Start at the Prologue and First Chapter here

Frank returned home from San Francisco dead tired after a sleepless night on the redeye flight. Under the mailboxes in the foyer was a large package with his name on it. What could that be? He carried it upstairs and opened it in the kitchen. Oh, right. Birdseed. After he got some sleep, he even got around to filling the feeder his daughter had given him for his birthday.

For the next several days he looked for birds whenever he passed the door to his porch. But no luck. No birds, and the feeder was still full. Oh well. It had been a nice thought on Marla’s part.

When he returned from New York the next week, he was surprised to see that the feeder was empty. So, the birds had finally gotten around to finding it. Maybe Julius had returned! Frank refilled the feeder and looked forward to seeing who would visit.

The next day, the seed was untouched. Frank sat down where he could keep an eye on the feeder as he worked, but then got immersed in what he was doing and forgot to look outside. When he got up for a cup of coffee a couple hours later, he was surprised to see that the feeder was half empty again. No birds, but clearly there must have been. He’d have to keep a closer eye on it this time. But again, no luck. He didn’t see a single bird all day.

The next morning, the feeder was completely empty. He refilled it and vowed that whatever was emptying his feeder wouldn’t escape his notice this time.

When it did anyway and the feeder was empty for a third time, Frank began considering a web cam.

That proved to be unnecessary, because the next morning, the mystery was solved. Sticking out of the feeder were the butt and twitching tail of an obviously well-fed squirrel. Hah! Caught him in the act. Frank tapped on the window to scare the beast away, but it ignored him. He tapped harder. Same result. So Frank opened the sliding door.

“Scat!”

The squirrel withdrew from the feeder and perched on its hind legs on the porch railing, looking like a tiny, irritated T Rex with its miniature front legs cocked before it. But otherwise, it didn’t move.

“I said scat!” But it wasn’t till Frank took a step forward that the animal made its way off along the railing, and then to the ivy vines it had scaled up the side of the building. It sat there bawling Frank out for his lack of hospitality until he stepped back inside.

Hmm. Frank had nothing against squirrels as such, but the goal here was to attract birds, not rodents. He went inside and rummaged through his recycling looking for the box the feeder came in. Yes, the hank of wire was still in it. He went outside, unclamped the feeder, refilled it, stood on a chair, and hung it from one of the brackets supporting his upstairs neighbor’s porch. That should do it. It would be a heck of a long jump from the ivy to this end of the porch.

He sat down inside by a window to see what would happen. Sure enough, the squirrel came back. It hopped onto the railing and studied the situation, cocking its head from side to side. Frank started to feel sorry for it and went into the kitchen. It wasn’t the squirrel’s fault it didn’t have feathers. What else could he feed it besides seeds? He found a granola bar and broke off a few pieces, opened the slider, and tossed a piece onto the porch close to the squirrel.

Sure enough, after a few moments evaluating this intriguing turn of events, the animal bounded forward, seized the bite of food, and hopped back to the safety of the vine. Intrigued, Frank wondered whether he could get it to eat out of his hand, the way Julius used to? He sidled slowly out on to the porch and sat down.

The answer appeared likely to be yes. Frank threw pieces of granola bar shorter and shorter distances. Each time, hesitantly and by fits and starts, the squirrel crept closer, no longer retreating to the vine between snacks. When he got the last piece of granola bar, Frank held it between his thumb and index finger and leaned over to hold it close to the floor of the perch.

The squirrel waited for Frank to toss the crumb forward, but Frank held fast. Slowly, the animal approached, one halting step at a time, it’s tail erect and occasionally twitching furiously. Frank had never seen a squirrel so close up and was fascinated by its bright black eyes and surprisingly long, delicate whiskers. Each time the animal stopped, it froze; tense; almost on tip-toe.

It was only six inches away now. Would it be brave enough to close the gap? It would.

“Yow!”

Frank jumped back, his index finger streaming blood. The squirrel scampered away, its prize secured.

Frank went inside and ran cold water over his still-bleeding finger. Okay, you little bugger. Game on.

The next day, the feeder was empty again.

*  *  *

Frank picked up his tablet to check on the news, scowling as has band aid-encumbered index finger swept ineffectively across the touchscreen. Uh oh. A headline said there’d been another big breach of a cryptocurrency exchange. He started the video to find out how big it was. One of two guys in suits sitting at a news desk began to speak.

