Bounty

by Michael Byrnes

  “Okay. I’ll work on that today.”

  “And how is Mom handling everything?” Novak asked.

  “Tommy spoke to her directly, really put her mind at ease. What a nice guy. I always liked that kid. Otherwise, you know…she’s getting by. I spoke with an elder-care counselor, and he’s looking into some options. Assisted-living facilities, skilled nursing facilities, nursing homes…there’s a lot to consider. In the next week or so, we’ll schedule some time to go and have a look at a couple of places.”

  “I’d like to come along on those appointments.”

  “If you can make it, great. But seriously, Roman, given everything that’s going on, if you can’t be there—”

  “I’ll be there, Dad. Let me know when you have the details.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Seems we’re both learning a lot about giving up control lately.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  In the background, Novak could hear his mother calling.

  “Sorry, buddy. I’ve got to go.”

  “Okay. Tell her I send my love,” Novak said.

  “I will. Love you, son. And good luck.”

  “Love you, too, Dad.”

  # 51.03

  Fifteen minutes later, with renewed vigor, the team was back in their groove. As Knight had pronounced at the morning’s strategy meeting, Operation CLICKKILL was indeed unwinding the Bounty4Justice money trail. What he hadn’t reported was that where answers should have been, new questions had arisen.

  “CERT just confirmed it,” Walter said, pointing to the email on his screen. “They’ve combed through Echelon’s computers. Bounty4Justice was paying the Sorvino brothers exclusively in NcryptoCash.”

  “Shit,” Novak groaned. NcryptoCash’s peer-to-peer encrypted transactions completely circumvented banks and clearinghouses, leaving no audit trails whatsoever; to a forensic accountant, this was kryptonite.

  “Surprise, surprise,” Knight said. “I take it there’s no chance we can trace the payments?” he asked rhetorically.

  “Not a one,” Walter said unequivocally. “You know the game: NcryptoCash is even better than the real thing. No fingerprints, no drop-offs. Whoever’s running Bounty4Justice is no fool. All the transfers to Echelon were channeled through its anonymity network. Even though Echelon’s computers show all the incoming transfers into the company’s NcryptoCash Safebox software, we have no way of knowing where those payments originated.”

  “How much are we talking about here?” Knight asked.

  “About twenty-seven million—tax-free, of course,” Walter said. “Out of that, the Sorvinos claim to have paid half for labeling and shipping, but not a dime toward the cost of producing or packaging the pins. At least that’s the story they’re sticking to. And if it’s the truth, then those boxes of prepackaged pins shipped from China to Port Jersey after someone else had already paid for them. We could try to track the shipment back to the manufacturer to see who funded things on that end, but we all know that the Chinese won’t help us enforce a damn thing. Blatant counterfeiting and trade infringement are right up their alley. They’ll just claim to know nothing, like they always do. Especially if they have any inkling that it all ties in to a major cybercrime investigation.”

  During the interrogation in Jersey City, Novak had listened to the Sorvinos swear up and down multiple times that they had had no face-to-face interactions with any human being associated with Bounty4Justice. Add to that their nebulous plausible deniability about the contents of the tiny envelopes. The entire arrangement, they’d maintained, had been hashed out in an anonymous chat room hosted on the darknet, with the older Sorvino’s techie nephew acting as their facilitator—the digital realm’s equivalent of a safecracker.

  “Let me guess: the company that was paying the Sorvinos is just some made-up name,” Knight said.

  Walter grinned. “The Alliance for Social Harmony and Justice, Limited. Glasgow, Scotland. No records. Not even a Google hit. A completely fictional entity. Might as well be called Screw You Incorporated.”

  “With the volume of pins the Sorvino brothers have been sending out,” Novak said, “almost all of which Hargrave tracked to addresses here in the States, it stands to reason that they were Bounty4Justice’s exclusive U.S. distributor. You can bet that they have counterparts in other countries filling the same role.”

  “Makes sense,” Walter said.

