Simply Lies

Chapter 70

Nathan Trask was not in a good mood when Francine walked into the same room they had met in before. He looked agitated and distracted. And when he glanced up at Francine his displeasure deepened.

“Did I come at a bad time?” she asked as she sat down opposite him.

“I don’t know. You said you were successful?”

“It took a lot of work, but I finally located an account owned by Pottinger with about seventy million dollars in it, twenty mill over what you said he took you for. But who said a little bonus isn’t in order?”

“How did you find it?”

“Proprietary information,” she said, smiling disarmingly. “That’s how I make my living. I’m sure you can understand.”

“So how do we get the money?” asked Trask.

“I’m confident I have a way. And it’s not in a traditional bank account. It’s in bitcoin.”

“Bitcoin! I didn’t think Pottinger even knew what that was.”

“Either he did, or he had someone advising him who did.”

“So, again, how do we get it?”

“To do it, I need your help.”

He looked at her in surprise. “You’re getting paid to do this. Why do I need to be involved?”

“Trust me, if it were money in another type of account, I could handle it solo. But bitcoin is a different beast.”

“Okay, tell me your plan and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.”

She smiled again. “I like my clients to be proactive.”

He sat forward, so they were almost knee to knee. “I’m not your client. I’m a man who let you into his world on a very temporary basis to see if you could solve a problem I have that nobody else seems able to handle. You do that, and you’ll be fine. You start trying to elevate yourself in this situation to something you’re not and never will be, then we have a problem. And that is never good for someone like you. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“And another thing — my people who I pay to watch those things tell me that there are stories out there about this. About me getting taken advantage of.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Wrong answer. You’re getting paid to anticipate stuff like that and then do something about it.”

He snapped his fingers and the door instantly opened. A large man came in, walked up to Francine, ripped her from the chair, slammed her up against the wall, and wrenched her arm up her back until she cried out in pain.

Trask nodded and the man let her go. She staggered over and fell back into her chair.

“I thought I was getting paid to find your money for you,” she said quietly, rubbing her injured arm.

Trask nodded at the man, who slugged Francine in the jaw. She screamed and held her hands up in a defensive posture, as blood trickled from her mouth.

Trask said, “Again, wrong answer. You’re not doing too well. See, when you work for me, you do everything above and beyond. You think of this shit. You deal with it so that it never touches me. I hire people who are smarter than me. If they turn out not to be, what good are they?” He sat back. “Now tell me the plan and maybe he’ll have to hit you again. Only harder. Or my people might have to do something more than that to you. It all depends on what you say next. No pressure, just relax and start talking.”

Francine composed herself, sat up straight, and wiped the tears from her eyes, then her expression hardened to stone. “Do you have a computer handy?”

“Why?”

“It’s bitcoin. That’s where it lives.”

He studied her for a moment. “Why can’t you use your computer?”

“I could, but then I’d just have to transfer it over to yours.”

“Then that’s what you’re going to have to do.”

“The thing is, Mr. Trask, if we do it that way, your account, passwords, and other information will be on my cloud. I’m not sure you want that.”

“You can erase it.”

“How will you know I did? Even if you have someone to check it? And I don’t want you coming after me if anything goes sideways with respect to that, especially if someone hacks me before I can erase it. And how will I know you’ll even let me walk out of here if there’s a chance of that? I came here to finish the job and collect my commission, that’s all.”

Trask said nothing for about thirty seconds. “Okay, I’ll play along, for now.”

He made a call and a minute later a man walked in with a laptop and handed it to her.

“It’s password protected,” she said. “Can you open it up for me?”

He did so and she started typing, her fingers flying over the screen.

“Mind explaining what you’re doing?” said Trask.

“I’m persuading a secure wallet, or hot storage, to believe that I’m Dan Pottinger with the private key.”

“That’s all you need, a private key? I thought this stuff was all secure with that blockchain crap.”

“Which is why I’m not attacking the blockchain. That’s thousands of computers tied together. I’m not beating that in my lifetime. But if you want to do anything with your bitcoin, you have to go on other platforms and digital exchanges.”

“And how are you able to do that?”

“Before he died I hacked Pottinger’s home Wi-Fi. I did so to see if I could capture his PII.”

“What’s that?” asked Trask.

“Personal identifiable information. With that I can hopefully capture his crypto private key.”

“But he’s dead. He’s not doing things online anymore.”

“Doesn’t matter if he’s dead, if he set up remote instructions to execute a transaction with his bitcoin on a certain date and time, that transaction will still be fulfilled.”

“And did he?”

“Yes. And now I’m going to divert that transaction to your account.”

“What, you mean now?”

“That’s why I came here when I did. I’ve got the transaction set to run. I need your people to plug in your account info as the destination. Seventy million will be coming in, in five minutes, but we need the end account.”

“Five minutes! I don’t like to be rushed,” snapped Trask.

“Okay, but this is the only shot we have because he has no other remote instructions pending. The bitcoin will be lost forever unless he willed the private key to someone. And if so, they’ll get the money.”