In what may be the biggest cryptocurrency hack to date, Delirium revealed today that someone has made off with over one billion dollars’ worth of DTs, the alt coin that it introduced to the marketplace just eighteen months ago. Here to tell us what this means to the cryptocurrency marketplace is Karl Engel, our chief financial analyst. Karl, the cryptocurrency marketplace has been soaring lately. Do you think this will bring it back to earth?

Well, Jack, on any other exchange, that’s what you’d expect. But this is the crypto market, and it seems like nothing can spoil the party. And don’t forget that this is nothing new. Six months ago, over one hundred million Tabbies –

The alt coin issued by PerpetualKitten.com, right?

That’s right. Anyway, Tabbies worth almost four hundred million dollars were stolen. And the Tabby hit a new high just eight days later.

But Karl, don’t you think this will have some sort of impact?

Of course. All the other crypto currencies are up dramatically.

(The news anchor shook his head.) That doesn’t make any sense.

Sure, it does, Jack. Part of Satoshi Nakamoto’s genius was to launch a currency with a limited supply. Unless a majority of the bitcoin miners agree to it, there can never be more bitcoin than the number Nakamoto set back in 2008. And most of the other alt coin developers have adopted the same policy.

But what does that have to do with the Delirium breach, Karl?

It’s supply and demand, like I said. Don’t forget, before this breach, the market value of Delirium was eighty billion dollars – second only to bitcoin. Now that the DT seems insecure, everyone’s flocking to the other cryptocurrencies.

Frank closed the video. Well, it did make sense, in a crazy, world-turned-upside-down kind of way. But only if you accepted the concept that cryptocurrencies made any sense to begin with. And he didn’t. Even if you could make a totally secure system that mined alt coins and executed and recorded the transactions, there was lots of vulnerability outside that core. People needed to keep their coins in electronic wallets, and then trade them on exchanges, all of which could be hacked. Or you could spoof a party to a transaction and have someone send their alt coins to your wallet instead. Since you could never change the blockchain after a block had been finalized, you were just out of luck.

And that was just the start.  If you wanted to use a cryptocurrency the same way you used good old dollars, stores, restaurants, gas stations and everything else had to be willing to accept them. Incredibly, many were. That meant there were the same kinds of opportunities for the bad guys to clean you out as there were with credit card transactions. Only more, because everything was so new. There were flaws everywhere, and the black hat crackers usually spotted them before the white hat developers did.

His phone buzzed and he saw a meeting invitation. Oh heck. He’d just gotten home from New York, and now he’d have to be on the 6:00 AM shuttle and go back. Cronin had called a meeting of the cryptocurrency team for 8:30 tomorrow morning.

*  *  *

Frank settled into the taxi with a grunt of relief. It had been a long day, and he’d spent most of it in a conference room on the eighty-fifth floor. And not just with Cronin and the cryptocurrency team, but for the first two hours with Horace Nukem, the Chairman of the board of directors, as well. Before retiring from the military as a four-star general, Nukem had served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He’d pushed hard, probing everyone – and especially Frank – on whether the bank’s new blockchain platform was bulletproof. Cronin almost rose from his seat in annoyance when Frank replied that nothing deployed over the Internet was ever one hundred percent secure.

“While Frank, of course is right,” Cronin interrupted, “You can be sure we’re doing everything humanly possible to ensure that the bank’s assets are secure.”

“That’s not good enough,” Nukem replied.

“Well, if you find an alien that’s better than a human cybersecurity expert, send him my way,” Cronin said, giving Frank a sideways look. The look said, “and I’ll gladly give him Frank’s job.”

Yeah. A long day indeed. Back in his tiny office on the fifteenth floor late in the afternoon, Frank worried whether he had any idea at all how secure the GBFS blockchain was. The bad guys were still finding flaws in programs that were twenty years old. Blockchains were so new there had to be plenty of flaws and vulnerabilities that no one had figured out yet.

One commentator had nailed it when he said that blockchain technology was like a proof of concept that had gotten out of the laboratory and escaped into the wild. Enthusiastic proponents had jumped on board before anyone had time to really think every security concern through, or heck, thought about most of them at all. Or even the ones they knew about. Most famously, Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper had highlighted that anyone owning more than half of the bitcoin ledgers could change the blockchain any way they wanted to. And that was still the case. The obvious risk of such a feasible attack had simply been minimized by bitcoin enthusiasts as an inconvenient truth.

