Constant Fear (4 page)

CHAPTER 6

B
eth took a few steps back to get some distance from Andy and his friends. One glance told her that Ryan had her in his sights. From the red splotches creeping up Ryan’s beefy neck, Beth knew the coming blowup was going to be a doozy. She contemplated running, but didn’t want to make a scene.

Sure enough, Ryan skipped the snide remarks about David’s long hair (a first) and didn’t even bother elbowing Andy in the taunting way he often did when the two passed in the halls. His ire, his complete and total focus, was reserved for Beth MacDonald. He grabbed Beth’s shoulder before she had a chance to pull away. Her upper arm seemed to vanish within Ryan’s massive hand.

“We need to talk,” Ryan said in a commanding voice.

Beth shrugged hard and freed herself from his hold, but the look on her face showed that it had hurt.

“Ryan, there’s nothing to talk about,” Beth said. She turned and tried to walk away, but Ryan accelerated, grabbed her once again, and forced her back around.

“There’s plenty to talk about,” he said in a low voice, almost a growl.

Afraid, Beth bent at the knees to try and break from his hold, but this time Ryan wouldn’t let go. She squirmed, trying to get loose.

Andy’s every impulse was to stop Ryan and help Beth. But would she welcome his involvement? It could turn into a thing between them. “Why did you interfere?” he imagined Beth might say. “This was between me and Ryan.” He didn’t want to upset her.

“You’re hurting me, Ryan. I said there’s nothing to talk about. Now leave me alone, you asshole!”

“No. Not until you talk to me, Beth.”

Andy had enough. Ryan Coventry was way out of line, threatening even. Stepping forward, Andy tapped Ryan hard, several times, between his shoulder blades.

“Leave her alone, Ryan,” Andy said. His voice came out a little weaker than he had intended; but then again, Ryan had four inches and seventy pounds on him.

Ryan whirled, catching Beth by surprise. She stumbled clumsily forward, and would have pitched face-first onto the grass, were it not for the pythonlike grip Ryan maintained around her wrist. For a time, Ryan said nothing as he glared at Andy with rabid eyes. A bull might have shuddered under his hostile gaze.

“What did you just say to me?” Ryan snarled.

“I said leave her alone, dickhead.”

“No, no, you didn’t,” David said, correcting Andy. “You called him Ryan, not ‘dickhead.’ You added the ‘dickhead’ part after.”

Pixie spoke up. “Good embellishment, though. Way more effective. I bet that’s what he wished he said the first time.”

Ryan eyed David and Pixie with contempt before setting his sights once more on Andy. The splotch on Ryan’s neck had grown to the size of Jupiter’s great red spot.

All Andy cared about was that Ryan let go of Beth. The whole rapid-boil anger thing didn’t seem to bother Andy in the least—until, moving with the speed of a lynx, Ryan lunged forward and seized Andy by his shirt, pulling him up on tiptoes as if he were a bag of feathers.

The four other boys in The Shire retreated a few steps, but Hilary held her ground. Beth leapt to Andy’s defense, slamming her fists several times against Ryan’s back.

“Leave him alone, Ryan. Stop being such a jerk,” she said.

Ryan ignored her pleas just as he ignored the blows. Andy’s shirt looked like a wrung-out dishrag within Ryan’s meaty grasp.

“You better watch yourself, geek boy,” Ryan growled. With his biceps straining, Ryan hoisted Andy up until the two were at eye level.

Andy fought to keep a serious expression, but a laugh escaped anyway, even though he had intentionally pulled his lips tight against his teeth.

“Are you freaking laughing at me?” Ryan was incredulous.

Andy tried to hold his laugh in, but it burst out once more in a loud
pfffftt.

Ryan still couldn’t believe his ears. “I thought I told you to watch yourself,” he said.

Andy couldn’t keep a straight face. “It’s just that you sound like such a walking cliché, Ryan,” Andy said. “I mean, look—you’re the big, tough jock, trying to win back the affections of your beautiful girlfriend while you’re holding one of the geekiest kids in the school by his shirt. You’re kind of being Johnny Lawrence from
The Karate Kid
right now.”

