Eva met me outside of school on Monday morning. She didn’t say anything. She was just there for me and I appreciated her. We walked in together and I expected to start feeling anxious like before. I waited for it and then I waited some more. I let out the breath I’d been holding and relaxed. Maybe figuring out what was bothering me was the key. Maybe it was having talked to someone about it that released all the anger. Maybe it was the ‘time-off’ that I’d taken over the weekend. Whatever the reason, it was really nice. I was going to enjoy it and be happy while it lasted.
Being able to talk to people without grinding my teeth at their first mention of college felt like having a whole new superpower. I even managed to listen to what they had to say and give them my thoughts on what they were saying. My goodness. An actual conversation at school. How weird is that?
Eva had changed her mind, yet again, about her future. Over the past year she’d considered going into accounting, dentistry, and graphic novel creation (aka drawing comic books). I’d once suggested that she join the army since she liked her ‘Boot Camp’ fitness classes so much. That had earned me a glare from Eva and a laugh from James. This time she said that she had made her final decision and she was going to apply for entry into the Sports Medicine program at UNC, majoring in Exercise Science or Athletic Training or both.
As soon as she said it, I agreed that it seemed to be the perfect fit for her. Sports nutrition, biomechanics, and injury prevention were all things that she spent her free time learning about anyways. James was also applying to UNC. He wanted to get accepted into their business program and major in finance. This was not a surprise at all since that had been his plan since I’d met him.
All the college talk forced me to reconsider my own options. Did I want to go to university? What would I study there? What about The Hannah Foundation? The foundation was great and I loved the mission, but I’d gotten it going and put quality people to run things. I was effectively overseeing everything through Shauna now and I wasn’t needed there often. I could take the time now to do something else.
Did I want to do something else? From the beginning, my plan had been to grow the foundation and put Hannah’s Homes all over the world. Had my goal changed? No, it hadn’t. My recent freak out with Eva had shown me that my main motivation for the foundation was to find and help my mother and even though it didn’t seem like that would ever happen, the foundation still felt like something that I had to build. That meant that university was out. It would sideline the growth of the foundation for these last nine months of school and then I’d get it up and running at full stride.
It wasn’t like I couldn’t learn things on my own, especially with the discovery of my new scan-reading ability. Actually, I’m not sure what the point of regular classes would be anyways when I could learn an entire course load of material in a few hours. Sure, I’d still need instruction when it came to application of the knowledge, such as science labs or situational problems, but I could hire tutors for that part, if I was interested enough.
I met up with Shauna and the team at Hannah’s Home after school. This weekend had been physically relaxing, but I hadn’t been able to get thoughts of saving my mother out of my head. Through the bank accounts and their transactions, we had a small portion of Serpentine’s client list, as well as a list of some of their ‘supplier’. We should be able to find out where she’d been sent to. So far, I’d only given the team five accounts to work with. It was time to ramp up our game.
“Gabriel, these are the folders with the information and passwords for the other twenty accounts that Serpentine used. They have dates on them and I figure that they changed accounts a few times a year for security reasons. I want you to go through them and find all the easy pickings. Anyone that can be identified without needing bank access. I’ll need you to get me a list of all the accounts that you need banking access to uncover who they are. Breakdown that list by bank and I’ll have Roger start with the banks that have the most unknown accounts. Access to a single banks’ systems could help identify dozens of clients. These files are the string that we’re going to pull on to unravel the entire Serpentine supply and demand chain. Anything you need to get this done as soon as possible, you let Shauna know. If you need more people, we’ll get it for you. If you need faster computers, you’ll have them.”
Gabriel nodded and took the files. “I can get you the list of accounts and banks in a few weeks, Abby. Jenny and I laid out a lot of the groundwork for how to get the information we needed while we worked on the first accounts you gave us. My worry is how Roger will be able to get us into the banking servers. Banking servers are some of the most secure computers in the world. They have insane protections built in. I know that Roger can do amazing things, but this would be on a whole other level and if he can hack the banking systems, then he can get all this information without our help.”