And then there was Etherium, which was now the second most popular cryptocurrency. Almost immediately after Etherium started issuing Ether, its alt coin, somebody launched a crowd sourced venture fund to invest in Etherium-based startups. True to form, the fund would operate using a blockchain the founders of the fund had quickly slapped together. Almost one hundred and fifty million dollars was raised very quickly, and almost as quickly after that, someone made off with sixty million of it!

There had been more and bigger hacks after the Etherium theft. But that hadn’t slowed things down in the cryptocurrency movement at all. Some things would never change, Frank sighed as his taxi rolled to a stop at the edge of a fancy awning that ran out to the curb of the avenue.

A uniformed doorman opened the taxi door for Frank.

“Good evening, Mr. Adversego. I hope you’ve had a pleasant day.”

“Sure, sure. Thanks. Hope you have, too.”

“Thank you very much, sir” the doorman said.

Frank gave a tight smile, embarrassed that he’d forgotten the doorman’s name again. The lobby he crossed to reach the elevator was understated in its modern elegance; all brushed aluminum, glass and travertine. Muted, abstract paintings in complementary colors ran from the floor all the way up to the two-story ceiling.

The elevator took him to the forty-eighth floor. Only eight doors met him there. Frank opened one at the end of the hallway.

The view that greeted him inside was almost as impressive as the one at work. He wasn’t as high up, but that made it easier to appreciate the view of Central Park immediately below through the floor to ceiling glass that spanned two of the walls of his living room. As it did two of the walls of the adjacent bedroom, which was larger than the one in his condo back in Washington. And in the closet of that bedroom were five suits, each with a matching shirt, tie, belt and shoes, all selected by a personal shopper from posh Fifth Avenue stores at the behest of Audrey Adams. Frank was under strict orders from her not to be seen on the eighty-fifth floor unless he was inside one of them.

He flopped down on a couch that doubtless cost more than all of his living room furnishings at home combined and contemplated the wet bar against the wall. Like a hotel wet bar, it was fully stocked and replenished daily. Unlike a hotel amenity, he never received a bill. The bank saw to that, as it did all of his other New York living expenses. He could get used to that. He was even growing to appreciate spending time, for the first time in a great many years, in a place that was comfortable, cleaned by someone other than him, and attractive to behold. Not to mention wildly expensive.

Not for good, of course. But if the job demanded it, well, what could he do?

He walked over to the wet bar and poured himself a glass of fifteen-year-old Dalwhinnie scotch. He’d checked its price at the liquor store around the corner. Seventy bucks a bottle. He’d never dream of paying that much for a bottle of hootch, no matter what he was earning. But he was learning to appreciate good scotch on somebody’s else’s nickel. He could get used to that, too.

*  *  *

Author’s Notes for This Week:

For starters, now you know who Frank’s animal nemesis will be in Book Five. As I’ve noted before, while it’s true that Frank is not my doppelganger, it is the case that I would never let Frank do anything truly stupid that I hadn’t first done myself. And so it is here. The real-life Fang was an Alberts Squirrel (the Rocky Mountain tufted ear variety, rather than the common gray squirrel of the East Coast). And both the granola bar and the wound were administered on a balcony on a motel in Flagstaff Amazon. The slice into my finger was quite impressive. I would not have guessed a squirrel’s teeth could be so sharp.

Moving along, FFF (Faithful Friends of Frank, as you’ll recall from last week) will notice several Easter Eggs in this post. One harks back to the first book in the Frank Saga, while the second is an example of my penchant for playing with names. Kudos to the first reader to spot both. One that you won’t spot, unless you went to law school with me, will be the name Horace Nukem. Nukem was the client from hell in the comic strip I wrote while at Cornell, and self-published under the title Sisyphus vs. The World. It also ran in the Beverly Hills Law Journal; go figure. As the name suggests, the main character – one Roscoe Sisyphus by name – shared a few traits with our mutual friend Frank.

Next Week: We’ll get to know Dirk Delhohn and the bank’s plans a bit better, and check in with the Cryptomancer himself. If you have some friends that might like to follow the story along, why not send them a link to the Prologue and First Chapter? You can find that link here.

 

Continue to Chapter 7 here