Francine sat in her room with the lights out and noise-cancelling headphones on. She had been drugged by Rochelle at Stormfield at one forty-five p.m. or close to it. She remembered looking at her watch right before she fell unconscious. When she had awoken in the bed all trussed up she could still see her watch. It was one minute past two. She had to be carried to a car. Two to four minutes to accomplish that. Then an eight-minute drive to where she had been taken and several more minutes to carry her in and tie her up and then she had to regain consciousness.
She closed her eyes and trained her mind to focus exactly on what she wanted it to focus on. She had done this back in Albuquerque when she was with the men who had paid her father, or else with Darren Ender, who loved to hear her scream. She had read about the technique in a book. It was a way of transporting your mind to another place while your body was engaged elsewhere. Prisoners of all sorts often did it, to get by. She could understand why.
It had allowed her to survive without losing her mind.
The roads around Stormfield were winding and the area was not heavily populated. The reality was you couldn’t get anywhere fast. The place she had been taken to had to be isolated so pesky neighbors wouldn’t be around to see her lifted out of the car and carried in. She calculated the time and distance and settled on a two-square-mile area with Stormfield as its epicenter.
She made her mind go blank for a moment and then proceeded to fill it up with as much as she could remember about the room she had been in.
There would have been an easier way to do this, but Rochelle had been smart enough to turn off Francine’s phone so she couldn’t go back and track where she had been taken.
She recited out loud, “Plank floor, small bed, tattered drapes, one window, peeling paint, cold, though the day had not been especially chilly.”
She didn’t remember much sun coming in the window. So perhaps lots of shade trees?
“Wooden two-panel door, looked old. Smell was musty, place was dusty.”
Abandoned house? That would make sense.
Now she focused on sounds, or lack thereof. No nearby traffic. No train rumble or whistle. No aircraft, so not on a flight path, presumably.
But there had been a sound. Consistent, loud. Mechanized.
A farm tractor?
She turned on the light, took off the headphones, opened an app on her phone, and plugged in her mileage parameters with Stormfield as the center.
She grabbed her car keys. And a Glock pistol she had purchased. She might need it against Rochelle’s knife or gun. It would certainly take the treasure to get her mother back. And it might take something more. Whichever it was, she was willing to pay the price. She wasn’t exactly sure why.
But I am willing to pay the price. Because I know Rochelle is.
Gibson had arranged for her parents to come over and watch the kids. Her dad had hugged her especially tight, something her mother noted but did not comment on.
“You look okay,” muttered her father into her ear.
“That’s because I am.”
“So it’s really over then?”
“That part is.”
“That part! Oh my God, I feel another ulcer coming on.”
“Just pop some Rolaids. Works for me.”
She left her parents with Tommy and Darby, and headed to her home office.
She fired up her computer. While Francine was looking for her mother, Gibson was going to make one more all-out assault on Langhorne’s treasure.
While they had used the cryptocurrency subterfuge to ensnare Nathan Trask, Gibson hadn’t thought that Langhorne was involved in that type of digital currency at all. But as she went over some records of Pottinger’s financial accounts again, she saw an intriguing bit of code that had been left there, like a dangling participle.
She copied the line of code and pasted it into an online search. She sat back and waited for the search to run.
“Damn!”
Harry Langhorne had just thrown her a curve.
The search had taken her to a site that sold NFTs, or Non Fungible Tokens, basically digital assets separate and apart from bitcoins. Each NFT was unique and equated to a specific asset. They ran the gamut from a one-of-a-kind meme autographed tweet, to a fractional ownership of a Banksy work, to a digital sports trading card signed by a superstar in very limited quantities. The very first tweet, from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, had sold for nearly $3 million as an NFT.
Now that is some crazy shit, but, hey, it’s only money. Or bitcoin.
One could buy an NFT with cryptocurrency, or, with some platforms like PayPal and Robinhood, a simple credit card would suffice. If crypto was used, the buyer would need a digital wallet to hold both the NFT and the crypto.
She’d chased down debtors who had stashed some of their wealth in NFTs. Thus, she knew that most NFTs were Ethereum based. Ethereum was a blockchain-based economic trading platform. In fact, many NFT marketplaces would take only Eth tokens as payment. You had to have a user account to create a transaction on Ethereum.
So had Langhorne bought an NFT? And if so, why? Was that the treasure?
She might be able to find out because, while NFTs were not bitcoin, they were pieces of digital information housed on blockchains. While one bitcoin could replace another, NFT tokens represented a unique digital asset. She wasn’t sure why someone would spend a ton of money on a tweet or sports card that anyone could take a screenshot of and claim it was original. But then collectors were strange beasts, and the blockchain would prove the authenticity of the NFT and its concomitant value, at least in theory. So there was that.
But the thing was NFTs could not really be traded for other NFTs or traditional currency. So once you bought one you really could sell it only for crypto. And recently, NFTs had been taking a beating in the news and financial markets because of fraud and hidden fees and the cost of or impossibility of maintaining the article on the Ethereum blockchain, as well as a host of other issues. Gibson wasn’t sure whether the whole market wouldn’t implode at some point, but she didn’t care about that. She just wanted to find the treasure, if it existed.
Okay, here we go.
On blockchains she started searching for ERC-721 tokens, upon which NFTs on Ethereum were based. She had to find some that had been owned by Langhorne and then used to buy one or more NFTs. There were many places to buy NFTs, platforms like OpenSea, Rarible, AtomicMarket, and SuperRare, among others. Hell, apparently even Amazon was thinking about selling them. She worked away, following one trail, which took her to another one. Some ended in dead ends. In fact, all of them did.
Until one did not.