  “I’ll notify Interpol,” Knight said, marking his notepad. “I’m sure these other outfits won’t be hard to find. We’ll get an alert out to the postal authorities to be on the lookout for anyone shipping huge batches of those tiny envelopes.”

  “Why wouldn’t Bounty4Justice have just started taking payments and paying the bounties exclusively in NcryptoCash to begin with?” Novak mused. “Why even mess around with pins and credit cards, knowing there’d be audit trails?”

  “Well, some people still aren’t comfortable with NcryptoCash,” Walter ventured. “Everyone knows how to use a credit card online, but think about how long it took people to get used to that concept.”

  Novak shook his head. “No. I think there’s more going on here.” A lot more: the website’s avowed mission to bring swift justice to those who’d beaten the system, the shell game of payments, the muscle flexing in Russia…He just couldn’t put all the pieces together yet.

  “Seems to me it’s looking to show off,” Knight said. “It’s trying to scare people, give them a peek at the dark side of things.”

  Novak nodded this time. “That’s closer, I think. It’s exposing the system. Isn’t it? It’s demonstrating the danger in things…all the pitfalls of technology, all the shady dealings going on beneath the waterline. It’s showing us how even the Mafia has gone digital. Criminals don’t need to meet anymore. No need for deals in back alleys. They go to the darknet now. It’s less risky. It’s anonymous. It’s instantaneous. It’s seeming to me that Bounty4Justice is willingly exposing its methods. That raid in Jersey City was too easy. Too successful. Those packages led us to the Sorvinos.”

  “It’s revealing the chaos,” Walter said, nodding agreeably. “Not causing it.”

  “Precisely. And if my hunch is right, those credit card transactions are going to uncover something else, too. Same with that cash mailed to Manny Tejada. But I’d wager that none of it will give away the identity of whoever is behind all this.”

  “Anything else?” Knight asked, jotting on his pad.

  “Oh, yeah…” Walter shuffled through some papers on his desk. “Now that we’ve got our gorilla warrant, I have something for the NSA to process. A code block we came across. Here, have a look.” He handed a printout of Novak’s text file to Knight and explained how the “iArchos” segment buried in the mess of run-on characters might point to an online identity used by Bounty4Justice’s webmaster.

  “We’ve been working this for days,” Walter said. “Coming up completely dry. We need to bring out the big guns.”

  “All right,” Tim said. “Just copy me in on it.”

  Walter barely glanced at Novak as he finessed the confidential source. A knock at the door effectively changed the subject.

  Connie walked in, holding a sheaf of papers and looking spooked. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “What is it?”

  She handed Walter the papers. “The traces on those Visa payments.”

  “And?”

  She looked over at Novak, then at Knight, then back at Walter. Then she told them who controlled the accounts, and Walter nearly slid off his ball chair.

  Huffington Post @HuffingtonPost • 35m

  @Bounty4Justice: Abductions, harassment, and murder—why targets’ family members also pay the price. Unintended consequences?

  huff.to/1J2blt341

  # 52.01

  @ Georgetown

  11:42:05 EDT

  Senator Barbara Ascher and her husband, Dr. Daniel Ascher, an oncologist, sat with Jones and Vargas in the brownstone’s living room,
in comfortable leather armchairs arranged in pairs close to a grand bay window that, under better circumstances, would have provided a great view of the park across the street. Except the shades were drawn tight, and lamps substituted for sunlight.

  Jones shifted in his chair, trying to get comfortable, thinking that his ribs might be more than just bruised after all. All things considered, what happened over at the school could’ve wound up much, much worse. From the looks of things, the abduction team was a group of local toughs trying to cash in on Ascher’s bounty. They’d planned to use Sam and Max to lure their mother to a burned-out building, where she’d be directed by cellphone to walk toward them across a rigged floor, which would collapse under her weight and send her plummeting twenty feet into a basement outfitted with rebar spikes, floodlights, and remote video cameras—like some twisted scene from a Saw horror flick. Whether the grotesque impalement they’d envisioned would have played out according to plan was highly questionable. But Jones was happy to have helped keep it in the realm of imagination.