“The first
Karate Kid,
with Ralph Macchio, not the remake,” Hilary said, feeling a need to clarify the reference.

Of course she’d know that,
Solomon thought.

“Nah, I’d say he’s more like Biff Tannen,” Rafa said.

“From
Weird Science
?” Pixie asked.

“Back to the Future,”
Hilary said.

“I’d go with a blanket reference and say he’s being totally Disney TV,” Solomon said in a very matter-of-fact way.

The Shire desperately needed to release some tension, but none of this banter amused Ryan. He looked furious.

By now, some of the other students were taking notice of the commotion and began a swift trot over to the action. Jake Dent happened to be transporting a broken heater fan from Hillman Hall across campus to his workshop behind the Terry Science Center when he caught sight of the student migration. He followed the gaggle and was surprised to see his son in the center of the action. Jake knew the student who was holding Andy by his shirt, and it was obvious that these were mismatched opponents.

Rather than intervene, Jake took up position by the walkway abutting the Society Building—far enough back not to be noticed, but still close enough to see the action.

“You think you’re really funny, huh?” Ryan said, pulling Andy up so high his shirt came untucked from his pants.

“I’m giving you a chance to let go of me,” Andy said. His expression turned serious.

Hidden in the background, Jake Dent had to crane his neck to get a better look over the gathering crowd. He wanted Andy to take care of his own problems, but Jake worried the confrontation would be too one-sided. He didn’t want anybody to get hurt.

“I’m going to give you one more chance to let go of me,” Andy said.

Ryan’s toothy grin suggested some devious thinking. Sure enough, he let one of his hands holding Andy’s shirt go so that he could make a fist, which he cocked back behind his head in a quick and fluid motion.

At the same instant, Andy took a giant step backward and planted his left foot behind him. As he did this, Andy bent slightly at the knees and twisted his body to the right. To the untrained eye, Andy appeared to be off balance, but Jake could see that Andy already had the upper hand. Before Ryan could throw his first punch, Andy’s right arm came up and over the arm holding onto his shirt and he twisted his body toward his left hip.

The move not only surprised Ryan, but it forced him to release his hold. Ryan was off balance, but he took a wild swing anyway. His punch connected with air.

Without missing a beat, Andy balled his hand into a fist, bent his elbow, made what he thought to be a forceful yell, and uncoiled at the waist. Andy’s elbow made a solid strike against the side of Ryan’s head. The blow felled the larger student to his knees. For a moment, all Ryan could do was rock back and forth in pain.

From his vantage point, Jake was impressed—not at all surprised by the outcome, but not entirely satisfied, either. He and Andy had worked on that move countless times. Breaking free from a front hold was one of the most basic skills in hand-to-hand combat. Andy was near perfect in executing his escape maneuver, but his yell was more warble than war cry. Jake couldn’t count the number of times he had explained that the purpose of the yell was not only to startle the assailant, but also to focus the power of the strike. They’d go over the maneuver tonight after Andy finished his homework.

Beth MacDonald looked stunned, and also a bit starstruck. Her eyes traveled back and forth between Ryan, on his knees, and Andy nonchalantly tucking in his shirt. Andy’s friends, Beth noted, didn’t seem at all surprised by the outcome of this David versus Goliath battle.

“Andy, that was—that was amazing.”

Ryan shakily got back to his feet. Embarrassed, he lowered his head and charged off in the direction from which he had come.

Andy smiled at Beth. “Meet me over at Tanner Hall and we’ll study together for that test. I’ve got enough Red Bull in my backpack to guarantee us at least a B.”

Beth nodded but looked dazed, still incredulous. She turned and departed, heading toward Tanner Hall.

Andy watched her go and waited until she was out of earshot before he spoke. A glower materialized on his face. “One of us has taken two hundred million dollars’ worth of bitcoins, and, trust me, that’s more than enough money to get us all killed.”