“But you said you got the key. Why can’t you go in anytime you want and empty the account?”

“Because Pottinger was smart. He used a onetime private key system. I got the one. It’s good for this transaction and only this transaction. After that, it becomes useless.”

“Shit!” Trask sat up and looked at his assistant. “Get George to plug the Zurich account in. Hurry up.” He looked at Francine. “A little more notice would have been good.”

“I just found all this out. Digital works on its own schedules with not a lot of warning. That’s why I asked to meet with you immediately.”

The man got on his phone, and two minutes later another man hurried in. He was around thirty, skinny, and wearing an ill-fitting suit.

He sat down at the laptop and hunched over so no one could see what he was typing in.

“Okay, it’s done,” said George.

“Now George here is going to watch every keystroke you hit,” said Trask. “He sees anything out of the ordinary, and I mean any little thing that shows you’re trying to screw me, you get a bullet in your head.” He nodded at the man who had hit Francine. The man took out a gun and placed it against the back of Francine’s head.

Francine noted George’s fearful look. She smiled reassuringly, her big eyes growing ever larger, threatening to swallow the man whole. “No pressure, George. We’ll get through this, okay?”

She squeezed his hand reassuringly even as her other hand started hitting the keys. He smiled back at her, his gaze drifting over her for a few moments.

“Okay,” he said.

Francine’s fingers were flying so fast that even the tech-savvy George looked impressed.

She filled him in on what she was doing as she typed, keeping up a running commentary as he nodded in understanding, continually looking at her, just as Francine intended. He glanced at Trask and said, “She’s really good, sir.”

Two minutes later she said, “Okay, you are seventy million in bitcoins richer, Mr. Trask.” She looked at George. “Feel free to confirm.”

George took the laptop and clicked some keys. He smiled and looked up. “She’s right, sir. Seventy mill in bitcoin just came in.”

“And it’s like cash,” she said. “No ownership trail because I had the private key. A dead man just paid you off, Mr. Trask. But with companies in crypto going bankrupt left and right, my advice would be to cash out as soon as you can.”

Trask waved his gunman away and chuckled. “I don’t understand any of that crap, but I do understand seventy million dollars.”

“Less my commission of three point five million. I’ll be happy to take it in bitcoin. And then I’ll cash out.”

Trask considered this. “Why not?” He waved at George. “You able to do the transfer?”

George did not look confident. Francine said, “You confirm the bitcoin figure and I’ll do the transferring. That way we all know where we stand and the numbers are what they are. And you don’t have to access any of your own funds, only the stuff I just got for you. So you’re golden.”

George looked at Trask, who nodded. “Do it.”

He confirmed the amount and then Francine got back on the laptop and started hitting keys. A minute later, the transaction complete, Francine said, “Nice doing business with you, Mr. Trask.”

“Can you do anything about this shit floating around on the internet?”

“Yes I can. And I will, right away.”

“And there was another woman. She went to see my father. She was looking for this stuff, too.”

“Well, you snooze you lose. And since you have your money back plus a nice little bonus, if I were you, I’d forget about her.”

“I think you’re right.”

Francine shook George’s hand. “Nice working with you, George.”

“You too.”

“Let’s grab a coffee some time.”

He smiled and nodded, and Francine felt her heart quiver, because she knew George was probably now a dead man.

I’m sorry. But it was either you or me.

The golf cart took her to the gate, where she walked quickly off.

She went into a store, did a costume switch in the bathroom using clothes and a wig she had previously hidden there, and walked out through another exit.

Four blocks later she climbed into a white van.

Three stern-looking representatives of the FBI stared back at her as they sat in front of a bank of computers, along with Gibson, who was smiling.

Francine said, “I take it you were you able to follow the entire transaction after I put the keystroke tracking software on?” she said.

“Oh yeah,” said Gibson. Then her smile faded when she saw the bruises on Francine’s face, and how her right arm was hanging funny. “Shit, those assholes beat you up.”

“I’ve been hit a lot harder, trust me.”

“We got every line of code’s worth,” said one of the men. “And access to all his accounts. That was good work. You took a big risk going in there naked like that.”

“Well, it makes life interesting.”

Another agent looked at Gibson. “We could use people like you two.”

“Quite frankly, I don’t think you can afford us,” said Francine, causing Gibson to hold back a snort.

Francine climbed out of the van and kept walking.

A few moments later Gibson joined her. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

“That was really brave what you did.”

“It was necessary to get to the end result.”

“You always this transactional?”

Francine stared directly at her as she wiped more blood off her lips. “Welcome to my world.”

“I’m starting to figure you out, you know.”

“Don’t waste the time. After this is all over, if I’m still alive, you’ll never see me again.”

“Off to pull more ‘transactions’?”

“If I find the treasure, there’s a place in France I’ve been looking at.”

“But if I find the treasure?”

“Then you and your kids can go live in France. I’ll forward you the Zillow listing.”

Gibson looked at her pensively. “Maybe I haven’t figured you out.”

“There’s no maybe about it.”