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A farm tractor?
She turned on the light, took off the headphones, opened an app on her phone, and plugged in her mileage parameters with Stormfield as the center.
She grabbed her car keys. And a Glock pistol she had purchased. She might need it against Rochelle’s knife or gun. It would certainly take the treasure to get her mother back. And it might take something more. Whichever it was, she was willing to pay the price. She wasn’t exactly sure why.
But I am willing to pay the price. Because I know Rochelle is.
***
Gibson had arranged for her parents to come over and watch the kids. Her dad had hugged her especially tight, something her mother noted but did not comment on.
“You look okay,” muttered her father into her ear.
“That’s because I am.”
“So it’s really over then?”
“That part is.”
“That part! Oh my God, I feel another ulcer coming on.”
“Just pop some Rolaids. Works for me.”
She left her parents with Tommy and Darby, and headed to her home office.
She fired up her computer. While Francine was looking for her mother, Gibson was going to make one more all-out assault on Langhorne’s treasure.
While they had used the cryptocurrency subterfuge to ensnare Nathan Trask, Gibson hadn’t thought that Langhorne was involved in that type of digital currency at all. But as she went over some records of Pottinger’s financial accounts again, she saw an intriguing bit of code that had been left there, like a dangling participle.
She copied the line of code and pasted it into an online search. She sat back and waited for the search to run.
“Damn!”
Harry Langhorne had just thrown her a curve.
The search had taken her to a site that sold NFTs, or Non Fungible Tokens, basically digital assets separate and apart from bitcoins. Each NFT was unique and equated to a specific asset. They ran the gamut from a one-of-a-kind meme autographed tweet, to a fractional ownership of a Banksy work, to a digital sports trading card signed by a superstar in very limited quantities. The very first tweet, from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, had sold for nearly $3 million as an NFT.
Now that is some crazy shit, but, hey, it’s only money. Or bitcoin.
One could buy an NFT with cryptocurrency, or, with some platforms like PayPal and Robinhood, a simple credit card would suffice. If crypto was used, the buyer would need a digital wallet to hold both the NFT and the crypto.
She’d chased down debtors who had stashed some of their wealth in NFTs. Thus, she knew that most NFTs were Ethereum based. Ethereum was a blockchain-based economic trading platform. In fact, many NFT marketplaces would take only Eth tokens as payment. You had to have a user account to create a transaction on Ethereum.
So had Langhorne bought an NFT? And if so, why? Was that the treasure?
She might be able to find out because, while NFTs were not bitcoin, they were pieces of digital information housed on blockchains. While one bitcoin could replace another, NFT tokens represented a unique digital asset. She wasn’t sure why someone would spend a ton of money on a tweet or sports card that anyone could take a screenshot of and claim it was original. But then collectors were strange beasts, and the blockchain would prove the authenticity of the NFT and its concomitant value, at least in theory. So there was that.
But the thing was NFTs could not really be traded for other NFTs or traditional currency. So once you bought one you really could sell it only for crypto. And recently, NFTs had been taking a beating in the news and financial markets because of fraud and hidden fees and the cost of or impossibility of maintaining the article on the Ethereum blockchain, as well as a host of other issues. Gibson wasn’t sure whether the whole market wouldn’t implode at some point, but she didn’t care about that. She just wanted to find the treasure, if it existed.
Okay, here we go.
On blockchains she started searching for ERC-721 tokens, upon which NFTs on Ethereum were based. She had to find some that had been owned by Langhorne and then used to buy one or more NFTs. There were many places to buy NFTs, platforms like OpenSea, Rarible, AtomicMarket, and SuperRare, among others. Hell, apparently even Amazon was thinking about selling them. She worked away, following one trail, which took her to another one. Some ended in dead ends. In fact, all of them did.
Until one did not.
CHAPTER75
IT TOOK ABOUT TWO HOURS,but Francine finally found what she thought was the place to which she’d been taken.
