Start at the Prologue and First Chapter here

Discovering the alt coin vulnerabilities required to make those attacks possible had required great skill and painstaking effort. But the time needed to ensure they would occur was trivial. All Crypto had to do was pick the right sites on the Dark Net at which to offer those vulnerabilities for sale. Capitalist greed had done the rest. It had been amusing to watch the feeding frenzy as the black hats snapped up the exploits and raced each other to launch their assaults. Their efforts left the markets spinning crazily in shock and awe. In a matter of hours, the value of affected and unaffected cryptocurrencies alike dropped catastrophically. Most importantly, the credibility of BankCoin began to rise. And that was what the sole purpose of the exercise.

All of which was as predictable as the next sunrise, Crypto mused. The invisible hand of capitalism guided criminal enterprises just as surely as legitimate ones. And cybercrime was now a very big enterprise indeed.

More predictable! The voice echoed.

Yes, yes, Crypto responded. That capitalists were first and foremost dedicated to their own self-interest was a lesson his teachers had recited unceasingly as he grew up. That was a given for anyone attending school in the German Democratic Republic before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In retrospect, he realized his teachers focused as much on indoctrination as education.

Be that as it may, life after the collapse of the Soviet Union confirmed that what he had been told about the evils of the capitalists and the puppet governments they controlled was not all propaganda. Indeed,  he concluded that the egalitarian ideology of East German communism had been more fully realized than the equal opportunity myth of the United States. Not that either system could be pardoned for the abuses it perpetrated on its own citizens.

Life might have been bleak on the side of the Berlin Wall, Crypto reflected, but not so much for a child of the elites. His father – a haughty, distant man as unavailable to Crypto at home as he was ever present at the office – was a high-ranking official in the much feared and loathed Ministry of State Security. The  Stasi, as it was more commonly referred to. Those in power, like his father, were entitled to large apartments, luxury foods and many other privileges denied to those that in theory they served.

Special care was given to the children of the elites, too, to ensure their proper ideological orientation. Not only to groom them for future success, but to protect the parents against the possibility that a child might attract the attention of one of the hundreds of thousands of Stasi informants. Regardless of who you were, where you lived, or what you did, there was an informant in your building, your club, your classroom. Often enough, even in your bed.

And then the wall had come down, more abruptly than anyone could have imagined, breached in a day by cheering crowds wielding crowbars and anything else they could turn to that purpose. Ironically, the precise moment of its fall was not the result of a coup, but of simple miscommunication and confusion at the top-level of government. But once the flood of celebrating East Germans surged through the widening gaps in the hated symbol of oppression there was no turning back. Soon, the governments of Soviet Socialist States were falling like dominoes across eastern Europe and central Asia. As if overnight, half of the world order that had existed since the end of the Second World War crumbled like the wall into rubble.

But indeed change had already been in the air. Two days before the wall came down, Erich Mielke had resigned as head of the Stasi, ending thirty-two years of iron control over its vast apparatus. A month thereafter, the prime minister called for the dissolution of the Stasi itself. Two weeks later its end was legislatively confirmed, and the most notorious and effective tool of government control lay also in ruins.

At first, his father was contemptuous of the change, working covertly with other Stasi officers to orchestrate the creation of an interim government that would promise fair and open elections, but would in reality do the bidding of those in power before the fall. But the flood of euphoria of the masses there and throughout Eastern Europe was too great. Ten days after the dissolution of the Stasi, Nicolae Ceaușescu, the much-hated dictator of Romania, and Elena, his equally despised wife, fled and were promptly captured. Within a matter of hours, they were convicted of high crimes, placed against a wall, and summarily executed by an impromptu firing squad.

The abrupt changes shocked Crypto. No longer secure at the top of the governmental infrastructure, his family was suddenly in danger. Especially so, after a mob surged into the former headquarters of the Stasi and prevented those guarding its records from destroying the millions of pages of files the secret agency had meticulously created. Those records held the identities not only of the hundreds of thousands of informants and the friends and family they betrayed, but also the names of the decision makers whose orders the torturers and executioners carried out.

And then things grew worse for Crypto and his parents. Before a year had passed, East and West Germany were reunited. Any remaining hope the East German elites had of retaining influence, much less control, was dashed. The reunification, after all, was closer to the acquisition of a bankrupt company than a merger of equals. Russia had long since stripped East Germany bare of what industrial infrastructure escaped Allied bombing during World War II, and Moscow had milked the subservient East Germans ever since. By the time of reunification, East Germany was economically destitute and at the mercy of West Germany, leaving the politicians of the west firmly in control. The same government the Stasi had worked tirelessly to infiltrate and subvert was now the master of its former puppeteers.