CHAPTER 7

J
avier Martinez was in his home office, on the phone with the computer expert he hired. If he did not solve his problem soon, he was going to die. It was that simple.

When Javier first discovered the theft, he had tried to fix the problem without alerting Soto. The computer whiz, whom he’d found through a craigslist ad seeking a bitcoin guru, had given him hope. The man went only by his hacker handle—“L10n,” or “The Lion,” in its non-phonetic form—and he seemed well versed on the subject.

“But you told me you could find it, get it all back,” Javier said.

His voice trembled and he felt on the verge of tears. Javier could not recall the last time he had really cried. It might have been at his father’s funeral, ten years ago. So much had changed in those ten years, and Javier was grateful his father was not around to see his only son murdered by a Mexican drug cartel. This was not the life they had imagined for him when they left Mexico to come to America.

Javier’s parents had grown up on the hardscrabble streets of Tepito, a barrio in Mexico City. Local residents called it
“Barrio Bravo,”
or fierce neighborhood, because of its reputation for crime—robbery and counterfeiting mostly. Having given their life savings—an amount equal to a few hours’ work for Javier—to a man who claimed he could smuggle them into America, Javier’s parents made it safely to California. They came to escape the violence. Evidently, they didn’t travel far enough.

“I told you, Javier, I got into the kids’ computers, all of them,” The Lion said, “but the bitcoins aren’t there.”

“I don’t understand,” Javier said. “We know who took them.”

Sure enough, The Lion had found proof of the theft on a certain piece of hardware, as well as the names of those he suspected of participating in the heist, but no actual bitcoins.

“Yes, that’s true,” The Lion said. “But I can’t get the coins back if they’re not in the wallet we thought they were in.”

“But they’re on the network!” Javier said. “I can see them.”

The Lion couldn’t see Javier tapping his finger against his computer monitor for emphasis. He was looking at blockchain.info, the public ledger website of all transactions in the bitcoin network. The ledger showed his bitcoins, but did not reveal who had them, or where they might be stored. All it told him was that the bitcoins existed somewhere in the Internet.

The Lion said, “Yes, you can see them. But that’s all you can do. Without the new key, you cannot get to them.”

“So we get the key from the kids. It has to be one of them, it has to be,” Javier said.

“Yes, I agree. It has to be one of them.”

The main culprit, a boy who went by the handle of Dark Matter, had managed to fake the balance in Javier’s digital wallet, making it appear that he had the bitcoins in his account when, in fact, they’d actually been transferred out. It took him weeks to even notice the theft.

“What can I do?” Javier asked.

“I’m afraid I’ve done all I can,” The Lion said. “I’ll expect payment immediately.” The line went dead.

By now, Soto knew the money was missing, and the deadline for the bitcoins’ return had passed. Javier hid his face in his hands. He contemplated suicide. He had brought this nightmare on himself. At no point in time had Javier planned to lose more than half of his clients’ assets, but that was what had happened, and the ultimate reason for this catastrophe.

Fifteen years earlier, Javier had launched his boutique financial management firm, Asset Capital, with a small initial investment from a wealthy banking client who believed that the ambitious child of Mexican immigrants could generate big profits. He was right. Working with an independent broker-dealer, word spread of Javier’s financial gifts; and until a few years ago, Asset Capital had been managing about $105 million.

Business, as his father often said, was like a relationship. If not properly cared for, it would sour.

After some bad picks put him in a hole, and some aggressive maneuvers only dug that hole deeper, Javier was in serious trouble. He spoke about his financial troubles to a cousin in Boston, and the next day got a phone call from a stranger inviting him to a meeting. What the meeting was about, the other party wouldn’t say, but implied that he (whoever he was) could solve all of Javier’s money problems.

The meeting took place in Javier’s office in Newton. The man who showed up refused to give his name, but he was obviously Mexican and spoke Spanish with the same regional accent as his cousin. Javier suspected that the solution to his problem would somehow involve drug money. He should have told the man he wasn’t interested, but desperation eclipsed his better judgment. He had so much at stake: a wife and son to support, a mortgage, bills, tuition, and car payments—not to mention the prison time he would face when his clients discovered the fraud.

