incident report before telling Farrell and the other driver to move along. No harm, no foul.
The driver’s license he’d presented to D.C. Metro had drawn no scrutiny. The resemblance between Farrell and the man in the license photo was incredibly close: both clean-shaven, slender white guys with green eyes and buzz cuts and the same tilt to the eyebrows. It wasn’t mere coincidence. The previous day, Farrell had shopped the DoD’s database for a military sniper matching these strict physical specifications and had been pleased to find one David Furlong. Oz’s encrypted top secret clearance to every level of government and commercial data had let him mine Furlong’s banking records, too. From there, he’d used some nifty counterfeiting machines and print stocks—also provided by Oz—to press out official duplicates of Furlong’s Virginia driver’s license and Visa card.
What still troubled Farrell was the fact that the video clip sent to Oz had been posted to that damn vigilante website for the whole world to see, evidently to secure a prize of more than half a million dollars. He’d wondered why Oz would go and do something stupid like that: exploit his most valuable asset to cash in on some prize money. Farrell’s skills were not something to be abused or grandstanded with; this arrangement of theirs was not to be taken lightly. So why would Oz want to rain chaos on people like that, here on domestic soil? Completely illogical.
As best Farrell could tell, it seemed that his kill video had set Bounty4Justice in motion here in the United States. He’d drawn attention to it, added validity to it. Gave it free publicity. And that raised a question: was the website Oz’s creation? It certainly didn’t fit the mold. If it was justice the man was after, there were plenty of Farrells on the payroll who could handle the work. Why leave the job to amateurs and freaks? The marks on the website weren’t the typical fare for the Jonathan Farrells of the world. They were fairly low-level scum that fell through the cracks of society, not political pariahs who threatened world order or some national economic interest.
Equally troubling was the huge bonus Oz had wired to his account in Zurich (in addition to his $30K monthly retainer): more than half a million bucks, instead of the usual $50K single rate. When Farrell had seen the deposit, he’d feared a setup, because the sum matched the bounty paid out on Chase Lombardi. But there was no way that account could be traced back to him. So he’d pushed aside his paranoia and had taken some of that money to pay off this lovely dream home. After all, given his protections, he was untouchable by U.S. authorities, scandal or no scandal. Best to keep his mouth shut, follow orders, and understand his place in the order of things. He was a tool, plain and simple.
Having a home took some getting used to. It represented unstructured possibilities and potential unforeseen commitments and things that would someday require fixing—obligations that normally didn’t agree with Farrell’s credo of detachment. But everyone needed a home base.
So here he was looking out over the most beautiful sight he ever did see.
The little piece of the world he’d carved out for himself.
Since he was allowing himself this rare moment of introspection, he even considered that maybe, just maybe, there was a God who’d made all this, and had made him. And he wondered if that same God might ever forgive him
for everything he’d done. It was too hard to figure all that out and make sense of it. Making sense of things wasn’t his job. He was a soldier. And soldiers obeyed orders. Even if those orders came from a ghost on the other end of a satcom.
The Boston Globe @BostonGlobe • 2m
BREAKING: Anon hacker uses Facebook to out Sorority Stalker. Police arrest Kevin Chesney as he waits for his next victim.
bos.gl/g5mZRb4
# 39.01
@ Dallas
Forty minutes after the discovery that Bounty4Justice was indeed making good on its promises, four forensic techs wearing FBI windbreakers showed up at the truck-repair shop. By then, Michaels had taken pictures of the seizure—the box, the shipping label, the bundles of notes and their metallic wrappers, the random paperbacks used as filler strewn about the floor. The shipping label on the lid of the box had a tracking number, which listed the sender’s address as San Jose, California, even though the shipment had originated from Massena, New York. When Michaels searched for the San Jose location on her phone, however, nothing came up, not even on Google Maps. No surprise.
While Simmons went out front for a cigarette break, Michaels stayed with the techs in the back office as a silent observer.
