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“You’re never going to see that money,” Sue said. “The Bitcoin. If I were you, I’d send the address back to the hospital’s insurance company and hope if the feds ever do track you down, that’d lighten your sentences. I’m serious about that.”
“No help,” Letty said.
Sue shrugged: “Nothing to be done about it. If you want to get in the ransomware business, you’ve got to set up your exit ahead of time. If you don’t do that...”
“What do we do?” Baxter asked.
“When you get the coin, you move fast,” Sue said. “Really fast. You’ve already set up accounts in every shithole money-laundering country you can find and run the Bitcoin through them as fast as you can. Overnight. Not the whole amount with every jump—you break the take up into smaller pieces, different for every jump, so the transactions aren’t immediately obvious. You don’t want a million disappearing here and another million immediately popping up somewhere else. And then, after you’ve run it through all theseother places, you take the Bitcoin to El Salvador, where it’s legal tender. You’ve already arranged to sell it to a guy at a discount, maybe twenty percent, but you’ll have anonymous cash. All that needs to be set up in advance—the whole sequence.”
Bob: “If it’s not set up in advance, you’re shit outa luck. And you two... are shit outa luck.”
“Can’t be,” Letty said. “We can’t lose it all.”
“You already have,” Sue said. “It used to be, Bitcoin was fairly anonymous. Now the feds have gotten good at tracking it. The way to defeat them is to move it so fast that they can’t keep up. They’ll eventually get to El Salvador and then they’ll give up.”
“Because they know you’ve got a box full of nice greasy much-used greenbacks, courtesy of a Mexican drug cartel, and there’ll be no way to trace it,” Bob said.
Baxter: “Goddamnit.” He looked at Letty. “I told you.”
“There is one other possibility,” Sue said. “But it’s kinda nasty.”
“I’ll listen to anything,” Letty said.
“There are some great hacker combines in Russia and North Korea. Do your research, you might be able to hook up with one of them, sell the Bitcoin address. Since they’re government-sponsored, they can pull the Bitcoin out and there’s nothing the feds or anyone else could do about it. You might get ten percent. You might also get ten years if the FBI finds out.”
Baxter shook his head and said to Letty, “We should go.”
“We gotta do the North Korea thing,” Letty said to him. “Fifty thousand is better than nothing.”
“I’ll figure out something,” Baxter said. “I can take a job, that’ll hold us for a while.”
“Holdyoufor a while,” Letty said. “Not me. You can drop meoff at that boat place we saw. Marina Ray. I’ll find somebody who needs a cabin girl.”
Sue asked Baxter, “What kind of job?”
Baxter shrugged: “I do machine controls. Always jobs there, good money.”
“Not five hundred thousand good,” Letty said. “Not tax free. We were gonna buy a boat in Cabo.”
“Okay, I couldn’t get five hundred, but I could get a hundred and fifty, two hundred,” Baxter said.
“Yeah,per year. Three thousand a week, pay two thousand a month for a shitty apartment and pay all kinds of tax and... Fuck it, I’m tired of talking about it,” Letty said. “Drop me at the Ray place. Let’s go.”
“You can take a fuckin’ Uber,” Baxter said.
“Not gonna get my drums in a fuckin’ Uber,” Letty said.
“Not gonna get your drums on a fuckin’ boat,” Baxter said.
“How good are you with the software?” Bob asked Baxter.
Baxter bobbed his head. “Very. Got a PhD from Florida, but school was one thing, industry was something else. Bores the snot outa me.”
Sue cross-examined him with technical questions that Letty could barely follow, at best, and she eventually plugged her phone into a hundred-beats-per-minute blues shuffle that she slapped along with, on her thighs.
After a ten-minute quiz, Baxter got tired of the questioning and said, “Okay, you do what you gotta do. You got a job for me? Fine. If you don’t, we’ll say good-bye right now.”
Sue looked at him for a few seconds, then said, “Maybe a job. If you’re not cops.”
