Page 30 of The Atlas Maneuver

She entered the main office and closed the door.

Lana Greenwell worked at the bank as a senior vice president. She was a tall, elegant woman, her hair, sliding to gray, cut in a fashionable tight coiffure. An American, lured away twenty years ago from a Fortune 500 company, she knew every aspect of their computer systems, which represented an investment of many millions of euros for some of the most sophisticated data processors in the world. Kelly had not worked under her, only with her, as the two women had never cared for each other. There’d been continualinterdepartmental feuds that Catherine had refereed on more than one occasion. They were each top-notch and the bank needed their respective expertise, so a truce had always been found, one fueled by their individual ambitions and, to a large extent, greed. Both women had been paid generously, though Kelly had garnered more in the way of rewards. Catherine had already spoken to Lana on the phone before heading up from the basement.

“Explain to me what happened?” she asked.

Lana turned from the terminal on her desk. “We’ve only had a few minutes to take a look, but it appears Kelly directly infected the air-gap server with some ultra-sophisticated malware that was programmed to activate the first time new wallet keys were requested. I just had someone run a diagnostic. The server is frozen with a kill switch. If we try to bypass or affect it in any way, everything gets erased. All of the keys and the internal hard drive backups will be gone. It’s clever and sophisticated. But I would have expected no less from her.”

Kelly had been brilliant. No doubt. She’d created something utterly unique. Blockchain. Which led to something equally novel. Bitcoin. Both crazy ideas, for sure, but ones that had become revolutionary.

“Governments can adopt bitcoin as their formal currency,” Kelly told her. “A means of exchange for goods and services within their nation. They could even use bitcoin value as their reserve currency, backing up whatever currency they currently use. No more dollars or euros. Right now gold is the most valuable asset on earth. But by the time the fourth halving occurs, bitcoin will be the rarest asset on earth. Twice as scarce as gold. Bitcoin could, quite literally, replace gold in value.”

And here they were, at the fourth halving. She’d never considered such a broad-reaching possibility. But Kelly was right. People thought gold infinite. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There were maybe 171,000 metric tons of it aboveground in the world, at the most. Compressed, that would be a cube measuring around twenty-one meters square. Not a lot.

Just like bitcoin. Finite.

Valuable.

“Can’t we just unhook the hard drives from the air-gap server and access them externally?” she asked. “Securing the keys.”

“That was my first thought. But a preliminary analysis shows that if the power supply stops, the program triggers and erases the drives as a fail-safe. She thought of that possibility.”

Of course Kelly would. She thought of everything.

Like always.

“Katie, think about it. If nations adopt bitcoin as their currency, or simply back up their existing currency with its value, we would then be in a new era. The world would fundamentally shift away from tangible metals, away from fiat currency that is worthless, to ones and zeros in a computer program. The value of which the users themselves will determine. There was a time when salt was the currency of the world. Or cattle. Or animal skins. Each replaced by something else, which was replaced by something else. Change always happens. We may be at one of those crossroads when it will happen again.”

So brilliant.

“Why would she do this?” she asked, more to herself.

“That was the thing about Kelly. She was really good at showing you only what she wanted you to know.”

Yes, she was. Fooled her completely.

“It could take months—years—to undo the damage,” Lana said. “And we could activate that kill switch at any point in the process. Which would be catastrophic. My recommendation is to leave it alone, until we know more.”

The bank had long ago stopped keeping hard copies of the bitcoin wallet keys. Too risky and nearly impossible to secure. Instead, they’d opted for the air-gap server, with three electronic hard drive backups that were generated each time the server changed the keys. So clever they’d thought themselves. But how foolish that false sense of security had turned out to be. The bitcoin world was replete with stories of how investors lost the private keys to wallets. Once gone, the bitcoin was gone too. At present it wasestimated that around fifteen percent of the twenty million or so existing coins were forever lost, inaccessible in the cyberworld.

Now the bank’s were at risk.

“Everything is happening over the next two days,” she said to Lana.

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“We must have access to that bitcoin.”

“I realize that, and we’ll be working on it. But Kelly timed her actions carefully.”

The second call Catherine had made before coming up from the basement was to Kelly’s office, verifying where she was staying in Basel. That information was passed on in her third call, made to Kyra in Siberia, ordering her to find Kelly, in Switzerland, and fast.

“This is ordinarily not what I do,” Kyra had said.

“We’ll double the bitcoin you received if you find her, unharmed, and return her to me.”

She knew that would work.

Kyra, though born Russian, was a capitalist at heart.

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