The money inspectors pulled random samples from the cache, and Michaels took notes on every one of their observations, since she was sure that Knight and Novak would want all the nitty-gritty details.
The bills’ linen and cotton blend felt just right to the tech’s touch. The front-side images of Ben Franklin were the real McCoy, he told her, same with the iconic Independence Hall on their reverse sides, same with the optically color-shifting ink and the tiny red and blue enwoven security fibers. Under magnification, the microprinting and watermarks were spot-on. Chemical swabs passed with flying colors. A UV light wand made the security strips glow hot pink and highlighted random oily fingerprints and the trace crystals of cocaine endemic to 90 percent of all U.S. currency. Finally, he observed, the paired serial numbers matched on each note, and the bills were nonsequential from one note to the next.
“Looks good to me,” the lead tech concluded. “Legal tender. We’ll need to run a final counting back at the lab and go through the rest of the batch, but assuming these are all ten-thousand-dollar stacks, it’ll add up to just over two hundred K. Sure, we could run DNA or fingerprint analysis, but we’d wind up pulling hundreds of thousands of low-quality samples that really don’t prove a thing.” He said this last part as if the same old questions he’d been asked a million times before were already queued up in his brain.
Michaels was again reminded of the timeless beauty of cash and why it presented such a daunting challenge to law enforcement. It left no paper trail, and it was accepted the world over. Particularly in the Mafia-infested zip codes throughout Long Island.
“These look like standard shielded wrappers,” the tech said, holding up the silver foil pouches that held the bills. “Probably lead, you know, to deter an X-ray scanner from registering the notes’ security strips, or maybe even the bills themselves, since they have a different density than the other contents stuffed into that box. But the postal service isn’t in the business of scrutinizing packages on that level, anyway. It’s not like they run these boxes through scanners or anything like that. I mean, you should see some of the stuff we’ve confiscated that’s passed through the mail: every drug imaginable, weapons, pipe bombs, a human head, all kinds of cockamamie crap. You remember that website Silk Road?”
“Of course,” she said. “Hard to forget.”
Silk Road had been a global, billion-dollar online marketplace, hosted anonymously on the darknet, where drug dealers had carried out transactions with bitcoins and fulfilled orders using standard mail carriers. It remained active for nearly two and a half years, until the FBI shut it down in 2013, and then only because a few lucky breaks exposed its twenty-something mastermind, Ross Ulbricht, who’d logged into the website’s administrator portal from his laptop via a Wi-Fi connection at his local public library. The biggest break was that Ulbricht lived in San Francisco, well within the FBI’s reach. Silk Road was a close cousin to Bounty4Justice—an eBay for criminals. And it had been run almost entirely by one “kid.”
“Well, if Silk Road could ship heroin and cocaine through the mail for years on end, you can imagine the possibilities. Therefore, in my opinion,” the tech said, holding up the wrapper, “this here’s just a bit of overkill.”
“There’s nothing at all unique about that?” Michaels said. “Nothing that might trace back to a particular source or a manufacturer or something?”
“Sure, we could figure out who makes them. Can’t imagine there’s a huge market for these things. But, honestly, that won’t do you much good. And this? A piece of wrapping paper?” He gave Michaels a tough-love look.
“Gotcha,” she said, even though she didn’t agree on the point. She’d been down this road before, and anything unusual, no matter how obscure, could open all sorts of doors. But the Secret Service policed the nation’s money supply, not the FBI, and Michaels had a longstanding contact there who might shed light on this delivery method.
She stared at the stack of bills. All along, the FBI had been thinking about exotic payment instruments the scheme might employ. Yet like so many aspects of Bounty4Justice, this critical piece of its functionality was so cleverly deceiving. So universal. So simple.
# 39.02
“I still can’t believe someone would send all that cash in the mail,” Simmons said, weaving the Taurus around a plodding truck and zipping through a red light. “Just plain crazy.”