The month’s after the wall came down passed like a blur for Crypto. Before the end of the year, his family was evicted from their comfortable apartment. Within six months, Crypto’s father decided they must move again, this time to Slovenia, where they arrived with few possessions. Everything else, including their real names, they left behind. Crypto was horrified and disgusted when he realized they had fled to avoid possible revenge by those his father had persecuted, or their survivors.

It might have been easier had he been older or younger, Crypto thought, rather than turning fifteen on the very day the wall came down. One moment he was the pampered child of a respected – make that feared – government official, assured of a privileged job and career. And then, long before he turned sixteen, he was on the run, scurrying from one tiny, miserable flat to another.

East Berlin might have been grim, but it was luxurious compared to the primitive rural village they removed to in Slovenia, with more donkey carts in the streets than cars. Crypto did not dare approach his father, who daily grew more prone to launch into tirades of abuse at the smallest real or imagined provocation. When he did, his voice rose, his face grew flushed and the veins in his forehead bulged and throbbed in a way that alarmed Crypto’s mother. She had always been a quiet woman, subservient to her husband . Now, she lived in terror of his rages, and life for her and Crypto was miserable. His father rarely left the tiny, squalid house, and neither did Crypto. He was unable to attend school, much less look forward to a career in a country whose barbaric language he could not speak and refused to learn.

Incredibly, there was worse to come, though at first their change in circumstance seemed heaven-sent. One day, Crypto woke up to find his father gone, away on a trip whose purpose his mother would not share. Eight days later, his mother shook him awake an hour before dawn; she told him to dress as quickly as possible. Ten minutes later, a strange man hustled them into a waiting car, leaving behind the few belongings they still possessed. A day and a night later, they were in Los Angeles, California. His father, Crypto learned, was somewhere on the east coast of the United States.

Later he would learn that his father was in Washington, D.C., telling the Americans everything he knew about the Stasi, the Soviets, and anything else they wanted to know that he had not already told them in Berlin in exchange for the family’s safe passage to the U.S. It was three months before he rejoined the family, and only a month after that when he died of a stroke. With all the heartless certainty of a sixteen-year old, Crypto thought it was just as well.

*  *  *

The soft ding of a calendar alarm roused Crypto from his thoughts. How much time had he wasted on nonsense when there was work to do? To date, those charged with law enforcement had wasted little of their time worrying about thefts of alt coins owned by speculators foolish enough to put good money into invisible tokens. But the police and FBI could scarcely ignore the financial bloodbath Crypto had just unleashed. He would have to be even more cautious now.

Especially regarding BankCoin. Though he had spared it in the recent attacks, surely the banks would be pushing their cybersecurity experts as hard as possible to ensure that the BankCoin platform was as safe as it was possible for humans to make it. They would be looking hard to discover what someone like Crypto might be up to.

What if they are successful? The voice interrupted, WHAT IF THEY ARE SUCCESSFUL?

Crypto squirmed: Hush! You know I’ve considered that possibility a hundred times.

Till now, he’d been confident that he could not be found out. But what if this Adversego person is –

– as good as First Manhattan keeps trumpeting? The voice completed the thought.

He just might be, Crypto thought.

Then you must stop him!

Crypto stared into the air above his computer screen. But to stop him, he would need assistance.

Then get it!

Crypto looked back at his screen. The voice was always so insistent; so confident. Sometimes too confident. But usually it was right.

Do it!

All right, all right! He waved his hand in the air. Sometimes that bought him a few minutes of peace.

After all, the voice was right. He could not ignore the risk that Adversego might notice something. But if Crypto sought assistance, there was also the risk that anyone he entrusted with a task might be careless. Or even betray him.

What to do?

Do it! Do it NOW!

It was growing hard to separate his thoughts from the voice. Perhaps a measured response was warranted. Greed was a powerful motivator. There was no more powerful glue to keep lips sealed than money. He could afford to pay well, and he would need to expose very little to gain much. Perhaps that would be all that was needed.

Yes. DO IT!

*  *  *

Frank’s phone rang; the frosty voice of Audrey Addams was waiting for him when he answered it. Neither knew they were not the only ones on the line.

“Do you know what time it is?”

Frank was briefly bewildered; he stabbed at the keys on his computer and pulled up his calendar.

“Sorry! I’ll be right up!”

He was in the elevator when someone slipped unseen into his office and closed the door.

As the intruder expected, Frank’s tablet computer, with its thumbprint sign-on sensor, was in his computer bag, sitting on the floor next to his desk chair. Good. On the other hand, Frank’s desk top was messy. Not so good. The intruder stood on the desk chair and took a picture to record the exact placement of everything on the desktop before clearing a space in front of the chair. That was better.

He removed a plastic tablecloth from his own bag and spread it on the desktop. Then he donned a pair of latex gloves and eased Frank’s tablet by its edges out of his computer bag and set it down in front of him on the desk.