“Roger won’t hack their computers. He’ll hack their people. Think about it. Why break into a place if you can get someone to give you the key and the alarm code? Roger’s specialty is getting into places that he shouldn’t be able to get into. Once inside, he has ways to get the administrator password and he uses that to gain access to the files he needs. That’s how he got into the prison servers. Roger says that no matter how sophisticated a system is, the human element will always be the weakest link.”
Gabriel looked dubious at this so I consulted my phone for a few seconds, walked over to his computer and logged on as Gabriel. Then I logged onto Jenny’s computer. The stunned looks on their faces were priceless.
“How and why do you have their passwords, Abby?” Shauna asked.
“How is easy. Roger sent them to me this morning. The why has to do with Roger’s paranoia and what I told him I’d be speaking to you guys about today. You see, besides those twenty-five accounts, Serpentine had a master bank account where they offloaded the money from the other accounts. I’m simplifying things a bit because the money was routed through a series of other accounts before it finally made it to the master account. I want Gabriel to work with me to create a series of our own accounts and I want to move the money in the master account to our account. From our master account, I’ll transfer some money into an operational account for Shauna to use. The current master account had just over fifty-one million dollars in it. Roger doesn’t know you guys and his having your passwords was his way of letting you know that he’s keeping a close eye on things and that he is expecting the money go where it’s supposed to without any shrinkage. You should also know that his email had Shauna’s password and my own, so please don’t take this personally.”
Jenny was the first to speak. “Fifty-one million dollars? I guess I’d be paranoid about it too. I can see a problem though. It’s going to be hard to spend. Any transaction that we do can be traced through the bank and we can’t just go to the bank and take out fifty thousand dollars to pay for things in cash. Banks have reporting requirements for large amounts.”
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“That’s another reason Gabriel is here. He’s the expert. How do we solve this problem?” I turned my gaze to him and raised my eyebrows questioningly, just like dad always did to me.
“It’s really two problems. One is spending it without being traced and the other is how you explain any assets that you purchased with it. The mob and the cartels have teams of people working all sorts of money laundering schemes and they’re incredible creative about it. They take money earned illegally and funnel it into a legitimate business. They pay taxes on his legal income and they’re free to use it any way they want to. I don’t think that we’re looking to do that here. From what Abby has said, we’ll be using the money to do mostly clandestine work and not for buying assets. That takes care of one of the problems.
As to spending the money without being traced, we’ll set up our own series of accounts and hide in the maze of international banking. Most people won’t care where the money is coming from, especially since we won’t be asking where they got their merchandise from. For the cash we have several options, including working within the legitimate banking world, if we take the time to set things up properly. However, the easiest way would be to convert some of the money into Bitcoin. It’s a completely anonymous currency that is outside of the government’s control. The value fluctuates much more than the US dollar, but no one can trace your transactions. I suggest that we use both off-shore banks and Bitcoin.”
Gabriel gave us a tutorial on cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, and explained things like ‘Bitcoin mining’, ‘cold wallets’, and how to make transactions. At the end of it all, he ordered a few Trezor cold wallets for us to use. Cold wallets were little gizmos that gave out a passcode that would authenticate your Bitcoin transaction. Now we just had to create our accounts, transfer in the money from Serpentine’s master account and funnel some of into other accounts from which we could buy some Bitcoin and tie it to the Trezor thingy. My head hurt with all the new details but this was important and I couldn’t simply delegate it to Shauna. When it was all set up, I would be the only one with the passwords to move the money around.
After the meeting, Shauna asked me to join her in her office for a few minutes. The way she said it sounded a bit ominous and I briefly wondered if she was about to quit. Had she changed her mind about rejoining the army now that her brother was free? I really hoped not. I’d come to rely on her so much over the past months.
“Abby, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a few months and I couldn’t bring myself to do it until now. I’ll start by saying that I appreciate the hell out of Roger. He rescued Samuel and I’ll forever be grateful for that. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have a responsibility to make sure that you understand the implications or consequences of what you’re doing with Roger.”
Well, at least she wasn’t quitting. However, I wasn’t sure what she was getting at so I asked, “What are you talking about, Shauna?”
