Page 23 of The Atlas Maneuver

On her phone she opened to the web address the bank had provided for the transfer of Yerevan’s bitcoin. They’d already learned where Yerevan’s online wallet was located, which was no small feat, but the bank had sources no one else possessed. Of course, the account information was useless without the private key. Which she now entered with a few taps. The screen acknowledged that she controlled the wallet, which contained 41,867.45 bitcoin. She’d also been provided account information and another key into a wallet the bank owned. She tappedTRANSFER, then copied and pasted the information onto the screen from herNOTESapp. For security her smartphone did not sync theNOTESapp to any cloud server. Whatever she typed stayed only in her phone. Per her arrangement with the bank, one percent of what she’d acquired belonged to her. So she entered 41,448.78 to be transferred. In the blink of an eye, bitcoin worth billions moved from one wallet to another.

Confirmation appeared on the screen.

She then deleted the information fromNOTESand accessed her own wallet, transferring the remaining 418.67 bitcoin to herself. Right at seventeen million euros with current values.

She tapped in a text message confirming her success.

DEPOSIT MADE.

And sent it to Luxembourg.

She heard the growl of car engines outside. She fled the study and headed back to the great room. Three vehicles had stopped and doors, front and back, opened. Men emerged, each shouldering automatic rifles. FSB. No question. Roza had definitely called for backup.

She smiled.

Too late.

She hustled out the back door into the dim twilight of day.

And headed for the dock.

CHAPTER 15

1:30P.M.

CATHERINE ENJOYED ANOTHER PIECE OF CORDON BLEU. SHE WASordinarily a light eater at lunch, but on meeting days she splurged. After completing their monthly business the consuls always retired to the third-floor dining room to enjoy a light buffet. The others were now gone. The meal had ended a short time ago. She’d lingered. Cordon bleu was a personal favorite. Chicken, Danish ham, and Swiss cheese, breaded and sautéed. This particular version added paprika and a creamy white wine sauce that she’d always thought superb.

Her phone lay on the table.

Which had yet to signal a new incoming call or message.

The last call, though, had been instructive.

From the wine repository in Geneva.

An unexpected breach. But not unwelcomed. The CIA had come for a look. She’d expected that at some point. So she made good use of the opportunity and instructed her representative there to deliver a clear unequivocal message backed up by an empty gold vault. Hopefully, that would be the end of the bank’s association with the CIA. Decades of doing their bidding was now at an end. Other first consuls had tried to terminate the relationship.

They all failed.

But she succeeded.

She was enjoying the quiet, studying a square shaft of white sunlight that angled through the windows to the floor, waiting on confirmation from Russia. Kyra Lhota was an extraordinary woman who seemed to function on two totally different levels at the same time. One civilized and refined, the other utterly barbaric. Kyra was engaged in another private acquisition, one of many the bank had financed over the past few years. The consuls were aware of each one, but never apprised of the details. Better that way. Those she and Kyra handled alone.

It helped that their targets were scattered around the world, usually in lawless places and relatively reckless with their own personal security, thinking themselves invincible. Murder was not always involved. In fact, most of the acquisitions had been through thefts cleverly carried out by Kyra, leaving not a trace of a trail back to the bank. Yerevan had been different. A Russian oligarch was a special breed. Better to end that life than allow any opportunity at retribution. The bank needed to acquire as much bitcoin as possible. Every one of them strengthened their upcoming position.

Incredible, really.

History seemed to be repeating itself.

In the 1800s gold rushes started all across the world, which led to extensive mining that lasted for generations. Most of those entrepreneurs immediately spent their newly acquired wealth on tools, food, horses, gambling, liquor, and women. Just like today, gold then was not a currency in and of itself. The real value was in the IOUs, the paper certificates that banks handed out to individuals in exchange for keeping their gold safe—certificates that could be returned later and traded back for gold. Over time, as more and more gold came from the ground, and more and more governments stockpiled it as their reserve to back up their national currencies, less and less gold was available on the open market.

So the price rose.

As more time went by, new gold veins became harder and harder to find. Today, the amounts of gold being mined were trivialcompared with two hundred years ago and the price remained sky-high.

Bitcoin worked in a strikingly similar way.

Mining gold from the ground, or filtering it out of a river, was mimicked by solving a complex mathematical challenge fed to computers through a specialized program. Like a lottery number that the computers must decipher, scrolling through the billions of possible combinations, searching for the right sequence. If found, a block on the chain was sealed and the miner earned a coin. Proof of work, it was called. The rewards themselves known as a subsidy. The challenge came from landing on the right answer before anyone else. In the beginning miners used ordinary computers, but then, smartly, they moved to ultra-high-speed machines. In the beginning, back in 2009, 50 bitcoin were generated with each block solved. After 210,000 blocks, the subsidy was cut to 25. At 420,000, to 12.5. Then 630,000 down to 6.25. The latest halving at 840,000 blocks dropped the subsidy to 3.125. On average, halvings occurred roughly every four years. Thirty-two in all. No more. And, like gold, there was a finite amount of bitcoin. The program would only create 21,000,000. That number had been set when blockchain was first made public on the internet.

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