  Three of the runners had been brought to MedStar Georgetown University Hospital—one with a skull fracture, two with gunshot wounds to the legs (lucky for them they’d been unarmed, or Vargas would have aimed higher). The unlucky gunman in the princess mask had been taken out in a body bag, which left the van driver and the wolfman to do most of the talking. There wasn’t much to tell. They were all in their mid- to late twenties, just a bunch of desperate, misguided young men who’d made a really bad choice in a long series of other really bad choices. With the economy in the toilet for the past few years, at least for ordinary people, shit luck wasn’t just a freak chance anymore. It’d become an epidemic.

  While they waited for the police and the agents from the FBI to bring out chairs from the kitchen, Jones studied the Aschers. The patrician Dr. Ascher looked a bit older than his wife, maybe early fifties. But they could easily pass as brother and sister—both fair-skinned, slender, and light-complected—which suggested to Jones a predisposition to narcissism on both their parts. Two peas in a pod. Her yin to his yang. They even held hands like an Olympic skating duo waiting to hear their score from the judges. Senator Ascher caught Jones staring and said, “Once again, thank you so much. If it weren’t for both of you—” But then the agents and cops came bounding into the room, creaking the floorboards, lugging in the kitchen chairs. Her lips quivered, and she shook her head. So Jones gave her a friendly nod to let her know that everything was going to be okay.

  Once everyone settled in, Senator Ascher sat up, straight and composed.

  It was her husband who spoke first: “This godforsaken website has taken over our lives. It won’t be happy until one of us is dead. For Christ’s sake, hasn’t this gone far enough? Can’t you people just shut this damn thing down? It’s a website. It’s a thing. It’s not another Osama bin Laden.”

  The cops and G-men exchanged glances, every one of them reluctant to field the reply. Finally, the tall FBI supervisory special agent, Eugene Fitzky, grimaced and cleared his throat. “Dr. Ascher, what we’re dealing with isn’t just a ‘thing.’ Bullets took down Osama bin Laden, sir. Ideas are bulletproof. You can’t kill ideology. You can’t kill sentiment. And that’s what we’re dealing with here.”

  “But you can shut down a website,” Ascher insisted. “Let’s not ignore the reality of the technology and the fact that it enables this madness to happen.”

  Jones was expecting Fitzky to remind the doctor of what had happened in Russia when an attempt had been made to “shut it down.” But his rebuff was much more subtle.

  “I assure you that this technology isn’t coming from some high school kid in his mother’s basement,” Fitzky said. “Even if we could shut it down—and that may happen, eventually—there’s nothing to stop it from popping up again in some far-flung spot in Eastern Europe or God knows where. And the game begins anew, fast and furious, racking up plenty more hits before we shut it down again and everyone moves on to the next round. So if I can speak candidly, Senator…” he said, turning to her.

  The doctor rolled his eyes dramatically.

  “Please,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  “From what we’ve learned so far, Bounty4Justice chose you as a target using software that analyzes all the negative publicity and allegations surrounding your case…somehow scouring and quantifying all those nasty blogs and tweets and news reports out there on the Internet. But that software didn’t go digging through your emails and phone records to get to the real dirt on you. The most damning information was uploaded to the website by an anonymous whistleblower, after the fact. Somebody you know. Somebody very close to you.”

  Jones could tell that the words wounded her, though she did her best to shrug it off.

  “I don’t understand this at all,” said Dr. Ascher, jumping in again, releasing his wife’s hand and throwing both of his into the air. “I mean, look at all these crooks, like…like”—he spun his hands in frustration—“like Bernie Madoff. The guy’s a complete fraud, but he’s not on this ridiculous list.”