“Do you remember when Alexander thanked you on behalf of the German government for making the rescue of Strudel possible?”
“I do. How could I forget? We all have to go to Washington next month for a ceremony.”
“Ok, and do you remember when I also thanked you after seeing the video of Samuel and you said that Roger did all the work and you only talked to him about it?”
“Sure. He did do all the work.”
Shauna let out a frustrated breath. “When you point a gun at a target and press the trigger, do you say that the gun did all the work? No, you don’t. Abby, Roger is a loaded gun and you pointed him at the prison. You are ultimately responsible for saving my brother and all those others. The thing about loaded guns though is that you have to handle them very carefully because they can kill people too.
When Roger freed those slaves at Serpentine, he saved forty people and killed five others. The way I read the report, he didn’t have to kill them. He could have taken them out with broken bones like he did with the higher ups or he could have used that drug he used on Samuel. He chose to kill them. You need to remember that. He is helping our cause, but he is a very dangerous man.
Now, you weren’t directing him at the time, so none of those deaths are on you, but what if the next time you send him out to save someone he ends up killing other people. That will be on you. Is that something you think you can handle? Because once you point the gun and fire, you never know what the bullet will tear through on the way to your target.
You need to consider how forgetting to take safety precautions can lead to you shooting yourself in the foot or the head. He might mess up and end up killing one of the people that you’re trying to rescue. I don’t know how you’d handle that. I’m not sure if I could.
The last question you need to ask yourself is where does this all end? Today you’re sending him against slavers. Will you be sending him out against rapists and murderers and spousal abusers next?
I’m not telling you to stop, Abby. I fully support your mission. I just want to be sure that you’ve thought all this through and understand that things can and will go wrong and the longer you do this, the more chances there are of you becoming more like the people that you’re targeting.”
Shauna’s words hit hard and if I hadn’t already asked myself a lot of those questions, I’d probably try to deny some of it and argue with her. I had considered those points though and I’d already made my decision. After all, there was no Roger. I had killed those five people and I’d done it deliberately. It wasn’t a ‘misfire’ and I felt no guilt about it at all. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. As far as I was concerned, the slavers didn’t get enough of what they deserved.
“I really appreciate your concern, Shauna, and I want you to know that I have considered everything that you’re telling me. However, you and everyone else focused on why Roger picked me and how I impressed him. Only it wasn’t like that at all. You see, I don’t need Roger for the foundation. I was already building that before he contacted me. We can even do the rescuing part without him. We’d have to hire a team and they wouldn’t be half as good as he is, but it would work. What you should have been asking me is why I accepted to have him work for my foundation. The answer is that he told me exactly what happened in that warehouse and if he hadn’t killed those animals who were about to rape their captives, then he wasn’t the right man for the job. His killing them, or at least hurting them so badly that they wished they were dead, was what recommended him to me.”
Shauna let out a sigh of relief. “I’ve never been so glad to have misunderstood a situation or a person. I was worried about you having second thoughts once things turned violent.”
“You don’t have to worry on that account. You should also know that I’ve never bought into that argument of “becoming what you despise”. I despise people who prey on the weak and the innocent and who treat them like they’re property. No matter how many slavers are killed, I won’t become like that. It’s funny, my friends and I have had this same conversation in different terms. They’re comic book geeks and we’ve had long arguments over why Batman doesn’t kill the Joker. In the comics, the Joker has killed hundreds of people and each time Batman has the opportunity to kill him, he doesn’t. He ties him up and leaves him for the police to put in an asylum, from where he eventually escapes or is released, only to have him go out and kill more people. I always argue that Batman is complicit with every murder committed by the Joker because he had the chance to put a stop to the Joker and didn’t.”
Eva says that the Batman doesn’t want to kill the Joker because it would be the first step down a slippery slope and over time he’d get used to the killing and become like the Joker. Maybe he’d end up justifying killing common thieves like the one who’d killed his parents. I felt that the ‘maybe’ was worth the ‘for sure’ killing that was already going on and I trusted the disciplined mind behind the mask to retain his humanity and not become a predator of the innocent. I had no issues with him becoming a more deadly predator of scum.