“The Man with No Name” dangled the right carrot in front of Javier’s face. According to him, if Javier made it into the organization, all his money problems would be gone. He wouldn’t say more. At the end of the meeting, the man left with Javier’s Social Security number and a promise to be in touch.

What followed was a series of phone calls, more meetings, and several business trips, all done under the radar by using burner phones, forged documents, encrypted messaging services, and even a couple dead drops. It was all very covert, but Javier went along blindly. He told the same story to each person with whom he met or spoke, and there were plenty.

They wanted to know about him as a person, what made him tick, the reason he got out of bed every morning. He had to be someone levelheaded and trustworthy, and they seemed willing to overlook his current business troubles. People can learn from their mistakes, he was told.

They asked about his wife. Her name was Stacey. They seemed to like that he’d been married for seventeen years. It showed he was grounded. Javier had met Stacey at his thirtieth birthday party. She was the caterer, and although not Mexican, she made mouth-watering churros, delectable taquitos, and these amazing margarita cupcakes, which got most of the seventy guests completely wasted. Javier flirted with Stacey throughout the evening and scored her number as she was putting the last of the dishes inside her catering van.

They asked about his hometown of Winston and his son, Guzman Antonio Martinez—or “Gus,” as his friends at The Pep called him. They liked that he was active in his community, his church. They smiled with him when he talked about coaching his son’s Little League team, back when Gus was passionate about the sport.

“We all love baseball,” one of the Mexicans had said.

They wanted to know everything they could learn about Javier’s parents, specifically their life in Tepito, friends his mother still kept in touch with, enemies the family might have. He told them about growing up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and detailed his résumé, including his work for Wells Fargo before going out on his own.

It was the most thorough interview Javier had in his life and he still didn’t know what the job entailed.

Finally a man named Carlos, who spoke with him in a hotel room in Ciudad Juárez, told him what he had long suspected.

“We need a new money manager to help us expand our influence in America,” Carlos had said. “There’s a lot of money to be made, Javier . . . if you have a level head and a smart sense for business.”

That was when the first girls showed up, long-legged and draped in silky negligees. It was a night Javier would never forget. What Javier later read about Sangre Tierra made his boyhood nightmares seem like fairy tales. But the allure of easy money, beautiful women, and the drugs—yes, he had sampled and enjoyed—proved too powerful to resist. The cash Javier made from laundering Sangre Tierra’s drug money paid back the debt he had kept secret from his clients, and made him a millionaire many times over.

The money meant nothing to him now.

Javier’s joints cracked as he got up from his desk. He used to be in better shape, but the women and drugs had turned him soft. They’d turned his mind soft, too. How had he not used better security to safeguard the bitcoins?

With his feet in slippers, Javier padded along the hallway of his spacious home; his robe flapped open. Beneath his robe, he wore boxer shorts over which his ample belly protruded. He had been to the office only a few times since the theft; in those days, his beard had grown thick.

At the entrance to his kitchen, Javier paused. Something wasn’t right. He just had a feeling. He took a single step into the room and saw him.

A steely bolt of fear raced up Javier’s spine. He thought of running, but his legs wouldn’t move. He wanted to scream, but he had no voice.

Standing in front of the coffeemaker was a man Javier knew well. He had long, dark hair tied in a tight ponytail and wore a silken shirt decorated with a floral design, suitable for any of the nightclubs Javier frequented.

The man smiled, his grin twisted and wicked. Javier gazed in horror at the gold teeth, each ornately designed. He knew who this man was and, more frighteningly, what this man did. Fausto Garza whistled, summoning seven men into the kitchen. The men all had brown complexions, and they came in a variety of heights and sizes. One even had a shock of dyed bright red hair. Some were dressed casually, while others wore tactical clothing, but all of them carried rifles.

“Hello, Javier,” Fausto Garza said to him in Spanish.
“Tenemos que hablar de negocios.”
(“We’ve got business to discuss.”)