Fall 2013
Gavin woke to the sound of construction and the racket compounded the dull thud in his head. He shouldn’t have let Rohan talk him into staying out so late. The occasion deserved it however, so he relented. After many snags, work on his baby was complete. The High Orbit Ion Cannon was ready for a test run.
The tedious bit had been setting up thousands of brokerage accounts with the stolen or counterfeited identities he’d purchased from Viktor’s contacts and their associates. Collecting the information, in this day and age, wasn’t all that tricky, but setting up verified accounts was excruciatingly time consuming.
He couldn’t outsource it so he resorted to scripting the program himself, going to great pains to conceal the fact that the account applications originated from a central location, routing everything through several proxies. Once the accounts were set up and verified his work became a lot more interesting.
The next step was setting up hundreds of bitcoin keys and creating a mechanism to automatically convert the bitcoin to dollars before transferring them into the newly created brokerage accounts. Being a perfectionist, he implemented algorithms in the transfer mechanism to try to attain the best exchange rate for the day. Gavin set up intermediary offshore accounts to receive the dollar denominated funds from their foreign exchange platform on their way to the thousands of brokerage accounts he’d set up.
Viktor’s work helped immensely with the most complicated part, writing the programs to facilitate the transfer of funds from bitcoin to dollars and getting them finally to their resting place at dormant trading accounts around the world.
All the dominos were set, except for the first: he still needed a thousands of bitcoin that wouldn’t be missed. Then the program could go to work gathering scattered bitcoins at a single exchange server, converting them to dollars and transferring them to intermediary accounts. There the money would rest until the need arose. Then it would be diverted to thousands of brokerage accounts that Gavin controlled centrally. Gavin knew he couldn’t funnel anything out of Legion’s accounts, Jason was too sharp to allow simple embezzlement. No, they needed a different solution.
He’d been stuck for weeks with no movement towards an answer, when Rohan began one of his rants.
“Gavin, you see what they’re doing with this Sandy Hook shooting?”
“No, enlighten me Rohan, what’re they doing?”
“Knee jerk reaction in the press, take away the guns! Of course no one says a peep about antidepressants. I swear, every shooter I can remember has been on antidepressants or antipsychotics. And you’re telling me some drugged up depressed kid with no training goes into a school and kills 30 frantic children? Get the fuck outta here. If the story’s so airtight, why’re they sealing up all the records and 911 calls and demolishing the school? Makes no sense… Worst of all, no one ever mentions the fact that gun violence is down by like half since the ‘90s.”
“Whoa, whoa, calm down there motormouth,” Gavin replied. “What did you honestly expect?”
“I don’t know, but it still pisses me off!”
“Relax. Americans aren’t giving up their guns without a fight. The biggest problem really, is registration.
Once your gun is registered, they can come and hold you accountable for it. But clever individuals will find clever solutions. Now they sell 80% complete AR-15 receivers that you can buy unregistered and drill press yourself. If you’re not mechanically inclined, there’s even a guy in Texas who’s designed a 3D printed lower receiver. Just download the file onto your 3D printer, buy the upper, mag and all the rest of the parts and you’ve got a completely unregistered firearm.”
Rohan’s face brightened, “That’s genius!”
“Yeah, I have one in my bug-out bag back in the states. You just never can be too sure, right?”
“True. You know what else is crazy? Some people just set up fake charity sites after the tragedy and they’re raking in money. Can you believe that shit?”
That was it! Gavin thought, there was no need to embezzle or steal money, people were just giving it away.
“You just gave me a great idea.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Fake charities man! Remember how we’re stuck with the Ion Cannon?”
“Yeah, we don’t have any money to divert to the project… What’s that have to do with Sandy Hook?”
“Not Sandy Hook! Fake charities, we can put up hundreds of different donation sites and viola, we’ve got a source of funding for the Cannon.”
Rohan thought it over. Making a bunch of dummy charity sites wouldn’t be difficult. With some search engine optimization, he knew they could draw in funds. People always needed to be absolved of responsibility. They could sell peace of mind just as good as any real charity out there. Still, it was questionable.
“Dude, that’s sketchy as fuck. You want to basically scam people into funding our pet project.”
“Think of it as crowdfunding. Isn’t that all the rage these days? How many of those projects are failures or outright scams. We’ll actually be doing some good with the money.”
“Let me think about it. This is pretty heavy man.”
“Rohan, I appreciate your input, always have and always will. But you need to understand one thing, I’m still in charge here. At the fund you’ve got the public face, but you know it’s set up contractually so that I have the final word. On everything, from the light fixtures to the pay structure. And that’s the hedge fund that we’re officially partners on! Do you really think that in what we do outside the firm, you can dictate anything? At this point, you’re involved enough that you have no choice but to follow through.
But I can be generous, for all the help you’ve provided in getting this far. If you want, you can back out completely and I’ll go at it alone. I’ve gotten far enough that I can take it from here. But if you want to stick around, you have to respect the hierarchy.”
Rohan’s ears were burning. Gavin had the singular ability to drive him to the point where he felt he had no option but to react violently. But he wouldn’t allow him the satisfaction. The only way to respond was diplomatically, and he slowed his breathing down. He couldn’t let Gavin go rogue. He had to remain involved, and he had to have his voice heard. Without his restraint, there was no accounting for the damage Gavin could do.
“Well Gavin, I’m glad we had this talk. Sincerely. It’s good to establish relational hierarchies early in any venture. I’ll play ball, but I want input on the content for the websites. In fact, I’ll write something up myself and you can use it as boilerplate. Keep me in the loop with the accounting too, I’ll want to understand what we can do in the market, based on the money we have. It’s the difference between crushing an unprofitable shale oil company and the Bank of Japan, you know what I mean?”
Relieved that his hard stance worked, Gavin was conciliatory.
“Of course, man, we’re in this together.”
The next morning Gavin rolled out of bed with his task set for the day: looking up successful charity websites and creating templates for various disasters. Rohan was going to draft verbiage to make the organizations seem real. He remembered a company that was in the news, it was writing machine learning software for SEO. They predicted it would be a game changer. True or not, there weren’t enough hours in the day for Gavin to do it himself, and they couldn’t risk outsourcing for fear of someone ratting them out. He put the thoughts aside, he’d have to figure it out after coffee.