  “If I had to guess,” Fitzky said, “I’d say that’s because Madoff is behind bars serving a life sentence. In a system of law that’s functioning properly, it’s the outcome that’s expected. More or less, he’s been brought to justice.”

  “And you’re saying my wife hasn’t?”

  Fitzky wouldn’t take the bait. He kept his mouth shut and sat back in his chair and folded his arms.

  The senator looked away, her lips tightening even more severely.

  Silence settled over the group. Then Jones decided to toss a grenade.

  “Is it true?” he asked the senator, as tactfully as possible. “Those documents on Bounty4Justice, and all those charges. Is it all true?” What the hell, he figured. He’d almost died protecting her kids. The least she could do was answer the question everyone wanted to ask.

  Dr. Ascher once again attempted to shield his wife. “Come on. Are you serious? How the hell can you sit there and—”

  “Stop!” she screamed. “Enough, Daniel. This is my fight.”

  The doctor’s face went beet red.

  “Fine. Do it your way.” He stood abruptly and pointed at her face. “That’s what got us into this mess to begin with, isn’t it, dear? It’s all about you. Always has been. You want to make yourself the sacrificial lamb? Go ahead. Fine by me.” He stormed out of the room.

  There was dead silence as she smiled sadly. She sat tall and pulled back her shoulders. “I’ve given this a lot of thought,” she said to none of them in particular. “And what happened this morning only makes my decision easier.” She folded her hands in her lap resolutely and looked over to Jones. “Yes, Agent Jones. Bounty4Justice has it right. Everything you’ve read is true.”

  Jones felt a chill as the grenade got tossed back at him. Holy shit.

  “I’m not an idiot,” she said to the group. “I know what the courts are going to say about all of it. And I know what that means for me, and for my family. Scandals don’t last forever. Neither does sentiment,” she said, giving Fitzky a cold stare. “Death, however, is permanent.” She gazed up at the ceiling, where they could faintly hear the kids playing in the room above. “So let’s talk about what happens next.”

  Tea Party @TeaPartyOrg • 12m

  America is being overrun by vigilantes and lawlessness, while “progressives” want to disarm the police and cut Defense spending.

  bit.​ly/​1Tfg34eti

  The Seattle Times @seattletimes • 8m

  @Bounty4Justice video IDs body parts on courthouse steps: Seattle mogul’s son acquitted for dismembering brother in self-defense.

  buff.ly/1FRe5T7

  # 53.01

  @ Manhattan

  “This can’t be right,” Walter said in disbelief, flipping through the pages and scanning the dozens of account numbers on the printout.

  Connie stood beside him, arms crossed tight across her chest. “That’s what I thought, too. But they all
checked out. I verified everything as best I could through SWIFT.”

  The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication was the network through which nearly all major international wire transfers between financial institutions around the globe were routed. It was the switchboard for the global banking system—the means by which payments were settled.

  She added, “They told me that all those accounts are controlled by a company named Archer Offsite Systems LLP. No address. No contact information. Nothing. When I tried digging a little deeper, I hit the walls you typically encounter when you accidentally come across a classified account. They started pushing back. In other words, SWIFT is giving me the cold shoulder.”

  Knight was skeptical. “And you’re thinking it’s linked to some other intelligence agency?”

  She threw up her hands. “The ODNI, CIA—take your pick. I’m just saying. I’ve seen this before, at my old job. Every now and then I’d stumble upon secret accounts, and this is the same runaround I got back then.”

  Connie would know, thought Novak. She’d worked the money desk at the CIA for seven years before transferring to the FBI. And the money she’d dealt with wasn’t the sort that went into agents’ paychecks.

  “This is how they typically fund operatives and pay informants,” she said. “They set up phantom bank accounts that have no clear ownership.”

  Knight’s face twisted into a knot. “You mean to tell me that Visa has been transferring money that’s being paid to kill people—”

  “I’m just saying it’s a possibility we should seriously consider. And there’s more. Lots of those accounts are also linking to the U.K. Same company name, same roadblocks.”