Commander-In-Chief (30 page)

T
erry Walker missed his home country the way many of his fellow countrymen do when they become expatriates, because Australia is a beautiful place, but he had to admit that his temporary digs weren’t half bad. As he looked around his massive bedroom, his eyes slowly adjusting to the early-morning light, he knew he was in the midst of pure luxury, and he wondered why this didn’t make him happier.

As he lay there in bed, the dawn approaching through the curtains to the balcony, he thought about his life for a moment. It wasn’t lost on him that he had most everything he ever wanted; those who knew him thought he was living a dream. But it also wasn’t lost on him that the dream he’d assembled for himself had come at a great cost.

He did his best to push all his worries from his mind, and he climbed out of bed quietly. He dressed in workout gear in the dressing room adjacent to his bedroom, then he kissed the mop of chestnut hair sticking out from between a clump of overstuffed pillows. The hair belonged to his wife, Kate, who would sleep for another
hour, and when he tiptoed down the hall and looked in on his seven-year-old son, he saw that Noah was sound asleep as well, with a stack of comic books next to him in the bed.

A minute later Terry was out in the early-morning air, walking through the lush tropical property toward the five-thousand-square-foot gymnasium down at the bottom of a hill lined with jacaranda and coconut palms.

Tarpon Island was no regular resort hotel; it was an exclusive resort on an even more exclusive private island, owned by a British billionaire and a celebrated bon vivant. The man had purchased the island in the 1980s to use as his own private refuge, but he’d taken to inviting so many of his well-heeled guests to the place in the past three decades his entrepreneurial spirit told him he could simply open a corner of the island up as a resort for the rich and famous.

Perhaps rich
or
famous was a better way to frame it.

Rock stars, movie stars, and fashion icons all stayed here, but these were just the famous guests. More common were men and women like the Walkers, fabulously wealthy but unknown to anyone but a very few within their industry.

The Walkers were unique in one respect, however. Where most other guests at the Tarpon Island resort stayed a week or two at most, the Walkers had been living here for the past six months, and they planned on being here for six months more.

Terry worked out in the gym for nearly an hour, his mind appreciating the focus exercise gave him, and then he headed home, past the smallest units on the island, cottages that could sleep six, and back up the hill to his place, the four-bedroom mansion with floor-to-ceiling views of the Caribbean Sea from almost every single room.

At eight a.m. a showered, shaved, and fed Terry Walker walked around the breakfast table, kissing his wife and child as he went. He
waved good-bye to the cook, then headed down the steep hillside pathway to the beach, just fifty yards from his back door. He wore a suit and tie today because he had a meeting, but on most days he just wore board shorts and a polo. Even with the suit, Terry carried a backpack over his shoulder, a particular affectation of his because his large collection of electronic gadgetry wouldn’t fit into a regular briefcase or messenger bag.

A candy-apple-red Robinson helicopter landed on a beachside road promptly at 8:05, as it did every day, and Walker climbed aboard as the aircraft’s only passenger. He chartered the helo every day to cut his commute time down from what it would have been if he had taken a launch, and this gave him a little more precious time in the mornings and evenings with his family.

As he did virtually every morning, Walker sat in the back of the helo and looked out at the villa as he lifted into the air. Then, when he could see it no longer he regarded the resort below, and the rest of the hilly island. And then, when the island twisted out of view, he gazed across the blue-green water that shot below him.

Terry was blowing nearly ten grand a day on the house, the office, the helo, the food, and the rest of this operation, so it was a good thing he was averaging about $75,000 a day in profit from his work. He was making too much money to shut this temporary gig down yet, but, he told himself, the day was coming.

This bit of paradise would not be theirs forever. He’d promised Kate they’d spend no more than one year here in the BVIs. After that they would return to Sydney and then they would do . . . well, Terry wasn’t sure yet.

He was only certain of one thing: They wouldn’t do
this
anymore.

Kate didn’t understand exactly why Terry had to work here, and he’d done his best not to burden her with the details. It wasn’t
that she wasn’t smart enough to understand her husband’s work. No, Terry Walker did not want his wife to know the ins and outs of it all, the reason he really had to stay here in the BVIs to do his job, because the truth was that in virtually any other place, what he was doing would get him thrown in prison.

•   •   •

T
wenty minutes after lifting off, the Robinson dropped him at a helipad just a block from his office in Road Town, on the island of Tortola, and he walked the rest of the way to work. Unlike his rented home, his rented office was utterly nondescript. It was a suite of rooms on the second floor of a two-story glass box building on Lower Estate Road. It might have been the nicest and most modern non-hotel structure in Road Town, but that wasn’t saying a hell of a lot.

Terry’s operation only used a couple local assistants to serve as file clerks and, when clients came in, something of a fake secretary to sit at the desk in the lobby and pretend to do real work. It wasn’t that Terry didn’t have work that needed doing. It was just that Terry didn’t trust anyone else to do it, so he did it all himself.

Walker found it necessary to work here in the BVIs to get around money-laundering laws that he didn’t feel rightfully applied to him. BlackHole was a Bitcoin exchange, and in most every other country his company was considered a financial institution. With this designation came all sorts of regulations, the most important of which was that if he had doubts about the source of income of a client, he had to report it to local financial regulators.

In the BVIs, however, he was able to skirt this restriction, as well as a number of others. He merely had to establish his business here, pay his taxes—plus a few bribes—and then he and his young business were left in peace.