Working quickly but carefully, he removed several more items from his bag: several sheets of laminating plastic, a container of fine powder, an old-fashioned shaving brush, a magnifying glass and a scissors. After sprinkling the powder on the glass screen, he lightly dusted the loose powder off again, taking care to keep it on the tablecloth. He wiggled a corner on one of the sheets the laminating plastic up and down until the backing paper began to separate. The rest of the backing paper peeled off easily, allowing him to apply the sticky side lightly to the glass surface of the tablet. Then he peeled it back off again and placed it sticky side up on the tablecloth. Placing another peeled sheet of laminating plastic down on the first, sticky side to sticky side, completed the process.

Now came the hard part. He hoped Frank Adversego didn’t have unusually dry fingers. A few seconds with the magnifying glass confirmed that Frank did not. There were two satisfactory thumbprints to choose from, each with its whorls faithfully reflected in powder. He cut the best print out.

Only one more step. For that, the intruder removed a laptop from his bag, connected it to Frank’s tablet, and powered them both up. Then he pressed Frank’s borrowed fingerprint on the tablet’s sensor.

By the time Frank returned from his meeting, his desk was as he had left it and his tablet was once again nestled in his computer bag, exactly the same as before. Or almost so. Now it had some interesting new software installed, including a keystroke logger and a program that would allow the intruder to activate the microphone and wireless card. And the intruder had a mirror image of Frank’s tablet on his laptop.

Within a few days, the keystroke logger had captured and transmitted to the intruder the log-in information he needed to access all the software he had copied from Frank’s tablet. From there, it was an easy step to access Frank’s laptop, to transfer the same malware to it, and then to access everything that he found there.

*  *  *

Author Notes for This Week:

As I believe I’ve mentioned in the past, constructing a convincing villain can be challenging. It’s hard enough to sketch out a bad guy for garden-variety genres, such as murder mysteries, even though the real world reminds us on a daily basis such people do exist. Coming up with a convincing portrait of someone out to destroy the world is a lot harder. What, after all, could possibly motivate anyone to set out to do such a thing?

Many thriller writers punt on this, and don’t bother to create a three-dimensional character at all. Instead, they opt for the type of cartoon caricature that can fill the role the plot requires without providing any added value to the reading experience. Other writers, like David Cornwell, a/k/a John le Carré, go to the opposite extreme, investing far more pages of back story than we may actually want to read. It’s hard to find just the right balance.

In this chapter, I start to flesh out a back story for Crypto that’s intended to make him both interesting as well as credible. You just read half of it. The second half includes the explanation for something above that must have been puzzling you. Voice? What voice?

This is an example of what it’s like to follow the construction of a novel as it takes shape, or at least as it takes shape when someone like me is writing it, as compared to someone who outlines the entire story in detail before they begin to type the actual text – something I could never pull off. It would only take a couple of chapters before I began chasing some interesting new plot fox off on a chase that would consign the plot outline to the trash can.

In this case, what occurred to me is that Crypto would be much more credible if he was mentally ill. In the real world, we don’t have comic-book evil doers. We have real people who seldom, thank goodness, if ever follow Hitlerian ambitions. We do have schizophrenics, however, many of whom hold their inner demons in check through medication. Some of those individuals can still hear voices, however, and such voices, I think, can provide some interesting flavor to Crypto, as well as an explanation of how he could play the part that I have assigned to him.

Honestly and effectively constructing a mentally ill character, of course, is as daunting a challenge as is creating a super villain. I’m starting off from a position of almost no knowledge, but have started to read up on the symptoms, treatment and progress of the condition. That said, portraying mental illness of any type is by nature a tough assignment, and I’ll turn again to David Cornwell for an example. In Smiley’s People, Cornwell introduces Tatiana, the daughter of Karla, George Smiley’s KGB nemesis throughout many of Cornwell’s books. We meet her in the first person, and only gradually realize that she is mad. It’s an interesting approach, and arguably convincing. Whether you think the significant investment Cornwell makes in this experiment pays off in the effectiveness of the book is a matter of taste.

I don’t plan to dedicate an equal number of pages to making Crypto real to the reader, because unlike Cornwell, I aim to write about halfway between genre and literary fiction, sacrificing some amount of texture and context to maintaining pace. Whether I can pull it off is something that we’ll all have to see as time goes on.

After deciding to go down this road, I went back to my off-line draft and began adding in appropriate voice inputs in the Crypto sections, beginning with the Prologue. It’s likely that I’ll move the above chapter, and the second part of the back story, to an earlier position in the book as well.

Next week: Assuming that I don’t reshuffle the three or four chapters currently in the queue, we’ll follow along with Frank as First Manhattan tries to turn him into a spokesperson for security – if you can imagine that.

Continue with Chapter 14