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He sat forward, so they were almost knee to knee. “I’m not your client. I’m a man who let you into his world on a very temporary basis to see if you could solve a problem I have that nobody else seems able to handle. You do that, and you’ll be fine. You start trying to elevate yourself in this situation to something you’re not and never will be, then we have a problem. And that is never good for someone like you. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“And another thing—my people who I pay to watch those things tell me that there are stories out there about this. About me getting taken advantage of.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Wrong answer. You’re getting paid to anticipate stuff like that and then do something about it.”
He snapped his fingers and the door instantly opened. A large man came in, walked up to Francine, ripped her from the chair, slammed her up against the wall, and wrenched her arm up her back until she cried out in pain.
Trask nodded and the man let her go. She staggered over and fell back into her chair.
“I thought I was getting paid to find your money for you,” she said quietly, rubbing her injured arm.
Trask nodded at the man, who slugged Francine in the jaw. She screamed and held her hands up in a defensive posture, as blood trickled from her mouth.
Trask said, “Again, wrong answer. You’re not doing too well. See, when you workforme, you do everything above and beyond. You think of this shit. You deal with it so that it never touches me. I hire people who are smarter than me. If they turn out not to be, what good are they?” He sat back. “Now tell me the plan and maybe he’ll have to hit you again. Only harder. Or my people might have to do something more than that to you. It all depends on what you say next. No pressure, just relax and start talking.”
Francine composed herself, sat up straight, and wiped the tears from her eyes, then her expression hardened to stone. “Do you have a computer handy?”
“Why?”
“It’sbitcoin. That’s where it lives.”
He studied her for a moment. “Why can’t you useyourcomputer?”
“I could, but then I’d just have to transfer it over to yours.”
“Then that’s what you’re going to have to do.”
“The thing is, Mr. Trask, if we do it that way, your account, passwords, and other information will be on my cloud. I’m not sure you want that.”
“You can erase it.”
“How will you know I did? Even if you havesomeone to check it? And I don’t want you coming after me if anything goes sideways with respect to that, especially if someone hacks me before I can erase it. And how will I know you’ll even let me walk out of here if there’s a chance of that? I came here to finish the job and collect my commission, that’s all.”
Trask said nothing for about thirty seconds. “Okay, I’ll play along, for now.”
He made a call and a minute later a man walked in with a laptop and handed it to her.
“It’s password protected,” she said. “Can you open it up for me?”
He did so and she started typing, her fingers flying over the screen.
“Mind explaining what you’re doing?” said Trask.
“I’m persuading a secure wallet, or hot storage, to believe that I’m Dan Pottinger with the private key.”
“That’s all you need, a private key? I thought this stuff was all secure with that blockchain crap.”
“Which is why I’mnotattacking the blockchain. That’s thousands of computers tied together. I’m not beating that in my lifetime. But if you want todoanything with your bitcoin, you have to go on other platforms and digital exchanges.”
“And how are you able to do that?”
“Before he died I hacked Pottinger’s home Wi-Fi. I did so to see if I could capture his PII.”
“What’s that?” asked Trask.