It wasn’t that Terry
wanted
to dodge the laws of other lands, he simply did not agree with them. He felt the British Virgin Islands was one of the few countries that understood his business, understood that he wasn’t trading, he was merely purchasing something on the Internet for a client, and then selling that something on the Internet to another person.

Of course
he was trading,
of course
BlackHole was a financial institution, and
of course
Terry Walker knew this, but his moral compass had been knocked out of alignment by the fact he was making half a million dollars a week managing his company, and handling trades for large investors.

He was in a different boat from most people who had to concern themselves with the financial reportings of their clients, because Walker’s clients were temporary. He’d work with a person who wanted to buy a few hundred thousand, or a few million—in some cases tens of millions had been traded—and he’d manage the transaction for them, putting their purchase in his computerized hopper, where it was rendered invisible to anyone who might have the ability to track Bitcoin transactions.

And for a premium, Terry offered another service, one that was not advertised on the BlackHole website or promotional material. For a few well-heeled clients he had arranged their travel here to Road Town, and then he’d structured their transaction in a way that made the movement one hundred ten percent invisible. Even Terry had no way of knowing where the proceeds of these special sales went after the trade was made, since BlackHole automatically wired the money received for the sale of the hopper-hidden Bitcoin into an account entered on the physical computer at Terry Walker’s office. He simply executed the buy of Bitcoin, threw it into the hopper, sold it, then left his office for a moment. His client sat at his desk and entered routing information for the new money,
sending it anywhere in the world he wanted it to go with a few keystrokes. The record immediately erased itself from the hard drive.

The perfect move for a money launderer.

This necessitated face-to-face meetings, of course, but normally the person showing up at his office was a cutout a dozen times removed from the beneficiary of the money, so Terry never knew who was profiting from his services.

Obviously Terry Walker was no fool, he understood these special transactions were likely being conducted by criminals, corrupt government officials, or other ne’er-do-wells, but again, Terry Walker was making seventy-five grand a day.

Walker was not concerned about the occupations, habits, or predilections of his clients, but he was obsessed with not getting hacked. It was the terror of everyone in the cryptocurrency market, but for a man like Walker, who dealt with powerful clients with regularity, he knew that losing either money or information that belonged to someone else just might mean a death sentence.

To keep his data ultra-secure, he had something called a cold wallet, a completely offline file kept on a computer in a room with no Internet access of any kind, and he moved his Bitcoin information to it with handwritten sheets of paper from another room in his office, this with computer access. Once he received a new wallet of valuable coins on his computer, he would register the information on his pad, check it three times, then rip out the page from the pad and walk it into his “cold room.” Here he would input it in the file, then immediately slip the paper in a crosscut shredder next to the desk.

When he needed to transfer the Bitcoin from the cold wallet to the network to make a transaction—depositing funds into an account owned by a private trust set up on Mauritius or Dubai, for example—he would merely reverse the process, taking the information off the
cold wallet and walking it into his room with Internet access. Here, again, he had a fingerprint scanner, a retinal scanner, and a voice scanner, all of which had to be satisfied that he was, in fact, Terry Walker. He then entered his twenty-digit alphanumeric code, which he had memorized, combined with double-factor authentication.

To Walker it seemed he had the perfect system, with one obvious flaw. It wasn’t scalable. Walker himself had to work, day in and day out. He had to input the “special trades” into his system, and he had to be here on those occasions when his “special clients” came to input their account information into the system.

It was this lack of scalability that was burning him out. He told himself that in a year’s time he would sell BlackHole to some other wealthy tech-minded cryptocurrency maverick. He’d make tens of millions more for the sale on top of what he was banking now, and he would then explain to the new owner about the special transactions he had been conducting in person. While the new owner weighed this information, Terry Walker would take his family home, and when he got home he would park his money in offshores and work in something else; he didn’t know what just yet, but one thing he told himself he would not do was deal with any more dangerous people. He had a wife and a son, and while he was providing for them in a way most people could never dream of, he was very aware they were, ultimately, in as much danger as he was.

This job was great for making money in the short term, but it was terrible as a long-term plan.

Terry told himself he’d keep at it for a while, but he’d pick and choose his clients now. He wanted no more dealings with dangerous individuals, so he planned to keep an eye out for business opportunities that seemed too good to be true.

Today Terry worked away the morning, and then into the
afternoon, pausing for only a few minutes to exchange texts with his wife and a few minutes more to eat a rice-and-sausage dish brought in by one of his local employees.

At three p.m. his secretary came over the intercom in his office, even though she was sitting just a dozen feet away in the front room. “Mr. Walker? Mr. Ivanov and . . . and a colleague are here for you.”

Terry had forgotten about this afternoon’s meeting, but with the call he immediately brushed the last of the rice off his face and took a long swig of bottled water to do what he could to hide the garlic from his breath. He tightened his tie and headed for the little lobby of the office.

Most offices in this building belonged to local attorneys, and Terry doubted many of them had ever had a client visit them in person. That wasn’t what the BVIs and several other Caribbean offshore financial havens were all about. But Terry found himself face-to-face with one of his special clients or potential clients every week or so.

Walker shook hands with the two men and introduced himself.

One of the men spoke in a heavy Russian accent. “My name is Ivanov, and this is my associate, Mr. Popov.”