“Short of a money order,” Michaels said, “I’m not sure any other method would be all that secure or anonymous, either. And the odds that anyone would ever open the package during shipment are virtually zero.”
“Unless your nosy neighbor gets his grubby hands on it after hearing in the news that you’re due a big payout,” Simmons countered.
The severe prison towers loomed up ahead.
“Well, sugar, I think we’d agree that Bounty4Justice isn’t following any rules,” Simmons said. “Really, now, anyone who can dole out these huge sums as if they’re just trifles being stuffed into a birthday card must have lots to burn.” She blasted the siren again to push the cars out of a snarled intersection. “I’m surprised the website even pays out the money to begin with. I mean, who would ever know if the bounty was never paid, right? It’s not like an assassin would file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau for getting stiffed.”
“True,” Michaels said.
“I mean, what if whoever’s behind it all is already rich? Like some investor type who scored a fortune during the tech bubble who’s trying out a new venture. Or maybe some billionaire who’s had a come-to-Jesus moment?”
“Anything’s possible,” Michaels acknowledged. “Could be an elaborate Ponzi scheme, for all we know.”
Simmons made it back to the prison garage in record time, and she flicked off the lights and sirens and rode up two levels to where Michaels had parked the rental car.
“Great meeting you, Angie,” Michaels said, opening her door.
“It was a hoot,” Simmons said, giving her a hug. “You take care of yourself. I know you’ll eventually find the right guy, and he’ll be damn lucky to have you.”
“I’m sure you’ll find your man, too. But given your track record, promise me you won’t go marrying him.”
“I promise,” Simmons said, flashing a big bleached grin.
As Michaels got into the rental car, she received a call from Novak.
“Hey there, Deputy,” she said cheerily. “What’s happening?”
“Hate to put a damper on an otherwise productive day,” Novak replied. “But Tim just got a call from Quantico. Told him that our suspected sniper, David Furlong, has a ton of witnesses and surveillance video that place him at his local shooting range in Lynchburg, Virginia, at the time of Chase Lombardi’s murder. He was nowhere near Manhattan
this week.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No joke. We’re back to square one.”
The Daily Beast @thedailybeast • 12h
@Bounty4Justice helps authorities and assassins track fugitive con man in Mexico.
thebea.st/3rMHGsti4
PETA @peta • 9m
WOW: N. Dakotan pet shop owner caught on video brutally killing puppies shares same fate on @Bounty4Justice.
bit.ly/2eMrt5v.t
# 40.01
@ Moscow
Saturday, 10/28/2017
14:17:55 MSK
Inside Rostelecom headquarters, chief network administrator Yegor Krasneker sat at his desk atop the control room’s command platform, staring in bafflement at the critical error messages flashing up on his screen. At first, his brain denied the whole thing, telling him that what he was seeing could not be right. It was illogical. A mirage…
“Yegor,” his lead technician called to him from a workstation in the pit below. “Are you seeing this?”
“Yes.” Yes. He studied the screen once more. It was there. This was really happening.
Throughout the control room, all the lights and screens flickered for an instant, as if struck by an electromagnetic pulse—an electrical hiccup that quickly stabilized before any equipment went dark.
“The generators…” said the spooked lead technician, coming to his feet and looking around the control room warily, as if it would explode at any moment.
Now dozens of technicians rose from their disabled workstations, looking up to Krasneker for guidance.
On the control room’s main screen, Krasneker brought up a schematic that overlaid a web of color-coded lines across a map of Russia. The grid—stretching from the Far East, to Siberia, to the Urals, and under the Kerch Strait to Crimea—traced out 550,000 kilometers of multi-terabit backbone fiber lines that connected Rostelecom’s close to fifty million residential and corporate customers. Over half of Russia’s digital communications ran through it: voice, Internet, data, media…even the secret networks known only to the Kremlin. It was the Motherland’s central nervous system.
Bounty Page 19
